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Revised edition: 2015

ISBN 978-1-329-10281-1

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[1]

Table of Contents

FOREWORD 47

Ali Al-Hassnawi,1 Milton A. George,2 & Sergio Saleem Scatolini3

1 University of Buraimi, Oman 2 KU Leuven, Leuven & University of Buraimi, Oman

3 Al Musanna College of Technology, Oman

UNESCO: EDUCATION, DREAMS, AND REALITIES

814 Stijn Dhert

Leuven-Limburg University College, Belgium

THE CURSE OF BABEL

1520 Joris De Roy

Leuven-Limburg University College, Belgium

SUPERDIVERSITY AS THE RECOGNITION OF THE ORDINARY

MISCHIEVOUS SACRED 2128

Francio Guadeloupe University of St. Martin, Sint Maarten

SAINT PETERSBURG IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

2940 Liesbeth Spanjers

Leuven-Limburg University College, Belgium

THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORY

4145 Dima Bou Mosleh KU Leuven, Belgium

[2]

EDUCATIONAL MODERNIZATION IN IRAN AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 4570

Mitra Madani KU Leuven, Belgium

EDUCATION AND LANGUAGE IN SINT MAARTEN

7199

Milton George KU Leuven, Belgium

University of Buraimi, Oman

MISSION-COLONIAL COLLABORATION TOWARDS THE EDUCATION

ENTERPRISE IN UGANDA 1925-1962 99126

Lucia Wanjiku KU Leuven, Belgium

CHALLENGES OF TEACHING AND TRAINING HEALTHCARE

INTERPRETERS IN UAE 127165

Yasmin Hannouna University of Buraimi, Oman

EFFECTS OF EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING

AND KOLB LEARNING STYLE INVENTORY THEORIES ON LEARNING 166181

Mehmet Ozcan Afyon-Kocatepe University, Turkey

BEYOND THE CULTURAL CAPITAL THEORY:

SOME UNEXPLORED DIMENSIONS OF WORKING CLASS LEARNING 182204

Akhtar Hassan Malik & Hyder Kamran University of Toronto, Canada University of Buraimi, Oman

[3]

ENGLISH LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AT ENGINEERING COLLEGES IN ANDHRA PRADESH, INDIA

205220 Afsha Jamal

Al Musannah College of Technology, Oman

THE IMPACT OF EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ON LIFESTYLE: A CASE STUDY OF STUDENTS IN BELGIUM

221232 Michael Ugochukwu JOE

KU Leuven, Belgium

ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN OMAN: DEFINITIONS AND STUDENTS PERCEPTIONS

233252 Sergio Saleem Scatolini

Al Musanna College of Technology, Oman

E-LEARNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

253258 Davis Daniel

University of Buraimi, Oman

[4]

FOREWORD

Ali Al-Hassnawi,1 Milton A. George,2

& Sergio Saleem Scatolini3

1 University of Buraimi, Oman 2 KU Leuven, Leuven & University of Buraimi, Oman

3 Al Musanna College of Technology, Oman

Recently, we have occasionally dwelt on the issues of culture, language,

and education as deeply interrelated dimensions of our own lives, not

only because we are language teachers, but because we are human

beings. We were born as biological human beings, but we can live as

existential humans thanks to factors such as culture, language, and

education. Without them, there would be no truly human communities.

They mark our kinds passage from biology to spirituality (as

encompassing both religious and non-religious aspirations and value

systems). This book brings together papers that focus on aspects of

these three dimensions, namely anthropological and literary issues; the

history, principles, and practices of education; Arabic-English translation;

engineering education; Education for Sustainable Development (ESD);

and Entrepreneurship Education (EE). Another feature of this book is

that it functions as a meeting point for writers from different cultures.

This enriches the rationale of this compilation which casts a realistic, yet

also hopeful, look at culture, language, and education.

Cultures constitute comprehensive language games encompassing rules,

strategies for self-expression, ideas, rituals, texts, hypertexts, products,

etc. Cultures are self-imposing domains. Through them, people learn to

describe, familiarize themselves with, interiorize, interact with, and re-

arrange reality or, better still, concrete, imaginary, virtual, personal and

shared realities. Spanjers article about three examples from the Russian

literature about Saint Petersburg shows that cities can be inhumane and

crash their citizens. In other words, although cultures humanize and

[5]

domesticate nature, this does not mean that all regions of the inhabited

world are homely to all.

Within these language games, languages play a key role. We mean not

only languages such as English, Arabic, Mandarin, and the like, but also

sign languages, as well, and other systems which are not usually thought

of as languages, like programming languages in IT, logic, mathematics,

and chemistry.

A key feature of all of these languages is being means of communication.

Without them, human beings would remain islands, and thought would

be practically impossible. Moreover, without them, no truly human

communities would exist. The notion of the inseparability of language

and culture, and the co-existence theory justify why these articles have

been bundled together in one publication. Nonetheless, the authors are

aware that the ability to communicate does not always lead to the

creation of grand communities capable of embracing differences.

Oftentimes, languages signal and cause miscommunication and

misunderstandings. As De Roy argues, languages at times work as

cultural dividers. They classify us simultaneously as peers to some, and

aliens to others; for example, as native speakers and foreign speakers;

tribal members and aliens.

History is plagued with instances of discrimination based on language. In

fact, as De Roy explains, this is such a typically human phenomenon that

it made its way into the Bible as the legendary curse of Babel. A look at

present-day Babylon, or Iraq, will probably make us wonder whether we

are doomed to continually regard speakers of another language,

including other cultural and religious languages, as barbarians whom

people who claim to be more civilized may combat, even do away with.

Are we ever going to be able to break the curse of Babel? Hannouna

argues that we must. The need to enhance the bridging dimension of

languages is deeply felt and acutely urgent in hospitals with multi-lingual

patients, where misunderstandings can potentially lead to death.

Furthermore, as Jamal shows, this also applies to other sectors, such as

engineering students in India. Fortunately, Guadeloupe underlines that

[6]

there are real everyday instances of genuine inter-human recognition in

situations where mental borders are crossed. At those culturally

mischievous moments, people surmount the socio-cultural realities that

turn them into aliens as they attempt together to deal with complex

realities.

As for education and all things educational, they are the means whereby

people invent, reinvent, and reinforce their identities as cultural

communities, and articulate their own identities as individual humans

within some groups and over against other groups. In other words,

education teaches men and women to identify with some people and, at

the same time, to distance themselves from others. This way, education

perpetuates US and THEM co-relational, co-creative and, occasionally co-

destructive binary oppositions. This dynamic was visibly at work in

colonial settings, such as the ones described by Wanjiku and George,

especially as the desire for freedom gained force and had to reassert its

self-worth in the presence of the colonial masters.

Be it the Biblical story of the curse of Babel, Russian literature, or our

official narrations of history, we must realize, as Bou Mosleh suggests,

that histories do more than merely describe past facts. Cultures,

languages, and education systems imagine the world, even alternative

worlds, in light of social institutions with their own rules and judges

(often economic, political, academic or religious elites). However, on a

hope-giving note, Dhert argues that education and we might add

culture and language exists thanks to the tension between dreams,

including nightmares, and reality. In addition, Madani gives examples

from Iran and the Ottoman Caliphate, where the governments realized

that military reforms could only be effective if the entire administrative

system was reconstructed and modern schools were established. Their

defensive modernization was an instance of culture, language, and

education channeling dreams into realities. Joe and Scatolini, too,

provide contemporary examples of the potentials of education for

positive change from the fields of Education for Sustainable

Development and Entrepreneurship Education, respectively.

[7]

To conclude, as Ozcan suggests, the perception is growing that

organizations and societies are learning systems, and that the process

whereby they are managed is a learning process. These learning systems

and processes are hubs on which culture, language, and education

converge. Furthermore, as Akhtar and Haydar plead, this process should

not be restricted to the official and formal framework of culture,

language, and education. Cultural capital is context specific, and its value

varies across the fields where the struggle for power and legitimization

exists. Moreover, as Davis shows, the Internet and other modern

technologies offer numerous opportunities to reshape the education

process and to create possibilities for continuous, collaborative, and self-

managed learning.

