European Heritage Research Articles

Blackness, linguistic nationalism, and postcolonial class inequality in Haiti

AbstractThis ethnographic examination of a binary linguistic hierarchy in Haiti shares the critical terrain of Viranjini Munasinghe's unpacking of Caribbean creolization theory. It is a grounded inquiry into a problematic of ontology that inheres in techniques of making non‐white identities deployed by Caribbean privileged people of color at arm's length from a European colonial heritage that underpins their privileged class positions. Borrowing Munasinghe's analytic concept of theory made schizophrenic by ideology, the investigation reveals Haiti's francophone minority ideologically utilizing Haitian Creole as a black‐nationalist symbol in its domination of the monolingual Creole‐speaking majority. The ideological move devalues Creole while elevating French in the reproduction of class inequality. The linguistic schizophrenia undermines the theoretical nation‐building logic of Creole as national language. Failing practical validation of Creole in all spheres of Haitian life, I conclude, claims on the state and civil society by Haiti's vast monolingual Creole‐speaking majority cannot logically be validated.

The impact of anxiety on the risk of kidney stone disease: Insights into eGFR-mediated effects.

Previous studies have linked kidney stone disease (KSD) with depression, but there are no reports on the relationship between anxiety and KSD, and the mechanism underlying the potential relationship remains unclear. Associations of anxiety and incident KSD were assessed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHENES) using multivariate logistic regression. Two-sample bidirectional Mendelian randomization studies and a two-step two-sample MR was used to estimate the mediating factors that influence KSD risk. Examinations of NHANES data revealed that a rise in the frequency and intensity of anxiety were independently associated with incident KSD. In MR analysis, anxiety (uk-a-51 and uk-b-6519) were from the UK Biobank, with sample sizes of 328,717 and 450,765 respectively. KSD data were from the FinnGen, including 8597 cases and 333,128 controls. In the IVW analysis, genetically predicted anxieties (ukb-a-51 and ukb-b-6519) were found to be causally associated with a higher risk of KSD, with odds ratios of 6.18 (95% CI 2.54-15.04) and 3.44 (95% CI 1.67-7.08), respectively. There were no reverse causal effects. Further mediation analysis indicated that anxiety increases the risk of KSD by raising eGFR, through which 11.8% of the effect of anxiety on KSD risk was mediated. The research was confined to individuals of European heritage, and there could be specific genetic variances among diverse ethnicities. The current study suggests anxiety as an independent causal risk factor for KSD and unveils a new pathogenic mechanism, showing that anxiety raises eGFR, thereby increasing the risk of KSD.

Heritage volunteerism, cultural journalism and participatory placemaking: insights from ‘European Heritage Times’ and Erzgebirge cultural landscape

This study investigates the impact of collaborative creative approaches and voluntary work in the heritage domain, particularly exploring how participatory journalism can involve young volunteers pursuing serious leisure careers. The investigation utilises concepts from citizen humanities, participatory informal placemaking, and serious leisure theory to explore the potential advantages of engaging in voluntary heritage-related activities for both serious leisure volunteers and applied World Heritage Sites. These activities encompass visits to historic locations, short-term stays in heritage sites, and participation in experiential and formative programs. Furthermore, the study explores the effects of this volunteering process on transformation, highlighting both the volunteerism and placemaking aspects of the learning-making process. The researcher, serving as both a serious leisure volunteer and participatory action researcher, employs the editorial project ‘The European Heritage Times’ to assess the impact of this process on volunteers and the heritage sector, as well as on informal placemaking within the applied cultural context of Erzgebirge.

Intertwining Narrative and Technology: Reinterpreting European Cultural Heritage through the Voices of Latin American Women Writers

Travel literature not only provides relevant information about cultural heritage, such as authorship, chronology or location, but also reveals the impressions evoked by its reception. This article describes the methodology of the ongoing REWIND project, which explores European cultural heritage through the perspectives of Latin American women writers who travelled to Europe in the early twentieth century. The project seeks to amplify the voices of non-European women committed to feminism and sociocultural diversity to foster decolonial, inclusive and pluralistic historical narratives. On the one hand, we address the configuration of the project corpus, the semantic annotation process, and the design of the ontological modelling according to the deep data concept. On the other hand, we explain the analysis of the relationships between cultural heritage, time, space and emotion. The project uses travel literature in digital format to retrieve, study and interpret data on cultural heritage, creating a workflow that integrates information from various historical sources to raise further questions and provide new insights. The proposed methodology follows the FAIR principles and prioritizes using open-source software to ensure reproducibility and facilitate the use of deliverables in other studies.

