Greetings from Trento!
Turning Points: ‘Turns’ in Recent Historiography #history 👉 bit.ly/3PDK1GF
The #conference reflects on the meaning of a series of recent historiographical turns and on their impact on our interpretation of the #past @histodons@historikerinnen@digigw
"We live in a world marked by the dead...
The #dead don’t walk among us, for there is no need for that.
We walk to them, bearing gifts of flowers.
We are haunted, haunting ourselves with our imaginations and our memories"
HERITAGE, THE POWER OF THE PAST, AND THE POLITICS OF (MIS)RECOGNITION by Laurajane Smith (2022).
"Heritage is a political resource; no matter how this concept is defined, “heritage” is charged with representing individual and group identity, sense of place and belonging".
"This paper will illustrate how heritage and museum visiting, as a leisure activity, facilitates or impedes recognition and redistribution in direct and indirect ways. Drawing on extensive qualitative interviews with visitors to 45 heritage sites and museums in the USA, Australia, and England, the paper demonstrates the importance of emotions in mundane struggles over recognition and misrecognition. How emotions uphold or challenge investments in heritage narratives are examined."
PRÁTICAS DA HISTÓRIA "is an online academic journal published at the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH) with the support of the IHC – Institute of Contemporary History and of CHAM – Centre for the Humanities. The main aim of the journal is the promotion of discussions on historical theory, historiography and the uses of the past".
An interesting journal. The theme of the last two issues (2022 and 2023) is "Political Uses of the Past: Public Memory of Slavery and Colonialism".
Most of the articles have been published in English, but some have also been published in Portuguese or Spanish.
The idea of a "moral decline" is linked to the narratives we create about the past, in which events are idealised or simplified. On the other hand, human beings have a tendency to analyse events in terms of how we would like things to be. This example was published last year in the Times of India Reader's Blog:
"Moral values are fading these days. […] The culture is degrading day by day due to the effect of the western influence and movies which often mislead the younger generation.
[…] The low moral values have created unrest and turmoil in society. […] We can dream of a kind and honest world only if we nurture moral values and keep our ethos."
Such arguments, with many variations, can be found everywhere nowadays. The only problem is that similar arguments can be found in texts from many other periods in the past.
THE MYTH OF “DECLINE AND FALL” by Edward Champlin (1996).
"Everyone knows that the Roman Empire “declined and fell.” The title of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is part of Western cultural consciousness. There is something deeply thrilling about the notion: Rome, the largest political and economic unit in the world before the year 1000, fell; are we too doomed to lose our power, our culture, even our memory?"
"But the notion of decline is an extremely difficult one. A political unit may indeed “fall” because of complex political, social, and economic reasons. The real problem comes when we, like the Romans, do not understand these reasons and, like the Romans, equate decline with moral decline."
"In the end, “Rome” did not decline; it changed, as all cultures must. "
THE ILLUSION OF MORAL DECLINE by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert (Nature, 2023).
"In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline."
"HOW THE HINDU RIGHT-WING IN INDIA IS UNDERMINING MUSLIM IDENTITY THROUGH HERITAGE" by Maitri Dore.
"In service of the myth of a Hindu golden age, the Hindu right-wing is contorting historical facts and attempting to cleanse the built environment of Muslim heritage. Their meddlesomeness is proof of the pudding that heritage is more than simply brick and mortar. It is about the selection and use of these for political purposes. In this scheme then, architecture–by way of claims to mosques, and public space–through its renaming, are merely convenient props that hold up the cherry-picked narrative."