Cultural Identity

Heimat- und Identitätslosigkeit – diese Themen beschäftigen Schriftsteller, die ihr Geburtsland verlassen haben, seit jeher. Manche Autoren nehmen eine passive, resignierte Haltung gegenüber der Unmöglichkeit eines Ankommens im neuen Land ein, andere beharren auf der Illusion einer Heimatfindung.
Das Motiv der Identität(slosigkeit) spielt auch in den Werken des aus Siebenbürgen stammenden Schriftstellers Franz Hodjak eine zentrale Rolle. In seinen Gedichten und Romanen behandelt er das Thema des Sich-fremd-Fühlens und der Identitätssuche, das Gefühl, nirgendwo zu Hause zu sein, mal mit heiterer Gelassenheit, mal mit resignierter Desillusionierung und behauptet: „In der Heimatlosigkeit besteht meine Identität.“ Es ist nicht das traurig-resignierte Gefühl des Ausreisenden, das in den Werken von Franz Hodjak anzutreffen ist, sondern eher der Ausreißende spricht den Leser an.
Die vorliegende Untersuchung zeigt anhand verschiedener literaturwissenschaftlicher und soziopsychologischer Theorien Aspekte der Identität und Identitätsgestaltung in der Gattungs- und Formenwahl der Werke Franz Hodjaks auf.

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

The book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of  ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity,  as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues,  forms of actualization of ethnic and civil  consciousness,  ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

