History writing and nation building in post-independence Tajikistan

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helge Blakkisrud ◽  
Shahnoza Nozimova
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Gray Zone ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
Common Understanding

Since the end of the Tajik civil war in 1997, the Tajik authorities have being seeking to instill a new national consciousness. Here the educational system plays a crucial role, not least the way history is taught. Through a state-approved history curriculum, the authorities offer a common understanding of the past that is intended to strengthen the (imagined) community of the present. In this article, we examine the set of history textbooks currently used in Tajik schools and compare them with Soviet textbooks, exploring continuities and changes in the understanding of the Tajik nation. We distinguish between changes in the perception of the national “self” and the new “other,” the Uzbeks, and introduce two intermediary categories: the Soviet/Russian heritage as an “external self” and Islam as an “internal other.” The main battle for the further delimitation of the Tajik “self” is likely to take place within the discursive gray zone between the two latter categories, where the authorities will have to find a balance between a continued secular state ideology and the heavy presence of Islam, as well as between a Soviet past and a Tajik present.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Competition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

Macedonia Faculties’ Students - “Chrisi Avgi” (Right Party) Followers’ Critique on the Greek Educational Policy

2014 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalerante Evagelia
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Educational Policy ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
History Books

AbstractThe present paper is involved with the Pedagogical faculties’ students’ critique on the current educational system as it has been altered after 1981. The research was carried out utilizing both quantitative and qualitative tools. Students-voters participated in the interviews whereas active voters were difficult to be located to meet the research requirements. The dynamics of the specific political party is based on a popular profile in terms of standpoints related to economic, social and political issues. The research findings depict the students’ strong wish for a change of the curricula and a turn towards History and Religion as well as an elevation of the Greek historic events, as the History books that have been written and taught at schools over the past years contributed to the downgrading of the Greek national and cultural identity. There is also a students’ strong belief that globalization and the immigrants’ presence in Greece have functioned in a negative way against the Greek ideal. Therefore, an overall change of the educational content could open the path towards the reconstruction of the moral values and the Greek national identity.

The Riddle of a Common History

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constant Part ◽  
Intrinsic Component

By identifying two general issues in recent history textbook controversies worldwide (oblivion and inclusion), this article examines understandings of the United States in Mexico's history textbooks (especially those of 1992) as a means to test the limits of historical imagining between U. S. and Mexican historiographies. Drawing lessons from recent European and Indian historiographical debates, the article argues that many of the historical clashes between the nationalist historiographies of Mexico and the United States could be taught as series of unsolved enigmas, ironies, and contradictions in the midst of a central enigma: the persistence of two nationalist historiographies incapable of contemplating their common ground. The article maintains that lo mexicano has been a constant part of the past and present of the US, and lo gringo an intrinsic component of Mexico's history. The di erences in their historical tracks have been made into monumental ontological oppositions, which are in fact two tracks—often overlapping—of the same and shared con ictual and complex experience.

The Invention of Papal History

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
Commissioned Works ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The Church

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

Vietnamese Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Pelley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asian ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Southern State ◽  
The Past ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Political Function ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North Vietnam

This chapter demonstrates how the process of decolonization and the ensuing separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern state as part of the Cold War in Asia led to different types of history-writing. In both Vietnamese regimes, the writing of history had to serve the state, and in both countries historians emphasized its political function. Whereas North Vietnam located itself in an East Asian and Marxist context, historians of South Vietnam positioned it within a Southeast Asian setting and took a determinedly anti-communist position. After 1986—over a decade after reunification—with past tensions now relaxed, the past could be revaluated more openly under a reformist Vietnamese government that now also permitted much greater interaction with foreign historians.

The New Islamic State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.

“Forward to David the Builder!” Georgia's (re)turn to language-centered nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christofer Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The Rose ◽  
State Language

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n= 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.

