Destruction Of Culture Research Articles

Theme of the Revolution in the Artistic Discourse of Mikhail Prishvin

The aim of the paper is to analyze Prishvin’s view of political, economic and social causes of the October Revolution, based on the material of the “The Worldly Cup” story, the writer’s publicistic writing and diaries, previously unpublished due to the censure. Prishvin sharply criticizes the course of the Bolshevik Party for the destruction of all previous culture of the Russian people, being against of the Marxist ideology of class antagonism and primitive equality which is established by violence. It is shown in the paper that the class struggle implemented by the Bolsheviks in the village is destroying traditional morality and family ties upon which the peasant life is based. But although Prishvin considers the new government as a way of life of robbers and thieves, he is against the unilateralism in the assessments of events happening in the country. In contrast to the Whites and emigrants, the writer does not consider the failure of the Soviet idea as the failure of socialism in general. Prishvin has a keen sense of personal responsibility for the fate of the Russian people and state. Historical and philosophical analysis of Prishvin’s creative heritage leads to the conclusion that the dialectical thinking of the writer allows him seeing not only the dark, but the bright side of life. Prishvin believes that there is a way out from the abyss of general enmity, where Russia fell after the revolutionary catastrophe, that the primitive psychology of hostility can be overcome only by means of Christian forgiveness and love. So Prishvin sees his self-affirmation and salvation himself as a writer in his devotion to good, not to evil of the class hatred. Keywords: Bolshevism, Class Struggle, Creativity, Ideology, Marxism, Revolution, State

Editor’s Introduction: Preservation in a World of Diplomacy

Preservation in a World of Diplomacy Tim Winter The ongoing destruction of cultural heritage by Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq brings to the fore a glaring paradox. On the one hand, preventing the deliberate destruction of culture now appears to hold little moral ambiguity, with such acts now regularly condemned by various governments and agencies around the world as both “war crimes” and a “crimes against humanity.” And yet, the failure to prevent IS’s campaign of destruction is a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities of culture in times of conflict, and the inability of the so-called international community to act upon the imperative to preserve. Indeed, today it appears as though the threat to cultural heritage is increasing in magnitude in accordance with the changing nature of international conflict and terrorism. Looking across Western media, academia, and the various agencies committed to preventing further destruction, the response to IS has revolved around select themes, namely the legal instruments for preventing the illicit trafficking of objects, the challenges of protecting archaeological sites and museum collections, or the benefits of documentation and digital capture. While fully recognizing the critical importance of such efforts, I would, however, suggest that the challenge posed by IS extends beyond questions of actual preservation and international law, to include a serious diplomatic conundrum, one that has not received the critical and sustained attention it deserves. We have come a long way since World War II, and yet the characteristics of today’s international relations and diplomatic arena mean significant challenges remain in putting together effective solutions to a phenomenon like IS. UNESCO has led the charge in raising awareness of the plight of the region’s cultural heritage, and the issue has received sporadic attention from a number of governments around the world. In September 2014, for example, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the Department of State would dedicate resources for preservation and documentation of heritage in the region. In May 2015, ninety-one states supported the UN General Assembly Resolution “Saving the Cultural Heritage of Iraq” (69/281). With the protection of culture now widely acknowledged as a human rights issue, it would appear it is the responsibility of all to act. This idealism, however, belies the far more complex task of bringing together “coalitions of [End Page iii] the willing.” For Syria and Iraq’s regional neighbors, material culture inherited from the past is deeply entangled in the broader politics of the region today and speaks to the hostilities between Sunni and Shiite groups and the religious roots at the heart of tensions between countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. The possibility for enacting effective heritage protection interventions in Syria has been further complicated by the domestic political situation, whereby IS has provided a geopolitically expedient foil for Bashar al-Assad. In this regard, both Syria and Iraq also raise the highly challenging question of how to intervene in the protection of culture when states collapse and domestic governmental priorities shift in other directions. Although IS’s version of Wahhabi extremism, which attempts to erase the cultural pasts of others, bears the hallmarks of nation-building, their declared aim to establish a caliphate is an explicit attempt to stand outside the current international system of nation-states. The situation presents major challenges for both states and intergovernmental agencies searching for diplomatic solutions to the heritage issue. With so much of the focus on the destruction of high-profile sites such as Palmyra and Nimrud, we also need to ask why far less concern has been expressed in the Western media over the destruction of Syria’s mosques, churches, and other shrines, or to the extensive damage to the historic cities of Yemen caused by Saudi Arabian air attacks. Equally, with much of the burden seeming to rest on the shoulders of UNESCO, what should we expect from the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in steering more effective political, legal, and “on the ground” policies? The pursuit of such lines of enquiry adds clarity to a situation wherein the protection of culture and heritage appears to be a largely uncontentious enterprise with a clear moral...

