Foundational Narratives Research Articles

Your Turn As An Example Of Multi-Modal, Ethnographic And Collective Documentary

Documentary cinema is a film genre that aims to reproduce authentic reality and provide awareness to the audience by addressing real events, people or subjects with a claim of objectivity. Such films generally use a narrative language that is not based on fiction and reflect reality as it is. There are several standpoints a documentary film-maker may follow and adopt. These standpoints usually determine the formal characteristics of the film. A documentary may be ethnographic, journalistic, poetic, etc. Likewise, a documentary film-maker may seek to approach reality without any self-involvement and he/she may choose to observe rather than participate in the content or vice versa. Utilizing a number of methods, documentary cinema has flourished in both content and form in recent years. New ways of making documentaries are flourishing and minor realities as well as major ones are brought to the audience. One approach is the ethnographic documentary, where the filmmaker adopts a participant-observer role, immersing themselves in the socio-cultural phenomenon to authentically convey a particular truth. Taking ethnography as a starting point, a film-maker makes numerous stylistic choices and enrich his/her narrative following different patterns. This study aims to interrogate the prospects of documentary cinema in recent years and define the relationship between the film-maker’s standpoint and the stylistic choices he/she makes, using the film Your Turn (Capai, 2019) as a case study. The sample film was chosen via purposive sampling method and a textual analysis was conducted. The results of the analysis shows that Your Turn (Capai, 2019) utilizes ethnography and turn the participant-observation method into a collective practice which contributes to the overall aesthetics of the film as well as its narrative foundation.

Trimming the Tangle of Legend: Heroic Haircuts, Materialising Meals, and the Legitimisation of Dynastic Succession in Norwegian and Polish Foundation Narratives

Trimming the Tangle of Legend: Heroic Haircuts, Materialising Meals, and the Legitimisation of Dynastic Succession in Norwegian and Polish Foundation Narratives

Cultural Historical Activity Theory: A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Post- Method Pedagogy

Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) serves as an effective theoretical framework for analysing post-method pedagogy, providing valuable insights into the complexities of educational practices. This framework integrates social, cultural, and historical contexts, allowing for a comprehensive perspective that examines patterns influencing educational processes, cognitive development, and equitable education. At the heart of CHAT is the concept of expansive learning, which emphasises the continuous improvement and evolution of teaching methods over time. This approach advocates for adaptive and innovative practices that respond to the dynamic needs of learners and the ever-changing educational environment. By incorporating CHAT into post-method pedagogy, educators can significantly enhance their teaching practices, fostering more democratic, versatile, and effective methods that engage all students. This paper delves into the impact of CHAT on education, tracing the foundational narrative of its development through the contributions of three generations of influential scholars, from Lev Vygotsky to Yrjö Engeström. CHAT distinguishes itself by moving beyond mere rote cognitive accumulation, offering a conceptual toolkit for refining, and leveling pedagogical practices. Key elements of CHAT include the division of labour, which defines roles within the teaching and learning process, and mediating means, which involves the tools and resources utilised in learning. The central theme of expansive learning underscores the ongoing improvement of teaching methods, illustrating CHAT's practical application in English language instruction. By fostering inclusive learning environments, CHAT effectively addresses real challenges faced today in education. For educators seeking to strengthen their teaching methods, adopting CHAT offers a transformative pathway which is accessible to everyday teachers striving for positive change in their instructional practices. Integrating CHAT dynamics into teaching holds significant promise for those committed to continuous improvement in the field of education.

Stories of Experience: Learning and Teaching by Creating and Listening

Narrative is a foundational element to understanding human learning. Our inherent capacity to tell and process stories allows us to communicate and remember complex information to improve and adapt to our environments. This paper presents stories of experience as a pedagogical approach that can enliven curriculum in an age of technological dominance by providing a theoretical foundation of experience, narrative, and autobiography. Together with pedagogies of listening, storytelling, and care, they suggest an alternative transformative engagement with learning.

