Ethnoscripts
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194 research outputs found
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Changing Gilgit-Baltistan: Perceptions of the recent history and the role of community activism
Full text linkChanging Gilgit-Baltistan: Perceptions of the recent history and the role of community activis
Making a Nation in High Mountains: Balawars and Balawaristan Nationalism in Ghizer District of Gilgit Baltistan
Full text linkMaking a Nation in High Mountains: Balawars andBalawaristan Nationalism in Ghizer District of Gilgit Baltista
Disaster and (im)mobility: Restoring mobility in Gojal after the Attabad landslide: A visual essay
Full text linkDisaster and (im)mobility: Restoring mobility in Gojal after the Attabad landslide: A visual essa
Afterword: Jewish Agency and Iridescence in Heritage-Making Processes
Full text linkThe afterword reflects on the various contributions in this special issue of Ethnoscripts, which explores the dynamics of contemporary Jewish agency in the context of Jewish cultural heritage. It emphasises the complexities and tensions that arise as Jewish subjects engage with their heritage, highlighting negotiations within communities, intergenerational dialogues, and the interplay between State and minority interests. The afterword revisits several matters discussed in the contributions, such as post-vernacularity, counter-heritagisation, and State and national narratives and policies. It highlights dimensions of critical reflection and attention to complexity. It argues that Jewish heritage should not only be revived and enlivened but also critically engaged with, fostering a dialogue that recognises its complexities and contradictions across different contexts and historical narratives. This text introduces the concept of iridescent heritage, which articulates heritage as dynamic, multifaceted, and shaped by the interactions between subjects, heritage objects, and interpretive frameworks. This idea moves away from fixed and flat conceptions of heritage towards a more processual and complex understanding of its meanings. The afterword suggests the explanatory resonance of a conceptualisation of iridescence with the insights from several contributions in the special issue
From the Objects to the Actors of Restitution: Jewish Agency in the Nazi-Era Looted Art and Artefact Restitution Field
Full text linkScholarship on the restitution of art and artefacts looted during the Nazi era has predominantly focused on objects rather than the actors who have shaped this field. This article adopts an actor-oriented approach to examine the agency of Jewish cultural brokers formative to restitution processes since the 1950s. Drawing on interviews conducted with fifteen Jewish cultural brokers from 2022 to 2025 and archival research at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives in New York, it traces how Jewish actors have pioneered and transformed the restitution field. The research reveals two phases of restitution work. In the first phase (1950s–1990s), Jewish lawyers and organisations established legal frameworks for restitution claims. In the second phase (late twentieth century to the present), second- and third-generation Jewish actors shifted the field from national toward moral and global frameworks to emphasise ‘just and fair solutions’. Contemporary Jewish cultural brokers understand their work as both personal heritage practice and moral obligation. They assert agency, seeking not merely the return of objects but the restoration of marginalised stories to history. This actor-centric approach reveals restitution as a processual, relational, and spatial practice of heritage-making that encompasses voice, recognition, and collective memory. By centring Jewish agency, the study demonstrates how marginalised populations can transform institutional fields, offering new perspectives on cultural heritage as an active, lived process rather than a static product of the past
‘Yellow Bar Mitzvah’: Mobilisations of Gangsta Rap as Futures Oriented, Agential Jewish Heritage in Germany
Full text linkState-approved and -funded Jewish cultural heritage has largely focused on concrete tangible spaces or structures, such as synagogues and mikvaot (ritual baths), and material objects. They often represent and evoke an idealised, unchanging Jewishness of the past that is presumed to be acceptable to non-Jewish audiences, yet one that bears little resemblance to lived Judaism, whether past or present. Using hip-hop by Jewish subjects in Germany as a case study, with a special focus on rapper Dimitri Chpakov, this article investigates the mobilisation of popular culture in the twenty-first century by diverse Jewish subjects under the radar of state-sanctioned conceptualisations and representations. Past studies have examined Jewish hip-hop in Germany within the authorised heritage discourse around Holocaust commemoration and anti-Semitism. This article argues that Jewish hip-hop initiatives need to be explored as alternative statements of Jewish heritage, Jewish communal identity, and Jewish diversity, geared towards young living Jewish community members. Such functions tend to be ignored or misunderstood in top-down discourses perpetuated in the public sphere. This article examines the extent to which present-day German Jewish hip-hop prompts a counter-heritagisation process: by creating compelling, deeply personal, and imitable musical forms, it reimagines and reforms conventional definitions of heritage in the service of young Jews living in Germany
Radzanów on the Verge of Change: Jews, Non-Jews, and a Returning Canadian
Full text linkThis article examines changes in travel to Poland since the decade after the fall of communism. Using as its focus the author’s ancestral village, Radzanów, located north-west of Warsaw, it traces patterns in Jewish return to such places, shifts in Polish attitudes about Jewish heritage and history, and the impact of key heritage institutions and tourism trends. In Radzanów, a derelict synagogue building and an unmarked burial ground desecrated by the Germans in wartime are the lasting markers of pre-war Jewish life
Ways of Seeing: Anthropological Approaches to Right-Wing Movements
Full text linkThe article shows the diversity of ethnographic work on the far right. It distinguishes between different approaches, highlighting their potential for the anthropology of right-wing movements: participant observation, interview-based studies, and a focus on cultural semiotics and political economy
Öffentlichkeit und Teilhabe: Citizen Journalism in Gilgit-Baltistan
Full text linkÖffentlichkeit und Teilhabe: Citizen Journalism in Gilgit-Baltista