Construction Of Myth Research Articles

Cost Reduction through Relocation, or the Construction of Myths in Discourse

The findings of recent studies into relocation by German companies are puzzling: companies relocate because they are willing to cut costs, but entrepreneurs and managers seem to have failed to predict further and sometimes fatal costs associated with relocation. This paper sheds light on why relocation has become a general trend among German companies, despite those inefficiencies and costs. It points to the role of the discourse in creating the myth of relocation as a strategy to reduce costs. Discourse can in fact help to diffuse ideas independently of their empirical truth and give voice to influential actors who are able to induce isomorphic processes. In order to give an account of why companies' decisions to relocate have become so popular in Germany, regardless of their economic soundness, the paper draws on an analysis of German newspapers and business press that were published between January 1990 and July 2005.

Traumatized masculinity and American national identity in Hollywood's Gulf War

The main question of this article is how traumatic male subjectivity and American national identity are rendered explicitly in contemporary Hollywood war films, the latter through encounter with the enemy, who is inevitably figured as other. I deal with this question by referring to an emergent critical discourse surrounding the aesthetics and technologies (and politics/economics) involved in constructing millennial or 1990s American cinema; what Jon Lewis has described as the end of cinema. This form of cinema contains persistent themes of trauma, memory, nostalgia, endings, terminations, death and apocalyptic images. I use this and contemporary theorizations of masculinity and film in order to look at Hollywood Gulf War films such as Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick 1996) and The Jacket (John Maybury 2005). I argue that encounters with the usually abstract and obscured enemy appear to present a challenge to American dominance and paternalism, a challenge which has to be worked through and rebuffed if the film is to be successful in achieving what Marita Sturken has dubbed making way for the next war. Contemporary Hollywood cinema is crucial in this regard, since the conservative ideology of making way for the next war in order to reinforce and fortify US foreign policy, becomes fraught with ambiguities. I also argue that contemporary war films which engage with recent US foreign policy exhibit many slippages and imbrications regarding identity and memory, and hence national identity is formulated in an inter-subjective and inter-relational manner. The value of this exploration is that it shows how recent US foreign policy is worked through in the context of contemporary cinema, and how American national identity is founded upon mythical constructions of victimhood, perceived emasculation and the centralization of male crisis in representation.

Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795 – 1831

Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795 – 1831

Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present David Leheny (bio) Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C, 2006. 446 pages. $94.95, cloth; $25.95, paper. It seems unlikely that Japan’s 1990s will ever come in for the kind of sentimental, nostalgic treatment that director Yamazaki Takashi recently created [End Page 396] for Tokyo’s 1950s in his highly popular film Always—San-chōme no yūhi (Always: sunsets on Third Street). Japanese commentators seem inclined mostly to lament the decade, while politicians suggest that they have absorbed its lessons, turning it into an instructive hiccup between the miracle growth of the 1950s through the 1980s and the “beautiful country” (to use Abe Shinzō’s term) or the “tremendous Japan” (Asō Tarō’s) of the new millennium. As the authors in Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian’s new edited collection Japan after Japan indicate, the intellectual trends and social debates of 1990s Japan reflect the difficulty of grappling not only with the Heisei recession itself but also with the meaning of the “long postwar” that had preceded it. Although its thematic connections are occasionally perplexing and its stylistic choices may prevent it from reaching many of the scholars who would benefit from reading it, Japan after Japan is a vital piece of scholarship and an indispensable guide to the social debates emerging from 1990s Japan. Yoda’s two chapters are superb. Her introduction provides an overview of some of the more visible of the myriad social and cultural debates in millennial Japan, exploring the “return to the modern” among neoconservative and left-leaning Japanese intellectuals. Yoda, whose previous book examined modern tropes in the interpretation of Heian literature, deftly traces arguments by the likes of Miyadai Shinji, Asada Akira, Fukuda Kazuya, and Karatani Kōjin, showing that in particular the last three, despite their diverse and deeply informed theoretical projects, often revert to a flawed notion of a “duality between Japan and the world (now cast as global capitalism or the United States as its embodiment)” (p. 49). In her other chapter, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society,” Yoda focuses partly on the mythical construction and recessionary deployment of postwar Japan as a kind of miraculous if maternalistic economic machine, generating relatively egalitarian growth, fostering harmonious labor relations, and premised on a stable and fulfilling home life for the nuclear families of the large middle class. This image was exploitable by nationalists after the collapse of the economic bubble, decrying the kind of narcissism and weakness purportedly generated by maternal structures and proposing instead a tougher, more paternalistic role for the state. While she contextualizes Japanese maternalism within transnational patterns of industrial development, Yoda neatly engages and critiques Nihonjinron-esque claims of national distinctiveness, particularly Doi Takeo’s arguments in The Anatomy of Dependence (Kodansha International, 1973) and Kawai Hayao’s reformulation of Nakane Chie’s views of Japan as a vertical society. Both chapters by Yoda astutely conclude with notions of loss: the possible disappearance of the collective drive to create a “master narrative” of national striving or cosmopolitanism (and that a “return to modernity” can presumably resuscitate), or the loss of maternalism in the face of neoliberalism, though without providing much in the way of liberation. [End Page 397] Although the editors do not explicitly say so, many of the chapters seem to be paired in their thematic concerns or source material. Harootunian’s chapter—as convincing and thoughtful as Yoda’s—and J. Victor Koschmann’s excellent essay both discuss Katō Norihiro’s 1995 book Haisengo ron (Since defeat; Kōdansha, 1997). Harootunian notes that Katō’s description of Japanese “self-loathing” in an America-driven break with the prewar “resuscitate[s] a hidden authenticity,” an imagined, original communitarian ethic that is as appealing to right-wing ideologues as it is amenable to exploitation by political figures with fascist ambitions. Providing a first-rate example of history as critical intervention, he discusses Imamura Shōhei’s 1971 documentary Nippon sengoshi: Madamu Onboro no seikatsu (History...

Digital Whiteness, Primitive Blackness

This essay argues that cultural scripts, such as popular films and other forms of visual culture, have constructed a racial ideology about technology, especially in conceptualizations of the “digital divide.” By associating whiteness with “progress,” “technology,” and “civilization,” while situating blackness within a discourse of “nature,” “primitivism,” and pre-modernity, the digital divide amasses cultural and racial weight and highlights hostile interactions with digital technology among marginal groups. However, a growing corpus of work by digital artists of color and web 2.0 participants has exposed these mythic constructions by re-imagining blackness and womanhood beyond technological exclusion and surveillance.

La construction idéologique du passé agrigentin : Théron et les ossements de Minos

Maria Cruz Cardete del Olmo, The ideological construction of the Agrigentine past: Theron and the bones of Minos, DHA 34/1, 1008, 9-16. Abstract: In Agrigentum, borders function as areas of constant interaction : separating the Greeks from the indigenous populations and the Greeks from the other Greeks, they concur to set relations between them. Their significance legitimates the instrumentalization of beliefs as ideological justification of the territorial occupation. The mythical construction of the Agrigentum's past elaborated by Theron by means of the return of Minos' bones is taken as an example.

Canada Dry wiseguys at Apalachin: politics and the social construction of a crime problem

This essay contrasts what little has become known about the Apalachin meeting with the myth of organized crime in America emerging in its aftermath. Constructing a myth about crime essentially involves the manipulation of information. One of the fundamental techniques utilized in constructing the Mafia myth, drawn in part from events at Apalachin, was the creation of criminal stereotypes. Public officials and especially the media played up the image of the Italian wiseguy. Transforming the opinions of “experts” into incontrovertible facts was another common technique used by both the media and government officials. Most prominent in the Apalachin myth construction was the use of undocumented sources of authority. Among the various bodies investigating Apalachin, the McClellan Committee was especially guilty of masking its own preconceived opinions through the use of supposedly independent police sources. Yet a review of the hearing transcripts clearly demonstrates that Committee witnesses and investigators were called to confirm an already favored viewpoint.

