Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund

In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Ji?í Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. The Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of ‘old’, ‘decadent’, and indeed ‘popular’ culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund’s multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the ‘high’ and ‘low’, the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time. But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund’s political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. This article investigates how the curious ‘command celebrity’ of ‘H&Z’ straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.     

The migration response to the Legal Arizona Workers Act

The 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) requires all public and private employers to authenticate the legal status of their workers using the federal employment verification system known as E-Verify. With LAWA, Arizona became the first state to have a universal mandate for employment verification. While LAWA targets unauthorized workers, most of whom are Latino immigrants, other groups could experience LAWA's effects, such as those who share households with undocumented workers. In addition, employers may seek to minimize their risk of LAWA penalties by not hiring those who appear to them as more likely to be unauthorized, such as naturalized Latino immigrants and US-born Latinos. Existing research has found a reduction in foreign-born Latino employment and population in response to LAWA. This paper asks a different question: have groups that are most likely to be affected by the law migrated to other states? We find a significant and sustained increase in the internal outmigration rate from Arizona of foreign-born, noncitizen Latinos – the group most likely to include the unauthorized – after the passage of LAWA. There was no significant LAWA internal migration response by foreign-born Latino citizens. US-born Latinos showed some signs of a LAWA-induced internal migration response after the law went into effect, but it is not sustained. The results indicate that local and state immigration policy can alter the settlement geography of the foreign born. This leads us to speculate about how immigrant settlement may adjust in the coming years to the intersecting geographies of post-recession economic opportunity and tiered immigration policies.     

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Flinders Petrie was one of the earliest excavators to recognise that all archaeological material had research potential, and pursued a whole range of artefact types as the key to understanding past cultures. But what impact did the way in which he excavated have on the rate at which objects were discovered, and the condition in which they were found? And how important was it to him that the objects he acquired were closely linked to the physical and chronological landscape of his sites? This article looks at Petrie's field practices to try and answer some of these questions, with particular attention being paid to the relationship between Petrie and his workforce, his object collection policies, and some of the failings experienced in recording object provenance. These issues are critical to those who wish to make use of these objects to answer current questions about the ancient Near East—because it is only by understanding the way in which this material was recovered that we can begin to judge how it should be used in the present day.     

Digital heritage in a Melanesian context: authenticity,integrity and ancestrality from the other side of the digital divide

This article examines how digital heritage, in the form of 3D digital objects, fits into particular discourses around identity, ancestrality and cultural transmission in Melanesia. Through an ethnographic analysis of digital heritage use amongst the Nalik community in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), it demonstrates how digital heritage is understood not in terms of deceit and a loss of authenticity, but instead, towards an understanding of authenticity in terms of completeness and integrity. A notion of completeness and integrity, I argue, has the effect of creating an authentic experience of the past for Nalik communities by bringing back museum objects (‘old’ objects) that have been dispersed amongst museums and heritage institutions worldwide. In tracing out the operations and effects of how a Melanesian community engages with 3D digital objects, this article offers unique ethnographic insights into digital heritage in ways that challenge widely-held assumptions about the heightened value placed on the original object over its digital counterpart.     

Cultural Contact and Cultural Transfer in Medieval Western Eurasia

This essay deals with cultural contact, exchange, and transfer at the eastern margins of medieval Europe where interactions between different cultures of European and Asian origin have, over the centuries, shaped a unique cross- cultural zone. As the western part of a Eurasian highway for peoples from Central Asia since ancient times, whose western migration became a crucial factor for early state formation in Europe, this intersection resulted mainly from eastward Slavic migration and the Varangian expansion to southern lands that brought the Norman Rus’ into contact and conflict with the Byzantines and the emerging steppe empires of the Desht-i Qipchaq. Evidence is given to support the view that cultural exchange is a concept not precise enough to explain how cultural goods were adapted and integrated in this cross-cultural zone which I prefer to call Slavia Asiatica. A more complex approach to culture transfer is needed to explain acculturation processes in medieval times, comprising many cultural subsystems: language and writing, law and religion, knowledge, values and norms, practices and socio-political institutions.     

Technology and gay identity: the case of the pre-Second World War male flight attendant

This article examines 1930s aviation in the USA through an unconventional lens – the male flight attendant, a figure who served as a cultural touchstone for negotiating gender roles in the emerging business of commercial air transport. As aviation had broad resonance as a symbol of modern and cosmopolitan life, the male flight attendant, too, became bound to this larger context of technological development and the futuristic transformations of society it promised. My aim is to detail these connections between the flight attendant and technological innovation, but also to make a deeper claim: that the occupation of flight attendant, the place of gay men therein, and the cultural acceptance and resistance to this fact were constituent, not ancillary, to the history of the 1930s. In the process, I am arguing not only that gender serves as a fundamental category of historical analysis – via the assumptions and power relations through which historical actors make history – but also that issues of gay identity and homophobia are integral to such analysis     

以歙县虹源王氏为中心看明清徽州宗族的婚姻圈

明清徽州宗族婚姻圈有以下特征:第一,婚姻缔结以县境地域范围内特别是周边邻近宗族为主要对象;第二,徽州境外的婚姻缔结与徽商的迁徙和经营地域圈的扩大有关,长期经商外地甚或侨寓外地的徽州商人在商业经营或土著化进程中与当地人士结成婚姻;第三,徽州宗族的婚姻缔结以几个大的宗族为主要对象,相互之间结成世婚之家,在一定程度上反映了世婚制在徽州的盛行;第四,较多以业儒仕宦为背景的宗族相互结成婚姻关系,在一定程度上体现了婚姻背后文化上门当户对的特征.     

