“Wasn’t it golden?”

Author(s):  
Anindya Raychaudhuri

This chapter examines how we construct ideas of home and homeliness in various ways within diverse memory narratives. Apart from oral history testimonies, the chapter focuses on visual art, literature, and the cinema of partition. The chapter examines the many meanings that the concept of home has in people’s memory. It looks at the powerful emotional connection that people experience and preserve in their memories of the lost home. Analyzing these meanings and emotions, the chapter goes on to make the case that the memories of the lost home, and the ways in which these memories become part of one’s life-narrative can be a powerful force in transcending and undermining national borders and statist narratives of history.

Ethnologies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Jennifer S.H. Brown

The author of this article examines the ways in which the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage considers the protection of aboriginal languages and provides a case study of the challenges of the preservation of the Cree language in Canada. For Indigenous people, in Canada as elsewhere, questions arise about who speaks for whom; many of their constituents may not identify with the major political organizations that represent their interests to governments and are recognized by government agencies; and other structural and logistical barriers also arise. The paper takes a look at the richness of Aboriginal history around Hudson Bay as held in language and stories, and then discusses the many challenges that a Hudson Bay Cree storyteller, Louis Bird, and his collaborators faced in pursuing an oral history project funded by a Canadian governmental agency with its own parameters and priorities.


Author(s):  
Nēpia Mahuika

This chapter examines the form of oral history sources and what scholars argue constitutes an “oral” source. It compares popular definitions drawn from the fields of oral history and tradition, and analyses these from an indigenous perspective using the voices of Ngāti Porou people. This chapter proposes a specific Māori definition of oral history called “kōrero tuku iho,” and explores the many ways in which tribal peoples describe and define the form of oral history. These include broader perceptions of what constitutes an “oral literature,” the concept of ownership and oral history, the living nature of oral sources, the shaping and dissemination of oral history via word of mouth, and the intergenerational construction of oral memory in formal speech making, narrative, performance, songs, carvings, incantations and prayer.


2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia M. Cole ◽  
Kit Johnson

It is a commonly held belief that divorce “kills” the family business, especially when copreneurs divorce or separate. Yet there are examples of copreneurs who have successfully continued to work together postdivorce. However, to date, there have been no studies or theories developed regarding successful, postdivorce copreneurs. This grounded theory study examines successful postdivorce copreneurs and proposes a model that can help advisors navigate the many potential pitfalls a divorcing couple can experience. This study finds that copreneurs who have a great deal of trust in one another can continue to work together postdivorce. Emotional connection, compartmentalization, synergy, commitment to the business, and positive gender issues also contribute to the success of the business and the business relationship.


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven High ◽  
Jessica Mills ◽  
Stacey Zembrzycki

Tens of thousands of oral history interviews sitting in archival drawers, on computer hard drives, or on library bookshelves have never been listened to. Thousands of new interviews are being added each year by the many large testimony projects now underway, including Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Historica–Dominion Institute’s Memory Project. Although the existence of these immense collections is widely known, the interviews are difficult to access. How can we combine oral history and new media to ensure that the potential of such important projects is fully realized? Emergent and digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for accessing Canadian memories and transmitting them to various audiences. New forms of media are changing the ways we think about and do oral and public history.Des milliers d’entrevues d’histoire orale oubliées dans des tiroirs d’archives, sur des disques durs et sur des étagères de bibliothèque n’ont jamais été écoutées. En même temps, chaque année, de nouvelles entrevues viennent s’ajouter par milliers dans le cadre de grands projets de témoignage, y compris la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada et le Projet Mémoire de l’Institut Historica Dominion. Bien que l’existence de ces collections immenses ne soit guère un secret, les entretiens sont difficiles d’accès. Comment peut-on combiner l’histoire orale et les nouveaux médias afin de réaliser pleinement le potentiel de projets si importants? Des technologies numériques récentes présentent de nouvelles possibilités pour accéder aux souvenirs canadiens et les transmettre à divers publics. En effet, de nouvelles formes de média sont en train de changer les manières de penser et de pratiquer l’histoire orale et publique.


