scholarly journals Byen og bygden – grønlandskhedens landskaber

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-33
Author(s):  
Bo Wagner Sørensen ◽  
Søren Forchhammer

Denne artikel tager udgangspunkt i udtalelser om Grønlands hovedstad Nuuk som ”et stykke Danmark på klipper”. Formålet er at vise, hvordan og hvorfor Nuuk er omstridt, og hvordan synet på byen har ændret sig over tid. Ved hjælp af landskabsbegrebet defineret som en relation mellem det sociale livs forgrund (os som vi er nu) og baggrund (os som vi kunne være) påvises en sammenhæng mellem synet på byen og den politiske udvikling i Grønland. Hvor den anti-urbane fortælling var fremherskende fra sidst i 1960’erne, hvor byerne var associeret med danskhed og fremmedgørelse, og grønlænderen og byen blev set som uforenelige størrelser, blev den fra 2000 i stigende grad afløst af en mere inkluderende og kompleks grønlandskhed. I landskabsterminologi var situationen den, at folk levede et utilpasset, danskpræget dagligliv i byen, men drømte om et andet liv i pagt med grønlandske traditioner og værdier. Hvor forgrund og baggrund lå meget langt fra hinanden, er der sket en tilnærmelse ved, at byen er blevet approprieret som et grønlandsk landskab. Nuuks status har således ændret sig i retning af stigende anerkendelse. Men Nuuk beskyldes samtidig for at videreføre en dansk centraliseringspolitik og kan i den forstand stadig ses som ”et stykke Danmark på klipper”. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Bo Wagner Sørensen and Søren Forchhammer: The Town and the Settlement – Landscapes of “Greenlandicness” This article analyses statements about the Greenlandic capital Nuuk as being “a piece of Denmark on rocks”. The purpose is to show how and why Nuuk is contested and how this perspective has changed over time. Using the concept of landscape defined as a relation between the foreground (the way we are now) and background (how we could be) of social life, the article demonstrates how this perspective of the town is connected with the political development in the country. The anti-urban narrative was dominant from the late 1960s when towns were associated with “Danishness” and alienation, but it was increasingly replaced by a more inclusive and complex “Greenlandicness” from around 2000. In landscape terminology it appeared that people lived incompatible “Danish” everyday lives in towns, but dreamt about another life more in agreement with Greenlandic traditions and values. While foreground and background used to be far apart, they have come closer as the town has been appropriated as a Greenlandic landscape. Thus the status of Nuuk has changed towards increasing approval. However, Nuuk is also criticized for carrying on a Danish policy of dominance and centralizing. In this sense it is still considered “a piece of Denmark on rocks”. Keywords: Greenland, Nuuk, urban studies, landscapes, migration.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Mettler ◽  
Andrew Milstein

Although scholars of American political development (APD) have helped transform many aspects of the study of U.S. politics over the last quarter-century, they have barely begun to use the powerful analytical tools of this approach to elucidate the relationship between government and citizens. APD research has probed deeply into the processes of state-building and the creation and implementation of specific policies, yet has given little attention to how such development affects the lives of individuals and the ways in which they relate to government. Studies routinely illuminate how policies influence the political roles of elites and organized groups, but barely touch on how the state shapes the experiences and responses of ordinary individuals. As a result, we know little about how governance has influenced citizenship over time or how those changes have, in turn, affected politics.


1971 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Kavanagh

ALL POLITICAL CULTURES ARE MIXED AND CHANGING. WHAT IS interesting in the English case, however, is the way in which a veritable army of scholars has seized on the deferential component. Other features in the overall cultural pattern have been neglected. This paper is devoted to an examination of the concept of deference as it is applied to English politics. In particular it will focus on the different meanings that the concept has assumed in the literature describing and analysing the popular political attitudes, and those aspects of the political system, including stability, which it has been used to explain. My concluding argument is that deference, as the concept is frequently applied to English political culture, has attained the status of a stereotype and that it is applied to such variegated and sometimes conflicting data that it has outlived its usefulness as a term in academic currency.


2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882091246
Author(s):  
Miroslav Nemčok ◽  
Hanna Wass

Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that “electoral winners” (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe.


