Search Results

This chapter weaves together historical geography and political ethnography, rendering provincial north India within an analytical reassembly. Drawing upon Chris Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (2012), along with other historians of South Asia, the chapter situates the north Indian province between empire and nation, contrasting the fluvial regime of colonial and postcolonial governments. It thus arrives at the question of flood-control embankments – and their frequent breaches – as an administrative allegory for the state in mid-Ganga plains of north India. It draws our focus to the role of embankments, as artefacts of administrative and engineering ‘solutions’ to a problem they only aggravated, established the character of state-society relations in the region, and forced a relentless wave of distress migration among the landless or small-landholding castes. The chapter argues that provincial India is dumped in a gulf and bypassed via the infrastructures of global modernity amplifying spatial, economic and infrastructural slippages, which underline the precarities of provincial life.

In this chapter, I try to explain why it was necessary to conduct interviews and fieldwork in Central Asia. Essentially, the voices of the Koreans and their “agency” was very difficult to find in the Soviet archives. By going to Central Asia, I confirmed what I had read previously by Dr. Khisamutdinov, that there were Korean NKVD officers who took part in the repression and deportation of the Soviet Koreans. I interviewed four such families. Interviewing subjects in their native land (vs. émigrés) helped me to understand and record the variance and variety of opinions and experiences. Memory work also displayed the “multivocality” within the individual subject, that is, the subject in various interviews exhibits a wide variety of roles, voices, personages and influences (e.g. subject A speaking from their experience as a child, adolescent, soldier, mother, and welder and accompanied by changes in body language, attitude and voice).

This chapter outlines how political economy—particularly neoliberalism and marketization—has impacted on pedagogy within higher education globally, and specifically on archaeological pedagogy. This is most explicitly seen in debates on vocational training, where concerns with speed, efficiency, and market forces frame training in banking instrumentalist terms. In contrast, the chapter argues that taking an assemblage approach foregrounds the multivocality of the archaeological process and recognizes that learning assemblages are comprised of multiple material elements, which also substantially affect learning. It considers online learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs), examining how a technology which should democratize can marginalize the individuals who need it most. Ways forward are presented, drawing on examples of good practice such as Framework Archaeology, Catalhöyük, and the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project (ATP), including technology and the Archaeological Skills Passport as tools for reflection. The ‘training versus education’ dichotomy is challenged, arguing that these are components of the same learning assemblages.

A detailed case study introduces many of the key issues to be elaborated in the rest of the chapters. Responding to a listener's grievance about overcharging at mills, Gogo Breeze embarked on investigative journalism before stating his own views on air. The case indicates how the radio station depended on several media technologies apart from broadcasting - such as letters, SMS messages, phone calls, and pictures. It also begins to show the gendered dynamics of Gogo Breeze's work, including the influence of female colleagues on his judgments and the relative dominance of male voices among those who called the station. Particular attention is given in the chapter to the relationship between voice and mobile phones. Qualifying the idea that the widespread access to mobile phones empowers Africans to make their voices count on interactive radio shows, the case study indicates the importance of having a trusted authority figure mediating those voices. The chapter argues that media technologies that enable the broadcast of multiple voices are not intrinsically more multivocal than a radio elder speaking alone in the studio. Much hinges on whether the technologies are harnessed to render voices as dialogical rather than monological.

This chapter investigates how Breeze FM came to mediate public concern with children's rights in Zambia. It follows the preparation and production of programs sponsored by a non-governmental organization (NGO). Its approach contrasts with Gogo Breeze's perspective on a violent incident that had alleged occult dimensions ignored by the NGO. Where the voices on the NGO programs became rather monotonous in their convergence on a small number of key points, the radio elder actively solicited contrasting views by recognizing different interests among the people he spoke with. Underlying his achievement of multivocality was the firmness of his own views and the grandfatherly confidence with which he threw himself into argument with his diverse interlocutors. Rather than expecting a singular expression of an acceptable point of view, he used his own standpoint as a foil for other views.

This chapter focuses on Lisbon’s theaters, especially their transformation with the introduction of new genres, like the operetta and the revista. These types of performances embodied modernity, and by exposing the people to popular entertainment, helped to modernize the nation. This chapter draws from anthropological and psychoanalytic theories to study the process through which pleasure derived from the entertainment market facilitated the circulation of ideas concerning the nation-state. The open-ended form of the revista allowed it to integrate representation of social and political events into into the performance where shifting, competing, and even contradictory readings of both modernity and nation could surface.

In this chapter, a framework for assessing the openness of virtual archaeological reconstructions to a multiplicity of readings is presented by focusing on the case of Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. Since its discovery in the 1950s, there has been a diversity of opinion on Çatalhöyük’s settlement rank along the path from settled village to urban agglomeration. This diversity of opinion has been expressed both verbally and visually, the latter including numerous computer-based visualizations for a variety of purposes and target audiences. Among the internationally approved principles for computer-based visualizations of cultural heritage is the need for intellectual and scientific transparency. Umberto Eco’s theory of the “open work,” as applied in literary and visual works including motion pictures, offers a theoretical framework for discussing the transparency of Çatalhöyük visualizations, as does Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of “cinematic materiality.” Three of the virtual works on Çatalhöyük are briefly presented in this chapter, as a basis for discussing the applicability of Eco’s and Kracauer’s ideas in this type of production as a measure for “open multivocality,” leading to an assessment of whether visualizations reveal any or all alternative interpretations of the site.

This chapter illustrates how historical-critical discussions concerning the role of the Documentary Hypothesis and the Deuteronomistic Historian of the Hebrew Bible have challenged traditional readings of scriptural authorship, authority, and canonization. Creative tensions emerge from viewing sacred scriptural text as an unharmonized compilation of competing, multivocal narratives. Biblical scholarship provides a model for Latter-day Saints to accept multiple, authoritative, competing historical narratives.