scholarly journals Les empêchements de la mémoire

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Marie Gagnebin
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Scientific Conception

This article begins with a presupposition regarding Ricœur’s approach to memory and forgetting in Memory, History, Forgetting. His reflections on “just memory” occur within a French political landscape that suffers from “commemorative bulimia,” as Pierre Nora put it in Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory). The article contrasts the opposition to the import of subjective emotions from a rigorous scientific conception of memory (Nora), with living memory as the transcendental condition of our relationship to the past (Ricœur). This confrontation underscores the ethical dimension of the politics of memory and of the collective practices of forgetting and amnesia. According to Ricœur, Freud’s hypotheses concerning trauma and mourning should serve as the best suited model for a task that aims for a just historical narrative.

Populism and Memory: Legislation of the Past in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542095080
Author(s):  
Nikolay Koposov
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The Holocaust

This article belongs to the special cluster “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.

scholarly journals Young children's selective trust in informants

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 1179-1187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Harris ◽  
Kathleen H. Corriveau
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
The Past ◽  
Selective Trust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Conception

Young children readily act on information from adults, setting aside their own prior convictions and even continuing to trust informants who make claims that are manifestly false. Such credulity is consistent with a long-standing philosophical and scientific conception of young children as prone to indiscriminate trust. Against this conception, we argue that children trust some informants more than others. In particular, they use two major heuristics. First, they keep track of the history of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, they endorse claims made by someone who has provided reliable care or reliable information in the past. Second, they monitor the cultural standing of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, children endorse claims made by someone who belongs to a consensus and whose behaviour abides by, rather than deviating from, the norms of their group. The first heuristic is likely to promote receptivity to information offered by familiar caregivers, whereas the second heuristic is likely to promote a broader receptivity to informants from the same culture.

The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical Monuments in Postwar Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Sam A. Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Coffee Table

For much of the past two centuries German governments encouraged or even sponsored the construction of war monuments. By the turn of the twentieth century Germany was covered in more than a thousand such shrines, most of which had local or regional significance as places of annual celebration or commemoration. Government, media, and business all contributed to an elaborate hagiography of Germany's battles, war heroes, and martyrs, with monuments usually serving as the centerpieces. Millions of middle-class Germans attended or participated in commemoration ceremonies at war monuments all over the country, and/or filled their homes with souvenir trinkets, tableware, wall decorations, coffee-table books, and other quotidian items that reproduced images of the monuments or scenes from the events they memorialized.

Historical Narratives and Understanding

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Stefan Petkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epistemic Criteria

This paper defends the view that narratives that bring understanding of the past need not be exhaustively analyzable as explanatory inferences, nor as causal narratives. Instead of treating historical narrative as explanations, I argue that understanding of history can be analyzed by the general epistemic criteria of understanding. I explore one such criterion, which is of chief importance for good historical narratives: potential inferential power. As a corollary, I dispute one of the distinctive features of narratives described by some philosophers: the non-aggregativity of narrative histories. Instead, I propose that historical narratives modestly aggregate and this aggregation depends on the success of the colligatory concepts they offer.

Looking backward to the future: Counter-memory as oppositional knowledge-production in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Activist Groups

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.

scholarly journals Warfare, Ethics, Ethology: evolutionary fundamentals for conflict and cooperation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Barreiros
Keyword(s):  
Phylogenetic Tree ◽  
Common Ancestor ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
African Apes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cognitive Capability ◽  
The Social

The aim of this article is to set a macro-historical narrative concerning the emergence of warfare and social ethics as symplesiomorphic features in the lineage of Homo sapiens. This means that these two behavioral aspects, representative of a very selected branch in the phylogenetic tree of the Primate order, are shared by the two lineages of great African apes that diverged from a common ancestor around six million years in the past, leading to extant humans and chimpanzees. Therefore, this article proposes an ethological understanding of warfare and social ethics, as both are innate to the social high-specialized modular mind present in the species of genera Pan and Homo. However behavioral restraints to intersocietal coalitionary violence seems to be an exclusive aspect of the transdominial modular cognition that characterizes modern humans. Thus, if in the evolutionary long durée, warfare and restrictions to intrasocial violence both appear to be ethologically common to humans and chimpanzees to a certain extent, an ethics of warfare - and, of course, the cognitive capability for intersocietal peace - seems to be distinctly human.

scholarly journals Indo-US Civil Nuclear Deal & Pakistan Security

2017 ◽  
Vol 01 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tauqeer Hussain Sargana ◽  
Mujahid Hussain
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Strategic Partnership ◽  
Similar Treatment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Strategic Objective ◽  
Strategic Stability ◽  
Qualitative Research Methodology ◽  
Method Approach

The ‘Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation’ has casted negative shadows over Pakistan’s security with that of strategic stability in South Asia. This paper makes the point that the emergence of strategic partnership between Indian and US has served bilateral objectives while impacting deeply on the geo-political landscape of Pakistan’s strategic interests. The fundamental strategic objective of Pakistan has been to resist Indian hegemonic role in the region. To achieve such a balance the country has not only joined security alliances in the past but had to detonate its nuclear weapons in reaction to Indian attempt to outburst the ‘balance of power’. Due to Indo-US nuclear cooperation, suddenly Pakistan came under stress as it allowed India to feed its civilian reactors by importing fuel from international market with that of using domestic fuel in its military reactors. This not only allowed India to fix energy shortfall but also sustain its nuclear weapons program. Pakistan contrary to that was set-aside and denied the similar treatment as of India. Therefore, this paper has made an attempt to objectively analyze the premises of Indo-US nuclear cooperation and highlight security implications for Pakistan. The study is deductive in nature and has used mixed method approach with qualitative research methodology.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

scholarly journals Is history of economic thought a "serious" subject?

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Marcuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Textual Exegesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of research methods in the history of economic thought. In reviewing the "techniques" which are involved in the discipline, four broader categories are identified: a) textual exegesis; b) "rational reconstructions"; c) "contextual analysis"; and d) "historical narrative". After examining these different styles of doing history of economic thought, the paper addresses the question of its appraisal, namely what is good history of economic thought. Moreover, it is argued that there is a distinction to be made between doing economics and doing history of economic thought. The latter requires the greatest possible respect for contexts and texts, both published and unpublished; the former entails constructing a theoretical framework that is in some respects freer, not bound by derivation, from the authors. Finally, the paper draws upon Econlit records to assess what has been done in the subject in the last two decades in order to frame some considerations on how the past may impinge on the future.

scholarly journals Reviving Stories And Space Of The Past: Exploring New Opportunities In Mixed Media Storytelling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawsyn Borland
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Informal Learning ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
House Museums ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historic House ◽  
Multisensory Interactions

This project presents the idea that historic house museums (HHMs) can use Augmented Reality (AR) and physical interactive space to bring stories and characters of the past back to life. Designed to foster self-directed discovery and informal learning of the space and story, this project uses a historically factual AR character to reanimate the sense of human presence within the space. Rather than disrupting the traditional narratives of HHMs, this mixed media storytelling experience extends historical stories by making them more personal and relatable. Using tangible stories, multisensory interactions, and an AR experience to extend the historical narrative, this form of museological work creates more opportunities for empathic character-driven storytelling. Lastly, I identify that this proof of concept could be used in multiple applications, as both a storytelling medium and a communication tool.

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