Unbroken Thread Research Articles

Some reflections on the SAJS – an unbroken thread in our national life since 1905

Some reflections on the SAJS – an unbroken thread in our national life since 1905

Northern Ireland’s Interregnum. Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security

This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction (No Bones, 2001; Little Constructions, 2007; Milkman, 2018) as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of (post-)sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by (or have fed themselves upon) an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though immersed in the world of the Troubles, paradoxically communicates “an idiosyncratic spatiotemporality” (Maureen Ruprecht Fadem’s phrase), namely an experience beyond the self-imposing, historical time limits. As such, it gains the ability to provide insightful commentaries on conflict-prone relations, the patterns of which can be repeatedly observed in Northern Ireland’s socio-political milieu. Overall, the main idea here is to discuss and present the narrative realm proposed by Burns as (in)determinate, liminal in terms of time and space, positioning readers between “then” and “now” of the region.

Leveraging model based definition and STEP AP242 in task specification for robotic assembly

This article explores using aspects of STEP AP242 for constraint-based robot programming for assembly operations. Industry 4.0 envisions smart, connected factories where all the operations are connected by an unbroken thread of product and process data. As part of these efforts, many industries are adopting Model Based Definition and STEP AP242. STEP AP242 is an exchange format that allows Model Based Definition where Product Manufacturing Information is directly associated with the 3D CAD model. This article relates the geometric and assembly constraints from the CAD model to motion constraints on the robot during the assembly process. This article also discusses the use of Product Manufacturing Information from STEP AP242 files for automatic robot programming. The results are showcased with a prototype for a motor assembly scenario.

An Unbroken Thread: African American Exclusion from Jury Service, Past and Present

The right to an impartial jury and the right to serve on a jury are defining aspects of the American legal system. However, this nation has yet to fully make good on these guarantees to African Americans. Black people are routinely underrepresented in jury pools and Black defendants often face juries that fail to reflect the communities in which they are prosecuted. Despite laws prohibiting racial discrimination in jury selection and legislation to improve jury representation, the under-representation of Black people on juries persists. This article draws an unbroken thread from the history of total exclusion of Black people from juries to the contemporary under-representation of Black people in jury pools. Historically, the framers excluded Black people from citizenship, and by extension from serving on juries. Although the Reconstruction Amendments extended citizenship rights to African Americans, racially neutral, but vague juror qualifications enabled state officials to continue excluding Black people from juries well into the Twentieth Century. Today, felony disenfranchisement prevents millions of Americans from being eligible to serve on juries, including a disproportionate number of African Americans. This article argues that policies to increase racial diversity on juries must account for the centuries’ long exclusion of Black people. Such reforms must be large scale and transformational, addressing juror eligibility standards, fair cross section jurisprudence, and policies governing juror summons. Only then can America’s promise to Black people of an impartial jury selected free from racial discrimination be recognized.

A licence to drive? Neurological illness, loss and disruption.

The sense of freedom and independence that being able to drive generates may be taken for granted by many until it is threatened by illness. Drawing on the 'mobility turn' in social sciences that emphasises the social and emotional significance of the car (Sheller and Urry , ), this article presents secondary analysis of narratives of driving and its significance across four neurological conditions (epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, transient ischaemic attack and motor neurone disease). Taking an interactionist approach we explore how the withdrawal of a driving licence can represent not just a practical and emotional loss of independence, but also loss of enjoyment; of a sense and feeling of 'normal' adulthood and social participation; and of an identity (in some cases gendered) of strength and power. Conversely the ability to keep driving can maintain an unbroken thread of narrative, for example enabling people with speech difficulties to feel and look normal behind the wheel. Moments of pleasure and normality illuminate the importance of examining the micro-strands of disruption illness can cause.

Born in Melbourne? Considerations on the origins of Australian political science

ABSTRACTIn a pioneering academic discussion of Australian politics written just before the First World War, William Harrison Moore reinforced the image of Australia as an increasingly autonomous part of a slowly evolving but essentially liberal British Empire. In this 34-page account of ‘Political Systems of Australia’ published in George H. Knibbs, ed., Federal Handbook (Melbourne, 1914), the Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Melbourne arguably created the ur-text of the Australian Politics textbook. It is argued that there is an unbroken thread of Cambridge-inspired political science teaching and writing at Melbourne from Harrison Moore onwards. The early Australian politics textbooks and ‘Political Systems of Australia’ are cut from the same cloth, making the latter an important precursor.