Becoming Moustaki

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Moustaki is not alone in expressing his strong attachment to Alexandria. Writers including Lawrence Durrell, Constantin Cavafy, and Daniel Rondeau also express their nostalgia and affection for the city. 2. It should be mentioned that Egypt's official hostility to Zionism predated 1948. 3. Moustaki's mythical construction of the role of early settlers as harbingers of peace and idealism occults a number of important factors. Many have argued that Israel was war-like from its inception. Because they were fighting for their very existence against hostile forces bent on their destruction, they embraced a ruthless determination sometimes called the “Holocaust syndrome.” Moreover, Moustaki's representation overlooks the revisionist Zionism of groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang, which indulged in practices in the 1930s and 1940s that were far from peaceful or “ideal” in Moustaki's understanding of the term. 4. My relatives were among those imprisoned. 5. The number of Palestinian refugees in question is debated, but it is generally assessed at between 800,000 and 2,000,000. It is also generally conceded that about an equal number of Jews left or were driven from Muslim countries.

The Important Books: Children's Picture Books as Art and Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature David L. Russell (bio) Stanton, Joseph . The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow P, 2005. This slender volume consists of half a dozen essays—most published in some version elsewhere—on children's picture book writers and illustrators. The essays focus on specific books and specific artists—the works of Margaret Wise Brown, Arnold Lobel, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, William Joyce, and one chapter is devoted to Donald Hall and Barbara Cooney's Ox-Cart Man. As his title suggests, these are among the most important names in modern children's picture book illustration. In his brief introduction, Stanton writes that a picture book must appeal to both children and the parents who buy the books "in equal measure." He refers to the "marketplace circumstances that spur the ongoing development of the form" of the picture book and goes further to say that "[p]icture book writers and artists cannot afford to bore or mystify either parent or child" and that the very best picture books reach both audiences (2). However, on the following page he refers to the tepid adult reaction to Where the Wild Things Are in the face of the unbridled enthusiasm of the children. Here he argues that "children are capable of appreciating the greatness of a compelling original work more than many adults" (3). This seeming contradiction suggests, if nothing else, the complex nature of the picture book, and this is one of the themes of this collection. The individual essays themselves are lucid and at times insightful. Stanton is a critic who can speak with clarity and without becoming bogged down in specious critical jargon and ponderous literary theory. On the other hand, some may find that the brevity of the essays and of the book as a whole (it is under one hundred pages) prevents Stanton from thoroughly exploring any of his subjects. We learn a little about a half dozen writers and illustrators—and not really a lot about any of them. In his chapter on Margaret Wise Brown, Stanton focuses on her characters who are either runaway children or children alone in the world, from which he deduces that her interest is in the "rebellious aggressiveness" of the child. Stanton praises Brown for her lack of sentimentalism tempered by her belief in the interconnectedness between the parent and child. He relates an amusing anecdote about Brown who, when someone pointed out the seeming contradiction between her writing children's stories and hunting rabbits with hounds, remarked, "Well, I don't especially like children either. At least not as a group. I won't let anybody get away with anything just because he is little" (8). Stanton is at his most imaginative when discussing Goodnight Moon, in which is sees a mythical construction of the naming of the universe, not at its beginning, but at its ending. Although he does not make this connection, it is tempting to recall the [End Page 280] conclusion of Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. However, if the story is about the ending of the universe, what does that mean in the context of the child's bedtime tale? Stanton never explains. In the chapter on Arnold Lobel, Stanton compares the characters of Frog and Toad with the comedy team of Abbot and Costello, and refers to them as vaudevillian. But beyond the observation that in us all is a little of the fool and a little of the sage, Stanton has few insights, and he has surprisingly little to say about the illustrations—even though this entire study is presented as an examination of the picture book. A very brief chapter treats Donald Hall's The Ox-Cart Man, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, which he interestingly compares to a medieval book of hours in its expression of ordinary everyday life as it moves through the months of the year. He contends, quite convincingly, that this book is an ideal collaboration between poet and artist, the work of each enhancing the other. It is the quintessential picture book in that the union of the pictures and text...