(Re)storying Japanese Canadian Histories: Artistic Engagements

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862098726
Author(s):  
Matthew Chin ◽  
Izumi Sakamoto ◽  
Jane Ku ◽  
Ai Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Art Making ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Structure ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Japanese Canadian ◽  
Cultural Identity Formation

This paper examines how Japanese Canadian (JC) artists challenge discursive limitations of constructing representations of JC pasts. Their interventions into JC history-making are significant given the rise of interest in and proliferation of JC historical accounts, partly as a result of the accelerated passing of the remaining survivors of JC incarceration within a broader context of unsettled and unsettling discourses around incarceration in JC families and communities. Contrary to narratives of JC history premised on the conventions of academic history writing, we explore how JC artists engage with the past through their creative practices. Focusing on JC artist Emma Nishimura’s exhibit, The weight of what cannot be remembered, we suggest that JC creative history-making practices have important implications for processes of ethno-racial and-cultural identity formation. In so doing, we decenter state-bound history-making processes that reproduce colonial frameworks of JC subjectivity, temporal linearity, and “objectivity.” Instead, we focus on the temporally circuitous way that Nishimura and other JC artists engage with the past through the idiom of personal intimacy in ways that facilitate a more expansive notion of JC identity and community. Though Nishimura’s work is indexical as opposed to representative of contemporary JC art-making, it is significant in tapping into a common structure of feeling among JC artists that emphasizes a notion of JC’ness rooted in the active struggle to establish a relationship with the past. In attending to Nishimura’s work, we highlight the productivity of art-making as a method of (re)storying to expand meaning-making endeavors within and across communities.

Prestige versus Practicality—A Dilemma for the Engineering Profession

1985 ◽  
Vol 199 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
K McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Engineering Profession ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Training

British engineers have claimed that their important contributions to economic and social well-being, based on their achievements as practical people, have gone unrecognized or unrewarded. Yet over the past thirty years efforts to boost the social prestige of British engineers appear to have undermined the social arrangements which fostered the strong practical ethos. Increasing reliance on the full-time educational system is tending to raise social prestige through bringing the ‘all graduate profession’ and through trends to recruitment from higher social backgrounds. Yet these trends have been associated with a fall in traditional and recognizable training. This paper examines both the nature of the ‘practical’ tradition and efforts to raise ‘prestige’ and asks whether the engineering profession is caught on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma—to boost either prestige or practicality. The paper concludes that in principle the British pattern of education and training has much to commend it still, with the strong emphasis on training elements in a working environment. But it is argued that its success will depend on engineers and their employers becoming much more active in the field of training.

scholarly journals Sámi álbmotbeaivi – «samefolkets dag» eller «samenes nasjonaldag»?

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Lien
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Power Relationship ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Language And Culture

This article is based on the current debate about whether or not the official Sami flag day 6 February may and should be referred to as "Sami Day" or "Sami National Day." While the Norwegian government is consistently referring to the Sami as a people (folk), the Sami decided in 2005 that the celebration referred to the Sami as a nation. The use of the term “nation” by the Sámi Parliament has created reactions among parts of the non Sami population, especially in current and historical Sami core areas, and in some political parties, especially representatives from the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet). The negative statements in connection with the national identity of the Sami, reflects specific attitudes to the power relationship between the majority community and the Sami. In light of these criticisms, it may be useful to see the historical development of the Sámi political mobilization and the common European tradition from which it was born. The Sami National Consciousness grew up in the early 1900s, equivalent to Norwegian nationalism in the wake of union resolution with Sweden. At first glance, The Sami opposition in the period after 1905 seems to be in the business and cultural spheres, but looking at the sources, there is a language that was also indicative of the Norwegian majority community in the same period. The Sami opposition to the Norwegian authorities developed early strategies to respond to assimilation and cultural imperialism. Although the pressure of the Sami opposition fell in periods, it was an important self-awareness of the Sami as political subjects. The Sami initiative is important symbols of Sami political commitment and the national consciousness. The Sami resistance struggle testifies that the conditions of the Sami not only came under the reconciliation policy of the Norwegian authorities, but that Sami demands for rights and respect for language and culture have been fought through well over hundred years. The fact that the Sami nation-building process has been overlooked in Norwegian history writing is arguably an important reason why the idea of a Sami nation seems alien, provocative and partly revolutionary from a majority point of view. However, the Sami nation constitutes itself first and foremost as a cultural nation (cultural heritage, languages, myths, folklore, customs and history), not through demands for political independence.

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