У статті проаналізовано дослідження українськими вченими проблеми функціонування історичної пам’яті народу та міру розробленості цієї облеми на сучасному етапі розвитку історіографії. Метою публікації є аналіз основних досліджень функціонування історичної пам’яті в Україні після проголошення незалежності. Показано, що за роки незалежності України вченими здійснено перші кроки в осмисленні функціонування історичної пам’яті. Дана проблематика потребує більш розширеного та поглибленого вивчення у подальших дослідженнях.

Historical memory is considered in this article as one of the most important pillars of national identity. In addition to identifying some of the characteristic features of national, historical memory, the author shows that historical memory is influenced by two factors—the direct experience of the witnesses and participants of past events and official propaganda. As the direct witnesses of events disappear, the possibility of reconstructing and distorting historical memory increases. The ideas put forth in (...) this article are formulated based on the historical memory of World War II in the United States, Russia, Germany, and other European countries. (shrink)

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and (...) promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism. (shrink)

An archive is a repository - that is, a place or space in which materials of historic interest or social significance are stored and ordered. A national archive is the storing and ordering place of the collective memory of that nation or people(s). This article provides a brief his torical/theoretical introduction to the politics of the archive in late capi talist societies and discusses this politics of memory via the performance of ordinary daily activities of librarians and archivists. Some (...) relevant political/discursive questions include: who controls, establishes and maintains the archive, and how do they do so? Which materials are preserved in the archive and which are excluded? As the documents and artifacts selected for the archive are ordered and classi fied, how do the schemas and structures applied include, exclude, fore ground or marginalize those materials? Finally, to what extent do the logical hierarchies for classification and arrangement reflect social or political hierarchies? Librarians and archivists face these concerns in HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;17-32; 006604]their professional practice as they make decisions influenced by budgets, finite amounts of both physical and computer storage space and limited staff resources. The authors give real-life examples of choices made as archivists struggle to balance ideological goals made contradictory by practical constraints. For example, is it more appro priate to acquire as many materials as possible but be unable to describe, preserve and present them adequately, or is it preferable to describe, preserve and make fully available a more limited range of records and documents? Because of such practical concerns in modern technicist cultures, the explicitly political who often is reduced to the technically instrumental how - that is, political-moral questions are displaced to nonmoral and nonpolitical technical discourse, thereby establishing a 'meta-politics' that is understood only by the initiated. Conversely, archival activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are 'technical' activi ties that may become explicitly 'political'. The article concludes that technical activities always are political, at least latently or potentially, even when they are not contested and made explicitly political. (shrink)

Intercultural comparative historiography raises fundamental methodological problems: Is there any ground for comparison beyond the peculiarities and differences of cultures to be compared? One must avoid taking the Western cultural tradition of historical thinking as the basis for the comparison. Therefore one has to conceptualize the theoretical grounds for comparison and explicate elements of historical thinking which operate in every culture. Then cultural differences in historiography can be analyzed as peculiar constellations of these elements. In order (...) to develop this comparative groundwork, one has to start with some fundamental considerations about historical memory as the universal cultural means of orienting human practical life in its temporal dimensions. On this foundation one has to erect a theory of historical consciousness and its constitutive factors, procedures, and functions. In a systematized form the relationship of these elements can be used to identify the varieties of historical thinking in different contexts over time. This approach has as one objective an intercultural exchange of knowledge about history as a medium for identity-forming. It should enable the participants in this exchange to overcome the widespread logic of exclusion in favor of a more inclusive manner of historical self-understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Narratives and the Meaning of NationalismLloyd KramerThe vast, expanding literature on nationalism may well defy every generalization except a familiar, general theme of intellectual history: texts about nationalism have always drawn their perspectives and passions from the evolving political and cultural contexts in which their authors have lived. Modern accounts of nationalism show the unmistakable traces of political, military, and cultural conflicts in every decade of the (...) twentieth century—from the era of nationalist rivalries before World War I to the redefinitions of gender, literature, and history that have emerged in contemporary postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.This connection between the texts of nationalist scholarship and the modern contexts of politics and culture suggests why historical narratives of nationalism have become part of the history of nationalism itself. Nationalism’s scholarly interpreters cannot easily separate themselves from the objects of their analysis, and their interpretations are often as diverse and fragmented as the nations they describe. This essay enters the debate on nationalism, describes recurring themes in the historical literature, and replicates a key characteristic of the historiography by stressing that the complexity of nationalism and its interpreters resists every simplifying, comprehensive definition. Histories of nationalism provide a striking example of how the history of ideas never reaches a point of uncontested closure and never finally escapes the political and cultural contexts in which all historical narratives are produced.Like most analysts of nationalism, I assume that it is one of the decisive forces in modern history and that its significance demands careful, critical analysis. It also calls for always incomplete definitions, one of which can be drawn from the German historian Peter Alter. Nationalism is “both an ideology and a political movement which holds the nation and sovereign nation-state to be crucial indwelling values, and which manages to mobilize the political will of [End Page 525] a people or a large section of the population.”1 Nationalist ideas are thus a distinctive form of modern thought that shapes the political actions and cultural identities of individuals as well as groups. The meanings of nationalism and national identity typically depend on various dichotomies that define the nation in terms of its differences from other places or people—the dynamic process of identity formation that has received wide attention in contemporary cultural studies. My own view of the “oppositional” structures in nationalist thinking coincides with the concise description by Peter Sahlins: “National Identity is a socially constructed and continuous process of defining ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.... National identities... do not depend on the existence of any objective linguistic or cultural differentiation but on the subjective experience of difference.”2 Sahlins thus assumes that something called national identity is “there,” but he also insists that national consciousness is a “constructed” identity. Nationalism, in short, does not express or reflect a natural, primordial reality.The assumption that nationalisms are historical rather than natural phenomena shapes most of the scholarly literature, so that the study of nationalism leads to historical analysis rather than to biology or physical geography. Although there have been countless historical studies of nationalism in different periods, cultures, and conflicts,3 my discussion will refer to a small number of narratives that have made especially significant theoretical claims about the nature of nationalism. There is of course no way to analyze such theories without exclusions and generalizations, which I shall provide by focusing mostly on works about Europe and dividing the patterns of historical analysis into the following broad categories: (1) the description of nationalism as a central component of modernization, reflecting and also shaping intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political transitions from premodern to modern history; (2) the claim that nationalisms are modern religious movements, related to but also displacing earlier religions; (3) the argument that nationalism is a linguistic, literary construction that depends on new forms of communication, intellectuals, and narratives; (4) the description of nationalism as a discourse of gender and ethnicity that shapes individual identities and also expresses anxieties about sexuality, culture, and respectability; and (5) the argument that nationalisms can be divided into categories (good/bad, Western/Eastern, [End Page 526] political/cultural) and phases that represent sharp differences in the development of modern... (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Narrative Psychology and Historical Consciousness Relationships and Perspectives DONALD E. POLKINGHORNE Postmodern theory has severely undercut ...