Law in the Mongol and Post-Mongol World: The Case of Yuan China

Law in the Mongol and Post-Mongol World: The Case of Yuan China1 Macabe Keliher (bio) Bettine Birge. Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan Dianzhang. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. xii, 324 pp. Hardcover $27.95, isbn 978-0-674-97551-4. The historical impact of Mongols and their empires of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has long been dismissed. Conventional perceptions portray the Mongols as destroyers and plunderers, and until recently, scholars were usually content to pass off the Mongol conquest of Eurasia as a phenomenal aberration in history: the Islamic world was quickly re-established, Russia beat back the Golden Horde, the Ming dynasty quickly resumed China’s late imperial trends, and despite the physical and cultural destruction, Korea threw off Mongol domination and adopted Confucianism. Research over the past few decades, however, has given a more balanced picture and made strong claims for the Mongol conquests and empire as a world changing event.2 Whereas less than a decade and a half prior, historians still had to ask, “did the Mongols matter?” they can now more affirmatively divulge “how Mongolia matters.”3 Law is one area that has received less attention, however. This is due largely to sources; the early Mongol empire followed an unrecorded customary law asserted by Genghis Khan—the jasaq or yasa—and the later empires often failed to codify or promulgate. Recent work on individual Eurasian empires and regions, however, has begun to show the specific developments of law and society within the various empires in the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. Viewed comprehensively, these individual studies demonstrate a trend of legal and social change throughout Eurasia in the wake of the Mongol invasions. Broadly speaking, domestic legal codes and practices were supplanted by a newly imposed dynastic law. This development often shook local society, resulting in confusion, challenge, and tension, and leading to the elevation of a particular school of thought to mediate conflict and reinterpret tradition and social ideals in accordance with the new political order. While the particulars of each society generated individual dynamics, a general repositioning of law took place throughout the post-Mongol Eurasian world. [End Page 107] This essay takes up the case of one Mongol empire, Yuan China (1271–1368), and in doing so moves to highlight broader Eurasian trends. It looks at the specifics of a long-standing problem in Chinese history on women and law in China’s middle period, and Bettine Birge’s contribution to addressing this problem, especially in her new book on marriage and property law in the Yuan, Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan. The problem goes something like this: from approximately the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, existing laws and practices in China were challenged and revised, old codes were abrogated, and new understandings of social and political order were imposed. One of the most reverberating changes was in gender and property relations, where wives and daughters, who had steadily gained more access to property and unilateral divorce in the Song dynasty (960–1279), were subjected to new legal restrictions in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1636–1912) that gave primacy to the agnate. One of the key questions is what happened and why. Birge’s research shows that the Mongol conquest and subsequent political developments in the Yuan dynasty were instrumental in this transformation. The rest of this review is divided into four sections. The first section examines historiographical debates and summarizes the conclusions of Birge’s arguments; it also looks at the importance of the legal text she has translated, the Yuan dianzhang 元典章, or Statutes and precedents of the Yuan dynasty (complete title, Dayuan shengzheng guochao dianzhang 大元聖政國朝典章). The second section considers the text of the Yuan dianzhang itself as a legal and social document, and questions its historical production. Section three draws on the Yuan dianzhang to explore a case of uxorilocal marriage in the early Yuan, noting the dilemma faced by jurists and illustrating interventions by the school of thought that would rise to prominence in the Yuan and Ming, the Neo-Confucians. The last section returns to the broader argument...