Association of Walking Pace and Risk of Stroke: A Two- Sample Mendelian Randomization Study in a European Ancestry Cohort.

Walking pace (WP), a simple physiological indicator, has been found to be strongly associated with a variety of health outcomes in recent years. Among them, the relationship between walking pace and stroke is of particular interest. Given the high morbidity, disability and mortality associated with stroke, identifying modifiable indicators of health, such as walking pace, could help in stroke prevention strategies. However, the causal relationship between WP and stroke risk remains unclear. This study aims to determine the causal relationship between walking pace and risk of stroke using a two-sample Mendelian randomization approach in a European-ancestry population. In order to evaluate the potential for a causal relationship between WP and stroke in people of European heritage, a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study was carried out. Statistics about the association of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with stroke were taken from FinnGen (R8) (n = 284,040), while the UK Biobank genome-wide association studies (GWAS) provided the summary data on the association of SNPs with WP (n = 459,915). The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method was utilised as the primary strategy to examine the causal connection between WP and stroke. Additionally, complementary analyses were conducted using the MR-Egger and weighted median. In order to identify the potential directional pleiotropy and heterogeneity, the MR-Egger intercept test, the MR-PRESSO test, and Cochran's Q statistic were all carried out. This connection was evaluated using OR with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). A total of 48 SNPs were identified as valid instrumental variables in our two-sample MR analysis. The result showed that a slower walking pace is associated with a higher risk of stroke (OR = 0.573; 95% CI, 0.383-0.858, P = 0.007). The "leave-one-out" analysis demonstrated that the absence of a single SNP did not affect the robustness of our results. The MR-Egger intercept test indicated that genetic pleiotropy did not introduce bias into the results [intercept = -2.9E-03, SE = 0.008, P = 0.719] and Cochran's Q test revealed no heterogeneity. Therefore, the sensitivity analyses yielded comparable results. Consequently, the results of the sensitivity analyses were consistent. Our MR study revealed that WP is inversely associated with risk of stroke. These results provided evidence that slower WP causally increased the risk of stroke, recommending that patients with lower WP should have a prompt physical examination and targeted interventions to reduce their risk of stroke and enhance their quality of life.

‘The Happy Valley’: Temporalized Spatiality in Michael Radford’s White Mischief (1987)

ABSTRACT Contemporary times mark a fundamental shift in our sense and experience of the world. The postmodern condition — as remarked by Fredric Jameson (1991) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1979), among others — calls for new conceptions of lived reality. Nevertheless, profound uneasiness with notions of space and time is not only a postmodernist obsession. Modernist cinema, on account of its aesthetic self-reflexivity, also grapples with ways of inscribing spatiality and temporality. The 1980s saw a resurgence of European heritage films, reminiscent of interwar years of empire (early 1920s–late 1930s), produced in Kenya. Out of Africa (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1985), White Mischief (dir. Michael Radford, 1987), and The Kitchen Toto (dir. Harry Hook, 1988) became global audience staples. Not only do these films perpetuate Western viewers’ ‘master-race’ instincts; they also reproduce ‘cult images’ of an ‘exotic’ African locale. This paper phenomenologically reflects on White Mischief’s nostalgic reconstruction of a colonial settler village, the Happy Valley, and its ultra-privileged white hedonists. It explores how materiality of physical space can aid re-inscription of time and vice versa. Turning the colonial gaze upon itself, in critical self-reflection, my analysis foregrounds profound ruptures, discontinuities and contradictions in the historical fact and experience of European colonialism in Africa.