The Modem Construction of Myth

The Modem Construction of Myth

Translating Terror

Starting with a reading of a translated text from an Islamist website, this essay looks at the underlying cultural and literary traditions that have influenced the translator's strategy. The author suggests that the horizon of expectation of the potential readership has been shaped by centuries of textual anxiety about Central Asia, a region perceived as a cradle of savagery and anti-modernity since the Middle Ages. From the creator of the C13th Mappa Mundi who added a note to the effect that all kinds of horrors were to be found in the region, through the age of the Tamburlaine, then through the Afghan wars that triggered the start of the Great Game to Umberto Eco's most recent novel similar negative representations of the region can be found. The veracity of traveller's accounts is mediated through the mythical construction that continues today in reporting on the region and in the language selected by translators. Underpinning the essay is the question posed by translator scholars concerning the ethics of acculturation as a textual strategy. The author argues that there are historical, extra-textual reasons that determine the choices available to translators in this context

News and Nuances of the Entrepreneurial Myth and Metaphor: Linguistic Games in Entrepreneurial Sense–Making and Sense–Giving

This article describes a social construction of entrepreneurship by exploring the constructionalist building blocks of communication, myth, and metaphor presented in a major British middle range broadsheet newspaper with no particular party political allegiance. We argue that the sense–making role of figurative language is important because of the inherent problems in defining and describing the entrepreneurial phenomena. Myth and metaphor in newspapers create an entrepreneurial appreciation that helps define our understanding of the world around us. The content analysis of articles published in this newspaper revealed images of male entrepreneurs as dynamic wolfish charmers, supernatural gurus, successful skyrockets or community saviors and corrupters. Finally, this article relates the temporal construction of myth and metaphor to the dynamics of enterprise culture.

Francis Phelan in Purgatory: William Kennedy's Catholic Imagination in Ironweed

A cradle Catholic born in 1928, William Kennedy says that he ceased long ago to give allegiance to the Church in formal or ritualistic (Nelson 221). When asked by interviewers about the influence of his Catholic upbringing and education on his work, however, he goes long way toward suggesting that much of what is distinctive in his worldview and his approach to fiction has been shaped definitively by his Irish-Catholic heritage. In an interview with Rudy Nelson, published in Image in 1994, he says that his religious education gave him the substructure of his life, a way of engaging the world, and he talks frequently throughout the published interviews about the ways in which Catholic doctrine, images, cultural practices, and habits of mind have gotten into my imagination and my language (221-22). While he doesn't look at it in the way [he] used to when [he] was kid, he tells another interviewer, he believes that Catholic theology has humanistic dimensions, great wisdom about how to achieve peace of mind in relationship to the unknown, the infinite. Maybe it's palliative [...]. At the same time, it's beautiful. It's as good as I see on the horizon. I don't need Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism--I've got the Sacred Heart Church in North (Quinn 85). Kennedy's keen, not to say obsessive, interest in rendering the particularities of historical Albany--especially of Irish-Catholic Albany between 1850 and 1960--makes attention to the of the Church in the lives of his characters supremely important. A writer who wants to bring to life the world and worldview of such characters cannot but be attentive to the presence of the Church, the influence of which historically has pervaded the domestic, social, and political lives of Albanians. Kennedy somewhat paradoxically connects this interest in novelistic verisimilitude with his famously mixed style, in which lyric flights of magic (a favorite word), fantasy, and surrealism are wont to break out in the midst of even the most starkly realistic or stylistically mundane passages: there must be, he says, surreal dimension in any society in which religion plays such dominant role (Quinn 82). Kennedy's Albany is world shaped historically and in the present by collective imaginative vision that regards the real world of sense perception as always open to the unaccountable and mysterious. His passages of magic, then, are part of commitment to render as fully as possible the world in which his characters actually live. In distinguishing the imaginative world of what he has called his best book,--Ironweed--from that of the first three (The Ink Truck, Legs, and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game), Kennedy emphasizes his interest in creating fictional worlds that make room for mystery. All four novels spring from his attempt to move beyond the ordinary realism and psychologism of mid-century American fiction into more capacious, more expansively rendered reality. The surreal, wacky, and hyperbolic comedy of the Ink Truck, he says, liberated him from the strictures of too materialist or naturalist vision, but was insufficiently grounded in reality, as if his imagination were always operating six inches off the (McCaffery 51). In and Billy Phelan, Kennedy worked to ground his vision in the historical reality of his subjects--the prohibition-era gangster lack Legs Diamond and the dark underside of Albany politics in which Billy Phelan finds himself entangled--while exploring simultaneously the continuing fascination such people and places hold as larger-than-life mythic constructions. The subject of both novels is to large extent the processes through which imagination shapes history, creating through the resources of story or myth super-reality that is somehow discovery of the true shape or inward significance of the real. In both novels, participant-narrator in the tradition of Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway allows Kennedy to move back and forth between the historical and the mythic, exploring, defining, blurring, and sometimes erasing the boundary between them. …