Wymiar moralny wspomaganego rodzicielstwa

Thanks to the achievements of modern science and medicine it is possible to bring to life a child outside of the mother's body. The most popular medical techniques of artificial procreation include artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (FIVET), artificial insemination by the GIFT and ZIFT methods. The use of artificial reproduction procedures, however, involves the participation of third parties and manipulation of the human person at the earliest stage of its biological development. Artificial reproductive techniques are associated with personal destruction and dehumanization of man, society, human relations and culture. In view of the rampant “logic of relativism” it is necessary to properly show the truth about man, his dignity and recognition of the natural moral law.

Экстремизм как деструкция правовой культуры

Экстремизм как деструкция правовой культуры

Theme of the Revolution in the Artistic Discourse of Mikhail Prishvin

The aim of the paper is to analyze Prishvin’s view of political, economic and social causes of the October Revolution, based on the material of the “The Worldly Cup” story, the writer’s publicistic writing and diaries, previously unpublished due to the censure. Prishvin sharply criticizes the course of the Bolshevik Party for the destruction of all previous culture of the Russian people, being against of the Marxist ideology of class antagonism and primitive equality which is established by violence. It is shown in the paper that the class struggle implemented by the Bolsheviks in the village is destroying traditional morality and family ties upon which the peasant life is based. But although Prishvin considers the new government as a way of life of robbers and thieves, he is against the unilateralism in the assessments of events happening in the country. In contrast to the Whites and emigrants, the writer does not consider the failure of the Soviet idea as the failure of socialism in general. Prishvin has a keen sense of personal responsibility for the fate of the Russian people and state. Historical and philosophical analysis of Prishvin’s creative heritage leads to the conclusion that the dialectical thinking of the writer allows him seeing not only the dark, but the bright side of life. Prishvin believes that there is a way out from the abyss of general enmity, where Russia fell after the revolutionary catastrophe, that the primitive psychology of hostility can be overcome only by means of Christian forgiveness and love. So Prishvin sees his self-affirmation and salvation himself as a writer in his devotion to good, not to evil of the class hatred.

From Savage to Sublime (And Partway Back): Indians and Antiquity in Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This article examines the comparisons made between Indians and Antiquity in early nineteenth-century American literature (notably in the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper); to do so, it begins by reaching back to references in European and American writings of the eighteenth century. One of the main motivations behind the associations between Native Americans and the Ancient World made in the early decades of the nineteenth century was to “elevate” Indians in order to transform them into worthy symbols of the recently established United States. Such associations also rendered them suitable subjects for treatment by authors inspired to a large extent by the Romantic Movement and involved in the project of creating a national literature for the new country. Bringing together these two quite different worlds, however, resulted in various ambiguities: it simultaneously reinforced the suggestion that Indians were already part of the past (providing a certain complicity with the continuing destruction of Indian culture) and questioned the then dominant image of Ancient Greece and Rome as examples of some of the highest levels attainable of government and human civilization.

Trophies of War: Representing ‘Summer Palace’ Loot in Military Museums in the UK

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War (1856-60), Britishand French troops looted and then burnt the imperial buildings in the Yuanmingyuan(known at the time by foreigners as the ‘Summer Palace’) in the north of Beijing.This widespread destruction of China’s most important complex of palaces, andthe dispersal of the imperial art collection, is considered one of the most extremeacts of cultural destruction of the nineteenth century. Over a million objectsare estimated to have been looted from buildings in the Yuanmingyuan, manyof these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and publicmuseums.1 This article analyses the display of ‘Summer Palace’ objects in fivemilitary museums in the UK, exploring the meanings constructed around China’simperial artefacts at these particular sites of representation.

