World War Z,The Zombie Apocalypse,and the Israeli state’s monstering of Palestinian “others”

ABSTRACT

The authors deploy a critical cultural critique that extends the work of monstrosity scholars and other researchers who are interested in the application of zombie apocalypse analyses to critiques of contemporary nationalistic and social controversies. World War Z sets in motion a series of cinematic dynamics that invite audiences to consider how Israeli securitization of Jerusalem might serve as the world's best hope for containing the zombie apocalypse. By decoding the “monstering” features World War Z, the authors note the heuristic value of understanding how the rhetoric of autoimmunity influences mediated perceptions of Israeli and Palestinian conflicts.     

Archives and trails from the First World War: repurposing imperial records of North African and Indian soldiers in Palestine and Syria, 1917-1923

ABSTRACT

First World War scholars more or less agree on the limitations imposed by archival sources on the study of North African and Indian troops. Conventional methods to find ‘the voice’ of the soldier do not apply in this case and the scarcity of records partly explains why so little is written. So, what opportunities are there in such an endeavour? This article argues for the need to decolonise military archives from the Great War era. That is to say, to use information that was originally gathered to serve narrow military interests as a means to understand the war experiences of the colonial soldiers. These sources, largely official records, bearing stamps of the past regimes, cannot be separated from the context or intent of their production. Nonetheless, they must not be overlooked as new historiographical demands make it necessary to read colonial archives for evidence of their context. Failing to draw from, and reflect upon, colonial era records on the Great War, despite their shortcomings, is tantamount to condemning valuable aspects of global history to oblivion. In turn, acknowledging these shortcomings, paradoxically, lends greater value to such sources as the colonial context in which they were produced becomes observable.     

KEEPING IT TOGETHER: CONSERVATION,CONTEXT AND CULTURAL MATERIALS

Abstract

In 1900 a small group of Galician immigrants in New York City formed a self-help association. They displayed their state certificate of incorporation in a paperboard mat ornamented with textual and pictorial elements. In 2004 this wall plaque received conservation treatment for exhibition at the Library of Congress. Over the course of a century, this object went from representing a community to itself to representing a mechanism for self-preservation to the public. This paper explores context and interpretation; material integrity and cultural identity; and preserving the potential for discovering and creating meaning. It analyzes how context influences conservation and how conservation influences the historical trajectory of cultural materials. As an example it will consider the cultural context in which conservation has developed and its influence on the conservation treatment of the wall plaque.     

The historian activist and the Gift to the Nation project: preserving the records of the Australian Red Cross

ABSTRACT

In 2014, as part of their centenary celebrations, the Australian Red Cross initiated a project in which it transferred archives to various national, state and territory institutions across Australia including the University of Melbourne Archives and the State Library of New South Wales. The transfer of this voluminous (but not complete) collection built on earlier transfers of archives to the State Library of South Australia and the Australian War Memorial. This paper charts the origins of the plan to donate the records to public repositories. It interrogates the societal provenance of those collections, recognising that the pluralising of records is an historical process, in which the agency of archivists, historians and administrators must be understood. An investigation of Red Cross records in Australia exposes that process in its contingency, inertia and, ultimately, enthusiasm. The paper also reveals the challenges faced by voluntary organisations in preserving their records, and how historians and archivists both can benefit from assisting such organisations. Finally, this paper argues that the ‘Gift to the Nation’ project, with its national and international significance, reflects a shift in our understanding of the First World War to a transnational paradigm that recognises the important role of voluntary organisations.     

THE CONSERVATOR IN CONTEXT: CROSSING CURATORIAL BOUNDARIES

Abstract

Is the conservation profession dividing into two groups – specialized technicians often working in private practice, and generalists in the heritage sector whose work is often in preventive conservation covering a diverse range of materials? If so are we moving away from conservation specialists, who contribute to the wide range of processes involved with object care and research within particular curatorial disciplines? We examine the increasing distancing of conservators from collections and their curatorial colleagues and will assess how this is reflected in the changing nature of training courses, and the impact this may have on museums in the future. These issues are discussed with reference to the National Museum of Wales, which has recently undergone an externally refereed conservation review. The outcomes of this can be viewed in relation to other institutions employing conservators.     

Schoolmen and Humanists

ABSTRACT

This article, the first of two on electronic text and electronic text centers, looks at the period from the end of World War II to the late Eighties. It is a survey of the early history of working with electronic texts and a number of major initiatives, projects and standards are discussed. The author argues that electronic texts can only be understood in the wider context of humanities computing which during this period mistakenly modeled itself after work done in the pure and social sciences. Such an emphasis was based on a limited view of the computer and has now been largely superseded by developments in technology more propitious to humanistic endeavor.     

The inherent sharing of conservation decisions

Abstract

This paper provides an understanding of an under-explored aspect of the sharing of conservation decisions. In particular, it argues that conservation decisions are inherently shared in at least three senses. First, conservation is conceived as a field of shared values, principles, and decision-making methodology, and aspires to a universally shared ethic. This view is supported by the logical and ethical consistency of existing Codes of Ethics, and is made manifest with the aid of a conceptual model of what science is. Second, conservation decisions are conditioned by the identity of heritage entities. The values comprising the heritage identity of an entity transcend space and time boundaries; they are interrelated and interdependent and, as such, shared. Third, the benefits but also the harms stemming from conservation decisions and actions are distributed and shared among all people for whom the object of a conservation decision is heritage. As dictated by the do-no-harm principle, conservators have a duty to consider risks of such harms when making decisions.     

