Destruction Of Culture Research Articles

Archaeology against cultural destruction: the case of the Ilisu dam in the Kurdish region of Turkey

The llisu dam in the Kurdish region of Turkey, if built, would displace up to 78,000 women, children and men, causing immense destruction of culture, past and present. The article outlines some major issues arising as a result of work by an archaeologist to examine the dam's cultural impacts, work that has supported villagers opposing the dam and aiming to contribute to campaigns in Europe. Some of the work was part of the successful campaigning from 2000–2002 that resulted in the collapse of the consortium of companies then planning to build the dam. As a new consortium revives the project, an assessment is needed: where archaeologists are working with grassroots communities who are fighting for survival, mutual accountability is required. But how difficult is this to achieve? In particular, women's case against the dam is shown to be vital in an approach that requires both objectivity and commitment from archaeologists.

Archaeology against cultural destruction: the case of the Ilisu dam in the Kurdish region of Turkey

Archaeology against cultural destruction: the case of the Ilisu dam in the Kurdish region of Turkey

Hitler's Aesthetics: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Art and Fascism

Mankind has a natural drive to discover beauty. How rich the world will be for him who uses his senses. Furthermore, nature has instilled in everyone the desire to share with others everything beautiful that one encounters. The beautiful should reign over humans; the beautiful itself wants to retain its power. —Adolf Hitler, 1941 (quoted in Spotts, 2003, p. 119) Beauty, the formal aspect of idealization, can embody the finest and most transcendent values in human aesthetic experience (Hagman, 2002), but beauty can also be perverse and in some instances it can serve the needs of evil. This paper will examine the dark side of beauty. We will see how beauty can become grotesque and ultimately be destroyed when it is forced to fulfill the needs of the most terrible of self-disorders. In his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics Frederic Spotts (2003) argued that our image of Hitler as a monster is incomplete. He asserted that historians have failed to appreciate the place of Hitler’s aesthetics in our understanding of his motives and aims. Spotts pointed out that the young Hitler pursued a career as an artist for a number of years, until professional failure and the opportunity for political success offered him the narcissistic gratification through demagoguery that he so longed for from the arts. Once in power, it was Hitler’s obsession with aesthetic matters that dominated his passion for culture and disguised his hatred and aggression. Monomaniacal, he pursued the destruction of Western culture in his quest to remake and mold the aesthetic landscape according to his own idealized and grandiose self-image. In the face of his own self-disintegration, this passion for a depersonalized and inhuman beauty became

A Future for Our Past: International Symposium for Redefining the Concept of Cultural Heritage: Organized by the Istanbul Initiative at the Istanbul Bilgi University, Dolapdere Campus, June 24–26 2004

The Istanbul Initiative was established in 2003 in response to concerns raised by the continuing episodes of cultural destruction that have accompanied armed conflicts in Cambodia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq. The Initiative is comprised of Turkish academics, lawyers, and media professionals who aim to raise international awareness of the destruction of cultural heritage during wartime. Their first action was to organize the symposium A Future for Our Past in Istanbul from June 24 to 26 2004. The immediate impetus for the symposium was provided by the large-scale looting of museums, libraries, and archaeological sites that followed the Coalition invasion of Iraq in April 2003.

Language death and revival after cultural destruction: reflections on a little discussed aspect of genocide1

Minerals, plants, animals and humans all have an equal right to exist because they all equally enjoy the fact of existing. Christian Prevges2 The destruction of cultures and languages over the past...

Cultural Issues in Terrorism and in Response to Terrorism

Summary Among the multiple causes of terrorism is a clash of cultures. Trauma and the destruction of culture may create fertile ground for violent cultures and future terrorists. Cultural differences are important elements in the prevention, assessment, and treatment of post-terrorism psychological sequelae. Cultural and spiritual practices have been used or adapted to reduce anxiety, enhance recovery, and provide supplemental interventions. Learning within a community and engaging community and religious leaders, community members, and the individual patient in order to be guided by the specific needs of a group or an individual is essential to effective interventions following terrorism.

