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City of Felt and Concrete: Negotiating Cultural Hybridity in Mongolia's Capital of Ulaanbaatar in From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities: Cultural Politics of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Identity in Eurasia, eds. Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen (London: Routledge, 2015), 136-164; reprint of “City of Felt and Concrete: Negotiating Cultural Hybridity in Mongolia’s Capital of Ulaanbaatar,” Nationalities Papers 41, no. 4 (2013): 622-650.
Abstract
Capital cities play an integral role in the construction of national identity. This is particularly true when the capital is the country's only major urban center. Over the course of its history, Mongolia's capital of Ulaanbaatar has been periodically reshaped to reflect competing trajectories of national culture. This article examines the evolving symbolism of architecture, urban design, and public space in Ulaanbaatar as a means of exploring Mongolia's complex negotiation between its traditional culture (mobile pastoralism and Shamanism/Buddhism), its socialist legacy, and globalization. Amidst the rampant social change of the last two decades, rather ambiguous national narratives have emerged in Mongolia. Like the capital's cityscape, these narratives reflect aspects of both recent and distant pasts, as well as contemporary economic, political, and social realities. This article reveals how increasingly palpable global economic and cultural practices are fomenting material change in the current phase of Ulaanbaatar's evolution. A combination of secondary source research and observations drawn from several months of fieldwork provide the basis for a discussion of the city's role as a forum for cultural contestation and national reform. © 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities. All rights reserved.
... При анализе ситуации в городах региона мы выяснили, что, несмотря на значительные экономические и социо-демографические различия, агломерации региона проходят через cхожий процесс хаотичного разрастания города и поглощения пригородных поселений. Причем, в отличии от самовольной застройки пригородов Африки, Южной Америки и Азии, застройка пригородов в изучаемых городах Центральной Азии, в следствии электоральных процессов и непоследовательного регионального руководства, имеет тенденцию к легализации [Бреславский 2017;Diener, Hagen 2013;Hatcher 2015]. ...
... After analyzing situation in the cities of the Central Asia, we found that, despite significant economic and socio-demographic differences, the agglomerations of the region are going through a similar process of the chaotic growth of the city and the absorption of suburban settlements. Moreover, unlike the unauthorized development of the suburbs of Africa, South America and Asia, the development of the suburbs of Central Asia tends to be legalized as a result of electoral processes and inconsistent city management [Breslavsky 2017;Diener 2013;Hatcher 2015] The architectural appearance of cities gains new shapes. The cities of Central Asia give impression of a big village. ...
Mongolia began a transition to a market economy in the early 1990s, but old challenges continue to exacerbate issues of poverty and environmental degradation, and new problems have developed. As a result, much of the population is shifting steadily and permanently toward the capital city. Can a country with traditionally nomadic roots respond to such challenges in a sustainable way?
Cities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are creating new urban identities under conditions of postsocialist transformation, Europeanization and globalization. Discourses about postsocialist urban identity frequently attempt to `Europeanize' these cities' identity and to obscure elements of the `unwanted past', particularly the socialist, Soviet and Russian pasts. However, those pasts can return to disrupt dominant narratives of postsocialist urban identity. This article analyses how the past of socialism and relationships with Russia and the Soviet Union are treated in the construction of new urban identities in postsocialist CEE, particularly in the case of Łódź, Poland. After outlining the treatment of the socialist past in Polish society and politics, the article analyses the contested construction of a new identity for Łódź. The analysis focuses on the construction of a past multicultural `European' `Golden Age' for the city to create a new identity for it, and how that identity is contested and disrupted by the re-emergence of the city's socialist past and the history of its relations with Russia and the Soviet Union.The article concludes by outlining the broader implications of the case-study for the understanding of postsocialist urban identity formation.