The silk roads and shared heritage in Europe: Beyond ‘China to Rome’

This article offers critical engagement with ideas of shared heritage, considering representation of the silk roads in Europe as a counterpoint to their representation in China. Often cast as a ‘bridge’ between ‘East and West’ or ‘China and Rome’ (e.g. UNESCO’s description of the Silk Road Heritage Corridors), the silk roads are regularly depicted as an abstraction of interconnection. And as an abstraction, the idea of shared heritage is often emptied of its potential to communicate greater understanding of the past, respect for cultural difference and co-dependency, or to invite reflection on forms of community constituted through shared histories. Exploring the Sinicization of the silk roads, we argue that much of the rhetoric of shared heritage is deceptively exclusive. We turn to consider the depiction of these histories of trade within Europe, offering a discursive analysis of metatexts around the United Nations World Tourism Organization/European Commission Western Silk Road tourism project, with some discussion of the representation of ancient trade at different European museums. We argue that an enduring legacy of the silk roads’ romanticized image and the transcription of this into commercial tourism inhibit their potential as a useful metanarrative for the future because it fails to communicate the complexity of the past, particularly histories of violence and inequality. However, considering recent depiction of the amber roads, we argue that histories of trade can nevertheless be mobilized towards a more nuanced understanding of the past and a critical reflection on the past and present.

교육적 이상향으로서 인문주의에 나타난 ‘안과 밖’의 모순 - 독일 교양시민계층의 사례와 정전(正典) 논쟁을 중심으로

This thesis focuses on two historical cases by comparing the contradiction between the ideal of humanistic education and its realization in the concept of dialectical logic to the inner and outer. The first inside and outside is the socio-political consequence of the Bildung concept, which is the German typical of modern humanist educational ideology, and the educated middle class, which has made it a group identity. The result of the neo-humanistic educational ideals and the instrumentalization of education understood by the German educated middle class shows the modern origin of class inequality in schooling, which is a drastic problem in modern capitalist society. The second contradiction is that between the inner logic of European tradition and values, and the outer logic of non-European perspectives. Humanism has regarded the power-guaranteed classics, called canon, as an absolute value transcending time and society. However, since the middle of the 20th century, the discourse of diversity driven by multiculturalism, criticism of orientalism, feminism, and political correctness debate have raised questions about the canonization itself. Humanism tried to preserve its content value as a European heritage, but from the outside, charges of Eurocentrism were accused. The contradictory attributes of humanism are related to the aporia of discord between the ideology of education and reality.

Income and campus application disparities among European and non-European heritage Hispanic undergraduate applicants.

Leveraging every undergraduate application submitted by self-identified Hispanic applicants to the University of California system in the 2016 and 2017 application cycles, we show that a significant number of applicants claim Hispanic identity by virtue of European heritage. We subsequently demonstrate that Hispanic-identifying students of European descent are significantly more affluent and more likely to apply to selective University of California campuses than their non-European Hispanic peers. We comment on the practical implications of these disparities, as well as their relevance for studies of inequality in the social sciences and education.

Colonialism as ‘shared history’? Negotiating European colonial heritage in Casablanca and beyond

ABSTRACT While much attention has been devoted in Europe to other types of dissonant heritage such as the Holocaust, Nazism, fascism and socialism, colonialism and colonial heritage remain far more likely to be disremembered and forgotten. However, there have been some recent troubling attempts to reframe colonialism and colonial heritage as ‘shared history’ within European heritage diplomacy and foreign policy. This paper aims to unpack these officially sanctioned heritage discourses and the relationships of power characterising the turn towards ‘colonialism as shared history’ and the ambivalent place of colonial heritage within cultural diplomacy. While looking at the connections and disconnections between the European Union and Casablanca, I focus on the ways hegemonic and non-hegemonic perspectives operate at the level of heritage-making and identity building. Can colonial heritage be shared, and what are the implications of this framing? What heritage-making practices emerge in these contexts, particularly pursued by an emerging network of local policy actors? In the celebratory accounts of Casablanca as a laboratory of modernism and as an open-air Art Déco ‘museum’, this paper argues that the promotion of European colonial heritage addresses unapologetically the middle and upper classes and it can become an apparatus for the further marginalisation of already classed, racialised groups.

