Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Stråth

Over the last decades, a shift has occurred in the methodology of academic historiography, from an earlier focus on the quality of the sources towards the narrative framework of the history. The point in the new approach is that the sources are interpreted and put together into a narration. In the earlier approach, there was a kind of myopic source criticism, which stopped at the sources and never really questioned the way in which they were put together into a narration. The way in which this composition is made is as biased as the sources on which the narration is based. For this reason, critical scrutiny must move one step forward, instead of halting at the sources. The path-breaking Metahistory by Hayden White in 1973 demonstrated, in a provocative way, the bias in narrative structures. He moved the focus from the sources as such, towards the manner in which they were employed. When the book was published, it was generally rejected and marginalized by the historians’ craft. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that, even if it is not generally recognized, at least it is widely accepted. Metahistory alluded, of course, to metaphysics. White's conclusion was that history is basically ideology. History is not the past per se, nor, as Ranke argued, is it wie es eigentlich gewesen, but a reflection on the past from the present. This methodological shift does not deny the continued importance of a critical approach to the sources and does not reject the existence of events and facts. Methodological rules of how to evaluate sources critically are still valid. The events and the facts based on the events can be documented. No serious historian founding his or her work on sources would deny the fact that, for instance, the Holocaust really did occur.

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-783
Author(s):  
Dragana Frfulanović-Šomođi ◽  
Milena Savić

The design of socialist Yugoslavia received a particularly new look through the creation of Aleksandar Joksimović, which gave the new elements a traditional look, equally putting them in rank with world-famous designs of celebrated designers. This paper was created with the idea of emphasizing the importance of the creativity of Joksimović, which is within the framework of socialist norms, as an artist, remained insufficiently recognized, although his work was in the service of exclusive promotion of the cultural aspects of his country. His concept of design based on the medieval cultural tradition emerged from the framework of the then socialist clothes, and it is called grandiose exoticism. The names of the first collections given by the historical figures of medieval Serbian history are a clear indication that it is possible to draw inspiration from the past, if it is professionally approached and adequately, by contemporary trends, the audience and the market. Joksimovic's individualism, apart from design, was also reflected in the way the collection itself was modeled through models and choreographies, and clearly once again showed his step ahead of time, while the social and political circumstances forced him to stay one step behind.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 77-79
Author(s):  
Roberto Spagnolo

Urban regeneration is currently the most important issue in a period of building saturation and a severe public sector crisis. Cities no longer need to grow and the issue of critically rethinking the ‘already built' is acquiring decisive ethical and cultural value. It is therefore no longer a question of accumulation, expansion and consumption, but of rationalisation and moderation, saving, repair and integration. The regeneration of towns and cities and space already in use forms part of the now inescapable change of public perspective and is becoming an opportunity to reconsider our environment and the quality of spaces. What is needed in this context, however, is understanding and awareness of how much and how it is possible to manipulate and modify architectures that are ‘not sustainable' from an energy viewpoint, but are significant in the way they represent the architectural culture and traditions of the past.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvana Iuliana Albert

The volume of collected genetic data has been growing exponentially in the past few years and we need to improve the way we store, analyze and visualize it in order to be able to draw relevant conclusions that could improve the life quality of people. Extracting patterns and predicting future mutations and their impact will rely heavily on the efficient use of Big Data. Often a mutation on its own cannot provide enough information about a disorder or disease. Only if we combine the genetic information with the organism’s environment we can draw some conclusions about penetrance and expressively of the mutation. Because many genes can cause a single disease and at the same time a single gene can cause multiple diseases, we need to analyze the whole context of a person. In this work, a distributed solution that provides demographics and metrics about diagnostics and mutations is pro posed. Seeing the occurrence of a mutation in a particular geographic region can help medical special ists narrow down the search for a patient’s mutations without sequencing the whole genome.