Ukraine in Soviet Narratives about the October Revolution: A Case Study of Ihor Savchenko’s Film Ballad About Cossack Holota (1937)

Ukraine’s social, political, and cultural history has become a controversial issue since the 1990s. Dominant until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the discourse about the Soviet brotherly nations has since been contested by depictions of Ukraine as politically and ideologically divided over the course of its 20th-century history. Russia-Ukraine war that began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 Feb 2022 has had a dramatic impact on the process of replacing the formerly standard version of Ukraine’s past with new interpretations. At the same time, Russia’s war on Ukraine has also demonstrated that Soviet-era collective memory about the key events in Soviet history has outlived the Soviet state and has been mobilized for political use. When in pain of heart a Ukrainian politician says that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cancelled a shared past of Ukraine and Russia, he refers to a familiar discourse about these nations’ familial ties (Tkach). With this discourse now shattered, the question of particular salience is: How was the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations expressed and sustained? How did it evolve? In light of Russia-Ukraine war, the stories that were building blocks of the Soviet foundational narrative about Ukraine and Russia as fraternal nations are worth revisiting. An analysis of such stories reveals the mechanism of making Ukraine’s part an integral part of Soviet culture. In this paper, I discuss the issue of the evolution of the Soviet discourse about ‘eternal friendship of Ukrainian and Russian peoples’ in the example of Igor Savchenko’s film Ballad About Cossack Holota ( Duma pro kozaka Golotu, 1937), released by the Gorkii Film Studio as part of the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Igor Savchenko (Ihor Savchenko in 24 | WEEReview 13 | 2024 Ukraine in Soviet Narratives about the October Revolution Ukrainian) was a Ukrainian Soviet film director who made films both in Russian and Ukrainian film studios; his work played an important role in promoting the idea of familial ties between Ukraine and Russia. Ballad About Cossak Holota is based on Arkadii Gaidar’s novella for children R.V.S. (1925) that is set during the Civil War in Ukraine, following the October Revolution. Savchenko’s film is especially interesting in how he reworks Gaidar’s story; he depicts events of the Civil War in the context of Ukraine’s 17th-18th-century history, drawing on Ukrainian folklore. Cossack Holota, a character from Ukrainian folklore, becomes a symbol of the revolutionary liberation of Ukraine, a promise of a just social and political order. Drawing on memory studies, post-colonial theory, and theory of deconstruction, I discuss the artistic means that Savchenko used in order to integrate Ukraine’s experience of the revolution and the Civil War into the Soviet discourse about the fight for Soviet power. Savchenko constructs Ukraine’s response to the revolution by making use of tropes of a big family, Biblical imagery, elements of folk culture, conventions of the adventure film. The study of Savchenko’s film contributes to our understanding of the debates about Soviet-era and presentday collective memory about the October Revolution and the Civil War in Ukraine and Russia. As the discourse about the biggest Soviet nations’ familial unity is yet another casualty of Russia-Ukraine war, it is important to consider how the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations was expressed in Soviet cinema. Such analysis explains why Ukrainian’s common emotional response to the start of the war was that of a feeling of shock and betrayal.

Raskolnikov as a Transformed Character: Aki Kaurismäki's Adaptation of “Crime and Punishment” (1983)

How do motion pictures transpose the characters from a well-established literary work into a cinematic narrative, replete with their own narrative potential? Can the resulting film be regarded as an entirely new creation? To explore these questions, we have selected Aki Kaurismäki's 1983 cinematic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The primary objective of this study is to ascertain whether the characters from a literary work undergo a transformation into new personas, enriched by the narrative possibilities inherent to cinema. Kaurismäki's adaptation of Crime and Punishment transposed the narrative to a more contemporary era and streamlined the cast of characters, with the film director imparting his distinctive touch to their transformation. In Kaurismäki's rendition of Crime and Punishment, a metafictional dimension emerges, blurring the boundaries of narrative levels. The film's characters comport themselves as if intimately acquainted with the original novel's story and characters. While maintaining fidelity to the foundational narrative, a novel artistic creation takes shape, wherein the characters exhibit a profound awareness of their origins within the original literary work.

Weaving a foundational narrative – place-making and change in an old-industrial town in East Germany

ABSTRACT In light of economic, social and discursive changes, old-industrial towns and regions increasingly apply entrepreneurial strategies to actively shape discourses as part of place-making processes. Foundational narratives play an important role in this regard. They are used by agents to foster cohesion in a local community, to legitimize and anchor their actions and goals and to make sense of complex development processes. Applying the methodology of Critical Narrative Analysis, the present study zooms in such processes of narrative building in Lauchhammer (Germany). Despite having experienced the decline of the most important parts of its industry, local actors still mobilize the industrial past in order to strengthen local identity and attract new businesses and manufacturers. Yet, the paper shows that different agents foreground different aspects of the industrial past and narratives may be contested. At the same time, local, regional and national development strategies are closely interlinked offering ‘opportunity spaces’ for local actors but raising also questions about a potential (de)legitimization of local narratives.

