Mapping Authenticity

Author(s):  
Steven J Mock

Debates in the study of public heritage are rooted in the field’s inherently interdisciplinary nature. Heritage is about both the past and the present; about tangible objects and intangible myths; about individuals, groups, institutions, and nations. Cutting through these challenges requires approaching heritage as the emergent product of dense interaction between diverse systems that operate on multiple levels of analysis. This chapter explores the utility of a method known as Cognitive-Affective Mapping, capable of tracking the interaction between tangible and intangible elements of the past and present where they must, by necessity, meet on common ground: as emotionally loaded representations in the human mind. Drawing from the examples of Switzerland and Israel, we examine how such a method can be used both to explain the authenticity of a given object to a national heritage, and to illuminate the emotional significance of this property in situations of inter-group conflict.

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Beeghly

AbstractStudies using the Emotional Availability Scales have burgeoned in the past decade. The collection of papers included in this Special Section represents the latest innovations in research with this paradigm. Consistent with a developmental psychopathology perspective, these papers evaluate emotional availability in a variety of typical, at-risk, international, and intergenerational samples of children and caregivers, with many utilizing longitudinal designs or employing measures from multiple levels of analysis. One study begins to translate findings from this body of research into a promising intervention program. Although further growth and refinement in research with this paradigm is needed, the results to date begin to place the construct of emotional availability into a complex, dynamic biopsychosocial context, and promise to inspire a new generation of studies. In this commentary, some of the key contributions and challenges of this collection of studies are highlighted using a developmental psychopathology framework.


Author(s):  
Nike Romano ◽  
Veronica Mitchell ◽  
Vivienne Bozaleck

For the past few years, as concerned academics and educators in South African higher education, we have come together to meet/think/drink coffee/eat/discuss our research and teaching practices in a coffee shop that overlooks the Rondebosch Common, a public space and national heritage site. The Common invited us to take our thoughts for a walk and we embarked on numerous walking encounters that affected and troubled us in many ways. Our walks became research-creation events that surfaced the implicatedness of our white settler privilege. As we grappled with the complexities and ambivalences grounded in our relationality with this contested site, we were prompted to explore hauntology as a theoretical orientation for our pedagogical practices. Walking with/through the demarcated land that is surrounded by privilege in terms of buildings, services and residences enacted and materialised entanglements of the past/present/future histories. We felt an exchange of affect between those present, the ghosts of colonial and apartheid histories, and the implications for our ongoing teaching. Following Haraway's (2016) ‘staying with the trouble’ and Tsing et al.'s (2017) ‘how to live on a damaged planet’, the relationships between human and non-human continue to haunt us, as we grapple with the im/possibility of finding common ground in a country devastated by colonial and apartheid violences.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

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.


Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.


Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Zerilli

AbstractIn the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War.


2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chitralekha Zutshi

The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text—one “Orientalist” and the other “nationalist”—with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production.


2021 ◽  
pp. e20200042
Author(s):  
Alan Gordon

Historic monuments are the most public and recognized forms of commemoration. In Canada, as around the world, many monuments have come under fire recently for celebrating a vision of the past that is no longer palatable to large segments of the population. The heroes and events they enshrine have been denounced by many as tributes to racism, yet they are valued by others as aspects of our collective history and a celebration of our national heritage. Both these positions gloss over the complexity of the historical act of raising monuments and interpreting their historical meanings. Monuments in Canada, like all forms of commemoration, are reflections of the historiographical and methodological trends contemporary to the discipline of history at the time of their creation. Changes in methods and interpretations have thus also affected their meaning over time. Thus, monuments are not straightforward representations of history but, instead, layered expressions of historiography in physical form. Ascribing to them singular meanings obscures the complexity of the societies that constructed them and simplifies their connections to public life.


2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 692-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
deborah davis

over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. in terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. at the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism or marker of all that is negative about post-socialist city life. building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation of subordination and exclusion in favour of a more polyvalent and stratified reading that emphasizes individual narratives unfolding against memories of an impoverished personal past, and a consumer culture that simultaneously incorporates contradictory experiences of emancipation and disempowerment.


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