Duties to the Dead

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-60
Author(s):  
Zofia Stemplowska
Keyword(s):  
Living Will ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Past Injustices

Is it ever possible to mitigate any of the past injustice that was done to the living but who are no longer alive? Much has been written on what might be owed to the living on account of past injustices. Much less focus has been paid to the question of what might be owed at the bar of justice to the dead. This chapter advances an argument that does not rely on the possibility of posthumous benefit or harm. It argues that it is possible to mitigate some injustice done to those who are no longer alive. As a result, the living will sometimes have duties to the dead to mitigate some of the injustice they suffered while alive.

“Past injustice and present prejudice”: Reducing racial bias and increasing sympathy by framing historical racism as recent

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843022110058
Author(s):  
Mason D. Burns ◽  
Erica L. Granz
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Prejudice Reduction ◽  
Causal Connection ◽  
Subjective Perceptions ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
Past Injustices

Racial privity judgments – or the perceived causal connection between historical racial discrimination and current suffering among Black Americans – predicts sympathy for the victims of past injustices and perceptions of contemporary racial inequality. Four studies investigated the ideological roots of privity judgments; focusing on subjective temporal perceptions associated with privity judgments (e.g., subjective perceptions that past discrimination occurred more, versus less, recently). Study 1 revealed that liberals perceived historical instances of racial discrimination as having occurred more recently than conservatives, and that temporal perceptions of recency were associated with less anti-Black bias. Studies 2–4 manipulated temporal perceptions of recency by framing past discrimination as having occurred more recently. Results revealed that increasing perceived temporal recency resulted in reduced anti-Black bias and greater sympathy for present-day victims of racial discrimination across political ideology. Discussion surrounds how framing historical information as subjectively recent has implications for prejudice reduction.

scholarly journals The Old Greeks

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Kouvaros
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Dead

In his final unfinished book on the writing of history, Siegfried Kracauer wonders about his increasing susceptibility to ‘the speechless plea of the dead’. ‘[T]he older one grows, the more he is bound to realize that his future is the future of the past—history.’ For the children of migrants, the question of how to speak well of the dead is distinguished by complex feelings of attachment and rejection, identification and denial that are expressed in a range of everyday interactions. ‘The Old Greeks’ examines the part played by photographic media in this process of memorialisation. It elaborates a series of propositions about the value of photographic media that are tested through a consideration of the events that surrounded the author’s first years in Australia.

Alessandro Gavazzi: a barnabite friar and the risorgimento (Presidential Address)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 303-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Mind

Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridorsAnd issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

scholarly journals Patterns of Memory in Askold Melnyczuk’s Novels as an Example of Ukrainian-American Émigré Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137
Author(s):  
Marta Koval
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Definition Of

Although Ukrainian emigration to North America is not a new phenomenon, the dilemmas of memory and amnesia remain crucial in Ukrainian-American émigré fiction. The paper focuses on selected novels by Askold Melnyczuk (What is Told and Ambassador of the Dead) and analyzes how traumatic memories and family stories of the past shape the American lives of Ukrainian emigrants. The discussion of the selected Ukrainian-American émigré novels focuses on the dilemmas of remembering and forgetting in the construction of both Ukrainian and American narratives of the past. The voluntary amnesia of the Ame- rican-born Ukrainians in Melnyczuk’s novels confronts their parents’ dependence on the past and their inability to abandon it emotionally. Memories of ‘the old country’ make them, similarly to Ada Kruk, ambassadors of the dead. The expression becomes a metaphoric definition of those wrapped by their repressed, fragmentary and sometimes inaccessible memories. Crucial events of European history of the 20th century are inscribed and personalized in the older generation’s stories which their children are reluctant to hear. For them, their parents’ memories became a burden and a shame. Using the concept of transgenerational memory, the paper explores the challenges of postmemory, and eventually its failure. 