This article analyses the representation of Mongolia in five works of travel writing published since the fall of the country's communist regime in 1990. It argues that this travel writing is characterized by a discourse that generates and circulates an ‘imaginative geography’ of Mongolia as a ‘travellers' frontier’. Support for this argument is derived from highlighting sets of collective, cohesive representations, performances and speaking positions that crosscut the works studied. It is maintained that these have the effect of naturalizing a very particular conceptualization of Mongolia as a frontier destination in the age of globalization and mass tourism. This research adds to an established body of geographical scholarship on travel writing, but departs from it by considering contemporary works rather than ones from the colonial period. In doing so it attempts to illustrate the relevance of contemporary travel writing as an object of study for geographers seeking to explore the anatomy of today's imaginative geographies, which have clear links to, but are not entirely mediated by, the discourses that characterize colonial travel writing.
People are often amazed that Mongolia has adapted to democracy so readily and easily. As the second communist nation in the world, Mongolia had a seventy-year commitment to Soviet-style communism by 1989 and experienced total geographic isolation from the West once China became communist in 1949. Yet the 2001 Freedom House survey lists Mongolia as a free, independent democracy with a 2 rating for political rights (1 is the highest) and a 3 rating for civil liberties. According to Diamond's definition of liberal (Western) democracy, Mongolia is well on its way to fitting this form of government although it does not conform to all of Diamond's criteria at this point. Even Mongolia's former Communist Party (MPRP), when it regained power in the July 2000 election, sought legitimacy by pledging its commitment to democracy, the 1992 Mongolian Constitution, and civil society. Recent research suggests that Mongolians prefer liberal democracy as the appropriate form of governing. Although conversations with Mongolian academic and political leaders suggest that Mongolians derive much of their understanding of liberal democracy from 'the international environment', our data indicate that the Mongolian culture of liberal democracy precedes 20th-century Western influence. Indeed, it is derived from their nomadic, tribal ancestors and from their great leader Genghis Khan. Mongolians' rapid acceptance of democracy is not an aberration, as Lipset and Huntington would have us believe; rather it is a logical outgrowth of their history and political culture.
This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country's past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.
This article explores the formation of post–Soviet Russian national identity through a study of political struggles over key Soviet–era monuments and memorials in Moscow during the “critical juncture” in Russian history from 1991 through 1999. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Nora to explain how competition among political elites for control over the sites guided their transformation from symbols of the Soviet Union into symbols of Russia. By co–opting, contesting, ignoring, or removing certain types of monuments through both physical transformations and “commemorative maintenance,” Russian political elites engaged in a symbolic dialogue with each other and with the public in an attempt to gain prestige, legitimacy, and influence. We make this argument through case studies of four monument sites in Moscow: Victory Park (Park Pobedy), the Lenin Mausoleum, the former Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh), and the Park of Arts (Park Isskustv). In the article, we first discuss the role of symbolic capital in the transformation of national identity. Following an examination of the political struggles over places of memory in Moscow, we analyze the interplay between elite and popular uses of the monuments, exploring the extent to which popular “reading” of the sites limits the ability of elites to manipulate their meaning. We conclude by looking at the Russian case in comparative perspective and exploring the reasons behind the dearth of civic monuments in post–Soviet Russia.
Over the past two decades, geographers have probed the intersection of collective memory and urban space. Their sustained
interest in the subject reflects an understanding of the social condition of commemoration and the important role that space
plays in the process and politics of collective memory. Along with other critical social scientists, geographers envision
these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that reflect and legitimate the normative social order. A review
of the extant literature indicates that geographers scrutinize memorial landscapes through three conceptual lenses that may
be understood via the metaphors of ‘text,’ ‘arena,’ and ‘performance.’ These metaphors are in turn mobilized through a series
of analytic questions that serve to identify the interests served and denied by landscape ‘texts,’ the ‘arenas’ in which they
are produced, and the ways in which they are enacted via ‘performance.’ This article’s synopsis of the subfield’s predominant
metaphors and its attendant questions contributes to the ongoing cultural geographic project of articulating and implementing
methods for interpreting landscapes as open-ended symbolic systems.
