The following is simultaneously an essay in sociological theory, in cultural sociology, and in the empirical reconstruction of postwar Western history. Per theory, it introduces and specifies a mod...

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On the Social Construction of Moral Universals The `Holocaust' from War Crime to Trauma Drama

: The military operations under way in Iraq and Afghanistan require more-intensive and more-prolonged use of U.S. military power than at any time since the Vietnam War. Although greater in scale at its peak, the Gulf War was brief and did not extend into a long period of peacekeeping, reconstruction, and insurgency, and it did not involve urban conflict, suicide bombers, or roadside bombs. The one-third cut in active-duty manpower at the end of the Cold War, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million in uniform, has today resulted in the need for longer and repeated deployments, especially for the Army and the Marine Corps, and these deployments have posed challenges for active-duty service members and for their families. We undertook preparation of this monograph with the objective of offering insights into the challenges faced by active-duty service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the resiliency they and their families have shown in coping with these challenges, and the adequacy of defense manpower policy in assisting members and families. The monograph draws on the perspectives of economics, sociology, and psychology; provides a formal model of deployment and retention; reviews published work; reports on the results of focus groups conducted in each of the services; and presents findings from an analysis of survey data. The focus groups and survey data relate to the period from 2003 to early 2004. And, although the circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed markedly from that time, we believe that many of the monograph's findings and implications remain relevant. The monograph may be of interest to the military services, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, individual service members and their families, members of Congress and their staff, and the media. It may also interest foreign militaries that have converted to a volunteer system and that want to be informed about the personnel strains caused by a high operating tempo.

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How deployments affect service members

/RESUME This paper addresses the issue of how nation-states re-imagine themselves in local and global contexts. In particular, attention will be directed to how Canada has invented itself through strategies that have attempted to integrate a people separated by geography, history, ethnicity, class, and gender in the complex setting of two founding national-cultures, an expansionist neighbour, and a pro-immigration policy. Past strategies have turned to several meta-narratives: the spirit of the land; the cult of the hero; the transformation of wilderness into home and commodity; an ethic of progress; the nurturing of democracy and social justice. This paper will examine approaches to national identity that are self-consciously aware of place. This "geography of identity" is premised on the assumption that peoples' identification with distinctive places is essential for the cultivation of an awareness - an "a-where-ness" - of national identity. That is, nation-states occupy imagined terrains that serve as mnemonic dev ices. Familiar material worlds become loaded with symbolic sites, dates, and events that provide social continuity, contribute to the collective memory, and establish spatial and temporal reference points for society. That is, the nurturing of a collective memory and putative social cohesion through landscapes and landscapes, myths and memories, monuments and commemorations, quotidian practices and public ritual. When these are "placed" in context, they constitute the geography of identity. Cet article examine comment les etats-nations s'imaginent dans les contextes global et local. Plus particulierement, comment le Canada's est invente par des strategies qui visent a integrer une population separee par ses geographies, ses histoires, ses ethnicites, ses classes et ses genres, et ce dans le contexte complexe de deux nations fondatrices, d'un voisin expansionniste et d'une politique pro-immigration. Dans le passe, les stratdgies utilisaient les meta-narrations: "I'ame de la terre," le culte du heros, la dosmestication de la nature, 'ethique du progres, et le maintien de la democratie et de la justice sociale. Get article se concentre sur les approches de I'identitr nationale qui ont une conscience du lieu. La premisse de cette geographie de l'identite est que I' identification avec des lieux distinctifs est essentielle pour alimenter une "conscience" -- une "a-where-ness" -- de l'identite nationale. Autrement dit, les etats-nations occupent des terrains imaginaires qui servent d'outils mnemonique s. Le monde physique familier devient rempli de sites symboliques, de dates et d'evenements qui facilitent une continuite sociale, contribuent a la memoire collective et 6tablissent des points de repere spatiaux et temporels pour la societe. Grace aux paysages externes et internes ("landscapes" and "inscapes") aux mythes et souvenirs, aux monuments et commemorations, aux pratiques quotidiennes et rituels publics, la societe parvient a cultiver sa memoire collective et sa cohesion sociale. Lorsque ces elements sont "places" dans leur contexte, ils constituent la geograplhie de l'identite. INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SEEN In recent years, the fundamentalist view of collective identity has been challenged by those arguing the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and the construction of an "imagined community" (Anderson, 1991). (1) From this perspective, national identities are constantly being reconstituted according to a presentist agenda. Rather than being primordial entities, they are generated by "symbolic processes that emerge and dissolve in particular contexts of action" (Handler, 1994:30). It follows from this that we need to understand the ways in which nationalizing-states are continually re-imagining themselves and asking ourselves if the result is appropriate for a contemporary society in its local and global contexts. (2) The central theme of this paper, therefore, is the invention of Canada through strategies that have attempted to integrate a people separated by geography, history, ethnicity, class, and gender by constructing a national identity that is, among other things, self-consciously aware of place. …

Landscapes, Memory, Monuments, and Commemoration: Putting Identity in Its Place

If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, \"then we don't understand history.\" Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire—the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image—renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the current American administration. Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean) and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of detailed information about the people and society they sought to remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did, the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill’s lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the concerted use of air power—of what would in a later context be called \"shock and awe\"—to terrorize and subdue dissident factions of the Iraqi people.) Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East. Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s murderous tyranny.

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied

An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a ‘working memory’ (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms. Foucault’s ‘scarcity principle’ is used to show the role of media in generating shared memories through processes of selection, convergence, recursivity and transfer. This media-based approach, emphasizing the way memories are communicated, circulated and exchanged, allows us to see how collective identities may be (re)defined through memorial practices, and not merely reflected in them.

Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory

of his career but also, and more significantly, claiming that here she is providing 'for the first time, a stylistic analysis of one of the American theatre's most fascinating practitioners.' That she has this justification depends, partly at least, on the fact that his plays and productions have commonly been regarded as belonging largely, if not indeed exclusively, to the realm of the popular stage, whereas she seeks to draw them within the orbit of those revolutionary endeavours which in divers European countries sought to establish a new theatrical 'naturalism' both in play composition and in play presentation the avant-garde activities to be found in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Danish Theatre Royal, the French Theatre Libre, and the German Freie Blihne. That her endeavour is indeed fully warranted is demonstrated by the fact that when, for example, the Russian company and its companion organizations visited the United States various critics stressed their belief that its prod uctions 'had nothing new to teach Broadway.' Still more significant is the fact that Stanislavski himself put the seal of his approval on the activities of the American directorplaywright by actually making him an honorary member of the Moscow troupe. No doubt labels in themselves are of little or minor consequence, and no doubt on occasion they can prove misleading: yet it is of importance that we should teach ourselves how properly to interpret and evaluate outstanding achievements such as those manifested by such men as Belasco, and here Mrs Marker's study must be regarded as indeed a most valuable and accomplished textbook, or guidebook, call it which we will (ALLARDYCE NICOLL)

William Blissett

Papers

The great war and modern memory