Preventive Conservation: People,Objects, Place and Time in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

Preventive conservation, with its origins grounded in the material fabric of cultural material, is in a period of transformation, with numerous practitioners, in and outside of the field of conservation, considering its broader and holistic objectives. The conventional tools for the assertion of preventive conservation principles, namely the assessment and management of risks to cultural material from the ‘ten agents of deterioration’, have a central focus on the primacy of physical materials and degradation, with less clear relationships with people, place, and time in their modelling. With a case study focus on collections in the Philippines, this paper argues for a practice of preventive conservation that incorporates a balanced assessment and broader thinking around the contexts of objects, people, place, and time. The case studies of ecclesiastical Church collections, and museum environments in the Philippines, demonstrate how the interdependency of objects, people, place and time forms a holistic and conceptual preventive conservation framework. Through a cyclic renegotiation of these four parameters, this paper speculates on the gaps and opportunities for an inclusive view of preventive conservation that is current and more sustainable.     

Archives and the Australian Great War centenary: retrospect and prospect

ABSTRACT

Based on a keynote address to the 2018 International Society for First World War Studies conference, the author’s survey of a centenary of archival endeavour comprises four time periods and two themes. It highlights the unique role of the Australian War Memorial and its initial documentation priorities favouring Dr C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, the battlefront and the war dead. A post-centenary open-ended aftermath is also discussed covering processing backlogs, the prospective idea of ‘digital breakthrough’ and the archival implications of ever-widening understandings of the war and its endless aftermaths. The paper ends with an appeal for new voices in researching the documentation of Australia’s Great War experience.     

Reflecting the Census

Abstract

This article discusses ongoing changes and future challenges in collecting multi-ethnic and multi-cultural archival materials, as viewed in the context of several collecting projects undertaken by the former Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia.     

The Holocaust and Business as Usual

Summary

Fueled by the need to resolve problems in war production and working in the context of New Deal anti-monopoly sentiment, a number of important Senate committees before and during World War II investigated American and other Western corporate ties with German business. Their findings constitute important resources for Holocaust reference. The proceedings and reports of these committces-which include the Subcommittee on War Mobilization of the Committee on Military Affairs and the Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program-run to many thousands of pages and are located in leading libraries. Careful analysis by researchers may help determine the degree of American and Western responsibility for the Holocaust.     

The Slovak Periodical Press: Historical Development,Current Content,New Forms of Access

SUMMARY

The authors discuss the development of the Slovak periodical press within its historical context and their expectations for its future. The article covers general characteristics of Slovak magazines and newspapers from World War II to 1989, and their later development since the Velvet Revolution up to the present. It also discusses the Slovak press outside of Slovakia from the late nineteenth century.     

Embodiment unbound: Moving beyond divisions in the understanding and practice of heritage conservation

Abstract

This contribution discusses how embodied heritage values operate within a context of heritage sites, and tangible and intangible embodiments of what is valued as heritage. This is partly intended to re-contextualize ideas of material and materiality that have recently undergone reconsideration in conservation and heritage discourse. The paper questions the claim that ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophies of conservation are very different, and that they can be characterized as being concerned with intangible and tangible heritage, respectively. This is based on the assertion that influential preservation doctrines are as much a product of the context and practical situations as they are a product of different philosophies and cultures. Well-known examples from East and West are discussed to highlight the similarities, as opposed to the differences, in approaches. The article goes on to discuss the UNESCO definition of intangible heritage (2003), which conflates the intangible embodiment of values with the intangible values attributable to all heritage. As a way to contextualize this, the article considers embodiment of heritage values as a means to express both intangible and tangible heritage sites (since neither embodiment nor sites have to be physical). This is described by way of a simple, pre-existing communication model that moves from information source (which transmits the message) through the medium (the heritage site or object) to the audience (heritage user). These insights are intended to provide a balanced perspective that accommodates both the site and the embodied values in order to help make and justify conservation decisions.     

Taking Paint Samples for Pigment Analysis in Nineteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT

During the nineteenth century, chemists became increasingly engaged in the conservation treatment of polychrome surfaces. While collaborations between chemists and museum workers in charge of easel painting collections were mostly oriented towards the improvement of conservation practices, the involvement of chemists in the nascent field of archaeology was oriented towards material characterization, such as pigment analysis of polychrome surfaces. Since this type of analysis is destructive and damages the artwork, it could, therefore, be assumed that chemists were in these cases less concerned with the conservation of objects with an archaeological and historical provenance. On the contrary, my new reading of nineteenth-century English primary sources reporting pigment analysis shows that chemists also had ethical concerns about the physical integrity of archaeological objects and their conservation. This is apparent in the process in which paint samples were taken from the artworks for their subsequent analysis.     