Author(s):  
Martin C. Njoroge ◽  
Purity Kimani ◽  
Bernard J. Kikech

The way the media processes, frames, and passes on information either to the government or to the people affects the function of the political system. This chapter discusses the interaction between new media and ethnicity in Kenya, Africa. The chapter investigates ways in which the new media reinforced issues relating to ethnicity prior to Kenya’s 2007 presidential election. In demonstrating the nexus between new media and ethnicity, the chapter argues that the upsurge of ethnic animosity was chiefly instigated by new media’s influence. Prior to the election, politicians had mobilized their supporters along ethnic lines, and created a tinderbox situation. Thus, there is need for the new media in Kenya to help the citizens to redefine the status of ethnic relationships through the recognition of ethnic differences and the re-discovery of equitable ways to accommodate them; after all, there is more strength than weaknesses in these differences.


Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the political development of Iraq from the inception of the state in 1921 to the post-2003 years of political and societal turmoil. Its premise is that from the very beginning of the state the Iraqi project in fact devolved into three undertakings: the consolidation of the state and its governing institutions, the legitimization of the state through the framing of democratic structures, and the creation of an overarching, and thus unifying, national identity. The book is different from other studies of Iraq's political history, in that it traces the development of each of the three projects of governance, democracy, and national identity separately, while at the same time highlighting the way they impacted and shaped one another. The remainder of the chapter discusses the roots of the predicament of post-2003 Iraq.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
Rachel Broady

Journalists in Manchester have reported on homelessness with the intention of highlighting a problem, persuading a charitable response and encouraging legislative intervention. They serve as the way for readers, who may not spend time among the homeless, to observe and understand. This article argues that the representation is restricted by the ideological arena in which journalists work. It posits that by utilizing Fredric Jameson’s interpretive horizons methodology, the political unconscious of copy can be unearthed to reveal the acceptance of the inevitability of homelessness, which has been internalized and reconfigured in stories about the topic. It argues that it is possible to reveal the strategies of containment unconsciously employed, which conceal the relationship between labour and value, and ultimately defend the status quo, despite the intentions of journalists and publications. It further posits that the systemic, societal causes of homelessness are ultimately unchallenged, with the experience unconsciously mediated by the journalists and shared with an audience treated as fellow observers.


Author(s):  
Annalise Oatman ◽  
Kate Majewski

This chapter examines the conflict in Myanmar and its historical development as an example of the way that rape is wielded as a weapon of war. It also provides a discussion of advocacy for the ethnic minority women of Myanmar at the grassroots, national, and international levels. It reviews statistics on conflict-related rape and theories regarding the social and political forces driving it. It examines the political history of Myanmar and the status of Myanmarese women. It also discusses the way that current conditions have set the stage for conflict-related rape in Myanmar and data on its prevalence. It discusses the extradition of the rapist of a 7-year-old girl, Myanmarese grassroots efforts to address this issue, and international proposals for reform. In addition, it discusses the way that the “legal culture” of a nation can get in the way of the enactment of international legislation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-181
Author(s):  
Nandita Haksar

This article argues that although Irom Sharmila’s 16-year-old fast from November 2000 to August 2016 has earned her the status of an icon of non-violent protest, yet she did not seek these appellations; her only aim was to put moral pressure on the government to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. The article seeks to assess the efficacy of Irom Sharmila’s protest and how far it has helped or hindered in mobilizing public opinion against the Act. It propounds that the publicity around Irom Sharmila put her on a pedestal and trapped her in her own image, made invisible entire histories of sufferings of people in the northeast, including Manipur, and their struggles against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The gains of many struggles and efforts were wiped out of the collective memory of the nation and the only image of Manipur was this frail woman with a tube hanging from her nose. The article also argues that there is a kind of fetish in the way the media celebrates non-violence without reference to the political context.


1990 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-552
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr

Recent literature on Heidegger concentrates heavily on his (temporary) involvement in or collusion with Nazi ideology and policies. Without belittling the gravity of the issue, this article shifts the focus somewhat by invoking a distinction which recently has emerged (or reemerged) in political thought: namely, the distinction between “politics” and “the political” or between politics viewed as partisan ideology or policy making, on the one hand, and politics seen as regime or paradigmatic framework, on the other. The main thesis of the article is that Heidegger's promising contributions to political theory are located on the level of ontology or paradigmatic framework rather than that of ideological partisanship. While not neglecting the dismal intrusions of the latter plane, the article probes Heideggerian cues for a “rethinking of the political” by placing the accent on four topical areas: first, the status of the subject or individual as political agent; second, the character of the political community, that is, of the polity or (in modern terms) the “state”; thirdly, the issue of cultural and political development or modernization; and finally, the problem of an emerging cosmopolis or world order beyond the confines of Western culture. In discussing these topics, an effort is made to disentangle Heidegger from possible misinterpretations and to indicate how, in each area, his thought pointed in the direction of an “overcoming” of Western political metaphysics.


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