Multiple Voices of the Past: (Hi)stories and Memories from the Ethnically Mixed Neighbourhoods in Pristina

Multiple Voices of the Past: (Hi)stories and Memories from the Ethnically Mixed Neighbourhoods in PristinaUsing the Bakhtinian term heteroglossia developed by Andrea L. Smith, this article analyses the multiple and sometimes internally contradictory narratives, memories and stereotypes articulated in everyday talk about the common past in Pristina that could be heard nowadays in post-war Kosovo (mostly among Kosovo Albanians) and among the people who used to live in Kosovo prior to 1999 (mostly Kosovo Serbs) and then left the country for Serbia (Belgrade, Niš, etc.) or went abroad. The study explores the existing memories, images and stereotypes shared among the current and former citizens of Pristina (Kosovo) – both Albanians and Serbs – about each other and their city. It relies on the basic tools of cultural memory studies and applies them to the analysis of existing local narratives in the present-day Albanian and Serbian communities that used to be parts of one and the same city of Pristina. The article offers a discussion of the opposition between urban and rural models of mindset in changing Pristina and its importance in understanding some of the factors of ethnic conflict in Kosovo. The basic social unit selected for analysis is ethnically mixed neighbourhood and its memory due to the fact that this social and spatial entity functioned as the primary condition and source of interaction, mutual familiarity and cooperation both during peace and war. The empirical data for the study were collected in 2010–2020 during short visits to Pristina (Kosovo) and Niš (Serbia).Множественные голоса прошлого: история и память в этнически смешанных районах ПриштиныАннотация: Используя термин гетероглоссия, предложенный М. Бахтиным и разработанный А. Смитом, в данной статье я про- анализирую многочисленные и иногда внутренне противоречивые нарративы, воспоминания и стереотипы, сформулированные в повседневных разговорах об общем прошлом в Приштине, которые сегодня можно услышать в послевоенном Косово (в среде косовских албанцев) и среди людей, живших в Косово до 1999 г. (в основном косовские сербы), а затем уехавших из страны в Сербию (Белград, Ниш и т. д.) или за границу. Моя статья направлена на изучение существующих воспоминаний, образов и стереотипов, разделяемых нынешними и бывшими гражданами Приштины – как албанцами, так и сербами – по отношению друг к другу и своему городу. В работе используются основные инструменты исследования культурной памяти, в их применении к анализу существующих местных нарративов в современных албанских и сербских общинах, которые когда-то были частью одного и того же города Приштина. В своей статье я буду обсуждать противостояние между городской и сельской моделями мышления в изменении Приштины и его важность для понимания некоторых предпосылок этнического конфликта в Косово. В качестве базовой социальной единицы для своего анализа я выбрал этнически смешанный район и его память в связи с тем, что эта социальная и пространственная сущность функционировала как основное условие и источник взаимодействия, взаимного знакомства и сотрудничества как в периоды мира, так и во время войны. Эмпирические данные были собраны в 2010-2020 годах во время моих коротких визитов в Приштину и Ниш.Różnorodne głosy przeszłości: historia i pamięć w zróżnicowanych etnicznie dzielnicach PrisztinyOdwołując się do terminu polifoniczności, zaproponowanego przez Michaiła Bachtina i opracowanego przez Anthony’ego Smitha, w niniej­szym artykule przeanalizuję liczne i czasem wewnętrznie sprzeczne narra­cje, wspomnienia i stereotypy, sformułowane w codziennych rozmowach o wspólnej przeszłości w Prisztinie, które dziś można usłyszeć w powo­jennym Kosowie (w środowisku kosowskich Albańczyków) oraz pośród ludzi mieszkających w Kosowie do 1999 roku (przede wszystkim wśród kosowskich Serbów), którzy wyjechali do Serbii (Belgrad, Nisz itd.) lub za granicę. Mój artykuł ma na celu zbadanie wspomnień, obrazów i ste­reotypów, podzielanych przez obecnych i byłych obywateli Prisztiny, za­równo Albańczyków jak i Serbów, w stosunku do siebie nawzajem oraz do samego miasta. W pracy nad analizą lokalnych narracji we współczesnych wspólnotach albańskich i serbskich, które kiedyś były częścią tego samego miasta – Prisztiny, wykorzystuję podstawowe instrumenty badawcze dla dziedziny pamięci kulturowej. W artykule będę omawiać sprzeczność mię­dzy miejskim a wiejskim modelem myślenia na temat przemian Prisztiny, akcentując jego istotną rolę w rozumieniu niektórych przesłanek konflik­tu etnicznego w Kosowie. Jako podstawową jednostkę społeczną dla mo­jej analizy przyjąłem etnicznie różnorodną dzielnicę wraz z jej pamięcią, ze względu na to, że ta społeczna i przestrzenna jednostka funkcjonowała jako podstawowe źródło wzajemnych wpływów, znajomości i współpracy, zarówno w czasie pokoju, jak i wojny. Dane empiryczne zostały zebrane w latach 2010-2020 w czasie moich krótkich wizyt w Prisztinie i Niszu.

