At the beginning of the twenty first century, thousands of adult Europeans are playing Scotsmen. They dress up in kilts and tartan, parade in military-style bagpipe bands, toss tree trunks at Highland Games, commemorate Scottish soldiers of the past, and re-enact their vision of Scottish history at ‘Celtic’ and medieval fairs. Their largest festivals attract more than 25 000 people each year, and their more elaborate clubs are recognised by Scottish Clan chiefs. The ‘Scots’ of Europe do not usually claim to be Scottish – neither by birth, descent, or residence. Their performances are Scottish masquerades, and openly declared so. Unlike their cousins in North America and Australasia, the European impersonators only very rarely insist that their Scottish performances express their ‘ethnic’ identity. And yet, the European masquerade is a quest for roots and ancestors, too. This study demonstrates that by playing Scotsmen, the ‘Scots’ of Europe attempt to reconnect with their Celtic, Nordic, or otherwise pre-modern heritage. They feel that their own customs, songs, games, and tribes were lost to the forces of modernisation – but that some of it survived in the Scottish periphery. They employ Scotland as a site of memory, as ersatz history. This thesis is a study of European nostalgia. It examines the many men and women who attempt to rediscover their traditions and histories. It is concerned with what Jay Winter calls the ‘memory boom’; the growing public preoccupation with history and its remembrance. It argues that Scotland – or rather, dreams of Scotland – have a special resonance in the European memory boom. This study touches upon the fields of public history, memory, and festive culture. In order to understand how the past is remembered and re-imagined in Europe today, the author left the archive and questioned the commemorators. This study relies on original fieldwork conducted in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scotland during 2009 and 2010. The thesis’ focus is a qualitative one.

The objective of this thesis is to examine the issue of identity construction among Vietnamese intellectuals in North America. How is the way in which they construct their identity connected to their position(s) on the Vietnam War, anti-communist community discourse, and memory/commemoration, especially with respect to the contentious debate about which flag represents Vietnam today? Vietnamese Diaspora Intellectuals (VDI) are an understudied group, and I hope my research will help to fill this gap, at least in part, and also serve as a catalyst for further investigation. In my attempt to address this neglected area of study, I am bringing together two bodies of literature: diaspora studies and literature on identity formation among intellectuals. The intersection between these two areas of scholarship has received relatively little attention in the past, and it deserves further consideration, because intellectuals are so often in a position to serve as carriers and disseminators of new ideas, as well as facilitators in conflict resolution. Using a qualitative approach to my data collection, I conducted life history narrative interviews with 32 respondents in Canada and the U.S, as well as some participant observation research of community events. The majority of my interviewees were academics, but some were also journalists/writers, as well as community activists/representatives. A key element of diaspora research, as Cohen and Watts have argued, involves an examination of the “victim narrative”. My project considers the victim narrative in the context of the Vietnamese experience and evaluates the usefulness of such a narrative in terms of community politics and identity formation. My interviewees were often skeptical about the utility of such a narrative, and in some cases, viewed it as a thinly veiled mechanism of control, which serves the interests of community leaders, but may in fact, hinder the progress of the Vietnamese diaspora population. They contemplated some possibilities for transcending such a narrative, which could involve the creation of “free spaces”, permitting the expression of other points of view. As we will see, my interviewees reflected on the irony inherent in this situation. Many Vietnamese risked their lives in pursuit of the democratic ideal of freedom, but some of my participants discovered that the attempt to impose an overarching narrative – the rejection of communism – in fact led to the very antithesis of that ideal. In this connection, my research complicates Cohen’s work on diaspora, which assumes that all diasporic communities speak with one voice with regard to defining moments in their history. Cohen argues that members of such groups, by definition, shared a common past, an agreed-upon way of commemorating that past, and a common destiny. I argue that Cohen has oversimplified the situation. My research demonstrates that there is no such thing as unanimity. Vietnamese diaspora intellectuals do not simply navigate academic “interaction ritual chains” as Randall Collins has asserted, they must navigate several - often competing interaction rituals - which extend to their roles as members of their ethnic community as well. How do my interviewees deal with the inevitable conflicts and tensions engendered by such competing interaction rituals? Finally, what are the possibilities of moving forward, of generating a new narrative, which will transcend the rigid and restrictive anticommunist discourse dominant in community politics thus far? And what role can Vietnamese diaspora intellectuals play in this regard? My research indicates that they are uniquely qualified to facilitate the process of rapprochement, because the life of intellectuals demands a high degree of reflexivity and thus better enables them to evaluate the merits of conflicting viewpoints. My hope is to inspire future research – not only in the Vietnamese community, but on and for other diasporic groups as well. My work extends Neil Gross’ theory of the “intellectual self-concept” (ISC) (which focuses on American academics) by introducing the notion of the diaspora intellectual self-concept (DISC). Such concept allows us to include analysis of intellectuals with significant transnational connections who are dealing with racial and ethnic tensions in their new homeland while establishing themselves as professionals and citizens in a new cultural and political context. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.A.)--Cincinnati Christian University, 2008. / Includes abstract and vita. Description based on Print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-157).

