‘Sites of memory’ of the Holocaust: shaping national memory in the education system in Israel

Abstract. This article attempts to understand the development of the national memory in Israel and the stress on the Holocaust as the constitutive representation of the national identity in the last decades. In the first three decades of the existence of the state, at a time Israeli society was embedded in an ‘environment of memory’ due to the presence of a big proportion of Holocaust survivors, the subject of the Holocaust was almost neglected in schools. On the other hand, since the 1980s, when the ‘environment of memory’ of the Holocaust started to fade naturally, ‘sites of memories’ of the Holocaust started to blossom in the education system. The national memory is meant to support political and social arrangements in the present; thus, in order to shape national subjects, the education system has to adapt the official memory accordingly. While in the past, the memory of the Holocaust was counterproductive to the formation of the ‘new Jew’, it became an appropriate response to the crisis of the national subjectivity unleashed after the Yom Kippur War.     

Educating the nation: shaping student-citizens in Indonesian schools

Children in Indonesia experience the state in ways that are vastly different from any other citizen. This article explores how the bodies of schoolchildren are a key site for nation-building practices in Indonesia through an examination of two state schools in Riau Islands Province. I investigate the ways in which national identity is inculcated in students through various performances intended to shape the student-citizen, including the wearing of school uniforms, morning national callisthenics and the weekly flag ceremony. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity, I argue that students’ embodied performances of the nation can be understood as performative in the necessity of repetition or ‘citational practices’, which perpetuate the meaning and maintain the power associated. It is through repetition that meanings embedded in the performances of schoolchildren, such as hierarchy, awareness of a higher bureaucratic power and a sense of belonging to the nation, are perpetuated and normalized to the performers.     

The shaping of the American Empire

This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.     

Working-with: talking and sorting in personal archives

This paper draws upon experiences of working in a personal archive in a domestic space in order to contribute to recent debates about archival formation, conduct and practice. By exploring the collaborative practices of working-with an archive owner in ordering and cataloguing a collection, we provide methodological insights into how historical geography research is carried out. Although such working-with in archives is, we argue, a common practice amongst researchers, these interactions with others are often absent from published work. This paper provides an explicit discussion of these often hidden collaborations and socialities, highlighting their importance for the conduct of archival research in three specific areas. First, we show how working-with actively (re)shapes and (re)makes archival materials and the stories that emerge from them. Second, we argue that working-with the owners of archives, but doing so without clearly defined research aims and going against the grain of productivist methods of working, can be rewarding both within and beyond academia. Third, in focussing on working-with, the paper extends conceptions of the archive and archival practice. We argue that the domestic setting of archival work produces particular patterns of archival conduct and disrupts the boundaries of collections themselves.     

Colonialism and knowledge in Algeria: The archives of the Arab bureau

Despite the preeminence and recent scholarly debate on Orientalism, little attention has been paid to the variant of French Orientalism which solidified its base during the early phase of North African colonization. This essay investigates the foundations of French colonial knowledge of Algeria, and by extension North Africa, through an analysis of the archives of the Arab Bureau (1841–1871), a military institution that laid down, formulated, and shaped French views of Algeria through their extensive fieldwork. In turn, it is upon this knowledge that later scholars, such as Emile Durkheim and Robert Montagne fashioned their own work. This essay examines the politics behind the various representations of the natives of Algeria, and it also pays attention to the emergence and the play of conflicting interpretations and ideologies. Thus, this essay explores the dynamics that allowed a particular discourse to become more dominant, at the expense of other, opposing, representations.     

The future of United Kingdom nuclear weapons: shaping the debate

Britain has been a nuclear-weapon state since the 1950s, mostly in extensive cooperation with the United States in equipment procurement, though (contrary to the aims of anti-nuclear campaigners) full freedom of operational action has been kept. The current force of four nuclear-powered submarines armed with Trident D.5 missiles is not expected to be dependably sustainable beyond the early or middle 2020s in key respects, and lead times mean that initial decisions on whether and if so how to maintain capability thereafter need to be taken by about 2010. The open debate for which the government has called will have to consider international obligations and likely repercussions, strategic and ethical arguments, options for renewal (including at reduced scale), the amount and incidence of costs, and opportunity costs. The government has not yet published enough information to underpin firm conclusions about continuance other than for 'true believers' either pro or con.     

Changing spaces: the role of the internet in shaping Deaf geographies

While there is a burgeoning literature on the role of ICT in the creation of new forms of social networks, dubbed on-line communities, much less attention has been paid to the complex set of relationships which are emerging between some off-line communities and the internet, and in particular to some of the new spatialities that are emerging as a result of community-based ICT practices. This paper develops this work by focusing on the example of ‘the Deaf community’. In reflecting on the implications of the communication possibilities offered by the internet for the production of Deaf space we begin by outlining the history of development of the off-line Deaf community in the UK and by reflecting on the concept of ‘community’. The paper then goes on to explore how Deaf people are using the internet to communicate with each other and, in doing so, to reflect upon how the internet is contributing to the re-spatialisation and scaling-up of this community while also having other unanticipated effects on Deaf people's mobilities and the space of the Deaf club.     

Writing sex and sexuality: archives of colonial North India

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.     

Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage

Abstract

The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical links to Iceland. In spite of the fragmented activities of AISBRA since its establishment, the number of participants has increased, reflecting their growing interest in their Icelandic past. This paper examines how the members of Iceland Brazil Association produce their heritage independently, outside the state recognised heritage, within the Brazilian national context. We analyse how identities are re/shaped in new ways to engage with the past and how values from the past are extracted and turned into contemporary economic, social, and political values. This paper stresses heritage-making as a social imaginary used to define collective identity, which, while based on ancestry, also intersects with ideas of race and class. Representations of their Icelandic heritage allow the members of the Brazil Iceland Association to emphasise their ‘Europeanness’ and thus their associations with whiteness in contemporary post-colonial Brazil.     

Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: towards an immigrant history of the present

Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis Island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so‐called golden age of European immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobh Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance‐based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled ‘Calling Up Annie Moore’. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed.     

岩土类遗址保护加固工程档案编写研究

随着国家逐渐对岩土类遗址保护的重视和保护力度的加强,作为唯一能够全面展示保护工程信息的档案资料,在保护工程活动中占有重要地位,是岩土类遗址保护工程的重要组成部分。本研究通过分析岩土类遗址保护加固工程档案资料的重要性,阐述岩土类遗址保护加固工程档案资料编写与搜集的内容和方式方法,明确形成和保存档案资料的主体,梳理和凝练工程资料的类型,将其划分为施工前期准备文件、施工技术文件及竣工文件三部分,并分析论证三者之间的联系与区别。分析总结了保护工程档案资料形成与搜集、分类与整理、排序与组卷过程中的具体操作程序、内容和要求。研究结果对岩土类遗址保护工程水平的提高有积极的促进作用。     

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non‐Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro‐active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo‐classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.     

The shaping of time in action: Guatemalan divination reconsidered

Barbara Tedlock. Time and the Highland Maya. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; 1982. 304pp. $27.50.