Classifying Cultural and Physical Destruction: Are Modern Historical and Current Human Rights Violations in China Violations of International Criminal Law?

Modern (Communist) China has a chequered history with regard to the commission of and accountability for mass violence and human rights violations. Campaigns by the Communist Party have resulted in horrific mass crimes such as killings, starvation, torture, beatings, and persecution. While such conduct undoubtedly amount to violations of human rights, there are many examples from China’s recent past and in China today where situations of mass human rights violations, as well as mass atrocities, could also constitute violations of international criminal law (war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide). This paper will assess three examples in modern China’s history and present to determine whether they amount to international crimes: the Cultural Revolution, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and human trafficking (including the consequential crimes of forced marriage and forced prostitution); and offer a brief overview of what accountability steps China should take with regard to these crimes.

“Why Is No One Talking about Libya's Cultural Destruction?”

Since 1990, as country after country throughout West Asia and North Africa has fallen victim to civil disturbance or conflict, its cultural heritage has been looted to feed the demand of an international antiquities market. International public policy has failed to achieve any kind of hold on the problem. This paper looks at the reasons for policy failure, with a particular emphasis on recently implemented policy initiatives intended to safeguard cultural heritage in Syria. The paper is critical of the relationship between traditional and social media news reporting and policy making. It concludes by arguing that attempts to safeguard cultural heritage at its source are inappropriate for the task at hand and more needs to be done to tackle demand on the destination market.

The Sand Creek Massacre

The 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans by a Colorado territorial militia regiment is investigated through a genocidal lens, both as a component of the larger destruction of Native American cultures and peoples by U.S. forces and in its own specific economic and ideological context. Using the work of many other scholars in the field of genocide studies and the established definition of genocide provided by the UN Convention on Genocide, this essay initially defines how the gradual dwindling of Native American populations from the onset of European colonization through the next three centuries can be viewed as genocide. Following this groundwork, the question of culpability for the massacre is brought forth and three main categories of suspects are identified: local government and military leaders, the White settler population of Colorado, and the U.S. federal government. All three potential areas of culpability are shown to possess varying degrees of responsibility in effecting the massacre. Upon conclusion of the investigation, there is a brief discussion of possible means of reconciliation accompanied by an examination of the nature of current reconciliation efforts.

Muslim-Friendly’s Homestay in Malaysia: Issues and Challenges

This research explore the shariah compliant and issues of muslim-friendly homestay in Malaysia. Malaysia is a tourism-based country that offer many experience opportunities to the tourist. One of it is homestay-tourism package. There are many homestay accommodation build up especially in rural area. However, the services and surroundings are not fulfil the Islamic way of live. Most of the homestays offer the guests to stay with the owner’s family member without determine the space limitation between owner and guest. Thus, the implication goes to the maslahah of the user and the family. Therefore, the study indicates the issue to be solved with the shariah way. The issues of a shariah compliant and muslim’s friendly homestay were observed based on the Islamic built environment criteria. Among the issues are Bii’ah (2 issues), salaamah (1 issues), nazhofah (1 issues), and sirriyyah (2 issues). All of the homestays were categorized as moderate in practising the shariah attribute. Some elements were lack due to environmental, social, cultural and privacy destruction. In conclusion, there is a need for host and guest in term of awareness and practicality to comply in the muslim-friendly and shariah compliant homestay ecosystem.

The Destruction of Identity: Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples

International law defines genocide in terms of violence committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” yet this approach fails to acknowledge the full impacts of cultural destruction. There is insufficient international discussion of “cultural genocide,” which is a particular threat to the world's indigenous minorities. Despite the recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which acknowledges the rights to culture, diversity, and self-determination, claims of cultural genocide are often derided, and their indicators dismissed as benign effects of modernity and indigenous cultural diffusion. This article considers the destruction of indigenous cultures and the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples through the analytical lens of genocide. Two case studies—the federally unrecognized Winnemem Wintu tribe in northern California and the Inuit of northern Canada—are highlighted as illustrative examples of groups facing these challenges. Ultimately, this article seeks to prompt serious discussion of cultural rights violations, which often do not involve direct physical killing or violence, and consideration of the concept “cultural genocide” as a tool for human rights promotion and protection.

