Blood Affairs: Racial Blood Group Research and Nation Building in Greece, 1920s–1940s

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-51
Author(s):  
Ageliki Lefkaditou

Abstract This paper examines the transnational exchanges associated with the emergence of racial blood group studies in Greece. It explores the overlap between anthropological and medical perspectives as well as the concurrences and tensions between national and transnational concerns. By following the work of the main Greek physical anthropologist of the interwar period, the paper asks how politics interpenetrates into this case study in a scientifically consequential way and conversely how innovation in research allows anthropologists to intervene with politically timely questions. It showcases how wartime mobilities generated anthropological data that weaved and strengthened the fabric of the Greek national narrative.

Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

Using the Republic of North Macedonia as a case study, this article analyzes the processes through which national sports teams’ losing performance acquires a broad social and political significance. I explore claims to sporting victory as a direct product of political forces in countries located at the bottom of the global hierarchy that participate in a wider system of coercive rule, frequently referred to as empire. I also analyze how public celebrations of claimed sporting victories are intertwined with nation-building efforts, especially toward the global legitimization of a particular version of national history and heritage. The North Macedonia case provides a fruitful lens through which we can better understand unfolding sociopolitical developments, whereby imaginings of the global interlock with local interests and needs, in the Balkans and beyond.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nóra Veszprémi

Abstract After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-336
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Taylor

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet's birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society's past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet's iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia's spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year's events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan's strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly's eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people's tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.


Author(s):  
Remi Chukwudi Okeke

This study examines the linkages between relative deprivation and identity politics in a postcolonial state. It further investigates the relationship among these variables and nation-building challenges in the postcolony. It is a case study of the Nigerian state in West Africa, which typically harbours the attributes of postcoloniality and indeed, large measures of relative deprivation in her sociopolitical and economic affairs. The study is also an interrogation of the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. It has been attempted in the study to offer distinctive explanations over the problematique of nation-building in the postcolonial African state of Nigeria, using relative deprivation, identity politics and the neo-Biafran movement as variables. In framing the study’s theoretical trajectories and in historicizing the background of the research, ample resort has been made to a significant range of qualitative secondary sources. A particularly salient position of the study is that it will actually be difficult to locate on the planet, any group of people whose subsequent generations (in perpetuity) would wear defeat on the war front, as part of their essential identity. Hence, relative deprivation was found to be more fundamental than identity politics in the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. However, the compelling issues were found to squarely border on nation-building complications in the postcolony.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunjung Lee ◽  
Marjorie Johnstone

This article critically examines the close tie between host and source countries in producing education migration. Using South Korea and Canada as a case study, our analysis illustrates how the gradual granting/limiting of citizenship to education migrants is ingrained in social policy which contributes to the nation-building of the host country while relying on ‘foreign’ income from the source country, impinging on family life (i.e. splitting family structure trans-nationally), and risking social integration. Although the actors are changed from labor migrants to education migrants the same dynamic of excluding migrants from citizenship and distinguishing worthy migrants from non-worthy migrants remains unchanged.


Author(s):  
Ray Gallon

The challenges of teaching Content Strategy and Information Architecture in a professional Master’s program are daunting because in these two disciplines the source of quality is hidden, and methodology can provide little useful guidance. The solution was to provide the cultural, epistemological, structural, and strategic principles behind these disciplines in classroom sessions, employing traditional lecture methods plus interactive exercises. All practical, hands-on experience comes through group research projects where students are expected to apply the principles that have been discussed in class. Students are evaluated solely on the group research projects. This case study suggests classroom methodology adjustment to make it more interactive and bring it into line with the informational environment students live in every day.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Christian Zukowski

This paper is primarily a case study of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal case Caring Society v Canada and seeks to accomplish three things. First, create a theoretical foundation built upon historic instances of discriminatory/assimilationist policies based upon theoretical understandings of social reproduction, biopolitics, and neoliberalism. Second, to situate Caring Society within said theoretical framework for the purpose of determining the context in which it occurs and the role of the case's context in producing discriminatory/assimilationist policy. Third is the application of both the theoretical framework as well as Caring Society to determine how the Canadian state engages in nation building through processes of othering and framing Indigenous peoples as a foreign threat to the security of the Canadian identity. In doing so, I not only argue that Indigenous child welfare is the perpetuation of residential schools, but that it systematically breaks down Indigenous children and Indigenous communities in response to their perceived threat through processes of othering and nation-building.


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