During the last two decades, a surge of historical revisionism has commanded considerable attention in both academia and the public sphere, as historians have linked their understandings of the past to salient problems and identity crises of the present. Increasingly, the histories of nations have been problematized and have become the object of commemorative battles. Historiographical disputes thus reveal no less about contemporary political sensibilities than they do about a nation's history. This article situates the proliferation of historical (...) revisionism within the context of ongoing negotiations regarding the meaning of the nation at the end of the twentieth century. Through a comparison of recent historians' disputes in Germany and Israel, I explore the relationship between revisionism and collective memory, and the ways in which both are reflective of and contribute to the reformation of national identification. While national identities are usually predicated on continuities with the past, new German and Israeli identities are being defined in opposition to the founding myths of their nation‐states. Both are continuously reassessing their pasts, negotiating the balance between a commitment to universal values and the persistence of particularistic traditions. To be sure, national pasts have been contested before, but until recently the primacy of the nation itself was not significantly challenged. I suggest understanding the ongoing phenomenon of national demystification in the context of changing state–society relations. States no longer enjoy the same hegemonic power over the means of collective commemoration. In contrast to the state‐supportive role of historians during the formative phase of nationalism, collective memory has become an increasingly contested terrain. In both countries, revisionists from the left and right self‐consciously struggle to provide historical narratives of their nation's past to suit their present political views of the future. (shrink)

Georgiy Fylypovych. Church in Diaspora as a factor in the preservation of historical memory of Ukrainians. The article analyzes the role of the Church in the formation and preservation of historical memory in the Ukrainian Diaspora. It turns out the influence of churches on national identity through the creation of autonomous image of Ukraine and Ukrainians, positive stereotypes and myths, scientific concepts and popular brands.

The word «history» can always be understood in two different meanings: as what happened in the past and as a story about the past. One and the same past can be described in different ways. The gap between historical events and representations of these events determines the diversity of historical discourses. Shifting the focus of the philosophy of history from identifying the con- ditions for the possibility of historical knowledge to the analysis of the process of (...) class='Hi'>historiography reflects an understanding of the fundamental nature of historical discourses for the formation of pictures of the past. But the fascination with the subject of historical representation often overshadows what makes it possible in principle. Historical discourse is a modern narrative of the past. Thus, the condition for the possibility of historical discursiveness is the mediation of the horizons of the present and the past, which is a fundamental feature of the historicity of human existence. This article explains the discourses of memory and oppositional critical scientific history. Discourses of memory are considered as modern forms of manifestation of the historicity of human existence, because it is in them that the constant mediation of time horizons of the past and present becomes thematic. Critical history declaratively opposes the discourses of memory, but reveals the dependence of its methodological foundations on predetermined forms of under- standing the past presented in memory. The opposition between the discourses of memory and critical history structurally repeats the opposition of tradition and scientific history revealed in hermeneutics. The conceptual shift from tradition to memory reflects the fundamental changes in the modern understanding of historicity associated with the further detraditionalization and globalization of the world. Me- mory appears as a new form of understanding the past, associated with the fear of losing it, as well as understanding the distances and gaps in relation to it. Based on the differentiation of collective memory types, the corresponding types of dis- courses are distinguished. It is argued that historical discourses of identity cannot be identified with historical discourses of power, and historical-didactic and historical-aesthetic discourses are independent forms of modern attitude to the past. In an effort to separate critical reconstruc- tion from memory, scientific discourses become counterfactual to the taken for granted past, represented in the narratives of collective memory. (shrink)

‘Soul’, ‘self’, ‘substance’ and ‘person’ are just four of the terms often used to refer to the human individual. Cutting across metaphysics, ethics, and religion the nature of personal identity is a fundamental and long-standing puzzle in philosophy. Personal Identity and Applied Ethics introduces and examines different conceptions of the self, our nature, and personal identity and considers the implications of these for applied ethics. A key feature of the book is that it considers a range of different approaches to (...) personal identity; philosophical, religious, and cross-cultural, including perspectives from non-Western traditions. Within this comparative framework, Andrea Sauchelli examines the following topics: -Early views of the soul in Plato, Christianity, and Descartes -The Buddhist ‘no-self’ views and the self as a fiction -Confucian ideas of our nature and the importance of self-cultivation as constitutive of the self -Locke’s theory of personal identity as continuity of consciousness and memory and objections to Locke’s argument by Butler and Reid as well as contemporary critics -The theory of ‘animalism’ and arguments concerning embodied concepts of personal identity -Practical and narrative theories of personal identity and moral agency -Personal identity and issues in applied ethics, including abortion, organ transplantation, and the idea of life after death -Implications of life-extending technologies for personal identity. Throughout the book Sauchelli also considers the views of important recent philosophers of personal identity such as Sydney Shoemaker, Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman, and Christine Korsgaard, placing these in helpful historical context. Chapter summaries, a glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading make this a refreshing, approachable introduction to personal identity and applied ethics. It is an ideal text for courses on personal identity that consider both Western and non-Western approaches and that apply theories of personal identity to ethical problems. It will also be of interest to those in related subjects such as religious studies and history of ideas. (shrink)

