Imaginative Construction Research Articles

Acculturation and imagination as social practice in Heremakono

This article investigates the relationship between contemporary global cultural flows of media and migration in West Africa, and the perceived effects of acculturation on the African imagination. Considering acculturation as a key concern of Sissako's film Heremakono/En attendant le bonheur/Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002), the article explores how the construction of an African imagination is complicated by the way in which West African cinema itself works within a transnational milieu. The article firstly considers the film's representation of the disjunctures of the global economy and its negative affects on cultures and peoples of the global South. However, it continues by contextualizing the film's mode of production as part of a system that works from a Franco-Parisian centre, repositioning the film within a broader transnational milieu and complicating reading the film through a North/South cultural dichotomy.

Visuality, Hybridity, and Colonialism: Imagining Ethiopia Through Colonial Aviation, 1935–1940

This article examines the discursive construction of visual imaginations of Italian East Africa through visual and textual materials associated with fascist colonial civil aviation from 1934 through 1940. Analysis of materials produced by Ala Littoria, the fascist regime's main airline, reveals discursive strands and themes that contributed to the deeply modern depiction of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and Eritrea (the constituent colonies within Italian East Africa) as “natural” landscapes that could be accessed, consumed, and dominated through the air, and in particular through aviation technology and the institution of a colonial civil aviation network in East Africa. Aviation was as a hybrid technology that contributed to the discursive, and therefore material, imaginative construction of Italian East Africa through aviation's material and technological basis as well as its visual representation.

Something More than Straws and Sticks and Bits of Coloured Paper: English at Hackney Downs (formerly The Grocers' Company's School), 1876–1881

Herbert Courthope Bowen was a progressive spirit in English teaching during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Ideas about the role of activity in the development of the child – ideas usually associated with progressive teaching in the 1960s and 1970s – may be found in Bowen's published papers. In connection with the time that Bowen was Head Master of a London secondary school, I explain what turned on the amount of Latin in the school curriculum, why Latin mattered so much at the time and why English teaching at Grocers' (Hackney Downs) where Bowen taught, was so controversial. Bowen published a series of remarkable papers on key themes. At the core of all these writings lies his passionate interest in the psychological development of the individual child. From Froebel Bowen gained a rich conception of the productivity of mind as well as a sense of children's individual worth and dignity. I argue the case that his writings deserve revisiting as pivotal contributions to a theory of English that has a strong psychological component. Bowen acted as a conduit for a rich legacy of largely German ideas about self‐cultivation (Bildung). His emphasis on ‘self‐activity’, ‘creativity’ and the ‘constructive imagination’ prefigures the working out of principles usually associated with progressive English Teaching in the post‐war period, such as ‘personal growth’. Indeed, many of the presuppositions, norms and assumptions of progressive educators were shaped by the ideas I discuss. By historicising them, and stripping them of their aura, I envisage opening up fresh possibilities for interrogation and critique.

Uma discussão epistemológica sobre a imaginação científica: a construção do conhecimento através da visão de Albert Einstein

Este trabalho tem como objetivo discutir o papel da imaginação científica na construção do conhecimento. O estudo teórico foi realizado em duas etapas. Primeiramente, discutimos a relação da racionalidade com a imaginação na epistemologia contemporânea. A discussão teórica é complementada com uma análise histórica do pensamento de Albert Einstein, para tornar possível a apresentação de uma visão de construção do conhecimento científico que considere e valorize o papel da imaginação.

“Ridden with a Welsh Goat”: Parson Evans' Correction of Windsor's English Condition

The early modern English theater engaged its diverse audiences in the imaginative construction of a cohesive British community from a wealth of regional, religious, ethnic, class and gender cohorts. Spurred on by the demands of numerous masters, including the highly competitive marketplace, playhouses produced myriad narratives that rehearsed and broadcast innovative variations on social cohesion and cultural identity. This essay explores how ideologies of ethnicity and gender in The Merry Wives of Windsor divide and structure community and more particularly how the strategic use of ethnic constructs, especially as marked by dialect in the Welsh parson Hugh Evans, helps to create, defend, and reproduce the distinctive English character of Windsor. This process “logically” justifies the imposition of a hierarchical social structure that will include the Welsh and, indeed, rely on them, but resist admitting them as equals in a newly-imagined and substantially anglicized British nation. (A. M. O.)