Professional minutia and their consequences: provenance, context, original identification, and anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois

Historical settings structure how archivists and museum staff understand their work and how they apply relevant professional principles including the three core principles of provenance, context, and original identification. Their professional practices shape how the public understands or reads “original” artifacts and records. In helping to define what originals (artifacts and documents) are at a particular point in time, archivists and museum staff reinforce, support, or contradict theoretical paradigms, discourses, and social narratives on ethnicity, empire/internal colonialism, class, and gender among others. The article discusses two exemplary cases from the museum world that illustrate how the application of the three core principles is influenced by historical conditions and theoretical concepts and how these contingent applications influence what originals come to signify. In the first example, the theoretical concept of social evolution and the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago informed the founding, collecting, describing, and displaying of American Indian objects at the Field Museum of Natural History in 1894. Reflecting this, provenance, context, and original identifications were defined to mean different things for Euro-American versus American Indian objects and records, and Native Americans and others challenged these definitions and practices at the time. In the second example, the 1929–1933 making and displaying of the Hall of Races, a specific race anthropological understanding of race created unambiguous race anthropological provenance, context and original titles (identifications) for both the exhibit and individual race sculptures. By altering information concerning the three principles over the next 60 years, the Field Museum consciously destroyed the integrity of the originals and their meanings. The exhibit had become a political liability and the museum wanted to erase any trace of the race anthropological roots of the project and its sculptures. The article ends by asserting the contingency and importance of the three core principles for archivists and museum staff regardless of the format of the material involved and adds a few related observations for our contemporary hybrid, that means physical and digital, work world.     

Conserving ourselves: Embedding significance into conservation decision-making in graduate education

Graduate conservation students are well educated in many aspects of their work; however, it is difficult in the classroom to teach students how to base their conservation decisions on aspects of cultural significance. It is widely acknowledged that conservation decisions are not neutral, that they depend on cultural context and upon the predilections of the conservator and the owning individual or institution. Partnerships between community members and conservators have had a long history within conservation practices described as ‘ethnographic’, and such methods have arguably influenced working practices within other conservation specialties. A graduate conservation class is described in which students conserved important heritage items belonging to their classmates, in an environment where access to discoveries of significance were encouraged for their ability to inform preservation decisions. Cases are described that link decisions with specific values.     

From Belgium to The Hague via Berlin and Moscow: documenting war crimes and the quest for international justice, 1919-2019

ABSTRACT

Exploring new sources on the Great War a hundred years after it ended is a unique and exciting experience for any First World War historian. The very nature of the documents that we are dealing with in the present case makes it even more thrilling: hundreds of investigation and prosecution files documenting the invasion and occupation of Belgium, produced by both military and civil jurisdictions in an effort to prosecute war criminals. These fascinating records – repatriated to Belgium from Moscow in 2002 – offer new material on issues such as the German atrocities and everyday life under the occupation, but they also provide highly valuable insights into the history of international criminal law. This exploratory article will trace the unexpected trajectory of these archives, contextualise their creation and highlight some of the treasures they contain. In doing so, this article will attempt to discuss the thorny issue of archive repatriation and the questions this raises from an archival and historical perspective. It also seeks to show that the establishment of an International Criminal Court, despite the fact that it is now being called into question more than ever before, rests on solid and far-reaching historical foundations.     

SOME ASPECTS OF THE CONSERVATION OF WORKS OF ART IN BUILDINGS OF NEW CONCRETE

Abstract

This paper deals with the materials used in conservation treatments in the first half of the twentieth century for the preservation and consolidation of wooden art objects from the Saxony region in Germany. The use of such materials must be seen as early attempts to find a conservation treatment for wood. The documentation of conservation treatments provides a reference to the application of oils and oil–resin mixtures. The results from the chemical analysis of samples of historic preservatives from the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century (so-called 'Puckelin') carried out by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis confirm the use of tung oil as a drying oil, whereas the use of linseed oil cannot be excluded. Colophony and, probably, amber varnish were used as resinous constituents. There are indications that a conservation material dating from the second half of the twentieth century most likely contained rapeseed oil.     

International Media

The Concise Reference Guide to Publications and Broadcasting Media of Black America, Africa and the Caribbean (New York: Panther House Ltd. Box 3552, 1971—$15.00/ 12.50)

Olav Stokke (ed.), Reporting Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 101 Fifth Ave., 1971—$9.50)

Harold D. Lasswell's Propaganda Technique in World War I (reissue of 1927 edition titled Propaganda Technique in the World War). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971—$2.95, paper)     

Addenda

Abstract

Little has been written about the roles of conservators in regard to the preservation of human remains. This article examines the new challenges that face conservators as we become more involved with human remains under the new laws and approaches that protect indigenous community rights. The authors explore three areas critical to this debate, namely conservation expertise, training and outreach. Three scenarios for the conservator's role are presented. The authors suggest conservators should aim for the third role, that of ‘contributing colleague’, especially in the multidisciplinary and highly sensitive area involving the study of human remains. Also presented is a case study involving teamwork with the Kennewick Man remains. Though the discussion is limited to applications of preservation issues to human remains, the concepts have wider applications in the conservation field in general.