Search results
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
them with my own academic and ethical ideas of curatorship indeed meant walking a fine line, as the following personal account shows. The background Ethnic shows2 were a widespread form of entertainment all over the Western(-dominated)3 world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: non-European people were recruited to perform in Western spectacles in front of paying audiences and to show what were considered ‘typical pursuits’ of their cultures of origin. Several of these shows came from Samoa, and, for example, toured the United States, and there
-Celtic people given appropriate space? Perhaps when I was there I missed some rooms where their history is featured but ever since my visit I have thought of the museum as being about the migration to South Australia of the various ethnic minorities – I am correct in thinking this?2 Written in 1995, nine years after the opening of the Migration Museum in Adelaide, Australia, the question posed by Evelyn Wallace-Carter in her letter to the museum reflects some of the central problems faced by migration museums in a settler country like Australia – who are migration museums
cultural practice and shared semiotic knowledge. Within cemetery space, people shared a conceptual understanding by participating in episodic narratives which were specific to that place and those people. Because of this, burial practice was not universal; it might be interpreted differently by local, regional and individual agents depending on their own circumstances and experiences. It is for these reasons that broad questions like ethnicity, religious practice or afterlife belief and cultural death ways have proved difficult to address (Lucy, 2000b ). Sam Lucy ( 1998
acceptable creative workarounds, experimentation, and new forms of problem solving. Although geographical remoteness from resource-rich centers can pose challenges (particularly economic ones), it also provides freedom from the dominant “trends, fashions and compulsions” (Gibson et al . 2010 , 31), as well as from the baked-in or path-dependent expectations of well-known processes and their presumed results. Indeed, the creative expression of marginalized communities – the queer community, ethnic minorities, etc. – often has an out-sized impact on popular culture: the
( 2007 )). These same port towns align with a high incidence of tower houses, although, as described in the preceding chapter, many of these survive as documentary references only. As Ireland's closest geographic neighbours, England, Scotland and Wales always exerted economic influence. This was particularly so in those parts of Ireland closest to these countries and depended on ethnic make-up, with those identifying as Anglo-Irish more likely than the Gaelic-Irish to trade with England rather than the continent. The degree of involvement was
objectivity or superiority compared to past interpreters, as if I were somehow insulated and immune from the passage of time and trends in analysis. I am writing at a period of heightened global anxiety around concepts of identity and ethnicity. These contemporary concerns will inevitably, as they have always done before, shift the kaleidoscope through which we view objects from another culture – albeit one that is attractively ancient and safely distant. The Egyptian and Sudanese collections of Manchester Museum are amongst
essentialism that privileged Native exegesis above others. For the German curatorial team, equating culture with ethnic identity obscured the global interdependence of politics and economics and, among other negative consequences, obfuscated alliances between local and foreign classes that cut across culture. In opposition, El Colectivo argued for the incorporation of video presentations and first voices to express the Indigenous historical perspectives of how Andean communities had appropriated Spanish colonial imagery which they had ritually rearticulated and transmuted
might easily finish his task, the Ministry of Education adds that government officials, priests, teachers and ‘everyone else’ should be at his disposal (cited after Kostić, 2011: 3). As a result, his hosts and guides through bureaucratic labyrinths, as well as through the landscape of Serbia, were numerous government officials: from ministers and mayors to engineers, physicians and priests – everyone indeed. Of particular importance for Kanitz’s archaeological work were people like Janko Šafarik (1814–76) or Jovan Gavrilović (1796–1877), both ethnic Slavs born in
instead sought ‘to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and intensity’. The bog bodies gave him every example of violence he was seeing around him or had heard of through folk memory: execution on the basis of religious and ethnic difference; for sexual liaison with that which was banned – fraternisation bound up with betrayal and thus due a death; for sheer bloody-mindedness or youthful rule-breaking; disruptive behaviour or rivalry that needed suppression by both (para)military and martial law. Heaney’s work does not provide