In contemporary scientific discourse, interest in memory problems has increased significantly. This trend, in our opinion, is due to a number of factors, among which one of the leading places is «democratization» of history. This process began to a large extent under the influence of a violent wave of emancipation of peoples and ethnic groups, which began at the end of the twentieth century. It actualized the need to rethink the past and revive a large part of the cultural heritage (...) of a number of ethnic and ethno-regional communities.Growth of attention to memory studios was facilitated by globalization. Itsliberal-oriented universalist intentions led to the erosion of the foundations of national identity without deprecating sociality as such. The fluidity and rapid change in social standards that have become a logical consequence of this process have shown the urgent need to find those ideological landmarks that can provide certainty at least on a daily basis. Here, a person feels the need for group consolidation, which is perceived directly through participation in social practices. Such practices reproduce the identity of the group and at the same time broadcast a historically formed and established system of group values. The revival of local forms of identity, which takes place under the influence of globalization in the conditions of the rapidity of social standards, can be regarded as a completely positive phenomenon. Meanwhile, in cases of politicization of collective memories, such local groups can significantly undermine the stable development of national states. The purpose of the study is to reveal the value of collective memories in the process of forming and preserving group identity.The task of the paper was to identify the universal foundations of human sociality and to reveal the importance of collective memories in the process of formation and preservation of group identity. Methods. The methodological basis of the study was the multidisciplinary approach, which was combined with the principles of objectivity and impartiality. The basic place in the process of scientific understanding of the role of memory in the process of formation and preservation of group identity was played by general scientific principles and methods, namely: the principles of historical and logical unity, objectivity, integrity and comprehensiveness. Also were used such general scientific methods as analysis and synthesis, induction, analogy, retrospective,comparison, etc. Along with the mentioned methods were widely used methods of cultural, social and categorical analysis, as well as the principles of philosophical hermeneutics. Results In the course of the study, M. Halbwachs’es implicit conclusion about the key role of collective memories in the process of formation of collective identity was refuted, some aspects of collective memory theory developed by him were specified. In particular, the provision on the decisive role of collective memory in the process of formation of group identity was revised and the importance of social friendship in the process of formation of the social community was shown, the persistence and moral significance of which is determined by common memories.Memories provide the appearance of images that become the status of collective identity symbols, which contain behavioral patterns and moral teachings for members of the community. Common memories can be transmitted through direct communication that covers a limited social space, or to be executed in a ritual and/or text. Due to rites or texts reinterpretations, a significant part of the memorization that is important for the collective identity can remain unchanged for a long time. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant (...) by the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. -/- The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. -/- Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. -/- Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. -/- From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. -/- Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. -/- In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself. (shrink)

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts (...) that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history. (shrink)

The focus of this study is the city of Berlin as a site of contested spaces and its representations in the novel Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis. As a number of recent books on Berlin have indicated, the ongoing efforts to physically re-configure historical sites in the city and construct a new post-unification identity for the capital and the nation has produced dissonance between long-standing national narratives of identity and the challenges presented by new identity narratives. The (...) foundation of cultural identity, social memory, is political, shaped and wielded by those in power. Yet, as Michel de Certeau has posited, such power can be contested at the street level where ruptures can be observed. Book of Clouds, the first novel by transnational author Chloe Aridjis, explores the relationship of identity and memory as Tatiana, a young Mexican Jewish woman living in Berlin in the first decade of the twenty-first century, observes and interacts with the city and its inhabitants from an outsider’s perspective. (shrink)

This article deals with the analysis of concepts of national identity and ethnicity as the "cluster of ideas" and/or concepts which have similar constitutive elements. This article intends to analyze the relationship between these concepts and the concept of memory culture. Finally, the author is attempting to discuss the concept of memory culture as the segment of cultural identity. U okviru ovog ogleda autorica predlaze utvrdjivanje zajednickih konstitutivnih elemenata pojmova nacionalni identitet i etnicitet, kao i promisljanje odnosa navedenih pojmova (...) i pojma kultura secanja. Ovi pojmovi se mogu analizirati kao " grozdovi ideja " i/ili skupine pojmova koji poseduju izvesne specificne konstitutivne elemente. U ogledu se predlaze razmatranje kulture secanja kao segmenta kulturnog identiteta. (shrink)

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more “present” than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciousness brings together leading historians, ethnographers, and other scholars who give illuminating reflections on the aims, methods, and conceptualization of their own research as well as the successes and failures they have encountered. This rich (...) collective account provides valuable perspectives for current scholars while charting new avenues for future research. (shrink)

Philosophers of history posit a class of concepts known as colligatory concepts that contribute to historical consciousness and that refer specifically to historical events. Although analysis has identified colligatory concepts in historical discourse, these concepts have not yet been investigated empirically. We present a new methodology for studying these concepts and historical consciousness more broadly, as well as pilot data supporting the methodology. Our aim in the pilot study was to establish whether colligatory concepts are processed (...) differently from control concepts when subjects are asked to judge historical statements. We compared judgments of colligatory concepts in healthy participants and in a patient group with impaired working memory cognitive processing capacity. Forty healthy, college-educated participants and 25 patients with Parkinson's disease were asked to rate narrative sentences containing historical content and an equal number of identically constructed narrative sentences of equ.. (shrink)

The multiple realizability thesis (MRT) is an important philosophical and psychological concept. It says any mental state can be constructed by multiple realizability (MR), meaning in many distinct ways from different physical parts. The goal of our study is to find if the MRT applies to the mental state of consciousness among animals. Many things have been written about MRT but the ones most applicable to animal consciousness are by Shapiro in a 2004 book called The Mind Incarnate and by (...) Polger and Shapiro in their 2016 work, The Multiple Realization Book. Standard, classical MRT has been around since 1967 and it says that a mental state can havevery manydifferent physical realizations, in a nearly unlimited manner. To the contrary, Shapiro’s book reasoned that physical, physiological, and historical constraints force mental traits to evolve in just a few, limited directions, which is seen as convergent evolution of the associated neural traits in different animal lineages. This is his mental constraint thesis (MCT). We examined the evolution of consciousness in animals and found that it arose independently in just three animal clades—vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod mollusks—all of which share many consciousness-associated traits: elaborate sensory organs and brains, high capacity for memory, directed mobility, etc. These three constrained, convergently evolved routes to consciousness fit Shapiro’s original MCT. More recently, Polger and Shapiro’s book presented much the same thesis but changed its name from MCT to a “modest identity thesis.” Furthermore, they argued against almost all the classically offered instances of MR in animal evolution, especially against the evidence of neural plasticity and the differently expanded cerebrums of mammals and birds. In contrast, we argue that some of these classical examples of MR are indeed valid and that Shapiro’s original MCT correction of MRT is the better account of the evolution of consciousness in animal clades. And we still agree that constraints and convergence refute the standard, nearly unconstrained, MRT. (shrink)