In short, although the authors are aware that culture, language, and

education have often been used to alienate people and to render them

powerless, these very dimensions of human social and individual life

have also at times become the tools for empowering people from

different groups to create shared non-dominant cultural capital. This

mischievous bypassing of the borders established by the powers-that-be

helps human beings and human communities to become more humane.

[8]

UNESCO: EDUCATION, DREAMS, AND REALITIES

Stijn Dhert

University College Leuven-Limburg, Belgium

In memoriam Jaak Trips

To Jaak, wherever we meet again

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing

currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the

identity to which so many attach such significance. These

currents, like the themes of ones life, flow along during

the waking hours, and at their best, they require no

reconciling, no harmonizing. A form of freedom, Id like

to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that

it is. Edward Said (1999). Out of place: A memoir. New

York: Knopf.

PART 1: PILLARS AND PARADOXES

Learning: The Treasure Within the 1996 Report to UNESCO of the

International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century,

chaired by Jacques Delors, proposed an integrated ambitious vision of

education. The report is widely considered to be a key reference for the

conceptualization of education and learning worldwide.

Education: Its Four Pillars

The Four Pillars of Education (learning to know, learning to do, learning to

live together, and learning to be) form the basis for Learning: The Treasure

Within. They cannot be defined separately. They form an integrated

whole, complementing and strengthening each other. This is logical, as

education is a total experience and, as teaching means more than

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inculcating particular skills, education means teaching students to be

disposed to think and act creatively and critically in appropriate contexts.

The four pillars of education can thus be seen as four central and

intertwined goals for education all over the world. They focus on the

development of the person as a whole since the end of education is to

discover and open the talents hidden like a treasure within each human

being. Setting out these four pillars, the commission, makes clear that

[] formal education can no longer emphasize simply and solely the

acquisition of knowledge, neglecting other types of learning. It is vital to

conceive education in a more encompassing fashion. Such a vision

should inform and guide future educational reforms and policy, in

relation both to contents and to methods. In other words: education

should be re-reconceived in terms of educating, referring to the

development of the whole person.

Education: The Necessary Utopia

In the Introduction to the Learning: The Treasure Within, Jacques Delors

calls education The Necessary Utopia. In the introduction, the writer

enunciates the existence of seven tensions that re-emerge throughout

the report. They include the tension between:

1. the global and the local

2. the universal and the individual

3. tradition and modernity

4. long-term and short-term considerations

5. the need for competition and the concern for equality of

opportunity

6. the expansion of knowledge and human beings capacity to

assimilate it

7. the material and the spiritual

The latter one refers to an underlying tension among the four pillars

themselves. Learning to do and learning to know, on the one hand, stress

the technological, scientific, economic and instrumental dimensions of

education; all of which are encompassed by the idea of globalization.

Learning to be and learning to live together, on the other hand,

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emphasize values, civic responsibility, interdependence, and esthetics.

Their focus is on the moral, cultural, social and spiritual dimensions.

I agree with Teasdale, who stated in his 1999 seminar Implications of

the Delors Report for Schooling in South Australia that these tensions

must not be seen as oppositions or conflicts. They do not represent

tensions between opposing parties where only one can win. There is,

in fact, a second kind of tension that is creative and functional. It is the

tension in a harp string, producing beautiful music. It is the tension in the

great cables that hold the impressive new Glebe Island Bridge in place.

Without the tension in the cables the whole structure would collapse. It

is a necessary tension, a functional tension. It is a tension that produces

balance and harmony.

It is not easy to get the tension right to strike a functional balance

and to keep it that way, so Teasdale says. It may even be a utopia to

think that a harmonious and general balance can be found. Nevertheless,

I believe that tools must be given to education professionals to reflect

upon these tensions and paradoxes and to philosophize about the

harmony and unison of these tensions and paradoxes. In fact, it is a

paradox in itself.

In conclusion, theres one more tension that I would briefly like to

mention. It is the tension between dreams and reality. I believe that

education cannot exist but through this tension. It is through the act of

dreaming of and hoping for a better future that the teacher, as well as

the learner, can truly become engaged in the educational reality.

Education is about making dreams come true.

PART 2: SUPER HEROES AND YOU (AND ME)

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of

men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.

UNESCO

UNESCOs countless actions spearheaded and sustained by so many

professionals and volunteers on so many different domains in all regions

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of the world serve one goal: to build peace through education. Each of

UNESCOs major fields of work (i.e. Education, Natural Sciences, Social

and Human Sciences, Communication and Information and Culture) is

the space where UNESCO-minded people share one aspiration: to make

this world better and therefore also safer and more peaceful.

To actively and effectively build peace in the minds of men and women

all over the world, UNESCO summons all people and all peoples to join

forces. It asks dreamers and visionaries to step up and envision better

futures. It calls upon planners, architects, landscapers, designers etc. to

translate dreams and visions into workable, doable projects.

Subsequently, UNESCO invites contractors to gather the professionals

and equipment needed to translate its projects into action. It also

gathers construction workers (bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters,

electricians, painters, decorators, roofers, tillers, welders etc.) to give

form and content to the dreams and projects which were developed by

visionaries and planners. Without a concrete social form a body and

face, they would remain elusive figments of the imagination. Last but

not least, UNESCO also needs people willing to live in this world. People

who are willing to live together, willing to overcome conflicts, willing to

look at diversity as an asset for a more exciting life (not as a hazard for

possible fights). Indeed, peace-making educators and educationalists are

people willing to help with dreaming dreams of better futures and to

contribute to the realization of those dreams day in and day out.

The people that UNESCO seeks do not need to be super heroes. They do

not need to be saints. They do not have to radically change everything

they have done before in their lives. Every little bit counts. For the

greatest acts of peace can be found in the smallest human gestures.

Every water pump that is installed where water is needed can be

a tool for peace.

Every toilet that enhances hygiene can be a tool for peace.

Every project that increases peoples individual capacities can be

a tool for peace.

Every independent research on climate change, on wealth and

poverty, on equal opportunities, on intercultural dialogue and so

on, can be a tool for peace.

[12]

Every exchange of knowledge and expertise between

professionals, companies, institutes, regions, countries, can be a

tool for peace.

Every man and woman who has learned to read and write and to

think and act independently, creatively and critically can be a tool

for peace.

Every journalist that can do his or her job independently and

without fear of punishment or revenge can be a tool for peace.

Every newspaper that informs the public objectively of the

actions of politicians and decision makers can be a tool for peace.

Every school that is built can be a tool for peace.

Every lesson that is taught in these schools can be a tool for

peace.

Every educational professional that is being educated and

trained can be a tool for peace.

Every piece of music can be a tool for peace.

Every play can be a tool for peace.

Every art exhibition can be a tool for peace.

Every act of friendship can be a tool for peace.

Every act of care can be a tool for peace.

Every thought about compassion can be a tool for peace.

Every warmhearted, tenderhearted, softhearted initiative for

encounter, for respect, and for understanding can be a tool for

peace.

Every conversation in which people are truly interested in one

anothers thoughts, aspirations and hopes can be a tool for

peace

Building peace in the minds of men and women is thus a global challenge

that calls for joint efforts that can only be realized through simple, daily,

individual, local actions. It needs belief and commitment. And it needs

you and me.

By believing in making this world a better place, we make a commitment,

and we say that we are willing to make a change, to contribute actively

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to world peace, and to be dreamers, planners, peace construction

workers. We make clear that we believe that we can make vital

contributions to making this world a better place for each and every one

of us, as well as for the generations to come.

As Nina Simone reminded us:

What've you got?

Why are you alive anyway?

Yeah, what've you got?

Nobody can take away.

You got your hair. You got your head.

You got your brains. You got your ears.

You got your eyes. You got your nose.

You got your mouth. You got your smile.

You got your tongue. You got your chin.

You got your neck. You got your boobs.

You got your heart. You got your soul.

You got your back. You got your sex.

You got your arms. You got your hands.

You got your fingers, got your legs.

You got your feet. You got your toes.

You got your liver. You got your blood.

You got your life. You got your freedom.

You got the life.

