A Time to Gather

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

The Spirit in Hebrews

There are surprisingly few references to the Holy Spirit in the letter to the Hebrews, though there are more than some may recognize. The author of Hebrews believes that the recipients of his letter/sermon should be fully grounded in their communal life in the Spirit, but he is most interested in how the Holy Spirit is exhorting and guiding the community to further truth during their critical time of need. Therefore, it is the content of what the Spirit is communicating that is his focus, and that content contains some of the most profound statements in the letter/sermon. There are possibly seven references to the Holy Spirit in the letter to the Hebrews. Two of them are consistent with the early Christian traditions about the work of the Spirit: three of them concern the Holy Spirit’s confrontation and communication to the readers through Scripture, and two are disputed as references to the Holy Spirit, although, if they apply, they may reflect a perception of the divinity of the Spirit. The importance of the contexts in which the author mentions the Holy Spirit indicates a role for the Holy Spirit in the sermon/letter that extends beyond the texts in which the Spirit is directly referenced.

Vernacular historical practices on Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland

The approach employed by memory activists to sites of memory often involves historical practices. This paper presents the results of the examination of historical practices undertaken in locations of Holocaust violence during World War II and the disposal of victims’ remains that were not memorialised properly according to local residents or other groups with an interest in the sites’ past. The analysed practices were observed in the course of field research in various locations in Poland. The goal of the research was to describe these practices, discuss their critical potential, and indicate their distinct features as activities pertaining to contested sites of memory. A central tool for approaching this task is found in concepts of “non-site of memory” and “vernacular historian” as introduced to the debate by Claude Lanzmann and Lyle Dick. As a result, the article presents the cases of four vernacular historians whose practices are experimental combinations of the components of the work of professional historians and ways of working conditioned by local cultural environments, individual experience and commitment to communal life. Although vernacular history is sometimes considered of little value by academic historians, the research shows that the practices in question have the potential to produce new, socially relevant knowledge. Two distinct features of vernacular historical practices in non-sites of memory were observed: these unmarked sites of burial attract activists and prompt them to undertake historical practices; vernacular historians of these locations often undertake unconventional, sometimes experimental activities..

A Future for a Rural Past: An Investigation of Rural Communal Life in New Zealand, through an Architectural Analysis of Rural Halls

<p>Since the early years of colonisation, rural settlements in New Zealand have undergone much change. The built infrastructure that once supported close-knit rural communities has become largely obsolete, degenerating into disrepair. Within this context of rural decline, my thesis explores the relation between rural buildings and communal living. In so doing, I offer a conceptualisation of a new rural facility, as an incubator for new communal experience, appropriate for bringing rural and urban dwellers together. My focus is specifically community centred on rural halls within Taranaki's Stratford District. In offering a critical analysis of their demise, I contend that rural halls in New Zealand have undergone this change through processes of urbanisation. Urban dwelling has given rise to a lack of agricultural knowledge, providing a disassociation between urban residents and their earlier ties to the landscape and farm practices. The development of new forms of social life has aided an increase in the degree of physical separation between individuals and their neighbors. The traditional physical sense of belonging to a close-knit rural community has been transformed if not destroyed. Belonging to a community is, I contend, a vital psychological requirement for humans. My theoretical stance is that buildings can and do support a sense of community. From a regenerative perspective, there is arguably a trend of moving back to rural environments as people seek out alternative ways of dealing with the overbearing issue of contemporary urban living. The built rural infrastructure may be of importance to New Zealand's current and future generations. This thesis explores the possibility for a reinterpretation/adaptation of rural New Zealand halls in expressing physical rural 'communal life' in a contemporary context. Critical Regionalist and Adaptive Reuse architecture theories are utilised to test this contention. The design ventures a new archetype, a new hub for a rural settlement that will include new facilities, whilst extending and reworking the traditional social roles of rural halls. Through fostering a renewed form of communal life and providing an environment that fuses rural and urban skill-sets, this facility is intended to breath new life into these former rural communities and in particular, the abandoned rural halls.</p>

A Future for a Rural Past: An Investigation of Rural Communal Life in New Zealand, through an Architectural Analysis of Rural Halls