Ambiguous Memory examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to (...) deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views. -/- Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity. (shrink)

This article will examine the role of imperial maps, Christian mission, shared memories and collective consciousness in the formation of Mizo identity. Arguing that imperial maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, were meant to suit specific purposes and were laden with deeper agendas, this article will maintain that other aspiring maps also depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descriptions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed have actual impacts (...) upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspirations of the Mizo Christians who embraced Christianity during the colonial period, and how they are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical and historical dimensions of their mental maps. (shrink)

Purpose. Based on the study of philosophical anthropological concepts, to highlight the project of personality in different historical periods, to reveal the meaning of humanistic issues in the postmodern epoch, to identify the essential features of the image of human of the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the principles of historicism, integrity, objectivity regarding the mastery of the issue of person’s image in postmodernism. The (...) research applied comparative-historical, culturological, analytical, axiological approaches to reveal the problem of individuality in the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. The theoretical basis of the article consists of scientific works in the field of philosophical anthropology, history, cultural studies, and aesthetics. Originality. The author revealed the peculiarities of transformation of the personality model from antiquity to postmodernism, specified the image of man of the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. Conclusions. The analysis of anthropological ideas of Western philosophy of different ages shows the variety of views about understanding the nature of the person, its complexity and ambiguity. In the epoch of postmodernism humanistic issues are of particular relevance, which is connected with social and political uncertainty, domination of mass consciousness, loss of national and cultural identity. The image of a person of this period is deprived of a solid foundation, it is blurred and relative. The destruction of faith in the absolute in the context of the second half of the twentieth century contributed to the formation of confidence in the interdependence of all things, raised the problem of the personality image to a new ontological level. Orientation in the achievements of European civilization, perception of its anthropological experience, intercultural dialogue contribute to the productive use of the achievements of mankind in order to understand the modern person and to form its adequate image. In its essence, postmodernism does not set the goal to realize a retrospection of subject type. However, separating from the cultural memory the excerpts of ideas about a person, by certain styles and directions, it builds on their formations its own eclectic image of the individual. (shrink)

Adorno's work “What does‘processing of the Рast’ mean” for the first time was presented as a report on November 6, 1959 before the Coordination Council on Christian-Jewish Cooperation. In this work Adorno considered the essence of social ideology prevailing in postwar Germany, which predetermined the strategies of social reconciliation with the political crimes of the former national-socialist power. According to the philosopher the social ideology of the consumer society uses a large number of appropriate means to stabilize its dominant (...) position in society. First of all this ideology tries to eliminate the collective historical memory of people about the horrors of the war period, trying to squeeze them out of the collective consciousness, in particular, through the memories of people about the “best times” of life under the “guardianship” of the previous totalitarian power. The philosopher marked as surrogate the identity of these people which socially integrated only through the authority of the power personality. They do not identify themselves with the victims of the totalitarian regime because of the influence on their consciousness of the cultural elements of this social ideology. Another consequence of this influence is the alienation of these people from the idea of democracy as a factor of properly sociocultural transformations. Adorno defined the new “democratic pedagogy” and the enlightenment as a “second education” as effective means to overcome this influence. They are practically implemented in a society as those educated people who have knowledge about the past crimes of the totalitarian regime. In this manner they cause within the educational process of the effective “re-education of the Past” through the formation of a personal understanding of an individual about social causes and the terrible consequences of rule of a totalitarian regime. This makes possible of his “political full-grown” and makes impossible of historic recurrence of the crimes of authoritarian power in Europe. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of revisionism in historiography, while focusing in particular on illegitimate revisionism and negationism. It is indisputably true that historiography must be subject to constant revisions. Like all scientific theories, it needs to be characterized by a sort of?conservative? openness towards new ideas; however, revisions and negations are often put forward without scientific grounding. They reject the well-established historiographical methods, while opening themselves to various kinds of ideologies, biases and manipulations. The paper further offers (...) a synthesized overview of the revisionist practice in dominant parts of the society and historiography in post-communist Serbia. The change in the ideological paradigm that occurred in the 1980s was accompanied by a politically motivated reinterpretation of the past, which primarily focused on World War II in Yugoslavia. In Serbia in the 1990s, Tito?s Partisans were no longer celebrated as national heroes and fighters against fascism; they were replaced by the royalist and nationalist Chetniks led by Draza Mihailovic, whose collaboration with the occupying forces was purposefully glossed over. The nationalist interpretation of history and the new revisionist politics in Serbia were supported by the state and the activities of its three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. In spite of the political changes that took place in Serbia in 2000, the dominant nationalist matrix in historical interpretations and revisionist politics remained unchanged. (shrink)

To this day, the Italian Jewish literary postwar canon is undisputedly ruled by Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Carlo Levi. This study of three major Italian Jewish women writers – Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi – highlights the presence in Italian literature of a subversive Jewish écriture feminine. These writers’ formal independence and subversive redeployment of narrative and thematic strategies not only consolidated a strong female voice in Italian literature but also produced a specific Italian brand of Jewish (...) literature. The following analysis shows how, through their literary ‘life miniatures’, Ginzburg, Sereni and Levi recentre the domestic everydayness of woman’s personal and historical experience, while, simultaneously, challenging the traditional representations of women’s positions within family and within the public space, as well as interrogating their Jewish identity vis-a-vis their country’s Fascist past. In particular, this article focuses on the way in which all three authors portray themselves as women trying to strike a balance between their Jewish identity and history alive only in the domestic space of their family lives, and their gender identity which is repressed by the patriarchal system both in the house and in the public arena. These women respond by moving ‘out’ of their homes, by exploring the city space – thus turning the ‘urban monster’ into a positive locus for women’s self-determination and political action – and by bonding with other women. Through a demasculinization of the city space, these memoirs re-elaborated notions of family, Judaism, private and historical memory, and they reinvented a poetics for the ‘small virtues’ of woman’s everyday existence while also pioneering a new space in literature that radically changed the direction of patriarchal Italian culture in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Collective memory: concepts and methods -- Collective memory and the Russian "schematic narrative template" -- Patterns of collective remembering and identity -- Historical narratives, cultural traditions, and collective memory in the South Caucasus -- Characteristics of collective memory, ethnic conflicts, historiography, and the "politics of memory".