Research and experimentation with technical textiles

This paper outlines the work being done by the Politecnico di Milano’s SPACE (Experimental process for architecture and life cycle of building products) research unit on the theme of textile architecture. It describes the major research done by the unit, giving a glimpse of the strategies put in place by the university and the European Union for pure research, applied research and even experimental design. The essay also presents some thoughts on the impact of technological research on a project and on the ability of technologist to contribute to the design process with ‘constructive imagination’ and with ‘non-routine skills’, encouraging cooperation between specialized areas and the achievement of goals using non-conflicting methods.

Antipodeanism, and Charles Dickens’ Imperialist Undertakings in Depicting Australia

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was, at once, the most prominent English novelist of the mid-nineteenth century and one of the most industrious workers in facilitating the emigration of the British lower classes to colonial Australia. Throughout his novelistic and journalistic depictions of Australia, Dickens draws upon the textual tradition of the imaginary construction of the southern continent. His writings, therefore, function as complementing pieces for the discursive puzzle of ‘Australia’ and ‘the Australian’ from the Empire’s point of view. I will argue that Dickens’ picture of Australia echoes the tenets of the centuries-held discourse of Antipodeanism. Under the guise of an impartial outlook, Dickens’ writings about the southern colony act as a hegemonic drive to ease the dissemination of imperialist ideas, hence the material domination of Australia. The power-directed aspect of these items, however, remains hidden under a philanthropic veneer. In addition, economic and spatial availability of Australia could not be justified in Dickens’ words, unless the core binarist system of representing the colony in relation to the metropolis is maintained.

Domesticated Wilderness in Two Norwegian Children's Classics

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES two literary works that were key in die marketing of Norwegian cultural identity at home and abroad in the early twentieth century, Hans Aanrud's Sidsel Sidserk (1903; Sidsel Longskirt) and Marie Hamsun's Bygdeborn hjemme ogpaa Soteren (1924; Village Children at Home and at the Shieling). Both texts express socially conservative values that die authors link explicidy to a sense of place identity, and both can be read as implicit commentary on Norwegian national identity construction in die face of modernity. The works are written for children and have a clear didactic purpose, which is to illustrate the superiority of a hierarchical agrarian society for the personal development of children. It is not difficult to identity the conservative and even reactionary ideological positions taken by Aanrud and Hamsun. The aim of this analysis is to map out the ways in which the topographies of the novels function in the imaginative construction of Norway as a nation during a period of dramatic domestic and international political change. Using Homi K. Bhabha's notions of national and counter- narratives, I demonstrate how these two writers use the same setting, namely the seter or high mountain dairy, to construct visions of a metaphorical home for the children of Norway. Written while Norway was still the lesser party in a political union with Sweden, Aanrud's novel can be read as a counter-narrative that depicts the Norwegian peasant population as only pardy subjugated by Swedish authority and that opens up possibilities for covert nationalist and anti-Swedish sentiment. Hamsun's novel, on the other hand, uses the same tropes two decades later as a reactionary response to increasing modernization and democratization. Aanrud thus uses the seter location performatively while Hamsun employs it pedagogically. Aanrud's novel appeared just two years before die union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved. It was quickly translated into many languages and printed in several editions. Jarle Bondevik and Olav Solberg comment that Den vesle jenten fra plassen hoyt oppe i Ha er blitt en representam for Norge, hva enten hun na heter Langsierk, Longskirt eller Langrockchen. Mange er de barn i fremmede land og fjerne verdensdeler som her har fatt sitt forste imitrykk av Norge (58) [The little girl from up in die meadow has become a representative of Norway, whether she is named Langsxrk, Longskirt, or Langrochen. There are many children in foreign countries and far away parts of the world who received their first impression of Norway here]. The novel is set in the 1870s (Svendsen 33), and tiiough written during a time of dramatic modernization, Aanrud depicts an idealized pre-industrial rural community with almost no reference to the societal changes that were underway in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hamsun's novel is the first in a series of five books1 about the bygdeborn [village children], a family of two boys and two girls who live with their parents on a small farm called Langerud, and it too is only loosely historically anchored. The series appears to be set in the 1920s though some aspects of die books reflect die author's childhood in the 1880s. The series was translated into German beginning in 1928 with Julius Sandmeier and Sophie Angermann's Die Langerudkinder.2 The entire Hamsun Family had close ties not only to Germany, but also to the highest circles within die German National Socialist regime starting in 1936 (Kolloen 198). Hamsun went on a five-week speaking tour through Germany in November and December of 1939 where she combined readings of her own and Knut Hamsun's literary texts along with pro-Nazi propaganda: Naziideologene, som haddc vxrt beskjeftiget med a gi turneen et riktig politisk innhold, hadde all grunn til viere fornoyd med Marie Hamsuns innsats (Kolloen 203) [The Nazi ideologues, who had been concerned about giving the tour the proper political substance, had every reason to be satisfied with Marie Hamsun's contribution]. …

