Contemporary Dutch Research Articles

Credibility of Churches’ Antiracism Engagement

Abstract This article aims to explore how the entanglement of Protestant Christianity and race and racism is manifested in contemporary Dutch society, and to identify which themes for introspection this yields for majority white Dutch Protestant churches. We argue that introspection on perceived superiority of white Dutch Protestantism is crucial to uncover subtle, unconscious mechanisms and ideas that are present in majority white Dutch Protestant churches and that contribute to maintaining racism. Furthermore, we argue that contemporary topical issues such as racism and colonial history run the risk of being pushed to the margins again as long as there is no systematic review of power and privilege of white Dutch Protestantism.

When Psalms Talk Back: How the Appropriation History of Psalms Challenges Contemporary Ritual-Musical Appropriations

This article discusses how, in contemporary Dutch and Flemish culture, the ritual-musical appropriations of Psalms in extra-ecclesial settings are challenged by the longer history of appropriating Psalms. Analyses of qualitative empirical research show that this history appears to challenge contemporary Psalm performances to address God, to perform Psalms collectively, and to contemplate life through these Psalms. Contemporary Psalm performances, thus, both continue the history of appropriating Psalms and are critiqued by this history. Evaluating the research results, we conclude that current appropriations tend to wipe away the Psalms’ ambiguity concerning images of God, the relationship between individual and community, and between hope and despair.

Grotius and Insolvency

Abstract This article considers Hugo Grotius’s ideas on a specific topic of commercial law, analysing his position and potential contributions to early modern Dutch insolvency legislation. It might be questioned how ‘Hollandic’ Grotius’s interpretations of legal solutions for insolvency as presented in the Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechts-Geleerdheid actually were. Grotius’s treatment of cessie van goede is relatively strict, whereas compositions are hardly mentioned. A rather different image rises from his later work. Here, Grotius displays a more radical view, in specific cases allowing the sovereign to interfere in private property rights and to restructure debts for the common good. It is an intriguing question if and to what extent these ideas can be related to contemporary Dutch insolvency practices.

‘Count your Blessings!’ The Interpretive Potential of Sacramental Theology for Everyday Ritualizations around Food

In this article, the authors explore the yield of a sacramental lens on extra-ecclesial ritualizations around food in contemporary Dutch ‘secularized’ culture. In an effort to explore the scope of sacramental theology beyond the liturgical ritual of the Eucharist/Holy Communion, they conclude that sacramental theology as a heuristic lens has a promising potential to reveal what is at stake when it comes to ordinary practices of food. Taking Louis-Marie Chauvet’s ground-breaking study Symbol and Sacrament as a point of departure for a sacramental frame, and using three examples from a recent Dutch TV series on counting blessings at dinner time, they seek to answer the question “What is the heuristic potential of a sacramental perspective on food-related ritualizations in everyday life?” The authors conclude that everyday ritualizations, in turn, constructively challenge ‘classic’ sacramental and liturgical theology. Thus, a sacramental lens on extra-ecclesial food-related ritualizations can enhance the understanding of the Eucharist/Holy Communion, as well as reveal what is at stake when it comes to ordinary (ritualized) practices of food.

E Pluribus Unum? Constructing a Typology of Contemporary Dutch Evangelicals

AbstractAgainst the background of the assumed polymorphous character of evangelicalism as a trans‐denominational movement, this article aims to construct a typology of Dutch evangelicals and, subsequently, to test whether this religious typology also manifests sociodemographic differences. Two research questions are addressed: Which types can be distinguished among contemporary Dutch evangelicals on the basis of their core religious convictions and religious orientations? and To what extent do these types also display sociodemographic differences? Analyzing survey data on more than 1100 Dutch evangelicals using latent class analysis reveals five types of evangelicals: Proclaiming Orthodox, Engaged Orthodox, Spiritual Orthodox, Seeking Orthodox, and Questing Liberals. These five types basically seem to represent an orthodox‐liberal continuum and mainly differ in terms of gender, age, income, education, and marital status.

Characteristics, Treatment Strategies and Outcome in Cardiogenic Shock Complicating Acute Myocardial Infarction: A Contemporary Dutch Cohort.

Cardiogenic shock (CS) complicating acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is associated with high morbidity and mortality. Our study aimed to gain insights into patient characteristics, outcomes and treatment strategies in CS patients. Patients with CS who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) between 2017 and 2021 were identified in a nationwide registry. Data on medical history, laboratory values, angiographic features and outcomes were retrospectively assessed. A total of 2328 patients with a mean age of 66 years and of whom 73% were male, were included. Mortality at 30 days was 39% for the entire cohort. Non-survivors presented with a lower mean blood pressure and increased heart rate, blood lactate and blood glucose levels (p-value for all <0.001). Also, an increased prevalence of diabetes, multivessel coronary artery disease and a prior coronary event were found. Of all patients, 24% received mechanical circulatory support, of which the majority was via intra-aortic balloon pumps (IABPs). Furthermore, 79% of patients were treated with at least one vasoactive agent, and multivessel PCI was performed in 28%. In conclusion, a large set of hemodynamic, biochemical and patient-related characteristics was identified to be associated with mortality. Interestingly, multivessel PCI and IABPs were frequently applied despite a lack of evidence.