This paper examines how narratives of history are organized spatially at historical sites and memorial spaces, especially
in urban settings and in places invested with a sense of collective memory. Much recent research has focused on landscape,
memory, and place and how relationships of political and social power influence the representation of historical events in
public spaces. Although the meaning of such sites may be hotly contested for long periods of time, we focus here on narrative
theory and the related, but unexplored, issue of how such historical stories are configured on the ground at actual historical
sites. We identify a number of narrative strategies which are frequently used to configure historical stories in space. Declamatory
strategies using markers presenting a snapshot of an event are common, but sequential and non-sequential linear strategies
are also used, as are thematic strategies that cross-cut space and time to present complex historical stories at various spatial
scales. Examples are drawn from a range of historical sites in North America, Europe and Israel.
As in most parts of Central and Eastern Europe, there is a tradition in Hungary of changing street names and memorials in
the wake of major political transitions. This article focuses on the change of street names and memorials, i.e. the city-text,
in Hungary’s political capital, Budapest, between 1985 and 2001. The city-text in Budapest became a locus of dispute between
different political authorities, including the nation state, the metropolitan municipality, and the district, each bearing
different political ideals during and after the fall of communism. Discursive changes in the post-communist city-text emerged
expressing specific conceptions of national sovereignty, but the direction of the changes were debated. Different levels of
administration in Budapest and Hungary had divergent visions of what the new discourse on national sovereignty should be.
The changes, therefore, did not express a simple transition to an agreed-upon post-communist value system, but were the result
of a symbolic struggle between different levels of administration over what should be commemorated in the city-text.
Discussions about the culture-economy articulation have occurred largely within the confines of economic geography. In addition, much attention has been diverted into caricaturized discussions over the demise of political economy or the invalidity of culturalist arguments. Moving the argument from inquiry on the `nature' of the economy itself to the transformation of the role of culture and economy in understanding the production of urban form from perspectives based in urban political economy (UPE), this paper focuses on how the challenges posed by the cultural turn have enabled urban political economy to participate constructively in interdisciplinary efforts to reorient political economy in the direction of a critical cultural political economy.
Geographers and political ecologists suggests that road/rail megaprojects are most commonly motivated by a desire for agricultural colonization, relief of urban or other population pressures, extraction of natural resources, integration with regional transportation networks and the world economy, as well as a compulsion to facilitate greater access to potentially vulnerable border regions. This list encompasses virtually all of the reasons for Mongolia’s proposal for its first trans-state highway. While still in the planning stages, the so called Millennium Highway offers an opportunity to hypothesize on the impact of a major transportation artery in a society traditionally associated with pastoral nomadism. In essence, the very future of the nomadic lifestyle in Mongolia will be affected by this mega-transportation project and how it will facilitate new patterns of mobility and immobility.
Section 1: Heritage Issues and Challenges in Developing Regions 1. Introduction: Heritage Tourism and the Less-Developed World 2. Protecting the Past: Challenges and Opportunities 3. The Politics of Heritage 4. Heritage Tourism and Its Impacts Section Two: Heritage Issues and Challenges: Regional Perspectives 5. The Meanings, Marketing and Management of Heritage Tourism in South East Asia (Joan Henderson) 6. Heritage and Tourism in East Asia's Developing Nations: Communist-Socialist Legacies and Diverse Cultural Landscapes (Dallen Timothy, Bihu Wu, and Oyunaa Luvsandavaajav) 7. Heritage Tourism in the Pacific: Modernity, Myth and Identity (Michael Hall) 8. South Asian Heritage Tourism: Conflict, Colonialism and Cooperation (Gyan Naupane and Megha Budruk) 9. Heritage Tourism in Southwest Asia and North Africa: Contested Pasts and Veiled Realities (Dallen Timothy and Rami Daher) 10. Tourism and Africa's Tripartite Cultural Past (Victor Teye) 11. Heritage Management and Tourism in the Caribbean (Leslie-Ann Jordan and David Duval) 12. Heritage Tourism in Latin America: Can turbulent times be overcome? (Regina Schluter) 13. Heritage Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe (Duncan Light, Craig Young, and Mariusz Czepczynski) 14. Heritage tourism in the Developing World: Reflections and Ramifications
"Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies-including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank-for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. Modern Mongolia is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that the agencies providing grants and loans insisted on Mongolia's adherence to a set of policies that did not generally take into account the country's unique heritage and society. Though the sale of state assets, minimalist government, liberalization of trade and prices, a balanced budget, and austerity were supposed to yield marked economic growth, Mongolia-the world's fifth-largest per capita recipient of foreign aid-did not recover as expected. As he details this painful transition from a collective to a capitalist economy, Rossabi also analyzes the cultural effects of the sudden opening of Mongolia to democracy. He looks at the broader implications of Mongolia's international situation and considers its future, particularly in relation to China."