“Eso Parece Español”. El Patrimonio Conflictivo Compartido de las Dictaduras

The following article is a local case study that examines the shared heritage of German and Spanish fascism in Berlin and its critical artistic reappraisal using the example of historical sites and monuments of art and architecture of the 20th century. The text is based on the experiences and controversial discussions of the heritage conservation andrestoration in the German capital after the opening of the Berlin Wall (1989/90) and the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe (1989/1991). Characteristic differences in the reception of history and heritage between the western sectors of Berlin and East Berlin after 1945 also became apparent. The text owes essential impulses to the recent Action Group ‘Integrated and Comprehensive Approaches for Dissonant Heritage in Europe’ of the ‘Partnership Culture and Cultural Heritage’ within the framework of the ‘Urban Agenda of the EU’ and is intended as a contribution to the current discussion at the II International PAMEFRAN Conference “Heritege and conflict Debate on the management and treatment of a multifaceted object”. The article opposes a politically motivated iconoclasm of symbols and monuments of autocratic systems of the past and advocates for their critical reappraisal and commentaryin situ.

The Shadow of the Film Monuments. Canonisation of the Czechoslovak New Wave as a Discursive Operation

The Czechoslovak New Wave represents an important chapter in the history of Central European cinema, and the body of films produced in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s is deservedly considered part of both national and European cultural heritage. This essay draws on the notion that the canon of the New Wave has established itself as a myth, obscuring the visibility of the newer Czech film production. Searching for the roots of the discursive nature of this canon, it finds it in a synergy of two opposing cultures. While the conservative communist power compiled the index of films associated with the 1960s reform process in order to stop their circulation, the dissenting community incorporated the same canon as a part of its collision with that power, a collision which manifested among others in the field of language. The transition of Czech cinema in the 1990s brought the Czechoslovak New Wave back to the spotlight, yet previous rhetorical use of this canon deepened the confusion between the discursive and the aesthetic and affirmed it as an unequivocal national monument. Exploring these tensions, I conclude that a new reading of the Czechoslovak New Wave heritage might be needed to make way for newer canons of films experimenting with different aesthetic and production approaches.

Intercultural Awareness Through Indonesian Gastronomy with European Flavours in The Midst of Plurilingualism Political Framework

In the midst of a multicultural society, cultivating intercultural awareness is a part of the political framework of plurilingualism, as European linguistic policy is based on a multilingual phenomenon. Plurilingualism is a renewal of the individual's ability to communicate on paralinguistic and paratextual aspects and develop intercultural skills, likely their cultural roots. This political hegemony unwittingly developed massively before the infiltration of French language in Indonesia through flavour contact in the form of gastro diplomacy. Starting with the European cookery heritage in Indonesia, this study aims to explore the presence of European flavours in culinary development to set up the attitudes of respect and understanding of the uniqueness of language culture based on French language learners. In addition to intercultural communication skills, this term contains nationalism as a political goal of plurilingualism, which ideally can eliminate cultural contestation. Therefore, the research methods are document studies, observations, and questionnaires, which aim to explore the existence of intercultural flavours as a form of cultural contact, authenticate cultural knowledge, build intercultural awareness, and diplomatic efforts from French language didactic. The result is a significant change, increasing interest in learning French, and also the development of national identity through knowledge, skills and behaviour as a part of intercultural awareness with authentic language materials.

Wspólnotowość jako wartość edukacji estetycznej w tradycji europejskiej

This paper discusses the issue of the sense of community as a value of the aesthetic education theory. The topic refers to the still ongoing search for permanent references to the European cultural heritage. The author poses a question about how inspiring and permanent are the traditions of the European sense of community created by Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Read. They both proposed a visionary perspective of the “aesthetic state” or “saving the humankind through art”. They worked in different historical eras but they both made an attempt to overcome the unfavorable civilizational conditions of their times. They created a different but related category of describing the sense of community, i.e. the “I-We” co-dependency. This paper contains the analysis of their views with the emphasis on the variety of accents in the understanding of the sense of community. In the summary, the author discusses the relevance of their ideas.