Property-driven Urban Change in Post-Socialist Shanghai: Reading the Television Series Woju

In late 2009, the television series Woju ([Formula: see text]) received extremely high audience ratings in major Chinese cities. Its visual narratives engage the public and comment on social developments by presenting detailed pictures of urban change in Shanghai and the everyday lives of a range of urban characters who are involved in and affected by the urban-restructuring process and represent three distinct social groups: “white-collar” immigrants, low-income local residents, and powerful officials. By analysing the visual narratives of these characters, this article highlights the loss of the city's historical identity and shows how the reorganization of urban space translates into a reallocation of resources, power and prestige among the social groups. The article also shows that Woju represents a new development in literary and television production in the age of the Internet and globalization; its imaginative construct of the city was based on transnational and virtual rather than local and neighbourhood experience. This also testifies to the loss of the city's established identity in cultural production.

Addressing Alcohol in the Context of Elementary Education: the Social Imaginary Reconstruction of Teachers

Alcohol consumption is considered a global problem, principally affecting adolescents. In this context, the aims of this study were to identify the pedagogical strategies developed by elementary school teachers in the approach to alcohol with adolescents; To analyze the attitudes, beliefs, values and practices of the elementary school teachers in relation to alcohol; To discuss the repercussions of the attitudes, beliefs, values and practices of the teachers about alcohol in the dialogue with the students and in the implementation of the strategies referred to above. This was a qualitative study performed with 26 teachers of a Rio de Janeiro public school. The data were analyzed through thematic content analysis and grouped into 5 categories. It was concluded that social imaginary and attitudinal construction of the teachers directly interferes with the personal and professional practice and has repercussions in the quotidian life of the students. It was noted that the focus should not just be on the students, but on the relationship of the teachers with their pedagogic strategies.

The Word in the World

This article addresses the topic “the Word in the World” by seeking to clarify both concepts in the light of biblical usage and the present situation of believers. While “the world” features quite prominently in the New Testament, the understanding of the motif throughout Christian history has reflected more the Church's experience with its socio-cultural and religious context rather than the New Testament usage. The largely defensive attitude to the world that was the stance of the Roman church in reaction to the Reformation and Enlightenment was radically challenged at the Second Vatican Council, offering the chance to re-orientate the Church towards an understanding of “world” in a less objectified sense as an imaginative construction of reality. From the New Testament, notably the Gospel of John, at least four understandings of “world” emerge, of which only one is negative. The Synoptic tradition, in particular the parable of the Weeds among the Wheat, addresses the issue of evil by indicating the world as one reality in which good and evil are pervasively intertwined such that believers can never isolate themselves over against or out of the world but must contest, with the power of the Gospel, the destructive dynamics at work in God's good world. The Word, which believers are commissioned to proclaim to the world, is not first and foremost a message but Jesus, the Word Incarnate, who is both with us and one us, while also the locus and instrument of God's salvific work within the world. The particularity of the Incarnation, especially as the Wisdom of God incarnate, rather than a scandal or limitation in a pluralistic world, can open us up to the infinite mystery of God mediated by all religious traditions. The Incarnation also designates our humanity as the locus of God's Presence in the world, enabling believers, as Christ's body, to be the Word of God resounding in the world.

