Popular Perspectives
Reorienting Western Consumer Subjectivity: Interpreting Ottoman Heritage in the West Balkans
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Derek Bryce
Normalizing subjectivities of "Europeanness" has effects on the interpretation and consumption of cultural heritage sites in non-Western contexts. Here we examine the liminal space of the "post-Ottoman" West Balkans, a European region with significant built heritage and contemporary social legacy reflecting the c.500 year rule of the Muslim Ottoman dynasty and its legal toleration and recognition of Christianity and Judaism. Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH), Republic of North Macedonia (Macedonia) and Albania are selected for contextual study given that their social complexion is perhaps most obviously a representation of that syncretic legacy, and because of their concentration of extant Ottoman heritage sites. We note first that these countries’ heritage and tourism sectors anticipate and to some extent modify their interpretation to accommodate ‘Western’ consumers affectation of "surprise" and "delight" at the region’s religious diversity, constructing it in binary terms as a "remarkable" crossroads between "West/East" or "Christendom/Islam." To understand why Ottoman heritage is often understood to be in but not of Europe, our analysis brings together and develops recent "Post-Saidian" scholarship which interrogates "Europe’s" discursive erasure of its Ottoman-Islamic-Oriental "self" as well as recent work on the particularities of the syncretic Ottoman mode of social organisation in Europe and its legacy.
The Right to Self-Defence and the Right to Bear Arms: Self-Defense Is a Human Right, the Right to Bear Arms Is a Legal Option - Rights and Privileges
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tennyson Samraj
Most citizens would agree that we cannot entrust self-defense to anyone other than ourselves. Therefore, many argue that the right to bear arms makes the weakest and the strongest as equals. In 2008 the Supreme Court of the United States of America affirmed the individual’s right to own arms for self-defense, (District of Columbia v Heller, 5-4, 2008). There seems to be no alternate basis that can ensure equal defense in self-defense, expect by the right to bear arms. One world view posits that to bear arms in self-defense is a human right (Newt Gingrich, 2012), another world view posits that that right to own guns for self-defense is not a human right (SE Smith, Guardian 2016). While the right to self-defense is a human right, the right to bear arms cannot be a human right –it is a legal option, right, and privilege. In this paper, I argue that there needs to be gun control and legislation in place for three reasons: (1). Gun legislation ensures that self-defense cannot be a pretext to kill anyone. (2) Gun legislature ensures the control of the size, quality, and quantity of arms for self-defense as a matter of public safety. (3) Gun legislature ensures that no individual has power over others in society due to the stockpile of weaponry in the name of self–defense. The right to own arms is a legal option, right, and a responsible privilege.
Radical Right Populist Entrepreneurs and the Use of Religious Representations in Popular Culture : George Becali Impersonating the "Saviour of the Romanian Orthodox Nation" View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Alina Asavei, Jiri Kocian
While there are a few significant studies on the varieties of populism in post-socialist Romania, little scholarly work on populists’ ethos of religious inspiration, as it appears reflected in popular culture, exists. This paper addresses this lacuna from a cultural studies perspective, exploring the cultural productions of religious inspiration employed by the radical right populist entrepreneur George Becali, and argues that the diversity of religiously encumbered cultural productions provide a significant insight in fleshing out the mechanisms of his messianic neo-populism. By employing critical visual analysis and hermeneutics, this paper aims to illuminate how a populist entrepreneur attracts potential supporters employing the rhetoric of nativism and "traditional, autochthonous culture and religion," purporting to reveal a mutual cultural ground between the messianic leader and "the people." His political strategies are often times packaged in cultural formats and discourses that emphasise local religious symbolism (in this case of Eastern Christian Orthodox descent) that turns him into a "Saviour of the Nation." Against this background, this paper analyses an instance of Romanian populist entrepreneurs’ political visual rhetoric that reveals an Eastern Christian Orthodox symbolism infiltrated through popular culture productions. Yet, at the same time, the paper demonstrates that popular culture can also constitute a foundation for resisting the populist’s kit of religiously loaded visual rhetoric.
Religious Statecraft: Ethiopia’s Evolving Religious-political Matrix
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rugare Rukuni
The narrative of Ethiopia is engulfed within a background of religious-martial tradition. Correspondingly, as a function of its national heritage, emerges the concept of Judeo-Christian statecraft as commensurate with the Ethiopian religious-cultural-political complex. The developed statecraft definitively shaped Ethiopia’s social-political narrative and implicatively other societies. Whilst Aksumite Ethiopia was the military hero in the realm of 5th-7th century Eastern Christianity and dually a symbol of resistance against Islamification, it was also the 1896 victory at Adwa from which an ideologized symbol of black consciousness emerged in the form of Ethiopianism. This research reviews the religious statecraft of Ethiopia against relatable dynamics such as Zionist elements derived from Judaism, Islamification, Rastafarianism, and African Nationalism as derivates of Ethiopianism. An intrinsic investigation of the notion of Ethiopian Christian statecraft, regarding its determination of social-economic strata within the multiplicity of ethnicity and religions is done. This enables a modular comparison with other historically religiously defined states such as Zionist Israel, historic America, Apartheid South Africa, Pontifical Rome, and Islamic states under Sharia. This comparative study notes how religious statecraft defined these nations, adopted to modernisation of the political apparatus, shaped martial policy or determined national warfare, and effected the treatment of natives-minorities. This study is enabled through document analysis. The investigation is an attempt to develop a prescriptive template for the interaction of religion with statecraft, and in addition, weighing the pros and cons of an implied religious-statecraft upon a modern state.