Adapting European heritage: Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005) and Omar Victor Diop’s Project Diaspora (2014)

ABSTRACT This article considers how the novel Soul Tourists (2005) by the British writer Bernardine Evaristo and the series Project Diaspora: a Journey through Time (2014) by the Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop critically intervene in and contribute to ongoing conversations about how ‘Europe’ is conceptualized. By adapting historical narratives and by playing with genre conventions, Evaristo and Diop shed light on historical perspectives and interpretations of Europe that have remained obscured. Most important with regard to the European public sphere, Soul Tourists and Project Diaspora adapt the category of ‘European heritage’. Artistically re-narrating the stories of Black people in Europe, Evaristo and Diop establish geographical and historical dialogues between Europe, Africa and the African Diaspora that re-write European heritage and that deconstruct the prevailing narrative of Europe as White. While their works could be said to ‘Africanize’ the categories of ‘European heritage’ and ‘Europe’, ‘Afro(euro)pean heritage’ and ‘Afroeurope’ are not the end-goal. Rather, by adapting categories that many Europeans continue to conceive as universals, Evaristo and Diop reveal received understandings of these categories as racialized particulars.

‘They abscond’: migration and coloniality in the contemporary conjuncture in Europe*

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the public sphere in Europe has become increasingly ‘culturalised’. Ideas about European heritage and culture have been used as a way to exclude people, notably migrants. My intention is to understand how at this time the cultural, political and economic are articulated together in Europe. I do so by examining the trope of ‘migrants absconding’ which is a prominent concern of the European Commission, as reflected in legal innovations and in media and far-right generated moral panics. By focusing on the social, political and legal relations around ‘migrants absconding’, I read from the ground up value regimes that animate and organize the European social formation at this conjuncture. This social formation is made up of articulations along political, economic and cultural grounds, which allow for incorporating the themes of populist far right groups into the very core of the European Commission. This fosters and legitimizes value regimes bent on culturally cheapening migrants as incompatible, deviant or dangerous outsiders with a very limited right to social and political participation, much less an independent social reproduction. This then allows for their labour power to be also cheapened, super exploited and disposable. This type of value regime centring on culturally cheapening people deemed outsiders, controlling their social reproduction, and making them available as cheap labour was also a key feature of the colonial social formations of the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries, where concerns about ‘natives’ absconding tended to also be prominent. That there is something colonial about the contemporary conjuncture may be seen in the cultural-political-economic articulations dominant in Europe and their cultural and economic cheapening strategies. To abscond is to leave value regimes. Absconding is transgressive, it is to deliberately step out of place, and to attempt to pursue an independent social reproduction.

МУЗИЧНА ПЕДАГОГІКА ПІВНІЧНОЇ АМЕРИКИ ЗА ЧАСІВ КОЛОНІЗАЦІЇ

The article dwells upon the evolution of music pedagogy in North America during the Colonial period. The study aims to highlight the development of music education in North America during this time and to identify the significant influences of European cultural heritage on the music pedagogy of the Indigenous peoples of North America. The authors have employed the following methods: systematization, analysis, and synthesis of historical, scientific, and pedagogical sources to generalize information on the outlined topic; historical and genetic analysis examines the impact of European notation systems and teaching methods on Indigenous traditions as well as the changes that occurred in musical practices during colonization; comparative analysis compares European and Indigenous musical traditions, particularly in the areas of vocal performance and pedagogical methods; cultural and contextual analysis addresses the social, cultural, and other conditions that accompanied music pedagogy during the Colonial period. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of how European musical practices were introduced and adapted within the colonial context, reflecting the complexities of cultural exchange and adaptation. The study focuses on transmitting European musical traditions, including instructional methods, notation systems, and musical repertoire, as they encountered the diverse cultural landscape of the American colonies. The article examines the role of music in colonial education, emphasizing its significance in religious instruction and socialization. It shows how hymns, psalms, and folk tunes were used in schools and religious settings to impart moral values and foster community cohesion. The impact of various European settlers is analyzed to reveal how their musical heritage influenced local pedagogical practices. Challenges such as geographical isolation, limited resources, and interactions with Indigenous populations are discussed to understand the adaptability of European music education practices in the colonial environment. The article also highlights the contributions of colonial educators and musicians who played a crucial role in shaping the musical education landscape. Future research prospects involve exploring contemporary educational practices in the context of historical influences and cultural changes, which will contribute to developing new approaches to music education that consider the diversity of cultural and social contexts. Key words: music pedagogy of North America, Colonial period, Indigenous peoples, European colonizers, musical traditions, cultural conflicts, assimilation, historical influence.

