The Construction of Turkey’s Circassians as a Docile Minority

The 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games revived memories related to the Circassians’ forced migration from their Caucasus homeland into the Ottoman Empire after 150 years. In that year, I conducted a considerable oral history project to understand the collective memories of Circassians in Turkey. The main focus of this study is, however, the social construction of the Circassian minority in Turkey. I examine their oral historical narratives related to their immigration, reception and resettlement, and instrumentalization. It is as important to place emphasis on the protected, multiplied and renewed sociocultural values of Circassians as it is to confront the history. I will examine the relationship between their diasporic identity and minority identity as well as their preferences in identity reproduction.

Tangibility-Intangibility on UNESCO World Heritage Baroque Philippine Churches: the Spirit of Place and Its Collective Memory

The churches (Manila, Santa Maria, Paoay, Miagao) built in the Spanish period of the Philippines (16-18C) exemplify the reinterpretations of the European Baroque style by Chinese and Philippine artisans. Symbolising the fusion of the West with local materials and motifs, they have formed an innovative building tradition. Characteristics of these churches are monumental and massive to protect against intruders or natural harm. The iconographic-decorative Miagao facade underlines the regional understanding of Christianity and Saint Patron among contemporary Catholics. This paper discusses the tangibility-intangibility of Baroque Philippine churches through the spirit of place and collective memories among churchgoers-inhabitants-visitors, reinterpreting sacred buildings.

Who are the 3 Per Cent? The Connections Among Climate Change Contrarians

Despite 97 per cent of scientists agreeing on anthropogenic global warming, the remaining 3 per cent play a critical role in keeping the debate about climate consensus alive. Analysis of climate change contrarians from multi-signatory documents reveals 3 per cent of signees to be climate experts, while the remaining 97 per cent do not meet expert criteria and are also involved with organizations and industries who make up the climate change countermovement. The data also reveal most contrarians to be aged sixty-five or older. As a result, we explore other factors (for example, collective memories and ideological views) that may have also contributed to expert and non-expert views.

Life Writing through Texts and Images – Picture books by Celebrities

In the last 15 to 20 years a lot of celebrities have published novels and or picture books for children and adolescents. This article will contextualise this international phenomenon within a theoretical framework of celebrity studies and research on life writing and intermediality. As will be shown, these literary texts for young people by celebrities represent an intermedial life writing that combines texts, illustrations, photographs and forms of online and offline self-curating as well. It is especially the picture book that seems to carry an archival function with respect to the authors’ lives. Here, the celebrities tell about themselves in words and images, they stage themselves as private and authentic persons. Understanding children’s and adolescents’ literature as part of intergenerational communication, these literary texts show different kinds of strategies to prolong the knowledge of a public person in societies’ collective memories.

What the Ground Says…

Ground, as a body incised by natural and human actions (European Landscape Convention), carries “stories”, going beyond quantitative values. As in a text, it holds the keys to understand what it covers or hides. In its thickness, it shelters “implicit projects”. Understanding its complexity requires a physical and perceptual commitment, challenging the body in space: dimensions gradually forgotten by Environmental Sciences. As a “threshold” between visible and invisible, Underground-Built-Heritage represents the reverse of the emerged world: hollow space, both generator and mirror of open space (cities, landscapes). The focus is on physical and mental relationships between these two worlds. Past and present relationships emerge, allowing hypotheses to reconstitute collective memories, practices, knowledge, and values, which serve territorial development. The “Three Countries Park” is a place for cross-border experimentation to test how UBH can rebuild common links for fragmented environments. The cavities of a geo-park (planned) and the tangles of underground mining architecture are the fragments of a vocabulary whose meaning communities have to relearn. Built undergrounds will, thus, emerge from common stories that revive the imagination of populations who have lost all notion of belonging to a place. UBH will become a vector of new territorial coherence linking the physical and mental perceptions of people.

Remembering Haludovo: The Penthouse Years and What Came Later

This paper contributes to a growing area within memory studies which explores individual and collective memories as communicated in the contemporary media. The “nexus of memory” in this case is the tourism complex Haludovo on the Croatian island of Krk. What made Haludovo exceptional in the context of the growing tourism industry in socialist Yugoslavia was its short-lived partnership with the adult magazine Penthouse. This paper looks at the history and subsequent fate of Haludovo in the postsocialist period, focusing on the episode dedicated to Haludovo in the Croatian documentary TV series Slumbering Concrete (2016). A collaboration between a media scholar and an architectural historian, who was also one of the scriptwriters and hosts of the series, the study makes use of these multiple perspectives to situate the Haludovo case in a wider framework—the mediated communication of history and memories of the Yugoslav Adriatic coast in television and cinema.

Invoking the “Yolocaust”?

The present study understands comedy in relation to the Holocaust as an attempt by Germany’s third and fourth generations to create alternative forms of commemoration. Analyzing the country’s history of coming to terms with the Shoah, it highlights that recent forms of subversive satire are reacting to a crystallization in official memory politics through counter-discourse to political correctness and the defenders of moralism. The article finds that it is possible to combine comedy and Holocaust memory if Jewish victimhood is not spoofed and the limitations of official memory politics are debunked. Finally, it contends that not every historical assessment based on a local/national context can serve as a global blueprint. The recognition of national historical guilt and the establishment of distinct collective memories are still crucial for understanding specific pasts. Accordingly, German popular culture referring to the Nazi past differs from u.s. comedy dealing with the Holocaust.

Media and History: Discourse of Historical Responsibility in a Changing World

В статье проанализированы особенности трансформации аксиологических функций медиа в отношении общественных представлений о прошлом в контексте антагонистического, космополитического и агонического проектов коллективной памяти. Обосновывается мысль, что переход от антагонистического к космополитическому типу коллективных воспоминаний в прошлом столетии и обозначившийся в начале XXI в. поворот к элементам агонического типа способствуют трансформации функций медиа и повышению их аксиологического статуса как среды развертывания дискурса исторической ответственности. Это связано с усилением роли и значения медиа в качестве инструмента конструирования самого дискурса исторической ответственности, а также инструмента демаркации различных ценностных сред обращения к прошлому и их носителей – сообществ памяти. The article deals with actual problems of the transformation of the axiological functions of media in relation to public representations of the past in the context of antagonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic projects of collective memory. The transition from the antagonistic to the cosmopolitan type of collective memories in the last century and the turn towards elements of the agonistic type that has emerged today contribute to the transformation of media functions. This transformation is associated with the strengthening not so much of their epistemological status as their axiological status in relation to the past. The axiological status of media is associated with understanding it as a significant environment for the deployment of the discourse of historical responsibility. Modern media act as a tool for constructing the very discourse of historical responsibility, as well as a tool for demarcating various value environments of referring to the past and their carriers - communities of memory.