This paper explores the meaning attributed to the national group as an entry point into how boundaries between the in-group and the out-group are formed. To do so, it focuses on the representation of the past of the group, taken as a symbolic resource able to produce a raison d’être for national groups, and does so within a dialogical framework. Using the transcripts of the French parliamentary debates on immigration from 2006, it proposes a qualitative analysis of collective (...) narratives of the past along three axes: 1) what meaning do they give to the nation, 2) how is such a meaning produced, and 3) how do the stories told by different groups reply or relate to one another. By identifying the main narratives found in the data and how they relate to each other – within and between groups – it proposes to see collective memory as itself the product of symbolisation processes and, therefore, as a cultural tool especially powerful to produce meaning about the present. This paper also argues that collective memory is a situated construction negotiated with – or contested by – others, made possible by the presence of common historical benchmarks to which different meanings may however be attributed. Finally, it proposes to understand “immigration talk” as potentially the product of the identity questions faced by the national group, rather than the other way around. (shrink)

This study investigates how students’ national identity affects their historical understanding by mediating their use of affective historical empathy. The research focuses on the case of “comfort women” (women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during WWII) in South Korea—a topic in which a strong nationalist narrative dominates social and educational discourses. I conducted semi-structured, task-based group interviews with 16 high school students in South Korea. In interviews, students’ national identity mediated how they utilized four (...) types of affective historical empathy: Students as ethnic Koreans cared more about “our” Korean comfort women over others; cared that Korean comfort women and others suffered from what “we” and “they” did as nations; cared for those women's voices from a humanitarian perspective beyond their ethnic and national boundaries; and cared to make social changes for those women and themselves as future citizens of their democratic nation. These findings help us understand how students’ emotional attachment to “our” nation and its members can mediate their historical understanding through affective historical empathy as well as how affective historical empathy can motivate students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns. This case study also stimulates reflection on historical empathy's implications for students’ democratic civic participation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only barrenness. The (...) third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

This book provides a social history of the Tamil Jainas, a minority community living in Tamil Nadu in south India. It holds special significance in the method of studying the community, living in villages of Tamil Nadu and retrieving their perspectives on their past. This is a new approach in terms of historiography from extant works on Jainism in south India. A major feature of this book is the hitherto uncovered aspect of the question of language and identity, caste (...) and the modern socio-political movements in Tamil Nadu, such as the Self-Respect Movement (initiated by 'Periyar'), in which some Tamil Jainas were active participants. Special features in the book include photographs of the community and monuments, maps, and a unique style, which combines a journalistic approach and academic historical research. This book is of interest to readers of Tamil language and history, and to anyone working on the idea of politics of marginalisation of religious identities, ide as of memory, and community narratives of shared history in the face of religious persecution. (shrink)