“The problem with all those teachers is that they are completely numb”: Representations of Teachers and Education in Recent Dutch Novels

ABSTRACTResearch shows that teachers and education are often represented negatively or stereotypically in popular and literary culture, both in the Dutch language area and in Anglophone contexts. Regarding contemporary Dutch literature, though, research on educational representations has until now focussed on small corpora of novels that explicitly deal with education. In this article, we explore the representations of teachers and education in a much larger and broader corpus: the 170 submissions to the bulk list of the prestigious Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs of 2013. We provide a Keyword in Context Analysis of 292 educational representations in this corpus and offer a demographic analysis of the 71 teachers who inhabit the novels under analysis. In doing so, we show that educational representations and teacher characters are relatively common in contemporary Dutch language novels. Our analysis also reveals that literary representations of teachers are predominantly negative in nature, especially regarding their behaviour towards students, their external presentation, and their pedagogical skills. Representations of education in general tend to be even more negative. In that sense, literary representations of education appear to converge with the negative public appeal of the educational sector in the contemporary Low Countries.

‘I Said: Hymn 38!’ The Reception of the Protestant Reformation in The Netherlands at the Turn of the Millennium—The Case of ‘The White Cowboy’

From 1998 to 2005, the once left-wing Protestant Dutch broadcasting company VPRO aired 26 episodes of The White Cowboy, including the episode ‘De Kerkgangers’ (‘The Churchgoers’). In this article, the author argues that this episode is an excellent example of the contemporary reception of the 16th century Protestant reformation within the Netherlands at the turn of the millennium. Within the secular context of contemporary Dutch society, the stereotypical world-avoidance and lack of any joie de vivre associated with the strict observants of the Dutch reformation are used to mock Protestantism specifically and Christianity (or even religion altogether) in general. Nevertheless, a more positive interpretation also remains possible if one is able to understand secularism itself as a product of the Christian tradition to begin with.

Citizenship Violence and the Afterlives of Dutch Colonialism

Through a close reading of Anton de Kom’s Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), this essay explores the complex legal, symbolic, social, and political lives of differentially positioned humans in the Dutch colonial and postindependent context. Firstly, De Kom’s 1934 book reveals the fundamental dualism between legal subjects and rightless bodies in the Dutch colonial context and how European law and the rights of citizens enabled the maximum exploitation of colonized and enslaved bodies. Contrary to universalist-inclusive and progressive notions of legal citizenship and the law, the concept of what the author terms “citizenship violence” seems appropriate to appreciate the dynamics revealed in Wij slaven. However, as De Kom demonstrates, the colonized were not passive subjects; they resisted citizenship violence in multiple ways. Secondly, in discussing the racialization of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Dutch society as part of broader European patterns, the essay highlights some ominous colonial afterlives.

THE "OLD ENGLISH GARDEN" AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW STYLE IN THEORETICAL TREATISES OF THE LATE 19TH - EARLY 20TH CENTURIES

At the end of the 19th century, landscape architects in England began a discussion about the revival of the "old English garden". Each of them offered their own image of the olden times and their own way of the new realisation. Three options stand out among them. Reginald Blomfield advocated the "formal garden" and created forms in which the plant world was enclosed among laconic rectangular walls, pools and parterres. His opponent William Robinson put forward the idea of a "wild garden" in which regular parterres were replaced by sods of wild herbs. Harold Pito substantiated the type of a small regular garden in the frame of Italian architectural forms. The creative collaboration of architect Edwin Lutyens and florist Gertrude Jekyll provided examples of "rural" architecture using natural stone; there were rich combinations of shapes, textures and colours of flowering plants. All these searches took place at a turning point. Using the nostalgic pathos of the Arts and Crafts movement as a starting point, the architects set the stage for 20th-century landscape solutions, including the “herb garden” by contemporary Dutch designer Piet Oudolf.

