Abstract
In 1636, Prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen sailed from Amsterdam to take up his position as governor of the Dutch West India Company colony in Brazil; a charge that included South America, the Caribbean and the West African coast. Maurits’ entourage included botanists, astronomers and artists and the governor established a botanical garden into which he attempted to gather every species of plant and animal: ‘every kind of bird and animal that he could find . . . parrots, macaws, jacifs, canindes, wading-birds, pheasants, guinea-fowl, ducks, swans, peacocks, turkeys, a great quantity of barnyard-fowls . . . tigers, ounces, cissuarana, ant-bears, apes, quati, squirrel-monkeys, Indian boars, goats from Cape Verde, sheep from Angola, cutia, pagua, tapirs, wild boars, a great multitude of rabbits . . .’3 When Maurits returned to the Netherlands he turned his palace at The Hague into a private museum of his Brazilian collections and, years later, sent a ‘curiosity cabinet’ to Louis XIV in the hope that its contents would be used as models in the Gobelin tapestry factory and woven into a perpetual representation of his achievements.4
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References
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I. Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory: In Sarajevo, Burned Books and Murdered Pictures (New York: New York Times, 1994).
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This is a problem of the last decade of the millennium. A survey of national libraries in various countries carried out in 1989 showed that few were actively involved in issues raised by electronic material, although it was recognised that a great deal of information was being lost (P. McCormick and M. Williamson, ‘Legal deposit and electronic publishing. Results of a survey’, Alexandria 2,3 (1990), pp. 51–63). Ten years on, the situation is very different with a widespread recognition that archiving dispersed digital information poses many problems. For example, the issue of ‘non-tangible’ forms of information was raised in the United Kingdom in a 1997 Department of Heritage consultation paper (D. Stoker, ‘Tangible deposits’, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 29, 2 [1997], pp. 65–68; J. Lyon, The nation’s virtual memory’, Information World Review 124 ([997], p. 9.); has led to the establishment of the Nordic Digital Library Centre (S. Hedberg, ‘Authorities and electronic publishing: an overview of the efforts to apply library legislation and established organizational patterns to electronic publications’, Alexandria 8, 2 [1996], pp. 135–142.); and has prompted legal revisions of legal deposit legislation in France (O. de Solan, ‘Les documents informatiques et l’avenir du dépôt legal’, Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France 40, 4 [1995], pp. 28–32; C. Vayssade, ‘Le dépôt legal des documents informatiques’, Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France 40, 3 [1995], pp. 34–38).
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http://www.hinduismtoday.kauai.hi.us/ht_home.html. For a South African-based Hindu site, see http://www.hinduism.co.za.
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Nandini Rao, personal communication.
M. Iijima, Feature: ‘Indian temple town just wants peace’, Reuters (1998).
Asking questions about the manner in which the archive is appropriated in the contemporary world leads to a re-evaluation of the concept of culture. In rejecting the idea that ‘culture’ is a thing in itself, Appadurai suggests the concept of ‘culturalism’, ‘the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics … frequently associated with extraterritorial histories and memories, sometimes with refugee status and exile, and almost always with struggles for stronger recognition from existing nation states or from various transnational bodies’ (Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 15). Culturalist movements are’ self-conscious about identity, culture and heritage, all of which tend to be part of the deliberate vocabulary of culturalist movements as they struggle with states and other culturalist forces and groups’ — ‘deliberate, strategic and populist mobilization of cultural material’ (Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 15).
M.Todorova, ‘The Balkans: from discovery to invention’, Slavic Review 53,2 (1994), p. 455.
R. D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts; A Journey through History (New York: Vintage, 1994).
H. Cooper, ‘Review of Robert Kaplan, “Balkan Ghosts,”’ Slavic Review 52 (1993), p. 592.
R. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (New York: Viking Press, 1941).
Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, p. xx.
‘Marooned Serb monk calls for Kosovo ceasefire’, The Times, London, 29 April 1998.
J. V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); J. V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987); N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
http://www.suc.org. The SUC’s “Blago Fund”, based in San Francisco, has as its goal “to preserve and promote Serbian treasures in a way that ties together the past, present and future.’” http://www.suc.org/Blago/Blago_mission.html.
R. Bozinović, ‘Serbian history through coinage’, http://www.suc.org/exhibitions/coins/ (1998).
T. Vuleta, ‘Medieval Serbian royal ornaments’, http://www.suc.org/culture/history/Medieval_Omaments/ (1998).
V. Dabić and K. Lukić, ‘Atmosphere of fear and ethnic cleansing in Vukovar’, http://www.suc.org/politics/war_crimes/vukovar/vukovar7a.html (1997).
Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
N. Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
Noel Malcolm, in his history of Bosnia: ‘[t]he biggest obstacle to all understanding of the conflict is the assumption that what has happened in that country is the product — natural, spontaneous and at the same time necessary — of forces lying within Bosnia’s own internal history. That is the myth which was carefully propagated by those who caused the conflict, who wanted the world to believe that what they and their gunmen were doing was not done by them, but by impersonal and inevitable historical forces beyond anyone’s control.’ (Malcolm, Bosnia p. xix)
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism; Malcolm, Bosnia.
S. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1995).
Todorova, ‘The Balkans’, p. 478.
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism, pp. 61–62.
Malcolm, Bosnia.
Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, p. 38; Malcolm, Bosnia.
Noel Malcolm points out that the battle of Kosovo Polje was less decisive than Serbian epic poetry recalls: both sides suffered heavy losses, and the battle itself left the conflict unresolved. The eventual Serb defeat was due to the Turks’ ability to follow up with repeated attacks on Serbia (Malcolm, Bosnia p. 20.)
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 213.
For the complex history of Croat nationalism and the emergence of the concept of Yugoslavia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Malcolm, Bosnia, Chapter 12.
Nenad Jeptanović, ‘Mausoleum of the Family Petrinović in Supertar, Island of BraČ’ (photocopy), and personal communication, May 1998. The mausoleum’s sculptures were by Thomas Rosandić, one of Croatia’s foremost sculptors, who carved his own face in the figure of Christ crucified.
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism.
Malcolm, Bosnia.
Ibid.
C. Sorabji, Bosnia’s Muslims: Challenging Past and Present Misconceptions (London, 1992), pp. 5–6, quoted by Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 222.
Malcolm, Bosnia; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism; V. Pavić, The register of war damage to museums and galleries in Croatia’ in War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia (Zagreb: Museum Documentation Centre, 1997), pp. 55–166.
Dabić and Lukić, ‘Atmosphere of fear and ethnic cleansing in Vukovar’.
B. Sulc, ‘Museums in war’ in War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia (Zagreb: Museum Documentation Centre, 1997), p. 14.
J. Vinterhalter, ‘Protection in museums — the first wartime task. Six years later’, War Damage to Museums and Galleries in Croatia (Zagreb: Museum Documentation Centre, 1997), pp. 19–38.
War damage in Croatia has yet to be fully assessed but has been claimed to include damage to more than sixty museums and galleries. Inventories of war damage are compiled by the Museum Documentation Centre (Pavić, The register of war damage to museums and galleries in Croatia’), but it is not clear to what extent these records are an accurate representation of what happened, and to what extent they are anti-Serbian propaganda. However, from an early stage in the conflict, it was argued that destruction of cultural property on this scale was not just the ‘collateral damage of warfare’, but rather the ‘assassination of culture’, following the 1948 Genocide Convention and other international protocols. It has been argued that such ‘cultural genocide’ should be formally recognised by the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (H. F Hodder, ‘Bibliocide’, Harvard Magazine http://www.harvard-magazine.com/nd96/right.biblio.html/nd96/right.biblio.html [1996]).
P. Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage, 1996).
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism, p. 10.
Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism.
K. Schork, ‘Analysis — KLA shatters Europe’s placid self-image’, Reuters, CNN, (1998).
N. Adams, ‘Architecture as the target’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993), p. 389.
Hodder, Bibliocide.
A. Riedlmayer, ‘Destruction of libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, http://www.cua.edu/vvww/mesabul/bosnia.htm (1995).
‘Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Washington Embassy; http://www.bosnianembassy.org.
Castells, The Information Age.
S. Ozkan, ‘The destruction of Stari Most’, Development Network 14 (1994), pp. 5–7.
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
‘Damaged or destroyed Islamic objects in Mostar’, http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/mostar/mostar.html. During 1997, blocks from the destroyed Mostar Bridge were hoisted from the Neretva River by a Hungarian military unit, part of the international stabilisation force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The last block was bedecked in flowers and raised in a public ceremony. An attempt will be made to rebuild the bridge; ‘Efforts to reconstruct the Mostar Bridge’, MTI Hungarian News Agency, 1 December 1997; http://www.applicom.com/manu/mostar.htm.
Riedlmayer, ‘Destruction of libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.
A. Riedlmayer, ‘Fighting the destruction of memory: a call for an ingathering of Bosnian manuscripts’, http://www.applicom.com/manu/ingather.htm (1998).
Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory.
