About lost futures or the political heart of history

The consideration that our era lives under the sign of memory and that this has become the main concern of culture in western societies is a commonplace. This shift to the past has been described as a “memory boom”,2 a “surfeit of memory”,3 a “world (that is) being musealised”4 and as a “desire to commemorate”.5 This “obses sion with recalls” has been interpreted in many studies: on local, cultural or “from below” mem ories, on ways of keeping memories (from me morials and monuments to files, movies, biog raphies and commemorations, etc), on ways of understanding a historiography that looks back to the recent past, about politics of memory and past uses, among other issues. These studies have multiplied in the most varied disciplines, including, sociology, social psychology, history, psychoanalysis, neurobiology, culture sociolo gy, philosophy, etc. The diagnosis seems to be unanimous: we are living in a period in which the present lives off the past, in a kind of “a present past”,6 with the result that we lapse into what Hartog calls “presentism”. This past that lives in the present has been called “traumatic”,7 “sub lime”,8 “espectral”,9 among others. We are expe riencing a “new order of time”: “D’un coté ... un passé qui n’est pas aboli ni oublié, mais un passé duquel ne pouvons à peu prés rien tirer qui nous oriente dans le present et nous donne à imagi ner le future. De l’autre, un avenir sans la moin dre figure.”10 An order of time which casts doubts on the future understood as progress. It puts in question the modern regime of temporality; “in stead of being oriented towards the future, it is oriented towards the past”Fil: Mudrovcic, Maria Ines. Universidad Nacional del Comahue; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Islam, Israel and the Czech Republic

An analytical article about a rising wave of islamophobia in the Czech Republi

State apologies, postcolonial resistance and ontological insecurity : the Matabeleland massacre

Open Access via T&F Agreement Funding Information: An early version of this article was presented at the Virtual Workshop on Political Apologies for Historical Wrongs organised by Tom Bentley of the University of Aberdeen. I thank the participants for their helpful questions and feedback. I thank the Third World Quarterly anonymous reviewers and Tom Bentley for their valuable comments, which significantly improved this article.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The development of apologies in the Japanese L2 of adult English native speakers

The present paper focuses on the use of seven apologies strategies in the Japanese of 20 adult, high-intermediate English learners/users of Japanese. Nine of these learners had spent a minimum of two years in Japan. The proportions of apology strategies produced by the two groups of learners in response to 8 situations presented to them in a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) were compared with data obtained from a control group of 14 Japanese L1 participants and a control group of 12 British English L1 participants. In total, 1999 tokens of apology strategies were collected. Statistical analyses and an analysis of lexical items allowed us to describe the learners‟ development and the effect of the stay in Japan

Strategies of expressing written apologies in the online newspaper

Expressing apology is a universal activity although people have different strategies or ways to express the apology based on the culture, situation, and context. An apology has played a vital role in verbal politeness; it is certainly impolite when someone does not express an apology when he or she has commited an offence to the others. Apologies in the Pragmatic study is classified under speech act theory. An apology based on Searle (1969) is classified as expressive speech acts because it expresses speaker’s physiological attitude. An apology expresses speaker’s sorrow and regret because he/she has offended hearers or readers.  This paper tries to discuss strategies of editors in expressing written apologies in the online newspaper. The objective of this paper is to explain what the strategies of written apologies are in the online newspaper. This study uses qualitative method; the writer chooses descriptive interpretative technique for analyzing data. There are four written apologies in the online neswpapers as data sources in this paper, the data are taken from The Jakarta Post, The Daily Express, The Sun, and Brisbane Times. The writer tries to describe and analyzes utterances in the data sources based on Olshtain & Cohen theory (1986). There are five main strategies in expressing apologies according to Olshtain & Cohen (1986); they are Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), expression responsibility, explanation/justification, offer repairs, and promise forbearance. The writer found that all of the written apologies used combination strategies, they used IFID by using performative verb: apologize and be sorry then followed by expression resposbility, explanation, offer repairs, and promise forbearance.

The phenomenology of near-death experiences in Northland Māori of New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North Campus, Manawatū, New Zealand

Near-death experiences (NDEs) can be described as profoundly life-changing, subjective events, that typically manifest in those who have been pronounced clinically dead. Over the past four decades, NDEs have been a field of interest for many researchers. However, the majority of NDE research has been conducted in Western contexts, with fewer than ten studies completed in non-Western regions (Sleutjes, Moreira-Almeida, & Greyson, 2014). The limited non-Western NDE research makes it difficult to determine the role culture may play in the development or interpretation of the NDE. The focus of the current study is the phenomenology of the NDEs of Maori residing in Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Because of the Maori focus, Kaupapa Maori Research was selected as the most appropriate methodological framework for this study. A ‘whanau of supervisors’ consisting of five Kaumatua and Kuia assisted the non-Maori researcher with respect to Kaupapa Maori. Six participants took part in unstructured interviews. Findings revealed the significant role of tikanga Maori within the NDEs of participants’, as well as a high similarity with the features often reported by NDErs of Western culture. Based on these results, it is suggested the two positions previous authors have regarded as conflicting, are not in fact mutually exclusive. The NDE may be cross-cultural in nature and culturally interpreted, but incorporate elements developed in reference to culture

Enter time the winter’s tale, Aristotle and Derrida

For the abstract of this paper, please see the PDF fil