The trend to centralization of the Mizrahi narrative has become an integral part of the nationalistic, ethnic, religious, and ideological-political dimensions of the emerging, complex Israeli identity. This trend includes several forms of opposition: strong opposition to "melting pot" policies and their ideological leaders; opposition to the view that ethnicity is a dimension of the tension and schisms that threaten Israeli society; and, direct repulsion of attempts to silence and to dismiss Mizrahim and so marginalize them hegemonically. The Mizrahi Democratic (...) Rainbow [The Keshet], the most prominent proponent and representative of this trend, was established in the 1990s with the intention of being a leading civic and political body in Israeli society. While it was the Mizrahi worldview that led to selection of the organization's name and aims, their vision was to be involved in social struggle on behalf of other groups in Israeli society. Since it was established, The Keshet has aimed to function as an assertive, long-term alternative coalition exerting influence, power, and pressure on the Israeli narrative network. And, indeed, the organization has succeeded in disrupting Israeli discourse, principally, by challenging the ideological foundations of the Zionist meta-narrative. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and nearly a decade since it was established, The Keshet not only represents the most current wave of Mizrahi discourse, it has changed it to such a great degree that it is impossible to ignore its influence. Further, this alternative narrative may have significant potential to advance the internal Jewish discourse so fundamental at this time given the changing Israeli situation and regional conditions. And, while it is possible to view The Keshet and this new narrative as a continuation of the Mizrahi struggle, as a narrative The Keshet's agenda represents a post-colonial perspective and multi-cultural alternative to Zionism as a social vehicle. Amidst all of this, The Keshet continues to offer concrete proposals to change the Jewish character of the state as well as its internal and external relations. One of the primary goals of this study was to examine the rise of the Mizrahi narrative over the last two decades and the new Mizrahi discourse in Israeli society. More specifically, the study sought to attain an in-depth understanding of the central narrative created and represented by The Keshet. An additional goal was to investigate the influence of The Keshet's activity and the narrative it constructed in regard to other narratives. In particular, the study focused on The Keshet's opposition to the central Zionist narrative that infuses civic, political, and academic frameworks in Israel. Accordingly, the primary research questions investigated in the study sought to determine: What has been the influence of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow on the Mizrahi narrative in Israel? And, what are implications of such influence for the central Zionist narrative? Methodologically, the study was based on narrative and comparative analyses of texts from different periods of the older and newer Mizrahi narratives. The corpus included two types of texts: First, academic texts and opinion pieces, both philosophical and programmatic in nature, published in magazines, journals, books, as well as position papers; second, all of the texts published by prominent and influential figures who charted the path of The Keshet or led it organizationally and/or intellectually over the last twenty years (e. g., Yehudah Shenhav, Yossi Yona, Moshe Krief among others). All texts were examined by means of philosophical, historical and critical hermeneutic tools. This analysis revealed different levels of Mizrahi and civic discourse in Israel as well as among The Keshet's founders and leading ideologues. The study was based on a three stage process model, developed for purposes of this study, for investigation and analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative as well as other oppositional narratives, in particular opposition to the hegemonic meta-narrative. The stages are: issuing the challenge, dissolution and, liberation; that is, liberation is the measure of the ultimate success of the struggle for narrative change. Such change is not based on success in the field, but rather on a radical, fundamental reversal of thought, discourse patterns, stylistic structures, as well as forms of questioning - in this case of taken-for-granted racist mechanisms. However, the principal change is in achieving a deep, inner de-legitimization of the signifiers, categories, and reproductions of all manner of mockery that are based on immoral colonialist processes that are reinforced by regimes of fear and intimidation whose self-destruction began upon their very creation. This three stage model charts the course of the oppositional Mizrahi narrative from: accounting for the past (passing judgment on the so-called historic colonialist Zionism) to writing a new (pure Mizrahi) history and creation of a Mizrahi-Arab identity separate from the Ashkenazic, identified as Zionist. Contemporary post-colonialist discourse is integral in these stages. Such a perspective has been transformed by transitions from - binarism to hybridity, Orientalism to Occidentalism, the politics of "liberation" to "constructive" politics, from the history of consciousness to the history of change, as well as from nationalist to post-nationalist questions. Fundamentally, according to this approach, political and other struggles for the emerging narrative of Mizrahi (or Arab) history seek to centralize it in society and weave it amidst the models of multiculturalism. Undertaken in parallel, the central characteristics of all these stages are borrowed from countries in which the need for national reconciliation led to renunciation of apartheid and racist policies and historical judgment of the hegemony supported by racist leaders. In addition, these three moves were undertaken in Keshet and its ideologues by means of substantive symbolic violence directed at the hegemonic Ashkenazic discourse, which included creation of hatred of it, use of stereotypes the opposite of oppressive discourse, and adoption of an arrogant point of view toward it. This stands in stark contrast to the claims of the self-proclaimed new Mizrahi stance of a discourse established on purely ethical grounds that sought to cleanse itself of these very same oppressive elements. The model developed for and demonstrated in this study allows for analysis of oppositional narratives in which the libratory stage evolves into a form of entrapment, as appears to be occurring to the new Mizrahi discourse. This conclusion is based on the observations shared by many Keshet proponents including leading intellectuals who worked on the manifestos that were the subject of criticism from the Zionist camp. The study identified and defined the following six interwoven strata, which for purposes of explication are each discussed in a separate chapter: The first chapter presents a general theoretical discussion of the issue of the narrative and the inter-narrative struggle that has become central and applicable in various ways in the latest generation (e. g., anthropologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically). The analysis surveys different discussions in the inter-narrative struggle and locates them in the contexts, relations, and meanings derived from, representing, and indeed reproducing the narrative of national identity. The second chapter includes a historical survey of the older Mizrahi struggle that existed prior to the ascendance of the new Mizrahi narrative. Initially, Mizrahi discourse focused on expressing the ethnic protest that grew in years to follow. These feelings of discrimination and social distancing of the immigrants from Islamic countries gave birth to expressions of protest, the most prominent of which were Wadi Salib and the Black Panther Movement's various activities. The research literature contains many explanations for the exacerbation of the ethnic problem and creation of a situation that could not be ignored. The consensus academic view reached at the end of the 1970s identified a number of primary factors for this situation: the existence and extensive numbers of different ethnic groups; the relative or absolute segregation of frameworks within which members of these ethnic groups lived and acted; and the significant overlap between socio-economic status and feelings of discrimination retained by members of the Mizrahi group due years of neglect by the Ashkenazic establishment, the strengthening of Mizrahi social, cultural, and political power, as well as the emergence of a Mizrahi elite that identified with Mizrahi problems. The severe consequences of feelings of discrimination were expressed in a long series of events, such as: rioting by residents of the Rehovot Sharayim neighborhood in 1956; events of Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959; and a chain of activities involving the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Protest was also an aspect of the "tent movement" in the 1970s and 1980s. Political activities were advanced by the Tami Movement that competed in the election for the 10th Knesset in 1981 and the Shas Movement that has continued to garner political power since being found in 1984. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized as the era of radical consciousness of Mizrahi discourse as well as by the rise to power, in consecutive order, of the political parties – Tami, Shas, and the Mizrahim HaHadashim [the New Mizrahi]. The latter party laid the foundations of the new radical Mizrahi discourse from which emerged such cultural activities as: Iton Aher [A Different Newspaper]; Bimat Kivon Aher [Another Direction Forum]; Efir'yon journal; the Halah Organization for Education in Neighborhoods, Development Towns, and Villages; Kedma; the newspaper – Patish [Hammer]; and, eventually the establishment of Keshet. The third chapter presents an examination of the materialization of the inter-narrative struggle in the case of Israel, with a specific focus on The Keshet and the new Mizrahi narrative advanced by it and intellectuals. The Keshet ideology is examined in the context of its grounding in post-colonial thought, especially that of Edward Said; the directions proposed by Ella Shohat and her followers; the central thinkers of the narrative in Israel in the last decade; and the harsh critique leveled at the Ashkenazic-Zionist narrative. The practical steps proposed for implementation within the multicultural model are also examined. Here the effort to reduce the centrality of Zionism while revealing its oppressive mechanisms was undertaken in parallel with use of these mechanisms in order to create a Mizrahi space with broad margins inclusive of alternative forms of Israeli identity in the Middle East and in conjunction with Arabs within and beyond Israel. Mizrahi traditionalism is examined in the fourth chapter in two particular respects. First, the criticism of the new Mizrahi narrative leveled by the renewed view and, second, the implications of the alternative in terms of creating a Mizrahi space that does not oppose Zionism. Rather, in opposing the post-colonialist perspective, this renewed traditionalist perspective criticizes as well as values Zionism. This space seeks to be both Jewish and Mizrahi. It does not detach itself from nationalist Zionism but rather views itself as a continuation of this tradition and, accordingly, is an effort to develop a next stage in its development. For example, an essential dimension of the traditionalist perspective, "commitment," is considered in this stage to be a fertile basis for dialogue with the past and as an anchor for contemporary interpretation of Mizrahi and other Jews' identities in Israel. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with all of the vectors of criticism directed at the new Mizrahi narrative, including its ideological foundations, philosophical stance, as well as intellectual and practical basis in the Israeli sphere in the face of Palestinian nationalism. These vectors of criticism from within and beyond The Keshet deal with issues, such as, the meaning of the movement's activities and the narrative that it offers regarding questions of Israeli identity, Israeli collective memory, and Mizrahi self-perception. At the same time, it must confront the capitalist neo-liberal narrative in a global world and thrive in a context in which it must make itself manifest amidst oppositional narratives. The final chapter presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative. It does so by means of a theoretical model that examines it as an oppositional narrative – one that seeks to challenge the hegemonic meta-narrative, to dissolve the boundaries of the narrative discourse, and to propose liberation and redemption that may led to entrapment amidst a changing, a-dichotomous realities (e. g., global economic development in the face of Zionist nationalisms that display ideological strength as well as development of the sense of being an Israeli that maintains its vitality and continuity while being constituted by sectors that challenge being a Mizrahi, such as co-ethnic subjects. The Keshet's influence is dramatic and extends in a number of central directions. Its political activity and non-entry into the domains of the Israeli parliament granted the movement significant power in civic discourse and contributed to changing the persona of the Mizrahi discourse; for example, from political-party struggles over budgets and obtaining shares of the regime to changing the face of Israeli society and the centrality of the Mizrahi narrative. This change included deconstructing the Ashkenazic narrative and constructing comprehensive Ashkenazic-Zionist guilt, as evident in the Ehud Barak's request for collective forgiveness. This was accomplished through the participation of leading members of Keshet who appeared in prominent intellectual forums and engaged in lively discourse - principally in academic, social, and media domains. Such participation gave new meaning to various aspects of Israeli society while establishing different models of multiculturalism. The rise of the new Mizrahi narrative is a significant marker in the inter-narrative struggle as it represents a desire for separate or hybrid identities. And, the deep probing of the narrative constructed by leaders of The Keshet and those who identify with the movement produced a number of clear ways to distinguish it from the old Mizrahi struggle, whose history was portrayed through social protests, in a manner similar to linear vectors marked with wars and elections. The old Mizrahi struggle selected the traditional tactical struggle identified usually with social and political movements that seek to change political, social, and economic reality - from the bottom up. Their primary demand was to change decisions as well as the division of social goods and resources. Hence, this older period of struggle was not aimed at opposing the ideological foundations of the hegemonic narrative nor did it seek to undermine in a radical manner the unique nature of the state of Israel as a revolutionary solution for the problems of the Jews according to the Zionist approach, as a national home for the Jewish people, and recognition of the right to an preferred and meta-definition of Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the top down struggle advanced by the new narrative is part of an ideological movement led by the educated that is assertive and ground in post-colonialist theory. Accordingly, it was critical of the techniques and mechanisms of oppression as well as sought to attack the Zionist ideological foundations and to reveal its racist operations and the regimes that have preserved it so efficiently for many years. The uniqueness of this narrative is the intellectual offensive that continues to be advanced and, in parallel, development of the discourse struggle in Israel concerning the justification for Zionism and the concrete political proposal that Jews reject the taken-for-granted status of it as an ideology. This new narrative recognizes the historic difficulties of subversion as an emancipatory and, principally, moral effort. In addition, the new Mizrahi narrative shares the foundations and narrative of Palestinian victimization. In its radical version, the new Mizrahi narrative seeks to connect to the Palestinian narrative in order to create a new space here. According to this version, this action will take place gradually. The first stage will be characterized by opposition to Western European, Ashkenazic Zionism. The Eurocentric Zionism will surrender in the second stage, to be followed in the last stage by creation of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that will be establish through concrete actualization of the refugee status and victimization that is shared by both Palestinians and Mizrahim (whether as Mizrahim or Jewish-Arab). Not a speculative academic exercise, the goal sought by this narrative is delineate and to achieve a multicultural model in which equality, liberty, and social justice will overcome the nationalism and colonialism of either side; that is it will be neither Zionist nor Jewish. Thus, this approach stresses what is shared (e.g., acceptance of the Arab space and not a rejection of it; the legitimacy of the Arab language and culture). This is part of detachment from and historic judgment of the colonialist Zionist enterprise. This possibility includes moral elements that remove the evil and harm caused by Zionism for many years as well as inner cleansing – primarily among Ashkenazim – of attitudes towards Jews and non-Jews. Though, in this regard, it should be noted that, to date, the new narrative has not made similar claims that Palestinians undergo a similar process. The assumption seems to be that this should be tested, that the coalition proposed is a possibility that will be recognized by the Palestinians, and that they are prepared to undergo a similar, shared moral process that involves negating the state of Israel as a Jewish, Western state, a state of the Jewish people, and not only for those who live within it. These Mizrahi thinkers conducted a significant move through deconstruction and substitution of the Eurocentric narrative with a multi-cultural proposal that is optimistic and even attractively naïve. Today, they acknowledge that they did not take into account Palestinian nationalist violence directed to citizens, the traditionalist alternative, and widespread opposition within the Mizrahi community toward what is perceived to be Mizrahi seclusion. They also did not take into account the harsh criticism rendered by young and educated Mizrahim who claim that they were born into a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-layered identity that includes internalization of the language of the West and rules of the game of this complex identity. And, though they are critical of some of its values, this makes it difficult to mount internal emotional opposition to the West and to the globalization contained within this world. Hence, this more familiar world is preferred over the values of the Mizrahi-Arab alternative, particularly in regard to problems in the domains of democratic citizenship, stance taken toward women, and freedom of speech. Further, educated Mizrachim reject the post-colonialist perspective and are stridently critical of its dichotomization. They claim that such a division is irrelevant in a world in which older ideologies have collapsed and new spheres – such as cyberspace and others – are open to them in which they can present themselves with an Israeli identity that is not categorized as necessarily Mizrahi. (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that a (...) structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

