Re-presenting Heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar

Re-presenting Heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar
Author: Rosabelle Boswell
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9994455613

There are nearly 900 sites inscribed on the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Council (UNESCO) World Heritage List (WHL). These heritages (defined in this book as forms and sources of knowledge) are significant as sites for tourism and nation building. However, inscription on the WHL can also have negative consequences, by encouraging the reification of culture as well as the dis-embedding of practices and sites from their substantive and dynamic contexts. UNESCO's inscription and preservation of heritage includes the qualitative valuation of one's heritage for the maintenance of cultural diversity and as a symbol of humankind's creativity. Using anthropological research methods and perspectives this study asks how does one explain the continuation of heritage management in the southwest IOR in the absence of cohesive heritage management institutions? And what role do women play in heritage management? In the study heritage is treated as a source and form of knowledge. Thus these two key questions are followed by deeper questions about: who controls knowledge in Zanzibar and Madagascar? What can be considered as acceptable or unacceptable heritage and what can we learn from heritage that is left behind? As the study aims to show, in the largely patriarchal southwest Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar and Zanzibar, women contribute enormously to the social, economic and political functioning of the society. However, they are rarely involved in institutional efforts to manage heritage. Instead they are often marginalised and stereotyped as passive beings ready to be 'consumed' via international tourism or to be 'used' in the maintenance of patriarchal regimes. The book argues that women in Zanzibar and Madagascar are active participants in their social worlds and have much to contribute to knowledge making in these societies.

Gender equality, heritage and creativity

Gender equality, heritage and creativity
Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: Gender mainstreaming
ISBN: 9231000500

Initiated by the Culture Sector of UNESCO, the report draws together existing research, policies, case studies and statistics on gender equality and women's empowerment in culture provided by the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, government representatives, international research groups and think-tanks, academia, artists and heritage professionals. It includes recommendations for governments, decision-makers and the international community, within the fields of creativity and heritage. Annex contains essay 'Gender and culture: the statistical perspective' by Lydia Deloumeaux.

The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage

The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage
Author: Rosabelle Boswell
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030993477

This handbook is unique in its consideration of social and cultural contributions to sustainable oceans management. It is also unique in its deconstruction of the hegemonic value attached to the oceans and in its analysis of discourses regarding what national governments in the Global South should prioritise in their oceans management strategy. Offering a historical perspective from the start, the handbook reflects on the confluence of (western) scientific discourse and colonialism, and the impact of this on indigenous conceptions of the oceans and on social identity. With regard to the latter, the authors are mindful of the nationalisation of island territories worldwide and the impact of this process on regional collaboration, cultural exchange and the valuation of the oceans. Focusing on global examples, the handbook offers a nuanced, region relevant, contemporary conceptualisation of blue heritage, discussing what will be required to achieve an inclusive oceans economy by 2063, the end goal date of the African Union’s Agenda 2063. The analysis will be useful to established academics in the field of ocean studies, policymakers and practitioners engaged in research on the ocean economy, as well as graduate scholars in the ocean sciences.

Storytelling around the World

Storytelling around the World
Author: Jelena Cvorovic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1440872953

This book provides students, instructors, and lay-readers with a cross-cultural understanding of storytelling as an art form that has existed for centuries, from the first spoken and sung stories to those that are drawn and performed today. This book serves as an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in storytelling and in multicultural approaches to the arts. By taking an evolutionary approach, this book begins with a discussion of origin stories and continues through history to stories of the 21st century. The text not only engages the stories themselves, it also explains how individuals from all disciplines, from doctors and lawyers to priests and journalists, use stories to focus their readers' and listeners' attention and influence them. This text addresses stories and storytelling across both time (thousands of years) and geography, including in-depth descriptions of storytelling practices occurring in more than 40 different cultures around the world. Part I consists of thematic essays, exploring such topics as the history of storytelling, common elements across cultures, different media, lessons stories teach us, and storytelling today. Part II looks at more than 40 different cultures, with entries following the same outline: Overview, Storytellers: Who Tell the Stories, and When, Creation Mythologies, Teaching Tales and Values, and Cultural Preservation. Several tales/tale excerpts accompany each entry.

