Abstract: Established in 1843, the Jewish residential quarter in Samarkand (located at the time in the Bukharan kingdom, and today in independent Uzbekistan) has been emptied of its Jewish residents in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Since then, physical markers testifying to their history in the neighbourhood have also been eroding. This process has been organic, rather than a deliberate program of erasure. Still, these shifts in the built environment fit within Uzbekistan’s larger project of state-building, as Jewish homes and communal structures belie the Russian and Soviet colonial legacy, which has been spurned since independence. Drawing on recent and historical accounts, as well as my own observations in the 1990s and in 2013, this article documents the built environment in the very moment of transition, as physical structures transform and are separated from the history and memories that enlivened them. With this disappearance, a tourist opportunity for encountering global Jewish diversity is lost, and Uzbekistan’s project of nation-building – absent its historical minority populations – is further solidified.
Abstract: While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.
Abstract: There is a rich body of literature examining the contribution of Holocaust museums to the Holocaust memorial culture by focusing on their educative, awareness-raising, and memorializing functions. In this context, ample attention has been devoted to these museums’ exhibitions, educatory activities, reenactment practices, digital strategies, as well as their historical and architectural narratives. This article brings a novel perspective to the literature by giving an account of how Holocaust museums act as a medium through which individuals contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture from a Constructivist perspective. It argues that Holocaust museums do not treat individuals as passive recipients of the Holocaust memorial culture, but actors who could exercise agential capacities in relation to the Holocaust memorial culture. This argument is illustrated by case studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Berlin Jewish Museum, and the Anne Frank House. It is shown that these museums offer platforms through which individuals actively contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture by encouraging them to conduct and share their Holocaust-related research, donating Holocaust-related objects, and engaging in social activities to diffuse related norms and messages.
