History and Cultural Identity : Retrieving the Past, Shaping the Future / Edited by John P
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Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series VII. Seminars: Culture and Values, Volume 29 General Editor George F. McLean HISTORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY Retrieving the Past, Shaping the Future Edited by John P. Hogan The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Copyright © 2011 by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Box 261 Cardinal Station Washington, D.C. 20064 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication History and cultural identity : retrieving the past, shaping the future / edited by John P. Hogan. p. cm. -- (Cultural heritage and contemporary change. Series IIV [i.e. VII], Seminars: culture and values ; v. 29) Papers on history and cultural identity by scholars who attended a 10 week seminar in Washington, DC in 2006. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. History--Philosophy--Congresses. 2. Cultural pluralism-- Congresses. 3. Group identity--Congresses. 4. Historiography--Congresses. I. Hogan, John P. II. Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. III. Title. IV. Series. D16.8.H624178 2011 2011000261 901--dc22 CIP ISBN 978-1-56518-268-4 (pbk.) TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword: Cultural Identity and History v David N. Power Preface vii John P. Hogan Introduction: History, Hermeneutics, and Culture 1 John P. Hogan Part I. Overview and New Paradigm Chapter 1. The Use of History 15 William Sweet Chapter 2. The Construction of a New Paradigm for History 33 in the Third Millennium George F. McLean Part II. Human Action, Meaning, and Story Chapter 3. On Confucian Philosophy of History 69 Vincent Shen Chapter 4. Xuan Zang: Monumental Figure in 99 China’s History of Translation Cheng Mei Chapter 5. Collingwood: The Re-Enactment of Past Thought 109 John P. Hogan Chapter 6. History as an Increasingly Complex System 129 Carlos Eduardo Maldonado Chapter 7. Narrative History and Social Integration: Africa 153 Ikechakwu Ani Part III. Dialogue: Freedom, Tolerance and Pluralism Chapter 8. Religious Culture and Historical Change: 171 Vatican II on Religious Freedom John Farrelly Chapter 9. Toward a Sustainable Global World Order: 183 Religious Pluralsim and Tolerance Richard K. Khuri Chapter 10. Islamic Doctrine and the Relationship between 199 the Public and Private Spheres Rahim Nobahar iv Table of Contents Part IV. Symbols, Sufferings and Hope Chapter 11. Troping Trauma: Conceiving (of) Experiences 209 of Speechless Terror Rosemary Winslow Chapter 12. Between Two Circles: “Host” as Metaphor 233 of Identity in the Language of Inclusion and Exclusion Rosemary Winslow Chapter 13. History and Cultural Identity: The Philippine Case 251 Rolando M. Gripaldo Chapter 14. Social Memory and the Ontological Roots of Identity: 275 Kyrgyz Republic John P. Hogan and Maura Donohue Chapter 15. National Identities and Cultural Globalization: Vietnam 283 Nguyen Ngoc Ha Chapter 16. The Roots of Democracy in Indian Culture 287 Chintamani Malviya Part V. Eastern Europe, Reclaiming the Past to Build a Future Chapter 17. The Interpretation of the Concepts “Culture” and 295 “Civilization” in the Works of A. I. Herzen Elena S. Grevtsova Chapter 18. Russia—A Special Destiny in History? 309 Elena S. Grevtsova Chapter 19. Chasing the Global: The “World” in 319 Bulgarian Historical Thought Ivelina Ivanova Chapter 20. Memory and Idenity in Post-Communist Romania: 333 A Phenomenological Approach to the Recent Past Wilhelm Dancă Chapter 21. History, Identity and Conflict: 367 Romanian Confessional Identity and the Byzantine Catholic Church Alin Tat Chapter 22. Civil Society and Social Capital in Poland 379 Eugeniusz Gorski Chapter 23. Solidarity: The Creative Power of the Symbol 395 in the Polish Revolution Michal Reka List of Contributors 411 Index 413 FORWARD CULTURAL IDENTITY AND HISTORY DAVID N. POWER One of the principal ways in which peoples, ethnic groups, and religions, express their sense of origins, of destiny, of identity, and of communal belonging, is through the narration of their history. It is with this that they associate many of their rituals and symbolic expressions and hopes for the future. One of the well-known assertions of post-modernity is that under the conditions of life in the world today, there is no overarching myth and no grand narrative to which people may hold; there is only a series of small and often disconnected stories. Factually, it is true that, with constant uprooting and migration and under the influence of globalization, the kind of history which tells of origins, destiny and communal belonging is difficult to unfold or to keep in place. It is also true that hitherto established perceptions of the past are called into question when its wrongdoings, mishaps, oppressions and ideologies become more apparent. For many of the peoples of the world who were subjected to colonial rule, their history has often been told through the eyes of the colonizer or