(Free interpretation of Ain't Got No...I've Got Life)

[14]

We have our hands and our feet, our dreams and our ideals, our

ambitions and our passions, our brains, our heart and our soul as our

working tools. Still, the road is long. With many a winding turnAnd we

dont know for sure where it will lead us -- you and me. But together, we

have high hopes. As tools of peace

[15]

THE CURSE OF BABEL

Joris De Roy

University College Leuven-Limburg, Belgium

In memoriam Jaak Trips

Gods in His heaven

Alls right with the world!

(Robert Browning, Pippa Passes)

By far the most interesting story in the Bible at least in my opinion is

that which recounts the history of the Tower of Babel. Even though the

tower is never actually named as such in the Bible, it has nevertheless

become one of those archetypal images that many people grow up with,

whether they are religious or not. Not only has this story inspired artists,

such as Pieter Breughel the Elder and Lucas van Valckenborgh, it has also

been a central image and a touchstone for countless linguists (see for

instance George Steiner in After Babel) who see it as a metaphor to

explain (the origin of) linguistic diversity in our world. I myself use the

image as well as a popularised version of the myth in my course

Language: Code & Culture, as a way of opening my students mental eye

to what diversity could mean and to how we can begin to overcome

global misunderstanding.

The story, as recounted in Genesis 11:4-9, is rather elliptical and at some

instances even cryptic, to say the least. It is only through many

retellings, and partly thanks to Hollywood interpretations of biblical

stories, that the story becomes clear. The main message that it delivers,

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however, is that before Babel humankind was united by one common

language, and as long as they spoke the same language, there was

nothing they could not achieve. Twinned with this first message is that

of a most jealous god who, anxious that mankinds budding ambitions

and potential might make his own omnipotence look rather lame in

comparison, decides to thwart their plans to build a tower that reaches

up into the sky and in religious imagery infringes on his divine

territory. The rest is history. The god of the Old Testament sows

confusion by making all people speak a different language, effectively

separating them into tribes. Goodbye to communication; goodbye as

well to cooperation; goodbye to peace on earth.

If one now wishes to be smart and pursue dolloping religious images,

one could argue that this historical event coincides with the creation of

Hell. Life was pretty perfect until Babel, when god, out of sheer spite,

felt the need to interfere and spoil it for everybody, no quarter given. In

contrast to the image of Heaven as put forward by the church, i.e. a

place that is clearly distinct from earth, and that one can only reach by

leading an exemplary life, an image of heaven seen through a linguists

eyes would probably be the opposite. Linguistic heaven would very

much be based on earth and it would of needs be a human construct. It

would not be reached through exemplary behavior (whatever that may

mean), but would be actively created through unfailing attempts at

restoring mutual understanding, just as it was before Babel. Hence the

Curse of Babel.

But the curse of Babel does not stop just there; neither does the

influence of the story, which makes it so interesting. The very word

babel seems to have become part of the vocabulary of a number of

languages, mostly in ways where a strict etymological relationship may

be difficult to prove, but still so teasingly close that it makes a closer

examination of the assumed connection worthwhile. English has the

verb to babble, to indicate talking quickly in a way that is difficult to

understand. The noun babble, meaning talking that is confused or silly,

and therefore difficult to understand, but also the sound of many people

[17]

speaking at the same time1, is nearly identical to one of the meanings of

Dutch gebabbel and babbelen.

Even more telling could be the link of babel to the (classical) Greek

, which is a later form of the Mycenean pa-pa-ro. (Note that

the second bilabial was then not yet preceded by the later Greek rho.)

The website Palaeolexicon calls the etymology of this word uncertain2,

but establishing a link with babel becomes extremely tempting,

especially when one takes into consideration the meaning of both

and pa-pa-ro. It is exactly the meaning the original one and

its later evolution of the word and the various adaptations

of the Greek original (such as English barbarian) that I would now like to

pursue.

What few people today seem to realise is that the original meaning of

the Greek barbarian did not necessarily imply something negative (at

least not in a way it obviously does today). When asked to describe a

barbarian, my students invariably come up with ideas and concepts such

as caveman, uncivilised, wild, warrior, unmannered, amoral, etc. Going

back to the initial meaning of the word, however, one soon discovers

that the term was used as an antonym to (a citizen), i.e. to

indicate someone who did not belong to the speakers tribe or, in the

later context of the Greek world, to the speakers ethno-political unit.

The most obvious trait that betrays whether one either belongs or does

not belong to a given community is, in most cases, ones language3, both

ones pronunciation and ones choice of words. For the Greeks it was an

easy decision: either one spoke the same mother tongue as the other

members of the tribe, or one babbled, i.e. one produced a stream of

garbled speech that was unintelligible to the tribe. This precisely takes

us back to our original biblical story. Was it not gods express purpose to

1 Meanings based on Hornby et al. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, 8th edition. 2 http://www.palaeolexicon.com/ShowWord.aspx?Id=16902

3 Note another interesting passage in the Bible (Judges 12), from which the term shibboleth is taken, used to indicate a linguistic nugget used to distinguish between people from different groups or tribes. See for example the use of Derry or Londonderry to find out about a persons political and religious leanings.

[18]

drive the united tribes apart by confusing their language and thus make

them less united? Turn them into each others competitors? Turn them

mutually unintelligible?

Language evidently works as a cultural divider. Purely on the basis of the

language a person speaks, one either belongs or does not belong to a

certain group. As long as this division into groups limits itself to linguistic

matters and does not turn into discrimination, one could rejoice at so

much variety and diversion. However, history is rife with examples of

discrimination and suppression based solely on language, so much so

that I can refrain from giving examples. Instead, let us revisit the Greek

term barbarian and investigate its later (and now current) meaning.

Once tribes have acquired a cultural identity (partly based on a shared

language, but equally on customs and traditions), they will compete with

other tribes at a cultural level as well, next to engaging in plain warfare.

Their own culture becomes a totem which is regarded as obviously more

developed, more civilised, more refined and more rewarding than and

superior to the cultures of surrounding tribes. Since language is by far

the most important transmitter of culture, it is self-evident that someone

who does not speak a certain language cannot possibly partake of the

culture behind that language. Consequently, a barbarian as the

speaker of unintelligible speech is forever excluded from the perceived

superior culture of ones own tribe and therefore has become a

barbarian in the new sense of being less civilised than members of that

culture.

Are we therefore doomed to regard speakers of another language as

less civilised? Is this the ultimate curse of Babel?

By and large this article is about mutual understanding or rather, about

the lack of it. This lack of understanding is attributable foremost to the

lack of a common language. By saying this I in no way wish to imply or

even give the impression that we should strive to create and start using a

unifying language. What we should aim for, is doing away with the

babble.

[19]

It would be pretty nave, of course, to attribute all worries of the world,

all friction and misunderstanding, war and strife, to the destruction of

the Tower of Babel and the concomitant scattering of the worlds tribes.

But just as the Tower has served as a metaphor for linguistic diversity,

another tower, yet to be built, may serve as a metaphor for mutual

understanding regained. If the god of the Bible found it necessary to

divide and scatter us all over the planet, maybe now is the time for

mankind to take the initiative in their own hands and work towards a

common project a new tower.

In a number of ways this project is what we are trying to achieve with

the International Education Classes (IEC) at UC Leuven-Limburg. Just like

music and the visual arts, education is a manifestation of culture, and

possibly the most vital manifestation for any society to allow it to

continue to exist. Unlike the former two examples, however, education

is a manifestation that cannot exist outside language, and how does one

tackle global education across borders in a linguistically diverse world?

By bringing together students from different cultures and guiding them

through a post-graduate programme covering a plethora of aspects and

facets of education in an international dimension, we have willy-nilly

committed ourselves to exploring the possibilities of finding that

common language to discuss values we all share4.

