The Cultural Frontiers of Europe

2007

the publishers-the Institut für Auslandbeziehungen and the Robert Bosch Stiftungpointed out that the problem with European culture is not that there is not enough of it, but that it is never perceived as European. On the contrary culture is identified as Italian, French, German, and Hungarian... Hardly anyone would consider Alfred Hitchcock a 'European' film director, or Heinrich Böll a 'European' author. At least, not in Europe and among the educated public: you can expect an American or the general public not to tell a German piece of art apart from a Polish one; intellectuals, however, especially European ones, are trained to identify distinguishing features. Not 'seeing' (or pretending to see) the difference between a French and an Italian novel will alienate you from your intellectual friends. Paradoxically enough, there seems to exist a correlation between the discerning capacities of people and their European awareness, or, to be more precise, their openmindedness about European culture. The general public, on the other hand, contents itself with what it can understand: things that fall within their own referential framework. As long as it comes through their personal TV-set, is recommended by a friend or acquaintance, and, most importantly, is in their own language (translations or adaptations will do fine), people don't bother where their 'culture' comes from. Hence the success of global, mainly commercial formats, often referred to as 'low culture'. Anything that infringes the familiar setting is perceived as threatening.

Choice Reviews Online, 1999

This third, revised and augmented edition of Peter Rietbergen's highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History provides a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. From ancient Babylonian law codes to Pope Urban's call to crusade in 1095, and from Michelangelo on Italian art in 1538 to Sting's songs in the late twentieth century, the expressions of the culture that has developed in Europe are diverse and wide-ranging. This exceptional text expertly connects this variety, explaining them to the reader in a thorough and yet highly readable style. Presented chronologically, Europe: A Cultural History examines the many cultural building blocks of Europe, stressing their importance in the formation of the continent's ever-changing cultural identities. Starting with the beginnings of agricultural society and ending with the mass culture of the early twenty-first century, the book uses literature, art, science, technology and music to examine Europe's cultural history in terms of continuity and change. Rietbergen looks at how societies developed new ways of surviving, believing, consuming and communicating throughout the period. His book is distinctive in paying particular attention to the ways early Europe has been formed through the impact of a variety of cultures, from Celtic and German to Greek and Roman. The role of Christianity is stressed, but as a contested variable, as are the influences from, for example, Asia in the early modern period and from American culture and Islamic immigrants in more recent times. Since anxieties over Europe's future mount, this third edition text has been thoroughly revised for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, it now also includes a 'dossier' of some seventeen essay-like vignettes that highlight cultural phenomena said to be characteristic of Europe: social solidarity, capitalism, democracy and so forth. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts of sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support the arguments, this book both serves the general reader as well as students of historical and cultural studies.

European Review

Cultural borders play a significant part in modern European history as well as in the present. This Focus has been chosen in order to enhance reflections on the transcendence of cultural borders; how the crossing is conducted, why we want to move beyond cultural borders, and what actually lies beyond them. The individual articles investigate ways to transcend borders, primarily those of the European nation state, in different genres from the nineteenth century onward. This editorial article introduces the theme of thinking beyond borders and presents the contributions to this Focus. It attempts to situate the issue of Europe´s cultural borders within European history by delving into three relevant themes: the cultural construction of borders, the growing number of recognized nationalities, and the practices of Europeanization.

The Cultural Frontiers of Europe, 2010

The image of the European culture is given by the association of the concepts peopleculturehistoryterritory, which provides certain local features. From this relation, we identify a cultural area with local, regional and national features beyond a certain European culture. Thus, we identify at least two cultural identity constructions on the European level: a culture of cultures, that is a cultural area with a particular, local, regional and national strong identity, or a cultural archipelago, that is a common yet disrupted cultural area. Whatever the perspective, the existence of a European cultural area cannot be denied, although one may speak of diversity or of "disrupted continuity". The paper is a survey on the European cultural space in two aspects: 1. Europe with internal cultural border areas; 2. Europe as external cultural-identity border area. From a methodological point of view, we have to point out that despite the two-levelled approach the two conceptual constructions do not exclude each other: the concept of "culture of cultures" designs both a particular and a general identity area. The specific of the European culture is provided precisely by diversity and multiculturalism as means of expression on local, regional, or national levels. Consequently, the European cultural area is an area with a strong identity on both particular and general levels.

The Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften [Mainz Historical Cultural Sciences] series publishes the results of research that develops methods and theories of cultural sciences in connection with empirical research. The central approach is a historical perspective for cultural sciences, whereby both epochs and regions can differ widely and be treated in an all-embracing manner from time to time. The series brings together, among other things, research approaches in archaeology, art history and visualistic, philosophy, literary studies and history, and is open for contributions on the history of knowledge, political culture, the history of perceptions, experiences and life-worlds, as well as other fields of research with a historical cultural scientific orientation. The objective of the Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften series is to become a platform for pioneering works and current discussions in the field of historical cultural sciences.

European Societies, 2008

Studies in Euroculture, 2020

tioned diversity inherent to the Euroculture programme. On this note, Ampleman and Shaw outline how following the so-called CARE-competences, accompaniment, retention, engagement-model could further enhance students' learning environment. The second part to this edited volume is concluded by an outlook into further developing the Euroculture programme. More specifically, observing the strong institutional foundations of the Euroculture network, by now spanning eight European and four non-European partner universities, and acknowledging the everpresent embeddedness of the Euroculture programme within the field of Europe-Vicherat Mattar 20 faced today by the question of migration. Let's examine in turns the three key ideas presented in the title of this contribution. 2 Europe: A Region of Borders and a Border Region "Where is Europe?" appears to be a geographical question, which implies demarcations. To demarcate, as the geographer David Newman argues, is the process through which borders are constructed and the categories of difference or separation created. Demarcation is the process defining which criteria of inclusion/exclusion are relevant for a given political community, be it national citizenship, property regimes, religious affiliation, the color of your skin, etc. 7 The question is, of course, what motives define, promote, socialise and naturalise specific criteria of demarcation; and who has the power to do so (and with which purpose). Geographically, even pan-Europeanists like Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi argued back in 1922, 'there is no European continent [to demarcate]; there is only a European peninsula of the Eurasian continent'. 8 So where, or rather what, is Europe? While maps can serve the purpose to examine the where question, the criteria and justifications that underpin how demarcations are done is an eloquent form to understand the what question. According to Walter Mignolo the first representations of Europe as a whole distinctive unity date from the eighth century medieval orbis terrarum or T/O maps, where Europe is depicted as one of the three regions of the world, each one of them corresponding to one of the three sons of Noah: Asia (Shem), Africa (Ham) and Europe (Jopeth). 9 In this representation of the world the center is not defined geographically, but ideologically. This means that the answer to the question of where Europe is, is given by what it is, i.e. Christian. With the Atlantic explorations, imperial maps, granted to Europe a cartographic and geopolitical centrality, from the Mediterranean basin to the domination of various regions well beyond the European landmass. How did this shift in representation happen? After the "invention" of the Americas, 10 Europe's representations in maps account for its dominant position as imperial power in social, economic, political and cultural terms. The imperial expansion placed Europe in the top center-left position of the world map representations. According to Mignolo, an especially dominant position in the context of a culture defined by an alphabetic 7 David Newman, "The Lines that Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our Borderless World,"

2012

Routledge eBooks, 2021

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, to wit, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

There is a realm of culture which – no matter how big it is in certain parts of Europe – exists without an established consensual name, not just in the lingua franca of cultural policies (English) but in other vernaculars, too. Cultural centres or houses of culture are most often used but similar approximations do not prevail for the professionals and the activities connected to those houses. In the next pages the term socio-culture, a loan translation of the German Soziokultur will be applied.