scholarly journals The Cultural History MA at the University of Aberdeen, 1986-2011: a personal reflection

2011 ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
Nick Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
The University

Performing National Identity in the Interwar Period: The Sarrasani Circus in Germany and Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-201
Author(s):  
Sabine Hanke
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
National Image ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

This article examines the production and promotion of popular entertainments by the German Sarrasani Circus during the interwar period and how they were used to establish specific national narratives in Germany and Latin America. Focusing particularly on its engagement of Lakota performers, it argues that the Circus acted as an active negotiator of national concerns within and beyond Germany’s borders, and presented the group as ‘familiar natives’ in order to appeal to local and national ideas of Germanness. At the same time, it shows that the performers pursued their own interests in becoming international and cosmopolitan performers, thereby challenging the assimilation forced upon their traditions and culture by institutions in the United States. Finally, it demonstrates how foreign propaganda built on the Circus’s national image in Latin America to restore Germany’s international relations after the First World War. Sabine Hanke is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Duisberg-Essen. Her research examines the German and British interwar circus. She was recently awarded her PhD in cultural history, from which this article has evolved, at the University of Sheffield. A chapter based on her research is scheduled for publication in Circus Histories and Theories, ed. Nisha P.R. and Melon Dilip (Oxford University Press).

scholarly journals Museum cultural collections: pathways to the preservation of traditional and scientific knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The University

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.

Santería grand slam: Afro-Cuban religious studies and the study of Afro-Cuban religion

2008 ◽  
Vol 79 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 281-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Palmié
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Vantage Points ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

[First paragraph]Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. ix + 165 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. KATHERINE J. HAGEDORN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvi + 296 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00)The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. DAVID H. BROWN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. xix + 286 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.23)Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. DAVID H. BROWN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp. (Paper US$ 38.00)Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions,” field sites and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they factually undergo historical changes, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changeable epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe in writing from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping, historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the practical, but perhaps misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion,”1 and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to the study of it – cannot be easily separated: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this fact has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).

The Wisconsin School of African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
African History ◽  
Global History ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
Initial Cohort ◽  
The University ◽  
Distinguishing Features

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a prominent producer of doctorates in African history since 1963. As of 2017 the institution had granted more than 110 degrees. Philip D. Curtin and Jan Vansina, both pioneers in launching the field, led the program until 1975 and were joined in 1969 by Steven Feierman. Together, they supervised an initial cohort of graduates, several of whom became leaders of the then still-formative field, particularly in its methodological infrastructure, as well as in economic and demographic history, slavery in Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, and medical history. The distinguishing features qualifying a diverse array of individual intellectual trajectories as a coherent “school” include a focus on epistemologically historical approaches anchored in the intellectual perspectives of Africans as historical actors and often also as they engaged broader commercial Atlantic and Indian Ocean and world contexts; smaller numbers of more recent doctorates had subsequently sustained these orientations. Former graduates of the program, William W. Brown, David Henige, and Thomas T. Spear, returned after 1975 to update this framework by bringing social theory and cultural history to bear on the African historical actors at the program’s core. Since 2005, a third generation of faculty members, Neil Kodesh, James Sweet, and Emily Colacci (all students of Wisconsin PhDs teaching at other institutions), have added contemporary approaches to the Wisconsin school’s continuing commitment to Africans’ distinctive epistemologies as they engaged the flows of modern global history. Professionally, Madison graduates have, accordingly, led the ongoing effort to bring Africa in from its initial marginality—as the continent seen as uniquely without a history—into the historical discipline’s core. An aphoristic summary of the Wisconsin legacy might be “Africans’ worlds and Africans in the world.”

James M. Buchanan and Me: Reminiscing about a 50–Year Association

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The University

Abstract This essay commemorates James M. Buchanan's life and work by reflecting on my 50 years of association with him, starting in 1963 when I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia and ending with his death in 2013. This essay does not try to add to the substantial secondary literature that has arisen about Buchanan and his scholarly contributions. Objective contributions in that vein will doubtlessly continue; indeed, I have written some myself. Instead, this essay portrays Jim Buchanan through offering a personal reflection on some of my experiences with him over our half-century's association. Jim Buchanan was a pivotal figure in my life, as in many ways I have tried to carry forward what I acquired from through observation and interaction. I even thought I was carrying forward that acquisition when divergences arose between us, as they did increasingly as the years passed.

Towards a Chronology of the Eritrean Red Sea Port of Adulis (1st – Early 7th Century AD)

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Zazzaro ◽  
Enzo Cocca ◽  
Andrea Manzo
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Coastal Site ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Architectural Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Sequence ◽  
The University

The Eritrean coastal site of Adulis has been known to archaeologists since the second half of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Italian archaeologist Roberto Paribeni conducted extensive excavations in different areas of the site which uncovered the remains of monumental buildings, churches and houses, as well as rich deposits of related material culture. Since then, archaeological investigations have been limited to the activities of Francis Anfray in 1961–62 and to a survey conducted by the University of Southampton in 2003–04. Our team’s first excavations in stratified deposits began in 2011, and soon revealed a complex chronological sequence of great importance for the understanding of the cultural history of the southern Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa. The project’s main efforts were directed towards the identification of the main phases of occupation at Adulis, the establishment of a typological sequence of pottery, and the analysis of architectural change.

Stage over Study: Charles Marowitz, Edward Bond, and Recent Materialist Approaches to Shakespeare

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Massai
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Open Space ◽  
English Literature ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Royal Court Theatre ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

The flurry of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s represents a significant yet largely neglected chapter of recent cultural history. This article assesses two of the more enduring adaptations – Edward Bond's Lear (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) and Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure (Open Space Theatre, 1975) – in order to show how these controversial texts anticipated later mainstream critical approaches which still affect our reception of Shakespeare in the late 1990s. Several parallels between Marowitz and Bond's adaptations and recent materialist readings of their Shakespearean sources suggest that the adaptors anticipated the critics, and that both sought meaning from their Shakespearean originals by focusing on certain aspects of the text and by disregarding others. By demonstrating that whilst Marowitz and Bond's adaptations should best be regarded as a form of stage-centred criticism, Sonia Massai suggests that literary critical approaches inevitably reflect an arbitrary and historically determined appropriation of the Shakespearean original. Sonia Massai is a Lecturer in English Studies at St. Mary's, Strawberry Hill, a College of the University of Surrey. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations in Studies in English Literature, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, and in a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy. She is currently collaborating with Jacques Berthoud on the New Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

scholarly journals Culture Studies: A Bridge from Native Cultural Content to Learners’ Intercultural Competence

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2 (1)) ◽  
pp. 87-89
Author(s):  
Gayane Gasparyan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intercultural Competence ◽  
New World ◽  
University Teaching ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Traditional Grammar ◽  
The University

In recent decades the use of communicative methods of foreign language teaching has resulted in tangible changes and teaching has focused on the content of public culture and the further development of its intercultural approach. The traditional grammar-translation method with its linguistic restrictions has developed into a wider methodology of teaching based on the model of “language within culture”/ “culture within language”. The use of this model gives preference to the social environment of the given language in the context of its cultural history, norms and values.The idea of the creation of a “New World” forces the learner to feel more confident in different environments of interchangeable cultures and get acquainted with new cultural values. The university teaching course Culture Studies promotes the so-called “cultural competence” and the perception of a foreign language in the extralinguistic features of “the new world” attaching special importance to the development of intercultural knowledge.

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