The papers contained in this special issue contribute to a recently revitalised scholarship on architecture within social and cultural geography. New direction was given to established geographies of architecture by Lees's (2001) call for geographers to move beyond an emphasis on symbolic meaning (representationalism) and towards a consideration of ?the practical and effective or ?non-representational? import of architecture? (2001: 51). In the past decade social and cultural geographers have responded to this call and, in the process, reshaped the geography of architecture. The papers collected here make further contributions to that scholarship. The starting point for our own thinking, and the initial call for papers that generated the content herein, was the concept of ?practising architectures?.
An official in Mongolia's Foreign Ministry examines the forces shaping that country's efforts to forge a new identity and relationship with neighboring and more distant states in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. The paper explores both geographical and cultural dimensions of Mongolian identity before examining the interplay between the evolving Mongolian identity and the reorientation of Mongolian foreign policy. Of particular interest is the discussion of arguments for Mongolia's closer alignment with Northeast Asia and Central Asia, and on the need for a powerful "Third Neighbor" to counterbalance Russian and Chinese influence. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O53, Z13. 1 figure, 1 table, 34 references.
In this paper, then, I focus on the shifting representations of historical figures and events in Mongolian texts to illuminate the creation of a national identity in socialist Mongolia. In the course of examining these shifts and their meanings, I also call into question the distinction, standard in many works on nationalism, between 'ethnic' and 'civic' forms of nationalism. While my argument may appear to parallel Gellner's assertion that 'it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round' (1983, p 55) I suggest a slightly more complex picture. I do not deny the existence of nationalist sentiments and intentions among the intellectual vanguard of early 20th-century Mongolia (cf. Jagchid, 1988), but this did not lead directly to the creation of a national identity. Rather, I suggest, that creation of a national identity on a broader scale did not occur until later, and largely as a result of socialist efforts to do so. Nationalist sentiment, in other words, was mediated through socialism and their efforts at education, breaking the power of the Lamaist Church, and political legitimation.
This paper is the second report following the ″Living Environment of Nomads Residing on the Outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.″ The series of this study aims to reveal characteristic tendencies in the perception of livelihood and activities and behaviors of the nomads and to study the relationship between the life system with fewer environmental burdens fostered in the traditional nomad society and their perception of livelihood and communities. Opinion surveys and interviews were conducted for nomads residing on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar regarding their summer (August) campsites. A spatial configuration survey (measurement survey) of the groups (Khot-ail) formed by nomads was also conducted. The purpose was to consider the relationship between the living space and the unique lifestyle of nomads and their perceptions and activities, with the aim of obtaining basic knowledge regarding the creation of the unique nomad living environment. The results indicated that the sustainable lifestyle of nomads that is rooted in the characteristics of the natural environment is the result of the ″cooperative and cooperative labor″ quality of nomadic life, as seen in the daily life and leisure activities of nomads, and the ″flexibility″ of nomadic life, as seen in the mobility of nomads, the spatial configuration and household makeup of the Khot-ail and so on.
This study can be placed in a series of researches and studies we have conducted regarding the relation between the life style with few environmental burdens the nomads have fostered in their traditional pastoral society and their perception of their life and communities. For the study, the authors conducted a questionnaire survey targeted at the nomads living in the suburbs of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and then organized the responses to identify the characteristic tendencies of their awareness of life and their activities. In this paper, the characteristics of the perception of the living environment the nomads residing in the suburbs of Ulaanbaatar have were compared and analyzed with those of the residents in the ger districts (Gandan district in the Bayangol region) in the urban area of Ulaanbaatar with the aim of identifying similarities and differences in their living environments and perception of their living. By this process, the authors fully understood the actual situation and characteristic tendencies of the pastoral life and also gained a basic knowledge regarding the establishment of a sustainable living environment where coexistence can be found between people and people and between man and nature based on the region-specific environmental characteristics.