State Terrorism and Globalization

This article compares the essence and effects of Ethiopian and Sudanese state terrorism by focusing on the commonalities between the two states. These peripheral African states have used global and regional connections and state terrorism as political tools for creating and maintaining the confluence of identity, religion, and political power. Ethiopia primarily depends on the West, and Sudan on the Middle East, since Christianity and Islam are the dominant religions in these African states respectively. While the Ethiopian state was formed by the alliance of Abyssinian (Amhara-Tigray) colonialism and European imperialism, the Sudanese state was created by British colonialism known as the Anglo-Egyptian condominium. Massive social and cultural destruction and violence have produced and maintained these colonial political structures. These structures, in turn, have racialized identities by facilitating the processes of Abyssinianization and Christianization in Ethiopia, Arabization and Islamization in Sudan, and Africanization and marginalization of indigenous Africans in both states. Furthermore, each state has been involved in ethnonational cleansing, which has been disguised rhetorically as a move toward national self-determination and democracy. Consequently, the racialization and ethnicization of these states, external dependency, and domestic terrorism have prevented the implementation of national self-determination and the construction of legitimate multinational democracies that could solve the political, social, cultural, and economic crises in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman (review)

Reviewed by: Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman Ellen L. Arnold Brewster E. Fitz. Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2004. xii + 288 pp. Brewster Fitz's collection of eight interconnected essays on textual or secondary orality in Leslie Marmon Silko's narrative prose offers exciting new perspectives on Silko's work. Fitz states that he discovered Storyteller in 1992, and given his interests in literary theory, he was particularly attracted by the "aesthetic, ethical, linguistic, and formal problems posed by the interaction between literacy and orality" in Silko's work (ix). Framing his study within poststructuralist, postmodern approaches to American Indian literature, Fitz presents fresh readings of old favorites like Ceremony and "Lullaby," as well as groundbreaking interpretations of such underappreciated, undertheorized texts as "From Humaweepi, the Warrior Priest," "Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand," and Silko's newest novel, Gardens in the Dunes. Drawing on passages from Storyteller and Silko's essay "Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds, Picture Books of Preconquest Mexico," Fitz makes the case in his Introduction, "The Writing Storyteller," that Silko interiorized writing at an early age from the Marmon family tradition of the writing storyteller epitomized by Silko's Carlisle-educated great-aunt, Aunt Susie. Fitz argues that the tension in Silko's work between this interiorized literacy and her desire to write from within a primarily oral culture that is threatened by literacy reflects Silko's yearning for a culturally syncretic textual orality, a "writerly dream of grounding the oral tradition and her texts in an ontologically privileged kind of universal language in which writing and orality are organically one, life-affirming, all-embracing, and motherly" (7). In chapter 1, "Bears: Writing and Madness," Fitz examines bear stories in "From Humaweepi, the Warrior Priest," the short story [End Page 194] "Storyteller" and other selections from Storyteller, and Ceremony, to explore interrelationships of writing, orality, and madness, and to describe a narrative point of view he finds characteristic of Silko's writing. Comparable to magic realism or Victor Turner's notion of "total perspective," this point of view erases boundaries between the imaginary and real, natural and supernatural, creating a realm "where language has ontological efficacy, . . . creating the things to which the words refer" (35). In this syncretic and liminal space, Silko ceremonially "rebirths" herself, becoming, Fitz suggests, a "writing medicine woman" who heals cultural wounds through written orality (50). Chapter 2, "Back to the Text: 'Lullaby,'" examines writing as both an instrument of destruction of Navajo culture (figured in the unraveling Army blanket that belonged to Ayah's dead son), and the healing remedy administered by the writing storyteller to restore the oral world it has wounded (represented by the beautiful woven traditional blankets that now exist for Ayah only in memory). Thus, says Fitz, Silko "stand[s] in for the Navajo medicine man" and the story itself becomes "the maternal blanket in which the vitality of Navajo ceremony is warmly wrapped" (81, 90). Chapter 3, "'The Battle of Pie Town,' or Littlecock's Last Stand," compares Silko's "A Geronimo Story" to Austin N. Leiby's historical account of the service of Laguna scouts in the 1885 Apache campaign (based in part on records kept by Silko's great-grandfather Robert G. Marmon and his brother Walter). Using the tradutorre (translator)/traditore (traitor) aphorism, Fitz examines the rhetorical and linguistic battle at the heart of the story. Here Fitz finds most clearly articulated the cultural wound—the loss of the Keresan language—that he assumes to be the origin of Silko's yearning for a "perfect tongue" (237). Chapter 4, "Dialogic Witchery in 'Tony's Story,'" compares journalistic accounts of the historical murder behind "Tony's Story" to Silko's fictional version, arguing that Silko rewrites the "journalistic and legal story that is a classic example of the narrative of assimilation" as "a narrative of ethnic resurgence" (119). By changing the date of the events from Good Friday to San Lorenzo Day, the day in 1680 on which the Pueblo Revolt began, Fitz observes, Silko continues the Revolt textually, "seek[ing] justice in written orality" (128). The final three chapters of the book...

