Magister Artium - MA / In 1974 an Agricultural Museum Committee was established at the Worcester Museum which ultimately led to the development in 1981 of the Kleinplasie Open Air Farm Museum.This began a new phase in the museum’s history, one that I will argue was particularly closely linked to Afrikaner nationalist historiography, in particular to ideas about frontier farmers and pioneer farming lifestyles and activities.This study will take the form of a critical analysis of the establishment of Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum from 1974 until 1994. It will evaluate the making of exhibitions, its architecture, and the performances and public activities in the establishment of the institution as a site of memory and knowledge. The key question this work engages with is how representations, performance, exhibitions, museum activities, and public involvement were shaped to create particular messages and construct a site of cultural identity and memory at Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum.It will also deal with questions around who decides on the voices and content of the exhibitions, architecture and displays. The role played by professionals, those who claim to represent community, donors and other interests groups will also be placed under the spotlight. There are also questions around the provenance of collections, the way they were acquired through donations and sponsorships, and the crucial role objects played in the construction of the narrative and identity of the museum.A key question that emerges from my own work is the connection between the Afrikaner nationalist scholarship and the development of the open-air museum based on the life of the frontier farmer at Kleinplasie. While Kleinplasie does not seem to follow the monumental approach that was evident in schemes such as the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, where triumphalism and conquest are key metaphors, it does rely on a sense of ‘independence’ and self-fulfilment in social history type setting. There is thus a need to consider how Afrikaner nationalist historiography impacted on the way history was depicted at Kleinplasie. P. J. van der Merwe’s studies of the character and lifeways of the trekboer(Die Trekboer in die Geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie), seems to have played a central role in the construction of the theme and narrative. This three-volume trilogy provided Kleinplasie(literally, ‘little farm’) with a social and cultural history on which to construct its version of the past.

This essay takes its starting point in Legenda Aurea, a hagiographical compendium written in the thirteenth century by an Italian catholic friar, Jacobus de Voragine. The essay aims to find out how the Roman history in the third century is shown in Legenda Aurea, a Christian book written about a thousand years later. The purpose of this essay is to show how a part of the history of the Roman Empire is understood and remembered during the Christian hegemony that was during the thirteenth century. The main results of this essay show that the history of the Roman Empire during the reign of named emperors is remembered as a violent, brutal and authoritarian history, but also that Christianity seems to have been widespread within the Roman Empire during this time.

Transmission of memory: the Heritage Trail and Jeju Uprising This thesis aims to shed light on the stories of individuals in transmitting memories using the heritage trail as a medium. Thus, this thesis examines how the heritage trail works as memory embodiment and, further, its role in transmitting memory. The research site, Jeju Island of the Republic of Korea, was selected due to its little recognition as both cultural and natural heritage concerning the history of Jeju Uprising. This event is called in different ways, including the April 3rd Incident, Jeju Killings, Jeju Rebellion, and simply 4.3 (Sasam), representing the date of the armed uprising in Jeju Island in 1943. The heritage trail of the Jeju Uprising called the 4.3 trail was examined empirically as a case study. Fieldwork was conducted from 22 September to 10 October 2020 in Jeju Island. The data was collected from interviews and participant observation and then narratively analyzed. There are polysemic memories and narratives within the same discourse because the names of calling the Uprising vary from context to context. The memory workers were interviewed, and the practice of walking as a component of the trail was studied to examine multiple dimensions of the memories surrounding the trail. Finally, this thesis concludes that in...