The Stuart Relics in the Stonyhurst Collections

The Stuart artefacts described in this article have not previously been examined as an entity, and many are relatively unfamiliar to scholars. This paper will consider this unique collection of relics and discuss their significance within the personal as well as national and international contexts of their origins. That significance rests largely in their royal provenance, which was valued by the custodians at the English Jesuit College of St Omers, the predecessor of Stonyhurst College, founded to educate English Catholic boys in 1593. The Stuart cause, from Mary Queen of Scots to Charles Edward Stuart represented the best hope of English Catholics for a formal restoration of the faith. Relics, such as Mary Queen of Scots’ Thorn, were powerful symbols of tenacity and hope, providing an unbroken thread from the Passion of Christ to the martyred Queen, the more valued as the College gained its own seventeenth-century martyrs. Artefacts which arrived at Stonyhurst College after 1794 were valued for their romantic association with the failed Stuart cause. The creation of the Stuart Parlour in 1911and the adoption of the Borrodale tartan as part of the girls’ uniform in the 1990s demonstrate the significance these objects possess well into the twentieth century.

The Sources and Resources of Our Indigenous Theology: An Australian Aboriginal Perspective

I will attempt to show the Australian Aboriginal Christian from the spiritual, physical and cultural perspectives. The point that I wish to highlight is that there is an expression of continuity of relationship and ritual sacredness between my ancient people and their Higher Power (known by various names). This relationship is an unbroken thread that has weaved its way through the passages of time. It has been passed on for thousands of years to us here today as Aboriginal Christians. We are not only the “Children of God,” but are also the “Children of the Dreaming”– this is my identity.

Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation

Indigenous storytelling is connected to our homelands and is crucial to the cultural and political resurgence of Indigenous nations. According to Maori scholar Linda Smith, talk' about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, storytelling, and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of and an attitude about history (19). For example, when conveying community narratives of to future generations, Nuu-chah-nulth peoples have relied on haa-huu-pah as teaching stories or sacred living histories that solidify ancestral and contemporary connections to place. (1) As Nuu-chah-nulth Elder Cha-chin-sun-up states, haa-huu-pah are What we do when we get up every day to make the world good. Haa-huu-pah are not fairy tales or entertaining stories for children--they are lived values that form the basis for Indigenous governance and regeneration. The experiential knowledge and living histories of haa-huu-pah comprise part of the core teachings that Indigenous families transmit to future generations. The nation-state of Canada offers a very different version of than those of Indigenous nations--one that glosses over the colonial legacies of removing Indigenous peoples from their families and homelands when enforcing assimilationist policies, all of which were intended to eradicate Indigenous nations. The residential school era, which can be said to begin in 1874, is one example of the racist policies that were imposed on Indigenous people. (2) Designed to strip Indigenous people of their languages and cultures, the residential schools were administered by the government of Canada and run by four well-known denominations or churches. By the time the last residential school closed in 1996, over one-hundred-thousand Indigenous children had been forcibly removed from their homes. (3) According to Paulette Regan, Euro-Canadian scholar and academic liaison to Truth and Reconciliation Canada (TRC), settler Canadians have much to account for: Settler violence against Indigenous peoples is woven into the fabric of Canadian in an unbroken thread from past to present that we must now unravel, unsettling our comfortable assumptions about the past. At the same time, we must work as Indigenous allies to the dominant culture version of history; that is, we must make decolonizing space for Indigenous history--counter-narratives of diplomacy, law, and peacemaking practices--as told by Indigenous peoples themselves. (2) Given the monumental task ahead to restory the settler version of history, this paper explores the structure of Truth and Reconciliation Canada along with some of the criticisms that have emerged recently from residential school survivors regarding the shortcomings of Canada's attempts at reparations for residential school survivors in the form of Common Experience Payments (CEP). We anchor our discussion in haa-huu-pah as a form of truth-telling in order to demonstrate how Indigenous stories of resilience are critical to the resurgence of our communities. Moreover, haa-huu-pah are fundamental to teaching our families and communities who we are and how to govern ourselves on this land, intending to lead us toward action. After all, Awareness of truth [...] compels some kind of action (Waziyatawin 11). Processes of restorying and truth-telling are not effective without some larger community-centred, decolonizing actions behind them. Thus, haa-huu-pah signify a starting point for renewing Indigenous family and community responsibilities in the ongoing struggle for Indigenous justice and freedom. Haa-huu-pah also represent an alternative to the Canadian state's vision for reconciliation, which seeks to legitimize the status quo rather than to rectify injustice for Indigenous communities. As Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel point out, [T]here is a danger in allowing colonization to be the only story of Indigenous lives. …

“Unbroken Thread”: a Look into Pandora's Box by Nerija Putinaitė

Review: Putinaitė, Nerija. 2007. Nenutrūkusi styga: Prisitaikymas ir pasipriešinimas sovietų Lietuvoje. Vilnius: Aidai.

