Grave Marking and Wailing: Ritual Responses to the Babylonian Crisis in Jeremiah’s Poetry (Jer 31, 21)

This article explores Jer 31,15-22, which recapitulates the history of the Babylonian crisis from invasion to exile to manumission. Against traditional “triumphalistic” approaches to this poem that view the restored Israel in its repatriation as a victorious warrior (vv. 21-22), this article argues for a ritual reading of the text. It demonstrates that the need for a ritual response to the Babylonian crisis was so strong that Jeremiah prescribes mourning rites to Judah not only at the time of its demise (v. 15) but also at the time of its manumission from captivity (v. 21). Since the use of laments and other mourning rites in the restoration of “collapse societies” was well attested in the ANE, their appearance in the Book of Consolation as part of the poetic vision of Judah’s reconstitution can also be construed as a socio-religious necessity.     

The Conflict between Traditional Christian Churches in Ukraine as a Conflict of Identities: Where to Search for the Prospects of Reconciliation? A Reflection in the Light of the Theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach

Abstract

After the independence of Ukraine in 1991 there emerged or re-emerged four churches that derive their roots from ancient Kyiv Christianity. Those churches conflict with each other, the main cause of the split and tensions being the issue of cultural and social–political identities in the country. Such conflicting narrative identities have to be reconciled by the mutual recognition of their diversity when churches in Ukraine want to become a real force for transformation in society. Among the different models of the search for rapprochement in this article I refer to the theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach. According to the ethics of memory of Paul Ricoeur, traditional Ukrainian churches should abandon endless circles of melancholia about their losses and create new identities through the process of mourning. Because the tensions among traditional Christian denominations in Ukraine are not likely to be solved by institutional measures as history proves, churches should concentrate their efforts on working on social and relational platforms. Here I refer to the ethics of moral imagination of John Paul Lederach that envisions focusing the reconciliatory activities on locations of interaction between people that should finally contribute to the rapprochement.     

Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at this historic site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site where the first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a place of guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wish to forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initially remembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grieved and from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site. Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in the monumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride. This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms of commemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to ‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.     

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying,death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.     

Mourning During the Tongzhi Regency

The Tongzhi Regency (1861–1875), historiographically marked as the beginning of the Qing dynasty's (1644–1912) decline, also saw the emergence of a new political alliance between the Han Chinese grand councilors / Hanlin academicians and the Empress Dowagers Ci'an and Cixi, who ruled from behind the curtains with the former's support. The Hanlin academicians gained their high positions partly from their allegiance to the empress dowagers but largely through patron–client networks, which were based on native-place associations and scholarly interests. Using the case of Li Hongzao (1820–1897), the chief tutor of the Tongzhi Emperor, this article argues that, to him, such networks mattered more than the empress dowagers’ favor and recognition, and that his situation reveals the dynamics of late Qing court politics. In particular, the article focuses on how Li was able to use his appointment as Tongzhi's chief tutor to defy the wishes of the court and mourn his adoptive mother, showing the limits of late Qing imperial power in the realm of Confucian discourse.     

试论宋代的葬期

通过对南、北方地区出土墓志、地券中记载宋人葬期的统计,得到了对宋人葬期的一些初步认识。根据这些认识提出了宋人葬期过长是宋代的普遍现象,并且探讨了这一现象的原因。