“Workers’ Self-Management and Social Property”: A Comment

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 468-476
Author(s):  
Adolph L. Reed
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Property A ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Social Property

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjur up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.1

To Gaze Upon the Dead: The Exhibition of Human Remains as Cultural Practice and Political Process in Scandinavia and the USA

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Hand ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Dead

The clattering sound of a child’s shoes across the cold stone floors; the echo is magnificent. I am nine or ten years old and I make my way through the prehistoric exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. The dimly lit display cases are filled with arrowheads, heavy beads of perforated amber, funnel beakers, and bronze artefacts. I reach my goal, the alluring Bronze Age oak cists where the buried men and women from the heaths of Jutland are looking back at me. I touch the glass. My eyes wander over their reddened hair and their clothes, stained in deep shades of peat brown. My eyes seek theirs in the hollow orbits of their skulls. I close mine and imagine a life thousands of years ago. My small hand moves across the glass, leaving an almost invisible trace. Small fingerprints; a dreaming child’s gesture. I would stay there forever, dreaming of the past. Feeling it. I know that it was moments like this, when I could see and feel the humanity of the past that made me want to become an archaeologist. The immediate encounter with an individual from the past is a privileged moment. For a brief moment our destinies cross paths, and hundreds, even thousands of years are transcended. Scenes like this one, of children gazing at the dead and seeing the past, are not unusual. In museums across Europe, the archaeological findings from burials, including both the human remains and the items that accompanied the dead, are often displayed with pride and confidence. The public expects this and is drawn in with fascination to stand face-to-face with the deep past. Beyond this, the display of the dead and of death itself, with all of the allure and drama that accompany it, becomes a privileged locus for pedagogy and communication. But while this confident attitude towards the display of the dead may be typical in Europe, it is not as evident in North America. In North American museums, it is rare to see human remains from archaeological contexts displayed in any form (exception seems to be given to Egyptian mummies, which still are prominently displayed by many institutions that have them among their collections).

Germanicus as Religious Interpreter

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-120
Author(s):  
Kelly E. Shannon-Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Dead

This chapter focuses on Tacitus’ presentation of Germanicus, Tiberius’ rival. While Germanicus has often been associated with traditionalism and the past, this analysis shows that in the area of religion he is just as much of a threat to Roman cultic memory as Tiberius. When Germanicus engages with emperor cult or uses religious rhetoric in his speeches, he does so mainly to improve his image. In his campaigns in Germany he runs afoul of Tiberius when he attempts to bury the dead from Varus’ legions and opens himself up for accusations of religious pollution. On his journey east toward Egypt, he ignores several ominous occurrences that presage his death; and in his final moments his use of the rhetoric of fate and fortuna shows a poor conception of his own place in the cosmos. If Tiberian Rome is in a crisis of religious memory, Germanicus is not the solution.

Reordering the Royal Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Citizen ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead

This chapter narrates Agyeman Prempeh's return to Asante in 1924 from exile in the Seychelles. It unfolds how he had changed in the course of his 28 years in detention and repatriated as a private citizen, Mr Edward Prempeh. Two years later, having cemented a reputation among British officials as a progressive figure, he was appointed 'Kumasihene', head of the reconstituted Kumasi division of colonial Ashanti. That said, in his own mind and in those of his people, Agyeman Prempeh remained Asantehene. Despite his embrace of Anglicanism and colonial modernity, Prempeh was acutely conscious of this historical role and worked assiduously until his death to heal the wounds of the past and to ensure a reinvigorated future by attending to the dignity of the royal dead. The chapter examines his project, which took the form of three interconnected campaigns: to reorder the dominion of the dead in Kumasi; to rebuild the destroyed mausoleum at Bantama; and to repatriate the remains of those who died in the Seychelles and elsewhere. Together, they constitute a key episode in the political life of dead bodies in colonial West Africa.

Coping with crisis: labour markets, institutional changes and household economies. An introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Manuela Martini ◽  
Cristina Borderías
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Labour Markets ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Textile Production ◽  
Household Economies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Dead

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the ‘dead’ season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.

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