THE PROTECTION OF CULTURAL PROPERTY AND POST-CONFLICT KOSOVO

In the context of the unprecedented level of cultural destruction taking place in Kosovo since the international community took over in 1999, the author of this article seeks to provide an answer to two questions. First, whether the Serbian-built religious heritage in Kosovo deserves any international protection. Second, whether the two international authorities in place in Kosovo, UNMIK and KFOR, a NATO-led military force, are under any legal obligation to protect this religious heritage. Relying on the relevant international law provisions, the author determines that items of Serbian-built religious heritage in Kosovo qualify as cultural property of international value, thereby deserving international protection. Examining further the legal mandate received by the international administration in Kosovo, the author argues that both UNMIK and KFOR exercise public authority in this province, thus placing the Serbian religious heritage in question under their jurisdiction. As a result, the author concludes that the legal obligation to ensure the protection of cultural heritage in Kosovo, although normally assigned by international law to the territorial state, here devolves upon these two international entities.

History at the Limit of World-History (review)

Reviewed by: History at the Limit of World-History Bernardo A. Michael History at the Limit of World-History. By Ranajit Guha. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 116 + ix pp. $24.50 (cloth). This slender book grew out of a series of lectures delivered by Ranajit Guha, one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. In this latest book he strives to show philosophy's complicity with colonialism and its forms of knowledge. For this reason he takes the German philosopher Georg Hegel and his conception of "World-History" (Weltgeschichte) to task for its elitist biases, prejudices, and complicity in European arrogance, imperialism, and colonial knowledge. For Hegel, World-History signified the teleological movement of Reason in History through a series of successive advances that culminated in God. This providential design was undoubtedly highly Eurocentric. Hegel also attributed an important role for the state in this progressive movement. Such a conception of World-History, according to Guha, became the justification for European expansion, the colonization of continents and the wholesale destruction of entire cultures. World-History became the amoral record of states and empires, great men, and clashing civilizations. This in turn rendered irrelevant and pushed to the margins the everyday experiences of ordinary people (or "historicality," as Guha terms it). Everything that lay outside the narrative of World-History was dismissed as "Prehistory." To remedy this situation, Guha endeavors to take the reader to the limit of World-History (as defined by Hegel) and give the reader a glimpse of what history practiced outside World-History would look like. This for Guha is "a creative engagement with [End Page 530] the past as a story of man's being in the everyday world. It is in short, a call for historicality to be rescued from its containment in World-History" (p. 6). After introducing his argument in the first chapter, Guha proceeds to elaborate on it in the remaining four chapters. In chapters 2 and 3 he examines the contents of historicality and World-History. Hegel's notion of world history denied large parts of the world any agency in human history. Thus, while Hegel admired India for its religious and spiritual qualities, he felt it did not have a history because it lacked a state. Obviously, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary, and Guha cites the instance of Ramram Basu, a petty official working for the East India Company, being commissioned to write a history of kings of the province of Bengal, in eastern India. Guha calls for broadening our prose of the world to include "all of man's being in time and his being with others to write itself into that prose and enter it with all the multiplicity and singularity, complexity, and simplicity, regularity and unpredictability of such being" (p. 46). He argues that historians should decenter statist concerns with public affairs in their writings and focus more attention to issues of historicality. In chapter 4 Guha examines indigenous southern Asian traditions of history (itihasa) that focus on the experience and circumstance of the narration versus the European novel, which privileges the firsthand experience of the narrator. He calls for rescuing historicality from marginalization by World-History and its emphasis on writing, the state, and notions of universal progress. He believes that this task remains to be accomplished as historians are still conceptually walled in by Hegelian notions of World-History. Our narratives need to be filled with a sense of wonder about human agency at the level of everyday life and be less concerned with the rigid formalities of representing the development of states. In the final chapter Guha turns to literature as a way out of the clutches of World-History. He finds sustenance in the concerns the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had for historicality—in the "weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery, has always been there in the peasants' fields and village festivals, manifesting their very simple and abiding humanity across all of history—sometimes under Mughal rule, sometimes under British rule" (Rabindranath Tagore cited...

Jamaican tourism and the politics of enjoyment

Critical approaches to tourism, united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as mere enjoyment, illustrate how Third World tourism typically involves labor exploitation, unequal gender relations, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Researchers presuppose, however, that enjoyment is an innocent and self-evident psychological phenomenon underpinned by and opposed to worthier objects of inquiry such as exploitation, domination, and discrimination by virtue of their politically serious, conceptually profound, and empirically complex properties. These critical approaches, however, are not critical insofar as they tacitly assume that the phenomenon of enjoyment is just enjoyment: easily enjoyed and unrelated to the problems of tourism. The main thesis of this paper is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently rigorous. The psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and the work of Slavoj Žižek offer an unparalleled theoretical vocabulary with which to investigate the subjective, material, embodied, discursive, and enacted dimensions of enjoyment in tourism. The paper elaborates what I call a politics of enjoyment using key psychoanalytic ideas that include jouissance, the pleasure principle, the Other, and fantasy to critically explicate the contradictions, antagonisms, and impasses that (de)structure Jamaica's “One Love” and “No Problem” tourism product located on a Caribbean island renowned for beach bliss and civil unrest.

