a search

1. a book

As an anthropologist, and as the author of this chapter, I bring my own set of presuppositions and framework to my work, but at the same time attempt to present just a few of the many voices within the Yugoslav Jewish population.[n.2] I do not adopt a structuralist or post(anti)-structuralist approach. If anything, I try to give visibility to what may be for many the invisible individual Yugoslav Jew. An argument can be made that it is precisely individual Jews, outside the context of the organized community, who gave visibility to the Yugoslav Jews as a whole. I recognize that they were a post-traditionalist population, and the ethnographic reality of the postwar Jews of Yugoslavia reflected not one but many Jewish minds, not an integrated and unified Jewishness but an ethnic bricolage, and not one voice but many voices. I am not referring to multiple interpretations of a single voice, but to many voices, each with its own set of meanings that must be understood in terms of where the individuals were socially, culturally, and psychologically situated. My aim is to show how these individuals constituted or situated themselves (i.e., how they engaged in private and public symbolisation), how they were situated by others and the external factors that touched their lives, and how I analytically and interpretively situated them within the framework of my research problem and assumptions. In addition, I assume that there is commonality that underlied or potentially underlied (e.g., when Jewishness became visible in times of crisis, when there was a perception of threat to the Jews collectively) the diverse particulars found in the narratives that follow. One unfulfilled analytical task is to locate the common strands in all of the individual webs. This is problematic because I do not have the well-developed webs or the life histories of these individuals. A subsequent research objective would to collect life histories and many more strands of the individual webs. In contrast to the collective forms described in chapters 3 and 4, whose structures and patterns are more apparent and amenable to traditional anthropological analyses, my understanding of individuated Jewishness is very partial and tenuous. Hence my presentation of the individual narratives that follow is fragmented just as their Jewishness is fragmented to them. [n.3]

I have been asked, Are these typical individuals in the narratives?  How typical are they? I am not sure I know what typical means. Certainly I make no claims for any individuals being typical of some "existing type." Instead, what the individuals in the following narratives reflect in varying degrees are the strands of significance within the Yugoslav Jewish population. Some of the strands are structural, such as generation and gender; some are experiential, such as whether or not an individual experienced prewar Jewish life, Holocaust, and the National Liberation Struggle; some are ideological, such as whether or not an individual supported the politics of the state. If one was a member of the senior generation, he or she carried the experiences and memories of a vibrant Jewish past, whereas members of the middle and youth generations could not draw upon that which they never knew or experienced. All generations, however, felt an acute sense of disjuncture. The following narratives show how individuals, each different from the others, have confronted and dealt with this disjuncture.

Voices of Yugoslav Jewry

Commitment to a Secular Jewish Community in Socialist Yugoslavia

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2. a paper

My novel is a collection of interrelated stories. Each story is framed by the idiosyncrasies and prejudices of a different first-person voice. There are gaps in narrative time and there is disparity between the narrators' voices. The result is a 'discontinuous narrative'; this term describes the early work of Frank Moorhouse; 'an innovative narrative method using interconnected stories' (Griffith University 2011).

As I draft and re-draft the stories, I am forced to assess the interaction between the voices. I am aware of the disjuncture, and I ask my self: Why not tell the story through the eyes of one narrator? Why not choose a third-person perspective, an omniscient narrator who might collect all of the voices together, in a coherent way?

As I second-guess my approach, I realise that the splintering of voices feels like the right way to tell the story and, in this way, I approach the question of methodology. I am aware that a sense of disjuncture arises out of the medley of voices, but I also realise that the disjuncture is carefully constructed; it is not accidental. This is an intuitive judgement.

If I edit my novel ethically, I ask what the discontinuity achieves, rather than how it fails in the context of logic. This means that I recognise that the narrative begins from a place that does not worry about logic, and I realise that second-guessing the surface content of the narrative, from a rational perspective, may be counterproductive.

The conscious mind, ( ... ... )

3. a paper

Appearance to the contrary, no systematic orthodoxy exists in American higher education. No single institutional form, curricular conception, professorial tole, structure of regulatory oversight, system of external funding, or student demographic has defined American higher education from its beginning to the present. Instead, American higher education has periodically adopted new institutional forms as it has adapted to the changing needs of American society (Brubacher & Rudy, 2004; Rudolph, 1990; Veysey, 1970).

These changes have been concentrated at moments of social disjucture when the received systemic orthodoxies of American higher education no longer matched emerging social realities. Frederick Rudolph (1990) captured this sense of disjuncture when discussing the changes in American higher education from the late 1800s through 20th century:

Hidden in the absurdity of [overabundant course] offerings [of emerging 20th century universities] and in all of the impulse to growth was that fact that between 1890 and 1925 enrollment in institutions of higher education grew 4.7 times as fast as population. ... The road from the Yale Report of 1829 to the University of Nebraska course offerings of 1931 was paved from the bodies of friends of the old-time college who tried to hold them true to intellectual and social ideals that could not adequately serve a democratic society. (pp. 442-443)

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