The role of low educational attainment on the pathway from adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems to early adult labour market disconnection in the Dutch TRAILS cohort

Mental health challenges in adolescence may affect labour market transitions in young adulthood. Policies addressing early labour market disconnection largely focus on early school-leaving and educational attainment; however, the role of low educational attainment on the path from adolescent mental health to labour market disconnection is unclear. Using the TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey from the Netherlands (n = 1,197), we examined the extent to which achieving a basic educational qualification (by age 22) in the contemporary Dutch education system, mediates the effect of adolescent mental health (age 11–19) on early adult labour market disconnection, defined as ‘not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET, age 26). We estimated the total effect, the natural direct and indirect effects, and the controlled direct effects of internalizing and externalizing symptoms on NEET by gender. Among young men, clinical levels of adolescent externalizing symptoms were associated with a 0.093 higher probability of NEET compared with no symptoms (95% confidence interval, CI: 0.001, 0.440). The indirect effect through educational attainment accounted for 15.1% of the total effect. No evidence of mediation was observed for the relationship between externalizing symptoms and NEET in young women. No evidence of mediation was observed for the relationship between adolescent internalizing symptoms and NEET in either gender. The findings imply that adolescent externalizing symptoms disrupts the achievement of a basic educational qualification, leading to a higher probability of NEET in young men. This mechanism may play a smaller role in the risk of NEET associated with internalizing symptoms and in young women.

Microcephaly as observed in the late 19th century cemetery of the Meerenberg psychiatric hospital: Diagnostic issues and the value of population‐specific data

AbstractMicrocephaly, characterized by crania with an abnormally small occipitofrontal circumference (OFC), is only sporadically described in paleopathological literature. Accurate identification of individuals suffering from microcephaly is challenging when performed in an archeological context, especially in mild cases, as appropriate reference data are often not available. This study aimed to describe the craniometric characteristics of the Meerenberg (MeB) skeletal collection and to identify microcephalic individuals while focusing on the diagnostic criteria and the influence of reference data on the prevalence of the condition. The value of virtual endocasts as a diagnostic tool was also assessed. Forty‐eight adults (1891–1936) excavated from the cemetery of the MeB psychiatric hospital (Bloemendaal, The Netherlands) were investigated. Microcephalic individuals were identified by using the craniometric characteristics of a contemporary Dutch archeological population as reference. In order to investigate the usefulness of modern clinical head circumference reference data on the diagnostic process, cranial OFCs of the MeB individuals were converted to head OFCs. Virtual endocasts were created from the identified microcephalics and three normocephalics. Three MeB females (all &lt;−3 SD) were identified as microcephalic when compared with a sex‐matched contemporary archeological reference sample. The same three MeB females were classified as microcephalic when using sex‐matched modern clinical reference data and when applying −3 SD of the pooled sex archeological craniometric reference data as cut‐off point. No individuals were classified as microcephalic based on the metric characteristics of the virtual endocasts. Microcephaly can only be accurately identified when using sex‐matched contemporary population reference data, or in its absence, modern clinical data after soft tissue correction. Should sex estimation be unreliable, a –3 SD cut‐off point generated using pooled sex reference data seems suitable as diagnostic tool. Virtual endocast did not support the identification of microcephaly in this study.

Dieren lezen in hedendaags proza voor jong en oud. Antropomorfisme versus anthropodenial

In the field of animal studies, there has been an ongoing tradition of critique of anthropomorphism in (literary) representations of animals. To some extent, this critique is understandable: in order to emancipate the animal, this form of human appropriation should be questioned. However, the dangers of anthropomorphism have been qualified by scholars who point out that not anthropomorphism, but rather anthrophodenial – the a priori rejection of any similarities between humans and animals – might hinder an inclusive ecology in which humans and animals are interconnected. In this article, we illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial through an interpretation of five contemporary Dutch literary texts – two children’s books and three novels – in which animals play an important role. Specifically, we analyze stories revolving around a relationship between a human character and a dog as a companion species. Focusing on the ontological, political and narrative dimensions of these stories, we analyze, respectively: to what extent they suggest a binary opposition between human and non-human beings; how they reflect relations of power; and which narrative techniques are employed to represent animals.

How vector space models disambiguate adjectives: A perilous but valid enterprise

AbstractThe present study is part of a larger research project developing computational tools for large-scale corpus-based semantic analyses. One such tool represents semantic structure with vector space models (VSMs). The paper shows that this tool and the models built require a deeper understanding, especially with a view to how its results relate to cognitive theories of meaning. Although token-based VSMs are increasingly used in corpus-based cognitive semantics, we believe it is insufficiently appreciated how alternative parameter settings deal with a range of semantic issues, such as granularity of meaning, prototypicality of the domain of application and interaction with syntactic patterns. For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on only one of those issues, viz. the prototypicality of the domain of application, presenting the results of three of our case studies on the Dutch adjectivesheilzaam,hoekig,hachelijkandgeldig. The models presented are built from a 520MW corpus of contemporary Dutch and Flemish newspapers and by varying parameters such as window size, part-of-speech and frequency thresholds in the selection of features. The resulting VSMs are evaluated through visual analytics: although multidimensional, they can be reduced to 2D and represented in scatterplots where more similar tokens appear closer to each other. The color-coding with manual sense tags employed here makes it possible to compare the groupings provided by human annotators with those of the computational models in a way consistent with the cognitive approach to meaning and categorization.