Derived from Maithil practices and festivals and assumed to protect the household, the Madhubani Paintings spread since the 1960s in India and abroad. Transferred on paper in order to be commercialized, they undergo important changes. I will focus on the reception history of Mithila paintings through two Western mediators, who each declared themselves to be the discoverers of these paintings: one is British, William Archer (1907- 1979); the other French, Yves Véquaud (1938-2000). They bear witness to an international reception which underlines a particular aspect of the worldwide connected and shared histories of Bihar.
After being appointed officer of the Indian Civil Service in Bihar, Archer publishes in 1949 the article “Maithil Painting”. This is a first moment in the reception history of these paintings. His writings show a universal aesthetic, based on psychoanalyze, surrealism and an organic vision of art.
The hippie “counter-culture” renews enchanted orientalist and romantic visions of a South Asian universe presumed to be spiritual, pantheist and sensorial. Followed on the heels of the sixties, indophily appears a particularly favourable, moment - or kairos - in the reception of Maithil works. It parallels the internationalization of its actors: Erika Moser Schmitt in Germany, Tokio Hasegawa in Japan, Raymond and Naomi Owens as well as David Szanton in United States and Yves Véquaud in France. The writings of the latter mingled an aptitude to capture the “air du temps” with a real interest in India and adhered to the values of the counter-culture. He is today mostly known for his essays on Mithila paintings. The Mithila Art is published in 1976, then translated in 1977 into English and German. In 1974, he co-directed the documentary Mithila. During a period of about ten years, he exhibited his collection of Mithila paintings in France and abroad (in particular in Paris, Musée de l’Homme, Musée des arts Décoratifs...).
In 1970, Véquaud discovered the Mithila paintings in New-Delhi thanks to the museologist Ratna Fabri. He remained in India for two years, went to Madhubani and met some village painters. In his writings, the Maithil women painters are presented as charismatic figures, between holiness and genius. In 1973, Sita Devi “appears to him as a saint”, withdrawn from the world, “in a inner-peace and trust refuge which nothing could disturb". From the author’s standpoint, the talent of these painters, neo-tantric muses presumed to create only when in a yogic state, is compared with that of an exorcist. This vision of the prophetic artist, fluctuating between the christic figure of the saviour and the holy icon, also bears witness to the transformation of the status of the artist since the 19th Century in the West and to the appearance of a ”vocational regime” (Nathalie Heinich). These charismatic figures call to mind the appearance of a conception of the artist as the author of innovative works, and living a singular life. Like Braque and Rouault, the Maithil women painters would so be transformed into figures of legend, likely to guide the work of their followers in their efforts to become an artist. These prophetic artists would become a modern incarnation of holiness. In 1968, Yves Véquaud describes Mozart and Van Gogh as saints, whose example overwhelms. From his standpoint, the prophetic Maithil artists are devoid of the overwhelming heroization that affects Western artists. They would correspond to his promotion of creative spontaneity and a present freed from the burden of the past, in quest of eternal moments.
In Yves Véquaud’s conception, the women painters swing between an ideal of devout humility and religious immortality. In 1973, Sita Devi is described as the one who “knew all the honours” and yet remained “humble and loving”. From the westernized standpoint of Véquaud, the artistic success of Maithil painters may be explained by their desire for singularity and timelessness in their results. This involves both the personalization of means, namely the invention of new paths, as well as the depersonalization of the ends of the success, namely the creation of objects crystallizing values recognized beyond the author. This contingency was traditionally reserved for saints and heroes.
His admiration for these artists assumed an almost devotional character. Following the example of the canonization of Western art, Yves Véquaud established a relationship between the Maithil pictorial phenomenon and a religious phenomenon, the neo-tantrism. His behaviour was almost that of a believer. He set up his exhibitions with a nearly sacerdotal and proselytizing diligence. His hermeneutics of the works is almost theological. The conditions in which the paintings were produced has been neglected. The art of Mithila is described as a (wedding) liturgy ; the paintbrush becomes the tool of prayer. The biographies of the painters appear as a “golden legend”. Nevertheless, these exegeses underline the effective ritual dimension of these paintings. Maithil art became the sphere onto which he projected the expectations traditionally assumed by the religion. It is no longer the instrument, but the object of the sacralization. Sanctified with the admiration of Yves Véquaud, the painters were not “acknowledged by the ecclesiastical authorities”: it concords with the informal religiosity of the author. He thus put forward an essentialized vision of Mithila paintings. Perhaps it represented also an attempt to sublimate his own artistic failures by projecting onto fantasized painters an imaginary solution to a melancholy situation: giving up novelistic publications, whether due to lack of inspiration or to editorial refusals. His neo-tantric vision of Mithila paintings resulted from the kairos of the hippie phase previously evoked.
Yet in 1994 India Served and Observed, the memoirs posthumously published by William Archer and his spouse, Mildred, put forward a fanciful account about the discovery of Mithila paintings, marked with a Flower Power sensitivity : it stays in-between the construction of a storytelling and an aesthetic emotion, which is a posteriori inflamed. To seize the proclaimed strong and valued discourses of the moment on South-Asia is equivalent to a re-enchantment of Archer’s writings. This work builds itself in resonance with Véquaud’s one. Thus in this new narrative about the discovery of Mithila paintings, the meeting with the paintings and the painters is described as simultaneously exalted and distanced, but sublimated by aesthetic emotion. A narrative play takes shape wavering between desire and repression. According to their words, "in these murals we somehow electrically met".
I will analyzed in what extent these idealized works and their women heroized figures could be situated in the social context of the “counter-culture” and the hippie movement, foreseeing the globalization of Mithila paintings in the 1990s : since then some maithil artists free themselves from categories of gender, caste and local belonging. The appearance of painters men in Mithila, motivated in particular by the prospect of profits, polls gender categories associated to a practice for a long time exclusively feminine. Simultaneously some researchers deconstruct this essentialized tradition. They expound Archer’s and Vequaud's interpretations as an hegemonic discourse constituted from masculine canons.

As advocates of critical pedagogy (CP) and anti-oppressive education, in as much as these paradigms serve as critical lenses for “learning to question” (Freire and Faundez, 1989) and for critically “reading the world” (Freire and Macedo, 1987) and our experiences in it, we understand ...

The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic - Kushitic Oromo Nation - due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians - lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world's most tyrannical realm and the location of the world's more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan's (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia's) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.

Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
First published here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kushitic-oromos-ancestry-in-ethiopia-ancient-sudan-semitic-amharas-tigrays-abyssinians-ancestry-in-yemen/

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Abstract: In this paper, we outline a number of features of an interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to economics. As a suitable example of how an interdisciplinary cooperation can unfold, we focus attention on the relations between institutional economics and psychoanalysis. In the first ...

Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit der Minderheitenpolitik in Estland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kultur. Dabei wird der Nationale Aktionsplan ausgewertet und der Einfluss der Kulturpolitik auf die Inklusion ethnischer Minderheiten untersucht. Die Studie legt einen Schwerpunkt auf die Bereiche Bildung, Medien und Partizipation. Die Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass ethnische Minderheiten in weiten Bereichen unterrepräsentiert sind, und gibt Handlungsoptionen zur Verbesserung der Situation. (ICD

The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an extensive interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran.

This paper describes the use of adaptation patterns in the task of formulating standards for adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) systems that is currently under investigation by the EU ADAPT project. Within this project, design dimensions for high granularity patterns have been established. In this paper we focus on detailing lower granularity adaptive patterns based upon learning styles. Several patterns from existing AEH system case studies are identified and classified according to an extended learning style "onion" model. This model forms the basis of a learning style taxonomy, introduced here, whose components determine adaptation patterns for AEH. These patterns are of importance both for authoring, as well as for interfacing between adaptive hypermedia systems. From an authoring point of view, these patterns may be used to establish a fine-grain approach to instructional strategies that can be implemented in AEH systems, as a response to a particular learning style. The implementation of this adaptation pattern taxonomy is discussed, both generally and in detail.

Theories of hybrid culture and transculturalism are analyzed from the point of view of comparative literature. In the modern world the transformation of multiculturalism and
globalism towards transculture is an inevitable consequence of the complicated
processes of cultural interaction in all countries of the world. Transculturalism is an
alternative to multiculturalism as a product of globalism and has different rhetoric of
the Other. The transcultural concept, put forward by F. Ortiz as an alternative to the
asymmetric concept of acculturation in the area of cultural contacts, provided
opportunities for describing the complex processes of cultural interaction in the era of
globalization. Transculture is based on the cultural polyphony, in which there should
not be a complete synthesis, where the cultures retain some opacity. The concept of
transculturality can be used as a basis for a modern comparative analysis of literature.
At the same time, key issues of interaction of cultures in post-Soviet discourse are not
solved. Therefore, the study of methodologies of post-Soviet studies is important not
only as theoretical problem, but also as a problem of general cultural significance.
Therefore, the Caribbean philosophy, which is being built as a significant element of
contemporary comparativism in the field of interaction between cultures, directly
concerns the problems of choosing ways of further postcolonial development of postSoviet cultures. Transculturalism proposes the principle of hybridity instead of the
archaic principle of the purity of national culture, declaring the change in attitude to
national languages, cultural traditions and the very concept of nation-state, giving way
to the processes of transnationalization and polyglossia associated with the principle of the networked cosmopolitanism. This is a new relationship between languages and
cultures. Ultimately, this new andmagological interaction between the Own and the
Other. It is a search for a new unity of the various Others.

Key words: comparative literature, postcolonial studies, transculturalism, hybridization, multiculturalism, globalism, post-Soviet studies, cultural identity.