Author(s):  
Alan Filewod

Now widely used as a catchall term to describe politically combative or oppositional art, "agitprop" originated from the early Soviet conjunction of propaganda (raising awareness of an issue) and agitation (exciting an emotional response to the issue), as theorized by Lenin in What Is To Be Done (1902) and institutionalized in the many departments and commissions of Agitation and Propaganda in the USSR and the Comintern after the Russian Revolution. The portmanteau term conveys the terse telegraphic efficiencies of Bolshevik bureaucratic rhetoric. Considered both as a mode of artistic production and a set of formal characteristics, agitprop had an immense impact on modernist cultural practice, particularly in graphic design, visual art, and theater. In the theater, agitprop developed in Russia and Germany as a mobile form of exhortative revolutionary theater designed for quick outdoor performance. It was adaptive to location, audience, and cast, and suited the sightlines and acoustics of outdoor performance in found spaces. Short phrases, heavy cadence, and repetition allowed performance to project through noisy and unruly audiences. The form achieved widespread popularity in the brief period between the mid-1920s and the coalescence of the Popular Front in 1934, when artistic and political radicalisms aligned in a vision of an artistic practice mobilized by international proletarian modernity; in this, agitprop was theorized as the theatricalization of modernity.


Author(s):  
Kaisa Hiltunen

Hetkiä elämän virrasta. Kerronnallinen ja kokemuksellinen aika Joki-elokuvassaJarmo Lampelan elokuvassa Joki (Suomi 2001) kerrotaan kuusi samanaikaista, toisiaan sivuavaa tarinaa, joissa joukko pikkukaupungin ihmisiä joutuu valintojen eteen tai kohtaamaan elämän mullistavia asioita. Eri-ikäisten henkilöhahmojensa kautta Joki piirtää esiin koko elämänkaaren.Artikkelissa Jokea tarkastellaan ajan näkökulmasta kiinnittämällä huomiota ajan eri tasoihin ja ulottuvuuksiin. Aikaa tarkastellaan yhtäältä osana elokuvan muotoa ja toisaalta katsojan ja elokuvan välisessä kohtaamisessa syntyvänä ilmiönä. Lisäksi kysytään, miten Joki filosofisen sisältönsä kautta tematisoi aikaan liittyviä kysymyksiä.Kertovassa elokuvassa aika kytkeytyy kerrontaan. Joen tapauksessa tämä ulottuvuus korostuu, koska elokuvan rakenne poikkeaa tavanomaisesta lineaarisesta ja yksilinjaisesta kerronnasta. Samanaikaiset tapahtumat kerrotaan peräkkäisinä episodeina. Joen episodimaista rakennetta analysoidaan muun muassa David Bordwellin verkostonarratiivi-käsitteen avulla. Aikaa kerronnallisena ilmiönä käsitellään elokuvateorian ja Paul Ricoeurin kerronnan ja ajan suhdetta käsittelevän filosofian valossa.Myös Joen katsoja tulee tavallista tietoisemmaksi ajasta joutuessaan suhteuttamaan tarinalinjoja toisiinsa. Elokuvan aika on aina kokemuksellista siinä mielessä, että se on katsojaa varten rakennettua ja syntyy elokuvan ja katsojan kohtaamisessa. Joessa aika on kokemuksellista myös siinä mielessä, että se ilmaisee henkilöhahmojensa aikaan sidottuja kokemuksia. Näitä kokemuksellisia ulottuvuuksia tarkastellaan ajan fenomenologian ja fenomenologisesti suuntautuneen elokuvateorian avulla.Aika ei ole redusoitavissa pelkästään kerronnalliseksi ilmiöksi, vaikka Joessa aika kytkeytyy vahvasti kerrontaan. Artikkelissa pohditaan lisäksi millä muulla tavoin aika ilmenee Joessa kuin osana kerrontaa. Moments in the Flow of Life. Narrative and Experiential Time in The RiverJarmo Lampela’s film The River (Joki, Suomi 2001) narrates six simultaneous and intersecting stories in which small town characters are faced by important choices and life-changing events. Through the characters of differing ages The River outlines the course of a human life.In this article I ask how time is manifested in The River. I examine the many dimensions of time that can be reached through cinema. On the one hand, time is examined as a part of film form, and on the other, as experiential. Moreover, the article asks how The River thematizes time through its philosophical content.In The River, narrative time is emphasized, because its structure with six storylines deviates from the typical linear and unitary narrative. The six simultaneous events in The River are told as subsequent episodes. David Bordwell’s concept of network narrative is used to analyze this episodic structure. Film theory and Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative are used to address questions related to narrative time.The spectator becomes conscious of time when she has to figure out what the relationships between the storylines are. Cinematic time is invariably experiential, because it is constructed for the spectator, and comes into existence in the encounter of the film and the spectator. In The River, time is experiential also in the sense that its narrative expresses the personal experiences of its characters that are temporal in nature. This experiential dimension of cinematic time is examined in the framework of phenomenology of time and film theoretical adaptations of phenomenology.Time in cinema is more than a narrative phenomenon. Thus, the article examines how time is manifested both as a narrative and a non-narrative element in The River.