De esthetica van het boertige en het kluchtige

This article argues for a new approach to early modern Dutch humour. Where existing research on this topic usually focuses on either the social practice of laughter or specific comical genres like farce, this new approach puts the aesthetics of humour upfront. Looking at humour aesthetically means that one departs from the formal existence of comical texts, and asks how aspects like rhetoric, structure and style make a text humorous within a given context. When applying this approach to the early modern Dutch situation, the first conclusion is that what we today call humour is best captured by the terms “boertig” and “kluchtig”, which back then had a much broader and more neutral meaning than in contemporary Dutch. The second conclusion is that this humorous form – “het boertige en het kluchtige” – in and of itself generates certain (ideological) meanings, which is demonstrated by an analysis of the satirical text De menuet en de dominees pruik (1772) by Elisabeth Wolff.

Making Sense of the Psalms

AbstractThis article discusses the appropriation of psalms in contemporary Dutch and Flemish culture through their performances in ‘extra-ecclesial’ settings and the ways in which aesthetics and embodied experiences play a role in this appropriation. Drawing on postsecular theory, we describe how both religious and secular dimensions are manifest in the performance of psalms on the level of aesthetics. Our contribution is a detailed analysis of empirical research data regarding different sensory perceptions (bodily, auditory, visual, synaesthetic), which we have studied both in isolation and interrelation. We show that religious and secular dimensions become intertwined in the temporally and spatially organized stimulation of different senses. A balancing act takes place between synaesthetic immersion in a collective ritual, and a more distanced, unisensory involvement to maintain individual authenticity. In this balance, an immersive ritual experience can become fertile soil for interaction with the transcendent. We argue that a postsecular stance should entail the interrogation and contextualization of immanent/transcendent dichotomies.

National Socialism, Colonialism and Antifascist Memory Politics in Postwar Dutch–South African Exchanges

ABSTRACT This contribution addresses the dynamics of Dutch memory politics in the Dutch–South African exchanges between 1948 and 1975. The 1948 election victory of the Nationalist Party and their Apartheid policies brought about painful memories of Nazi attrocities, antisemitic persecurtion and anti-fascist struggle in the Netherlands. Soon, however, the Dutch government acquired an interest in highlighting a different history in relation to South Africa when referring to the notion of stamverwantschap. This implied an ethnic–racial identification of the Dutch with White, Nationalist South Africans on the basis of an alleged shared history of Dutchness. These memory politics changed after ‘Sharpeville’ in the 1960s. Once more memories of racist exclusion during National Socialism were revived in relation to the Apartheid regime. These memories facilitated and were strengthened by a growing anti-Apartheid movement. Yet, in their effort to be ‘on the right side of history’, the grassroots memory politics of the anti-Apartheid movement ignored the Dutch colonial implementation of racial inequality and its effects, not only on the Apartheid policies but also in contemporary Dutch society. This article aims to explore spaces for a synergy between narratives of historical catastrophe such as colonialism and Nazism, both with deep historical and intellectual roots in many parts of the world.

Functieverba in Nederlandse verbonominale constructies

In comparison to the German Funktionsverbgefüge, the Dutch light verbs constructions are usually described from the lexicological point of view and not from the grammatical point of view. This article focuses on a brief characterization of the most frequent Dutch light verbs. These verbs have primarily a grammatical function and their lexical meaning is very. The research questions I try to answer are: How can the Dutch light verbs be characterized? What are the most frequently used light verbs in contemporary Dutch? In characterizing the Dutch verbs, I am partly inspired by the description of the German light verbs by Helbig &amp; Buscha (2001: 79-105). The use of the most frequent light verbs in the Dutch light verbs constructions was verified, among others, with the help of the written corpus of contemporary Dutch (Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands).

Persoonshaven Urban Housing, Rotterdam

The social housing project at Persoonshaven in the Feijenoord district of Rotterdam in the Netherlands provides an adaptation of a common late 19th-century speculative house type. The changes in its appearance, spatial organization, details and structure result from standardized contemporary Dutch construction techniques and current regulations and spatial standards. The house types and building methods will be described in the context of Martin Steinmann’s characterization of traditionalist design as practiced by the Danish architect Kay Fisker.

P138 - Overall survival of patients receiving cisplatin or carboplatin for primary metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder: A contemporary Dutch nationwide cohort study

P138 - Overall survival of patients receiving cisplatin or carboplatin for primary metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder: A contemporary Dutch nationwide cohort study