Heritage AS Resistance – Looking Forward to Cultural Recovery
SIEF2023 16th Congress, Living Uncertainty, Brno, June 7-10, 2023
This panel looks at Ukrainian cultural responses to Russia’s war, from explicit resistance to humor, from verbal defenses to re-assertions of identity through traditional practices. In dark times, we need optimism and hope; we try to reassert a sense of control.
Much of culture is an attempt to assert control over the world around us, controlling the uncontrollable through searching for patterns and predictability. But when the world as you know it is turned upside down, questions of identity are brought to the fore – Who am I? Who are we? Who are my people? – and there is an urgent need to reconstruct it through enacting and reinventing traditions, humor, and stories.
In this environment, our family traditions, markers of identity, and symbols of cultural heritage and allegiance can take on a range of functions, from redemptive and inspiring to elegiac and memorial. Collectively, they can help us, by reaching into the past, to rehearse the future, as W. F. H. Nicolaisen puts it, a future that will be, that might be, that we wish to be.
We invite contributions that examine, or employ, the present-day function(s) and meaning(s) of cultural inheritance, tangible or intangible, in the face of strife, conflict, and uncertainty – the unknown that looms large in all our lives.
At the workshop, contributors will reflect on papers and how we might move forward to practical projects aimed at facilitating community and cultural recovery.
Much of culture is an attempt to assert control over the world around us, controlling the uncontrollable through searching for patterns and predictability. But when the world as you know it is turned upside down, questions of identity are brought to the fore – Who am I? Who are we? Who are my people? – and there is an urgent need to reconstruct it through enacting and reinventing traditions, humor, and stories.
In this environment, our family traditions, markers of identity, and symbols of cultural heritage and allegiance can take on a range of functions, from redemptive and inspiring to elegiac and memorial. Collectively, they can help us, by reaching into the past, to rehearse the future, as W. F. H. Nicolaisen puts it, a future that will be, that might be, that we wish to be.
We invite contributions that examine, or employ, the present-day function(s) and meaning(s) of cultural inheritance, tangible or intangible, in the face of strife, conflict, and uncertainty – the unknown that looms large in all our lives.
At the workshop, contributors will reflect on papers and how we might move forward to practical projects aimed at facilitating community and cultural recovery.
Submission deadline: January 10, 2023
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