As the birthplace of the Nazi Party, Munich assumed a prominent role in Hitler's plans to build a new Germany. The first major project of this Nazi building program aimed to redesign Munich's Konigsplatz Square as a new 'Forum of the Movement'. Contemporary writers and later scholars have generally seen the project as a successful and effective example of Hitler's ideas concerning urban design. Yet, informed by recent theoretical and methodological developments in geography, a critical analysis of contemporary sources and greater awareness of the square's new spatiality and functionality suggest that the project suffered from several deficiencies that limited its effectiveness both as a symbolic representation of Hitler's architectural aspirations and as a practical venue for party events. Indeed, the difficulties of co-opting this established public space likely played a pivotal role in shifting the focus of Hitler's monumental building program to new locations away from traditional urban centers and historical buildings.
The issue of diverse identities imprinted on the urban landscape as the result of political changes and the struggle for power between different social and ethnic groups is analysed here using the example of Katowice, the capital and largest urban centre in Upper Silesia, Poland. Basing their conclusions on systematic investigation of the most important changes and features in the cityscape in five clearly distinct historical periods, the authors explore the conditions and mechanisms of the creation of the city’s symbolic landscape and its links with urban identity. They argue that Katowice represents a peculiar model of urban identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe that has to date not been researched in any depth, in which each successive historical period represents a rupture with the foregoing values and ideas and an attempt to make a new, lasting imprint on the material outlook of the city. The development of such a model of identity is the result of the complex interplay between the city’s changing geopolitical context and its economic and functional development path.
While numerous studies have examined the post-war contestation surrounding commemorative sites associated with the legacy of Nazi Germany, relatively little attention has been dedicated to the ways in which the Nazi regime itself sought to create places of memory congruent with the movement's political and cultural goals. Indeed, party leaders sponsored a variety of disparate, and at times contradictory, programs to re-orientate some of Germany's most prominent historic places to better serve the needs of the regime. To expand our understanding of this process, this article examines the practice and rhetoric of historic preservation in Bavaria during the Nazi period with a focus on the preservationist program sponsored by Bavarian President Ludwig Siebert. Nazi propaganda promised to rejuvenate and protect Germany's architectural heritage for the public good, but the regime's actual priorities and policies led to widespread confiscation, damage, and eventually destruction.
History & Memory 11.2 (1999) 94-114
So ran part of an interview with three young members of MAHN (the Mongolian acronym for the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) in the party newspaper Ünen (Truth) at the end of November 1997. It was a short comment, tucked in among various other questions about life and politics in post-socialist Mongolia. I had almost missed it when I first flipped through the paper one afternoon. The comment was not followed up, but this was not surprising. Youth defending MAHN on this issue was enough. The interview itself merited front-page coverage, headlined with an excerpt of this quote, and was part of MAHN's attempt to argue for its own relevance in the current political atmosphere.
Once I found this passage, I was not surprised to see it there. The interview was published at a critical time in Mongolian politics for MAHN. Earlier that fall, the ruling coalition government had survived a vote of no confidence demanded by the minority MAHN faction in the Ih Hural (Parliament). Moreover, a law that MAHN objected to, dealing with compensation for victims of political repression, had recently had its first reading in the Ih Hural. The autumn of 1997 marked sixty years since the beginning of the wave of repressions that had swept across Mongolia, leaving at least 22,000 people dead out of a population of about 750,000 in a period of eighteen months. That autumn, for the first time, government representatives officially visited a memorial to the victims which had been erected at the site where high-ranking government officials had been executed in 1937. A new memorial statue was being built in Ulaanbaatar in front of the history museum, which is next to the main government building. It would be dedicated on 10 December, the official anniversary of the 1990 democratic revolution in Mongolia, as well as the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The president and other officials would be in attendance. Just a year before, the tenth of September, the date when the first mass arrests had taken place in 1937, had been declared a day of remembrance for the victims. In short, the issue of political repression was attracting unprecedented public attention.
