Ghiwanism and dissident nationalism: music, politics, and cultural memory

Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel with music memory and to map/unmap the travelling of music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to memorialise it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory.

Provisional evidence that the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor gene is associated with musical memory

This chapter explores how people recall personal music memories from their youth and how they relate their past and present-day music preferences to particular local, regional and national identity signifiers. The findings are based on an online survey carried out in the Netherlands and the UK, as part of a European project on popular music, cultural memory and identity. The survey contained a mix of open questions – where respondents could elaborate on their music preferences and memories – and closed questions that were analysed to reveal how background characteristics (age, education, profession) and listening habits can help explain variations in attachment to regional and national music styles. Early music memories are often associated with family and friendship bonds, and they trigger nostalgic and emotionally charged reminiscing of family outings, holidays or first contacts with music or favourite acts. Language and locality are important markers of authenticity, while canonical acts are more often cited. We also note a strong bias towards positive reminiscing. The quantitative analysis reveals generational differences in listening practices and attachment to regional and national music, while also shedding light on how first experiences of music have become less convivial and more individualised in recent decades.

Territorial integrity is one of the central tropes in contemporary Georgian cultural memory and historical imaginaries. The article traces when, how, and why the narrative of the “miraculous victory” of medieval Georgian King David IV the Builder over Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Didgori in August 1121 and his seizing of Tbilisi entered the Georgian “realms of memory”. This complex and often contradictory mnemonic legacy, shaped by medieval, imperial (Tsarist and Soviet), and nation-state (the First Republic and post-Soviet Georgia) conjunctures, feeds the current representations of this military success as a symbol of the unification of the Georgian state. In the Soviet and post-Soviet “regimes of memory”, the story of Didgori and reconquering Tbilisi became intertwined with territorial nationalism. In the unilinear Soviet Georgian narrative, these victories appear as “progressive” and unifying occurrences. In the post-Soviet period, ethnoreligious nationalism and re-sacralization of David’s image and the challenges to the country’s territorial integrity motivated Georgians to zoom in and magnify selected images of the glorious past. These historical events represent a fateful and luminous episode in the nation’s history that fed hope for an analogous victory and restoration of the country’s territorial integrity.

ABSTRACTExisting literature has long recognised that the Beijing government has utilised different strategies to suppress the opposition in Hong Kong. However, with the rise of localism against the Chinese government, the implications of such political repression require new exploration and insight. This article adopts Hale’s analytical framework on political repression and argues that the Beijing government can comparatively tolerate an opposition fighting for democratisation, but the localists who advocate self-determination or separatism are harshly condemned and suppressed. In Beijing’s approach, this ‘red line’ was adopted to place national security, territory integration and sovereignty as the top considerations. Theoretically, this paper contributes to distinguishing between two types of opposition groups within sub-national hybrid regimes and analyzes different responses from the sovereign state. Empirically, the case of Hong Kong will help enrich the existing literature by comparing Beijing’s strategies of repression in regard to the democratic opposition and localists.

Основні тенденції історико-культурного відродження в Україні, 2005–2010 рр.

Territorial integrity and state weakness

Hua-ling Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach delineates the diasporic journey of a Chinese female. Because of the political upheaval and chaotic domestic war in the modern China, the protagonist is forced to displace from China to Taiwan and America. However, as each of her geographical relocation in a new country only repeats the social and political persecution she encounters in the previous one, she starts to experience psychological inconsistency in order to cope with the unavoidable mental and physical abuse. Through the writer’s employment of a double female narration in her tactical juxtaposition of Mulberry’s journals with her alter ego Peach’s letters, the readers are led to not only inspect the protagonist’s two divergent reactions to the atrocity of nationalism and patriarchy but also witness a violent negotiation between the two personalities. It is in response to the controversy of whether the novel’s open ending and moral ambiguity do justice to upholding female autonomy and accusing the female subjugation that woman repeatedly faces in the social-political fields that this thesis attempts to observe the uncanny relationship between woman and nation in Hua-ling Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach. From the perspective of the uncanny, the protagonist’s geographical relocation and mental transition become both a protest and subversion against the oppressive status quo. On one hand, Mulberry’s story reveals that woman’s plight under patriarchay is a phenomenon that transcends national boundaries. Her traumatic experience of schizophrenia can be read as an indictment to the nation-state with its patriarchal ideology that prospers at the expense of its female national. On the other hand, Peach’s unconformist behavior and transgressive thinking as an outlaw disrupt the paternal demand of genderalization and frustrate the national pedagogy of subjectivization through ideological (system of gendered education) and actual (system of law enforcement) coercion. Her so-called insanity ironically mocks a male-dominated nation whose endeavor to contain and control its female nationals by means of domination and restriction only drives them mad.

