Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) first argued that there were continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She claimed that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of ‘superior races’ to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies, the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War Europe. These claims have rarely been taken up by historians. Only in recent years has the work of scholars such as Jürgen Zimmerer and A. Dirk Moses begun to show in some detail that Arendt was correct. This collection does not seek merely to expound Arendt’s opinions on these subjects; rather, it seeks to use her insights as the jumping-off point for further investigations – including ones critical of Arendt – into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked, and the ways in which these terms have affected the United States, Europe, and the colonised world.
In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the profound transformations that have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990. Based on a wide variety of ethnographic case studies focusing on Russian, Siberian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, and Polish communities, this volume proves the significance of emotions to post-socialist political processes as an inherent part of the transformations and sheds new light on the impact of local, national, and transnational political forces that have given rise to the resurgence of nationalist sentiments, increasing poverty and marginalization, conflicts arising from the restitution of state property, constitutional changes, and economic deprivation.
History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.
In response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and war in Afghanistan, the Fulbright New Century Scholars program brought together social scientists from around the world to study sectarian, ethnic, and cultural conflict within and across national borders. As one result of their year of intense discussion, this book examines the roots of collective violence – and the measures taken to avoid it – in Burma (Myanmar), China, Germany, Pakistan, Senegal, Singapore, Thailand, Tibet, Ukraine, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe. Case studies and theoretical essays introduce the basic principles necessary to identify and explain the symbols and practices each unique human group holds sacred or inalienable. The authors apply the methods of political science, social psychology, anthropology, journalism, and educational research. They build on the insights of Gordon Allport, Charles Taylor, and Max Weber to describe and analyze the patterns of behavior that social groups worldwide use to maintain their identities. Written to inform the general reader and communicate across disciplinary boundaries, this important and timely volume demonstrates ways of understanding, predicting and coping with ethnic and sectarian violence. Contributors: Badeng Nima, David Brown, Kwanchewan Buadaeng, Patrick B. Inman, Karina V. Korostelina, James L. Peacock, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Wee Teng Soh, Hamadou Tidiane Sy, Patricia M. Thornton, Mohammad Waseem.
Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945. Hitler and his followers believed that art and culture were expressions of race, and that “Aryans” alone were capable of creating true art and preserving true German culture. This volume’s essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism, and are authored by some of the most respected authorities in the field: Alan Steinweis, Michael Kater, Eric Rentschler, Pamela Potter, Frank Trommler, and Jonathan Petropoulos. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to this important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.
Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia.
The powerful impact of Socialism and Communism on modern German history is the theme which is explored by the contributors to this volume. Whereas previous investigations have tended to focus on political, intellectual and biographical aspects, this book captures, for the first time, the methodological and thematic diversity and richness of current work on the history of the German working class and the political movements that emerged from it. Based on original contributions from U.S., British, and German scholars, this collection address a wide range of themes and problems.
Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of «pristine nature» or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of «primitiveness» and «pristine nature» so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.