How Central Water Management Impacts Local Livelihoods: An Ethnographic Case Study of Mining Water Extraction in Tarapacá, Chile

Chile’s neoliberal central water management gives shape to a series of conflicts arising from diverse understandings and ways of life linked to water. This article addresses the question of who is responsible for the ecological costs regarding water use of mining activity in the north of Chile. From the perspective of hydro-social territories, we analyze how the local population in Tarapacá is acting on unequal footing regarding environmental information and knowledge. Local and practical experiences are devalued against technical and scientific modeling, supported by legal and political definitions of “the environment” and “water”. Focusing on diverse local narratives, we show how the local population feels threatened by the environmental impacts of mining activity but struggles to find legitimate ways of articulating those anxieties to gain a sense of agency. We conclude that the local ecological consequences of extractivism in this region can only be understood in the context of the wider legal and economic framework regulating the appropriation of water as a resource and that long-term efforts in more participatory sociohydrological modeling might help to broaden the knowledge base for contested decision-making.

Upcycling Wild Pigeon's Field in a post-hydrocarbon Brunei - An Exploration of Architecture Reacting to Social Changes Through Narratives

<p>The hydrocarbon industry has immensely influenced and moulded the societal structure of the inhabitants of modern day Brunei. Nonetheless, the dependency on this commodity will eventually cease, shifting the future social structure and leaving questions on plausible resolutions towards treatments on the existing sites, ‘non-buildings’ and infrastructures of the industry. Infrastructures and ‘non-buildings’ are typically subjected to the process of dismantling, removal, deep sea dumping and abandonment. It has been observed that in recent times, alternate methods are offered within the architectural profession. Through the application of adaptive reuse architecture, warehouses, factories and even ‘non-building’ are repurposed, where its industrial heritage and cultural value are highly recognised and considered necessary to retain. Focusing on specified onshore oilfields in Brunei, this thesis seeks an exploration into a methodology of regenerating a site and offering spaces that evoke a ‘sense of belonging’ or cultural identity. Through architectural discourse on memory and semiotics, local narratives are put forward and explored as an extension to cultural identity. This methodology is further explored through the application of John Hejduk’s concept of languages and masques. It proposes an imaginative practise into visual experiments for an exploration on the effect of reusing hydrocarbon infrastructure as architectural spaces. As Brunei shifts towards a new epoch, studies on current socioeconomic structure are critical to recognise where the structure is leaning towards to as it cannot simply change overnight.</p>

Upcycling Wild Pigeon's Field in a post-hydrocarbon Brunei - An Exploration of Architecture Reacting to Social Changes Through Narratives

<p>The hydrocarbon industry has immensely influenced and moulded the societal structure of the inhabitants of modern day Brunei. Nonetheless, the dependency on this commodity will eventually cease, shifting the future social structure and leaving questions on plausible resolutions towards treatments on the existing sites, ‘non-buildings’ and infrastructures of the industry. Infrastructures and ‘non-buildings’ are typically subjected to the process of dismantling, removal, deep sea dumping and abandonment. It has been observed that in recent times, alternate methods are offered within the architectural profession. Through the application of adaptive reuse architecture, warehouses, factories and even ‘non-building’ are repurposed, where its industrial heritage and cultural value are highly recognised and considered necessary to retain. Focusing on specified onshore oilfields in Brunei, this thesis seeks an exploration into a methodology of regenerating a site and offering spaces that evoke a ‘sense of belonging’ or cultural identity. Through architectural discourse on memory and semiotics, local narratives are put forward and explored as an extension to cultural identity. This methodology is further explored through the application of John Hejduk’s concept of languages and masques. It proposes an imaginative practise into visual experiments for an exploration on the effect of reusing hydrocarbon infrastructure as architectural spaces. As Brunei shifts towards a new epoch, studies on current socioeconomic structure are critical to recognise where the structure is leaning towards to as it cannot simply change overnight.</p>

Contesting Collective Representations of the Past: The Politics of Memory in South Korea

<p>Because monuments, memorials and other 'sites of memory' privilege particular collective interpretations of the past over others, they represent inherently contentious and political spaces. Contention over representing the past is particularly resonant in Korea, where sites of memory are imbued with strong, often polarised meanings. By focusing on two such sites in Korea, this thesis seeks to discuss the wider implications of the ongoing conflict over what representations of the past should be privileged. In Gwangju, the area surrounding the former provincial hall (docheong) is being redeveloped, part of the city's attempts to become 'reborn' as a capital city of human rights and democracy in Asia. However, to many citizens in Gwangju, this new image ignores the meaning that the city's dissident past holds for local communal understandings of identity. Conflict arose as citizens protested to keep the symbolism of the docheong intact, thus, helping to maintain local narratives of the past. In Seoul, Myeongdong Cathedral, a key symbol of protest and democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, is now having its meaning re-interpreted, as the Catholic Church de-couples religion from socio-political concerns. The conflicting meanings of Myeongdong Cathedral are representative of a wider divergence in Korean society, as apathy towards Korea's past grows among society at large while other segments appropriate the past to protest contemporary socio-political concerns. Ultimately, these Korean case studies emphasise that the meanings sites of memory convey are not fixed, and that groups are often able to appropriate sites to affirm their own narratives of the past and to emphasise their own collective voice. Therefore, sites that represent particular understandings of the past, while contentious, also provide a space for debate and, thus, help to understand ongoing concerns within wider society.</p>