Disputing Discipline

Disputing Discipline
Author: Franziska Fay
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978821751

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.

Heritage at the Interface

Heritage at the Interface
Author: Glenn Hooper
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813052114

"Provides innovative and exciting insights into heritage identity, meaning, and belonging from a global perspective. A welcome addition to the growing heritage literature."--Dallen J. Timothy, author of Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction "A critical collection of international heritage case studies that represents a wide range of issues and exemplifies its complexities and contradictions vividly."--A. V. Seaton, coeditor of Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism Bringing together high-profile cultural heritage sites from around the world, this volume shows how the term heritage has been used or understood by different groups of people over time. For some, heritage describes a celebration of a particular culture and history or a sense of identity, ownership, and belonging. However, for others it is frequently connected with social privilege and exclusion, made all the more complicated due to its relationship with the tourism industry. These case studies are taken from America, Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, India, China, and the Caribbean. The varied approaches to heritage range from the Nazi regime's vision of German national history to the present-day push to recover Native American culture from outdated Hollywood portrayals. The contributors argue that heritage has a central yet sometimes problematic purpose: creating divisions, contesting identities, and constructing narratives of history that may not be seen as accurate by all. Exploring the benefits of cultural inheritance, this volume also acknowledges the ways that heritage operates in places with clashing viewpoints about what exactly that heritage represents. The essays argue that although heritage and tourism may help to alleviate poverty and create opportunity, they can also become a burden by compromising cultures and landscapes. Featuring a tribute to Sir Gregory Ashworth, whose influential work drew attention to the contested meanings of heritage, this volume illuminates a fascinating international debate.

In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker
Author: Luke Bennett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1783487356

During the Cold War military and civil defence bunkers were an evocative materialisation of deadly military stand-off. They were also a symbol of a deeply affective, pervasive anxiety about the prospect of world-destroying nuclear war. But following the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 these sites were swiftly abandoned, and exposed to both material and semantic ruination. This volume investigates the uses and meanings now projected onto these seeming blank, derelict spaces. It explores how engagements with bunker ruins provide fertile ground for the study of improvised meaning making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and trauma studies. With its commentators ranging across the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this multi-disciplinary collection sets a concern with the phenomenological qualities of these places as contemporary ruins – and of their strange affective affordances – alongside scholarship examining how these places embody, and/or otherwise connect with their Cold War originations and purpose both materially and through memory and trauma. Each contribution reflexively considers the process of engaging with these places – and whether via the archive or direct sensory immersion. In doing so the book broadens the bunker’s contemporary signification and contributes to theoretically informed analysis of ruination, place attachment, meaning making, and material culture.

The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification

The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification
Author: Zarine L. Rocha
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 826
Release: 2020-01-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030228746

This handbook provides a global study of the classification of mixed race and ethnicity at the state level, bringing together a diverse range of country case studies from around the world. The classification of race and ethnicity by the state is a common way to organize and make sense of populations in many countries, from the national census and birth and death records, to identity cards and household surveys. As populations have grown, diversified, and become increasingly transnational and mobile, single and mutually exclusive categories struggle to adequately capture the complexity of identities and heritages in multicultural societies. State motivations for classification vary widely, and have shifted over time, ranging from subjugation and exclusion to remediation and addressing inequalities. The chapters in this handbook illustrate how differing histories and contemporary realities have led states to count and classify mixedness in different ways, for different reasons. This collection will serve as a key reference point on the international classification of mixed race and ethnicity for students and scholars across sociology, ethnic and racial studies, and public policy, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

Things Left Unsaid

Things Left Unsaid
Author: Rosabelle Boswell
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9956551384

In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear and sense of marginality when ones work and achievements are reduced to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in such a context, one can only achieve true freedom from the tyranny of belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those in power and putting oneself in a clearing where flexibility, openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form, poetry.