When Bereaved of Everything: Objects from the Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück as Expressions of Resistance,Memory, and Identity

When survivors from the Ravensbrück concentration camp arrived in Sweden in spring 1945, some of the objects they brought with them from the camp were collected and preserved. These are modest in appearance, but were – as oral testimonies show – invaluable in camp. The concentration camp context of obliteration stretches the limits of interpretation of material culture to its extreme. In this article the objects are discussed as expressions of resistance, memory, and identity. These immaterial values were among the most vital coping strategies used by the prisoners against the dehumanization laid upon them by the camp administration. The material culture was central in enabling, upholding, and realizing these.     

Enfleshing Aesthetics: Theological Anthropology in M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom and Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh

To contend with the racist scaling of bodies seems to tend toward the ontological and metaphysical. Counter-strategies entail engagement with the predominant framework – i.e., with its categories of being and its grounds of analysis – however, much subjected to critique and deconstruction. Shawn Copeland and Mayra Rivera both identify and accept this “risk” in their theological projects. I argue that, although each does it with differing relative emphases, their political theologies trade upon an alternation between practical and poetical modes of critical reflection – the one is more negative and formal, the other is more positive and material; and this unitary alternation is what staves off failure in ideology and foundationalism. I furthermore suggest that the practical-poetical alternation I describe represents a contemporary politicization of the aesthetical.     

Status,Estate, or Profession?

This article focuses on how social stratification was performed in everyday practice in 1730s Sweden. By studying the titles people were given in the court material of three communities – Uppsala town, Lagunda härad, and Sala town with its silver mine – three factors defining social categorization can be identified: status, estate, and profession. Only people who rose above the commoners were entitled, which means that all titles denoted status. Some titles were shared by different social groups that had little in common, and therefore cannot be said to mark anything other than status. Other titles were exclusive to definable groups. Among those, some were given to groups whose exclusivity was based on legal and fiscal privileges, rather than education or competence. They were simply feudal corporations, or estates. In other groups – all defined by occupations – the members had completed specialist education that included formal exams. In those, social stratification was the result of professionalism.     

Assessing stories before sites: identifying the tangible from the intangible

Despite a growing recognition that intangible heritage forms an important part of the significance of heritage sites, and that intangible values are intertwined with material resources and spaces, many procedures for the identification and management of heritage sites remain unchanged and fail to integrate these two sets of values. The conservation of heritage sites continues to be dominated by a process that first identifies a material site and then identifies the associated values that comprise its significance. This paper suggests that rather than identifying the physical expression of heritage as the initial point of heritage assessment, the stories (or intangible values) of a region or national history can form the primary mechanism for identifying physical heritage sites. Using the example of Australian government policies of Aboriginal segregation and assimilation, we suggest how national stories – or intangible values – might be used to identify representative sites.     

The Turnover Club: locality and identity in the North Staffordshire practice of turning over ceramic ware

This paper explores a key practice adopted by those local to or from Stoke-on-Trent, and outlines its significance in the wider context of ‘ordinary’ consumption and material cultures, globalisation and local identity. Being a ‘turnover-er’ – someone who always turns over pottery to check whether it is Stoke-on-Trent ware – is an oft practised, but little examined part of the living heritage that connects those with affinity to ‘the Potteries’ (as the region is known) and its ceramic ware. The project set out to explore qualitative accounts of turning over and to gauge its salience and reach as a practice, linking this to broader accounts of material culture, consumption and heritage. We carried out 20 interviews with those who turn over or who have an interest in local ceramics, and an online survey (n = 500) which explored the some of the reasons for turning over. Findings indicate the strong connections established by the practice of turning over to local identity, both inherited and adopted, and further indicates the social salience and emotional attachments to the meanings of local ware.     

Nativism in Late Medieval Norway

Scholars have long regarded nativism – the concerted marginalization of foreigners in preference for natives – as a major factor in Norway’s national movement in the late Middle Ages. While anti-foreign statements and policy reforms introduced by the country’s aristocracy demonstrate the existence and function of nativism in political discourse, historians have exaggerated or misconstrued its role in cases of popular unrest. This article challenges the theory that peasants frequently and ardently resisted foreign officials in the 15th century. Taking the one known case of popular nativism – Amund Sigurdsson’s uprising of 1436–1437 – as reference, it examines another nine well-known incidents of peasant activism in order to determine a similar degree of antipathy toward foreigners. It is argued that while there is very little empirical evidence to support the nativist theory, there is ample material to inspire more focused examination of socio-economic and structural developments, and the role these played in Norway’s turbulent national awakening.     

Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic ‘other’: nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries*

Abstract. This paper aims to develop a model for the ethno‐nationalist incorporation of the space and time – that is of the geography and history – of ethnies considered as ‘others’ by the ethno‐nationalist core of an emerging nation‐state. It contends that one of the reasons for the recurring power and emotive force of nationalist discourse and practice stems from the disjunction between the complex history of a locality – exemplified in its material culture – and the homogenised present, which various strategies of ethno‐nationalist incorporation have brought about. Based on the analysis of the empirical evidence of the case of the city of (Sanli) Urfa in Southeast Turkey, it argues that a ‘spatial perspective’ focusing on the locale might facilitate unveiling hitherto understudied aspects of local nationalisms, as well as the rather dark sides of most nation‐building projects such as large‐scale population exchanges or ethnic cleansing.     

Vessel Glass from Kaupang: A Contextual and Social Analysis

The article presents ideas about distribution and consumption of vessel glass in the Viking Age arising from a contextual analysis of finds from Kaupang. Considering aspects of spatial distribution and waste handling, it is argued that the sherd assemblage primarily represents vessels used and broken on the site – and not vessels in transit or cullet collected for recycling as previously suggested. The glass vessels should most likely be associated with wine drinking and be related to the use of ceramic pitchers and spouted jars. Tableware of this kind represents a material culture that was not confined to elite consumption but available to merchants and artisans inhabiting production and market places – like Kaupang – with good contacts to Continental wine districts. It is suggested that its use was triggered by adoption of Continental table etiquette rather than any status associations. The concept of commodification is introduced to explain the transformation vessel glass went through in Northern Europe during the 8th and 9th centuries, from an item of luxury gift exchange to an alienable commodity.     

Unknown Anzacs: The Politics and Performance of Bodily Repatriation in Postcolonial State Formation

This article explores the politics and performance around the repatriation of the Unknown Australian Soldier (1993) and the Unknown New Zealand Warrior (2004). A comparison of the ‘Unknown Anzacs’ with the return of Indigenous bodily remains from overseas jurisdictions – drawing on the cases of Aboriginal leader and resistance fighter Yagan in the 1990s and Māori toi moko over the 2000s – reveals the complex politics of legitimacy and authority derived from the act of bodily interment. Mobilising both a postcolonial and a transnational framework, this paper shows how acts of repatriation expressed imagined worlds, and made apparent hidden relationships in the unsettled polities of postwar Australia and New Zealand, thus rendering them material in the nation. These transportations also reveal state involvement in violence and death and its role as perpetrator along with its responsibilities to victims and their communities.     

Gramsci and the issue of religion: Catholic modernism and the Italian Partito Popolare

ABSTRACT

Gramsci's interest in Italian politics led him to tackle a key issue in the present-day discourse: the relationship between the Holy See and the national State. Additionally, he paid close attention to internal issues of Christianity, from its origins to his own times and – similar to many other socialist thinkers – he believed that there were several echoes between the early Christian experiences and contemporary socialism. From this arose his concern with the religious crisis of the early twentieth century – so-called ‘Modernism’ – as well as the story of the Partito Popolare (Popular Party, PPI), the organization founded by the priest Luigi Sturzo after the First World War, which was marked – especially amongst its left-wing components – by its anti-fascist positions.     

‘The vandals at home’: Antonio Cederna’s denunciation of the devastation of Italian cities in the postwar period

Writing for the influential magazine Il Mondo, Antonio Cederna relentlessly denounced the projects and works that endangered Italy’s historical and landscape heritage in a period – the 1950s and 1960s – characterized by processes of change that were as intense as they were disordered and contradictory. The battles he waged against the danger of Italian cities being tampered with by those whom he called ‘the vandals at home’ had a significant impact on urban development. In addition, his discourse left a deep and enduring trace in Italian journalism, urban planning and historiography. This article focuses on the early period of Cederna’s journalistic activity: it delineates the core features of his denunciation, paying as much attention to its contents as to the form and manner in which it was expressed, and it assesses the outcome and legacy of his press campaigns both on a material and a political-cultural level.     

A military camp in the middle of nowhere: mobilities,dislocation and the archaeology of a Second World War German military base in Finnish Lapland

This article discusses military mobilities and encampment, and associated themes such as dislocation and displacement of people, through the case of a Second World War German military camp in Finnish Lapland. The article describes the camp and its archaeological research and discusses various aspects of the camp and camp life in its particular subarctic ‘wilderness’ setting, framing the discussion within the themes of mobilities and dislocations, and especially their multiple impacts on the German troops and their multinational prisoners-of-war based in the camp. A particular emphasis is put on how mobilities and dislocation – in effect ‘being stuck’ in a northern wilderness – were intertwined and how the inhabitants of the camp coped with the situation, as well as how this is reflected in the different features of the camp itself and the archaeological material that the fieldwork produced.     

