Brad West

Dialogical Memorialization, International Travel and the Public Sphere: A Cultural Sociology of Commemoration and Tourism at the First World War Gallipoli Battlefields

As part of a larger ethnographic research project, this article analyses the history of memorialization on the First World War Gallipoli battlefields and its relationship with international travel and tourism. It contrasts the original Australian and New Zealand memorialization on the site with Turkish memorials constructed there in the late 20th century, a significant proportion of which are characterized by direct symbolic recognition of the ‘other’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writings on referential discourses I refer to these as being dialogical. At Gallipoli this dialogical memorialization facilitated the rise of Australian tourism to the battlefields by allowing for a cosmopolitan reimagining of the military campaign, which included emphasizing extraordinary cases of humanity and framing soldiers as tourists. A cultural sociology of the public sphere is proposed as a way of comprehending such tourism, one that avoids assumptions about the severing of meaningful cultural ties with the events and institutions of modernity.

Pedagogy beyond the culture wars: De-differentiation and the use of technology and popular culture in undergraduate sociology teaching

In recent decades there have been various calls for a pedagogical revolution in universities to address a new technology-savvy generation of students. These developments have been met with concern about the postmodern relativizing of educational achievement and accusations of the ‘dumbing down’ of course content. Moving beyond such culture war divisions between orthodox and progressive worldviews, this article outlines how reference to popular culture and utilization of its styles can result in student re-engagement with traditional learning materials and formats. Drawing on focus group interviews with students from an introductory sociology class that incorporated a specifically designed DVD, we outline the individual and societal benefits of a de-differentiated pedagogy that combines traditional rationalist education with more playful forms of learning that directly link with students’ life-worlds.

National humanitarianism and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami elicited the largest international humanitarian response of any disaster in history, yet comparatively little research has examined the way the disaster agent and the ensuing fundraising have been culturally framed in Western societies. While scholars have speculated that the humanitarian reaction is a response related to the capturing and distribution of the disaster through digital media, this paper focuses on the discursive meaning-making of the crisis as it appeared in a single national public sphere. From an analysis of articles in major Australian newspapers, the study finds that the tsunami discourses of risk, suffering, government aid and public charity were constructed in terms of Australian symbolic boundaries and national sentiment. Existing literature on humanitarian communication provides insights into this media portrayal; however, to more fully comprehend the ways in which national discourse can mobilise populations in responding generously to global catastrophes we propose the concept of national humanitarianism.

Historical re-enacting and affective authority: performing the American Civil War

Drawing on historical materials, manuals and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the performative dimensions of American Civil War battle re-enacting. Unlike traditional leisure-based national rituals such as public holidays and days of remembrance, it is argued that the main political power of this re-enactment rite is not social integration of the group or selective portrayal of history but providing participants with certain moods and motivations that result in subsequent activism. This principally occurs through secondary performances where re-enactors voluntarily give talks and demonstrations at museums and schools where they propagate literal understandings of history and challenge the popular belief that the war was fought over slavery. While social theory has highlighted the role of leisure within new social movements, this has typically been orientated to political progressivism. In contrast, Civil War re-enacting provides insights into the significance of play for political orthodoxy.

Towards a strong program in the sociology of war, the military and civil society:

In this article we make the case for a strong program of sociological research into war, the military and their symmetry with civil society, pointing to the ways in which sociology has failed to appreciate their relationship as a central feature of modernity. We particularly emphasize the need for a multi-dimensional comprehension of militarization and the relationships between representation, belief and action in conflict and post-conflict environments. We conclude that a strong sociology of the war and the military requires a greater appreciation of the influence of organized state violence on the shaping of contemporary social relations, breaking with weak traditions that only comprehend the significance of military institutions and warfare through analysing capital and other material and political forces.

War memory, national attachment and generational identity in Australia

In this article we use a module from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007 to analyse how particular events in history resonate with Australians. We emphasize three significant findings: (1) evidence of a strong level of attachment to the world wars and an equivalent significance given to the terrorist events of 9/11 and the 2002 Bali bombings, with far less importance given to other event types; (2) a surprisingly weak correlation between the experience of events in adolescence and the assigning of historical significance; (3) indication that both closeness to the nation and a strong sense of worldliness is important in explaining attachment to the past. Overall the data challenge recent theories of postmodern memory and a range of survey results that supports Mannheim’s cohort theory. Instead, we point to the resilience of historical events to remain culturally significant, particularly through the emergence of a cosmopolitan collective memory.

Towards a Cultural Sociology of Re-Enchantment

This opening chapter explores the role of ritual in rejuvenating national attachment in an increasingly plural and global world. While the chapter draws on cultural sociology to provide a critique of postmodern assumptions about the death of the nation, it agrees that the second half of the twentieth century has seen a general demise in the West of the symbolic power of national historical narratives. The thesis forwarded in the chapter, however, differs from postmodernist scholarship in challenging the assumption that this cultural malaise will inevitably continue. It does this by introducing the idea of national re-enchantment and by outlining how this is facilitated by various new forms of national ritual that are broadly consistent with the highly aestheticized capitalism. Such cases highlight a type of globalization that is not antithetical to the nation but which encourage a counter-shift in national identities.

The Power of Ritual and the Future of the Nation

This chapter summarises the relationship between national re-enchantment and four new national ritual forms: international civil religious pilgrimage, recreational re-enactment, dialogical crisis and national humanitarianism. In doing so it points to the ways in which the study of these rites advance the sociological study of national ritual. This occurs in two way. Firstly, the examining of new national ritual forms has contributed to pushing sociological analysis of national rituals beyond concern with modern state based rites, and the idea that these simply sanction dominant beliefs systems or becomes a site of conflict reflecting broader social and economic structures. Secondly, such ritual analysis evidences the need for postmodernists to understand that national meanings run deep and that they have adaptive qualities. This means that national identity will not necessarily continue to erode, and in fact when it is engaged with through contemporary consumption, leisure and tourist practices and logics it can become rejuvenated and institutionally strengthened.

Dialogical History in a Time of Crisis: Tourist Logics and the 2002 Bali Bombings

This chapter examines the re-enchantment of the nation through the way national pasts help frame contemporary conflicts and uncertainties. This is an under studied aspect of national identification. From a postmodern perspective it is assumed that the evoking of the nation during times of social upheaval is reactive and short-lived rather than representing a basis for seriously re-engaging with history. This chapter examines what Schwartz refers to as the role of collective memory in a “time of crisis” (1996) through a study of Australia’s response and subsequent commemoration of the 2002 Bali bombing terrorist act. While international terrorism is frequently cited by postmodern theorists to highlight the deficiencies of the nation-state, the Bali bombing case highlights how national identities can play an important role in countering terrorism without indiscriminately demonising of Others and evoking fears of cultural difference.

National Humanitarianism and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami: Charitable Response and the Ethical Dilemma of Cultural Understanding

This chapter examines the cosmopolitan possibilities of civic nationalism in the context of humanitarian responses to foreign disasters. This is considered in a case study of the discursive construction and chartable response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Australia and the United States. Academic literature on humanitarian communication generally assumes that the nation is an impediment to charity, and therefore studies into the promotion of humanitarianism have been limited to variables associated with global values and individual cognitive processes. In contrast, this chapter will emphasise how the national framing of what Boltanski (Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics, 1999) refers to as distant suffering can positively influence humanitarian assistance. It is argued that in the public spheres of Australia and the United States, national discourses and symbols helped facilitate the large humanitarian response to the tsunami through universalising risk and providing a cultural basis for organising charity events such as sporting contests and music concerts.