However, not happy with limiting our efforts towards mutual

understanding in an educational environment to a select group of

(mainly) post-graduate students, we at UC Leuven-Limburg have set

ourselves some further and wider-reaching goals. Realising that thinking

and language mutually influence each other and that cultures may

experience things differently depending on their governing language, we

now want to make foreign languages the medium through which

knowledge is acquired and thinking is stimulated. That is why we have

decided to start a new post-graduate programme in Content and

Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as of September 2015. This

programme would induce secondary school teachers into the didactics

of CLIL-based education and hopefully implement it in their daily practice

4 For more information on the IEC, please consult

www.groept.be/www/voortgezette_opleidingen/piec/

[20]

with 12 to 18-year-olds. In this way we hope to contribute to renewed

global understanding in generations to come.

It is now time to conclude by revisiting the quote at the beginning of this

article. Without knowing which one the author intended, I sincerely

believe Brownings quote can have two rather contradictory readings. I

do realise that the most obvious reading implies that everything is as it

should be with the world as long as God is at the helm. Yet, I wish to

propose a different reading, partly based on the possessive adjective

his preceding heaven, and partly inspired by the story of the Curse of

Babel. Could Browning have meant that all will be well with the world as

long as God is in his heaven - and remains there, far removed from the

world? Maybe he also realised it was time for us, human beings, to take

the initiative in our own hands and start building a better world?

This article is dedicated to the fond memory of my dearly missed colleague,

Jacques Trips, who passed away in December 2014, much too soon.

[21]

SUPERDIVERSITY AS THE RECOGNITION OF THE ORDINARY

MISCHIEVOUS SACRED

Francio Guadeloupe

University of Saint Martin, Sint Maarten

University of the Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Are not all attempts at achieving genuine inter-human recognition

answers to questions of how to live in a world in which we can never be

almighty gods or goddesses? In other words, in a world in which others

continuously upset our mental creations of the way things were, the way

things are, and the way things will be. One could call this the inevitable

interruption of the self-divinizing dream of seeking to make the ought

of our dream worlds, the is of our actual Living! Only when two or more

individuals genuinely meet inter-subjectively due to a life-changing

experience, can an understanding of that which is of ultimate concern

or, said otherwise, that which will be deemed Sacred, emerge. I will

address this question of inter-human recognition by focusing on what

the anthropologist Steven Vertovec has termed superdiversity and

combining this analytical concept with an idiosyncratic rendition of the

Sacred (but then again are not all renditions of the Sacred idiosyncratic!).

Superdiversity is a concept that signals the bewildering multiplicity of

diversities that cannot be captured in the simplified schemata of first

came the postcolonial migrants from Indonesia, Papua, Suriname, and

the Dutch Antilles, with which the Netherlands had colonial ties and then

came the guest workers from Turkey, Morocco, and central and

southern Europethe latter being post-WO II replenishments of older

flows of worker migrants from countries outside of Europe such as the

Chineseboth of whom stayed. What this schema obfuscates is that

there has always been movement of peoples, cultural expressions, and

objects from within and without Europe. These crosspollinations haunt

any assertion of Dutch national homogeneity. Moreover, even those

seemingly emancipating ideologies, such as the feminist movement or

[22]

the workers movement, and national projects of an imagined

homogeneity cognizant of existent heterogeneities, have always been

informed by border crossings. There is no construction of the so-called

soul of a nation or ethnicity prior to the simultaneous construction of

intimate and faraway outsiders.

Coming to terms with superdiversity entails shifting the Dutch (and

wider European) discussion away from multiculturalism and the politico-

ethical question of dealing with racism, as well as from the primarily

secular xenophobia towards Islam that it implicitly engendered. If the

multicultural question is the question of how to deal with ethno-racial

and ethno-religious difference, the super diverse question in my radical

reading of it is how to stimulate the popular experiments of everyday

ethical-political senses of Sameness and the fidelities to these that

continuously render ethno-racialized and ethno-religious understandings

of difference inconsequential. Although these questions resemble each

otherthe multicultural one and the super diverse oneand although

many of us who dare still claim to be radical social democrats may feel an

affinity for both, they are not the same. Multiculturalism thinks the

multiple becoming of individuals (who are then conceived as belonging

to particular ethnic or religious groups, which are regarded as being

equally multiple) in terms of difference. Multiples are implicitly imagined

as a collection of Ones founded on a metaphysics of difference. Ethno-

racial and ethno-religious difference is envisaged either as being an

indestructible presence and a great goodthe leitmotif of identity

politicsor as an absent-presencethe politics of the eternal

differentiation within ethnic and religious Ones encountering each other.

With multiculturalism any talk of human Sameness is suspected of being

simply a device of one of the collection of Ones, or the dominant One. In

the Netherlands, the dominant Ones go by the name of the

autochthons, who wish to turn the other Ones into carbon copies of

themselves (while retaining power).

I would like to invite you to appreciate that with superdiversity, senses of

Sameness are not colonial moves but the outcome of fidelitys to

ultimate concerns, to renditions of the Sacred, born of soul transforming

experiences. This is so because in the case of superdiversity, there is an

[23]

acknowledgement of the multiplicity of diversities within an individual or

groups without having recourse to difference. It is, in the spirit of the

philosopher Alain Badiou, an inconsistent multiplicity, an understanding

of a diverse reality without unifying these multiples in a collection of

Ones (founded on a metaphysics of difference that inevitably

differentiates within). Let me furnish an illustration of a super diverse

outlook: I can see people of Dutch Antillean extraction as inconsistent

multiples having something in common without thinking of them as

having a Dutch Antillean essence that differentiates them from others in

the Netherlands or, in other words, without thinking of them as a One. I

can do so by acknowledging the permanent inconsistency of each

individual that renders any group boundary or homogenous narrative of

Self a guiding fiction. From this follows that everyday political senses of

Sameness can emerge with superdiversity because there are no

collections Ones that pre-exist or are indestructibly grounded on

difference. Sameness is simply the outcome of an event that encourages

the emergence of a new inconsistent multiplicity around a Sacred that

renders older ones obsolete. It is the fidelity of individuals making a life

together and being struck by unforeseen circumstances together that

ruptures the accepted grounds of so called collections of Ones

struggling for power.

If we translate the super diversity question into the multicultural

question without any loss, we will have missed the opportunity to re-

describe our contemporary living in a way that ushers in a new reality.

We will have missed the opportunity to see attempts at achieving

genuine inter-human recognition.

Now the super diversity question awakens us to what I, following the

cues of the theologian Erik Borgman and the anthropologist Richard

Pelton, would like to call the workings of Ordinary Mischievous Sacred in

the Netherlands. The super diversity question can lead us to recognize

how the Ordinary call it the profane and the Sacred call it the

holy are bound together by the Mischievous call it the ambiguity

element. Allow me to invite you to appreciate this point by furnishing an

illustration of what I consider a universalizing tendency in the super

[24]

diverse urbanities in the Netherlands: womens conversations about man

troubles in relation to the occult.

The infidelity of men and the belief in each others spirits and occult

traditions as an explanation for this behavior are the unforeseen threads

used to weave provisional seams of Sameness among women of

different ilk. A new inconsistent multiplicity is born rendering older ones

less important. I want to invite you to recognize with me that these

provisional seams of Sameness are answers to the super diversity

question. It is these forever unfinished experiments of everyday ethical-

political Sameness that ought to be occupying us as academics, public

intellectuals, artists, policy makers, social workers, and activists

struggling to exorcize racism and other modes of xenophobia out of

existence. These unfinished experiments are expressions of the Ordinary

Mischievous Sacred at work.

I came to this understanding of super diversity by witnessing how

provisional seams of Sameness are spun in the home of Ingrid, a 41 year

old homemaker, who was born in the Netherlands and lives in the low

income neighborhood of the Eeuwsels in the city of Helmond. She works

in the field of home care nursing for the elderly and lives together with

Wensely, who began his life on the island of Curaao. Wensely works as a

mechanic at the DAF factory in Eindhoven. I followed Ingrid and Wensely

for two years as part of my anthropological research on the politics of

belonging in the Netherlands.

An important method was doing what my interlocutors did. A way of

narrowing the gap between the way people live their life and the way

they explain it to temporary outsiders such as me.

Many afternoons Ingrid and I watched Oprah Winfrey together. She was

a big fan and according to her Oprah had taught her more than all the

schoolteachers she had had after leaving a school of domestic science.