<p>Since the early years of colonisation, rural settlements in New Zealand have undergone much change. The built infrastructure that once supported close-knit rural communities has become largely obsolete, degenerating into disrepair. Within this context of rural decline, my thesis explores the relation between rural buildings and communal living. In so doing, I offer a conceptualisation of a new rural facility, as an incubator for new communal experience, appropriate for bringing rural and urban dwellers together. My focus is specifically community centred on rural halls within Taranaki's Stratford District. In offering a critical analysis of their demise, I contend that rural halls in New Zealand have undergone this change through processes of urbanisation. Urban dwelling has given rise to a lack of agricultural knowledge, providing a disassociation between urban residents and their earlier ties to the landscape and farm practices. The development of new forms of social life has aided an increase in the degree of physical separation between individuals and their neighbors. The traditional physical sense of belonging to a close-knit rural community has been transformed if not destroyed. Belonging to a community is, I contend, a vital psychological requirement for humans. My theoretical stance is that buildings can and do support a sense of community. From a regenerative perspective, there is arguably a trend of moving back to rural environments as people seek out alternative ways of dealing with the overbearing issue of contemporary urban living. The built rural infrastructure may be of importance to New Zealand's current and future generations. This thesis explores the possibility for a reinterpretation/adaptation of rural New Zealand halls in expressing physical rural 'communal life' in a contemporary context. Critical Regionalist and Adaptive Reuse architecture theories are utilised to test this contention. The design ventures a new archetype, a new hub for a rural settlement that will include new facilities, whilst extending and reworking the traditional social roles of rural halls. Through fostering a renewed form of communal life and providing an environment that fuses rural and urban skill-sets, this facility is intended to breath new life into these former rural communities and in particular, the abandoned rural halls.</p>

Ontosophy and anthropologised metaphysics: Revisiting the ontology of deities among the Igbo

Existentially, Igbo-African metaphysics swivels around ethics, morality, justice, and medicine. This state of being is evident in their credo on the ontology of the deities, which they see as a strategic variable in their hierarchy of beings and a critical agent in their quest for sane, responsible, peaceful existence and co- existence. Based on these premises, this paper interrogated these variables to establish the symmetry between them. In doing this, this research employed the critical analytic cum existential model in its analysis. After which, it became palpable that the existence and ontology of the deities accentuates the mode of operation of the Igbo-African and from that position; it was blatant that the communal life of the Igbo-African makes African metaphysics a lived-metaphysics or what I have called anthropologised-metaphysics.

Part Three, Book One: The Fire or The Eternal Life

In this text, I analyze the most important topics of one of the most complex portions of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. The chapter “The Fire or the Eternal Life” deals with the community and communal life of the eternal people, and it reconstructs the basic elements and conditions of communal living. A presentation of all key protocols of life and work of a group of people ought to show the plurality of heterogeneous practices that have helped maintain a people scattered and always on the verge of extinction.

Public parts, resocialized autonomous communal life

Commoning embodies the product of social contracts and behaviors between groups of individuals. In the case of social housing and the establishment of physical domains for life, commoning is an intersection of these contracts and the restrictions and policies that prohibit and allow them to occur within municipalities. Via a platform-based project entitled Public Parts (2020), this article will also present positions on the reification of the common through a set of design methodologies and implementations of automation. This platform seeks to subvert typical platform models to decrease ownership, increase access, and produce a new form of communal autonomous life amongst individuals that constitute the rapidly expanding freelance, work from home, and gig economies. Furthermore, this text investigates the consequences of merging domestic space with artificial intelligence by implementing machine learning to reconfigure spaces and program. The problems that arise from the deployment of machine learning algorithms involve issues of collection, usage, and ownership of data. Through the physical design of space, and a central AI which manages the platform and the automated management of space, the core objective of Public Parts is to reify the common through architecture and collectively owned data.

Konstruksi Identitas Nasionalisme Dalam Pikukuh Masyarakat Adat Baduy

<p>This research is entitled “Construction of Nationalism Identity in Baduy Society Based on Pikukuh and Buyut.” This is a library research on the philosophical life of the Baduy, a traditional community in Indonesia. Analysis was conducted using interpretation, inductive and deductive, internal coherence, and holistica approaches. This research resulted is some conclusions. First, the Baduy community was found to uphold a form of ethno-nationalism which is based on Pikukuh and Buyut with a strong focus on the meaning of leadership, communal life, and observance of laws. However, this ethno-nationalism does not conflict with the state nationalism upheld by the Indonesian government. Indeed, seba shows that there has always been good relationship between the Baduy people (which uphold ethno-nationalism) and the Indonesian government (which upholds state nationalism). Secondly, the “imagined” nationalism in the Baduy community is founded based on traditional bond, in which case nationalism is not separated from tradition. Consequently, the values are oriented towards basic rationality in order to construct an identity of nationalism unique to the Baduy community. However, at the same time, instrumental rationality and the value-oriented rationality have the same role, in that they serve to construct the meaning of nationalism in the Baduy community. All of these factors result in a harmonious relationship between ethno-nationalism upheld by the the Baduy community and state nationalism upheld by the Indonesian government.</p>