CHOOSING NOT TO LOOK: REPRESENTATION,REPATRIATION, AND HOLOCAUST ATROCITY PHOTOGRAPHY1

This essay considers, from ethical and historical‐critical perspectives, alternatives to unconditional public access to Holocaust atrocity photographs. Photographic images have become the common coin of public awareness and historical information about the Holocaust. For the generations immediately following the genocide, atrocity photos and images of Nazi crimes served as vital testimony. For succeeding generations, however, access to certain “recirculated” images (Barbie Zelizer) has created a sense of familiarity with the Holocaust and with the National Socialist era that may prevent, rather than facilitate, engagement with the historical subject, particularly for students. Few of the victims of the Shoah pictured in either the best known or the least circulated images were willing subjects. As such, the bulk of Holocaust and National Socialist photography should perhaps fall under the same category as the results of Nazi medical experiments: they have been rendered inadmissible because they are ethically compromised materials, made without the participants’consent. While I am not advocating the wholesale destruction of Holocaust photographs, I will suggest that removing them from view or “repatriating” them might serve Holocaust memory better than their reduction to atrocious objects of banal attention. Just as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 provided a mechanism for the reclassification of human remains, from ethnographic to spiritually sacred artifacts, we should consider what a similar reclassification of Holocaust photographs could offer. Have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?     

‘Wanting the Children and Wanting K2’: The incommensurability of motherhood and mountaineering in Britain and North America in the late twentieth century

The death of British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, in 1995 while climbing K2 in Pakistan, the world's second-highest mountain, sparked debates in Britain and North America within mountaineering communities and the press. Hargreaves was a contentious figure because she climbed distant, high mountains as the mother of young children, and was thus constructed a ‘bad mother’. Drawing on ethnographic research in Banff, Canada and Nepal in 1999 and 2000, as well as mountaineering and other media, I examine the social anxiety arising over mother-mountaineers, in particular at a mountain film festival in Banff. Hargreaves and American Kitty Calhoun, who was also criticized, were both professional mountaineers and identified themselves as ‘normal working mothers’. I contextualize their maternal subjectivities within the wider public scrutiny over white, middle-class, working mothers at that time, to show how female mountaineers mediated their mountaineering desires within dominant discourses about ‘sacrificial motherhood’, which resulted in ambivalence. Hargreaves wrote in her diary while waiting to climb K2, ‘It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two’. I argue that these women were situated at the intersection of two clashing discourses—mountaineering as a journey far removed from home and motherhood as an intensive presence with one's children bound to home.

‘El deseo de niños y el deseo de K2’: la inconmensurabilidad de la maternidad y el alpinismo en Inglaterra y Norte América en los finales de siglo XX

La muerte de la alpinista británica, Alison Hargreaves, en 1995 mientras escaló K2 en Pakistán, el segundo pico más alto del mundo, resultaba en debates en Inglaterra y Norte América en las comunidades de alpinismo y los medios de comunicación. Hargreaves era una figura discutidora porque como una madre con niños pequeños, escalaba montañas altas y lejos, y como consecuencia fue construido como ‘mala madre’. Haciendo uso de medios de comunicación de alpinismo y otros, y una investigación etnográfica in Banff, Canada y Nepal en 1999 y 2000, examino la ansiedad social surgiendo de alpinistas madres, en particular en la festival cine de Banff. Hargreaves y la americana Kitty Calhoun, que fue criticado también, eran alpinistas profesionales y se identificaban ‘madres trabajadoras normales’. Contextualizo sus subjetividades maternales dentro del escrutinio del público a las madres trabajadoras blancas de media clase y muestro como median las alpinistas femeninas sus deseos de escalar dentro de discursos dominantes sobre ‘la maternidad expiatoria’, lo que resulta en ambivalencia. Escribío Hargreaves en su diario cuando esperaba a escalar K2: ‘Me está comiendo—deseando a los niños y deseando a K2. Siento que se me parte en dos’. Argumento que estas mujeres se situaron a las intersecciones de dos discursos en conflicto—alpinismo como un viaje que está muy lejos del hogar y la maternidad como una presencia intensiva con los niños que están obligado al hogar.     

The practical application of counter‐terrorism legislation in England and Wales: a prosecutor's perspective

This article gives a prosecutor's perspective on the practical application of UK terrorism legislation. It gives an overview of the working relationship between the Counter Terrorism Division's specialist prosecutors, police officers and the intelligence services, in order to outline some of the challenges in investigating and prosecuting terrorism cases, and to inform on prosecutorial decision‐making. It summarizes the main additions and changes to the criminal terrorism legislation over the last decade and gives examples of how some of the key powers and offences have been approached and used by prosecutors. The article deliberately concentrates on the criminal aspects of terrorism legislation and the importance of using due process to prosecute alleged terrorists fairly and proportionately. It describes how prosecutors use a mixture of the ordinary criminal and specialist terrorism laws depending on what is deemed appropriate in any given case. It is not intended to be a critique of the legislation itself or an analysis of what may or may not need to be changed. That is a matter for Parliament; the prosecutor's role is to apply the law not to make it. The article concludes that the criminal justice system is the correct place for terrorism prosecutions to take place and that the UK can continue to retain due process and respect for human rights while seeking properly to protect national security.