Oprah had also taught her to be honest, loving, and accepting of people

regardless of their ethno-racial or ethno-religious differences. She told

me she used to be a straatmeid/a ghetto chick, but now she was a lady.

Thanks to Oprah.

[25]

Try as I may, at first I could not detect how Oprah had rubbed off on her.

Oprah is a debonair, well-spoken jet set. Ingrid was loud-mouthed and

had no qualms uttering the crudest of profanities to anyone who rubbed

her the wrong way. Oprah and Ingrid had nothing in common.

Then I saw it! The connection was the Ordinary Mischievous Sacred.

Let me elaborate.

One Friday afternoon Ingrid had invited her friends Diana and Husne

over to drink cheap wine and talk about the troubles she had been

having with her man Wensely. She simply could not understand why he

was not having sex with her anymore, and why he was threatening to

leave her for another. It made no sense. She was after all, in her own

estimation, all Wensely needed. She was perfect. She habitually goes

under the tanning machine he bought her to keep that bronze color that

turns him on and reminds him of the Curaao sun. She takes good care of

their daughter and cooks the Dutch Caribbean dishes he likes so much.

Wenseleys mother and the rest of the family love her. She has been to

the island several times to meet them. She was perfect! Wensely was a

konio, a sinvergenza/an asshole, a good for nothing.

In her self-scrutiny, Ingrid felt she had no faults, except that she loves to

smoke shags (which Wensley detests) and is an expert in profanities

(which Wensley also detests). Yes, Wensely and she have terrible fights,

and, yes, he has more than once caught her flirting with another man

and, yes, she has threatened several times to leave him, but that did not

give him any right to leave her for what she termed some Dutch

Antillean bitch that surely was less of a woman than she is. Wensely said

he needed time and that he wanted someone of his own culture. Culture

my ass! She knew Wensely and Dutch Antillean men: they do not

discriminate when it comes to kut/cunt. There had to be more behind

this, since the girl Wensely was leaving her for was not as beautiful as

she is. Wensely occasionally had affairs, but he had always come back

home; especially when she threatened to do the same. She knew there

had to be more to this situation since Wensely was not sleeping with her

anymore, and that was not like him. Wensely never refused her, not even

when he was tired and she knew he had been out fooling around. There

had to be more. Ingrid was heartbroken.

[26]

Her friends Diana and Husne, of Surinamese and Turkish extraction,

asked her to consider the supernatural. They recalled personal

experiences and those of family and acquaintances. All these anecdotes

and stories were combined into a meta-story: mens infidelity was

increasingly being caused by unscrupulous women using spiritual means.

As they spoke and exchanged views, I was witness to the weaving of

senses Sameness beyond ethnic boundaries by way of the esoteric.

Bakroes, Djins, Jumbies and Klop Geesten (extra-human creatures for

respectively Surinamese, Islamic, Caribbean, and native Dutch

extraction) began to be likened and linked to one another. Ingrid, Diana,

and Husne spoke about how hair, finger nails, Wenselys underwear, a

photograph on Facebook, and even an audio recording of his voice could

be used to bewitch him. How his mistress may have put something in his

food. How she may have rubbed a special lotion on her let us call it her

money maker to hook Wensely to her. It was decided that she had to

ask God to help her and that she should see a bonuman/a specialist in

Afro-Caribbean Obeah. However, before that, Husne would contact her

family in Turkey because there lived an Imam that was specialized in

these kinds of love matters. He would reverse the spell and if she was

willing to pay extra, he could send a spell to the bitch that would make

her never think again about taking someone elses man in that way. The

first thing was to go to Rotterdam to one of those special tokos to buy a

special lotion for Ingrid, which she then had to give to Wensely like she

had done the first time. She smiled and recalled that he had unthinkingly

said, Ik wist niet dat Nederlanders konden neuken zoals Antillianen/I did

not know that native Dutch could fuck like Antilleans. Ingrid got up from

her chair and gyrated like the women in a video clip of the Jamaican

dancehall artist Beenie Man. Yes, she was taking back her man, and

Husne and Diana vowed to help. The new Sacred was for women to

unite beyond cultural and religious boundaries to fight off this threat.

The supernatural had to be fought with the supernatural. By any means

necessary. The future belonged to good women.

Sadness gave way to laughter as the wine worked its wonders and the

topic of other men arose. If Wensely could fool around, so could Ingrid,

too. Husne asked Ingrid about a particular guy whom she had met at one

[27]

of the Salsa parties and she had frequent telephone contact with.

Perhaps, now was the time to plan a secret date. Ingrid gave Husne the

eye that such could not be spoken about in my presence. At least not

today! Today, she was a good woman who was losing her man. Such was

the script.

I pretended not to notice the mischievous But I did. Here was a clear

example of the Ordinary Mischievous Sacred.

And as the women laughed, I became aware of the fact that there

were five of us in the room. Oprah was key. Oprah is not solely Oprah.

Only a mind open to seduction, unfriendly to exclusivist secular realism

epitomized in dominant renditions of the human sciences

recognizes his/her/its presence in our Dutch metropolises where such

esoteric expressions of super diversity have become plain; habitual;

ordinary. So Ordinary, in fact, that few discern his/her/its Sacred

eminence radiating and doing his/her/its Mischievous dance within and

around us.

Who was he/she/it? It was none other than Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny, el

conejo de la suerte, the rabbit who every child knows stole Lady

Fortunas heart. Bugs Bunny, the slick, sly, and slim, good-bad rabbit that

made the mighty hunter Elmo armed with his rifle and all the modern

creature comforts seem like a dunce. Yes, Bugs Bunny, one of the secret

weapons of North American Cultural Imperialism, the converter of

children in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe into

wannabe Yankee doodles.

Today, Bugs Bunny was showing me a side of himself/herself/itself that I

did not know. As we were speaking, s/he was doing his/her stuff on the

cartoon network TV channel. Suddenly, my mind saw in him/her Compa

Nanzi, and from Nanzi s/he morphed into Legba, into Exu, into La

Fontaines fox, and finally into Oprah Winfrey. Yes, today Bugs Bunny

was playing Oprah. Oprah, the champion of ordinary women the world

over. Oprah, the ordinary womans friend. Oprah, the one who

understands the everyday plight of working class women despite her jets

and limousines and cribs, the urban lingo for mansions. Oprah she is just

like us!

[28]

Oprah who never forgot to remind us to show reverence to the power of

the unseen that touches us. Oprah, who, deep down, we know is good-

bad, but we still like. Was Bugs Bunnys impersonation not a revelation

that Oprah was one of his/her imitators! Was she not One of those

tricksters who danced the Ordinary Mischievous Sacred dance of life

reminding us that those ethno-racial and ethno-religious differences

which we are so hooked on should not make a hell of a difference? And

were not Ingrid, Diana, Husne, and myself enactors and producers of the

Ordinary Mischievous Sacred? Fallible creatures. Good-bad, and,

therefore, simply ordinary.

Perhaps, you, the reader of this piece, care to join this ethical-political

dance beyond Manichean renditions of ethics and politics, which

hopefully may, one day, lead to genuine inter-human recognition.

[29]

SAINT PETERSBURG IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Liesbeth Spanjers

University College Leuven-Limburg, Belgium

In memoriam Jaak Trips

In remembrance of Jaak, an appreciated and appreciating

colleague, who passionately collected the world literature,

extended his house for his expanding collection, enjoyed

reading in his library, and loved to talk about the books which

he read. Jaak and I discussed a few Russian novels, and we

agreed to discuss some more. Unfortunately, that did not take

place. That is why I would like to share my thoughts on the

topic of SaintPetersburg in Russian literature posthumously.

Saint Petersburg, the city founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as a

window towards the West, is known for its planned construction, its

Western look, and the beauty of its palaces. It is a popular destination for

tourists who like to visit the Hermitage, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the

Palace Square, the canals, the parks, and many more. The Russian capital

since Peter the Greats reign until communism was built in unfavorable

conditions. First of all, it is a swampy, misty, humid place full of

mosquitoes. The air is damp, the winters are very cold. So many laborers,

forced to work on the construction sites, died. Russians often say that

the city is built on the laborers bones.