Author(s):  
Lizzie Seal ◽  
Maggie O’Neill

This chapter examines historical confinement via the example of homes for Indigenous children in Australia. Between 1910 and 1970 Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in children’s homes in order to assimilate and ‘civilise’ them. Frequently, this removal was forcible. This chapter explores how these homes are remembered and imagined in oral history testimonies, as well as in the cultural representations, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Doris Garimara Pilkington’s life narrative and its film adaptation, Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002).


1978 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 301-310
Author(s):  
Robert J. Papstein

Readers need not be reminded that an abundant literature exists concerning the techniques for recording and interpreting field work data; indeed, oral sources have been subjected to the most rigorous textual and literary criticism and we are even beginning to see what one observer calls ‘schools’ of oral history. All of this has been to the benefit of African history, as the many fine monographs of the last decade attest, while the proliferation of oral history projects in other areas of history attest to a general acceptance of oral data (except in the very darkest corners of the discipline) as a valuable source for the historian. But the concern with interpretation has been carried on largely to the exclusion of other fieldwork related issues. I would like to take up a number of these here, with the cautionary note that it is obviously impossible in this format to discuss them in the detail and with the variety of views they deserve and that my motivation in raising them at all derives from an interest to stimulate some debate on the topic of field work rather than to arbitrate what is correct or incorrect procedure. A further point is that, although my observations are first hand and therefore obviously limited, I believe they represent problems which are more widespread than the examples which follow.


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Eick

Almost forty years since the publication of Cutler's landmark “Oral history—its nature and uses for educational history,” growing numbers of historians of education have adopted oral interviews as the basis for historical analysis. Furthermore, questions about the objectivity of oral sources in view of memory's fallibility have been more productively redirected toward exploring, in light of credibility standards borrowed from the social sciences and literary theory, the many hues of subjectivity of oral historical testimonies, and their implications for understanding same past events from multiple perspectives. As Portelli aptly states, “the first thing that makes oral history different, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning” He boldly asserts that “what informants believe is indeed a historical fact “that is, the fact that they believe it”, as much as what really happened.” Oral historians not only reproblematized memory for historians by focusing attention on understanding the subjectivity of memory as a manifestation of historical consciousness, but they also brought to our attention how memories are gendered, racialized, and class based. They brought to our attention the importance of examining why different individuals and groups experience the same event in very different ways. Today, oral sources, particularly since the 1990s when historians began investigating the construction of identities, are compared less pejoratively with documentary sources by academic disciplinarians. And oral historians continue to break down “boundaries between the educational institution and the world, between the [history] profession and ordinary people.” However, they also continue to be faced with the challenge of articulating “the connection between individual and social historical consciousness.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Julius Ssegantebuka ◽  
Timothy Tebenkana ◽  
Ritah Edopu ◽  
Patrick Sserunjogi ◽  
John Bosco Kanuge

The study examined the challenges faced by tutors in the teaching of the visual arts education (VAE) in national teachers’ colleges (NTCs) in Uganda. The study adopted a qualitative approach where tutors’ and pre-service visual arts teachers’ (PVATs) views about the challenges facing them in the teaching and learning in visual arts were expressed. Data were collected from two pur­posively selected NTCs, and ten tutors. Yet, the 48 second year PVATs who participated in this study, were randomly selected from the many who were available. The researchers used interviews, document reviews and focus group discussions to collect data. The findings show that the challenges facing tutors in the teaching of visual arts have a great impact on what PVATs learn. Some visual art disciplines have too much content to be covered within a short period of two years. There is a general lack of teaching resources, such as art materials, tools and equipment, textbooks, and inadequate teaching space. The researchers recommended the reduction of the content of some visual art disciplines to fit the available time; provide art materials, tools and equipment as well as adequate teaching space which would allow the use of more appropriate teaching methods which would avail tutors with the opportunity to perform to their expectations in visual arts teaching.


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