En el año 2004, el productor y cineasta costarricense Hernán Jiménez presentó una de sus primeras obras audiovisuales en el país. La denominó "Doble llave y Cadena: el encarcelamiento de una ciudad", ganadora de la muestra de Cine y Video en aquel año. En esta pieza, Jiménez expuso magistralmente las consideraciones sociológicas, psicológicas y urbanas de la transición entre una sociedad rural contemplativa y rupestre a una urbe urbana como San José desordenada, fea e insegura. El eje con que presentó dicha transformación fue el aumento de la inseguridad. La pieza es narrada en primera persona, permitiendo conocer la forma como la subjetividad se va colocando frente a las transformaciones, los miedos, las incertidumbres del paso de un estado social, espacial, emocional, a otro. Con el eje de la inseguridad, Jiménez no solo explicaba la reconfiguración estética de una ciudad como San José que en pocos años se convirtió en un "campo de concentración con seguridad perimetral". También planteaba la consolidación de un espacio geográfico y social donde se condensaron todas las desigualdades, tensiones sociales y destrucciones de confianzas mutuas y comunitarias, para dar campo a experiencias cada vez mas individualizantes en los últimos 30 años. En este período, aparecieron los miedos hacia el otro, hacia los otros, generalmente diferenciados en razón de su color de piel y su proveniencia geográfica, fuera de las fronteras nacionales. Haciéndolo extensivo para el territorio costarricense, la sociedad en su conjunto se encerró en sí misma, se clausuró para resguardarse. El audiovisual continua vigente luego de sus ya 16 años de estrenado. Sus premoniciones sobre un país que "se quedó por fuera" fueron cumplidas y se exacerbaron con la coyuntura de la pandemia COVID-19, que ha terminado por instalar el cierre de una comunidad política y social imaginada, hasta hace pocas décadas. La base de esta clausura tiene múltiples dimensiones, algunas sociopolíticas, otras de orden sociocultural. Pero el principal rasgo que explica la fractura con la que cual Costa Rica acometió desde marzo de 2020 la actual coyuntura sanitaria, es la persistencia de un proceso cada vez más visible y permanente en esta sociedad: la construcción social de la desigualdad. Es este rasgo el que mejor describe una sociedad que se quedó por fuera, fue expulsada y contenida, mientras los vestigios de construcción social eran erosionados, minando la confianza y la solidaridad como construcciones identitarias comunes.

This article deals with identity political discourse in situations of cultural movements, precisely in situations of migration. It addresses the question of migration through the interpretation of past and in the making events. In this context, it focuses on the perception of Other, and on its representation. As such, it observes spatiotypies in their discursive specificities. Spatiotypies are attributions of power and discourse. They state, mentally and politically, the social life of individuals. The corpus is composed of French newspaper articles, from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2016. This period saw the dismantling of the "Camps de Calais" and the distribution of migrants to other locations on the French territory.

This article seeks to demonstrate how the myth of Troy is still relevant to modern-day European culture and identity, drawing on Gregor Feindt et al.’s concept of “entangled memory” as a theoretical foundation. In order to support this claim, it discusses Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Troy (2004), the successful exhibition Troy—Dream and Reality that opened in Germany in 2001; the heated debate sparked by this exhibition among German scholars; and the political discussion about Turkey’s unsuccessful application for membership in the European Union, in which references to Troy played a surprising role.

Assertions about the effects of imported media on national cultures and identities are often heard in discussions of globalized communications. One strand of argument holds that indigenous cultures are debased by foreign images and ideas brought by imported media. This article asks how we recognize an indigenous culture and what constitutes damage to cultural identity. Following analysts in
many other fields, it argues that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ culture, that cultural interaction has always been the norm, and that cultural identities are more resilient than is often credited. Placing these propositions into the analysis of media flows leads to the reconsideration of the purported negative effects of foreign media on identity. Such reconsideration, however, does not entail abandoning the idea of regulating imported media, and the article concludes with a discussion of reasons for doing so.

Winner of 2009 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.

Chapter One is available below

Three decades have now passed since Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Following the phenomenon of progressive distancing from the Communist past, the effects of post-Soviet transition are nowadays visible in the changing urban landscape understood as the bearer of memory. The city of Kaunas (Lithuania) is used here as case study as it looks forward to move away from the "temporary capital" label and play the role of European capital of culture in 2022. The main objective of this study is to explore how Kaunas' urban transformation affects the collective memory of the local population and in turn shapes the cultural identity of the city. Based on original survey data, this study finds that even though multiple cultural identities can coexist, there is evidence to believe that the local youth is still divided about the city's historical legacy of the 20th century. Finally, this article marks a step in the direction of integrating the study of urban areas into the discussion about historical memory and conflicting interpretations of the past.

