Archives

Anthropology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Zeitlyn
Keyword(s):  
Museum Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Specific Level ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past

Archives and archival studies have an increasingly high profile within anthropology. The term gets used to cover several different fields: in theory it is used to talk about how governments control their populations, including by controlling what sort of history gets written (Derrida 1995 cited under Key Monographs), and generalizing from this, also by controlling how the population thinks about the past and future and about political alternatives (see Foucault 2002 cited under Key Monographs). At a more specific level, one focused more on particulars, archives have become the focus of research in historical anthropology and memory (though the parallel between archives and memory is itself questionable). See the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Memory.” Studies are now being undertaken of how archives are created and how archivists do their work on the basis of parallels with museum studies. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Museum Anthropology.” Digital archives enable new forms of research, although some and perhaps even most of the conceptual issues around them as archives are in fact the same as for analogue archives, and the digital exponents (who no longer warrant being called pioneers) risk ignoring important precedents and having to relearn the same lessons as their predecessors. The term “archives” can identify the repositories of material (buildings, suites of rooms, or a web address) and the materials contained therein. There is often slippage between these two senses, and some authors pit them against each other. Professional archivists usually discuss “an archives”: the word is plural (because one building/website contains many files). By contrast, theorists who use the idea of records in an extended (metaphorical) sense, following Foucault 2002 and Derrida 1995 (both cited under Key Monographs), discuss the singular “archive,” often with a definite article, so we have “the archive” and sometimes even “the Archive.”

scholarly journals Visiting history, witnessing memory: A study of a Holocaust Exhibition in Paris in 2012

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 630-645
Author(s):  
Sarah Gensburger
Keyword(s):  
Museum Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Memory Mechanism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memorial Museums ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Empirical Material

Over the past 20 years, the number of memorial museums and memory exhibitions has increased exponentially and the commemoration of the Holocaust paved the way for this increase. This evolution has given rise to a significant amount of research. However, two questions remain largely unanswered: how are the protocols of memorial exhibitions planned and constructed in concrete terms? And then how do the visitors to these exhibitions use and appropriate this material? The search for the ‘visitor’s gaze’ which is at the heart of contemporary museum studies has only rarely been extended to memorial museums and exhibitions, even those dealing with Holocaust-related topics. This article aims to address this goal. It is thus situated at the crossroads of memory studies and museum studies. Based on extensive empirical material but within the limits of a case study, it focuses on the exhibition C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris, which was held at the Hotel de Ville in Paris, in 2012. In so doing, it aims to consider some of the underlying assumptions that often go unexamined in the scholarly work on Holocaust memory exhibitions and highlights the centrality of the witnessing memory mechanism as the main way of appropriating the exhibition.

Memory Practices in the Classroom

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Ahlrichs ◽  
Katharina Baier ◽  
Barbara Christophe ◽  
Felicitas Macgilchrist ◽  
Patrick Mielke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
History Education ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Online Videos ◽  
Memory Practices

This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media- saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in German secondary schools, this article identifies different memory practices as a nexus of pupils, teachers, blackboards, pens, textbooks, and online videos that enacts what counts as worth remembering today: reproduction; destabilization without explicit contestation; and interruption. Exploring mediated memory practices thus highlights an array of (often unintended) ways of making the past present.

News on the 700 Club: The Cycle of Religious Activism

1994 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Abelman
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
News Program ◽  
The Media ◽  
Religious Activism

This content analysis evaluates political topics and themes of televangelist Pat Robertson's high-profile news program The 700 Club during the early months of the 1992 presidential campaign. Considered the media arm of the Religious Right, this program was found to go against the trend of increasingly political and less religious content observed in earlier analyses of equivalent episodes during the 1983, 1986, and 1989 seasons. In addition, political topics were addressed more neutrally than in the past. The study discusses the possible impact of an increasingly competitive telecommunication environment on religious broadcasters.

Histories for Anthropology: Ten Years of Historical Research and Writing by Anthropologists, 1980–1990

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-455
Author(s):  
Susan Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Textual Practice ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Anthropological History

Editor’s Note: Susan Kellogg’s article on anthropology and history continues our special series “History and the Other Social Sciences.” There will be one further article, by David Robertson, on political science and history. An expanded version of the whole series will then be published as a book by Duke University Press.The past, once considered the exclusive domain of historians and antiquarians, has increasingly been embraced by anthropologists. Today, it is difficult to find a major anthropological study that does not claim to offer a diachronic, processual, historical analysis. In examining 10 years of historical anthropological writing, I cover three broad topics in this essay. First, I explain the emergence of a more historical anthropology as a widespread response to a crisis in the conceptualization of culture. Second, I argue that while there are certain identifiable themes that cut across this literature, in general, it reflects long-standing topical interests within anthropology; I review this literature according to these topics rather than divide it into interpretive or cultural studies versus studies of political economy. Third, I try to assess this body of work critically. I concentrate here on anthropological history as both research and textual practice, as well as briefly examine anthropological uses of the concepts of time, colonialism, and structure and agency.

Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure

First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Paasonen ◽  
Jenny Sundén
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Male Privilege ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feminist Media Studies ◽  
Public Exposure ◽  
Revenge Porn ◽  
Social Privilege

Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos’s refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.