The idea of the beautiful, powerful, but inhumane city of

SaintPetersburg can also be found in Russian literature. This dualism will

be illustrated in Pushkins Eugene Onegin and The Bronze

Horseman, Gogols The Portrait, and Dostoevskys Crime and

punishment. The plots of all these stories are staged in SaintPetersburg.

[30]

Alexander SergeyevichPushkin(1799-1837), considered to be the founder

of Russian literature and modern language, poet and prosaic, wrote the

novel in verse Eugene Onegin, which takes place partly in

SaintPetersburg and which has been musicalized by Tchaikovsky. In this

work, the dualism (beauty inhumanity) cannot be found yet. In The

Bronze Horseman, a narrative poem, pity for the little man (again an

Eugene) is opposed to the power of the beautiful city.

EUGENE ONEGIN

Eugene Onegin, born in an impoverished noble family, leads a life full of

intrigues and pleasure in SaintPetersburg. This life makes him somber,

depressed. He moves to the province, where he meets Lensky,

aneighbour. Lensky is in love with Olga. Her thoughtful sister Tatyana

falls in love with Eugene, but he turns her down.During a birthday party,

Eugene wants to make Lensky jealous, and he tries to get Olgas

attention. After the deadly duel with Lensky, Eugene leaves the

province. Three years later, he meets Tatyana again, who is then married

to a general and living in Moscow. This time, he falls in love with her, and

she rejects him because she belongs to her husband. The novel ends

with Eugene in despair.

In the first chapter, verses 35, 37-38, the main character, Eugene, is

introduced. He is a snob, and nothing really impresses him.

SaintPetersburg is depicted as the center of the country where it all

happens.It is the city of the balls, the parties, the drinks, food and

women. But all that is boring in the eyes of Eugene.

XXXV

His malady, whose cause I ween

It now to investigate is time,

Was nothing but the British spleen

Transported to our Russian clime.

It gradually possessed his mind;

Though, God be praised! he ne'er designed

To slay himself with blade or ball,

[31]

Indifferent he became to all,

And like Childe Harold gloomily

He to the festival repairs,

Nor boston nor the world's affairs

Nor tender glance nor amorous sigh

Impressed him in the least degree,

Callous to all he seemed to be.

XXXVII

And you, my youthful damsels fair,

Whom latterly one often meets

Urging your droshkies swift as air

Along Saint Petersburg's paved streets,

From you too Eugene took to flight,

Abandoning insane delight,

And isolated from all men,

Yawning betook him to a pen.

He thought to write, but labour long

Inspired him with disgust and so

Nought from his pen did ever flow,

And thus he never fell among

That vicious set whom I don't blame

Because a member I became.

XXXVIII

Once more to idleness consigned,

He felt the laudable desire

From mere vacuity of mind

The wit of others to acquire.

A case of books he doth obtain

[32]

He reads at random, reads in vain.

This nonsense, that dishonest seems,

This wicked, that absurd he deems,

All are constrained and fetters bear,

Antiquity no pleasure gave,

The moderns of the ancients rave

Books he abandoned like the fair,

His book-shelf instantly doth drape

With taffety instead of crape.

(Pushkin, 2007)

THE BRONZE HORSEMAN

In the narrative poem titled The Bronze Horesemen, Eugene is a poor

resident of SaintPetersburg. He lives a very ordinary life. He is in love

with Parasha, a widows daughter. Parasha and her mother are living

close to the water. When the 1824 floods demolish their house, they

drown. Eugene goes crazy. One night as he is walking along the bronze

horseman, which is the statue of Peter the Great (on Senatskaia Square),

he threatens the statue because he blames Peter the Great guilty for his

misery; after all, it was Peter who built the city too close to the sea.

Afterwards, it seems to Eugene that the bronze horseman is angry with

him and chases after him on his horse. Is it true or is it just a hallucination

of a tormented person? A few months later Eugene also dies.

In the introduction, Pushkin describes SaintPetersburg in all its glory,

beauty, and power. The last six lines of the introduction form the

transition towards the story of Eugenes pitiful fate. The fate of the little

man Eugene symbolizes the inhumanity of the city. He loses his beloved

one and goes crazy because he is at the mercy of the city and the water.

Dis the statue of Peter the Great really chase after Eugene? Or was it all a

mere hallucination? In SaintPetersburg, nothing is what it seems.

INTRODUCTION

[33]

I love thee, city of Peter's making;

I love thy harmonies austere,

And Neva's sovran waters breaking

Along her banks of granite sheer;

Thy traceried iron gates; thy sparkling,

Yet moouless, meditative gloom

And thy transparent twilight darkling;

And when I write within my room

Or lampless, read--then, sunk in slumber,

The empty thoroughfares, past number,

Are piled, stand clear upon the night;

The Admiralty spire is bright;

Nor may the darkness mount, to smother

The golden cloudland of the light,

For soon one dawn succeeds another

With barely half-an-hour of night.

I love thy ruthless winter, lowering

With bitter frost and windless air;

The sledges along Neva scouring;

Girls' cheeks--no rose so bright and fair!

The flash and noise of balls, the chatter;

The bachelor's hour of feasting, too;

The cups that foam and hiss and spatter,

The punch that in the bowl burns blue.

I love the warlike animation

On playing-fields of Mars; to see

The troops of foot and horse in station,

And their superb monotony;

Their ordered, undulating muster;

Flags, tattered on the glorious day;

[34]

Those brazen helmets in their luster

Shot through and riddled in the fray.

I love thee, city of soldiers, blowing

Smoke from thy forts; thy booming gun;

-- Northern empress is bestowing

Upon the royal house a son!

Or when, another battle won,

Proud Russia holds her celebration;

Or when the Neva breaking free

Her dark-blue ice bears out to sea

And scents the spring, in exultation.

Now, city of Peter, stand thou fast,

Foursquare, like Russia; vaunt thy splendor!

The very element shall surrender

And make her peace with thee at last.

Their ancient bondage and their rancors

The Finnish waves shall bury deep

Nor vex with idle spite that cankers

Our Peter's everlasting sleep!

There was a dreadful time, we keep

Still freshly on our memories painted;

And you, my friends, shall be acquainted

By me, with all that history:

A grievous record it will be.

PART ONE

And Neva with her boisterous billow

Splashed on her shapely bounding-wall

[35]

And tossed in restless rise and fall

Like a sick man upon his pillow.

'Twas late, and dark had fallen; the rain

Beat fiercely on the windowpane;

A wind that howled and wailed was blowing.

'Twas then that young Yevgeny came

Home from a party--I am going

To call our hero by that name,

For it sounds pleasing, and moreover

My pen once liked it--why discover

The needless surname?--True, it may

Have been illustrious in past ages,

--Rung, through tradition, in the pages

Of Karamzin; and yet, today

That name is never recollected,

By Rumor and the World rejected.

Our hero--somewhere--served the State;

He shunned the presence of the great;

Lived in Kolomna; for the fate

Cared not of forbears dead and rotten,

Or antique matters long forgotten.

So, home Yevgeny came, and tossed

His cloak aside; undressed; and sinking

Sleepless upon his bed, was lost

In sundry meditations--thinking

Of what?--How poor he was; how pain

And toil might some day hope to gain

An honored, free, assured position;

How God, it might be, in addition

Would grant him better brains and pay.

[36]

Such idle folk there were, and they,

Lucky and lazy, not too brightly

Gifted, lived easily and lightly;

And he--was only in his second

Year at the desk. He further reckoned

That still the ugly weather held;

That still the river swelled and swelled;

That almost now from Neva's eddy

The bridges had been moved already;

That from Parasha he must be

Parted for some two days, or three.

And all that night, he lay, so dreaming,

And wishing sadly that the gale

Would bate its melancholy screaming

And that the rain would not assail

The glass so fiercely.... But sleep closes

His eyes at last, and he reposes.

But see, the mists of that rough night

Thin out, and the pale day grows bright;

That dreadful day!--For Neva, leaping

Seaward all night against the blast

Was beaten in the strife at last,

Against the frantic tempest sweeping;

And on her banks at break of day. (Lednicki, 1955)

THE PORTRAIT

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852) is considered to be the first

important Russian / Ukrainian prosaic of the 19th century. He was born in

[37]

the Ukraine but knew Saint Petersburg well as he was a professor of

medieval history at the local university.