Utilisant « The Clockmaker » de Thomas Chandler Haliburton, cette étude examine comment la littérature informe notre compréhension du passé et les idées du présent. Ceci est une analyse des façons que le conservatisme de certains « Impérialistes canadiens » du XIXe siècle (Stephen Leacock, G.M. Grant, Andrew Macphail), des idéologues imaginant un rôle plus important pour le Canada au sein de l'Empire britannique, était influencé par celui présenté dans «The Clockmaker». Ce travail propose que l’ouvrage, problématique aujourd’hui, est tout de même important à analyser pour sa popularité et son influence dans le passé, ainsi que pour avoir contribué à faire revivre – grâce à sa rhétorique satirique, ses caricatures, et un style politisé – un conservatisme mourant que les Impérialistes ont ensuite adoptés. Cela a permis aux Impérialistes de développer une vision du Canada conforme à leur époque tout en s'appuyant sur un élément conservateur avec un fondement établi. « The Clockmaker » présente plusieurs idées similaires à celles des Impérialistes: une forte association britannique, de l’anti-américanisme, une plus grande influence du Dominion, etc. Conséquemment, il n'est guère surprenant que Grant lui-même ait noté l'influence de Haliburton sur la conception canadienne de l’impérialisme de lui et ses confrères. Étudiant les valeurs de Haliburton, leur expression dans « The Clockmaker », et comment les Impérialistes reflètent les idées et la rhétorique du roman, cette étude crée une continuité entre « The Clockmaker » et ces nationalistes qui ont cherchés une légitimité dans le passé en imaginant les traditions d'un jeune pays. L’étude examine la manière dont la littérature, au-delà d'être modélisée par son présent, devient l'histoire hautement-interprétable qui l’informe. / Using Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, this work examines how literature informs understandings of the past and ideas of the present. This is an analysis of how the Toryism of certain late 19th-century Canadian Imperialists (Stephen Leacock, G.M. Grant, and Andrew Macphail) was influenced by The Clockmaker. These Imperialists were ideologues who imagined a greater role for Canada within the British Empire. The contention is that Haliburton’s work, although highly problematic today, is nonetheless important to analyze for the popularity and influence it had at other historical moments, and specifically for the ways it helped revive – through satirical rhetoric, caricatures, and politically-charged writing – a dying form of Toryism that the Imperialists adopted into their thought in multiple ways. This allowed the Canadian Imperialists to develop a vision of Canada in-line with the times while relying on an element of Tory culture that had a sound historical background. The Clockmaker expounds similar ideas to those of the Imperialists: strong British ties, anti-Americanism, an added socio-political weight to the Dominion, etc. It is hardly surprising, then, that Grant himself noted Haliburton’s influence on him and his fellow thinkers’ conceptual framing of imperialism in Canada. Studying Haliburton’s values, their expression in The Clockmaker, and the way the Imperialists’ works reflect the ideas and rhetorical tools of the novel, this study creates a continuity between The Clockmaker and those nationalists who sought legitimacy in the past when imagining the traditions of a fledgling country. This study examines how literature, beyond being modeled by its present, becomes the highly-interpretable history that informs said present.

As a result of the development of visual media and the related tendency in social sciences described as "pictorial turn", many disciplines have incorporated in the field of their research also the study of phenomena that used to stay out of their attention. In sociology, this tendency resulted in the emergence of a new sub-discipline, referred to as sociology of the image or visual sociology. The subject of this dissertation falls within this sub-field: the attention is focused on movies, which today stand as a powerful media of cultural memory. The main goal of this project is to describe the specific practices of cultural remembering following from the nature of the film medium, and to explore the significance of the film as a source of sociological cognition. In the first part, film is recognized as a cultural/social phenomenon, which shouldn't be understood only as a product of individual authors, as there are many institutions and other subjects (which together form a cinematographic field) who also contribute to the making of a film by defining its possibilities and thus influence the way how particular events are represented. The second part of the work presents different theoretical approaches that map the nature of relation between film representation and reality - they describe the...

Collective memory has recently become one of the most explored topics in the social sciences and has led to the emergence of a separate and independent subdiscipline called memory studies. The thesis investigates the awakening of collective memory in two borderlands of Central Europe: the former Sudetes region in the Czech Republic and the southern part of former East Prussia in Poland. The thesis provides an overview of the current theories about collective memory with a focus on the interactional and visual character of the studied phenomenon. In line with this, the thesis presents, discusses, and elaborates on research conducted in the two borderlands in 2016 and 2017. The aim of the research was to study the role and form of collective memory (shared remembrance) in ethnic, cultural, and historical borderlands. The contributions of the thesis are both methodological and theoretical. Firstly, the discussed research revealed that between particularly family-based communicative memory and official, institution-generated cultural memory, there is ritualised communicative memory, maintained through interactions among members of the borderland community (community of memory). Secondly, the thesis contributes to various studies within the interactionist paradigm and proves the usability of Goffman's...

This thesis called The Term of Palimpsest and its Application in Examining of the Urban Space focuses on providing a more complex perspective of the analysis of urban space through the metaphor of text and also palimpsest. Thanks to the disintegration of the concept of the text multiple layers of reality began to be progressively viewed - from the literature to the culture text. This opens up the possibility to contemplate the city as well as another type of text, respectively in a metaphorical sense of intertextuality as so-called palimpsest. The work focuses on these terms in the theoretical part and suggests the urban space term and the possibility of examination. The empirical part is dedicated to the application of developer theoretical basis onto the site-specific urban space of the Prague's Peter's district. The anchoring of the palimpsest in the semiosphere of culture and cultural texts of historical depth but does not provide possibilities of complete renovation and securing the continuity of interpretation. This does not seem to be an obstacle for the set more complex view of palimpsest, on contrary it better reflects and deals with such this continuity. It helps to seek roots and identity of cities and their inhabitants.