Editorial

Professor Maitland liked to point out that the beginnings of the trust are discernible in a ‘slight but unbroken thread of cases, beginning while the Conquest is yet recent.’1 This forensic Methuselah retains its vitality today because reams of contractual boilerplate cannot compete with the efficiency of equity's default rules. These were famously expressed by the great Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals—later to become a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—Benjamin Cardozo, in Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 NY 458, 464 (1928): Many forms of conduct permissible in a workaday world for those acting at arm's length, are forbidden to those bound by fiduciary ties. A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior. As to this there...

Bande dessinée and the Cinematograph: Visual Narrative in 1895

Abstract The Lumiere brothers' L'Arroseur arrose ['The Sprinkler Sprinkled'] of 1895 was probably the first staged fiction film to be shown in public, but also the first cinematic adaptation of a comic strip, previous treatments of the subject including an Imagerie Quantin broadsheet by Hermann Vogel, a cartoon by Christophe in Le Petit Francais Illustre and an illustrated sequence by Uzes in Le Chat Noir. What emerges from direct comparison is an appreciation of the sophisticated narrative devices that French comic illustrators employed by the 1880s, namely a dynamic combination of shot scales, angles and heights that still conforms to the diegetic demands of consistent spatial continuity. In short, these were the techniques that, perversely, would come to be known as 'cinematic'. In the basement of the Grand Cafe in the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on 28 December 1895, the Lumiere brothers gave the first commercial public exhibition of their Cinematographe. The twenty-minute programme was a mixed one: ten short films, mostly of documentary or actuality subjects, demonstrating the camera's ability to capture large public scenes and small domestic incidents alike. The audience - which included a deeply affected George Melies - paid a one-franc admission fee, indicating the commercial possibilities of the medium. As an early example of a public exhibition of projected moving pictures, and despite technical improvements, the event used the same fundamental arrangement and apparatus that would become standard throughout the coming century. Perhaps most significantly, the sixth short film on the programme, between Les Forgerons ['The Smiths'] (1895) and Le Repas de bebe ['Baby's Dinner'] (1895), was a simple, 46-second record of a practical joke, popularly called L'Arroseur arrose, widely regarded as one of the earliest staged film narratives and the world's first film comedy.1 Such a litany of 'firsts' doubtless contributes to the simplified teleological view of cinematic history as a single developmental timeline, beginning in Paris in 1895 and concluding as an unbroken thread in today's multiplexes. Yet, as John Fell and others have shown,2 early experiments in film narrative took place, not in a cinematic vacuum, but against a complex and vital background of varied and innovative visual media activity. New curiosities and traditional entertainments jostled against each other for the attention of an increasingly sophisticated and demanding public, and techniques, ideas and subject matter flowed rapidly and freely between the various media. Cinema and popular picture strips in the late nineteenth century, for instance, often featured strikingly similar characters, stories, jokes and narrative developments, were motivated by similar objectives - to hold the audience's attention, to interest and amuse - and were often similarly constrained by limited time or space, whether because of the length of a reel of film or the size of a magazine page. Famously, the Lumieres' first fiction film has a number of more or less well-known antecedents in contemporary bande dessinee, and therefore offers a unique opportunity to compare the treatment of the same material in different visual media in the very period that would mark the emergence of cinema as both an industry and an art form. There were three separate versions of the Lumieres' comedy film: the first shot by Louis Lumiere sometime between 22 March and 10 June 1895; the second between spring 1896 and 1 May 1897; and the third between summer 1896 and May 1897.3 Confusingly, all three versions were listed and sold as film 99 in the Catalogue Lumiere from the first edition of 1897, while a 1993 article by Claude Beylie appears to demonstrate that no Lumiere film was originally titled L'Arroseur arrose.4 Their first 'hosepipe' comedy, included in the 1895 Grand Cafe programme, was entitled Le Jardinier ['The Gardener'], but was swiftly renamed Le Jardinier et le petit espiegle ['The Gardener and the Little Urchin']. …