Joan of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship by Ann W. Astell (review)

Reviews Ann w. astell, Joan ofArc and SacrificialAuthorship. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 226. isbn: 0-268-03259-9 (cloth), $55. isbn: 0—268-03260-2 (paper), $25. Astell's probing inquiry into modern literary constructions ofJoan ofArc builds its case upon, as she puts it, 'the poet's ability to depart from historical reality, to transform its matter in the process ofimitating it, and thus to give the world itself new, mythic models and ideals.' Astell's book offers a broadly researched and profoundly considered analysis ofpost-Enlightenment portrayals ofJoan ofArc in vernacular literature ranging from poetry to biography to drama to film, from Schiller to Sackville-West to Shaw to Dreyer. In essence, Astell demonstrates that Joan of Arc evolves mythically from the 'historical record' ofa living saint ofFrench liberation to a mythic symbol ofsuffering and sacrifice for universal humanity. Innovatively applying René Girard's theory of sacred violence and scapegoating for the ritual reunification of conflicted communities, Astell narrates the mythic constructions ofJoan's sacrificial agency in modern contexts of ideological change, political turmoil and artistic inspiration. Astell argues that every new construction of Joan beyond the fifteenth-century historical record is 'inescapably autobiographical' and reflects the voices ofboth its own historical era and the private world of its author. Astell directly and fairly addresses her own voice as author as well—a Catholic scholar and lifelong devotee of St. Joan. At various points, Astell objects toJoan's 'de-Christianization' by modern humanist thinkers. However, she goes on to reflect lucidly upon the ways in which Joan has been truly a 'catholic' rather than a 'Catholic' saint, i.e. a source of universal inspiration. Astell's own religious assertion (drawn from Girard), that the authentic ethos ofChristianity is 'antimythic' and 'antisacrificial' attempts to substantiate her argument that modern literary portrayals ofJoan as a sacrificial victim are mythic lies that decidedly swerve from the 'historical record.' Astell's Christian apologetics are insufficiently refined and considered, however, to meet the complex demands posed by Christian history's vast range of diverse voices, including the so-called 'historical record' ofJoan ofArc in particular. As a result, a rocky tension besets Astell's book between, on the one hand, what the author identifies as the 'historical record' ofJoan ofArc, and on the other, later literary constructions of Joan. Astell does not address directly why she considers Joan's fifteenth-century trial documents to be 'historical record' exempt from any literary criticism themselves. John H. Arnold's Inquisition and Power has recently shown that medieval trial texts embody distinctive constructions ofboth their authors ARTHURIANA I4.2 (2004) 83 84ARTHURIANA and subjects in genres of Latin writing shaped by legally formal, mythic, and discursive traditions. To explore further the unresolved implications about historical record versus artistic construction in Astell's book, one might consider how the author herselfat times imaginatively constructs the life of Joan of Arc while presenting it to her reader as 'historical record.' Astell would benefit from conscious reflection on her role in speculating upon and imaginatively constructing the historical Joan. For example, no forensic evidence exists at this time that precisely determines the abuses Joan experienced in prison at the hands of her hostile English guards and brutal living conditions. Astell asserts, however, as a matter ofhistorical record, that Joan underwent a rape 'attempt' in her condemnation trial. Whether Joan underwent a rape attempt, multiple rape attempts, an actual rape, multiple rapes, or indeed whatever degree or type of degradation, including what courts today refer to as 'sexual assault' versus 'rape,' remains a question that can only be speculated upon by historians on the basis ofsparse trial testimonies. This type of interpretive error unfortunately pervades Astell's analysis that straightforwardly contrasts historical reality with artistic deviations from the record. Identifying her intellectual perspective as that of a Catholic scholar, however, it may be Astell's wish in her 'rape attempt' assertion to dismiss certain offensive literary constructions ofJoan as a prostitute and to affirm Joan's virginity as lifelong, thus upholding Joan's canonization as a 'virgin' saint by the Catholic Church. If this is the case, Astell overlooks the extensive medieval discussion...

