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One of the key challenges that tourist destinations have to face today is mass tourism and its impact on local culture. Indeed, during the past years, tourist development had relied on mass tourism, which meant that the destinations had to accommodate a significant number of tourists, something that had an impact on the destination’s culture. Such an example is the case of Mykonos. This a case of an island that has constructed its brand name as a high-end cosmopolitan destination by including mass tourist activities on its product offering but also with mass culture activities, such as major dance music events. Nonetheless, the current situation has found Mykonos, like many other destinations, without tourist demand and with the need to reposition its tourist product. In the post-covid19 tourist industry, it seems that sustainable tourism can be the answer on how Mykonos shall develop so as to recover from the current crisis. Therefore, the suggested strategy is to shift from mass tourism and mass culture into sustainable tourism and emphasis high culture. This means that the destination will have to rely on a “less tourists and more income per tourist” model of development while Mykonos can focus on cultural tourism as part of its shift into sustainable tourism.

This chapter traces the history of the Russian philosophical novel from Karamzin’s sentimental tales to Nabokov’s metafictions. It argues that the novel served as a crucial medium of moral reflection and secularization throughout the “long nineteenth century.” By examining several novels that are pivotal to the Russian canon, I show that, contrary to the wide-spread assumption, nihilism was not the prevalent topic in the classical Russian novel. When it came to ethics, the majority of Russian authors were idealists, even when they adopted realistic (or naturalistic) representational techniques. As my analyses show, this idealistic bent in “high culture” and literature can be explained by the fact that fiction served as the realm through which members of the Russian intellectual elite asserted moral autonomy.

This chapter explores the sociology of education concerns around the phenomenon of ‘popular culture’ and presents relevant data. High culture often reflects a society’s ‘high status’ or colonising people and can be presumed to be better, refined and more sophisticated. Popular/low culture can be presumed to be mainstream, trend-based and unimportant – like that of society’s ‘low-status people’. Around a third of Australians reported that their school used liberal culture approaches based on luring young people to learning about high culture for assessments through minimal classroom use of low culture (pop music, modern movies, teen celebrities). A similar portion described their schools as following critical culture approaches valuing low culture that represented marginalised groups, including in assessments. Girls were more often exposed to this approach, perhaps due to their higher enrolments in humanities subjects with critical elements. Just under a fifth of Australians reported that their school used post-modern culture approaches interrogating the systems of privilege behind why some culture is cast as ‘high’ and some as ‘low’. Fewer (14.6% of) Australians said their school promoted a conservative culture approach which only encouraged ‘high culture’ – classical music, canonical literature and historical figures. A significantly smaller portion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and trans-spectrum participants reported that their school embraced low culture overall; revealing identity impacted one’s sensitivity to the absence of particular cultural artefacts and also to how marginal cultural offerings are undervalued. Tutorial questions for this chapter ask readers to consider how their school covered high and low culture, analysis of popcultural artefacts and designing of lesson plans around popular culture.

This chapter discusses gifts from the dead, things like Stonehenge, cave paintings, and the voices of long-lost poets. It is an attempt to come to terms with the humanities as something more than “high culture” trapped in schools or pleas that humans are next to angels.

The first earliest Tablets have been found by French excavations in Susa in the nineteenth century. The deciphered of Writing System of Tablets is at Beginning, but they bring light on the archaic Bookkeeping system and some writing evidences of Iranian Proto-writing Period. Archaeologies have been found the proto-writing tablets from other urban center of Iran such as, Choga-Mich, Geser, Malyan, Yahya, Shahre Sokhte, Godin, Sialk, Goli Darwish, Ozbaki and Sofalin. The archaeological levels cover Susa 2 and 3 in Khuzistan, Banesh in Fars and New Plateau in Iranian Plateau Zone. Apart from Iran and Mesopotamia proto-writing tablets have been found from Syrian and Turkey. The Tablets from Syrian and Turkey belong to only Late Uruk or pre Proto-Elamite phase. The present paper represents an attempt to the emergence of proto-writing in ancient Iran. The term “Proto-writing” refers high Culture period, with two pre and proto-Elamit Phases, dating roughly to the ca. 5300–4800 B.P. The tablets from this Period are the earliest writing documents in ancient Iran. The most of the ancient Iranian proto-writing Tablets are administrative documents recording. The administrative tablets record varying quantities of goods or measure of the collection and distribution, for example herding of animal and grain by sign or sign combination. The second attempts a clear relationship between the proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform scripts. The tablet format is a good indication of chronological development of writing in this Period. At the same time of Proto-Writing or high culture period, have been found Tablets from Mesopotamia, dating to the final stage of Uruk and Jamdat-Nasr Periods.