overlord, but today these peoples wish to retrieve their own history as they would tell it themselves. Unfortunately, many peoples are likely to practice the false art of forgetting, of committing to oblivion what is hard to remember or that of which it is difficult to make sense. In a contrary way, peoples can also hold so tightly to gathering and retaining the signs and facts of injustice and horror that these obscure all possibilities of gathering such events into an overarching historical story that projects the possibilities of hope and reconciliation, even for and with the dead. Given the issues at stake in elaborating a viable history today, it is all the more important to understand how history is told, what the word itself means, and how the narration of the past may be unfolded through an act of retrieving what was lost and a reversal of injustices. It is also important to heed how history is recast when minorities or oppressed groups try through historical narration to find their just place in the projection of a future, or when peoples or oppressed groups develop a postcolonial history. This project on history has multiple tasks. In the first place, it would be helpful to consider how facts are gathered through archival research or with the aid of auxiliary sciences such as archeology or the history of art and architecture. It would also be useful to give thought to the gathering of what is known as oral history, especially among peoples whose primary mode of communication has been oral. Indeed, this might also be helpful for recent events in the story of any people, especially with relation to memories of war and disaster. One also has to look at the contours of vi Forward historical narrative, realizing that events are not factually laid out in story but interpreted through the artifices of narration and imaginative construction. In this, one is attentive to the sense of time, relating past, present and future that is built into historical narrative. How does a phenomenology of being in time and towards death converge with the narrative of history and its openness to a future of promise. One also has to ask how forgetting intersects with remembering. In a more particular way, it would be helpful to hear postcolonial narratives through which peoples overcome the colonial narrative of their past to write it as their own and with their own perspectives. It would also be helpful to hear the narratives of those who have been oppressed or marginal to the symbolic order and the “ideal” history, such as feminist history, the story of Europe’s new immigrants, the story of slaves on the North American continent, the story of programmatic discrimination such as that practiced against Jewish peoples or under systems of apartheid, the story of peoples whose land was taken over by foreign invasion. How some writers have more recently written the story of childhood, the story of aging, or the story of illness, the story of death, the story of penal systems, could be examined to see how all this fits into the larger story of civilizations. For religions in particular, given that on the world scene they have been and are the cause of conflict, the history of religions, general and particular, has to be written in a way that offers new understandings of religions’ origins, of past religious conflict, and new promise of reconciliation and mutual understanding. In this, openness to what is common must not be allowed to obscure that which is particular to each religion, since it is only through respectful mutual recognition of differences that shared goals my be pursued. PREFACE During the fall of 2006, a group of scholars from around the globe met in Washington, DC, to discuss History and Cultural Identity. The 10 week seminar was lively and intense. Delicate issues were honestly confronted and discussions were characterized by a genuine praxis of research, candor and friendship. The papers collected here are the fruit of that endeavor. The editor gratefully acknowledges the following permissions to reuse material: from University Press of America to republish, “The Re- enactment of Past Thought,” from John P. Hogan, Collingwood and Theological Hermeneutics (UPA, 1989), as Chapter 5; from Heythrop Journal and Wiley-Blackwell Publishers to republish, M. John Farrelly, “Religious Cultures and Historical Change: Vatican II on Religious Freedom,” Heythrop Journal 49, (2009): 731-741, as Chapter 8; and from the Journal of Advanced Composition to republish, Rosemary Winslow, “Troping Trauma: Conceiving (of) Experiences of Speechless Terror,” JAC 24.3 (2004): 607-33, as Chapter 11. Gratitude is expressed to Maura Donohue, Nancy A. Graham and Florencio Riguera for their expert and creative editorial assistance and to George F. McLean, general editor, and Hu Yeping, assistant editor, for their help in bringing this volume to publication. John P. Hogan INTRODUCTION HISTORY, HERMENEUTICS AND CULTURE JOHN P. HOGAN INTRODUCTION In times of crisis and deep social change, the study and interpretation of history seem inevitably to bubble to the surface.