The portrait is the story of a poor, young artist, Andrey

PetrovichChartkov. He discovers a very realistic portrait in an art shop

and feels that he must buy it. The painting looks magical to him. It

presents him with a dilemma. Will he either struggle to find his own path

in life based on his talents or will he accept the help of the magical

painting to conquer wealth and fame? He chooses the last option, but

when he sees another portrait of a different artist, he understands that

he has made the wrong choice. He then dies from a fever.

In the story The Portrait, Gogol brings civil servants and poor people

on the stage, which was unseen until then in Russian literature, and he

describes them and their ordinary lives with humor. The Portrait is

staged in Saint Petersburg. In Gogols stories,the city is the place where

strange encounters and enigmatic adventures happen to its citizens. It is

there that citizens perish. Like in The Bronze Horseman, the city

overpowers the little man. However, Gogol, unlike Pushkin in The

Bronze Horseman, shows the citys vulgarity and banality rather than its

beauty.

In part two, Chartkov starts telling a story to the audience during an

auction. He describes Kolomna, a disctrict in SaintPetersburg.

"You know that portion of the city which is called

Kolomna," he began. "There everything is unlike anything

else in St. Petersburg. Retired officials remove thither to

live; widows; people not very well off, who have

acquaintances in the senate, and therefore condemn

themselves to this for nearly the whole of their lives; and,

in short, that whole list of people who can be described

by the words ash-coloured--people whose garments,

faces, hair, eyes, have a sort of ashy surface, like a day

when there is in the sky neither cloud nor sun. Among

them may be retired actors, retired titular councillors,

retired sons of Mars, with ruined eyes and swollen lips.

[38]

"Life in Kolomna is terribly dull: rarely does a carriage

appear, except, perhaps, one containing an actor, which

disturbs the universal stillness by its rumble, noise, and

jingling. You can get lodgings for five rubles a month,

coffee in the morning included. Widows with pensions

are the most aristocratic families there; they conduct

themselves well, sweep their rooms often, chatter with

their friends about the dearness of beef and cabbage,

and frequently have a young daughter, a taciturn, quiet,

sometimes pretty creature; an ugly dog, and wall-clocks

which strike in a melancholy fashion. Then come the

actors whose salaries do not permit them to desert

Kolomna, an independent folk, living, like all artists, for

pleasure. They sit in their dressing-gowns, cleaning their

pistols, gluing together all sorts of things out of

cardboard, playing draughts and cards with any friend

who chances to drop in, and so pass away the morning,

doing pretty nearly the same in the evening, with the

addition of punch now and then. After these great people

and aristocracy of Kolomna, come the rank and file. It is

as difficult to put a name to them as to remember the

multitude of insects which breed in stale vinegar. There

are old women who get drunk, who make a living by

incomprehensible means, like ants, dragging old clothes

and rags from the Kalinkin Bridge to the old clothes-mart,

in order to sell them for fifteen kopeks--in short, the very

dregs of mankind, whose conditions no beneficent,

political economist has devised any means of

ameliorating.(Gogol, 2011)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), author of Crime and

Punishment, is a Russian novelist, author of short stories, essayist,

journalist and philosopher.

[39]

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky starts off with the idea of the

existence of a kind of bermensch. Raskolnikov, the main character,

suggests that some people are so good that laws made by average

people do not apply to them.

In this novel, Dostoyevski shows the city of the poor as a gloomy place

where hope vanishes. SaintPetersburg despises ordinary people. It is a

city of bureaucracy and banality.

In the first chapter of the first part, the main character, Raskolnikov, is

introduced. The weather conditions of the city have an influence on the

behavior of Raskolnikov. Again and throughout the novel,

SaintPetersburg has power over its citizens.

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness,

the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all

about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar

to all who are unable to get out of town in summerall

worked painfully upon the young mans already

overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the

pothouses, which are particularly numerous in that part

of the town, and the drunken men whom he met

continually, although it was a working day, completed the

revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the

profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young

mans refined face. (Dostoevsky, 2006)

Concluding observation

The three examples dealt with in this contribution show that the theme

of the inhumane city that crashes its citizens is typical for Russian

literature about Saint Petersburg. Furthermore, Saint Petersburgs role

in Russian literature continued during the Soviet period. Most

remarkable is Anna AkhmatovasPoem Without a Hero about the fate

of the individual in the 20th century.

[40]

Bibliography

Dostoevsky, F. M. (2006, March 28). Retrieved from Crime and Punishment:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm

Gogol, N. V. (2011). Retrieved from The Portrait:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1045/

Lednicki, W. (1955). Pushkin's Bronze Horseman. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pushkin, A. S. (2007, December 27). Retrieved from Eugene Onegin:

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23997/pg23997.html

[41]

THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORY

Dima Bou Mosleh

University College Leuven-Limburg, Belgium

The production of history is a long standing art. Many historians, like

artists, paint their way through the past and into the future. What comes

on the way and how the events are being translated and represented

depends on the historians talent. They explore the past in order to find

out what men did and thought in the past (Becker, 1955), thus

establishing the facts of history. According to the American historian Carl

Becker, historians need only to deal with records and establish some

facts. But, at the same time, historians need to acknowledge that the

meaning and significance of a historical fact is difficult to agree upon

because the series of events in which it has a place cannot be enacted

again and again, in order to see what effect the variations would have

(Becker, 1955, p. 336). This implies that historians need to repeatedly use

their judgment in studying the significance of a set of events that took

place once at a certain moment and will never be repeated. Since the

records are incomplete and inadequate, this history will not be

completely known or confirmed (Becker, 1955, p. 336). Thus, into the

imagined facts and their meaning there enters the personal equation

(Becker, 1955, p. 336). The history of any happening is perceived

differently by different individuals and generations; every generation

writes about the same history in a different way and puts upon it a

different production (Becker, 1955). Each production of history represent

somewhat altered or fundamentally divergent attempts at restating the

past.

According to Becker (1955), the reason for the differences in how

different generations imagine the same event are determined by two

things: (1) by the actual event itself insofar as we can know something

about it; and (2) by our own current purposes, needs, presuppositions,

[42]

and biases all of which enter into the process of knowing it (Becker,

1955, p.336),i.e. knowing a given past event. Therefore, it is not only the

event that contributes to our imagined frame, but the mind capturing

this imagined frame does too (Becker, 1955, p. 337). This way, the

present influences our idea of the past, and, inversely, our idea of the

past influences the present. So we may say that the present is the

product of all the past (Becker, 1955, p. 337). However, what is history

writing? Is it objective and do historians show what actually happened?

According to Leopold von Ranke, the historian has been assigned the

office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of

future ages (Evans, 2001). Thus, the task of historians would be to show

what has happened; the German phrase that Ranke used

Wieeseigentlichgewesen - was translated in Evans writing as how it

essentially was. However, this was a misunderstanding; for Ranke, it

meant understanding the inner being of the past and not merely

collecting facts (Evan, 2001, p.9). Rankes confidence in historical facts

would at times be challenged by the realization that even though history

may be stuffed with facts, history writing is more than just mute and

dead events. Writing implies narrating, which brings the discussion into

the area of rhetoric.

The rhetoric of history focuses on the tropes, arguments, and other

means of language used to write history and to persuade audiences.

Some of the literature identifies rhetoric too closely with the pleasing

and seductive arts of fiction with tropes, with narrative, with the

multiple meanings of poetry (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey, 1987, p.221).