Instruments play a significant role in establishing peoples’ music at cultural memory and shapes of these instruments hold an important place in cultural memory. For instance, Eastern Black Sea Region is associated with kemence and Aegean region with sipsi . The immediate vision that comes to memory is that of a tar when Azerbaijan is mentioned, or it is bagpipes for Scotland. When we discuss armudi kemence (pear shaped kemence), one of our instruments, which make good examples for our subject, we see that the same form and structure is found in the musical memories of neighbouring geographical regions, under various different names. Instruments, which are referred to as lyra in Greece and Aegean Islands, as lyrica in Croatia, as gadulka in Bulgaria, in Turkey, as kemence in art music circles, and as tirnak kemane in Kastamonu and its environs, and which have established themselves under these names at memories in their respective territories, have similar traits in terms of performance and morphological features, and are evidential examples of collective music memory. But individuals living in these societies use the name of instrument, what they call in their region while talking about the music instrument. In this paper, forms of instruments, which have established themselves at collective memory, is analyzed through the example of kemence, the variations of the instrument found in the Balkans and in Anatolia, and their place in collective memories will be discussed in comparison. Keywords : Musical Instruments, Kemence, Collective Memory.

When facing the political, historical and cultural complexities of Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, problematic issues arise in relation to understanding the sorts of national/cultural identities that might be projected by them. With regard to these three Chinese language cinemas, a traditional national cinema approach focussing predominantly upon nation-state as a source of meaning would provide only a limited understanding of the meanings generated. This article, however, draws on what Benedict Anderson (1991) put forward as the theory of ‘Imagined Communities’ which assumes a large body of people regard themselves as members of a ‘nation’ (and here we interpret this term broadly and beyond understandings of geographical borders and political systems) through a variety of historical legacies, cultural memories and acts of consumption. In this article we hold the assumption that there is a shared cultural meaning (namely ‘Chineseness’) that extends across the three Chinese language cinemas and consider cultural affinity as greater than national and political boundaries.

The foreign population has become a structural trait of Italian society, and its territorial integration a key factor in social sustainability. Mixed couples, an emerging phenomenon in the Italian context, are leading to a change in social space and residential geography of the local environment. Encouraging an improvement in the level of territorial integration of the foreign population, by the host, plays an important role in understanding demographic changes. This chapter proposes a theoretical reflection on the importance of territorial integration of foreigners and an assessment of the dimensional effects it presents to the host societies’ social cohesion, and an empirical application to examine the relationships between foreigner residential integration and mixed couples. Results indicate that the increase in mixed couples leads to a weakening of residential segregation and therefore to greater territorial integration of the foreign population in the host society. Taking level of segregation of other ethnic groups under control, the effect of mixed couples on the level of residential segregation remains negative, while at the same time, the level of residential segregation of a given foreign community is positively correlated with other foreign community’s level of residential segregation. The territorial integration of foreigners is, thus, strongly linked to the local, social environment in context of multi-segregation. From this perspective, the growth of mixed-race couples, at least within a territorial dimension, can represent an agent of change in the social space modifying the majority and minority groups’ residential geography.