New Technologies in the Processing of European Digital Heritage and Their Application to the Historical Images of the American Flight of 1944 Over Spain

New Technologies in the Processing of European Digital Heritage and Their Application to the Historical Images of the American Flight of 1944 Over Spain

Shaping the Future of Endangered and Low-Resource Languages---Our Role in the Age of LLMs: A Keynote at ECIR 2024

Isidore of Seville is credited with the adage that it is language that gives birth to a people, and not the other way around , underlining the profound role played by language in the formation of cultural and social identity. Today, of the more than 7100 languages listed, a significant number are endangered. Since the 1970s, linguists, information seekers and enthusiasts have helped develop digital resources and automatic tools to support a wide range of languages, including endangered ones. The advent of Large Language Model (LLM) technologies holds both promise and peril. They offer unprecedented possibilities for the translation and generation of content and resources, key elements in the preservation and revitalisation of languages. They also present threat of homogenisation, cultural oversimplification and the further marginalisation of already vulnerable languages. The talk this paper is based on has proposed an initiatory journey, exploring the potential paths and partnerships between technology and tradition, with a particular focus on the Occitan language. Occitan is a language from Southern France, parts of Spain and Italy that played a major cultural and economic role, particularly in the Middle Ages. It is now endangered according to UNESCO. The talk critically has examined how human expertise and artificial intelligence can work together to offer hope for preserving the linguistic diversity that forms the foundation of our global and especially our European heritage while addressing some of the ethical and practical challenges that accompany the use of these powerful technologies. This paper is based on the keynote I gave at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024). As an alternative to reading this paper, a video talk is available online. 1 Date: 26 March 2024.

Hearing loss is not associated with risk of Parkinson's disease: A Mendelian randomization study

PurposeA few observational studies have indicated that Parkinson's disease (PD) risk may be higher in those with hearing loss, but the two's causal relationship is yet unknown. Using Mendelian randomization (MR) methods, this study sought to explore the causal link between hearing loss and the risk of PD. MethodsWe identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) linked to hearing loss (P-value<5E-08) in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) included 323,978 people from the UK Biobank. The summary data for PD in the discovery group came from a GWAS meta-analysis of 33,647 cases and 449,056 healthy participants of European descent. Using summary data from the aforementioned GWAS of PD (N = 33,647) and hearing loss (N = 323,978), we carried out a two-sample MR study. As validation groups, two separate PD GWAS studies were used. Inverse variance weighting (IVW) was utilized in the principal MR analysis. For our findings to be reliable, further analyses were carried out with the Cochran's Q test, MR-Egger intercept, and leave-one-out analysis. In addition, we assessed the causal link between various forms of hearing loss and PD using the IVW approach. ResultsTwenty-two SNPs with genome-wide significance linked to hearing loss were used as instrumental factors. In the discovery dataset, we failed to detect a causal relationship between hearing loss and PD (OR = 1.297; 95 % CI = 0.420–4.007; P-value = 0.651). The findings of other methods agreed with the IVW method. The results were robust under sensitivity analyses. Furthermore, the above findings were confirmed in two validation PD datasets. Additionally, no causal correlation was found between genetic prediction of four different types of hearing loss and PD (conductive hearing loss, IVW: OR = 1.058, 95%CI = 0.988–1.133, P-value = 0.108; sudden idiopathic hearing loss, IVW: OR = 0.936, 95%CI = 0.863–1.016, P-value = 0.113; mixed conductive and sensorineural hearing loss, IVW: OR = 0.963, 95%CI = 0.878–1.058, P-value = 0.436; sensorineural hearing loss, IVW: OR = 1.050, 95%CI = 0.948–1.161, P-value = 0.354). ConclusionIn those of European heritage, our investigation revealed no causal link between hearing loss and PD risk.