Modern Colonialism and Cultural Continuity Through Material Culture: An Example from Guam and CHamoru Plaiting

This article analyzes cultural persistence in Guam through plaiting, material culture, and maintenance activities, a set of daily practices that are essential to social continuity and well-being. The colonization of Guam began in 1668 with the Jesuit missions. Jesuit policies utilized maintenance activities to colonize Indigenous lifeways and subjectivities, but we believe those activities also functioned as reservoirs of traditional knowledge. Although plaiting has been situated in different historical contexts across the centuries, it no doubt expresses material continuities stretching from a precolonial past. The article also challenges today’s widespread belief that the search for change is a universal value. It argues that societies appreciate continuity over change in inverse proportion to technological control over nature, asymmetrical relationships of power, and specialized fragmentation of functional tasks. In the absence of such features, the best guarantee of survival lies in maintaining the balance achieved by traditional lifeways.

Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.

Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.

The End of Dystopia?

While the year 1945 marked a turning point in the sense of a new beginning for Jewish communities, the immediate postwar period was by no means a clear break with the past. Ruptures—in the sense of historical and cultural breaks—affecting the course of Jewish culture had, in fact, occurred earlier. As such, the postwar period saw a unique dialectic between changes in the aftermath of the Holocaust and a cultural persistence, which drew on historical musical models and practices that gave way to cultural mobility. As such, musical life in the Jewish communities appears as a brief epilogue to a glorious pre-Nazi past. The peculiar dialectic between cultural change and persistence is an indicator of the complexities the Jewish community faced in reestablishing itself after the Holocaust and for a provisional new beginning.

Superdiversiteit en culturele mobiliteit in Europees hoger onderwijs: een casestudie in culturele geschiedenis

The present article shows how the changing societal context in Europe is imposing a reshaping of the internationalisation of higher education. It argues that internationalisation has mainly focused on intensifying the mobility of students and staff, but has neglected the drastic change in European society brought about by “super-diversity” (Vertovec, “Super-diversity” and Super-diversity), that “diversification of diversity” which, over a couple of decades, has transformed the population of Europe into a highly complex mixture of people from different places, with different languages, religions and cultures. The consequence of this sudden change is that there is now an urgent need to “move beyond mobility” and to reshape internationalisation through “cultural mobility” (Greenblatt) in course content and learning styles. The second part of this article elaborates on a proposal for concrete course content in line with Greenblatt’s manifest to modify conventional ways of thinking about mobility. Taking account of “cultural mobility”, the proposed course in the Cultural History of the Arts tries to create a balance between cultural persistence and cultural change by introducing international content and interculturalism. The case study thereby highlights possible directions for future internationalised course development.

Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change

We examine a determinant of cultural persistence that has emerged from a class of models in evolutionary anthropology: the similarity of the environment across generations. Within these models, when the environment is more stable across generations, the traits that have evolved up to the previous generation are more likely to be suitable for the current generation. In equilibrium, a greater value is placed on tradition and there is greater cultural persistence. We test this hypothesis by measuring the variability of climatic measures across 20-year generations from 500–1900CE. Employing a variety of tests that use different samples and empirical strategies, we find that populations with ancestors who lived in environments with more cross-generational instability place less importance on maintaining tradition today and exhibit less cultural persistence.

From Negative Visibility to Positive Invisibility – Who Needs to Use Gypsies [Roma] as the Anti-citizens of Civilized Europe?

Since the 15th century, Gypsies in Occidental Europe have been subjected to special legislation and social action determined to cause one of two types of cultural identity extinction – extermination or complete assimilation. Five centuries later, the result has been an exceptional cultural persistence associated to social marginalisation and, in Portugal, a mixture of positive invisibility (unlike the Spanish situation, Portuguese Gypsies are not recognised as having made any positive form of cultural contribution) and of excessive exposure, in terms of a negative visibility constructed by public opinion and the media. This negative visibility of Portuguese Gypsies is worsened by the systematic silence and a certain connivance on the part of the authorities (Parliament, Government, Catholic Church, Courts, municipal authorities, etc.), with rare and personal, non-institutional exceptions, occurring in moments of excessive persecution. In this paper, we will explore the identity economy of social persecution against ethnic minorities that are not recognised as such in the Law, and are used in daily life as the negative image of the hegemonic ‘imagined society’.