[Extract] As with many Western nations with high numbers of immigrant intake, the Australian public debates have placed doubt on: • The levels and success of integration of newly arrived migrants and refugees • The success or failure of multicultural policies • The threat that migrants from different cultures and religions pose to national identity, national values and social cohesion The cornerstone of the democratic nation state is the establishment of rights: political, social and civil. Membership in a nation state denotes both civic belonging in the political community and cultural belonging in the national community. In the political community all citizens are seen as equal. However, evidence points to the continued disadvantage, social exclusion and marginalisation which characterise Australian society. Current and past policies, programs and ideas on social exclusion have focused on exclusion from the labour market, economic exclusion (including poverty), exclusion based on social isolation, geographic or spatial exclusion, and exclusion based on institutional processes and systems. In the considerations of social exclusion/inclusion, very little attention has been paid to exclusion based on culture, ethnicity, racism and other diversity signifiers as causal factors of disadvantage. Recent social inclusion debates in Australia have not resulted in any meaningful consideration of cultural diversity as a force for inclusion or exclusion. Furthermore, the nation state has been actively engaged in the construction of Australian in particular ways that have denied the consideration of ethnic identity as a positive feature of nation building. Through the use of fear, law and order, and a neo-liberal approach, the Australian state has constructed an environment which has depleted a sense of belonging for minorities. In so doing, it has depleted social capital in communities and social cohesion across the nation. This chapter explores the concepts of and belonging for minority communities in the context of globalisation and the nation state in Australia.

Purpose: This paper empirically examines determinants of Saudi Arabia’s development finance allocation and seeks implications.
 Design/methodology/approach: Based on the OLS and Tobit estimation, this paper analyzes a dataset covering Saudi Arabia’s 111 bilateral aid recipient countries during the time period 2015 to 2020.
 Findings: This paper finds that Saudi’s aid allocation considers both donors’ interest (DI) and recipients’ needs (RN) given that less populous and relatively lower income developing countries, with strong commercial ties with the Kingdom tend to receive more aid from Saudi Arabia. This result is robust across all the analyses, supported by statistical significance.
 Research limitations/implications: Geopolitical factors also matter considering that Arab countries are, on average, receive more aid from the Kingdom while other countries do not, and this confirms Arab solidarity. The Kingdom places a high importance on their non-interference policy in nation states’ sovereignty and their territorial integrity. The Kingdom has a short history as an aid donor. As such, bilateral data is available only since 2015, which is a major caveat in this study.
 Originality/value: Existing literature mostly deals with OECD DAC countries in examining aid determinants. This is one of the first studies in this field of literature empirically examining Saudi Aid. This study is expected to shed light to other emerging donors and promote effective South-South cooperation.

Emergence of nation states in the nineteenth century naturalized borders and boundaries as both inclusionary and exclusionary measures. Territorial integrity was viewed as the most tangible expression of the sovereignty of a nation-state, thus confirming a state’s monopolistic jurisdiction over a particular territorial unit. Since then a clearly defined and enforceable boundary has remained at the heart of the existence of the nation-state, the goal of which is to accentuate territorialist consciousness. In the past decades walls and fences have continued to be erected between nation states. Against this background, this paper examines broader questions such as: why do nation states feel the necessity to erect these walls and fences? How these walls and new modes of surveillance impact the lives of the people who live on the border regions? The paper examines these questions, specifically looking at the ongoing fencing of the India-Bangladesh border. The border fencing project of India had its origin in the violent protest and anti-Bengali pogrom in Assam in the 1980s, but the physical construction began in 1989. The project was initially opposed by Bangladesh, but in recent years Bangladesh government has embraced the idea. In this paper, the fencing is discussed within the broader question of border and how fencing has become the material and symbolic manifestations of state power. The examination of Indian official narrative of the Indian government shows that the issue has been securitized and blended with growing xenophobic discourse in Indian politics. The paper also explores the lived experience of those who lives in the border areas. For them borders become doubly exclusionary.

Several theoretical positions such as the “Global South” have challenged the developmentalist logic that continues to maintain cultural categorizations as they relate to art in the aftermath of WWII. In the current neoliberal era, the post-1945 developmentalist paradigm has gone even further by instrumentalizing culture itself produced under “conditions of oppression,” primarily to foster public diplomacy and economic benefits. Nation-states face globalization using these categories in order to create an authentic and competitive identity. This article engages in a cross-cultural analysis of arte popular brasileira—in which Brazil belongs to the Global South—and Māori art—in what I call the “southern isles” of Aotearoa New Zealand—both of which function in conditions of coloniality. I identify the implications of the strategies implemented in governmental policies and official institutional spaces for these artistic and cultural expressions.