Moreover, rhetoric is not restricted to tropes and narratives: it is the art

of persuasion to attain things with words. Neither is it restricted to

individual illumination in the archives (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey, 1987,

p.221). Hence, the writing of history entails making use of language and

logic to sustain an argument. Nevertheless, not many historians

acknowledge the fact that their writing is rhetorical, and this has to do

with the decline of classical civilization. To many, rhetoric comes from

the mouths of bad politicians (heated rhetoric) or from our enemies

(mere rhetoric) (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey, 1987, p.222), not from the

mouth of historians! This way, by assuming that history writing is an

[43]

objective enterprise, people often lose sight of the fact that history

writing is built on argumentation and persuasion. They prefer to think

that history is written like scientists write their lab reports (Nelson,

Megill, McCloskey, 1987). In their opinion, the information which

historians use is found in archives, and their job is merely to cast it into

reports. Hence, they presume that history writing is more solid than

philosophy, which makes use of argumentation and persuasion. From

this perspective, a comparison can be made between the solid scientific

knowledge and the solid objective historiography found in archivism; by

this we mean the tendency of the historian to think that the most

important relation is not with the readers, the times, or the questions,

but with the archives with what the historian misleadingly calls the

sources of history (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey, 1987, p.222-223).

However important archives may be to history writing, Megill and

McCloskey have given several examples showing that the sources of

historians work are found everywhere and are not limited to the

archives. It is the present problems that give material to historians for

their writings. Such issues are related to the work of historians, and

many others like the womens movement which created a totally new

field (Nelson, Megill, McCloskey, 1987, p.221). Therefore, it is important

to explore the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of history writing. This

I shall do by highlighting some thoughts from the works of Paul Veyne,

Hayden White, and Michel de Certeau.

Paul Veyne affirms that history remains fundamentally an account, and

what is called explanation is nothing but the way in which the account is

arranged in a comprehensible plot (Veyne, 1984; White, 1973; De

Certeau, 1988). He contends that there is no scientific meaning in

historical explanations; they are pure unfoldings of a certain plot to

make it understandable. Veyne believes, therefore, that the historical

explanation is entirely sublunary and not scientific at all (Veyne, 1984,

p. 88). Hence, he prefers to describe it as comprehension instead. In

addition, the intentions of the actors need not be forgotten since history

writing includes deliberation. Consequently, the world of history is

accompanied by liberty, chance, causes, and ends, as opposed to the

world of science, which knows only laws (Veyne, 1984, p. 89).

[44]

Hayden White highlights the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of

history by identifying the deep structural forms of the historical

imagination including the four figures of classical rhetoric: metaphor,

metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (1973, p. ix). White addresses the

issue through the historical mindfulness of nineteenth-century Europe.

He focuses on the problem of historical knowledge by presenting an

explanation of the growth of historical thinking during a specific period

of its development and a general theory of the structure of historical

thinking (1973, p. 1). Several questions were debated throughout the

nineteenth century about the meaning of thinking historically and the

method of historical inquiry. However, in the twentieth century, there

was doubt about the possibility of finding answers to these questions.

White used continental European thinkers such as Heidegger and

Foucault, who had cast serious doubts on the value of a specifically

historical consciousness, stressed the fictive character of historical

reconstructions, and challenged historys claims to a place among the

sciences (1973, p. 1-2). He also referred to Anglo-American philosophers

who had written several works on the epistemological status and

cultural function of historical thinking. When such literature is taken as a

whole, it justifies serious doubts about historys status as either a

rigorous science or a genuine art (1973, p.2). It was, therefore,

conceivable to interpret historical consciousness as a specifically

Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern,

industrial society can be retroactively substantiated (White, 1973, p. 2).

Michel de Certeau believes that the historical discourse claims to

provide a true content but in the form of a narration (1988, p. 93). De

Certeau states that when we think of history as an operation, we

understand its relation to a place (institution), analytical procedures

(discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature) (1988, 57). In

other words, writing history is a function of an institution, which

naturally demands both the obeisance to rules and the interrogation of

those very rules (De Certeau, 1988, p. 57). Thus, history writing is ruled

by constraints, bound to privileges, and rooted in a particular situation

(De Certeau, 1988, p. 58). The scientific process should not be alienated

from the social body. Consequently, as also Jrgen Habermas has

[45]

argued, there is a real need to repoliticalize the discourse in history. In

other words, the discourse should never be analyzed as being separate

from its discipline (De Certeau, 1988). A historical text is always a

product of a discipline and expresses an operation which is situated

within a totality of practices (De Certeau, 1988, p. 64).

In conclusion, the realization has been growing among historians and

philosophers of history that history writers do more than merely find

historical facts. In fact, they also imagine a history (or several

alternative histories) in light of a historiographical institution with its

own rules and judges. This new awareness has led to a crisis in the

discipline that (re-)writes history and has also had an impact on other

disciplines for which the past is an important factor (e.g. theology and

religious law).

References

Becker, C. L. (1955). What are historical facts? In The Western Political Quarterly, 8(3), 327-

340.

De Certeau, M. (1988). The writing of history. (translated by T. Conley.). New York: Columbia

University Press. (Original work published 1975).

Evans, R. J. (2001). In defence of history. History extension stage 6: Source book of

readings. Sydney: Board of Studies NSW. Retrieved from Board of Studies website:

http://www.board ofstudies.nsw.edu.au (Accessed on 10 February 2014).

Nelson, J. S., Megill, A., & McCloskey, D. N. (Eds.). (1987). The rhetoric of the human

sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs. University of Wisconsin

Press. p. 221.

Veyne, P. (1984; 1971). Writing history: essay on epistemology. (M. Moore-Rinvolucri,

Trans.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

White, H. (1973). Metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

[46]

EDUCATIONAL MODERNIZATION IN IRAN

AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Mitra Madani

KU Leuven, Belgium

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth

- Diogenes

ABSTRACT

This paper is a comparative analysis of educational

modernization in Iran and the Ottoman Empire from mid-

19th century to the first decade of 20th century as this

period is historically significant for both countries. The

focus will be more on the primary level education, but the

indirect role of institutions of higher learning in promoting

public elementary education will be discussed when

needed.

The objective is to partially fill the gap in scholarship of

educational reform in this part of the world and also to

contribute to the histories of education by addressing the

functionalistic changes of institutions of knowledge in both

countries.

A brief literature review and document analysis will allow

us to see the simultaneity of the educational experiences in

two Muslim countries across a large geographic area that

contained such a multitude of ethnic groups and religious

minorities.

Keywords: Education, Iran, historical, curriculum, reform

[47]

INTRODUCTION

The industrial revolution in Europe in late 18th century brought about

rapid progress in all fields of science, newer and faster methods of

communication, expansion of commerce and modernization of military

that in turn necessitated not only a fundamental overhaul and

modernization of the existing infrastructures in the army, government

and in turn the education system but also affected the aims of education

and states involvement in many countries.

In early 19th century, both the Ottoman Empire and Iran were financially

bankrupt due to constant warfare. This was mostly due to European

expansionism and in part to internal conflicts in the countries.Both

countries became embroiled in wars with the Russian Empire and lost

vast parts of their territories. The Ottomans had to abandon their claim

to the territories north of the Danube River and Crimea in favor of Russia

in 1774.

Iran too became a crucial site for the Anglo-Russian rivalry (Balaghi,

n.d.) due to its geopolitical importance. The Russo-Persian wars of 1813

and 1826 had disastrous results. According to the treaties of Gulistan in

1813 and Turkemanchay in 1828, Iran lost its Caucasian territories

(Tavakoli-Targhi, 2001).

These significant losses made both states realize that to safeguard their

territorial integrity, modern technologies, and military reform were of

utmost importance. To develop the same circumstances that had

enabled Europeans to become so powerful in a relatively short period of

time, the states needed to modernize the instruments of central

administration and the military.To realize this goal, a new educational

system was needed to replace the traditional one with its traditional

emphasis on religious content. Thus, in 19th century both countries

beheld a great reform movement that was to give rise to a modern

society in all aspects of life.

EDUCATIONAL REFORMS

The aim of the educational reform in both countries was to supply a class

of educated officers for the army and a cadre of civil servants for the

[48]

government as a means of administrative centralization. However, it

soon became apparent that modernizing the army necessitated much

more comprehensive changes in the government apparatuses.

Both states realized that educational reform and the establishment of

European style schools were essential for success in this regard. The first

step in this process was sending more students to Europe and hiring

foreign advisors to supervise the reforms at home. These students and

others who were later sent to France played a significant role in

introducing modern sciences and European political thought in Iran

which contributed to the success of the constitutional revolution of