The ‘ideal perpetrator’: The French National Railways and the social construction of accountability

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 327-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Federman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Ideal

Mass atrocity requires the participation of numerous individuals and groups, yet only a few find themselves held accountable. How are these few selected? This article offers a framework that is useful for understanding how the condemned often embody attributes that keep them in the spotlight. Because norms used to identify perpetrators can set the context for future violence, long-term security requires interrupting both the actions of perpetrators and the discourses about them. A form of praxis, this study of the contemporary conflict over the French National Railways’ (SNCF) amends-making for its World War II transport of deportees towards death camps considers how certain perpetrators come to stand for the many. The SNCF remains in the spotlight not because of greater culpability or an unwillingness to make amends but because it embodies attributes of an ‘ideal’ perpetrator: it is (1) strong, (2) abstractable, (3) representative of the nature of the crime, and (4) has a champion-opponent who focuses attention on the perpetrator. Understanding the labeling process makes visible who and what we ignore at our own peril.

Anglicans and Episcopalians in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan R. Gundersen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
World War ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

Episcopalians have built, reimagined, and rebuilt their church at least three different times over the course of 400 years in America. From scattered colonial beginnings, where laity both took major roles in running Church of England parishes and practiced a faith that was focused on worship, pastoral care, and good works, Anglicans created a church that blended hierarchy, democracy, and autonomy. It took time after the disruptions of the American Revolution for Episcopalians to find their place among the many competing denominations of the new nation. In the process women found new roles for themselves. Episcopalians continued to have a large impact on American society even as other denominations outpaced them in membership. As individuals they shaped American culture and became prominent advocates for the social gospel. Distracted at times as they tried to balance catholic and Protestant in their thought and worship, they built a church that included both religious orders and revival gatherings. Although perceived as a church of the elite, its members included African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and union members. Episcopalians struggled with issues of race, class, and gender throughout their history. After World War II, their understandings of the teachings of Jesus pulled a majority of Episcopalians toward more liberal social positions and created a traditionalist revolt eventually resulting in a schism that required new rebuilding efforts in parts of America.

“Brother, that Ain’t Imaginary!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
American Soldier ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
The Ideal

Billy Batson and his alter ego Captain Marvel reached the height of their popularity during World War II. This chapter studies several of Billy’s wartime adventures, stories that artist C. C Beck often dismissed later in his career. In these narratives, Captain Marvel embodies aspects of the ideal American soldier figured as an innocent boy whose courage all but guarantees a victory over the Axis powers. The chapter also examines the social and cultural consequences of this idealized figure, especially on returning soldiers and their families.

scholarly journals Metafora konsumpcji. Sposób opisu zmian kulturowych i społecznych w Ameryce lat 80. i 90. XX wieku w filmie Co gryzie Gilberta Grape’a Lassego Hallströma

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (56) ◽  
pp. 66-88
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Bogunia-Borowska
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Idea ◽  
American Society ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Ideal

The purpose of the paper is to present an image of American society presented in the movie What is eating Gilbert Grape by Lasse Hallström. It is the film that not only represents a consumer society, but promises the coming crises as a result of such social idea. This somewhat forgotten film is a penetrating analysis of consumer society. It points to the traps of the social and cultural model of consumption, which came to life after the Second World War an idea - a valve of security for Western societies, and which was to unload tensions and eliminate problems. The author of the movie uses food perfectly as a literal implementation of the next American dream about the ideal society and ideal citizens-consumers. Noting the risks and threats associated with it and anticipating the crisis of long-term implementation of the consumer society model.

Intercultural Experience, the Anglo-American Occupation and UNESCO in Germany 1945–1949

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Morley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
World War ◽  
United Nations Educational ◽  
Intercultural Experience ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Negative Sense

Independent of each other, though contemporaneous, the Anglo-American occupiers of Germany and the newly founded United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization employed culture to foster greater intercultural and international understanding in 1945. Both enterprises separately saw culture as offering a means of securing the peace in the long term. This article compares the stated intentions and activities of the Anglo-American occupiers and UNESCO vis-à-vis transforming morals and public opinion in Germany for the better after World War II. It reconceptualizes the mobilization of culture to transform Germany through engaging theories of cultural diplomacy and propaganda. It argues that rather than merely engaging in propaganda in the negative sense, elements of these efforts can also be viewed as propaganda in the earlier, morally neutral sense of the term, despite the fact that clear geopolitical aims lay at the heart of the cultural activities of both the occupiers and UNESCO.

John Cranko's Antigone (1959): A Ballet Lost and Found

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Jean Racine ◽  
World War ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
The Many ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
The Relationship

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
World War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

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