C 07
Objects of the Past and Present as a Resource. Cultural Heritage – Nationalism – Identity
Academic Disciplines
Ethnology
Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (European Ethnology)
Project Investigators
PhD students
Case study 1: The sacralisation of the landscape delimits the disordered space and creates the cognitive and emotional notion of a coherent region that connects heaven and earth and calls the past into the present. These attributions are memorably transported by narratives and become deeply imprinted in consciousness through rituals and practices.
Certain places can be seen as resources and the associated local and pan-Indian narratives, rituals and practices at, on and about these places as ResourceComplexes.
In recent times, the Hindutva movement in India appropriates places of national heritage for increasingly one-sided metanarratives of Hindu nationalism, altering and negating the histories, narratives and ritual sites of various minorities and local populations. To what extent do these appropriations and metanarratives alter perceptions of particular places and affective attachments to them in the Himalayan region? How do different actors articulate and negotiate their cultural heritage in this dynamic and contested process? How do memory culture and cultural memory change as the value of the resource is actualised?
Case study 2: Cultural policy work with participatory museum formats analyses collaborative approaches in the curation of ethnographic and historical exhibitions as producers, triggers and carriers of cultural identities. The starting point is the exhibition 'Surrounded Sarajevo' at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, which opened in 2003 and has been continuously revised and supplemented over the years with the involvement of audiences, artists and activists. The aim of the exhibition – to show how the inhabitants of Sarajevo survived during the siege that lasted from 1992 to 1996 – is framed by 1. the specific resources (or lack thereof, as both local and federal government bodies have refused to take responsibility for this state museum since the end of the conflict) and techniques used by the museum, and 2. the different narratives and understandings of Bosnian-Herzegovinian culture and society, which are linked by the ResourceComplexes available to the curators.
The project asks: How do the processes of negotiation about what the cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina is or represents take place between the actors involved? What role do the technical and structural framework conditions play, and how are these included in the discussions about the intended transfer of knowledge? What concepts and practices of different cultural identities are negotiated and generated through the presentation of material culture in the de facto abandoned state institution and what forums of interpretive sovereignty emerge in these processes?
Case study 3: The case study supervised by Prof. Thiemeyer within project C 07 is located at the interface of empirical cultural studies and contemporary history and deals with the question of how German memorials and historical sites deal with right-wing extremist influence.
The study focuses on three institutions: the Wewelsburg Memorial in Büren (NRW), the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial in Oranienburg (Brandenburg) and the Obersalzberg Documentation Centre in Berchtesgaden (Bavaria). The institutions were selected in particular because they differ greatly from each other with regard to some presumably relevant factors (geographical location, size, sponsorship, type of mediation). At the same time, they have one thing in common, namely that they regularly serve as a 'stage' and projection surface for collective right-wing extremist identities and images of history.
The hypothesis is that right-wing extremist influence not only affects the way the respective institutions work and what they offer (exhibitions, workshops, training, public relations, etc.), but also the emotions, (professional) self-perception, thinking and everyday practices of the staff.
By combining cultural studies’ concepts of research on space with those of research on emotions, the study approaches the following questions:
How does right-wing extremist influence manifest itself concretely and on which factors does the type of influence depend?
How is extreme right-wing influence dealt with and what factors do the respective strategies depend on?
What effects does right-wing extremist influence have on the working methods and services of the institutions and what consequences does it have for the self-perception and emotions of the staff?
In accordance with the narrative-theoretical tradition of empirical cultural studies, talking about practices and emotions will be the mode of the work. With the help of guided interviews, we will approach the individual experience, the emotional practices and the strategies of the employees. In addition, participant observation will be used to capture the interconnections between spaces, actors, emotions and practices. Discourse and media analyses will complement the range of methods in order to contextualise the empirical data.