An increasingly blurred understanding of the moral significance of accurate and authentic memory reconsolidation for an adequate apprehension of self, other, and community suggests a critical need to explore the inter-relationships shared between autobiographical memory, emotional rationality, and narrative identity in light of the contemporary possibilities of neurocognitive memory manipulation, particularly as it bears on ethical decision making. Grounding its thesis in four evidential effects – namely, (i) neurocognitive memory manipulation disintegrates autobiographical memory, (ii) the disintegration of autobiographical memory degenerates emotional rationality, (iii) the degeneration of emotional rationality decays narrative identity, and (iv) the decay of narrative identity disables one to seek, identify, and act on the good – the dissertation argues that neurocognitive memory manipulation cannot be justified as a morally licit biomedical practice insofar as it disables one to seek, identify, and act on the good. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Health Care Ethics / PhD; / Dissertation;

This thesis explores the identity perceptions of the Armenian and Jewish communities in the context of Ankara. Purpose of the study is to understand the ways the members of these communities experienced the social, spatial, political and cultural changes in the capital-city after the establishment of Turkish nation-state / and in what ways they draw on these experiences in terms of their identifications, self-understanding, and feelings of belonging. For this purpose, life-story narratives of people who were born in the early Republican era and of the following generation were collected through oral history methodology. As a result of the analyses of these narratives, multiple, fluid, contextual, and contingent character of identity in terms of the Armenian and Jewish communities in Ankara is pointed, and it is concluded that community identity for the members of these communities was symbolically constructed.

This thesis explores how women's writing in mid-twentieth century Uruguay enables a reconsideration of the intertwined hegemonic practices of literary canon formation and national identity in this seminal period. Within a national history and a cultural tradition conceived of as patriarchal, progressive and homogeneous, in correspondence to a European/Eurocentric concept of time and historicism, women writers struggled to find a recognised position from which to speak. Nevertheless, like other marginal groups, women writers have challenged the hegemonic discourses of modernity in Uruguay, as elsewhere in Latin America, producing what can be described, following Elaine Showalter, as a double-voiced textual strategy that replicates as well as subverts the dominant order. In this respect, Concepción Silva Bélinzon (Montevideo, 1900-1987) offers a remarkable case study to show how women's poetry destabilises and renegotiates the great discourses of modernity. Socially and culturally marginalised, Silva Bélinzon's life demonstrates the failures and limitations of a patriarchal/paternalistic society, while her poetry problematises the homogeneous national discourses of modern Uruguay, exposing the discontinuity inherent to a national history conceived of as masculine, linear and teleological. Silva Bélinzon's poetry has been defined as a synthesis of Modernismo and Surrealism, and described as a combination of free associations, biblical references and metaphysical concerns, all expressed within conventional metric forms, notably, the sonnet. Her poetry has been considered incoherent and bizarre, and has thus received little critical attention. However, one of the most interesting characteristics of her poetry has been overlooked. That is, the juxtaposition of different artistic trends and the dialectical tension that exists between the use of random, discontinuous and disconnected images within strict traditional poetic forms. The theoretical approach of this thesis is predominantly framed by postcolonial, feminist and gender theories, including those of Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler. In addition, drawing on Henri Bergson's work, Matière et mémoire (1896) and Marcel Proust's well-known idea of mémoire involontaire, I interpret Silva Bélinzon's elliptical poetry as a virtual journey through layers of the personal and national pasts that thereby deterritorialises the national, hegemonic discourses of the modern nation. Thus, using Silva Bélinzon's poetry as a case study, the thesis aims to demonstrate how women writers ‘overlap in the act of writing the nation' (Bhabha 2003: 292).