Remembering the Sea: Personal and Communal Recollections of Maritime Life in Jizan and the Farasan Islands,Saudi Arabia

People create narratives of their maritime past through the remembering and forgetting of seafaring experiences, and through the retention and disposal of maritime artefacts that function mnemonically to evoke or suppress those experiences. The sustenance and reproduction of the resulting narratives depends further on effective media of intergenerational transmission; otherwise, they are lost. Rapid socio-economic transformation across Saudi Arabia in the age of oil has disrupted longstanding seafaring economies in the Red Sea archipelago of the Farasan Islands, and the nearby mainland port of Jizan. Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding activity are few; long-distance dhow trade with South Asia, the Arabian-Persian Gulf and East Africa has ceased; and a once substantial pearling and nacre (mother of pearl) collection industry has dwindled to a tiny group of hobbyists: no youth dive today. This widespread withdrawal from seafaring activity among many people in these formerly maritime-oriented communities has diminished the salience of such activity in cultural memory, and has set in motion narrative creation processes, through which memories are filtered and selected, and objects preserved, discarded, or lost. This paper is a product of the encounter of the authors with keepers of maritime memories and objects in the Farasan Islands and Jizan. An older generation of men recall memories of their experiences as boat builders, captains, seafarers, pearl divers and fishermen. Their recounted memories are inscribed, and Arabic seafaring terms recorded. The extent of the retention of maritime material cultural items as memorials is also assessed, and the rôle of individual, communal and state actors in that retention is considered. Through this reflection, it becomes clear that the extra-biological memory and archive of the region’s maritime past is sparse; that intergenerational transmission is failing; that the participation of state agencies in maritime heritage creation is highly limited; and that, as a result, memories current among the older generation have limited prospect of survival. These memories, recorded and interpreted here, identify the Farasan Islands as a former centre of the pearling industry in the Red Sea, and identify them and Jizan as open to far-reaching maritime-mediated cultural influences in an era before the imposition of the attributes of the modern nation-state.     

On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland

What role does national identity play after civil war? Is reconstruction possible on the basis of an existing identity, or does a new identity have to be found? Much depends on whether narratives of conflict are unifying. I use the tools of cultural sociology to explain why the Finnish Civil War of 1918 has become a unifying ‘cultural trauma’ for the Finns, whereas the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 never became the dominant referent in Irish national identity. The difference is explained by the greater shock civil war posed to Finnish national identity.     

The Seventeenth-Century Terrestrial Globe by Morden,Berry and Lea

Throughout the early modern period, the intellectual and symbolic value of globes ensured these objects enjoyed a broad cultural appeal. Consequently, their design was subject to a wide range of social, commercial and intellectual pressures. The ways in which the intellectual and cultural concerns of seventeenth-century England became manifest in the cartographic design, resulting in a culturally specific product with broad appeal to an English audience, are highlighted in the case of a terrestrial globe constructed by Robert Morden, William Berry and Philip Lea, c.1683?1690, now in the Whipple Museum, Cambridge. Since this particular globe was produced at an early stage in the history of English globe making, light is shed on the emergence of a national globe-making tradition.     

Some Afterthoughts on Culture and Explanation in Historical Inquiry

I argue here that the articles in this forum contain basic agreements. All three reject naturalism, reductionism, and monism while retaining causality as an explanatory category, and all three emphasize the role of time and argue for a view in which culture is regarded as both structured and contingent.
The differences among the explanatory proposals of Hall, Biernacki, and Kane are as important as the similarities: while Hall favors a Weberian approach, Biernacki argues for a primarily pragmatic explanation of culture, and Kane for a primarily semiotic explanation. I argue that all three positions face immanent problems in elucidating the exact nature of cultural explanation. While Hall leaves the problem of "extrinsic" ideal-typical explanation unsolved, Biernacki simply presupposes the superiority of pragmatic over other types of cultural explanation, and Kane does the same for semiotic explanation. Hints at cultural explanation in the form of narrative remain underargued and are built on old ideas of an opposition between "analysis" and "narrative." This is also the case with the latest plea for "analytic narratves." I conclude that a renewed reflection on this opposition is called for in order to come to grips with cultural explanation and to get beyond the old stereotypes regarding the relationship between historical and social-scientific approaches to the past.     

