Oriel College persists in displaying a statue of Cecil Rhodes, despite his role in British colonialism and despite opposition from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. This article considers arguments in ...support of Oriel's position—including three versions of the charge that removing the statue might distort history—and show that they all fail. I argue that the conclusion that the statue should be removed, despite possible costs and complexity, follows once we realise that the statue makes demands on our attention and once we correctly understand that the descendants of those previously oppressed by Rhodes and who are currently subject to racism have a special insight, standing and claim to shape the environment in which they study, work and live.
Our culture of appreciation of old buildings today is a product of the heritage culture of the (broadly speaking) eighteenth-century Central European (white, male, educated) upper class. While we ...find it pleasant and historically informative to have buildings well preserved, we find the absence of critical questioning of the practice surprisingly absent, although we observe an increasing number of academic discussions in the field of heritage studies, informed by decolonisation, climate change activism, and sustainability issues. Critical artistic practices have too been venturing into heritage and memory politics. The extensive costs of preserving old architecture raise eyebrows mainly only in the far- and alt-right circles, but as late reactions by parts of the global community, such as the attacks on statues as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, signal, there might be a change coming regarding our relationship to the built material past. We offer a reading of the history of the phenomenon, which will make it easier to, first, see it as an ethnic and class construct, and then sketch out a new perspective on its metaphysics, from memory to identity, to discourse. We include voices external to the world of heritage – one that is still run by a privileged group that often claims to speak for others, and whose aims and practices are often, at least for now, accepted by others. We then proceed to discuss what kind of a role a curatorial approach could have in questioning and rethinking the idea of preserving.
A fascinating, richly illustrated study of the role and
significance of ancient statues in Egyptian
history and belief Why do ancient Egyptian statues
so often have their noses, hands, or genitals ...broken? Although the
Late Antiquity period appears to have been one of the major moments
of large-scale vandalism against pagan monuments, various contexts
bear witness to several phases of reuse, modification, or
mutilation of statues throughout and after the pharaonic period.
Reasons for this range from a desire to erase the memory of
specific rulers or individuals for ideological reasons to personal
vengeance, war, tomb plundering, and the avoidance of a curse; or
simply the reuse of material for construction or the need to
ritually "deactivate" and bury old statues, without the added
motive of explicit hostility toward the subject in question.
Drawing on the latest scholarship and over 100 carefully selected
illustrations, Ancient Egyptian Statues proceeds from a
general discussion of the production and meaning of sculptures, and
the mechanisms of their destruction, to review the role of ancient
statuary in Egyptian history and belief. It then moves on to
explore the various means of damage and their significance, and the
role of restoration and reuse. Art historian Simon Connor offers an
innovative and lucidly written reflection on beliefs and practices
relating to statuary, and images more broadly, in ancient Egypt,
showing how statues were regarded as the active manifestations of
the entities they represented, and the ways in which they could
endure many lives before being finally buried or forgotten.
Although controversial, numerous memorials venerating the Confederacy of the American Civil War remain standing across America, and removal efforts are met with backlash. Although research has ...investigated how racial bias and Southerner identification predict Confederate statue/symbol support, we investigated how conservatism and opposition to political correctness (anti-PC attitudes) explain attitudes toward controversial public statues. Across Studies 1a–5 ( N = 885), results revealed that conservatives consistently reported greater anti-PC attitudes than liberals, and anti-PC attitudes predicted support for Confederate statues even after accounting for anti-Black bias. However, conservatives’ anti-PC attitudes were not applied in a principled way. In Studies 2 to 5, conservatives and participants high in anti-PC attitudes opposed the removal of Confederate statues and statues of controversial right-wing figures. However, this pattern was reversed when participants considered statues of controversial left-wing figures. Furthermore, Study 5 investigated how participants’ immediate negative reactions (e.g., moral outrage) predicted their attitudes toward removing controversial statues.
The statue habit was a defining characteristic of Classical cities, and its demise in Late Antiquity has recently attracted scholarly attention. This article analyzes this process in the city of ...Rome, charting the decline and abandonment of the practice of setting up free-standing statues between the end of the 3rd c. and the mid 7th c. CE. Focusing on the epigraphic evidence for new dedications, it discusses the nature of the habit in terms of its differences from and continuities with earlier periods. The quantitative evolution of the habit suggests that its end was associated with deeper transformations. The final section examines the broader significance of setting up statues in Late Antique Rome, arguing that the decline of the statue habit must be understood in the context of a new statue culture that saw statue dedications in an antiquarian light, rather than as part of an organic honorific language.