Politics Rules: The False Primacy of Institutions in Developing Countries

Do institutions possess explanatory and prescriptive powers imputed to them by institutionalism? If they do, why do outcomes in developing countries (DGC) defy those powers? I argue that, although institutions play a role, they are neither the explanation for outcomes nor the prescription for development problems. The primacy of institutions is defied in DGC because ‘new institutionalism’ shares the premises of modernization theory-inspired ‘old institutionalism’. Both fail to subordinate institutions to society-rooted politics, the pre-eminent explanatory variable. I support this argument by: (1) demonstrating the pre-eminence of politics vis-à-vis institutions; and (2) relating various policy failures in DGC to the failure of the unbroken thread between old and new institutionalisms to recognize this pre-eminence. Because politics explains both institutional and socio-political outcomes, I propose that the crucial difference between politics in Western democracies and developing countries – and not institutions – be the focus of inquiry to account for outcomes and to prescribe solutions for DGC.

Community matrons' rounds: the unbroken thread

The article on the return of ‘matrons’ rounds' (Castledine and Close, 2005) describes a triple role for the new matrons. It is an exemplar role in relation to standards of care (demonstrating hand-washing and auditing cleanliness), a supervisory role (regarding nurses' progress and workload), as well as a public relations role for the benefit of patients and relatives (finding out their perceptions of care, ‘being visible’ and educating them). This is an interesting contrast to the new role of community matron, which is a clinical (care giving) and case-management role evolving directly from the existing district nurses' rounds.

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (review)

Reviewed by: Walking and the French Romantics. Rousseau to Sand and Hugo Göran Blix Thompson, C. W.Walking and the French Romantics. Rousseau to Sand and Hugo. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 160. ISBN3039100785 Walking and Romanticism are two inextricable cultural achievements, or so it would appear from C. W. Thompson's recent book. The modern form of recreational walking, which, first in England and Germany, and later in France, prompted a new generation of poets and painters to repossess their national landscapes on foot, had a measurable impact on the evolution of Romantic art. Thompson's book sets out to trace this impact on a handful of major and minor French Romantics, and starts from the slightly discouraging premise that while the French wrote more travel books than the English and German, they also walked less, with less enthusiasm, and more silently, so that a solid body of written evidence seems lacking. Yet from Rousseau to Hugo and Sand, through Senancour, Nodier, and Nerval, with scenic detours to the less well-known Charles Didier and to the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, we find that there runs an unbroken thread of francophone pedestrianism, a genuine if often muted enthusiasm for walking that translated into a stock of literary themes and formal practices. These are treated, not systematically, theoretically, or historically (as evolving symbolic forms), but more modestly and traditionally by author, so that after being walked through a series of mini-studies on the pre-Romantics, we are then, in the second part, given more thorough studies of walking in Sand, Nerval, Hugo and Töpffer. This organization of the study around a few major peaks perhaps echoes the experience of walking itself, but it [End Page 159] also has some drawbacks, since we neither discover the broader cultural discourse that no doubt accompanied the growth of pedestrianism, nor find a well-drawn map of the topoï, forms, rhythms, themes, and figures associated with it. The decision to center the study traditionally on a few canonical authors, rather than to sketch a cultural history of walking (based on a much wider corpus), while more modest, also imposes a greater burden: we need to be shown, not just that each author walked (as he or she also slept, dressed, and went to the opera), but also that it had a meaningful impact on their writing. Is the stamp of walking visible in their poetic practice? On this score, Thompson strives to make the case that much formal inventiveness, as well as some typically Romantic meditations, owe a debt to the peculiar rhythms and patterns of ideas imposed on the walker. Just as Rousseau, the great ancestral figure in this genealogy, had found himself unable "to meditate otherwise than on the move" (27), so the twists and turns of Senancour's agonized prose, his "style of fragmentation, digression and progressive accumulation" (37) correspond to his and to Oberman's ramblings. Sand's "cult of improvisation" (90) would also be indebted to her love of the road. Similarly, in Hugo, the rhythms of walking can be plausibly linked to the slow elaboration of a poem, as they are in prose to his digressive practice, and to the mythical vagrancy of Jean Valjean. The pages on Valjean as an errant "passant," as an ambulant Christian witness, testifying to random injustices, are some of the strongest in the book. Thompson also makes the case that pedestrianism affects content: Nerval's tangled projections of time, folding in upon each other, arguably draw on the walker's penchant to gaze into the past, and to project the spatial itinerary through the landscape into the meanderings of reminiscence. For Sand, on the other hand, the road beckoned as a space of freedom, and conjured up the attractions of bohemian vagrancy, promising liberation from the norms of bourgeois society and its rigid gender hierarchies. Thompson also explores, in Töpffer and Didier, how walking provided a vehicle for a genuine encounter with the Other – peasants, laborers, tourists, foreigners – outside the social constraints of class, gender, and profession. These revelations about the role of walking for the French Romantics seem at once well worth making, and slightly...

