scholarly journals Religious Heritage and Nation in Post-Vatican II Catholicism: A View from Quebec

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 259
Author(s):  
Hillary Kaell

With Quebec’s croix de chemin (wayside crosses) as a jumping off point, I explore the importance of heritage creation as the province transitioned away from pre-Vatican II Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s. I include two ‘sites of memory’: fieldwork with contemporary cross caretakers and archival materials from a major government-funded inventory of the crosses in the 1970s. Heritage professionals have generally implied that Catholic objects lose their sacred meaning to become objects of nation-building, while caretakers view them as still-active objects of devotional labour. Regardless, I find that both parties view themselves as laying claim to “modern” ways of interacting with religious objects, while also assuming that a cohesive national identity rests in part on promoting a rural Catholic past. More broadly, I argue that neither side can be fully understood without attention to the convergence of three trends in the 1960s and 1970s: Quebecois and other emergent nationalisms, Catholic liberalization, and the rise of an international heritage industry.

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
Mohammed Hassen Ali

Shaykh Bakrii Saphalo was a perceptive Oromo Muslim scholar who used traditional Oromo wisdom to make Islam intelligible to his people and part of their cultural heritage. A gifted poet who wrote in Arabic, Oromo, and Somali, he was persecuted by two successive Ethiopian regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. As an activist scholar, he sought to spread knowledge among the Oromo, who constitute about 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population. Due to the government’s tight control and distance, as well as the lack of modern communication and technology, his effort was limited mainly to the Oromo in Hararghe, eastern Ethiopia. For over six decades Shaykh Bakrii sought to uplift his people and secure respect for their language, culture, human dignity, and national identity. 1 Motivated by his desire to develop the Oromo language, which at that time was banned, he struggled to develop written literature in it. But despite all of these accomplishments, he has been largely forgotten.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

In this chapter, the history of the National Council of Catholic Women in the 1960s and 1970s – the years during and following Vatican II – is reassessed. The NCCW has been commonly perceived as a powerful anti-feminist organization for Catholic laywomen that was controlled by the Catholic hierarchy, but its archives reveal a sustained effort to engage with feminist ideas after the Second Vatican Council. Although most of the NCCW’s leadership did not self-identify as feminist, the group espoused many feminist beliefs, particularly about women’s leadership, opportunity, challenging ideas about women’s vocation, and women’s right to participate fully in the life of the Catholic church. The NCCW, under the leadership of Margaret Mealey, developed new organizational structures, educational programs, and publications to educate their membership about changing gender roles and the need to press the church for greater inclusion. Comparison to the international organization the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations (WUCWO), reveals the limitations of their feminism, however. Whereas WUCWO was willing to openly embrace feminism and feminist activism, NCCW was divided and preferred not to self-identify as feminist.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Lucic

This article explores the emerging national narratives about Muslim national identity in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. After the national recognition of a Bosnian Muslim nation, which was proposed by the members of the Central Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the intellectuals’ task to endow the national category with cultural repertoire. Hereby affirmative as well as negating discursive practices on the national status of Muslims entered the debates, which geographically expanded the republican scope of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The author examines internal discussions of the LCY on that issue as well as the intellectuals’ engagement in the public spheres in Socialist Yugoslavia. By integrating the nation-building activities of intellectuals outside Yugoslavia, the author postulates for a trans-national dimension of nation-building processes.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

This chapter introduces the argument that Catholic laywomen expanded on the changes of Vatican II by exploring shifting understandings of gender on a large scale in the ten years following the Second Vatican Council. The historical record reveals a significant output of written material in these years, written by laywomen, and intended to probe unsettled questions about gender rising in those uncertain times. Despite the official church’s reluctance to reassess its teaching on gender roles, moderate and often non-feminist laywomen used ideas from the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge accepted definitions of Catholic womanhood. In particular, Catholic women questioned the immutability of gender roles, and the accepted and wide-spread teaching of complementarity. They also challenged narrow conceptions of laywomen’s vocation, both spiritual and professional.


2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Indrek Jääts ◽  
Svetlana Karm