The claim that liberal democratic normative commitments are compatible with nationalism is challenged by the widely acknowledged fact that national identities invariably depend on historical myths: the nationalist defence of such publicly shared myths is in tension with liberal democratic theory’s commitment to norms of publicity, public justification, and freedom of expression. Recent liberal nationalist efforts to meet this challenge by justifying national myths on liberal democratic grounds fail to distinguish adequately between different senses of myth. Once (...) this is done (drawing on Arthur Danto’s analytical philosophy of history), it becomes apparent that historical narratives cannot be justifiably shielded from criteria of truth and significance, and that genuinely historical myths are incompatible with liberal democratic political philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" (...) involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

The paper explores the role played by concepts of temporality in shaping the self's identity and its moral responsibility. This theme is examined in both Kant and Benjamin, two theorists who view the modern self as an essentially historical being. For Kant, teleological and uniform time shoulders the heightening of the self's universal attributes and the constant expansion of a moral community. The desired end is the establishment of an integrated and homogeneous human space, a cosmopolitan stage wherein history (...) is finally redeemed. This progressive notion of time is seen as dangerous by Benjamin, since it generates forgetfulness and inner impoverishment of the self. Instead, Benjamin advances a fragmented conception of time, one allowing conversation between distant moments and grounding identity in concrete images. While the poetic recovery of memory leads to the distinct and exclusive, Benjamin follows Kant in demanding universal moral responsibility of the self. However, Benjamin's strategy, so to speak, is the integration of our temporal - not spatial - experience. Key Words: Benjamin • history • Kant • nation-state • space • time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher CimorelliReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher Cimorelli (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), xii + 356.There is no end of books on John Henry Newman, and this is a good thing, because Newman's importance is not waning, but—arguably—increasing. Christopher Cimorelli's (...) study, the adapted version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, under the directorship of the noted Newman scholar Terrence Merrigan, appeared in print in 2017. This book is of ongoing relevance, for at least three reasons. (1) No other work since then has replaced or improved upon Cimorelli's close reading and exacting interpretation of Newman's first [End Page 1339] monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century. (2) There exists no other study on Newman's theology of history in correlation to his development of doctrine of similar depth. (3) Cimorelli has recently become director of the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) in Pittsburgh. It is to be expected that the programmatic thrust of this work will inform to some degree the research agenda and the overall theological approach taken at the NINS under his leadership.Cimorelli's book does two things in one: it fills an urgent need in Newman studies, and based on Newman's thought about history, it makes an important—albeit not unproblematic—contribution to the ongoing discussion regarding the development of doctrine by advancing a new theory of the development of tradition. This makes the book fall into two parts of unequal length, the second shorter constructive part being conjoined to the first longer interpretive part, an investigation of Newman's view of history as a whole, ecclesiastical history, the nature of historical research, and its significance for theology.In the first chapter, Cimorelli treats lucidly and briefly the religious and socio-political context within which the Oxford Movement arose and in which Newman's self-perception as a historian developed. The central topic of the chapter is a succinct analysis of the religious epistemology of the Oxford Movement, based on the connection between ethos and religious knowledge taken to be embodied in the life and teaching of the early Church, the normative instantiation of orthodoxy and moral temper, and thus a model for the intended reform of the Church of England. Cimorelli argues persuasively that "the Tractarian ethos was... a way of life, a way of seeing the fallen world, and it directly involved the exercise of the human will in the maintenance of the moral disposition from which one views and judges the world" (37). This religious epistemology informed Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons and became increasingly articulated in an explicit way in his Oxford University Sermons.In the second chapter, Cimorelli reconstructs Newman's self-perception as an ecclesial historian and the theological and theoretical method Newman develops, in which historical inquiry has a particular nature that is characterized by the dynamic confluence of three constitutive elements: evidence, antecedent probabilities, and antecedent considerations. The judgments the historian has inevitably to make regarding the method and the resources of a particular historical inquiry are irreducibly personal, because the antecedent considerations that guide these judgments will vary from historian to historian. Because historical evidence is imperfect, such considerations are valid and indeed indispensable. Cimorelli's analysis is [End Page 1340] perceptive and valuable; regrettably, too few contemporary Church historians reflect on these epistemological and hermeneutical matters pertaining to historiography in general and Church history in particular with sufficient depth and rigor. The central insights of Newman's view are still pertinent. His hermeneutical considerations are truly critical because they do justice to the specific nature of historical investigation. Compared to Newman's hermeneutics, the use by many ecclesial historians of the historical-critical method comes across as theologically quite uncritical and unreflective. To put it differently: Cimorelli's able analysis makes Newman a strikingly relevant interlocutor in a contemporary discussion about the nature of an ecclesiastical history and a history of doctrine and dogma that is fully... (shrink)

Since Estonia is in the midst of a national redefinition and examination of past traditions and future aspirations, it makes an excellent case study for the potentiality of theatre as an arbiter of national identity. The changing value of the institution itself is part of the equation (will Estonians continue to appreciate and attend the theatre in coming years?). In addition, the historical role of Estonian theatre as a repository for national narratives, especially literary ones, makes (...) it a significant site for struggles around print and technology, and between embodied performances and archival performatives.This essay introduces a series of articles that address how Estonia and its theatre might be regarded and understood in light of its history, memories, present experiences, and future possibilities. The idea of pretence that lies at the heart of theatricality itself provides an ideal means for interrogating national identity in a time of great instability and flux. The examples of productions discussed in these three essays share more than a deliberate utilization of the rubrics of theatricality. It seems no coincidence that the reworking of national classics, Estonian national myths, and ethnic folk songs and ceremonies takes place concurrently with the representation of new technologies, commodity capitalism, and diasporic collisions. Embodying precisely the predicament of culture in a country reassessing its past and confronting its future, the theatre is an important institution for national resignification. (shrink)

Since Estonia is in the midst of a national redefinition and examination of past traditions and future aspirations, it makes an excellent case study for the potentiality of theatre as an arbiter of national identity. The changing value of the institution itself is part of the equation (will Estonians continue to appreciate and attend the theatre in coming years?). In addition, the historical role of Estonian theatre as a repository for national narratives, especially literary ones, makes (...) it a significant site for struggles around print and technology, and between embodied performances and archival performatives.This essay introduces a series of articles that address how Estonia and its theatre might be regarded and understood in light of its history, memories, present experiences, and future possibilities. The idea of pretence that lies at the heart of theatricality itself provides an ideal means for interrogating national identity in a time of great instability and flux. The examples of productions discussed in these three essays share more than a deliberate utilization of the rubrics of theatricality. It seems no coincidence that the reworking of national classics, Estonian national myths, and ethnic folk songs and ceremonies takes place concurrently with the representation of new technologies, commodity capitalism, and diasporic collisions. Embodying precisely the predicament of culture in a country reassessing its past and confronting its future, the theatre is an important institution for national resignification. (shrink)