Futurism from foundation to world war: the art and politics of an avant-garde movement

The cultural influence of the Futurist art movement on the modern era is undisputed. Of course, it is also undisputed that the movement was deeply involved in the politics of both liberal and Fascist Italy. Futurist politics were characterized by a pronounced nationalism and imperialism, but in the early years were also known for advancing ideas more associated with the extreme left, such as republicanism, anti-clericalism, and workers’ advancement through revolution. There is no consensus on how to narrate Futurist politics, or their relationship to Futurist art. Were the politics more of the left or the right? And, more to the point, should the politics be studied in isolation, or as integral to the broad ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’? This article takes the latter approach and offers an interpretation that unifies the art and politics of the Futurist movement from its foundation in 1909 through to Italy’s entry into the Great War. I argue that the Futurists themselves did not differentiate between their cultural initiatives to modernize Italy or their political interventionism. In looking at key moments in the political evolution of the movement, and the corresponding artwork of the period, I show that Futurism offered a confused political message in its first years, mixing elements of the left and right, but after the Libyan War and especially in the interventionist period, the political message became much more stridently nationalistic and bellicose, and such themes became prevalent in the art of that time.     

磁县湾漳北朝壁画墓卤簿图若干仪仗考

河北磁县湾漳北朝壁画墓是一座规格很高的墓葬。关于墓主,发掘者的推测之一,是北齐文宣帝高洋,而墓葬壁画所显示出来的卤簿仪卫之煊赫, 便是重要的依据。对于其中的卤簿图,发掘者在《磁县湾漳北朝壁画墓》中作了很详细的描绘,只是未及进一步的定名研究,因此它的意义尚未能充分彰显出来。本文以此卤簿图与文献记载相对照,发现二者多有契合无间之例,如相风、■罕、掆鼓等,且其中不少可以见出渊源与流变。作为帝王卤簿专属的相风、■罕,更是第一次在早期图像中得到确认。     

Against the Grid: The Cultural Emergence of Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.     

Cultural censorship in defective democracy: the South Korean blacklist case

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand the cultural censorship practiced in contemporary South Korea, a liberal democracy, where cultural quangos were established after political democratization, following the arm’s length model. I will focus on the analysis of cases from the film industry which has been central to the censorship debate historically in Korea because of its popular appeal. The establishment of arm’s length cultural organizations laid the foundation for freedom of cultural expression which had been seriously curtailed under military rule. However, recent revelations of cultural blacklist cases under the two previous administrations are baffling to understand since rampant political censorship was practiced through ostensibly autonomous cultural organizations. The paper examines the ways in which the state constructed a ‘system of ideological censorship’ by using not only cultural quangos but non-cultural state apparatuses. In so doing, the paper emphasizes the role of non-cultural policy state institutions in the operation of cultural policy and the effect of state systems on cultural organizations. I draw upon the concept of defective democracy to understand the socio-political condition where these cultural organizations exist.     

Unchanging boundaries: the reconstruction of Skopje and the politics of heritage

This study discusses the politics of urban planning and heritage in the city of Skopje, Macedonia. I compare three phases of urban reconstruction under three political systems: the inter-war Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, the communist regime and present-day ‘democracy’. I show that the ambiguous marginalisation of Ottoman heritage has been a continuous practice, despite today’s reading of communist planning as ‘open’. Through a discussion of Yugoslav politics towards religious and national ‘minorities’, I show that Ottoman heritage has been preserved only insofar as it fits within the state’s definition of power. I specifically detail how the construction of ‘European’, ‘secular’ public space has worked as a tool through which state/nation building established new hierarchies of power. I show how this is reflected most clearly in the specific politics of heritage by discussing the creation, regulation and management of ‘?ar?ija’, the ‘old Turkish’ neighbourhood of Skopje.     

From humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care: Care and enforcement at the humanitarian border

Throughout the world, increasingly securitized and militarized border enforcement efforts have made transnational migration an increasingly deadly endeavor for unauthorized migrants. The deadly consequences of unauthorized migration has compelled the emergence of what William Walters refers to as the humanitarian border—the concentration of humanitarian aid and services along the edges of the global North. This paper expands on Walters work through an in-depth analysis of the emergence and transformation of the humanitarian border in southern Arizona, USA. Through an examination of transformations in how migrant care is provisioned, overseen, and regulated in southern Arizona, this paper traces a shift from humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care whereby care is increasingly linked with enforcement efforts. In doing so, this analysis illustrates how care functions as a technology of border enforcement, increasing the reach of the state to govern more bodies and more spaces.     

Affective Protest Symbols: Public Dissent in the Mass Commemoration of the Sewŏl Ferry’s Victims in Seoul

ABSTRACT

Symbols used in the Sew?l protests in downtown Seoul from 2014 onwards proved effective in soliciting public engagement for three years. After the sinking of the Sew?l ferry that took 304 lives, most of them high school students, objects such as yellow ribbons gained iconic status as signifiers of the demand to investigate the ferry’s sinking and honour the memory of the victims. New visual indexes that created and articulated this emotionally laden discourse formed a common visual language of grief and anger towards the Korean authorities. This ethnography-based article explores the development of the protest’s affective aestheticism, its main agents and semiotics, and how it produced affect, which had strong cultural, social and emotional impacts. In 2016, the Sew?l movement became the core of larger protests against the ruling elites.