Estonian ethnographers have always taken a keen interest in Finno-Ugric peoples, their linguistic kin. The golden age of Finno-Ugric studies in Estonian ethnography began in the 1960s and lasted until the early 1990s. The State Ethnographic Museum of the Estonian SSR in Tartu (the current Estonian National Museum) emerged as the center of Finno-Ugric research with its long-term director Aleksei Peterson at the helm of the enterprise. Estonian ethnographers visited almost all Finno-Ugric peoples, with the major focus given to the Veps in the 1960s and 1970s, and to the Udmurts, in the 1980s. The museum acquired an awe-inspiring number of ethnographic objects, descriptions, photographs, drawings and films. Did all this benefit the peoples visited? What was the relationship of Estonian ethnographers with the subjects of their research? Did their plight affect Estonian scholars? The Estonian ethnographers had a high regard for the ethnic particularities, languages and traditional folk cultures of the kindred peoples and resisted their disappearance. Their views contradicted the Soviet nationalities policy which until the mid-1980s, emphasized the convergence and assimilation of nations. The interaction between the Estonian ethnographers and the Veps and Udmurts during the long series of expeditions helped to stimulate the suppressed and weak ethnic self-esteem of the latter. The mid-1980s marked the beginning of the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. As a result, national issues could be discussed openly, and it was at that time that the national revival of the Veps and Udmurts began. Estonian ethnologists embraced the process and actively contributed to it. This is especially true of Peterson, who was quite well known in Vepsia and Udmurtia and had a certain authority there. In his speeches at various events and in the press, Peterson encouraged the use of Veps and Udmurt in public life, including the schools. He emphasized the need to place a greater emphasis on traditional folk culture, which he considered to be critical to the national identity of small nations. His ideas influenced the creation of the open-air museum of the Udmurts. He supported the territorial autonomy of the Veps. He could speak as a messenger of perestroika whose word had weight. Thus Veps and Udmurt activists and nationally-minded ordinary people received inspiration and moral support from Peterson (and other Estonian ethnographers) for the preservation of their mother tongue, national identity and cultural heritage.


2001 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 239-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Reid

In the 1960s a host of African nations discovered their independence and, with it, rediscovered the pleasure and the pain of the past. States such as Nigeria and Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, using both local and expatriate scholars, embarked on the reconstruction of “national histories,” with an enthusiasm which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, seems enviable. From an academic point of view, this period witnessed the rejection of the colonial distortion of Africa's past—i.e., the idea that basically the continent had none worth talking about—and the historiographical offensive which was thus launched may be seen to have been ultimately successful.In terms of African politics, history was seen in many new states as a means of nation-building and the fostering of national identity. In Tanzania, for example, precolonial leaders such as Mirambo and Nyungu-ya-Mawe, the relative linguistic unity provided by Swahili, and the anticolonial Maji Maji uprising were used, both consciously and subliminally, to encourage the idea that Tanzanians had shared historical experiences which straddled both the precolonial and the colonial eras.It must be conceded that history did not always prove as reliable an ally to African politicians as to scholars of Africa. Penetration into the Nigerian past served, indirectly at least, to magnify the regionalism which had already troubled the decolonization process in that territory, and underlined the distinct historical experiences of, for example, the Yoruba in the south and the Hausa-Fulani in the north.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Hassen Ali

Shaykh Bakrii Saphalo was a perceptive Oromo Muslim scholar who used traditional Oromo wisdom to make Islam intelligible to his people and part of their cultural heritage. A gifted poet who wrote in Arabic, Oromo, and Somali, he was persecuted by two successive Ethiopian regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. As an activist scholar, he sought to spread knowledge among the Oromo, who constitute about 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population. Due to the government’s tight control and distance, as well as the lack of modern communication and technology, his effort was limited mainly to the Oromo in Hararghe, eastern Ethiopia. For over six decades Shaykh Bakrii sought to uplift his people and secure respect for their language, culture, human dignity, and national identity. 1 Motivated by his desire to develop the Oromo language, which at that time was banned, he struggled to develop written literature in it. But despite all of these accomplishments, he has been largely forgotten.


1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvana Patriarca

In recent years, due in part to the increasing diffusion of constructivist conceptions of the social and historical world, statistics has attracted the attention of historians more as an object than as a means of investigation and analysis. While quantification and statistical methods have lost the popularity they gained among social historians in the 1960s and 1970s, new and important histories of statistics and of the theory of probability have appeared that shed new light on the subject (Porter 1986; Stigler 1986; Kriiger et al. 1987; Hacking 1990). These works have traced—at times in highly original and sophisticated ways—genealogy and developments of the statistical methods and probabilistic conceptions that are at the basis of today’s quantitative practices.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Flanagan

This article traces Ken Russell's explorations of war and wartime experience over the course of his career. In particular, it argues that Russell's scattered attempts at coming to terms with war, the rise of fascism and memorialisation are best understood in terms of a combination of Russell's own tastes and personal style, wider stylistic and thematic trends in Euro-American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and discourses of collective national experience. In addition to identifying Russell's recurrent techniques, this article focuses on how the residual impacts of the First and Second World Wars appear in his favoured genres: literary adaptations and composer biopics. Although the article looks for patterns and similarities in Russell's war output, it differentiates between his First and Second World War films by indicating how he engages with, and temporarily inhabits, the stylistic regime of the enemy within the latter group.


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