Transcultural Rhetorics for Cultural Survival

2021 ◽  
pp. 318-332
Author(s):  
Louise Rodriguez Connal
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.


1999 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bartholomew Dean

An Urarina elder made this statement at a community assembly meeting in July 1996, which adults from the primary long house community on the Pangayacu River had called to discuss the educational future of their children. The unrelenting economic, cultural, and political pressures accompanying Peruvian national expansion into Amazonia have led indigenous peoples like the Urarina to question their prospects for future linguistic and cultural survival. Over the past decade I have worked with the Urarina, both as a social anthropologist and as an advocate working on behalf of the Amazonian Peoples' Resources Initiative (APRI). In 1995 APRI launched an integrated community defense program among the Urarina. In collaboration with a local NGO (Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües de la Amazonía Peruana), APRI has begun developing an educational program that promotes the political and economic empowerment of the Urarina peoples. It works to secure Urarina access to primary health care, culturally appropriate education in the face of perceived language endangerment, and sustainable natural resource management.


2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-502
Author(s):  
Susanna B. Hecht
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (256) ◽  
pp. 903
Author(s):  
Paulo Suess

A história da cidade de São Paulo e do Brasil é uma história de desaparecimentos e esquecimentos, de resistências e lutas pela sobrevivência física e cultural, de transformações e adaptações. Arar a memória dos destinatários e dos agentes da primeira evangelização, por ocasião dos 450 anos da “conversão do Brasil”, é uma tarefa instigante, sobretudo no contexto histórico de hoje, onde a pergunta sobre a possibilidade de um outro mundo é ao mesmo tempo uma pergunta sobre a relevância da evangelização. A comemoração da fundação da “Casa de Piratininga”, um pobre colégio que se tornou megalópole, tem a tarefa de religar o conhecimento histórico ao reconhecimento contemporâneo do outro. O Autor, missiólogo e historiador, por muitos anos ligado à causa indígena no país e no continente latino-americano, conduz o leitor pela cristandade do Brasil e pela diversidade étnica da Província de São Vicente. Dois eixos da evangelização ganham destaque: a questão da comunicação num contexto lingüístico plural e a questão da violência e da força diante da proposta evangélica de gratuidade e paz.Abstract: The history of the city of São Paulo and Brazilian history, in general, are full of disappearances and omissions, of resistance and struggles for physical and cultural survival, of transformations and adaptations. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the “conversion of Brazil”, to trace the memories of both addressees and agents of the first evangelization is a stimulating task, particularly in today’s historical context, where the question about the possibility of another world is, at the same time, a question about the relevance of evangelization. The celebration of the foundation of the “Casa de Piratininga”, an ordinary school that became a megalopolis, seeks to reconnect historical knowledge to the contemporary recognition of the Other. The Author – a missiologist and historian that, for many years, has been connected with the Indian cause in this country and in the Latin-American continent – guides the reader through the Christendom in Brazil and through the ethnical diversity in the Province of São Vicente. He focuses, in particular, on two axles of the evangelization: the issue of communication in a plural linguistic context and the issue of violence and coercion in the face of the evangelical proposal of graciousness and peace.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Matt Cohen

Nineteenth-century struggles over mapping concepts and techniques yielded the forebears of digital humanistic data visualizations today, staging the political tensions of the deep map’s entry into the humanities. The careers of educational reformer Emma Hart Willard and Creek poet and critic Alexander Posey, who were both map-makers in their ways, exemplify the entanglements of the history of deep mapping. Willard was a feminist innovator in her work with historical visualization, but at the cost of solidifying a regime of indigenous vanishment. Posey fought for his people’s cultural survival, but he did so from within a bureaucratic engine made possible in part by Willard’s widespread pedagogy linking the American map with a vision of settler dominance. These two figures left us provocative maps, but also offer a way to reflect on the justness of map-making — on the difficulty of deepening the map wisely, or even ethically.   


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