Destruction of Culture and Vandalism

While we can all condemn the destruction and defacing of antiquities and ancient sites that have been made by ISIS and earlier by the Taliban, one should put these acts in historical and religious context. Anyone reading the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition realizes that this behavior is well established in the tradition. From the earliest Jewish communities destruction of idols was a part of expressing the nature of the relationship the people had with their one god. The same is true of the earlier Christians and pagan art and this continued into the Middle Ages with the burning of books of Greek and Roman writers, paintings of gods and battering to fragments of sculpture. After the discovery of the New World Christians eliminated entire cultural inventories of Native American civilizations, burning the Aztec and Mayan libraries and their art and demolishing their architecture as well as the Inca and all other Native peoples’ objects of religion and culture

Uyghurs on Chinese Social Networking Sites: The Creation and Destruction of Ethnic Youth Culture

The Chinese social networking website Fenbei.com was started in 2003 by a young Chinese software engineer. By 2006 it provided an important online community for tens of thousands of Uyghurs, who developed an online culture and communication genres through which they creatively engaged in a virtual world with thousands of others who shared their interests. By 2010 the site was closed, stranding these Uyghurs and millions of other Chinese citizens without the online site that had become their virtual community and connected them to other users around China and even abroad. This article attempts to uncover a small part of what Fenbei meant for young Uyghur Internet enthusiasts and fills some of the gaps in research on popular Internet use in China.

Kresy południowo-wschodnie Rzeczypospolitej w badaniach i twórczości Stanisława Sławomira Nicieji

The theme of the dissertation is the research on the territories of the borderland (called Kresy) in the South-East of the Polish State in the interwar period (1918– 1939), that have been lost to the Soviet Union after 1945. Initially for political reasons prevented censorship publication on this topic, so it was especially to 1956 (untill October and liquidation of Stalinism) and completely aftergaining full sovereignty in 1989. The leading researchers and talented writers in this field is a historian from Opole Stanisław Sławomir Nicieja (born 1948), author of fundamental works on historical Polish cemeteries in lost Polish Lviv (cemetery on Łyczaków). Explorer is associated with the University of Opole, where was for four tenures a Rector. On Upper Silesia settled many of the inhabitants of the borderlands prior to 1945, whose memories and materials much enriched the material basis for the books of Nicieja. Article discusses in six sections their fortunes in a new homeland, the profile of a scientific investigator, and his most important works on the borderland villages and destruction of celturies-old culture. In this output leading position occupies today the anticipated for 30 volumes (not yet released 6) series, devoted the times of splendor and destruction their inhabitants. He geve it the title Kresowa Atlantyda, referring to the destruction of the legendary city in ancient times. It evokes Polish Lviv, Stanisławów and dozens of other towns durable stored in national history.

Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, VIII: Settings of the Gloria and Credo. Ed. by Peter Wright. * The Eton Choirbook: Facsimile and Introductory Study. Ed. by Magnus Williamson. * Songs in British Sources c.1150-1300. Ed. by Helen Deeming

The three volumes under review represent a relatively recent stage in the transmission of medieval and early Renaissance repertory. The Eton Choirbook was copied between c.1500 and 1504; the journey of its contents had begun a few decades earlier, when pieces were gradually devised and performed before their selection for one of the most glorious of illuminated manuscripts to have survived the deliberate acts of cultural destruction that characterized the sixteenth century. The Eton Choirbook can be linked palaeographically, and functionally, with Eton College, and its music reflects activities and liturgical priorities there from the 1440s. A monument of choral music at its inception, Williamson’s facsimile edition reproduces the sense of pride that was evidently a driving factor in the original commission and copying of the volume. Although a few pieces listed in its index have not survived, the facsimile demonstrates the coherence of the codex and the value placed upon its purpose: honouring the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The conquest of the Russian Arctic

