scholarly journals March minusivity: Strategies of immunising and counter-immunising in the atmosphere of the Polish 1968

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Nina Seiler

The article discusses mechanisms of social immunisation in the context of the Polish ‘March 1968’. Whereas immunising strategies are a normal part of sociality, I argue that around 1968 a growing anxiety about the mechanisms of being-in-common led to an autoimmunitarian dissociation of the Polish society, which I conceptualise as an atmosphere of minusivity. Strategies to counter exclusions and discriminations were trapped in this immunitarian paradigm as well. A crisis of communication arose from the dissonance between the reality created by the official language surrounding March 1968, and the reality experienced by many people, as this latter reality was silenced and repressed. Mistrust in language resulted in an immunitarian retreat from affective communication, which was replaced by impersonal communicative scripts. This communicative crisis widely prevented the March experiences from being conveyed in the cultural production of the time; nonetheless, I will try to retrace some of the immunitarian and counter-immunitarian strategies in literature, film, and retrospective accounts.

1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard S. Friedman ◽  
Louise M. Prince ◽  
Ronald E. Riggio ◽  
M. Robin DiMatteo

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Paulette Kershenovich Schuster

This article deals with the identity construction of Latin American immigrants in Israel through their food practices. Food is a basic symbolic element connecting cultural perceptions and experiences. For immigrants, food is also an important element in the maintenance of personal ties with their home countries and a cohesive factor in the construction of a new identity in Israel, their adopted homeland. Food practices encode tacit information and non-verbal cues that are integral parts of an individual’s relationship with different social groups. In this case, I recruited participants from an online group formed within social media platforms of Latin American women living in Israel. The basic assumption of this study posits that certain communication systems are set in motion around food events in various social contexts pertaining to different national or local cuisines and culinary customs. Their meaning, significance and modifications and how they are framed. This article focuses on the adaptation and acculturation processes because it is at that point that immigrants are faced with an interesting duality of reconstructing their unique cultural perceptions to either fit the existing national collective ethos or create a new reality. In this study, the main objective is to compare two different immigrant groups: Jewish and non-Jewish women from Latin America who came to Israel during the last ten years. The comparative nature of the research revealed marked differences between ethnic, religious and cultural elements that reflect coping strategies manifested in the cultural production of food and its representation in two distinct domains: private and public. In the former, it is illustrated within the family and home and how they connect or clash with the latter in the form of consumption in public. Combining cultural studies and discourse analysis, this article offers fresh insight into new models of food practices and reproductions. The article’s contribution to new food research lies in its ability to shed light on how inter-generational and inter-religious discourses are melded while food practices and traditions are embedded in a new Israeli identity.


Author(s):  
Camelia Suleiman

Arabic became a minority language in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalise Arabic on the one hand, and secutise it on the other. The book delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. It combines qualitative methods not commonly used together in the study of Arabic in Israel, including ethnography, interviews with journalists and students, media discussions, and analysis of the production of knowledge on Arabic in Israeli academia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahrir Hamdi

Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Graham

This essay explores the ways in which Ireland's sacralised national language figures in Beckett's work. Oblique references to Irish in the Beckett oeuvre are read against a history of Anglo-Irish investment in the language as a mode of ‘impatriation’, a means by which to circumscribe anxieties surrounding an identity fraught with socio-political anomalies. In addition, the suspicion of ‘official language’ in Beckett's work is considered in light of his awareness of the ‘language issue’ in his native country, particularly in relation to the powerful role of the Irish language in the reterritorialisation of the civic sphere in post-independence Ireland.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Robert Kiely

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Piotr Czarnecki ◽  
◽  
Justyna Podgórska-Bednarz ◽  
Lidia Perenc ◽  
◽  
...  

Introduction. Physical activity is known to be an important factor influencing health throughout human life. This issue has become crucial for public health due to the aging of the population in both developed and developing countries. Aim. is to present a literature review on the forms of physical activity undertaken by the elderly, as well as on issues related to physical activity and the population aging. Material and methods. The study was prepared on the basis of a review of Polish and foreign literature. The following databases and data sources were used: EBSCO, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. An additional source of data were the websites of the Central Statistical Office. Strictly defined key phrases were used during the collection of literature. The work has been divided into thematic subsections on the aging of the society, the impact of physical activity on health and the main topic, i.e. forms of physical activity selected by the elderly. Analysis of the literature. The number of elderly people in Polish society has increased by almost 3.7 million over three decades. Therefore, an important topic is prophylaxis aimed at increasing the number of days in good health, largely covering the broadly understood activation of the elderly. The available data indicate that only 12% of elderly people undertake physical activity once a week. The most common form of spending free time actively is walking (as many as 73% of people in this population declare this form of physical activity in one of the presented studies). Conclusion. Organized forms of physical activity are undertaken much less frequently by the analyzed age group mainly due to financial limitations and limited availability of sports infrastructure.


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