IMAGENS NA HISTÓRIA: IMAGINAÇÃO HISTÓRICA E HISTÓRIA VISUAL

Este ensaio tem como objetivo discutir as relações entre a imaginação histórica (KRAMER, 1992; BANN, 1994; WHITE, 2001) e a história visual (MENEZES, 2003), a partir do uso da imagem como objeto para o estudo da História. A imagem neste trabalho será encarada como texto visual, levando-se em conta o papel da imaginação na construção da narrativa e a contextualização das relações estabelecidas a partir, para e pela obra visual. Examinamos algumas concepções de cultura visual (HALL, 1996; HERNÁNDEZ, 2000; MITCHELL, 2001) na sua relação com a história, buscando as possíveis contribuições para a área de artes.

Introduction: Paul Ricoeur: Memory, Identity, Ethics

This special section on the later work of Paul Ricoeur is an attempt to examine the fruitfulness of that work for the social sciences. Of particular interest are his theorization and application of the notions of memory, identity, justice, and the relation to the other to political and ethical problems in the present. For example, his discourse links up the question of memory with that of justice and the problem of constructing new polities which can be considered just. To do this, he introduces the concepts of ‘translation ethos’, the ‘exchange of memories’ and ‘non-forgetful forgiveness’ in order to examine the problem of the conditions for the imaginary construction of political entities in which dialogue can take place between interlocutors with different, maybe conflicting, interests and historical locations, and thus with different senses of belonging and identities. His philosophical apparatus is shown to have particular salience for the analysis of contemporary society.

A Transnational Poetics (review)

Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. $29 he. XVM + 221 pp.Studies in modernism continue to complicate and redraw horizons of a period once characterized by a few and Eurocentric literary histories. Jahan Ramazani's book, A Transnational Poetics, neither dismisses nor rehearses such well-known accounts of era. Rather, Ramazani seeks to historicize porous and multi-directional channels between Euromodernism and postcolonial poetry, fashioning approaches to some usual suspects - most notablyT.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, and W.B.Yeats - and laying historical and critical groundwork for important, but otherwise ignored, Third World poets such as Christopher Okigbo, WoIe Soyinka, Okot p' Bitek, and Louise Bennett.The first two chapters draw on work by Arjun Appardurai, Kwanie Anthony Appiah, and to argue that too often modernist and postcolonial literature is read through a monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to alterities within and without, or [seen as] a self-contained civilizational unit in perpetual conflict with others (12). third and fourth chapters are thematically directed, focusing on traveling and of mourning, using these tropics to cut across and between East/West and North/South hemispheres. second half of book pivots toward latter, though often recalling thematic anxieties and technical features of Anglophone avant-garde. final chapter returns to London to theorize ways in which black British poetry fashions a translocal re-imagining of imperial center.Ramazani explores those terms that mark common and sometimes elusive capital of literary scholarship - including postcoloniality, hybridity, migration, and diaspora - to reflect on way in which these categories both enable and, in some cases, inhibit a rethinking of modernism within a larger global framework. book's ultimate bane and boon is its oscillation between theory and practice; neither a wide theory of modernism and modernity, nor a specifically developed historical study, readers seeking either one or other will, perhaps, be disappointed, since book seems as concerned with refining and complicating critical habits of reading as it does with building a case for transnational histories. Revisiting Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, Ramazani focuses on a poetics of enmeshment, a keyword of this study, to think about way texts encode and generate relationships across and between very borders that have come to demarcate the West from the Rest. So, Ramazani presses, how might field change if the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and poems... were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imaginative constructs? (24). National and generic categorizations might function as starting points for each of Ramazani's chapters, but A Transnational Poetici consistently rewrites very critical frames that have come to naturalize these starting points. For Ramazani, enmeshment means contending with both roots and routes that become, literally and metaphorically, threaded throughout a text both in terms of production and critical reception.Questioning tentative and interstitial relationship between local and global, Ramazani invokes famed Homeric line from Walcott's The Schooner Flight Shabine's incantatory I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation. Pointing out that in a critical framework which positions and interprets writers through lens of nationality and ethnicity, such categories often fail to capture fully way Shabine's particular nobody contains multitudes, Ramazani situates Shabine in a much larger tropics of literary history. A Transnational Poetics frequently examines how many postcolonial writers claim, indigenize, and ironically make new very aesthetic programs which have otherwise seemed part and parcel of colonial conquest. …