The concept of strategies of media use is introduced to describe how reception as a practice is related to social structure and individuals’ lives. Elements of strategies are outlined and hypotheses are proposed on their relationship to social structure. A quantitative survey demonstrates how strategies of media use can be measured. Using television and strategies pertaining to emotional experiences and high culture as an example, dimensions of strategies are analyzed and explained in terms of agents’ social background, current social position, and experiences during socialization and in the workplace.

One of the first things that stands out about Zizek’s discourse is his combination of high culture (philosophy) and low culture (popular culture). As an example of what many people call postmodernism, his work often uses humor to move beyond the modern divide between serious thought and entertainment. On one level, this combination of opposites points to the ways contemporary culture undermines past cultural distinctions by combining together multiple discourses. However, from a psychoanalytic rhetorical perspective, we should ask how does this use of language shape the meaning and effects of Zizek’s writing and speaking? In other words, how is his discourse framed to direct the expectations of his audience? What matters then is not only what he says but what rhetorical mode frames his discourse.

Here is described the unique structure of the Western theatre and the audience’s gaze, an element essential for the reception of the Judeo-Christian cosmology—the main dimension of the spectaculum. The audience’s contentless gaze succumbs to the aesthetic magic and the stage attains sovereignty in the theatrical experience. This gaze subverts the theatrical habitus—the dominance of drama—and challenges its importance in establishing the nature and power of the Western theatre as “high culture” among the arts. Against the background of a structural description of the theatre’s “boxes,” the Sinaitic Revelation is shown to be an event-that-models, through which the Western theatre may be understood—an event that embodies the structural and phenomenological properties of the myth.

The “New Science” of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, Steno, etc., and the Baroque in visual arts and literature, are two conspicuous aspects of 17th-century European elite culture. If standard historiography of science can be relied upon, the former of the two was not affected by the latter. The lecture asks whether this is a “fact of history” or an artefact of historiography. A delimitation of the “Baroque” going beyond the commonplaces of overloading and contortion concentrates on the acceptance of ambiguity and the appurtenance to a “representative public sphere”, contrasting with the quest for clarity and the argument-based public sphere of the new science, suggesting that Baroque and New Science were indeed incompatible currents. A close-up looks at Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, who was a major Baroque theoretician but also wrote much on mathematics, finding even within his mathematics love for ambiguity. The way his mathematics is spoken about in the Oldenburg correspondence shows that the mainstream of the New Science saw no interest in this.

The combination of Shakespeare—the supreme icon of high culture and Englishness—and manga—a popular art format originating in Japan—may seem unusual. Yet, substantial numbers of manga adaptations of Shakespeare’s works exist, both from Japan and from other parts of the world, including Osamu Tezuka’s Vampire (1966–69), which incorporates Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Richard III. Some manga versions of Shakespeare remain fairly faithful to the original, while others are wild spin-offs almost unrecognizable as Shakespeare. This chapter analyzes manga adaptations of Shakespeare to explore whether manga versions of Shakespeare should be praised for their creative reinvention of Shakespeare or should be condemned as sacrilege toward Shakespeare’s authority. I will argue that manga versions of Shakespeare challenge us to question and examine established cultural hierarchy.

In its past, Europe and Europeans were perceived as very different from today. Early European continent was an unknown territory in the North of the Mediterranean Sea, and its population was from the view of Greek’s high culture called “barbarians”. Europe was explored step by step, beginning with the voyages of Pytheas of Massilia to the North of Europe. Barbarians surrounding the Greek people were perceived as people of inferior culture, bad habits, uncivilized, primitive and cruel. Though Europe has made civilizational steps forward to higher cultural levels the threat though all kind of new barbarians have remained all the time a challenge for the continent and the world.

The seismic changes to Italy’s economy and society during the 1950s and 1960s created demand for popular versions of high culture. Education and knowledge were represented as a key dimension of a modern, scientific and prosperous Italy and key to success for young people. Not all attempts by publishers, advertisers and the Italian government to ‘civilise’ Italians found success. Yet, as the case studies of this book demonstrate, the presence of high culture was not solely a top-down process. Italians enjoyed and found meaning in their chosen forms of high culture, as magazines and television carried the adaptations of Italy’s humanist traditions and the Western Cultural Canon into the industrially produced mass culture and modern life.