Cultural Memory and its functions in the case of Božena Němcová The presented thesis is concerned with the topic of the construction of the portrayal of Božena Němcová and its functions in the cultural memory. Regarding the question of Božena Němcová's portrayal, this thesis is focused on the construction of gender identities in the remembering process. The influence of mediality of given representation on the process of gender identity construction is also explored here. The examination of the function of Božena Němcová's portrayal in the cultural memory is based on its intertextuality. The intertextuality is in this thesis understood as a valency plurality of Božena Němcová's portrayal in relation to other figures and themes of the cultural memory canon. The analyses in this paper is based on the concept of Cultural Memory Studies (Jan Assmann, Astrid Erll, Aleida Assmann), and Gender Studies (Judith Butler). There are different types of sources examined in this paper (textbooks, film, literature, press, social media), arranged from the present to the past. Key words: Božena Němcová, canon, cultural memory, mediality, gender identity

This thesis examines the state-sponsored rise of local patriotism in the post-1961 period, interpreting this as part of the effort to strengthen popular support for and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime during the second phase of de-Stalinization. It shifts the analytical focus away from the Secret Speech of 1956, the time of Khrushchev’s full-scale assault on Stalin and his legacy, to the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, the inauguration of a utopian and pioneering plan to build Communism by 1980. The thesis considers how this famously forward-looking programme gave rise to an institutionalized retrospectivism as Soviet policy makers turned to the past to mobilize popular support for socialist construction. It examines how this process played out in the Russian North West, where Soviet citizens were encouraged to turn inwards to examine their local history and traditions, and to reread these through the lens of Soviet socialism. The thesis takes as a case study the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda, where the state-sponsored regeneration of local traditions significantly impacted on the self-perception of local communities. In the first part, I look at the strategies for representing and displaying local culture in pubic institutions: the textual treatment and symbolic ordering of urban space in local tourist guides; the heritage movement and the attribution of cultural value to certain objects from the local landscape; and the primary focuses of the exhibitive 'gaze' in local museums. The second part of the thesis shifts the focus from institutionalized culture to popular culture, examining the informal practices and oral traditions that exist alongside the authoritative discourses of social identity in the post-Soviet period. The popular interpretation of public sculpture, the collective imagination of urban space, and the 'common knowledge' of the past as it is articulated in oral narratives are the focuses of discussion.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This dissertation is part of the Research Line "Culture, Migration and Work" Area of Concentration in History, Power and Culture on History Postgraduate Program at Federal University of Santa Maria, which received funding from CAPES. Food and Culinary of German immigrants - between the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century - were not simply transplanted. Food products hitherto unknown, had to be taken availed of, transforming tastes and flavors, resulting in a regional and original immigrant culinary. The main interest of this research is to understand how was the process of identity construction of German immigrants in the central region of Rio Grande do Sul, considering the social and cultural practices of the alimentation and its implications for society as a reinforcing element of an identity and immigrant memory in the new continent. Primary sources and research literature brought information about the behaviors and feeding practices of the group chosen for the research in question. / Esta dissertação insere-se na Linha de Pesquisa ―Cultura, Migrações e Trabalho‖, Área de Concentração em História, Poder e Cultura do Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, que contou com financiamento da CAPES. A alimentação e a culinária dos imigrantes alemães entre meados do século XIX e princípios do século XX não foi simplesmente transplantada. Produtos alimentícios até então desconhecidos, tiveram de ser aproveitados, transformando os gostos e os sabores, dando origem a uma culinária imigrante regional e original. O interesse principal desta pesquisa é entender como se deu o processo de construção da identidade dos imigrantes alemães na região central do Rio Grande do Sul, considerando as práticas sociais e culturais da alimentação, assim como suas implicações na sociedade como um elemento fortalecedor de uma identidade e memória imigrante no novo continente. Fontes primárias e bibliografia específica trouxeram informações sobre os comportamentos e práticas alimentares do grupo escolhido para a pesquisa em questão.

A considerable amount of information can be found about Pavel Z., but it is incomplete, his biographical data is listed only vaguely, usually in the form of short medallions. Most pieces about Pavel Z. are mainly written in connection with the so-called process with "Plastic People" or in connection with his artistic work. Mapping the life of Pavel Z., among other things, not just through his words and the testimonies of his close ones, is a probe into the history of a prominent personality, persecuted during the so-called normalization regime in Czechoslovakia and operating abroad, and a look back to his roots. Last but not least, it also represents an example of specific human thinking, and therefore serves as a mirror embedded in contemporary society.