March 25 - May 31, 2002
Link: Detailed Institute schedule
The twentieth century is generally imagined in terms
of major wars that pitted nations and groups of nations
against one another. Yet by the century's final decade,
the face of war had changed. New forms of violence,
most often understood interms of civil, ethnic conflict,
exposed the shortcomings of conventional understandings
of"intra-state" vs. "inter-state"
violence. The early 1990s brought an increase in both
the number and the character of these civil wars, the
majority of which had their origins in virulent strains
of intolerance for difference. The Carnegie Commission
on Preventing Deadly Conflict [Preventing Deadly Conflict
, December1997, 12,26] counted thirty-eight such conflicts
in the decade of the 1990s; these include ones involving
Armenians and Azeris, Palestinians and Israelis, Somali
and Amhara, Tamils and Sinhalese, Hutus and Tutsis,
Serbs, Muslims and Croats, as well as the populations
in conflict in northern Ireland. These conflicts are
often characterized by the discovery of an alien Other
within, requiring violent expulsion or genocidal extinction.
Additionally, war in the present era has become a spectator
sport. Through television, the inhabitants of Western
Europe and the United States have become the daily consumers
and voyeurs of the violent performances acted out on
the stages of the collapsing states of sub-Saharan Africa,
the Balkans, Chechnya and Afghanistan. What is called
for, rather than voyeurism, however, is a responsible
critique of issues of otherness, representation, violence,
and complicity.
On August 25, 1992, the Serb army began shelling the
National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
In the days that followed , over a million books, more
than 300,000 manuscripts, and centuries of historical
records went up in flames. The destruction of the National
Library was one component in a systematic campaign of
cultural eradication that included the targeting of
all Turkish built edifices and Muslim grave-markers,
and marked a war that was as much about effacing the
material signs of a people's historical existence as
it was about killing the inheritors themselves. Three
months earlier, the Serb army had targeted the Oriental
Institute in Sarajevo, destroying more than 5,000 manuscripts
in Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Adzamijski (Slavic
in Arabic script), and Hebrew. The army then attacked
the National Museum and began razing all Muslim religious
sites, including over 1400 mosques, some of them masterworks
of Renaissance architecture. The Serb assault on the
Ottoman and Islamic architectural legacy was not a by-product
of the fighting, but an important war aim. The gunners
on the hills above Sarajevo did not seek to defeat an
enemy army; at that time there was none. Yes, they did
want territory and political concessions--but also something
more. Their goal was the eradication of a people and
all evidence of that people's culture and existence.
Within no more than six months, gone was almost all
palpable evidence of over 500 years of intercultural/
interreligious life in Bosnia. Here were the extreme
circumstances of a conflict which was not about culture,
but with culture.
It is this new kind of war that the Institute, "The
Near in Blood, the Nearer Bloody," proposes to
study. We are not committed to any particular explanation,
theme, or theoretical approach to the discussion of
civil, inter-group war. We prefer to approach the topic
as a series of problems, and to view the Institute experience
as a journey directed primarily towards discovering
and critically describing points of similarity or difference
for which no single, unitary description could ever
suffice.
While focusing on a variety of localities [Afghanistan
, Algeria, Chechnya, Congo, Chiapas, Mexico, Northern
Ireland , El Salvador , Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda,
Somalia , Sri Lanka , East Timor , the former Yugoslavia,
Zaire] the topic that we will primarily study is the
attack, not only on peoples, but on the cultures with
which they are identified. While the core issue within
some of these conflicts has often been defined as "religion,"
this Institute will treat religion as a phenomenon subsumed
within the larger framework of "culture."
Among the issues the Institute may examine, are: Ethnic
War and the Modern Conscience, the Landscape of War,
Writers under Repression, War Zone Photography and Documentary
Film, The Performativity of Ethnic Conflict, the Power
of the NationalImaginary, the Fate of Moveable Heritage,
Television/Radio/Ethnic Conflict, Strategies of Resistance,
Strategies of Reconciliation, Privatizing War &
Peace, War Tourism, War/Web.
The Humanities Institute Directors will be Lynda
Boose, Professor of English and Annabelle
Winograd, Visiting Professor of Theatre.
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Participating Fellows:
Click on any name for a brief biography/project
description
Full-Time External
Fellows:
David M. Berman, U.
of Pittsburg
Conerly Casey, UCLA
Andrew Herscher, Harvard
Alan Keenan, Solomon Asch Center for the Study
of Ethnopolitical Conflict
Amitava Kumar, Penn State
Part-Time External
Fellows:
Julie Mertus, American
Univeristy
Irit
Rogoff, London University
Special External Fellow:
Joel
Halpern, U Mass Amherst
Internal Fellows:
Kathleen Allden, Dartmouth
Medical School
Francine A'Ness, Spanish and Portuguese
Ehud Benor, Religion
Lynda Boose, English
Ron Edsforth, History
Andrew Garrod, Education
Nelson Kasfir, Government
Angelia Means, Government
Donald Pease, English
Annabelle Winograd, Theater
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