Towards a Lyric History of India

For Professor C. M. Naim, ihtiraman

Anthropology in Question

Anthropology, abstractly conceived as the study of man, is actually the study of men in crisis by men in crisis. Anthropologists and their ob? jects, the studied, despite opposing positions in the "scientific" equation have this much in common: if not equally, still they are each objects of contemporary imperial civilization. The anthropologist who treats the indigene as an object may define himself as relatively free, but that is an illusion. For in order to objectify the other, one is, at the same time, compelled to objectify the self. On this score, the anthropologist betrays himself as inevitably as he does the native whom he examines. There? fore, when Levi-Strauss, whom I take to be both the most representative and the most elusive of contemporary anthropologist argues that, as the offspring of colonialism, "anthropology ... reflects, on the epistemo logical level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object," he tells us only half the truth.1 The other half is critical. For the anthropologist is himself a victim, and his power of decision is a fiction, embedded as it is in the exploitative foundations of civilization. Edmund Carpenter relates a case in point: the presumed results of an official experiment in communication to which he lent himself in Australian New Guinea. Although questioning the ethic of the undertaking, he argues that the disorganization, indeed the destruction of the village culture under systematic electronic assault (tape recordings, film and so forth) which his team initiated, could be justified only by the knowledge gained of analogous processes in our, the colonizing, society.2 Unless the anthropologist confronts his own alienation, which is only a special instance of a general condition, seeks to understand its roots and subsequently matures as a relentless critic of his own civili? zation, the very civilization which converts man into an object, he cannot understand or even recognize himself in the man of another culture or that other man in himself. Thus when Levi-Strauss finally

Deemed Unsuitable for Children: The Editing of Oodgeroo's Stradbroke Dreamtime

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Oodgeroo of the Tribe of Noonuccal, Custodian of the Land Minjerriba, spent three decades of her life in the public sphere. In the 1960s, known as Kath Walker, she established and consolidated her reputation as a pan-Aboriginal activist and 'people's poet’. Her voice was received as representative of Aboriginal experience and concerns, as she lamented the lack of civil rights, impoverished living conditions, the loss and destruction of traditional cultures and lands. Strident political poems such as ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights' and 'Oration' were first delivered at political gatherings and became catch- cries for the political struggle of organisations such as the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) and the National Tribal Council. However, for the majority of her public life Oodgeroo spurned this title as people's poet, preferring to be known as an 'Educator'.

Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday

This article traces the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking about technology over the course of what is considered to be his early, middle, and late periods. Over the course of the years, Heidegger’s concerns moved from somewhat conventional concerns over the consumerism technology entails, and the damage it causes to the environment, to the more complex position that technicity distorts human nature with an accompanying loss of meaning. The real danger, he said, is not the destruction of nature or culture, nor selfindulgent consumerism, but a new totalizing style of practices that would restrict our openness to people and things by driving out all other styles of practice that enable us to be receptive to realty.

Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions by Armine Kotin Mortimer , Katherine Kolb (review)

