Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Everyday Life in Karlovac under Ustasha Rule

2015 ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Filip Erdeljac
Author(s):  
Thomas Docherty

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.


Author(s):  
Jing Meng

In Chapter 3, 11 Flowers represents personal and fragmented memories of the Cultural Revolution from an 11-year-old boy’s perspective. These memories challenge the monolithic narrative of history and the Maoist rhetoric of revolution. At the same time, this fragmented narrative mode enables individual agency in narrating and constructing history. In addition, through portrayals of everyday life in the Maoist era, the film reveals how the dominant ideology at that time was strategically misinterpreted by ordinary people and was dispersed in everyday life. Socialism, in this context, becomes a mystery, a joke, and a traumatic awakening. In the lm, art possesses enlightening power for the 11-year-old boy, who begins to obtain self-awareness through painting. The film thus conveys the director’s authorial enunciation and his belief in art as a form of liberation, not only for a boy in the Cultural Revolution but also for Wang Xiaoshuai as a film-maker. The shifting trajectory of Wang’s film-making—from independent to art house—alludes to the shifting relations between film-making, the state, and the market. In 11 Flowers, personal memories become the hallmark of Wang’s auteur expression.


2019 ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind

This chapter focuses on how quantification began to increase in the everyday life of ordinary people, who are represented in this chapter by the allegorical figure “Everyman” (from the fifteenth-century anonymous morality play Everyman). It discusses the invention of the chronometer and explores the effect that the increasing availability of luxury items such as sugar, as well as the quantifying ideas that were coming into use at that time, had on the general populace. The chapter then introduces Pierre-Simon Laplace, who assiduously worked to bring the newly formed probability theory to Everyman, especially through his efforts on the orthodrome problem in Traité de mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics), his ideas on scientific determinism (symbolized by “Laplace’s demon”), and his General Principles for the Calculus of Probabilities. The chapter also introduces Joseph-Louis Lagrange, whose work on the calculus of variations had a great influence on Laplace.


This chapter focuses on traces of alternative discourses articulated by ordinary people and recorded in judicial documents, which present a specific type of archival memory not to be found anywhere else. These documents include confession materials, supporting evidence, overheard conversations volunteered by informants or official court verdicts. The chapter highlights memories about life on the fringes of society during the Mao Zedong era in order to show how ordinary people perceived their situation or domestic and international developments. The sources and the embedded snippets of alternative discourses provide us with rare insights into the situation of everyday life in the late Maoist era.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 669
Author(s):  
Anna Sofia Salonen

Despite the growing popularity of vegetarian foods and diets, the vast majority of people in North America and other parts of the affluent world still eat meat. This article explores what ordinary people think about eating animals and how they navigate the ethical questions inherent in that praxis. Drawing from interviews with 24 people living in Ottawa, Canada, the study shows how the concepts of dominion, stewardship and reconciliation manifest in the everyday lives of ordinary people as models for human relations with nonhuman others and the environment. These ideas resonate in the lives of ordinary people, both religious and nonreligious, and entwine as people try to make sense of how to live with the fact that their everyday food consumption causes suffering and harm. This study shows that in the context of everyday life, dominion, stewardship and reconciliation are not alternative views, but connected to each other, and serve different purposes. The study highlights a need for analyses that constitute practical ways to renew the broken relationships within creation and which incorporate nonreligious people into the scope of analyses that focus on the relationships between humans and nonhuman creation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pattana Kitiarsa

AbstractThis article addresses multiple issues of how the ongoing debates of 'Thai Buddhism in crisis' (wikrit phutthasatsana) are perceived and discussed in popular films. Purposefully selecting three film stories, namely, Fun, Bar, Karaoke (1997), Mekhong Full Moon Party (2002), and Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), as case studies, the author argues that the contemporary state of Thai Buddhism is narrated and interpreted in remarkably different tones. There is virtually no moral crisis concerning Thai Buddhism reflected in the films, but a firm faith in Buddhist teachings and principles is presented, with some critical concerns of its religious agencies and performances in Thailand's post-1997 economic crisis context. In the turbulent decade of the 1990s and the new millennium, the Thai people have strongly expressed a desire for religious sanctuary. Faith in Buddhism is still strong and powerful, but its form and content are always plural and multi-dimensional. Everyday life religion, not the official or canonical Buddhism, has continuously posted itself as a prominent frame of reference for ordinary people to re-assess and re-define the problems of modernity in the midst of emerging threats of global capitalist challenges.


Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (237) ◽  
pp. 772-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Barker

The Etruscan city states flourished in westcentral Italy from the late 8th century BC until their conquest and absorption by the emergent state ofRome in the 4th century BC. In 1985 Italy celebrated the century or so of work on its oldest civilization with a series of major exhibitions under the slogan, ‘Buongiorno Etruschi’ (‘Good morning, Etruscansi!’). There were eight major exhibitions in Tuscany displaying over 5000 objects from all the major collections in the region, designed to cover most aspects of Etruscan culture – settlement systems, domestic and religious architecture, religion, everyday life, crafts, and artistic achievement. As the sponsors FIAT wrote in their preface to the splendid catalogues produced for the project (e.g. Camporeale 1985; Carandini 1985; Cristofani 1985; Stopponi 1985), the intention of this massive undertaking was to convey to the Italian public that the Etruscans were not just a dead civilization known above all for the way of death of its élite, but ‘a lively culture of ordinary people, merchants, and craftsmen’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 294-314
Author(s):  
Prachi Priyanka

India has been swept by pandemics of plague, influenza, smallpox, cholera and other diseases. The scale and impact of these events was often cataclysmic and writers offered a glimpse into the everyday life of ordinary people who lost their lives and livelihoods and suffered the angst and trauma of mental, physical and emotional loss. This paper focuses on the devastation caused by pandemics especially in the Ganges deltaic plains of India. Through selected texts of 20th century Hindi writers – Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Bhagwan Das, Harishankar Parsai, Pandey Bechan Sharma – this paper aims to bring forth the suffering and struggles against violence, social injustices and public health crises in India during waves of epidemics and pandemics when millions died as they tried to combat the rampant diseases.


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