Inhabiting Adamancy: Contributions Toward a Queer Feminist Theology

This article seeks to demonstrate that the myth of creation, written in Genesis, originates in the history of the different technologies of power. Judaism, in the myth of origin, established a hermeneutic with ontological status on the creation of man. This has severely affected the theological work of sex–gender diversity groups, including feminist and queer theology. Since the myth of origin has been one of the foundational narratives of the history of Christianity, it is the theological matrix where the binary oppositions are constructed: man-woman in which a cis-heteropatriarchal theology of the texts is articulated.

Kodumaalt lahkumise põhjuste kajastumisest Abhaasia eestlaste rändenarratiivis: kurja mõisniku kuju

When adapting to a new host country, one of the most important issues is social belonging – the question on what basis people feel a sense of belonging. This is a question of group identity. Group identity is based on the group’s shared history and especially on myths of common and special origins. In the narratives of the Estonians of Abkhazia, the main reason for emigration is the difficult economic conditions in the old homeland. These stories are recorded in the written memories and village chronicles of the inhabitants of the Estonian settlements in the Caucasus, which date back to the 19th and 20th centuries, but they can be heard orally even today, because the stories have been heard from parents and grandparents. Both in earlier writings and in today’s oral presentations, the conditions in the old homeland of Estonia are depicted as poor, sometimes quite unbearable. An important figure in these stories is an evil and arrogant German landlord who oppressed the ancestors of the settlers. The first chapter of the article shows the historical background of the confrontation between the Estonian peasants and the German landlords in Estonia and how it was at least partially realized as an emigration movement under the influence of the peasant laws of the 19th century. The topic of the evil landlord was taken by the Estonian settlers to the settlements in Caucasus – these were stories told from personal experiences with the landlords. The formation and transmission of stories from generation to generation as founding narratives was facilitated by the opposition between Estonians and Germans in the Estonian national discourse. The second chapter focuses on the texts that reflect landlord-peasant conflicts in Estonia at the time of emigration – the texts of the leading figures of the national awakening movement in the school- and history books. These texts also influenced the developing identity of the Estonian colonists. The article then discusses the stories about the evil landlord told in various Estonian settlements on the Black Sea coast and finally the meaning of these stories in the formation of social belonging.

It's All in the Name: The Narrator's Anonymity in the Babylonian Talmud's Legal Discussions

Abstract: The "anonymous voice" in the Babylonian Talmud has troubled scholars and rabbis throughout the ages. However, while anonymity has been discussed from a historical perspective, the question has barely been addressed from a literary point of view. This article examines the narrator's anonymity from a narratological perspective while attempting to understand the effect that anonymity has on the textual dynamics of talmudic halakhic discussions. Through a close examination of the use of names within these discussions, I show that names enable citation, contradiction, and reference to other sayings, ultimately resulting in a "halakhic biography" of the scholar that becomes part of the tradition. In contrast, anonymous sayings cannot be classified, attributed, or cited, thus yielding a narrator who has no biography, and who cannot be confronted with previous sayings, thus providing the discussion with the narrative foundation that enables each discussion to be self-contained.

Resetting relationship trajectories: A reconceptualization of the relationship repair process

SummaryNegative events within and outside of work can disrupt coworkers' relationships, triggering a re‐evaluation of relationship quality. The subjective experience of these events – which we term relationship threats – harms relationships, resulting in long‐lasting negative interpersonal and organizational consequences. Coworkers' responses to a relationship threat determine whether relationships are repaired or whether the threat leads to a loss of commitment, lowered satisfaction, and increased negative affect. Because of the critical role that relationships play in organizational life, it is vital that we have a comprehensive understanding of the repair process. To date, researchers have focused on one of three repair processes: trust repair. In reconceptualizing relationship repair, we flesh out the remaining two processes: relationship work and sensemaking. Our reconceptualization balances the restorative actions that mitigate in‐the‐moment harm with those that sustain these benefits over time. We expand our understanding of relationship repair by highlighting the role that narrative foundations play in determining a relationships' vulnerabilities and determining effective repair processes. We highlight the importance of considering relationship threats as events embedded within a relationship's history; identify narrative foundations as a bridging mechanism between disrupted relationships and their repair; and expand our conceptualization of the processes that repair relationships.

Introduction: Why ‘Decolonizing Chinese History?’

