Reading Across Cultures: Global Narratives, Hotels and Railway Stations

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.This article takes its cue from the English critic, novelist and painter John Berger. He argues that what we know determines what we see. Hotels and railway stations, though they differ in size, design and appearance, are places of temporary national and international congress that are recognized by everyone. They become visible or even iconic once their history or their role is turned into at least part of a wider narrative—in literature, film or in other arts. This provides a representative focus by which we may read a city’s or a nation’s past. In exemplifying such connections I focus first on the long-term history of Friedrichstraße station and some of the surrounding hotels in the context of the history of Berlin, situating them within the national and, by implication, also the international context. Secondly, I will consider the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 as an event in which the role of railway stations generated both personal and collective memories across cultures and over several decades

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders

When East Meets West: International Change and Its Effects on Domestic Cultural Institutions

Domestic governments increasingly face the pressure to follow policy developments occurring at the international or supranational level. Yet international laws and policies need to be “translated” to suit domestic political institutions and newly adopted policies may challenge or contradict preexisting domestic policies, institutions, and interests. To explore the domestic impact of international institutional developments, we studied the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage and its adoption in four countries (Japan, China, France, and Germany). Using historical institutionalism, this comparative case study sheds light on the effects of the Convention on cultural governance systems in two supposedly different “camps” within the UNESCO: the East and the West. The study argues that it is the interaction and entangled relationship of exogenous and endogenous factors over time, particularly the timing and sequence in which they constrain and facilitate change, which shape actors’ preferences and institutional development at both levels

Fremde Nähe - nahe Fremde?

Peer Reviewe

Chapitre 5. La civilisation comme dynamique autoréflexive

L’intérêt des travaux d’Elias réside dans le décalage prononcé entre l’œuvre et sa réception. Il est vrai que des études fondamentales comme Über den Prozess der Zivilisation ont été élaborées dès les années 30 et n’ont été publiées que plusieurs décennies plus tard. Lorsqu’on « lit » véritablement Elias, il convient donc de remettre de larges pans de ses recherches dans la perspective d’un monde nouveau, tant du point de vue de l’expérience sociale que de celui de la connaissance scientifiqu..

Geschichtspolitik und Identitätspolitik

Peer Reviewe

Anmerkungen zum Gesellschaftsvergleich aus ethnologischer Perspektive

Mit der vorsichtigen Wendung „Anmerkungen“ im Titel ist bereits angedeutet, daß mir die Aufgabenformulierung ein gewisses Unbehagen bereitet. Und dieses Unbehagen ist keineswegs persönlicher, vielmehr fachlicher Natur, denn die Ethnologie geht mit dem Konzept des Gesellschafts- und Kulturvergleichs ein wenig um wie mit einem ungeliebten Kind. Zwar ist der Vergleichsgedanke in ihrer Wissenschaftsgeschichte eng, fast genetisch sowohl mit dem alten Volkskonzept wie mit dem modernen Kulturkonzept verbunden und die Vergleichsdimension wurde stets als theoretisches wie empirisches Konstitutivum betont, doch blieb die Vergleichsperspektive letztendlich vernachlässigt und daher auch theoretisch wie methodologisch deutlich unterkonzeptualisiert. Jedenfalls wenn man den Maßstab eines analytisch „kontrollierten Vergleichs“ (Hartmut Kaelble) anlegt.Peer Reviewe

Les Allemands, des étrangers les uns pour les autres

L’unification allemande a créé une situation quasi unique dans l’histoire européenne : deux sociétés essaient de (re)trouver une identité historique et nationale commune. Pendant quarante-cinq ans, la conscience d’une histoire, d’une langue et d’une culture nationales, spécifiques et partagées, fut presque ininterrompue chez les Allemands, dans la rfa comme dans la rda. Malgré la séparation politique et étatique, malgré des conceptions de la société idéologiquement différentes, l’entente entr..