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.

The Collective Unconscious and the Media Sphere

A synthesis of Marshall McLuhan's typology of media, Carl Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious, Teilhard de Chardin's Evolution, and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy is used to explain the current crisis of Western Civilisation, as well as suggest possible responses. McLuhan described the transition from print to electronic (and now digital) media. Jung explored the collective unconscious and the power of the archetypes. Teilhard posited three evolutionary spheres; here, a further stage is added, the Psychosphere, equated with the Jungian unconscious. And Steiner referred to a threefold polarity of spiritual hierarchies that influence human consciousness and society. Conspiracism and the disinformation crisis comes about through archetypes working through the lower psychecological zones. Orientation to positive epigenetic, imaginal, and divine realities, with their high degree of holism and mythopoetic creativity, offers an alternative to both the paranoia of conspiracism and the reductionism of materialism.

Rose-Patisserie and Coffee House

This case traces the life of a new endeavor, starting with a small patisserie and coffeehouse and the subsequent development of the business, considering three alternatives, namely optimizing the concept, expanding through a franchise network, and building a network of company-owned stores. The story of Rui and Joana raises a wide range of issues that managers need to address. After reading and working through the case, students will be able to evaluate the product portfolio, based on actual sales data, and to evaluate and propose strategic options using classical models.

A Critique of “Mascquerade”

This article begins by identifying the demand for “masc” in gay male digital cultures as a repressive phenomenon. Drawing on a key queer alt-right text by Jack Donovan in which “masc” is explicitly theorized, it shows that its disciplinary logic is distinct from homonormativity. The homo/hetero binary is explicitly rejected, and the perverse structure is weaponized as a repressive mechanism suited to a postnormative environment. Under these conditions, critiques of normativity and homonationalism are unable to provide an effective counter because the subjects they address have stopped caring. The article describes perverse homogenization processes as “homotribalism,” arguing that they provide an erotic basis for ethnonationalism. It then provides a detailed reading of Call Me by Your Name (2017), claiming that its striking contemporary relevance during the first year of the Trump administration followed from working through the question of homotribal desire within liberalism.

Civic Technology and Data for Good

Governments have long dealt with the issue of engaging their constituents in the process of governance, and e-participation efforts have been a part of this effort. Almost all of these efforts have been controlled by government. Civic technology and data4good, fueled by the movement toward open government and open civic data, represent a sea change in this relationship. A similar movement is data for good, which uses volunteer data scientists to address social problems using advanced analytics and large datasets. Working through a variety of organizations, they apply the power of data to problems. This chapter will explore these possibilities and outline a set of scenarios that might be possible. The chapter has four parts. The first part looks at citizen participation in broad brush, with special attention to e-participation. The next two sections look at civic technology and data4good. The final section looks at the possible changes that these two embryonic movements can have on the structure of participation in government and to the nature of public management.

KAJIAN SOSIAL KARYA SENI KRIYA KAYU DI DESA MULYOHARJO KABUPATEN JEPARA

The development of handicrafts in Indonesia is now experiencing such a rapid pace, especially those oriented to various modern technological facilities lately. Accompanying all human needs that are passive and have an active function, furniture or household furniture products are the main choice in various worlds of property today, both domestically and abroad. The relationship between craft art and several aspects that must be met shows the existence of a problematic in its embodiment. This is probably not realized by the kriyawan who appear instantly and oriented to a market. It's the same with craftsmen in Mulyoharjo Village, although there are those who have the idea of working through an artistic instinct and become unconventional craft craftsmen in their social community.

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe: Extended Essay on the Book

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe takes us back to his seminal text on “Necropolitics” translated and published in the US in 2003. At this point, 40 years after Foucault’s Biopolitics, Mbembe was re-theorizing biopolitics through a necro (death) horizon, which turned out to be a robust conceptual shift from Western thought. Not much else is explicitly said about necropolitics in the titular book, which comes 17 years after the seminal text that had a significant impact on the theory and practice of philosophy, politics, anthropology, and esthetics. Mbembe presents the layers of forms, modes, and procedures of the necropolitical working through contemporary neoliberal global societies. It is therefore not surprising that Mbembe makes reference to theory in forms, form is the way to redefine or rephrase content, and “who should live and who must die” is currently the beginning. But how this is done in the 21st century, what are the methods and procedures to implement this central act in neoliberal global democracy —that is the task of this book.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter outlines the implications of the book’s overall reinterpretation of Rorty’s relation to the classical pragmatists via the lens of reconstruction. After a brief precis of the accounts of Rorty’s relation to Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, and Addams in the preceding chapters, it revisits several prevalent criticisms of Rorty in contemporary debates to show how a fuller understanding of Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism helps mitigate the concerns, including his antirealism, reduction of truth to our peers, alleged relativism, and lack of resources to defeat the arguments of the Nazi. It then sketches the broad contours of a post-Rortyan pragmatism free of partisan allegiances and self-protective impulses, animated by creative energies resulting from working through and beyond his challenges to pragmatists to better realize the aims of moral and epistemic growth toward more just and inclusive communities.