It is commonly stated that China has 5,000 years of continuous history. It is a claim repeated in textbooks, mini-dramas, and tourist sites across the People’s Republic of China (PRC, also commonly referred to as ‘China’). It formed the narrative foundation for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It is also a ubiquitous claim internationally, recited by global political leaders, in foreign media, and in children’s books. Ironically, it even serves as the tag line for the highly political and anti-communist global dance show ‘Shen Yun’, its posters promising a celebration of ‘5,000 years of civilization reborn’.1 This millennia-long history, often short-handed as ‘Yao-to-Mao’ – the Yao referring to Emperor Yao, one of five founding Chinese rulers who is said to have lived in the third millennium BC, the Mao referring to Mao Zedong, the founder of the PRC – is a story of civilizational continuity in which a politically and culturally unified ‘China’ maintains its fundamental cohesion despite a range of challengers, invasions, and upheavals.2

Christian allegory on the northern frontier of New Spain: González de Eslava’s Coloquio quinto

ABSTRACT Fernán González de Eslava’s fifth Coloquio espiritual y sacramental is a Christian allegorical drama from New Spain of the 1570s. It concerns Spanish attempts to ‘pacify’ the Gran Chichimeca, a contested desert frontier to the north of the Valley of Mexico. The antagonist of this play is a Chichimeca warrior, who challenges military and missionary attempts to conquer and convert. González de Eslava’s allegory vilifies this nomadic native warrior, casting him as the very figure of sin. This piece portrays a fierce Indigenous alterity in order to justify Spanish incursions into native lands and promote a Christianizing agenda. Remarkably, the playwright portrays Chichimeca territory with reference to a major foundational narrative of central Mexican peoples. He invokes the storied trajectory of ancestral migrants who departed from legendary sites of origin in the north, and journeyed southward into the Mexican Basin, where they settled. However, the allegorical drama reconfigures this southward path, and in the place of a central Mexican foundational narrative, González de Eslava asserts a Christian narrative and symbolic system.

Settling History in Silwan: State Emblems and Public Secrets in Occupied East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT: This paper brings together two aspects of state formations that are rarely considered in unison, emblems and public secrets, and examines the semiotic processes that relate them. It considers these processes in tours given by a prominent organization, called El-Ad, that works to settle Jewish-Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem, and in particular in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. El-Ad claims that it has returned the Israeli state to Silwan, and seeks to substantiate this through a variety of practices used on tours of the biblical archaeological site known as the City of David. While the City of David site is associated with the biblical narratives of King David and the first Jewish kingdom, I show how El-Ad selectively reveals the secret history of its settlement on tour as well. To do so, I describe the discursive marking of this secret history, and, in particular, I review how the director of El-Ad, David Be'eri, retold to tour guides the organization's foundational narrative in the genre of an intelligence operation. I end by discussing how El-Ad tours of the City of David archaeological site narrate this secret history of settlement, as a means to normalize the occupation. Drawing on theories of the state, secrets and entextualizing practices, I argue that state emblems are key to understanding the masking effects of statecraft.

Uncanny returns in settler colonial state: return, exile, and decolonization in Palestine/Israel

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose uncanniness as a defining characteristic of return as I explore the settler colonial context of Palestine/Israel, where return has starkly ethno-nationalistic connotations. For Palestinians, return is associated with the liberation of Palestine, while for Israelis, it is part of Zionist foundational narratives. By explicating academic research and biographical literature, I consider how the concept of uncanny can further our understanding of what it means to return in this context, and beyond. Uncanniness brings attention to feelings of disorientation, strangeness, and not-at-homeness, and by approaching return as uncanny, I suggest, it is possible to tap into the volatility of “being-at-home” and thus unsettle exclusive and essentialist notions of belonging that define settler colonialism. Consequently, the article offers a way to consider return in a manner that gets from nostalgia to a new beginning and, in the settler colonial context of Palestine/Israel, from settler anxiety to decolonization.

La figura dello straniero nella Bibbia Ebraica: fenomenologia e teologia

The introduction of the article presents some methodological clarifications that aim to achieve a proper thematic treatment of the foreigner in the Bible. It (a) states the need to place the study of terms that indicate the foreigner in the relevant semantic field, (b) stresses the importance to be accorded to the founding narratives, and (c) indicates the value of the term “figure” as applied specifically to the immigrant. The contribution is then divided into three sections: 1. “The Phenomenology of the Foreigner in the Bible” shows the criteria for defining the foreigner, and emphasises the specific notion of the immigrant; 2. “The Biblical Theology of the Immigrant” illustrates the precariousness of the one who requests hospitality and, at the same time, makes manifest the divine blessing for the one who welcomes him. 3. “The Biblical Norms Regarding the Immigrant” show how different precepts tend to equate the immigrant with the citizen itself.

