Suchergebnisse

The article is founded on the cultural scientific research on some characteristics of Jewish diaspora in London. The main focus is on Jewish religion and ethnic identity and the strategies that the Jews at all times have had to preserve these. An important arena for the protection of identity and cultural representation is the museum. The fact that museums mediate the suffering of the Jews and of the human tragedy constituted by the Holocaust functions as a cultural sign of powerful symbolic value. Pain and suffering are products of events. They create wounds in the present time, but also for future generations. The article shows how difficult it is to maintain cultural identity in a migration process. Frequently, a person's former network is weakened or disintegrates as a consequence of migration. This study shows how the preservation of cultural identity is related to religious, economic and social aspects in the Jewish network. Emphasis is placed on how the Jews have defined their identity in diverse connections and from different perspectives. The article briefly discusses how Jewish museums mediate a cultural inheritance, but also how the museum represents a political factor.

Birgitta Frello: Identities about War

This article concerns the analysis of discursive constructions of collective identity. The first part of the article argues that collective identity is relationally constituted through the distinction between Self and Other and that a strategy for analysing constructions of collective identity should be able to grasp discursive ambiguities and dislocations. Two analytical strategies are recommended. One is a focus on the discursive strategies of essentialization and dessentialization. The other is to distinguish between categorization and characterization. The second part of the article presents an analysis of discursive constructions of identity in four Danish TV audience discussion programmes debating the Kosovo war and broadcasted during the conflict. The analysis applies the two strategies developed in the first part of the article, and shows how these strategies can shed light on ambiguities and dislocations in discursive constructions or identity and thereby off a contribution to the understanding of such constructions.