Yucatec Maya orality has been a popular topic of study of scholars from a wide array of disciplines. These studies often rely on academically generated categories of speech that have often been ...stylized in forms that descend from Western thought. The generated speech categories may overlook more performance-based forms that are more common of Indigenous knowledge systems. Most of the collected and analyzed Maya oral literature appears to be recounted by men, leaving women’s orality and their unique ways of interpreting the world largely under-documented. In this paper, I expand our understanding of Yucatec Maya women’s oral literature by providing a systematic documentation and description of u t’aan nukuch máak, words of the elders, a ‘speech’ genre that relies largely on performance. The performance of u t’aan nukuch máak are an embodiment of my female collaborators’ culture, as they occur in their daily routines. U t’aan nukuch máak are performed (or uttered) in the context of certain bodies, objects, times, and spaces that index concepts that reflect the strength of Maya cultural memory.
Culture, memory, and identity are intricately connected terms. Memory is not just an individual experience but plays a prominent role in the establishment of both individual and cultural identity. ...Jan Assmann, in his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, has defined cultural memory as “the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images, and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character” (15). Storytelling is a universal act of preserving the cultural aspects of a community. The works selected for the present study are The Caliph’s House and In Arabian Nights written by the travel-writer Tahir Shah. This paper intends to analyze the connection between cultural memory and cultural identity as presented in the selected works from two levels. Firstly, it studies how the author reaffirms the cultural identity of Morocco by exploring the cultural elements and the art of storytelling, and secondly, how he ascertains his personal identity through his explorations and experiences as a traveller.
Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms ...in on the role of photography in this memory-activism nexus. How do iconographic conventions shape images of protest? Why do some images keep movements in the public eye, while others are quickly forgotten? What role do images play in linking different protests, movements, and generations of activists? Have the affordances of digital media made it easier for activists to use images in their memory politics, or has the digital production and massive online exchange of images made it harder to identify and remember a movement via a single powerful image? Bringing together experts in visual culture, cultural memory, social movements, and digital humanities, this collection presents new empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights into the visual memory of protest.
This article reconsiders the role of land in the YHWH-Israel relationship in Hos 4-11, a text which reworks positive notions of land-gift, inheritance, homeland-as the land becomes associated with ...Israel's iniquitous actions and distorted values. To achieve this, the study explores how land is represented as a sacred space in the text and how sacred space is subject to the actions, ideas and perceptions of the people who inhabit the land. The study employs a synchronic, social-scientific approach and conducts a thematic analysis of the text, focusing on the interconnections of sacred space's moderators-holiness, cultural memory and covenantal exchange-and their place in the land's deconstruction and reconstruction. Considering these relational modes, the study shows that the representation of the land is reflected in the text's movements from deconstruction to reconstruction, which suggests that the state of the YHWH-Israel relationship is interlaced with the physical landscape.
This essay aims to analyze how the narrative management operated in the composition of Black Boy (American Hunger), by Richard Wright, takes part of the process of constitution of a cultural memory ...(ASSMANN, 1995) on African American experience. In addition, we discuss this cultural memory constitution as a way of breaking with “the single story” (ADICHIE, 2009), which, in this case, means History made up in the white perspective excluding points of view that scape this ethnic group. To do so, we analyze some pieces from the text concentrating on the stories brought up to constitute the narrative fabric and how they reshape comprehensions about past and question the official History.