Thesis Abstract The thesis deals with the visual content of the media of official memory, in particular the visual material of history textbooks and the exhibition of the National Museum. It examines the formal and content features of the representation of four key events of modern Czechoslovak and Czech history which entered the awareness of the general public as "eight" events: the founding of Czechoslovakia (1918), the signing of the Munich Agreement (1938), the communist coup (1948) and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies (1968). Moreover, it relates the modes of representation of these events to the issue of the political transition of 1989. By means of mixed methods research, it examines a sample of textbooks published during the communist era (1967, 1973, 1982, 1983, 1983), the post-communist era (1995, 1996, 1999, 1999, 2000, 2009, 2011) and the exhibits from the permanent exhibition Crossroads of Czech and Czechoslovak Statehood (opened in 2009). In its findings, the thesis presents 34 visual memory figures related to the representation of the selected historical events. It points out the circulation of these images between the medium of the textbook and the historical exposition, thus following the dynamic concept of memory discussed in the theoretical part of the thesis. It finds both...

The South African author C Louis Leipoldt is known as an Afrikaans poet and as one of the ‘Driemanskap’ with Celliers and Totius. Together with Eugene Marais, they wrote the first serious Afrikaans literary poetry in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. The ‘Driemanskap’, grouped together for its clear national(ist) thrust, is well-known as part of the Tweede Afrikaanse Taalbeweging not only for celebrating the universal effects of nature but also for extolling the virtues of forgiveness after the South African War. Apart from his extensive canon of Afrikaans literature and a sizable discourse in the culinary field, not much is known about The Valley, Leipoldt’s so-called ‘English’ novels written in the late 1920s and early 1930s in English, a language he was equally at home in. The titles of these novels making up The Valley trilogy are Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack and The Mask. Despite several efforts to have the novels published with leading publishing houses in both Britain and the United States of America, both during and after his lifetime, the three ‘English’ novels of C Louis Leipoldt remained unpublished for 69 years. It was in 2001 that for the first time they appeared unedited in a compendium volume. Prior to 2001, two of the novels were published −in 1980, the year of the centenary of Leipoldt’s birth, an abridged edition of Stormwrack appeared, edited by Stephen Gray and published by David Philip, Cape Town. It was re-published by Human&Rousseau in 2000. An abridged edition of Gallows Gecko appeared in 2001, under the title Chameleon on the Gallows which the editor Stephen Gray explains he changed for stylistic reasons. Leipoldt uses the form of historical fiction in his trilogy as a way of conveying historical meaning by relating the chronicle (1820 – 1930) of the place he calls the Valley, recognizable as Clanwilliam. Initially, the Valley is at peace and is sketched in its idyllic state. After the Jameson Raid of 1895, the prospects of the South African War become a reality for the inhabitants of the Cederberg as they are torn apart by their emotions, feelings and loyalties. The course of events drastically changes when war finally comes to the District. Discontinuity and change is a strong theme in the novels. Eventually the inhabitants ofthe Valley find that the former, respectful relations, based on tradition and tolerance, have given way to sectarian interests. This changes the social fibre of the once idyllic environment. The Valley is a lamentation of lost opportunities for a culturally unified South Africa. Its voice is one of moderateness and is inclusive for all South Africans, addressing race relations as a theme as well as decrying sectionalism. In the light of this, it is argued that Leipoldt is revealed as a political liberal and cultural pluralist. This can be heard through the voices of the characters in The Valley and seen by the way Leipoldt meant the events in his fiction to serve as an allegory for the way he saw South Africa emerging at the time. He was writing against the Nationalists, particularly against the narrative of Gustav S Preller, who spent his working life constructing a volksgeskiedenis that resulted in a significant public history that dominated Afrikaner historical thinking from circa 1905 to 1938. In this sense, it is argued, The Valley is an alternative history to the dominating Preller historiography, and because it is in the form of narrative/historical fiction, it can also be seen as an alternative form of history, to be read against certain theoretical texts, without in any way detracting from the voices of criticism against deconstructivist history. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Historical and Heritage Studies / unrestricted

The thesis called The term of Palimpsest and Intertextuality in the Antropological- ethnological analysis of urban space focuses on examination of urban space from the point of view of the metaphorical conception of the term text, intertext and palimpsest. By extending the meaning of the term text from the original concept in literary science to broader layers of reality, it is possible to apply it to urban space, and then read it as an urban text. Due to the fact that the urban environment consists of many layers, it becomes an interesting solution for its complex grasp to use the term palimpsest and intertext. The first theoretical part aims to explain these concepts. The second theoretical part deals with anthropological and ethnological approaches to urban space, while the perspective of the individual who walks through the city and lets it affect becomes essential for this walker. The content of the third, applied part is then the specific space of the Nuselské údolí (Nusle valley) and its immediate surroundings, within which the individual becomes a player in the game between space and his perception. The individual layers of the environment are examined from the perspective of concepts and anthropological-ethnological approaches, which, however, do not provide a complete and exhaustive...