Contesting Collective Representations of the Past: The Politics of Memory in South Korea

<p>Because monuments, memorials and other 'sites of memory' privilege particular collective interpretations of the past over others, they represent inherently contentious and political spaces. Contention over representing the past is particularly resonant in Korea, where sites of memory are imbued with strong, often polarised meanings. By focusing on two such sites in Korea, this thesis seeks to discuss the wider implications of the ongoing conflict over what representations of the past should be privileged. In Gwangju, the area surrounding the former provincial hall (docheong) is being redeveloped, part of the city's attempts to become 'reborn' as a capital city of human rights and democracy in Asia. However, to many citizens in Gwangju, this new image ignores the meaning that the city's dissident past holds for local communal understandings of identity. Conflict arose as citizens protested to keep the symbolism of the docheong intact, thus, helping to maintain local narratives of the past. In Seoul, Myeongdong Cathedral, a key symbol of protest and democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, is now having its meaning re-interpreted, as the Catholic Church de-couples religion from socio-political concerns. The conflicting meanings of Myeongdong Cathedral are representative of a wider divergence in Korean society, as apathy towards Korea's past grows among society at large while other segments appropriate the past to protest contemporary socio-political concerns. Ultimately, these Korean case studies emphasise that the meanings sites of memory convey are not fixed, and that groups are often able to appropriate sites to affirm their own narratives of the past and to emphasise their own collective voice. Therefore, sites that represent particular understandings of the past, while contentious, also provide a space for debate and, thus, help to understand ongoing concerns within wider society.</p>

Provocative landscapes: a study of everyday cultural landscapes at the outskirts of agglomerations

The paper describes research principles and preliminary results of collaborative interdisciplinary research project aimed at the study of everyday cultural landscapes on the periphery of the Yekaterinburg and Tyumen urban agglomerations. The research design of the project implies a paradigm shift from expert reading of the landscapes to communicative learning of the environment, from the perception of the territories in question as resource reservoirs to their exploration as a domain of affordances providing opportunities for endogenous eco-nomic development. In 2020, an expedition worked in the villages of Tobolsk Zabolotye, in the cities of Irbit and Polevskoy of Sverdlovsk Oblast, and in the village of Belozerskoye of Kurgan Oblast. The cases and places deemed perspective in view of the application of the research method were characterized. This paper mainly pro-vides an overview of the methodological principles that underpin our ongoing study, which should be considered only as an outline of the preliminary results of the first year of field work. The main source of the theoretical inspi-ration for the project design was the idea of affordances, coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who studied the problems of perception. The main methodological objective of the project is to apply the theory of affordances to the field study of strategies for everyday landscape choice. In the 2020 field season, the design of the project, envisaging comparative perspective and increased mobility of researchers, was significantly influ-enced by the method of traveling interview. While working in Tobolsk Zabolotye, we followed everyday patterns of mobility, conducting interviews along the way, discussing with the respondents the hierarchy of places and territo-ries, criteria for identifying vernacular regions, capacity of communication channels, modes of the mobility and its limitations. Concurrently, we were gaining the experience of non-discursive, embodied in materiality and corpore-ality, movement and recording local narratives of identity.

Transnational identification processes: An association of young business leaders

This article raises the question of how organisational identification emerges at distance and across cultural contexts. The question is explored in an empirical study of identification processes among Moroccan members of an international association that assemble young leaders and entrepreneurs in small- and medium sized companies. On the basis of a narrative analysis of interviews, observations, and documents, the article illustrates two mutually reinforcing identification processes: One is based on face-to-face social interaction with likeminded peers locally; another is imaginary in the sense that the Moroccan members envision members in other countries to be like themselves and what they aspire to become. This contributes to crosscultural management literature in three ways: first, the study adopts a transnational lens that shows the need to go beyond a national perspective and to explore identification at the intersection between the global and local; second, the study draws on concepts of imagined community (Anderson, 1983) and community of sentiments (Appadurai, 1996) to conceptualise the imaginary part of the identification processes, which transcends locality. Third, the study contributes methodologically by showing how the distinction between translocal and local narratives allows to analyse the interplay between an imagined transnational community and a local face-to-face community.

Congolese Child Soldier Narratives for Global and Local Audiences

The article examines narratives by and about former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a hitherto neglected corpus despite the topicality of child soldiering in African literatures after 2000. Critical readings of three testimonial texts that have been published in France are juxtaposed with the analysis of one testimonial narrative and one youth novel that have been published in Kinshasa. The editorial framing and narrative strategies that speak to different audiences located in different literary fields are identified. The popularity of testimonial narratives in the West relies on the depiction of violence and the iconic function of the child soldier in medial and human rights discourses. By contrast, narratives about the reconciliation and the reintegration of child soldiers prevail in the DRC. Thus, the different functions of global and local narratives on the sensitive issue of children at war are exposed.