Russia's dangerous texts: politics between the lines

Russia's Dangerous Texts examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia's authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution. Kathleen F. Parthe identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about literature and politics in Russia, which include a view of the artistic text as national territory, and the belief that writers must avoid all contact with the state. Parthe offers a compelling analysis of the power of Russian literature to shape national identity despite sustained efforts to silence authors deemed subversive. No amount of repression could prevent the production, distribution, and discussion of texts outside official channels. Along with tragic stories of lost manuscripts and persecuted writers, there is ample evidence of an unbroken thread of political discourse through art. The book concludes with a consideration of the impact of two centuries of dangerous texts on post-Soviet Russia.

National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (review)

Reviewed by: National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stag. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. For the past decade, we have seen a burgeoning of scholarly production in Asian American theater and performance studies. Archival and theoretical projects on Asian American theater and performance simultaneously developed at the end of the twentieth century.1 In one decade, we witnessed the publication of groundbreaking anthologies like Between Worlds, edited by Misha Berson, Politics of Life, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, and Unbroken Thread, edited by Roberta Uno. Other publications include collections of Asian American theater work such as Asian American Drama, edited by Brian Nelson, Tokens, edited by Alvin Eng, and But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise, also by Velina Hasu Houston. The presence of Asian American theater work in such recently emergent multi-genre literature anthologies like Bold Words edited by Rajini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaga also testify to the liveliness of the field. At the same time, scholarly publications of and that include Asian American theater and performance began to proliferate: James Moy's Marginal Sights, Josephine Lee's Performing Asian America, Dorinne Kondo's About Face, Yuko Kurahashi's Asian American Culture on Stage, Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place, and Meiling Cheng's In Other Los Angeleses, are among the most notable of such critical studies. A welcome addition to the expanding list of scholarly inquiry into the Asian American stage is Karen Shimakawa's National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage. National Abjection is an important intervention, primarily in the fields of performance/theater studies and Asian American Studies. While Shimakawa deploys a range of theories including postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, it is Julia Kristeva's notion of "abjection" that is the primary theoretical anchor grounding her analysis of Asian American work. Shimakawa's coupling of the psychoanalytic dimension of the "abject" with U.S. racial formation [End Page 73] and national concerns enriches the possibilities for interpreting and understanding Asian American theater, performance, and arguably Asian American cultural production in general.2 "Abjection," as defined by Kristeva and deployed in this text by Shimakawa, is "a state and a process," "a national/cultural identity-forming process, as a way of 'reading' Asian Americanness in relation and as a product of U.S. Americanness—that is, as occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical other" (3). In other words, the deployment of "abjection" to understand Asian Americanness helps us to see the place of Asian Americans in U.S. (cultural, political, and social) hegemony, and illuminates Asian Americanness, albeit produced as abject, as constitutive of U.S. nation formation. Shimakawa's discussion of various works by Asian American theater artists, including Yankee Dawg You Die by Phillip Kan Gotanda, 12-1-A by Wakako Yamauchi, The Year of the Dragon and Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin, Talk-Story by Jeannie Barroga, Tea by Velina Hasu Houston, and Deshima and Chinoiserie by Ping Chong, elucidates her thesis of Asian American abjection. In her introduction, Shimakawa analyses critical historical moments in Asian American history to delineate how Asian Americans have been made abject within the U.S. national context. Her discussion of the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans in World War II and the U.S. government's denial of citizenship (and hence benefits) to Filipinos who fought for the U.S. government in World War II sets up her argument of Asian Americans as abject vis-a-vis U.S. nation formation. This engagement with historical events is important given the underlying questions that animate National Abjection: "what is the connection between histories of nationalization/racialization/gendering, and theatrical performance? What can being attentive to the processes of national abjection tell us about performances that take place within the nation? Conversely, what can performance tell us about national abjection? And perhaps most important, what can performance do to/about that process?" (163). Throughout her analysis of the very emergence of contemporary Asian American theater and various play texts, Shimakawa decisively demonstrates how Asian American artists have mobilized the...

Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes; The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca

Book Review| October 01 2000 Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes; The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca Edited by Margot Blum Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward B. Dwyer.(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xxi + 503 pp., 86 illustrations,preface, contributors, introduction, chapter bibliographies, glossary, index.$19.95 paper.)Edited by Kathryn Klein. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. xiii + 162 pp., 158 illustrations, foreword, preface, chapter bibliographies.$55.00 cloth, $39.95 paper.) Judith Francis Zeitlin Judith Francis Zeitlin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2000) 47 (3-4): 833–836. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-47-3-4-833 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Judith Francis Zeitlin; Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes; The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca. Ethnohistory 1 October 2000; 47 (3-4): 833–836. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-47-3-4-833 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

A Discourse of Legitimacy

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, P.O. Box 607, FIN33101 Tampere, glowe@acnet.fi A zealous and time-honoured commitment to cultural concerns is a cornerstone of public broadcasting in the comparatively small Nordic countries (Hujanen and Jauert, 1998). The preservation and nourishment of Finnish culture has long been a central plank and supporting beam in the legitimacy platform that justifies Yleisradio’s [YLE] position in and demands on their society (Enden, 1996). Compelling contemporary evidence is found in the 1993 Act on YLE which legislatively reaffirms the company’s mandate to frame the services of public broadcasting here in culture-centred terms. This Act complements and extends a cherished historic devotion to such concerns, and has been suggested as the clearest unbroken thread of continuity in YLE’s institutional history (Lowe and Alm, 1997). Culture services in Finland and elsewhere in northern Europe are tightly linked with the legitimating logic of the Nordic welfare state wherein democratisation of broadcast programming is rooted in the ethic of providing “universality” in access to signals and content (Hujanen, 1995). That “public service” ethic, its presumed and incumbent values, as well as its institutional complexion and practical operation, have been challenged and critiqued (e.g., Raboy, 1996; Avery, 1993; Foster, 1992). Today’s competitive context is strikingly dissimilar when compared with monopoly arrangements twenty years ago. The differences are largely a function of increasing competition with the private, commercial sector, and the more general influences of market-oriented rationale in political, social and economic spheres of interest. The Nordic setting has been similarly construed (Kemppainen, 1998). Here as elsewhere, the legitimacy of a public service approach to and practice in broadcasting continues to be vigorously challenged. This is fundamentally a debate about legitimacy that is keyed to differences of opinion in social, political and cultural perspectives. “Some debaters think that public service broadcasting remains a historical relict, while others argue that in the new environment its unique features will be more important than ever” (Hujanen and Jauert, 1998:124). The essence of such conflict hinges on the degree to which public service broadcasting remains socially relevant and legitimate. To the extent that it does enjoy continuing or strengthening legitimacy, a decisive element is rooted in the strongly cultural agenda that tends to frame the enterprise (Radio and Television Systems in the EU Member States and Switzerland, 1998). The situation in Finland is relevant to this more encompassing “discourse of legitimacy.” Yet for all its evident centrality, “culture” has largely flourished under an assumed identity. It is summoned as a god-term to explain and justify what is and isn’t done, but in the institutional setting it is rarely explicitly defined. The meanings and values of ”culture” can, however, be ascertained and critically analysed. There are, of course, a variety of ways to describe this area of media studies, here it is framed as a three-dimensional construct: production, texts and reception. In this article, the author focuses on the first of those dimensions by investigating the ways culture is defined in professional discourse and for practical reasons. The analysis critically investigates “culture” as a defining element in the legitimacy discourse that characterises YLE in the 1990s. It is framed by a heuristic proposed by Lowe and Alm (1997) in which the envi-

The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca

Housed in the former sixteenth-century convent of Santo Domingo Church, now the Regional Museum of Oaxaco, Mexico, is an important collection of textiles representing the area's indigenous cultures. The collection includes a wealth of exquisitely made traditional weavings, many now considered rare. This book details a joint project of the Getty Conservation Institute and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico to conserve the collection. The book contains 145 color photographs as well as a wealth of information on weaving, cultural contexts, and conservation issues.