The report covers the attitude to the problem of cultural identity of G.-K. Kaltenbrunner, the "enlightened conservatism" theorist and researcher of the European spiritual history. Conservatism as a "territory comradeship" protects and keeps up the "unique song of landscape" as one of the major human existence constants. 
In an essay on one European spirit representative, which Kaltenbrunner has regarded Alexander Blok as a member, he emphasizes that the great poet introduces images of the "Finnish part of Russia", the realm of interminable forests and quietness, calm before the storm, St. Petersburg, surrounded by a marshy lake landscape, and the mythologized Scythian Euro-Asiatic steppe space. In an essay on the philosopher Ludwig Klages,  the description of  Schwabing, the "outskirts of the world" plays a large part. "At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the time of the romanticists, mainly "non–Bavarians" turned Munich into "Athens on the Isar". At the beginning of the twentieth century, those notable "newcomers" settled in Schwabing,  which was a neighborhood of artists and bohemians. They established a multicolored counter culture over there and turned Munich into a flourishing spiritual life center again".The essay on Adam Heinrich Muller, whom Kaltenbrunner calls "the conservative between Prussia and Austria", traces the path of a philosopher, rhetorician and renegade to Catholicism towards Austria. Kaltenbrunner assesses his decision to leave Prussia as "the return home... of a Lutheran", to the "Patriarchal polity", "finding shelter".
Formation of the personality and Europe-oriented pattern of thoughts of the native of Vein, resident of Germany G.-K. Kaltenbrunner were undoubtedly influenced by the "Austrianness", the Austrian culture, the attempt to realize the "Christian society ideal for all world races and languages" in Austria.
Österreichertum is a term introduced into the political philosophy of Austria by Dr. Alfred Missong (1902-1965), the founder and  former of the first Christian social program ÖVP. He was a friend of Ernst Karl Winter and August Maria Knoll, whose works are constantly quoted by the editor of the Initiative in works devoted to the theoretical justification of conservatism. The article "Österreichertum – einmal zu Ende gedacht" states: "in view of the death of Germany (1945), we need to think consistently by hitting upon the ide what is "Österreichertum", Austrian patriotism.
At the same time, A.Missong agrees with Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), the historian of culture and researcher of the history of Catholicism,  who believes that Austria represents a supranational idea of the state and a European-oriented way of thinking, determined by the values represented by Christianity.
While reflecting on the contribution of Austria (the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to the history of mankind,  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy believed that Austria-Hungary "was the Christian world itself, was a Western civilization in its totality", ... "the integrity of Austria was the integrity "by reference". The quintessence of its existence was to agglomerate the results of all phases of historical evolution." Austria "learned to speak universally among the Babylonian confusion of tongues", "strengthened its weak political foundations by developing a new type of an individual", having returned to the eternal features of human character, overcoming national unilateralism, universalism, "...soul and body belong to the individual, and consciousness and spirit are not properties of the individual. Intelligence allows the individual's soul to participate in global spiritualization."
Kaltenbrunner, 1995: 135: "one of the most striking and disconcerting consequences of Germany's progressive breakaway from Christianity is the total suppression, malicious eradication, and outlawing of vast areas of the European spirit, especially the Catholic spirit." It is symptomatic that similar words about the "almost sinister" suppression of Kaltenbrunner's name in modern Germany were written by Martin John Grannenfeld, a converter (former Protestant, now Catholic), musician and writer, "amateur theologist," in his no longer existing Internet project called Geistbraus".  One may agree with P. Mayer that Kaltenbrunner was more of a Christian rather than a representative of any nation. This was especially evident during the last fifteen years of his life, as evidenced by his recent books, his seclusion, and his return to mysticism.
The report concludes that Kaltenbrunner was a Catholic European thinker, Austrian philosopher who lived and worked in Germany. During his active social and political activity, he influenced significantly the German political philosophy, trying to ground the theory of conservatism by means of arguments that would weighty not only for believers, but also for agnostics and atheists. The main task of the last years of his life was restoration and preservation of the over individual spiritual guidelines by means of reference to the European spiritual history sources. In researching the European spiritual history, he gives much attention to how the national, regional, and landscape features enrich infinitely the European culture.

