Sign Geography

Signs are significant elements of cultural landscapes throughout the world. Through their form and content, signs reveal a variety of information about places ranging from locational and physical geographic data through social, economic and political characteristics. Signs, which tell of past events, current conditions and future expectations, are landscape notes on the geography of change. Signs are frequently evidence of cultural diffusion and convergence. Many signs give direction to human activity and symbolize societal quest for order. Others reflect tastes, values and attitudes, in concert with prevailing belief systems. Signs are both cultural phenomena and landscape statements that attest to the way of life in a place.     

Recent contributions to the study of ritual trance

Michael S. Laguere. Voodoo Heritage. Foreword by Vera Rubin. Beverly Hills/London, Sage Publications. 229 pp. Glossary, bibliography, index. $24.00.

Richard Katz. Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Jung. Foreword by Richard B. Lee. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1982. xix + 329 pp. Map, photographs, glossary, bibliography, index. $25.00

Michael Lambeck. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. xx + 219 pp. Tables, figures, stylistic conventions, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $32.50.     

Psychology versus anthropology in drug use studies: The representative case method

James V. Spotts and Franklin C. Shontz. Cocaine Users: A Representative Case Approach. New York: The Free Press, 1980. x + 517 pp. Tables, Index. $ 19.91, cloth.     

Heterodox structuralism

Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and Eugene G. d'Aquili. Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. 211 pp. Figures, tables, references, and index. $10.00 (cloth).     

‘Wanderer,kommst du nach Pforta …’: the tension between Classical tradition and the demands of a Nazi elite-school education at Schulpforta and Ilfeld, 1934–45

This paper explores the tensions which arose when Schulpforta, Germany's leading humanistic boarding school, was forcibly turned into a Nazi elite school (a Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt, or Napola). The time-honoured traditions of Christianity and enlightened humanism previously cultivated at the erstwhile Landesschule zur Pforta (alma mater of Fichte, Ranke and Nietzsche) were swiftly subordinated to the demands of National Socialist ideology. Schulpforta, a former monastic foundation, was radically dechristianised, and the school's Classical curriculum soon served only to emphasise those aspects of Greco-Roman Antiquity which could ‘help the Third Reich achieve its destiny’, portraying the Greeks and Romans as proto-National Socialists, pure Aryan ancestors of the modern German race. The Napola curriculum focused on sport and pre-military training over academic excellence, and contemporary documentary evidence, memoirs and newly obtained eyewitness testimony all suggest that the Napola administration wished to assimilate Pforta with any other Napola. This idea is borne out by comparing the case of Napola Ilfeld, a former Klosterschule (monastery school) with a similar history. By the mid-1940s, Ilfeld had lost almost all connection with its humanistic past. Ultimately, we can see the erosion and Nazification of these schools' Christian and humanistic traditions as exemplifying in microcosm tendencies which were prevalent throughout the Third Reich.     

Tourism and Tragedy: The Memorial at Belzec,Poland

In 1942, within in a period of 10 months, 500,000 people were systematically murdered in a specially built death camp at Belzec, Poland. When it had served its purpose the Nazis demolished it, and to hide its existence, grassed the site over, allowing the atrocities performed there to remain virtually hidden from public view for over 60 years. In 2004 an important new Holocaust memorial, covering the whole death camp area, was opened. Visually striking, this conceptual art/architectural artwork affectively elicits strong visitor responses. I explore ways in which the materiality of the reconfigured site makes the invisibility of such horror and collective loss paramount. My interpretation and visual analysis shows how ‘memory work’ can operate through viewer experience. This paper locates Belzec within its historical context and includes a related discussion about Polish–Jewish relationships up to the present. As a significant heritage site, Belzec’s new role in Polish Holocaust tourism is examined.