Lost in Narration: Rediscovering the Suomussalmi Copper Adze

The Suomussalmi copper adze is a native copper artefact discovered in 1980 on Kukkosaari Island (Suomussalmi, north-eastern Finland). Since then the artefact has been repeatedly used as an example when narrating the introduction of metal technology in prehistoric Finland, while its chronological position, function and significance have remained poorly studied. Here the object is reviewed both through the results of new metallographic analyses and by re-examining its position in the context of early metal use in north-eastern Europe during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The results of metallographic analyses indicate that the adze was shaped by melting/casting followed by cold hammering; both techniques are shown to have been used in the research area – Finland and north-west Russia – as early as during the Neolithic. While the provenance of the metal remains to be assigned, possible domestic, Karelian as well as Uralian sources are assayed critically. Instead of plain analyses regarding techno-typology and function, the Suomussalmi adze is here connected to the general enrichment of the (material) world that took place multi-locally through the adoption of new raw materials and the increased interest in their real or presumed properties.     

How to picture race?

The purpose of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, SIRB, was to survey the Swedish people according to its race criteria. In this research process photographs were used to document and portray the different races living in Sweden. This article examines how the photographs were used in this process: What pictorial rhetoric did they use and what did the photographs bring to the research process? The result shows that SIRB did not succeeded in developing consistent methods of portraying race. The style and formula of the portraits varied; sometimes environmental aspects came in to focus, sometimes bodily aspects. These methodological shortcomings must be attributed not only to the fact that the institution was working with a new and immature scientific medium – photography – but also that it operated inside an immature scientific discipline. The race scientific community had no joint theories and methods to work with, and did not know how to affiliate with other disciplines – such as anthropology, focusing on environmental factors, or medicine, focusing on bodily aspects. But the lack of methodological consistency was not just a shortcoming; it could also be used to bias the material in a way that served the ideas of eugenics.     

The Past is Tomorrow. Towards an Archaeology of the Vanishing Present

This paper arises from a dissatisfaction with the ‘Great Divides’ created between past and present, self and others, people and material culture in the context of ethnoarchaeology. While conducting ethnoarchaeological research in Spain, Ethiopia and Brazil, I have been faced with the theoretical and practical shortcomings of this field, which is too deeply rooted in modernist concerns and prejudices. I propose a reconsideration of ethnoarchaeology as archaeology tout court – an archaeology of the present – which has to be symmetrical in character. This means that present and past must not be hierarchically conceived – the former in the service of the latter or vice versa – nor strictly separated ontologically, and the relations between humans and things have to be properly problematized.     

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL STRATEGIES AND EUROPEAN SPATIAL VISIONS IN NORTHERN FINLAND

By exploring the Europeanization of current practices of regional spatial planning, this article sets out to demonstrate the evolution of the European integration project. Specifically, by creating spaces of engagement to which the local and regional actors are “forced” to adapt, the emergence of European spatial planning has made planning practices at the regional level more complex and complicated. As such, the present study contributes to the current understandings of Europeanization by exploring the European integration process through the geographical conceptualizations of space and scale. These conceptualizations are used to illustrate the multidimensionality, complexity and subtlety of the geographies of Europeanization. The empirical investigations show that regional and local spatial policies are strongly engaged – both explicitly through the “technicalities” and implicitly through the “mentalities”– to the spaces of Europeanization. The engagement affects the effectiveness of sub‐regional spatial planning by promoting mismatches between the strategic frameworks and the material practices of the policy. Overall, the article illustrates that the geographies of Europeanization are continuous processes, which take place – often unrecognizably – in manifold discursive and material practices in various geographical contexts.     

The new Cambridge modern history. volume xiii: companion volume

This article explores the link between religion and politics, religious liberty and the rights of religious minorities, by focusing on the constitutions which Italian states adopted and discarded from 1796 to 1849. It concerns questions about the ‘national character’ and the rights and duties of the citizen, and argues that – far from being ‘an outlet’ for material discontent – questions of religious identity and pluralism were integral to the Risorgimento definition of liberty. In this context, the author explores also the Mazzinian vision of a democratic republic inspired by an acephalous and non-hierarchical civil religion, similar to the Unitarian Transcendentalism practiced by some of his New York admirers – a far cry from the ‘religions of politics’ inspired by Saint Simon and Auguste Comte.     

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

Brit Solli: Seid. Myter,sjamanisme og kjønn i vikingenes tid. Pax Forlag A/S,Oslo, 2002. 327 pp. ISBN 82‐530‐2403‐7

This article develops the idea that the emergence of the Neolithic world was closely linked to discovering and becoming aware of new aspects and dimensions of reality. Practices such as pottery making and cultivation promoted attentiveness to new aspects of things and the environment, which in turn generated a new kind of lived world that was, in a sense, richer, larger and deeper than before. It is proposed that new forms of material culture and new material practices – new ways of engaging with the material world – expanded people’s horizons of perception and thinking. This cultivation of perception was an important mechanism through which new ways of life and thought associated with the Neolithic came into being.