Suchergebnisse

Recent years have brought a proliferation of studies on the family on such topics as household composition, marriage patterns, childbearing practices, and life-cycle transitions. Scholars in ancient near eastern studies have contributed mainly to the legal and economic aspects of family history. Frequently the work done has centered on philological questions. The cuneiform data on the Mesopotamian family, accidental and all too often limited, is spread over a period of some three thousand years. Nevertheless it is time to broaden the focus despite the inherent problems. In this essay, I treat the question of the dynamics of Mesopotamian family life, more specifically intergenerational conflict, a topic barely touched upon by scholars in the field.

Different generations have stepped into the 21st century with different life experience, which led to discrepancies in cultural and symbolic space of collective memory. The feeling of social space and historical time, which is specific for each of the living generations, has a peculiar reflection in the policies of memory, which development is influenced by both objective and subjective factors. Assessing the level of conflict between generations, and its relationship with politics of memory, we can talk about the different dimensions of stratification of life experience typical for the major age groups. The most important events of history that do not intersect in general axiological space get recorded in the collective consciousness of the living generations. Among those are the World War II, the post-war years followed by the Cold War, Gorbachev's perestroika and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the bipolar world, the formation and establishment of an independent post-soviet states. The social changes that have taken place in a relatively short historical period set the scientific community of the post communist countries before the need to reflect on the politics of memory and the conflict of generations. The research of value-based relationships between generations, as well as issues of historical gaps of social time and their influence on the politics of memory are on the agenda as well.

"The protests of '1968' have become a powerful symbol of generational belonging and central to the western world's collective memory. In many European countries, the '68ers' have been transformed into a mythical yardstick of what contitutes a generation. Yet few people thought of themselves in this way in the late 1960s: the idea of the '68er' only emerged from complex and often retrospective processes of generational building, both within countries and at an international level. Often labelled the first 'global generation', the term '68er' may have entered the vernacular across Europe, but what it entailed in different political and cultural contexts warrants examination. Were the '68ers' a pan-European phenomenon or did different generational entities emerge from national debates and discourses? The articles collected here examine the idea of a '68er' generation in West Germany, elsewhere in Western Europe, and in countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain. They address how activists - and those who observed them - made sense of those events at the time, how the idea of a generational experience was mobilized politically to powerful effect in the years that followed, and why the '68ers' have become the generation against which all others are measured in some countries, but not in others."--Publisher's description