2008 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tassos Patokos

Since its early days, the Internet has been used by the music industry as a powerful marketing tool to promote artists and their products. Nevertheless, technology developments of the past ten years, and especially the ever-growing phenomenon of file sharing, have created the general impression that the Internet is responsible for a crisis within the industry, on the grounds that music piracy has become more serious than it has ever been. The purpose of this paper is to present the impact of new technologies and the Internet on the three main actors of the music industry: consumers, artists and record companies. It is claimed that the Internet has changed the way music is valued, and also, that it may have a direct effect on the quality of the music produced, as perceived by both artists and consumers alike.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Nadim Khoury

At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages a struggle between two foundational tragedies: the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba. The contending ways in which both events are commemorated is a known feature of the conflict. Less known are marginal attempts to jointly deliberate on them. This article draws on such attempts to theorize a postnational conception of memory. Deliberating on the Holocaust and the Nakba, it argues, challenges the way nationalism structures ‘our’ and ‘their’ relationship to the past. While nationalism seeks the congruence of memory and territory, postnationalism challenges this congruence. Doing so entails (i) extending the communicative bounds of memory beyond national members, (ii) disrupting the territorialization of memory along national lines, and (iii) critically revising national narratives in light of a cosmopolitan memory. The article explores these three dimensions and offers a typology that differentiates the way nationalism and postnationalism mediate our relationship to the past.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Durrheim ◽  
Amy Jo Murray

Anti-racism has nurtured many visions of post-racism futures. All this talk and political action relies on and reproduces discourses of racism. While much of this discursive force lies in what is said, we argue that a haunting quality of racism may arise from what is unsaid. This includes the multifarious points of connection between the present and the past. We are all implicated, albeit unevenly. This article describes the phenomenon of spectral racism that arises from such implicature. We develop a discursive account of its constitution in acts of dialogical repression, and we consider some of the social psychological and political ramifications of haunting racism. We illustrate our arguments by an analysis of the way the prohibition against the use of the k-word echoes the toxic past and zombifies racism via psychological enticement.


Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.


Author(s):  
Wendy Junaidi

In the digital age, transactions range from hailing a taxi to watching TV shows on demand that depend on an internet connection. As consumers have more power than ever before, today’s internet service providers face more demanding service expectations from customers than in the past, they recognize the need to improve certain aspects of business, including the quality of the experience they provide to customers. In other words, meeting the demands of broadband internet has its own challenges. The purpose of this study is to provide insights regarding challenges along the customer journey as the opportunities for improvement. The results showed that longer time from ordering to installation and frequent network disconnection are prioritized customer experience issues in internet broadband business and service providers need to focus on improving on the way companies engage the customers through reliable touch points and resetting the way people work in the organization to be more customer-centric.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen

Abstract This paper examines how Hayden White and specifically Frank Ankersmit have attempted to develop the representationalist account of historiography. It is notable that both reject the copy theory of representation, but nevertheless commit to the idea that historiography produces representations. I argue that it would have been more advantageous to go yet one step further and reject representationalist language altogether on the level of narratives, as this implies that one is re-presenting a given object in one’s language in some sense. Narratives and other synthesizing expressions, such as colligatory notions, do not have such objects or references in the past itself, and therefore, it would be more appropriate to talk about constructed ‘presentations.’ In the end, I outline a non-representationalist alternative, according to which historiography is a form of discursive and argumentative practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-63
Author(s):  
Paolo Budroni

This article invites us to a concise walk through the past, offering insights defined by the major challenges science encountered during the centuries. Some lessons for today and tomorrow are enumerated in the three sections of the article, and they go beyond the relatively few perspectives offered by today's Data Science: Open Science (OS) is what has always happened and is nothing new, because science has always sought to be open. Esthetical values played a relevant role in the past. Former scientists recognized the intrinsic relation between the way they opened science and the way they followed the principles of beauty and the sense of esthetic. Their groundbreaking heritage still inspires us in being ready to open new ways in science. Whereas Latin was the original lingua franca of European science, and English is the recent lingua franca, the new lingua franca is software. Pieces of software are the filter, which connect researchers to the world, through layers of data. They assist in observing, in choosing, and in selecting. Open scientists should be aware of the fact that their autonomy in science depends on the quality of these pieces. Another lesson is that ethics—regarded as a source of innovative activities—must be a core component of innovative processes in OS, because society needs a responsible use of data and algorithms in corresponding practices that serve OS.


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