Empathy

The only avenue in which humans can understand tragedy

No human can have the exact same experience as another, but we can experience similar emotions. It is through emotions that we are able to display empathy; an understanding of feeling. Of course, I have always been able to feel empathy for people in Nazi concentration camps, but one particular ...
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Empathy

Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Cultural primatology in the Anthropocene

Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz ————— As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo ...
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Chimpanzee Culture Wars

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life

Can understanding distant parts of the world inspire deeper ways of thinking about our own? Can understanding moments in the past help us to think more creatively about the present? The Nietzschean “on the uses and disadvantages” is intended to suggest that thinking across time and space is not a ...
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‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with ...
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‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

In his three-volume work on the child’s tie to his mother, Bowlby includes this passage from a colleague’s description of the young child who has been separated from his mother. At the time, parent-child separation happened in routine circumstances, like the hospitalization of the mother or the child. Before it ...
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Creating Linkages

The Universal within the Particular

But the nagging question that has accompanied academic work on cultural memories of violence, apart from the historical knowledge it produces and helps to keep alive, is its relevance for our contemporary world, its ability to contribute to change. As much as the collage of Holocaust testimonies makes us painfully ...
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The Universal within the Particular

The Counter

Around the same time, I was watching the Netflix series Immigration Nation about the activities of the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ICE, and also the short documentary film The Last Time I Saw Them featuring interviews of Holocaust survivors who had been separated from their families. Several things ...
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The Counter

Instead of Comparing

Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past

“History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the  “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can ...
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Instead of Comparing

Boy Number 84

This is a photo of one of the children saved from the Jasenovac death camp in Croatia in 1942. Number 84 is already marked by hunger and negligence, beyond salvation. But who were these children?  They were Serbian children from villages in Croatia whose parents, civilians, were killed by Croatian forces called ...
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Boy Number 84

On the Uses of the Palm

In my case, she’s not really my sister. In 1980, a nationwide policy was introduced in China allowing every couple to give birth to only one child. At a population control symposium that spring, a group of rocket scientists at the Chinese University of Science and Technology used cybernetics – ...
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On the Uses of the Palm

Being Ahead of All Departures

In Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has returned from the bookstore run by the lovely Sylvia Beach, who is very nice to him, letting him borrow books without a deposit. It is with that goodness in his heart that Hemingway returns to his cramped flat and tells his wife about ...
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Being Ahead of All Departures