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How does the past matter in the present? How is a feeling of ‘ownership' of the past expressed in people's everyday lives? Should continuity with the distant past be seen as simply a nationalist fiction or is it transformed by local historical imagination? While recent anthropological studies have focused on reconstructing disputed histories, this book examines the multiple ways in which the past is used by people as a critical resource for interpreting the meanings of a changing present. It poses the issue of the felt relevance of the past in constructing present day identities. The Greek island of Kalymnos is a barren and seemingly bucolic setting of tourist imagination. But its history has been one of almost continuous occupation by foreign powers and of often fierce resistance. This has made Kalymnians particularly sensitive to seeing their island in a much wider context and to understanding the ‘games played by the powerful'. In examining changing gender relations, European integration, and local perceptions of the war in the former Yugoslavia, this book brings together local, national and international perspectives in a unified field. Controversial contemporary practices of dynamite throwing and dowry giving serve as tropes through which Kalymnians explore alternative ways of living in a changing world. Further, the author argues persuasively for the crucial importance of situated fieldwork in ‘peripheral'places in understanding the issues and conflicts of a transnational world. This book serves as an highly readable case study of the complex connections between local and global discourses and practices, and how they are shaped by their relationship to the past.
Through characters and stories that offer a wealth of insights about human nature and society, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers helps readers more fully understand why biodiversity persists when there are so many pressures for it not to. The key, Nazarea explains, is in the sovereign spaces seedsavers inhabit and create, where memories counter a culture of forgetting and abandonment engendered by modernity. A book about theory as much as practice, it profiles these individuals who march to their own beat in a world where diversity is increasingly devalued as the predictability of mass production becomes the norm.
A collaborative ethnography that collects ordinary persons' recollections of everyday life, politics, and the environment in Rajasthan from when the state was a kingdom and since independence.
The history of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration, which have produced a range of narratives, inside and outside Italy. This collection interrogates the dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture, focussing on the concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. It adopts a transnational perspective, offering a fresh approach to the study of Italy and of Modern Languages.
In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.
Faced with discrimination in Turkey, the Greeks of Istanbul and Imbros overwhelmingly left the country of their birth in the years c.1940–1980 to resettle in Greece, where they received something of a lukewarm reception from the government and segments of the population. This book explores the myriad ways in which the expatriated Greeks of Turkey daily understand their contemporary difficulties through the lens of historical experience, and reimagine the past according to present concerns and conceptions. It demonstrates how the Greeks of Turkey draw upon the particularities of their own local heritages in order simultaneously to establish their legitimacy as residents of Greece and maintain a sense of their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other Greeks; and how expatriate memory activists respond to their persecution in Turkey and their marginalisation in Greece by creating linkages between their experiences and both Greek national history and the histories of other persecuted communities. Greeks without Greece shows that in a broad spectrum of different domains – from commemorative ceremonies and the minutiae of citizenship to everyday expressions of national identity and stereotypes about others – the past is a realm of active and varied use capable of sustaining multiple and changeable identities, memories, and meanings.
Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe – and with what effects. Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which ‘materializations’ of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized – and a greater range of forms of ‘historical consciousness’. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls ‘the European memory complex’ – a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and ‘past presencing’. The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting – or ‘difficult’ – as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities, embodiment, commodification, nostalgia and Ostalgie, the musealization of everyday and folk-life, Holocaust commemoration and tourism, narratives of war, the heritage of Islam, transnationalism, and the future of the past. Memorylands is engagingly written and accessible to general readers as well as offering a new synthesis for advanced researchers in memory and heritage studies. It is essential reading for those interested in identities, memory, material culture, Europe, tourism and heritage.
History, Memory and Public Life introduces readers to key themes in the study of historical memory and its significance by considering the role of historical expertise and understanding in contemporary public reflection on the past. Divided into two parts, the book addresses both the theoretical and applied aspects of historical memory studies. ‘Approaches to history and memory‘ introduces key methodological and theoretical issues within the field, such as postcolonialism, sites of memory, myths of national origins, and questions raised by memorialisation and museum presentation. ‘Difficult pasts‘ looks at history and memory in practice through a range of case studies on contested, complex or traumatic memories, including the Northern Ireland Troubles, post-apartheid South Africa and the Holocaust. Examining the intersection between history and memory from a wide range of perspectives, and supported by guidance on further reading and online resources, this book is ideal for students of history as well as those working within the broad interdisciplinary field of memory studies.
Combines multiple theoretical perspectives and diverse media to examine the relation between music and memory in ancient Greece and Rome.
Excellence in Publishing Award, Association of Catholic Publishers Honorable Mention, Catholic Press Association Book Award Finalist, Washington State Book Award Pure Act tells the story of poet Robert Lax, whose quest to live a true life as both an artist and a spiritual seeker inspired Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, William Maxwell and a host of other writers, artists and ordinary people. Known in the U.S. primarily as Merton’s best friend and in Europe as a daringly original avant-garde poet, Lax left behind a promising New York writing career to travel with a circus, live among immigrants in post-war Marseilles and settle on a series of remote Greek islands where he learned and recorded the simple wisdom of the local people. Born a Jew, he became a Catholic and found the authentic community he sought in Greek Orthodox fishermen and sponge divers. In his early life, as he alternated working at The New Yorker, writing screenplays in Hollywood and editing a Paris literary journal with studying philosophy, serving the poor in Harlem and living in a sanctuary high in the French Alps, Lax pursued an approach to life he called pure act―a way of living in the moment that was both spontaneous and practiced, God-inspired and self-chosen. By devoting himself to simplicity, poverty and prayer, he expanded his capacity for peace, joy and love while producing distinctive poetry of such stark beauty critics called him “one of America’s greatest experimental poets” and “one of the new ‘saints’ of the avant-garde.” Written by a writer who met Lax in Greece when he was a young seeker himself and visited him regularly over fifteen years, Pure Act is an intimate look at an extraordinary but little-known life. Much more than just a biography, it’s a tale of adventure, an exploration of friendship, an anthology of wisdom, and a testament to the liberating power of living an uncommon life.