The Modern Construction of Myth

The Modern Construction of Myth

When the Personal Meets the Global at Home: Filipina Domestics and Their Female Employers in Taiwan

When the Personal Meets the Global at Home:Filipina Domestics and Their Female Employers in Taiwan Shu-Ju Ada Cheng (bio) Since Elsa started working here, I don't have to rush home to cook dinner. I can take my time. I don't have to worry about the messy house.... She picks up the children from school. She cooks them dinner. She prepares their lunch boxes. She helps them with the bath. They practice English with her.... Children really like her. I appreciate her too. But I am a bit jealous that they are so attached to her. They are becoming close to her like she was the mother.... My husband likes her too.... He is glad that I stop nagging him about helping me around the house. It's like she is becoming the mother and the wife.... I think about that a lot. Excerpt from an interview with Hui-Ling, a Taiwanese female employer of a Filipina domestic. When I interviewed thirty-seven-year-old career woman Hui-Ling in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1999, she had recently employed Elsa, a Filipina domestic. She had been juggling the double burden of family and work before she and her husband finally decided to hire live-in help. Her husband was concerned about the presence of a stranger at home, yet he was more than happy to be spared the constant pressure from Hui-Ling to take on more household responsibilities. Hui-Ling no longer had to perform the housework, but supervising the domestic became her new task. In addition, she had a certain ambivalence about the presence of another woman at home, as her narratives indicated. What did Elsa's emotional and physical labor say about the two women's respective status and role in the family? During our interviews, Hui-Ling expressed her anxiety about being a woman, a wife, and a mother. Many of the Taiwanese women employers I interviewed for my research on the global restructuring of home, child, and elder care shared her sense of crisis in identity. The Taiwanese government legalized the importation of foreign domestics [End Page 31] in 1992. Since then, many upper- and middle-class Taiwanese families have depended on foreign domestics as a source of cheap labor to address the deepening of privatization under globalization as well as the inadequacy of state provision for care.1 Foreign domestics have also become one of the major strategies for both sexes to attenuate conflicts over the allocation of household responsibilities. They have become the temporary solution to the unequal gender division of labor associated with the ideological construction of heterosexual masculinity and femininity.2 Not surprisingly, the presence of foreign domestics has compelled Taiwanese female employers to redefine their understanding of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood in relation to the paid labor of "other" women. Foreign domestics' intimate knowledge of the households that employ them has also enabled them to critique their female employers and unveil the mythical construction of the latter's status superiority. In this article, I examine the competing meanings of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood implicit in the global restructuring of care, focusing on the tension between Taiwanese female employers and Filipina domestics. I argue that meanings of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood constitute central loci of identity struggles between these two groups of women under the context of globalization. I juxtapose their interconnected experiences and contending narratives to demonstrate the relational construction of identities between them. While the importation of foreign domestics has allowed Taiwanese female employers to redefine their domestic roles and to elevate their status as household managers, they have also struggled to reframe their conceptions of womanhood and motherhood. Their redefinitions occur partially because of foreign domestics' active challenges. Crossing national borders to work as live-in help has also compelled Filipina domestics to redefine their ideas of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood. Occupying the position of the intimate other as well as the "outsider-within," they form resistance discourses surrounding these central identities.3 In other words, the personal meets the global at home. The process of globalization has introduced different sets of relations and dynamics of power within the private sphere Taiwanese female employers and their...

Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in Transition to Democracy

Acronyms Glossary Acknowledgements Acknowledgements for the English Edition Foreword for the English Edition Preface Chapter 1. Regarding Memory, Learning and Amnesia The Generational Question Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Presentism Taxidermism Amnesia Learning Ceremonies and Monuments Methodology and Sources Chapter 2. From the Justification of War to the exaltation of Peace: The Development of Official Discourse during the Franco Period Alternating Legitimacy Origin-based Legitimacy and Performance-based Legitimacy Champions of Francoist Legitimacy From War to Peace Sources of Political Socialisation No-Do Historical Narrative Commemorations of the Civil War Monuments of the Victors Legendary Sites of the Defeated Policies of Reconciliation and Policies of Vengeance From Punishment to Forgiveness From Munich to the Organic Law of State Symbols and Myths Relating to the Civil War Towards the Convergence of Interpretations Mythical Constructions of Francoism Regarding the Civil War Regarding Reconciliation and the Defeated Chapter 3. The Memory of War and the Lessons of Peace in the Democratic Transition Economic and Social Characteristics of the Transition History as Magistra Vitae Institutional Structure Reconciliation Consensus Conclusion Bibliography Tables Graphs Appendices Index

Museums without a Past

The myth of origin of each nation is a shifting cultural value, associated with a nation's ethos and sense of identity, and is contingent upon one's experience in the world. As museums have come to assume a crucial role in the building of the institutionalized notion of the past that is present in national identities, they have become privileged sites for investigation. This article examines the construction of myths of origin in 19th-century Brazilian museums and argues that the building of the Brazilian nation involved the construction of a historical sense strongly based on a future-oriented narrative of time. It focuses on the struggles for representation within the nation, as well as in some long-term processes and structures, which involve a dialogue between nations.

THE REFORM MOVEMENT AND THE DEBATE ON MODERNITY AND TRADITION IN CONTEMPORARY IRAN

To appreciate the significance of the reform movement represented by the books selected for this survey, one needs the sharply contrasting background of Islamic thought in Iran from the mid-1960s to the end of 1980s, the period perceptively surveyed by Mehrzad Boroujerdi in Iranian Intellectuals and the West . Boroujerdi shows that the moral indignation against Westernization in Iran pre-dated the outburst of revolution in 1979 by a few decades, beginning as a series of nativistic protests that gradually cohered in the shape of an Islamic ideology. The mythical construction of the West was not exclusively or primarily a religious affair. It was, rather, a fairly general indigenous or nativistic response to Western cultural domination in which Islam played a varying and fluctuating role before the revolutionary crescendo of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The essence of this nativistic cultural response was what Boroujerdi analyzes as Occidentalism, or, borrowing a phrase from Edward Said's Syrian critic Sadiq al-עAzm, as “Orientalism in reverse.”

How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (review)

This ambitious book expands on Paula Treichler's groundbreaking 1988 essay "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification." In that essay, reprinted here as the book's first chapter, Treichler argues that "the very nature of AIDS is constructed through language and in particular through the discourses of medicine and science" (p. 11). The epidemic has generated "a chaotic assemblage of understandings of AIDS," "an epidemic of . . . signification." Insisting that our understandings of what AIDS and HIV infection mean be regarded as "culturally constructed," Treichler proposes that we pay careful attention to how language creates rather than simply reflects the meanings of illness. Far from being objective, biomedical definitions of AIDS are based "on prior social constructions routinely produced within the discourses of biomedical science" (p. 15). Familiar "semantic oppositions" derived from existing social constructions—oppositions such as those between "self and not-self," "homosexual and the 'general population'," "addiction and abstention," "normal and abnormal," "prostitute and paragon," "First World and Third World"—pervasively shape scientific as well as popular concepts of the material reality of HIV infection and AIDS (p. 35). In the opening essay Treichler draws particular attention to the intransigent mythic construction of the gay male body as the "not-self," a binary division that attempts to contain or "barricade" the pathogenic potency associated with homosexuality in order symbolically to protect the self, and by extension, the social body, from contamination (pp. 35-37). But Treichler's argument reaches beyond this specific insight to contend that, especially in the context of HIV infection and AIDS, medicine and science, along with the corresponding popular discourses of illness and disease, urgently need to be analyzed along cultural lines in the interests of working against such dichotomies and advocating for social justice. [End Page 306]