“To me, you are not a Serb”: Ethnicity, ambiguity, and anxiety in post-war Sarajevo

Ethnicities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-563
Author(s):  
Jelena Golubović

The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters.

Author(s):  
M. Ballarin ◽  
C. Balletti ◽  
P. Faccio ◽  
F. Guerra ◽  
A. Saetta ◽  
...  

On 20<sup>th</sup> and 29<sup>th</sup> of May 2012, two powerful earthquakes struck northern Italy. The epicentres were recorded respectively in Finale Emilia (magnitude 5.9 Ml) and Medolla (magnitude 5.8 Ml) in the province of Modena, though the earthquake was formed by a series of seismic shakes located in the district of the Emilian Po Valley, mainly in the provinces of Modena, Ferrara, Mantova, Reggio Emilia, Bologna and Rovigo. Many monuments in the city of Mantova were hit by the earthquake and, among these, Palazzo Ducale with the well-known Castello di San Giorgio which host the noteworthy “Camera degli Sposi”. This building, the most famous of the city, was so damaged that it was closed for more than one year after the earthquake. The emblem of the Palace and Mantova itself, the previously cited “Camera degli Sposi” realized by Andrea Mantegna, was damaged and all the economic and social life of the city was deeply affected. Immediately after the earthquake, the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici of Brescia, Cremona and Mantova establish an agreement with the University Iuav of Venice, requiring an analysis and assessment of the damage in order to proceed with the development of an intervention project. This activity turned out to be very important not only from the point of view of the recovery of the architectural and artistic heritage but also because the city's economy is based primarily on tourism. The closure of one of the most important monuments of Mantova has led to a significant and alarming decline in the government income.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sarah Hackett

Drawing upon a collection of oral history interviews, this paper offers an insight into entrepreneurial and residential patterns and behaviour amongst Turkish Muslims in the German city of Bremen. The academic literature has traditionally argued that Turkish migrants in Germany have been pushed into self-employment, low-quality housing and segregated neighbourhoods as a result of discrimination, and poor employment and housing opportunities. Yet the interviews reveal the extent to which Bremen’s Turkish Muslims’ performances and experiences have overwhelmingly been the consequences of personal choices and ambitions. For many of the city’s Turkish Muslim entrepreneurs, self-employment had been a long-term objective, and they have succeeded in establishing and running their businesses in the manner they choose with regards to location and clientele, for example. Similarly, interviewees stressed the way in which they were able to shape their housing experiences by opting which districts of the city to live in and by purchasing property. On the whole, they perceive their entrepreneurial and residential practices as both consequences and mediums of success, integration and a loyalty to the city of Bremen. The findings are contextualised within the wider debate regarding the long-term legacy of Germany’s post-war guest-worker system and its position as a “country of immigration”.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.


Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Marcin Pliszka

The article analyses descriptions, memories, and notes on Dresden found in eighteenth-century accounts of Polish travellers. The overarching research objective is to capture the specificity of the way of presenting the city. The ways that Dresden is described are determined by genological diversity of texts, different ways of narration, the use of rhetorical repertoire, and the time of their creation. There are two dominant ways of presenting the city: the first one foregrounds the architectural and historical values, the second one revolves around social life and various kinds of games (redoubts, performances).


2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.


REVISTA FIMCA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Amanda Leite Silva Cabral ◽  
Flávia Peres Lima ◽  
Jéssica Iara Costa Bessa Paraguassú

Introdução: A afasia é uma das sequelas mais importantes que ocorrem após lesão cerebral de acidente vascular encefálico (AVE). Objetivos: Identificar o perfil da linguagem oral de pacientes com AVE, atendidos pelo Serviço Assistencial Multidisciplinar Domiciliar (SAMD) na cidade de Porto Velho – RO. Materiais e Métodos: Trata-se de um estudo transversal e quantitativo, realizado na residência dos pacientes que estavam sendo atendidos pelo SAMD. Onde foi utilizado o protocolo de Teste de Reabilitação das Afasias composto inicialmente de um questionário que foi aplicados com os familiares dos pacientes para coletar dados quanto ao AVE e os Testes de Comunicação Oral para avaliar dos pacientes. Resultados: Foram avaliados 11 sujeitos com AVE e oito sujeitos apresentaram afasia emissiva do tipo Broca (100%) com presença de agramatismo e anomia (87,5%), e déficit na organização da comunicação e na memória (100%). Referente à etiologia do AVE, verificou-se que 62,5% dos sujeitos apresentaram etiologia decorrente de hipertensão, com tempo de sequelas com tempo entre um ano menos e a três anos (37,5%). Todos os sujeitos (100%) eram muito falantes antes do AVE, porem 50% continuaram muito falantes após o AVE e os outros 50% se tornaram pouco falantes. Conclusão: Os resultados evidenciam que a maioria dos sujeitos apresentaram afasia emissiva do tipo Broca, em decorrência de Acidente Vascular Encefálico Isquêmico tendo como fator etiológico a hipertensão. Desencadeando alterações de linguagem como anomia e agramatismo, afetando ainda suas habilidades de comunicação como a memória e a organização da linguagem. Introduction: Aphasia is one of the most important sequels that occur after brain injury from stroke. Objectives: To identify the oral language profile of patients with stroke, assisted by the Multidisciplinary Home Care Service (SAMD) in the city of Porto Velho - RO. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional and quantitative study carried out at the residence of the patients who were being treated by the SAMD. Where the Aphasia Rehabilitation Test protocol was used, composed initially of a questionnaire that was applied with the relatives of the patients to collect data regarding the AVE and the Oral Communication Tests to evaluate the patients. Results: Eleven subjects with EVA were evaluated, and eight subjects presented Embryonic Emphasis of Broca type (100%) with presence of agramatism and anomia (87.5%), and deficits in the organization of communication and memory (100%). Regarding the etiology of the AVE, 62.5% of the subjects presented etiology due to hypertension, with sequelae time between one year less and three years (37.5%). All subjects (100%) were very talented before the AVE, but 50% remained very talented after the AVE and the other 50% became less talkative. Conclusion: The results show that most of the subjects presented Embryonic Emphasis of the Broca type, due to Ischemic Stroke, having as etiologic factor hypertension. Unleashing language changes such as anomie and agramatism, still affecting his communication skills as memory and the organization of language.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


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