This chapter describes the early opera television studio broadcasts, their connection with the popular film-opera genre cineopera and their close relationship with the opera in theatres from La Scala to the Metropolitan Opera. This chapter argues that opera was simultaneously a popular and elite cultural practice, enjoyed in different ways by two different audience segments: the millions of mass culture television viewers and high culture theatre-goers both watching the same operas, performers and even productions in the opera houses of Italy.

One of the elements which has rendered the classics and their ideal of “liberal culture” most questionable to the modern age is the rise of democratic-egalitarianism. In a democratic age the historic association of the classical ideals with “elitism” is deemed a decisive argument against them. In spite of the Greek origins of democracy, it is certainly fair to describe Greek culture as having an “aristocratic” tincture. Its central value was excellence, not equality and it believed in demanding standards of achievement. The classically rooted idea of the liberal as against the “servile” or “mechanical” arts was predicated on the notion of activities proper to the leisure of the “free” gentleman and an aristocratic denigration of labor, trade, and commerce. In more modern times is also the historical association of European high culture with aristocratic patronage. The egalitarian ideal (pace Nietzsche) seems to have roots not in the classical world but in Christianity with its proclamation of the equal dignity of all, and indeed its preferential concern for the poor, weak, and marginalized – an ideal which subsequently appeared also in secularized forms unmoored from its religious roots. Whereas Nietzsche viewed this as negative, we must acknowledge its moral fertility in the struggle for the dignity of laborers and indeed ultimately the abolition of slavery and other forms of oppression. Nonetheless, the applied to the sphere of culture, egalitarianism has a levelling effect destructive of high culture. An urgent task then is how to reconcile the worthy values in moral egalitarianism, with the “inegalitarianism” required for the existence of cultural standards.

This chapter explores the mass culture phenomenon that was the 1955–1959 television quiz show Lascia o raddoppia? (literally, leave or redouble). The chapter examines the prevalence of high culture subjects such as opera music, or the life of Dante, and most significantly the audience reactions to the program. Italy’s new focus on education and an industrialising economy played out on Italian television screens as gorgeous educated ‘modern girls’ and hard-working young men personified the opportunities of modern Italy. Barron argues that a close look at the responses of television viewers and audience enjoyment levels provides a more complete history of Italy’s first popular television program.

This chapter examines the symbolic importance of Italian cultural icons and high culture in Italy’s mass culture boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The image of the Mona Lisa on the 1957 cover of popular Epoca magazine is emblematic of Barron’s claim that high culture was integrated in distinctive ways into the new modern Italian identity and into Italy’s associated mass culture boom. Through mass culture, Italian citizens gained access to previously elite cultural practices in high circulation magazines and popular television programs.

This chapter identifies the motives of German occupying forces in destroying the culturally rich university town of Leuven/Louvain during the first weeks of the war. It discusses reactions to the sacking from “Beyond Flanders Fields” on the part not only of the Entente but also of German academics, politicians and the general public. In this sense it lays some of the foundations for Sebastian Bischoff’s account in Chap. 4 of German stereotypes of the Belgians.

Japanese productions of Shakespeare’s plays are almost always discussed with an exclusive focus upon their visual and physical aspects without any due considerations to their verbal elements. Most Japanese stage performances of Shakespeare use vernacular translations of Shakespeare. This chapter analyses Nakayashiki Norihito’s all-female productions of Hamlet (2011) and Macbeth (2012) in the historical contexts of Japanese Shakespeare translation. I will look at the ways in which the deliberately chosen rude or rough verbal expressions have enabled Nakayashiki not only to focus upon actresses’ corporeality but also to question the conventional ideas of Shakespeare’s language in the vernacular. The myth of Shakespeare as an icon of high culture has been challenged in verbal as well as theatrical terms.