It was in this climate that MAHN adopted what struck many people as a rather quixotic position. N. Enhbayar, the newly elected head of the MAHN faction in the Ih Hural, saw no reason for MAHN to apologize for the repressions that had occurred under its one-party rule. In fact, the party launched an offensive against those who suggested MAHN bore responsibility for what had happened sixty years previous. In response, the Democratic Coalition which held a majority of seats in the Ih Hural hammered MAHN for its stance. The banner headline in the Coalition's newspaper Ardchilal (Democracy) in November called for MAHN to halt all its activities and to be taken to the world court. The main photograph on the front page was of MAHN headquarters with a large "X" across it. Other groups quickly joined the fray, urging MAHN to accept responsibility, which it refused to do.
In this article, I want to examine the larger context of this debate as well as the debate itself. Why was MAHN so insistent that it was blameless? Why should this debate occur at this time, seven years after the collapse of socialism? Who indeed bears responsibility for past events? And why should the past matter so much? In the post-Soviet, postapartheid world, such questions are of more than historical interest. In examining the Mongolian case, I hope to shed light on the larger issues such a debate implicates. In particular, they point to the continuing debate over the role of the past in the construction of contemporary identity. As shall become clear in the course of this...
Nothing appears more ancient, and linked to an immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds British monarchy in its public ceremonial manifestations. Yet, as a chapter in this book establishes, in its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented. Anyone familiar with the colleges of ancient British universities will be able to think of the institution of such ‘traditions’ on a local scale, though some - like the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve - may become generalized through the modern mass medium of radio. This observation formed the starting-point of a conference organized by the historical journal Past & Present, which in turn forms the basis of the present book. The term ‘invented tradition’ is used in a broad, but not imprecise sense. It includes both ‘ traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period - a matter of a few years perhaps - and establishing themselves with great rapidity. The royal Christmas broadcast in Britain (instituted in 1932) is an example of the first; the appearance and development of the practices associated with the Cup Final in British Association Football, of the second. It is evident that not all of them are equally permanent, but it is their appearance and establishment rather than their chances of survival which are our primary concern. © E. J. Hobsbawm, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Prys Morgan, David Cannadine, Bernard S. Cohn, Terence Ranger. 1983.
In recent years, an increasing number of geographers have been concerned to develop what might be called a cultural politics of place. They have argued that the representation of places is both constituted by, and legitimates, social power relations. Although it is often acknowledged that the process of representation is thus the focus of struggle, there have been very few studies of particular examples of resistance. The paper suggests that the main reason for this neglect may be the bipolar model of culture with which most cultural geographers appear to work. This model establishes a hegemonic ideology which becomes the focus of critique and a counter-hegemonic opposition about which it is ethically difficult to speak This model has its strengths, but a weakness is its disturbing erasure of oppositional cultural practices from geographical studies. This paper therefore prefers to draw on the notion of cultural hybridity in order to be able to discuss two films made in the early 1970s by local groups in the East End of London. The paper argues that in order to understand how these films can be described as oppositional, their complex engagement with dominant discourses must be explored. Discussion of the films centres on contemporary definitions of 'community media' and on their realist aesthetic in order strategically to specify their oppositionality.
In this article I introduce our collection of oral histories composed of life histories recorded between 2001 and 2006. First, I discuss some devices implemented in the process of collecting life histories, which was to make oral histories 'polyphonic'. I then suggest that oral history always has a 'dual' tense, in that people talk about 'the past' from the view point of 'the present'. This is illustrated by six cases of statesmen narrating their views about socialist modernisation. Finally, using one of the cases, I demonstrate the co-existence of non-official or private opinions along with official opinions about the socialist period in life-history narratives in the post-socialist period. I call this 'ex-post value'.
