"A friend of mine asked me to accompany him to visit a young woman in her twenties named Kayitesi. At the time, in April 2007, Kayitesi lived in rural Kigali with two siblings. Kayitesi's parents and many of her relatives were killed during the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide took place in the central and eastern African country of Rwanda when radical Hutu youth militias and Hutu political elites targeted and killed the Tutsi for about three months, between April and July. The Hutus and some foreigners who protected the Tutsi or opposed the genocidal violence were also killed"--
The revival of interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon. Cultural memories can be defined as the social constructions of the past that allow individuals and groups to orient themselves in time and space. The investigation of cultural memories has necessitated an interdisciplinary perspective, though geographical questions about the spaces, places, and landscapes of memory have acquired a special significance. The essays in this volume, written by leading anthropologists, geographers, historians, and psychologists, open a range of new interpretations of the formation and development of cultural memories from ancient times to the present day. The volume is divided into five interconnected sections. The first section outlines the theoretical considerations that have shaped recent debates about cultural memory. The second section provides detailed case studies of three key themes: the founding myths of the nation-state, the contestation of national collective memories during periods of civil war, and the oral traditions that move beyond national narrative. The third section examines the role of World War II as a pivotal episode in an emerging European cultural memory. The fourth section focuses on cultural memories in postcolonial contexts beyond Europe. The fifth and final section extends the study of cultural memory back into premodern tribal and nomadic societies.
This book questions the sociocultural dimensions of remembering. It offers an overview of the history and theory of memory studies through the lens of sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, literature, art and media studies; documenting current international and interdisciplinary memory research in an unprecedented way.
Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities examines what takes place in writing classrooms beyond academic analytical and argumentative writing to include forms that engage students in navigating the civic, political, social and cultural spheres they inhabit. It presents a conceptual framework for imagining how writing instructors can institute campus-wide initiatives, such as Writing Across Communities, that attempt to connect the classroom and the campus to the students’ various communities of belonging, especially students who have been historically underserved. This framework reflects an emerging perspective—writing across difference—that challenges the argument that the best writing instructors can do is develop the skills and knowledge students need to make a successful transition from their home discourses to academic discourses. Instead, the value inherent in the full repertoire of linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources students use in their varied communities of belonging needs to be acknowledged and students need to be encouraged to call on these to the fullest extent possible in the course of learning what they are being taught in the writing classroom. Pedagogically, this book provides educators with the rhetorical, discursive and literacy tools needed to implement this approach.
This volume provides an overview of theories of cultural memory that are intensively discussed in cultural studies and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Cultural memory encompasses all rituals, institutions and practices through which communities establish their identity and common origin, which are challenged by the digital turn today. The book presents, on the one hand, basic arguments by the most important memory theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries and, on the other, exemplary descriptions of the most significant forms of cultural memory.
Interactions among individuals representing culturally dissimilar and politically unequal groups are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Navigating Power: Cross-Cultural Competence in Navajo Land by Gelaye Debebe is concerned with how these interactions affect task coordination in organizational settings. While much research has addressed the effect of cultural differences on these interactions, very little work has been done examining the role of political inequality. Research suggests that cross-cultural breakdowns arise from differing cultural values and assumptions. Overcoming these breakdowns requires cross-cultural competence. This competence entails the ability to sustain a learner stance in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and negative or ambivalent emotional states. Cross-cultural learning is also viewed as a mutual process in which individuals examine their assumptions and jointly construct novel solutions. This book suggests that where power inequalities rooted in historical events are coupled with cultural differences, politically subordinate group members have a keen understanding of the dominant group culture. For them, the violation of historical sensitivities rooted in collective memories, and not cultural clash, are potent triggers for communication breakdown. Because of political inequality, mutuality is not a given in the learning process. Frequently there is a presumption that the knowledge and expertise of dominant group members is universal, better and legitimate. Faced with this situation, subordinate group members draw on power-based rules to interrupt the dominant postures of the politically powerful group. To illustrate these dynamics, Navigating Power draws upon qualitative data from an inter-organizational relationship between an Anglo and Navajo organization. It focuses on two contrasting patterns of interaction, the first of which involves ignoring and suppressing context, and the second involves reading and writing context.
Interactions among individuals representing culturally dissimilar and politically unequal groups are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Navigating Power: Cross-Cultural Competence in Navajoland by Gelaye Debebe is concerned with how these interactions affect task coordination in organizational settings. While much research has addressed the effect of cultural differences on these interactions, very little work has been done examining the role of political inequality. Research suggests that cross-cultural breakdowns arise from differing cultural values and assumptions. Overcoming these breakdowns requires cross-cultural competence. This competence entails the ability to sustain a learner stance in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and negative or ambivalent emotional states. Cross-cultural learning is also viewed as a mutual process in which individuals examine their assumptions and jointly construct novel solutions. This book suggests that where power inequalities rooted in historical events are coupled with cultural differences, politically subordinate group members have a keen understanding of the dominant group culture. For them, the violation of historical sensitivities rooted in collective memories, and not cultural clash, are potent triggers for communication breakdown. Because of political inequality, mutuality is not a given in the learning process. Frequently there is a presumption that the knowledge and expertise of dominant group members is universal, better and legitimate. Faced with this situation, subordinate group members draw on power-based rules to interrupt the dominant postures of the politically powerful group. To illustrate these dynamics, Navigating Power draws upon qualitative data from an inter-organizational relationship between an Anglo and Navajo organization. It focuses on two contrasting patterns of interaction, the first of which involves ignoring and suppressing context, and the second involves reading and writing context.
Why is the past so dominant in the present? This book conceptualizes collective memory as currency, a medium of exchange, a system in common use, and one that is traded between and within nations. Bringing together contemporary case studies and multidisciplinary scholarship, this volume shows how past events are used and perceived as a commodity and a substantially fungible marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs, their supply or demand being a part of one universal market. This book provides readers with a broader understanding of the power of the past in the present. Specific past events are incarnated into collective memories that can transform into iconic, almost mythical stories that can be employed to help make sense of the present. Through evoking, constructing and reconstructing, selectively highlighting certain aspects or perspectives of prominent past events, these collective memories become a significant resource that actors and publics turn to in times of need. As currency, these memories provide a service. As currency, they can also relatively easily travel between collectives, since it is commonly understood that the past has value in the present, and that this value is similarly utilized in various countries around the world.
The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time. The essays move among a variety of cultural and political arenas--from public monuments to parades to political campaigns; from soldiers' memoirs to textbook publishing to children's literature--in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. Setting the politics of Civil War memory within a wide social and cultural landscape, this volume recovers not only the meanings of the war in various eras, but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. By recounting the battles over the memory of the war during the last 140 years, the contributors offer important insights about our identities as individuals and as a nation. Contributors: David W. Blight, Yale University Thomas J. Brown, University of South Carolina Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas, San Antonio Stuart McConnell, Pitzer College James M. McPherson, Princeton University Joan Waugh, University of California, Los Angeles LeeAnn Whites, University of Missouri Jon Wiener, University of California, Irvine