Bishop Allan Wilson Cook (Rabbi Haling Hank Lenht), Queen Malinda Morris, and the Independent Church of God: A Missing Piece in the History of Hebrew Israelite Black Judaism

ABSTRACT This article examines two figures from the early twentieth century beginnings of the Hebrew Israelite movement. Malinda Morris was a central, though forgotten, figure in William Crowdy’s Church of God and Saints of Christ but her creation of an independent Church upon Crowdy’s death has not so far been discussed. The strongest body of evidence regarding this Church is a booklet published by one of their Bishops, A.W. Cook, in Harlem, 1925. This booklet offers biographical, legal, constitutional, and theological information about Cook and his branch of Morris’ Church. Situated at a crucial juncture, at the beginning of the second wave of Hebrew Israelite preachers and congregations, Cook’s booklet offers some important insights into the development of foundational narratives of the movement, as well as allows us to reconstruct some of the life of this forlorn thinker and minister, and his leader Malinda Morris.

Mirroring Truths: How Liberal Democracies Are Challenging Their Foundational Narratives

Long-established liberal democracies with histories of settler colonialism—from the United States and Canada to Australia and Scandinavia—are beginning to explore their histories of violence and dispossession. This, in many ways, is long overdue, but the desire to come to terms with past injustices should not obscure the challenges that still stand in the way of any reasonable effort to do so. We argue that transitional justice can be applied to colonial history in liberal democracies, but there are major conceptual and practical obstacles that need to be overcome if this is to happen in meaningful ways. We explore three of these obstacles here that are particularly significant: the doctrine of intertemporal law, the unequal power balance between the Global North and the Global South, and national identity. If these are to be overcome, it is important to tie historical to present injustices and to incorporate, beyond violations of physical rights, violations of economic and social rights that are particularly relevant for understanding continuities between past and ongoing violations. These rights are commonly neglected even by states that recognize a broad set of liberal rights and have the capacity to ensure that they are realized, and represent a promising avenue for pursuing a truly inclusive, equitable, and universal understanding of justice.

The Reconciliation Project of Labour Law

Historically, in Canada, labour law has not only failed to protect Indigenous working people from the exclusionary logic of (colonization-induced) market capitalism but also marginalized (peripheral and vulnerable) working people among the settlers. In spite of the Canadian judiciary’s attempt to articulate a broader vision of labour law through the values of justice, liberty, equity, and participatory democracy, the foundational private contractual rationale of labour law acts as a constraint on the judiciary’s ability to develop a broader – and more inclusive – regulatory justification. In this article, I suggest that this tension between expansive normative values and narrow (exclusionary) regulatory justification of labour law could be usefully addressed by employing the idea of reconciliation, originally conceived to fashion the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. I argue that an appropriately formulated idea of reconciliation should be able to promote a more inclusive conceptual foundation of labour law, one that is receptive of non-Eurocentric world-views in its foundational narrative and democratic in its continued execution. In so aiding labour law, the reconciliation perspective can close the gap between normative values and regulatory justification of the discipline.

Canonical Indian Literature and Bhasa: a Study in Texts and Their Aesthetics

Indian Knowledge System, the repository of the entire literary and aesthetic corpus of the sub-continent, has a rich repertoire comprising texts like The Ramayana and The Mahabharata and critical texts like The Natyasastra. The former belong to the canon of Epics, they stand representatives of a tradition comprising texts like Chandrabati’s Ramayana, Jaini Ramayana, Asura: Tale of the Vanquished by Neelakantan, Draupadi by Pattanaik, etc. The genres that the tradition comprises vary from poetry to novel and a long oral tradition, as Nabneeta Dev Sen opines, of songs from these epics. In the list, however, is another writer, belonging to the canon of Sanskrit Dramaturgy, whose works are the oldest surviving extant texts in Sanskrit drama: Bhasa, the father of Sanskrit Drama. Chronologically, Bhasa is placed between the composition of Natyasastra and Malvikagnimitram and his plays are dramatic representations of the events of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. The research paper attempts to delve into two primary questions: that of aesthetic fidelity of the father of Sanskrit drama, to a tradition of writing that precedes him; and secondly, his literary fidelity to the foundational narratives in the Indian Literary Traditions. Through an interrogation of Bhasa’s works on these two parameters, and applying the terminologies of Adoption, Adaptation and Abrogation, the paper shall strive to place him in the canon of Indian Literature and the implications of his positionality, on Indian Literature, especially in relation to contemporaneity.