A Hint of Things to Come …

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Charles R. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Landscape Transformations ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter provides an overview of landscape studies in archaeology, particularly as practiced in the southeastern United States. There is an extended discussion justifying historical anthropology as an important point of departure for this study, in particular because of its usefulness for exploring processes of colonialism. The chapter provides summaries of the major Native American groups and European powers that appear in the remainder of the volume. Generally speaking, the three major European players, or the Spanish, English, and French had different goals and methods of colonization. These methods cumulatively spurred a highly ramified history of landscape transformations for Native Americans. The chapter’s approach resonates well with post-colonial approaches that attempt to decolonize the past by removing Europeans as the primary lens by which we view the actions of Indigenous peoples. Working under rubrics such as “Native-lived colonialism” and “decolonizing the past,” archaeologists increasingly are seeking to integrate European texts, the archaeological record, oral histories, and the perspectives of Native peoples to try and achieve a plural perspective on past lifeways.

scholarly journals Beyond trauma? Memories of Joi/y and memory play in Blade Runner 2049

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Arnold-de Simine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Cultural memory studies finds itself at an impasse: whereas ‘cultural memory’ is conceptualized as mediated, dynamic, imaginative and shaped by the present, the dominant paradigm of ‘trauma’ illuminates the hold the past has on us, casting the shadow of a melancholic subjectivity that threatens to obscure our agency as (political) subjects. This article asks what lies in store for memory studies beyond the focus on (classic) trauma (theory). Using the movie Blade Runner 2049 (US 2017; dir: Denis Villeneuve) as an illustrative example, it explores how creative and joyful forms of meaning-making through play and acts of memory inform each other in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described as ‘cultural experience’.

scholarly journals Recent climate-driven ecological changes in tropical montane lakes of Rwenzori Mountains National Park, central Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anson W. Mackay ◽  
Rebecca Lee ◽  
James M. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Organic Carbon ◽  
National Park ◽  
Organic Geochemistry ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Rwenzori Mountains ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Recent Climate

Abstract Rwenzori Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, has experienced rapid glacier loss since the beginning of the twentieth century, yet there has been little investigation of aquatic biodiversity change in the park. This study presents a paleolimnological analysis from Lake Mahoma (2990 m asl), which is situated in the bamboo-forest transition zone. Diatom and organic geochemistry data from a 39-cm-long sediment core with a basal age of c. 1715 CE were compared with new analyses of previously published data from Lakes Bujuku (3891 m asl) and Lower Kitandara (3989 m asl), in the alpine zone. Comparisons were made to determine if aquatic ecosystem changes exhibited similar inter-lake patterns over the past ~ 150 years of climate warming and glacial recession, or if only local change was apparent. The diatom flora of Lake Mahoma is acidophilous, dominated by Aulacoseira ikapoënsis since at least the mid eighteenth century. In recent decades, the obligate nitrogen-heterotroph Nitzschia palea increased in importance, concurrent with declining δ15Norg values. We suggest that these late twentieth century changes were linked to regional warming and increased thermal stratification of Lake Mahoma. Regional comparisons of the Rwenzori lakes were done using existing organic geochemistry records (total organic carbon, C/N and δ13Corg) and through diatom compositional turnover analyses, and categorisation of species into one of four diatom growth morphology traits, or guilds: tychoplanktonic, high-profile, low-profile and motile. Over the past 150 years, all three lakes showed unidirectional, compositional diatom turnover, indicating that deterministic processes had affected diatom communities. Declining turnover at each site is broadly mirrored by an increase in tychoplanktonic taxa, along with concomitant declines in high-profile diatoms at Lake Mahoma, and low-profile diatoms at Lake Bujuku, and at least for the past 60 years, at Lower Kitandara. The interplay between diatom guilds at all sites is mainly a consequence of competition for available resources. Sediment organic carbon at all sites comes from both autochthonous and allochthonous sources, the relative abundances of which are influenced by the time elapsed since lakes had glaciers in their catchment.

Historians’ Amicus Briefs

2018 ◽  
pp. 1094-1114
Author(s):  
Sam Erman ◽  
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Second World

This chapter seeks to understand why historians often find amicus brief writing so vexed and how they have navigated the challenges it poses. It starts with a conceptual analysis of the historians’ amicus brief, in two parts, focused on the problem of expertise. Courts permit historians to participate as friends of the court because they believe that scholars’ knowledge of the past and its relationship to the present are valuable to their juridical work. Yet there are two troublesome questions about expertise that threaten this cross-disciplinary collaboration. One is the nature of historians’ expertise. The second is that the courts’ expertise also concern relating the past to the present, especially where precedent is concerned. The chapter then explores high-profile amicus briefs by historians since the Second World War and considers what these analyses tell us about the prospects for future amicus briefs.

Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia’s colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship, c. 1980–2015

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1129-1143
Author(s):  
Barbara Laubenthal ◽  
Daniel Schumacher
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political System ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Framing

This article focuses on campaigns by former colonial soldiers from Nepal and Hong Kong and their struggles for British citizenship over the last three decades. When analysing these mobilizations, we combine approaches from social movement research with insights from cultural memory studies. We use the concept of ‘relational fields’ to determine how these former colonial soldiers systematically utilized the past as a political framing device and thus revealed themselves to be not outsiders to the political system but equal players therein. We argue that their actions are best understood as a series of connected postcolonial civil rights campaigns that often reinforce rather than reverse romanticized and positivist representations of Britain’s imperial past. While in some instances colonial veterans were able to mount meaningful political interventions, our analysis shows that the veterans’ eventual acceptance into British society could only come at the price of their continued stereotyped depiction as colonial subjects.

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