Identity recognition is always an exciting topic within the field of cultural studies. It is handy and exciting for one to study the society, culture and people of a specific place, with the combination of examination of the history of that locale.

Provided in the topic of research, it is ever known that 1997 was a crucial point in Hong Kong History. Signed in 1984, the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (hereafter known as the Joint Declaration) marked the future event of the 1997 Handover of the Sovereignty of Hong Kong to China (henceforth known as 1997 Handover). Since then, Hong Kong entered the transitional period, which lasted for 13 years. In the transitional period, the prominent historical event was the mass migration of HongKongers. Shortly after the signature of Joint Declaration in 1984, the uncertainty of future in their homeland, including the social and institutional changes and, most importantly, the incoming of the Chinese regime under the communist rule began hand in hands among HongKongers. This kind of fear, together with the June 4th Incident that intensified fear towards communist government after 1997, triggered the mass migration of HongKongers which reached its climax in the 1990s.

After the 1997 Handover, Hong Kong marched into another stage of rapid development. At that time, the Hong Kong economy went on another boosting. The society went on the trend of vibrancy under the implementation of the “one country two systems”. This posture, at a certain extent, changed the attitude towards the future of the city of a notable proportion of HongKongers abroad. Apart from that, migrated to foreign countries, a significant number of HongKongers found out life abroad was difficult. Albeit the character of flexible and adaptable possessed by HongKongers, some migrants could fit themselves into neither the local social systems nor the living modes there. They also found the economic environment hard to make them remain overseas. Therefore, because of the social development in Hong Kong after handover, together with the dilemma encountered in lives abroad, they began to have the idea for moving back to Hong Kong for life and developments after 1997 handover, which commenced the trend of a mass return of Hong Kong immigrants.

The abovementioned maybe relates to the population flow of society. However, this hides the actual issue of the identity recognition of Hong Kong citizens, which is the key topic that this thesis aims to discuss. Hence, provided by this exciting time background, this thesis wishes to examine the changes in the formation of identity recognition of HongKongers between the transitional period and post-1997 Handover Hong Kong. It is because this period consists of a new form of migrating mentality based on the uncertainty of their future, together with gradually forming hope towards their homeland.

Rural religion in Roman Spain continues to be misunderstood due to problematic narratives in both ancient and modern sources. Ancient sources misrepresent the religious practices of local inhabitants due to their lack of understanding of rural religion and bias towards portraying an adoption of Roman culture. In turn, modern scholars focus too much on the urban sphere, models of acculturation, and textual evidence. In contrast, I propose an alternative model aimed at presenting a more complete picture of religion in Roman Spain by analyzing the rural sphere, tracing inventions of traditions and analyzing textual evidence alongside its spatial context.

Identity is a necessary way of auto-definition in the process of building any human group. Some societies (not many) with strong political forces need to develop their identity process and to build the most powerful ethnic feelings. The building of ethnicity is not a simply task, as can be seen in the case of Mount Lykaion, in Arcadia. This is a clear example of the ideological force which characterizes the identity definitions and the ethnic building process.

This paper explores Malay songket motifs in relation to Malaysia’s cultural identity. An examination of government National Culture policy on fixed identity is contrasted with dynamic reality. The policy was imposed on a multi-racial population based on the concept of ‘Malay’ with no recognition of others. Divisions amongst the populace were created by Malay specific privileges. Failure to address others becomes the main interest of this research. Songket motifs are used to demonstrate the Malay’s link with traditional customs. The motifs symbolize Malay dominance in clinging on to power, echoing Malay history. Evidence of the motifs’ assimilation with Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic influences proved that there is no Malay ‘purity.’ The researcher’s practice transforms flat images of motifs into artworks. Practice differs from the norm of Malaysian artists, who translate Malay culture into art. A Malaysian artist having worked in the UK and USA, the researcher puts theory into practice....