Spanning nine time zones from Norway to the Bering Strait, the immense Russian Arctic was mostly unexplored before the twentieth century. This changed rapidly in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union implemented plans for its conquest. The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, a definitive political and environmental history of one of the world's remotest regions, details the ambitious attempts, from Soviet times to the present, to control and reshape the Arctic, and the terrible costs paid along the way. Paul Josephson describes the effort under Stalin to assimilate the Arctic into the Soviet empire. Extraction of natural resources, construction of settlements, indoctrination of nomadic populations, collectivization of reindeer herding--all was to be accomplished so that the Arctic operated according to socialist principles. The project was in many ways an extension of the Bolshevik revolution, as planners and engineers assumed that policies and plans that worked elsewhere in the empire would apply here. But as they pushed ahead with methods hastily adopted from other climates, the results were political repression, destruction of traditional cultures, and environmental degradation. The effects are still being felt today. At the same time, scientists and explorers led the world in understanding Arctic climes and regularities. Vladimir Putin has redoubled Russia's efforts to secure the Arctic, seen as key to the nation's economic development and military status. This history brings into focus a little-understood part of the world that remains a locus of military and economic pressures, ongoing environmental damage, and grand ambitions imperfectly realized.

Stages of Decline

After the fall of the Northern Song [Formula: see text] (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng [Formula: see text] to Jurchen invaders in 1127, diasporic literati of the Southern Song dynasty [Formula: see text] (1127–1279) recreated and revisited its lost sites through textual commemoration, especially in memorabilia literature (biji [Formula: see text], lit. ‘brush notes’). As knowledge of the city passed from communicative memory into cultural memory, its decline and destruction became the focus of nostalgia and indignation for Yue Ke [Formula: see text] (1183–1234), the author of the Pillar Histories (Ting shi [Formula: see text]), a collection of counter-narratives of Northern Song history that expressed the shared experience of social trauma induced by dynastic collapse. Disconnected from their spatial context and even from historical fact, the city’s memory sites became stages for amoralistic declension narrative, in which the city’s destruction and occupation was assumed to have been instigated by the decadence of the imperial court of the passive Emperor Huizong [Formula: see text] (r. 1100–26) and his ‘nefarious ministers’. The most colourful elements of Yue’s ludic and fantastical narratives became the focus of his indignation, which encouraged his readers to denounce the traitors who had betrayed the empire by inviting the Jurchen invasion. In the Pillar Histories, Yue deployed textual imaginaries of nostalgia as forms of resistance by re-contesting the past events that led to dynastic collapse. By reconstructing the city in the cultural memory of his fellow diasporic literati, Yue was creating a vision of an ideal political, cultural and moral community that once existed at the dynasty’s inception, and might be reconstituted in the future, if and when Song subjects recaptured their lost homeland.

Diversity in education: Kenyan sign language as a medium of instruction in schools for the deaf in Kenya

In Kenya, the only official document that deals with the use of mother tongue (MT) in Schools is the 1967 Gachathi report. The report has clear-cut guidance and policy regarding MT use by the hearing children. However, for deaf children, no such policy exists; therefore, the use of the deaf child's MT (Kenyan Sign Language (KSL)) in schools for the deaf has largely been ignored and there is a continued insistence on the use of the “oral” method of communication that puts emphasis on teaching deaf children how to speak. This continued denial of the use of KSL in schools for the deaf is tantamount to destruction of language and culture of a people and a violation of the deaf children's rights that fundamentally undermines their ability to acquire appropriate education. This is in direct contravention of article 26 of the universal declaration on Human Rights. Similarly, by denying the deaf in Kenya - a language minority the use of KSL - their MT, we are actually squandering a linguistic resource that can be used to impart the knowledge and skills necessary for their survival. This article therefore examines the importance of MT (KSL) in the education of the deaf in learning 2nd and 3rd languages and the way forward.