E. Kujundzić, ‘From ashes: the fate of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHili/6777/library.htm (1997).
Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory.
‘Many tried to rescue books as the Library burned for three days. Librarian Aida Buturovi, was killed by a Serb sniper while trying to rescue books from the flames’ (Riedlmayer, ‘Destruction of libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina’).
Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory.
There is a direct connection between the destruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s libraries and the creation of digital archives. The Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project aims to track photocopies and microfilms of the Oriental Institute’s manuscripts held by other institutions around the world, in order to restore a ‘copied archive’ (Riedlmayer, ‘Fighting the destruction of memory’). A parallel project to re-establish the Bosnian National and University Library centres on the reconstruction of its catalogue. This is being achieved through the use of on-line catalogues — Online Computer Library Center Inc.’s WorldCat — linking information from libraries around the world to establish ‘Bosniaca’ — ‘all documents in any format written in any language on or about the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina’. A search of 36 million records has resulted in more than one hundred thousand matches, and is being followed by the use of refined search criteria to search other library catalogues that are not incorporated in WorldCat (E. T. O’Neill, J. A. Young and Bremer, The Bosnian National Library: building a virtual collection’, http://www.oclr.org/ocir/research/publications/review96/bosnia.htm [1996])
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 21.
http://domovina.net; ‘Balkans turn to Web for news’, http://computerworld.com, 6/26/98.
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Official Web Site is at http://www.gov.yu, and the Serbian Unity Congress at http://www.suc.com. The Croatian Institute for Culture and Information’s ‘Croatia Online Weekly’ is at http://www.croatia.hr; the quotation is from the edition of 15 January 1998. The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina is at http://www.bosnianembassy.org.
See, for example, the Nettime list, ‘a moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and cultural politics’, archives at http:www.nettime.org. Vigorous exchanges between advocates of Serb and NATO positions brought into question the viability of list discussion within the context of war. Economist, ‘War on the Web’, 15 May 1999.
Maass, Love Thy Neighbor.
As with the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, economic factors played an important role in the Kosovo conflict. Kosovo has rich mineral resources and coal reserves essential to Serbia’s economy. In the words of Novak Bjelić, director of the Stari Trg mine in Kosovo: ‘the war in Kosovo is about the mines, nothing else. This is Serbia’s Kuwait — the heart of Kosovo. We export to France, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Russia and Belgium. And in addition to all this, Kosovo has 17 billion tons of coal reserves, Naturally, the Albanians want all of this for themselves.’ The Trepca mining complex is valued at US$5 billion and is of key strategic importance. In 1988 the mines were a focus of fierce opposition to Serbian expansionism, with strikes by the 75 per cent Albanian-speaking workforce against nationalist Serbs who were in positions of power at the mines. Subsequently, miners were replaced by Poles, Czechs and Muslim prisoners from Bosnia (C. Hedges, ‘The spoils of a blood feud: rich veins buried deep beneath Kosovo’, International Herald Tribune [1998]). In July 1998, major conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian forces centred on the huge open coal mine of Belaćevać. The mobilisation of Serbian national pride around the memory of Turkish defeat five centuries ago has to be seen in the context of Kosovo’s essential contribution to the Serbian economy, and the potential value of the region in a ‘greater Albania’.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
‘Man decapitated in possible racial killing’, CNN, 8 June 1998; ‘Byrd’s friends pay last respects to a murder victim’, CNN, 13 June 1998. Both reports from http://cnn.com.
http://members.aol.com/realmofteVindexl.html; http://www.kamellia.com.
‘KKK rallies in town of dragging death victim. New Black Panthers vow to protect Jasper’s blacks’, CNN, 27 June 1998.
N. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
F. Cook, The Ku Klux Klan: America’s Recurring Nightmare (New York: Julian Messner, 1980), p. 36.
Cook, The Ku Klux Klan; MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry.
Cook, The Ku Klux Klan; R Sims, The Klan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry.
Sims, The Klan.
M. Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
‘Southern Poverty Law Center say groups plan for race war’, CNN, 17 June 1998; http://www.splcenter.org.
Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right.
Aryan Nations is at http://www.nidlink.com.
http://www.natall.com. It is obvious that this claim of support for the philosophy of this neo-Nazi group would horrify Renfrew and many of the other authors whose work is cited.
D. Duke, ‘The coming white revolution: born on the Internet’, David Duke Online Report (1998), http://www.duke.org/data/internet.htm.
Said, Culture and Imperialism.
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Hall, M. (2002). Blackbirds and Black Butterflies. In: Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_19
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