The analysis investigates the denotative and connotative meanings of game rules, game mechanics, artwork, and tiles, critically assessing how these might influence the player’s cultural, social, and aesthetic experience of the ideological and historical context. Building on John McLeod’s definition of colonialism and interpretation of colonial economies, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, and Gayatri Spivak’s theory of subalternity, this comparative study examines representations of: a) the otherness of colonial subjects in relation to colonisers b) indigenous peoples’ agency and subaltern voice c) expressions of the indigenous culture and d) Eurocentrism.
On, where users have ranked more than 87,000 board games and extensions, these three are in the top three-hundred overall, with more than 3,000 votes each. These three games are simulation, strategy type Eurogames, with rules designed to emulate and reproduce two time periods: first-wave European colonialism ( Puerto Rico Archipelago) and 18th-century European colonial expansion ( Struggle of Empires). This article presents a critical analysis of colonial representations in three examples of the latter: Puerto Rico (2002), Struggle of Empires (2004), and Archipelago (2012). The author introduces the notion of a “contributive family model” in order to capture the individual choice of keeping in touch and the meaning of social practices, which transform ideas of relatedness into reconfirmed transnational solidarities.With all its intricate processes, colonialism, both as an ideology and a historical period, has been a rich source of inspiration for contemporary popular culture, whether in the form of movies, novels, digital games, or analogue games. These are different levels of mobility, the challenges and limits of diverse levels of technical connectivity between several localities, the dynamics between approved relatedness and family-based migration regimes as well as the normative aspects resulting in a gendered perspective on the demands of reciprocity. The contextualization of the individual life courses of its members and their changing relatedness in the course of time brings to surface a complex design of factors that contribute to the sense of belonging or detachment in this Creole transnational island society. Based on multi-sited qualitative anthropological fieldwork with a strong historical perspective centred on biographical interviews and social network analysis, the author examines a particular Cape Verdean household that comprises four generations and extends its contacts between several Cape Verdean islands, Portugal, São Tomé/Príncipe as well as the United States. This article employs the renewed anthropology of kinship to revisit historical approaches to the study of social relations taking place in transnational social fields.
0 kommentar(er)