Funkce rozumu a Proces a realita

This text concentrates on the investigation of relations of two books of Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality and Function of Reason, both being published in the same year 1929. Author of the text first exhibit Whitehead’s conception of method of speculative philosophy as it is presented on the initial pages of Process and Reality. He points out at Whitehead’s rejection of mathematical axiomatic method and position of rigid empiricism as appropriate methods of construction of philosophical scheme and shows Whitehead’s own philosophical method: method of descriptive generalization, which can be shortly summed up as imaginative construction of basic speculative scheme which is based on former empirical observations and is subsequently tested by new empirical observations. It is shown that Whitehead does not presents in Process and Reality the process of imaginative construction of his philosophy. One phase of Whitehead’s method of descriptive generalization is therefore missing in Process and Reality. It is argued that this missing phase of descriptive generalization can be found in Function of Reason.

Learning as lack: Individual learning in organizations as an empowering encounter with failed imaginary constructions of the self

The purpose of this article is to draw on psychoanalytic, particularly Lacanian, theorizing, to examine individual learning as an empowering encounter with fundamental lack. Specifically, I explore learning as an imaginary construction of the learner’s self that invariably fails thereby providing opportunities for the experience of empowerment and liberation. I discuss the implications this has for how we conceptualize and experience learning as an emancipatory discourse in organizations.

The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (review)

FLESLER, Daniela. The Return of Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008. viii + 246 pp.With The Return of Daniela Flesler has written foundational text of contemporary Spanish immigration studies, particularly regarding how Spaniards negotiate past and present representations of Moroccan immigrants. This is thoroughly researched, convincingly argued, groundbreaking scholarship that dialogues comfortably with current trends in Hispanism and those in colonial, postcolonial, and early modern and contemporary race studies. In this remarkable book, Flesler argues that there is a relation between how contemporary Spaniards imagine and relate to waves of North African migrations from 711 to seventeenth century and how they deal with their current relation to economic immigrants from Morocco. Having conflated all Muslim and North African migrants conveniently flattened category of menacing, invading Moor, Spaniards justify their rejection of contemporary and Muslim immigrants by appealing to an imaginary construction of their perceived radical, irreconcilable cultural differences from Spain fully integrated European Union and functioning as guardian of infelicitously called fortressEurope. These supposed differences must be emphasized because, of all groups of contemporary immigrants looking for work and a better life in Peninsula, one group most directly implicated in question of Spanish identity in relationship to Africa (3). Spaniards see not as guests that must be welcomed, but as former medieval hosts that were driven from their land and have come to reclaim what was theirs (3). Looked at from this perspective and taking consideration many phenotypical similarities between North Africans and Spaniards, Moroccans turn a 'problem' . . . not because of their cultural differences, . . . but because . . . they are not different enough (3; Flesler's emphasis).The book is divided five chapters, with an extensive introduction and a short but very helpful conclusion. Chaper 1, Difference Within and Without: Negotiating European, National, and Regional Identities in argues that, in joining European Economic Community in 1986, Spain gained economic, political, and psychological advantages. Spain could stop thinking of itself as one of Europe's others to become, instead, an equal partner in European modernization project. In this sense, immigration from Morocco reaffirms how Spain belongs to Europe at same time that it highlights internal contradictions, tensions, and ruptures of Spanish racial formation (11). The most compelling aspect of this chapter is its second part, where Flesler analyzes the intersection of immigration debates and politics of national and regional identities, in context of 'Europe of Regions' (11). She teases out complex anxieties that Catalonia, for example, experiences when negotiating presence of new immigrants who must choose whether to learn Catalan or Spanish, thus emphasizing Catalonia's own difficulties in shaping its cultural identity vis-a-vis Spanish State.Chapter 2, Ghostly Returns: The 'Loss' of Spain, Invading 'Moor,' and Contemporary Moroccan Immigrant, traces transformation of contemporary Moroccan immigrant into threatening figure of medieval (male) Moorish invader (12). Effectively dialoguing with current hauntology studies about Spain's repressed historical memories (Jo Labanyi, Joan Ramon Resina) influenced by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, Flesler demonstrates how the figure of 'Moor' continues to haunt Spanish imaginary, producing slippages between past and present and textually constructing as Moorish ghosts (12). Flesler's best contribution in this chapter is how, through painstaking literary and historical research, she separates myth from textual fact in mapping many rewritings of foundational stories of Don Rodrigo, Count Julian and his daughter La Cava Florinda, and of Don Pelayo as initiator of Reconquest of Spain from Moors. …