iooo Reviews work in the construction of Anglosexuality: the masculine 'word' is combined with the 'feminine' image to create an 'androgynous imagetext' (p. 172), and thus a new language in which to express homosexual desire. Unfortunately, the study contains a number of typographical errors, especially in quotations. Some surprising misreadings also intrude, as when Eells claims that 'the only sexual act Proust's narrator admits to indulging in is "le plaisir solitaire"' (p. 29). Occasionally, too, one detects a loss of tautness in the argument: the relevance ofa par? ticular intertext to the formation of an Anglosexuality is, at times, only belatedly and tangentially established. None the less, the work has considerable interest and value fora wide readership, including specialists in Proust studies and Victorian literature, as well as those interested in the more general fields of intercultural and interaesthetic exchange. Cardiff University Margaret Topping Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions. Ed. by Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb. Urbanaand Chicago: University oflllinois Press. 2002. xii + 316 pp. $39-95- ISBN 0-252-02754-x. It is fitting,as Jean-Yves Tadie remarks in his foreword to this excellent collection of nineteen essays on Proust, that it should be published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university not only hosted the Proust 2000 symposium, which provides the springboard forthe collection, but was also the home institution of Philip Kolb, editor ofthe twenty-one-volume Correspondancede Marcel Proust (Paris: Plon, 1971-93). Indeed, Kolb's monumental research achievements are commemorated in the university's Kolb-Proust Archive. Fittingly,Luc Fraisse demonstrates in the incisive opening chapter that Kolb's work on the correspondence is simultaneously an exegesis of A la recherchedu tempsperdu. Fraisse, forwhom the correspondence is the Big Bang in the history ofProustian composition, demonstrates elegantly thejunction between epistolary and novelistic productivity and traces the transmutation of everyday occurrence into the 'bit of eternity' (p. 31) that is Proust's work. The role of chance and circumstance in Proust's composition ofthe Recherche is furtherexplored in a number of compelling contributions: Christine Cano reflectswith acute insight on how the arbitrary moment of death itselfbecomes a contribution to editorial process; and ifCano, through her analysis of the competing editions ofAlbertine disparue, ana? lyses the ontological status of writing and its editing, Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer's 'Gen? esis of Proust's "Ruine de Venise"' complements this. Thus Mauriac-Dyer illustrates how the thematics of cultural destruction that infiltratesMarcel's response to Venice finds an editorial correlative in the savage deletion of text practised late on by Proust, deletion that was to make possible the controversial, abbreviated version of Albertine disparue published by Grasset in 1987. There are important explorations of Germanophiliaand sociology by Jerome Cornette and Alberto Beretta Anguissolarespec? tively, and also of Proust's treatment of sexuality, Elisabeth Ladenson reflecting on 'Gilberte's Indecent Gesture' and Laurence Schehr analysing, through the encounters at Balbec between Marcel and Charlus, the latter's radar-like search for the ho? mosexual. In the area of aesthetics, Francoise Leriche proposes a striking twinning of Proust and Gaudi as a prelude to resituating the author of the Recherche within the Art Nouveau movement. Ruskin, who plays a key role in Leriche's reappraisal, likewise figures in excellent contributions by Diane Leonard and Sara Danius. But ifthe vol? ume conveys genuinely insightful 'visions and revisions', italso alerts us, through Antoine Compagnon's erudite reflectionon allusiveness in Proust, to the real potential for loss of critical insight. Arguing that allusiveness in the Recherche is regularly not spelt MLRy 98.4, 2003 1001 out by either author or narrator, Compagnon provides striking examples of how, for today's reader, much of the implicitness and assumption, especially in the representa? tion of homosexuality and Jewishness, risks becoming buried and lost. Compagnon's salutary reminder notwithstanding, Proust in Perspective is to be welcomed as a con? sistently impressive set of contributions that will stimulate furthercritical debate. Royal Holloway, University of London Edward Hughes Le Roman monologue: Montherlant auteur, narrateur, acteur. By Sabine Hillen. Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard. 2002. 212 pp. ISBN 2-85210-064-9. Critics of Montherlant's novels and theatre have tended to divide themselves into...

Benjamin Keen (1913-2002)

Benjamin Keen (1913-2002)

Unheard Voices- Environmental Equity

Examining the connections between racism, sexism, cultural destruction, power relations, and environmental equity.

Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?

In 1993 the architect, essayist and former mayor of Belgrade Bogdan Bogdanović published a collection of essays entitled The City and Death which contained reflections on the origins of urbicide . By this the author meant the wilful destruction of urban infrastructure and urban culture and the partial extermination, partial expulsion of the city's inhabitants, a fate that befell, among others, the cities of Vukovar, Mostar and Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

The savage metropolis: Animism, aesthetics and the pleasures of a vanished race

In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that the autonomy of aesthetic production in a modern society preserves a sense of premodern enchantment. This relationship between aesthetics and enchantment was literalized in periodical literature about indigenous peoples in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. But in this specifically colonial context, forms of aesthetic affect linked to the textual evocation of animism also assumed the anachronistic nature of animism and, by extension, the extinction of the cultures embodying it. This was the precondition for its aestheticization. The production of aesthetic pleasure for a largely urban readership, in other words, both assumed and normalized the epistemic and paramilitary violence of colonization. Because the act of reading located animism in the imaginative experience of modern subjects, where its effectiveness depended upon the suspension of disbelief, it also constituted the literal passing of animistic worldviews as a fundamental condition of its own modernity. This dynamic, I argue, is assumed in Freud's writing on the relationship between animism and the uncanny, and embodied in the work of prominent colonial writers such as Marcus Clarke, Henry Gyles Turner and George Gordon McCrae. Exploring it enables us to offer a very tangible account of the relationship between popular print culture in nineteenth-century Australia and the destruction of indigenous culture at the hands of settler colonialism.