Working Through Colonial Collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

Fort Huachuca ranges : a history and analysis

Fort Huachuca Environmental and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) sent funds to ERDC-CERL to develop a historic context that assists Fort Huachuca personnel in identifying the likely history and provenance of numerous historic range features located across Fort Huachuca's training lands. The historic context will be used by cultural resources personnel to evaluate and manage the resources appropriately. Various historic training range features (e.g., structures, fragments, and items left over from previous activities) are located across the ranges of Fort Huachuca, representing its long and storied history. To help identify and catalog these features, ERDC-CERL conducted a field survey of the training ranges in 2016 in or-der to photograph the historic range features. Forty-one historic range features were identified. Researchers conducted archival research, literature reviews, and image analysis of historic and current maps and photographs to identify the 41 historic range features and place them within a chronological context of Fort Huachuca's training ranges. The report concludes with guidance on how to identify and associate sites and features within the overall historic training range chronology and evaluate them appropriately for significance and National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) eligibility.

Reading with David Jones

Chapter 1 represents a major archival reassessment of Jones’s knowledge of and interest in early medieval culture and history produced in England, demonstrating that Jones knew many Old English texts in the original language and was engaged with the historiography of the period. The chapter sets out the findings of new archival research with The Library of David Jones, National Library of Wales, and in particular with The Anglo-Saxon Library (Appendix 1). This archival research facilitates a new methodology for reading with Jones and brings evidence from his reading, including previously uncatalogued marginalia, together with the drafts and manuscripts for The Anathemata. This chapter also places Jones’s innovation within the wider context of his reading of historical scholarship on the early Middle Ages, tracing the development of a scholarly poetics with which Jones reshaped a British historical and cultural inheritance for the imagined community of The Anathemata.

Thinking Outside the Circle: The Geistkreis and the Viennese “Kreis Culture” in America

Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with them practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual circle. Based on archival research, the article uses a number of case studies to show that the Kreis was employed by the Viennese émigrés as a mental scheme and as a recipe for action. It argues that the émigrés’ adherence to the Kreis structure explains the friction between them and their hosts. By following the attempts of former Geistkreis members to create Kreis-like institutions in America, the article shows that the Kreis was more than mere organizational form. It represented an epistemical commitment to knowledge making as a collective effort, and the preference of general theoretical knowledge over specialized research. It also entailed an intermingling of “work” and “life” that did not conform to American norms.

A Brazilian Perspective on Audiobooks

This paper presents a Brazilian perspective on audiobooks. It contextualizes the past and current realities of the format in the country, on the basis of surveys coordinated by national associations connected to the book market and of archival research we have undertaken, and shows some examples of recorded literary works and recent initiatives in audiobook production. The ‘acoustic-editorial project’ idea is proposed as a way to highlight and deepen the materiality and production process of audiobooks, and to understand the editorial elements through which the listening experience is created. Authors from book history, bibliography, communication theory, and audiobook studies influenced this investigation and strengthened our construction of audiobooks as a research object.

Of Dhammacārinī and Rematriation in Post-Genocidal Cambodia

The literature over the last three decades has been trying to account for the stories of resilience by Cambodians both in their homeland and diasporas through performance and literature, visual culture, and religion to undo the legacy of displacement and traumatic experience of the Cambodians during 1975–1979, known as the Khmer Rouge Genocidal period. The repatriation of Khmer refugees to their homeland during 1992–1993 poses a question of to what extent the physical return could replenish the richness of people’s lives deprived by war-time atrocities. Dhammayietra (peace march; 1992–2018) originated by and centered around the spiritual leadership of late Maha Ghosananda has, being an exemplar, tackled this challenge. Yet, are there any significant moral contributions and ethical leadership from other sources? This paper therefore seeks to highlight the under-recognized stories of ‘Dhammacārinī’ (Buddhist Woman Leader) of Cambodia in the light of the spirituality that emerged in the post-conflict reconstruction. Based on my ethnographic accounts and engagement with Dhammayietra (2009–2018), archival research and biographical and dharma books published by the two dhammacārinīs of Cambodia, I argue that these Buddhist woman leaders attempt to offer the people of Cambodia ‘rematriation’, where the ethics of care, nurture, interconnectedness and healing join forces to counter the legacy of devastation and desperation.

Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960

This book explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. While some of these photographers are widely recognized for their work, many African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory backed up by extensive archival research, this book allows the reader to explore and understand twentieth-century jazz photography in both an engaging and comprehensive fashion.

Reason and Experience in Renaissance Italy

Political life in Renaissance Italy was held together by political principles which underlay, or were used to justify, political proposals and decisions in practice. This wide-ranging comparative survey examines these political principles, as expressed in sources such as council debates, preambles to legislation and official correspondence, in the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century Italy. Focusing especially on the five republics - Florence, Venice, Genoa, Siena and Lucca - the book also considers princes and signori, and the principles underlying relations between states, particularly relations between major and minor powers. Many of the ideas articulated by those confronting practical political problems ranged beyond the questions dealt with in formal treatises of political thought and philosophy. Drawing on extensive archival research, Christine Shaw explores the relationship between 'reason and experience' in the conduct of political affairs in Renaissance Italy, and the gap between theory and practice.

The Impact of Executives’ Gender, Financial Incentives, and Shareholder Pressure on Corporate Social and Ecological Investments

Archival research suggests that female executives have an impact on corporate decision-making and generally finds positive associations between female board representation and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance. However, archival research does not reveal why female executives decide differently in the context of CSR. As this is our starting point, we conduct an experiment and examine executives’ decision-making in terms of CSR investment. While female executives seem to be more oriented towards social and ecological practices, we find strong evidence that participants’ real-world incentive program mainly drives their CSR decision-making. We also examine if selected gender-specific character traits (risk propensity, sustainability attitude, and empathy) cause gender differences in executives’ CSR decision-making. In an exploratory analysis, we furthermore show that executives’ risk propensity affects their CSR decision-making conditional on the level of shareholder pressure they face. Our study contributes to the literature on executives’ decision-making and to the CSR literature by enhancing our understanding of determinants of executives’ CSR decision-making.