This article addresses the topical notions of hybridity and ‘in-between-ness’ as salient points of intersection between critical architectural inquiry and postcolonial studies. Focusing on domestic architecture in colonial-modern India, it examines the problematical role of the built environment in the construction and re-production of identities in nation-building processes. In the light of the equally problematical engagement of architectural form and symbolism in the increasingly reductive and reactionary identity politics of postcolonial India, the article discerns an alternative function that architecture may perform as an ‘in-between’ space enabling cultural intersection and innovation. Through a comparative interpretation of architectural references to the conundrums of hybridity in two historically and stylistically distinct novels about the awakening of colonial-modern India into postcolonial consciousness—John Masters’ Bhowani Junction (1954), and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1996)—literary fiction is engaged as an apposite representation of the ‘place’ of the built environment in the emerging conceptual and cultural landscapes of a new nation. Buildings are not merely ‘backdrops’ to the historical dramas enacted within and between them, the author argues, but cognitive constructions in which identities (national, communal and individual) can be negotiated creatively across cultural boundaries. In addition to aesthetic form and operative function, Architecture, like Literature, also has an ethical function as a heuristic framework for thinking.
This paper analyzes the link between the changing geographical scale of dominant ideologies in Russian society and the architectural scales of different versions of the preeminent national monument, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The history of this process of national monumentalization in Russia is profiled by focusing on mutual influences between processes at these two scales, and the interplay between the state, society, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Within the context of the new Cathedral, ongoing but nevertheless underestimated pre-Soviet and post-Soviet antireligious practices are revealed through an analysis of the politics of scale that shaped the monumentos meanings at different historical periods. Thus, the paper also attempts to contribute to the understanding of the importance of scale in politicogeographical studies.
The Mongolian steppes and their nomads, horses, herds and gers form a cultural landscape which is the region’s icon attraction, the central image in Mongolian marketing, the key feature of its flagship tourism products, and the most heavily commoditized component of its industry. In other Mongolian landscapes, and also in the steppes of neighboring regions and the grasslands of Africa, Australia, and North America, natural and cultural heritage are treated as separate attractions. The concept of cultural landscape is heavily used in a World Heritage context, has a significant role to play in the global tourism industry, and deserves further investigation as a tool for analysis.RésuméLe paysage culturel dans le tourisme mongol. Les steppes mongoles et leurs nomades, chevaux, troupeaux et yourtes constituent un paysage culturel qui est l’attraction emblématique de la région, l’image centrale du marketing mongol, la caractéristique clé de ses produits phare de tourisme et l’élément le plus intensément commodifié de son industrie. Dans d’autres paysages mongols, et aussi dans les steppes des régions voisines et les savanes de l’Afrique, de l’Australie et de l’Amérique du Nord, les patrimoines culturel et naturel sont considérés comme des attractions séparées. Le concept du paysage culturel est fortement utilisé dans un contexte du patrimoine mondial, a un rôle important à jouer dans l’industrie du tourisme international et mérite davantage de recherche comme outil d’analyse.
Post-socialist Mongolia presents an exciting oppurtunity for researching the role of gender in defining and legitimating social relations and power hierarchy. Hence, this essay sets out to explore the relationship between the interpretation and reinterpretation of gender and the cultural politics of national identity in the context of post-1990 Mongolia by discussing the positions of the two major competitors in this arena-civic-oriented nationalism and conservative/xenophobic nationalism-and their largely, in the case of the former, and almost exclusively, in the case of the latter, man-made images of a "proper" Mongolian woman. I will start out, however, by clarifying the main concepts such as nationalism and cultural identity upon which this essay rests.
The Rise of Cities in Nomadic Mongolia
- Alicia Campi
Campi, Alicia. 2006. "The Rise of Cities in Nomadic Mongolia." In Mongols From Country to City:
Floating Boundaries, Pastoralism, and in City Life the Mongol Lands, edited by Ole Brunn
and Li Narangoa, 21 -55. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Mongol arkhitekturynchimee ˙g (Mongol Architectural History). E ˙ rde ˙ne ˙t: Arkhitektur Khot Baı ˘guulaltyn Khu're ˙e ˙le ˙n
- Baldangiin Adiya
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