The set of eighth-century objects known as the “Tōdaiji Golden Hall Platform Pacifying Objects” (Tōdaiji Kondō chindangu 東大寺金堂鎮壇具; “Tōdaiji objects”) is among the earliest concrete evidence of ritual ...practice in the Nara period. This study reveals how the Tōdaiji objects transformed the space inside the temple’s colossal central statue of the Vairocana Buddha into a symbolic heavenly realm where the deceased would traverse to arrive at Vairocana’s Pure Land. Close analysis of the Tōdaiji objects within Sovereigns Shōmu’s and Kōken’s religiopolitical applications of the Kegon teaching strengthens Okumura Hideo’s argument that Kōken orchestrated the emplacement of these objects in the year 757 as part of commemorating the one-year anniversary of Shōmu’s death. I argue that the Tōdaiji objects encapsulated Kōken’s filial piety towards her father, Shōmu, by praying for his swift ascension to Vairocana’s Pure Land. The objects furthermore served as a reenactment of Buddhist repentance that not only ensured Shōmu’s salvation, but also the prosperity of Kōken’s new reign.
The paper aims to examine some references to the theme of silence within Socratic dialogues. More particularly, the analysis focuses on the importance recognized to the virtue of phrase omitted in ...two specific fields: 1) the education of youth and 2) the dialogical exchange. The first aspect is investigated mainly through the exam of Aeschines' Miltiades, which depicts positively the ability in young people to remain silent (Stob. 2.31, 23; Plu. De recta rat. aud. 4 p. 39b-c) and presents close parallels, in this regard, with some non-Socratic works (especially X. Lac. 3.5 and Isoc. Bus. 28-29). The second aspect, not unrelated to the former, is dealt with by taking into account a reference to the role of silence in Plato's Protagoras (329b), which sheds light on its anti-Sophistic overtone. Keywords: silence, paideia, Socratic dialogue, Aeschines, Plato. Obiettivo del presente contributo e un esame dei riferimenti al tema del silenzio in alcuni "luoghi" della letteratura socratica. Piu particolarmente, l'analisi si concentra sull'importanza riconosciuta alla virtu del phrase omitted in due specifici ambiti: 1) l'educazione dei giovani e 2) lo scambio dialogico. Il primo aspetto e indagato soprattutto a partire dal Milziade di Eschine di Sfetto, che presenta positivamente la capacita di tacere nei giovani (Stob. 2.31, 23; Plu. De recta rat. aud. 4 p. 39b-c) e che permette di istituire, a questo riguardo, alcuni paralleli con opere non socratiche (in particolare X. Lac. 3.5 e Isoc. Bus. 28-29). Il secondo aspetto, non privo di connessioni con il primo, e invece approfondito soprattutto a partire da un riferimento al ruolo del silenzio nel Protagora platonico (329b), che consente di indagarne la funzione piu specificamente anti-sofistica. Parole-chiave: silenzio, paideia, dialogo socratico, Eschine, Platone.
The paper aims to examine some references to the theme of silence within Socratic dialogues. More particularly, the analysis focuses on the importance recognized to the virtue of phrase omitted in ...two specific fields: 1) the education of youth and 2) the dialogical exchange. The first aspect is investigated mainly through the exam of Aeschines' Miltiades, which depicts positively the ability in young people to remain silent (Stob. 2.31, 23; Plu. De recta rat. aud. 4 p. 39b-c) and presents close parallels, in this regard, with some non-Socratic works (especially X. Lac. 3.5 and Isoc. Bus. 28-29). The second aspect, not unrelated to the former, is dealt with by taking into account a reference to the role of silence in Plato's Protagoras (329b), which sheds light on its anti-Sophistic overtone.
Sport heritage scholarship has grown in recent years, yet remains underexamined within the sport tourism field. In this conceptual analysis, we examine a type of tangible immovable sport heritage ...(Ramshaw 2020; Ramshaw & Gammon 2017) - sport statuary - that has a niche yet robust body of literature through the lens of the 'spatial fix' (Harvey 1981; 2001; 2006) in an attempt to explain the value both of sport heritage as a domain worthy of further investigation and the spatial fix as a useful tool for future conceptual and empirical analyses within sport tourism. Three themes were identified from the sport statuary literature through the spatial fix lens: marketing implications of sport statuary, location implications of sport statuary, and sport statuary as an instrument to frame symbolic heritage, the latter of which is the overarching theme. The current paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it posits the spatial fix to account for both the economic value of sport heritage phenomena and their presence in space, particularly urban space. Second, following guidance that has emerged from the literature of sport tourism's allied disciplines of management and marketing, this paper also represents an attempt toward a framework to be used in future conceptual scholarship within the field. An important implication is that the spatial fix appears to be inherent to the process of making intangible sport heritage tangible, as demonstrated through the sport statuary literature.
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