The central question informing this work on theorizing development problems in Africa is: Why are some nations rich and others poor? Traditional Eurocentric views have located the answers to this question within the context of the perceived dynamic European, or more broadly, occidental culture that refused to be fettered by tradition and religion, which have been considered to exercise a powerful restraint on human initiative. It has been shown in Weber’s work, and the perspective of the modernization theorists, for example, that the Industrial Revolution and other fruits of scientific inquiry could only have happened in the West and not among peoples that allowed themselves to be hindered by respect for traditions and hierarchies. Then, again, the whole new culture of work organization and ethics that followed the new developmental era only served to entrench the lead of the West. Thus it came to be understood that the possession of Western values and attributes was necessarily a developmental prerequisite and that where these values were lacking, society’s progress was bound to be retarded. An important challenge to this Eurocentric view was the concept of a world system which is most prominent in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, who put forward the notion of an international economic system fashioned to ensure the perpetuation of the advantages of the dominant economic powers of the capitalist industrial Western democracies. In this sense, the current chapter shows that the viewpoint on Eurocentric high culture informing development, and low culture negating it, has a long history which culminated in modernization theory. This is a viewpoint that drew the ire of Immanuel Wallerstein and Andrew Gunder Frank in the ‘World System’ and ‘Development of Underdevelopment.’ In as much as modernization theories are value laden, the current chapter drew inspiration from both historical and causal path analysis to show how the assimilation of cultural traits from Africans’ experience of colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism tends to encourage underdevelopment and the perpetuation of inequality between societies. Invoking the Marxist principles of praxis on the way forward, the chapter highlights perspectives on the path to genuine development coterminous with principles of genuine decolonization as the major panacea for African development problems.

The Conclusion reasserts the enormous, and hitherto largely unappreciated, importance of the scholarship boy writers in British children’s literature of the 1960s and 1970s. In response to the views and tastes formed by their original working-class cultures, these children’s writers not only succeeded in including aspects of working-class culture (including language and lifestyle) in children’s books, but also succeeded in adjusting the boundaries that previously had been drawn around children’s literature. The works of scholarship boy children’s writers were often characterized by fusions of two class cultures. They were highly successful at least in part because of their effective usage of middle-class literary culture. However, they utilised intellectual/high culture in ways that asserted the legitimacy of working-class culture.

Scholar of African American religion and culture, Monica R. Miller’s chapter, “The Absence of Presence: Relating to ‘Black’ (Non)Humanisms in Popular Culture,” turns to hip hop culture, the history of African American (humanist) religious expression, and the high culture of visual art galleries, to offer an allegory about why race (and other forms of social difference) are so difficult to see in spaces of humanism. And yet, the ability to see such differences (and difficulties) are vital to updating humanism to more equitably engage the world.

As part of their ongoing legitimation work, opera houses engage with the community of which they are a part. When reaching out to audiences who are not familiar with the art forms of opera, ballet, or classical music, it is crucial that the opera houses do not neglect the values attached to them by the art world. This chapter investigates how the Metropolitan Opera and the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet manage such balancing in performing legitimacy as civil opera houses. If being perceived as authentic in their dedication to serve both society and art, opera houses will be able to achieve widespread approval and artistic credibility, which in turn will help secure their financial stability.

Robot Opera proposes an avant-garde spectacle of performative media that places robots centre stage as signifiers of high culture within a 21st century total art work of the future. This chapter addresses how framing robotic performance as a Gesamtkunstwerk (and its historical ambitions) contributes to the canon of Cultural Robotics. The notion of robotic performance agency is detailed through the history and theories surrounding representations of the robot in popular culture, representations of robots as performance agents and through the dramaturgical concepts explored in Marynowsky’s previous robotic art works.

Although we are surrounded by official heritage, in daily life we live with and in societies of popular culture—popular in terms of mass, openness, fluidity, plurality, hybridity, and the personal. Vernacular life is dynamic and its heritage is expressed in performance and place, notably at the local level. At that scale authorized heritage is not as significant as the heritage that operates through actual communities. Even when “elite” heritage is present in daily life, such as living in or near monumental zones, that heritage is accessed at the local level in popular ways and with reference to notions of the ordinary. The meanings of heritage must be understood in terms of how heritage is received, talked about, circulated, loved, and even ignored. Most importantly, heritage is not static. It is continually in production. Moreover, we do not just produce our own heritage as and within popular culture, we also eagerly consume the heritage that is produced by others. Popular culture travels vast distances. The media, tourism and diasporas are notably active in generating and making available knowledge of these productions. The most striking characteristic of heritage as popular culture is that it is consumer behavior. We advocate greater attention to the relationship between heritage and popular culture.