O PAPEL DO SUJEITO EM UMA ENCICLOPÉDIA ONLINE

This text seeks to review the notion of subject from the perspective of discourse analysis to investigate the established designation for those who edit the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. For this, other important notions are rescued, such as: image, discoursive place, meaning and memory. Going through the formulations components of the encyclopedia, we can see the slides of meaning and the game of powers between the speeches, been emerging in the subjectivity of speech through an idealization. The Wikipedian would be, then, the correspondent at the plan of designation of an imaginary construction of the figure of an internet user as the one who applies all web resources and who is free to express himself, exchange with other internet users and who is an encyclopedist inside the virtual universe.

Self-Othering in German Orientalism: The Case of Friedrich Schlegel

In the 1960s and '70s, a number of scholars began to pay careful attention to German cultural constructions of the in the literary and philosophical works from the Baroque period to Romanticism. (1) However, with the publication of Orientalism (1978), Edward Said's analytical framework became, for good or ill, the dominant scholarly paradigm. In the wake of the appearance of Said's volume, a decade or more passed before the scholarship on popular or academic Orientalism in Germany attempted to move beyond what Said had intitially said on the subject. (As we shall see, Said himself had little else to say on the topic in the years following the first appearance of Orientalism.) The purpose of this essay is to consider the exceptionalism of German Orientalism, one that employs imagery of the Orient for very different purposes than the French and British variants. The central question under consideration regards the utility of this imagery in the tradition of German Orientalism. The construction of the idea of the Orient in German thought and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I argue, did not allow German thinkers to identify with the dominant powers of western Europe, but rather with the Oriental Other. In other words, they were engaged in a process of I do not wish to suggest that the German identification with the Asian had any real substance beyond the imaginative geography (to use a Saidian phrase), or that it was necessarily less nefarious than the images of the Orient constructed by their French and British counterparts. One hesitates to describe German Orientalism as being special in light of the imposing tradition of arguments over the Sonderweg thesis (though, obviously, the choice of this adjective is not unintentional). While I contend that German Orientalism was, in a significant way, special, it would be going too far to say that it was entirely unique. New light might be shed on a different variant of Orientalism by comparing the German phenomenon with Irish Orientalism, as described by Joseph Lennon: [t]o study Irish writings on the Orient ... is also to study Irish cultural narratives of antiquity, Celticism, and nation (xvii, xviii). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at least, the same could be said of German intellectuals and their writings on India--Celticism being easily replaced with Germanness--and for similar, though obviously far from identical, reasons. Before proceeding any further, it is perhaps best to provide an explanation of what is intended here by the term self-Othering. As we shall see, numerous German thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to establish a German national identity that they envisioned as oriental, in contrast to classical or occidental. The image of the Orient with which they identified was, of course, one of their own making. To argue that these German thinkers identified with the oriental victims of western imperialism is not to argue that they were, in reality, such victims. Nor is it to argue that this identification came as a result of any genuine engagement with or understanding of the Other with whom they sought to identify. Self-Othering, as it is described below, was a curious rhetorical strategy which involved two distinct forms or acts of Othering--imaginative constructions of the oriental with whom one could identify and the western imperial Other, against whom one was seeking to construct an identity. (2) Both the Indian and western European Others could be made to serve as the ideal mirrors for thinkers who wished to see themselves, and their country, at twice their natural size. As a rhetorical strategy, self-Othering has some noteworthy historical precedents in Michel de Montaigne's essay On Cannibals and Bartoleme de Las Casas's Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, both composed in the sixteenth century. …

Stereotypes and Emblems in the Construction of Social Imagination

This article develops two figures of the social imagination: the stereotype and the emblem. To start with we explore the notion of social imagination, principally from Emile Durkheim, Gaston Bachelard and Maurine Godelier. Secondly, the article deepens the two notions of stereotypes and emblems supported by the works of the historian Bronislaw Baczko and the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s. Throughout the paper, the theoretical aims are illustrated with reference to coal-mining memory and heritage in the north of France.