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(2005)
Classical writers either glorified the Celts and their cult officials, the druids, thereby demonstrating "soft primitivism", or they vilified them ("hard primitivsm"). Both types of primitivism reflect the self-assessment of the classical cultures concerning their own identity and the level of their cultural status rather than providing hard-core information about Celts and druids. Outside the archaeological evidence there is no reliable information about these. And even the archaeological evidence is very much open to controversial interpretation This situation leave much room to personal speculation, high-flung imagination and even fantasy. TRI
The five Potsdam "Studientage zum Englischen Mittelalter (SEM)" (1999-2003) served a number of purposes. These are fully discussed in this article. The first and foremost idea was to provide a yearly forum for young scholars in English medieval studies to present their research to other scholars in the field and to test their market value ("Nachwuchsfoerderung"). After Potsdam, the SEM meetings are circulating between those universities in the German speaking countries, which feature a Medieval Studies Programme in their departments of English and American Studies. This programme serves to boost their academic profile and etablish centres of excellency for English medieval Studies on the Continent. Networking is another prime objective of the SEMs. See http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/sem/sem.htm etc.
The language situation in the Philipines between the many different native languages and English is complex. The book under review outlines the various contact situations, focussing on the contact between Tagalog, the most important indigenous language of the Philipines on the one hand and English on the other. This serves as the basis for a detailed discussion of the sociological determinasts of the contact continuum between Tagalog on the one hand and Standard English on the other. The main asset of the book is to be found in its well informed survey character resulting from personal teaching experience.
In previous research, the methodology of typological investigations into languages was based on the analysis of standard languages (or rather standardised written languages). Prof. Kortmann's collection of essays broadens this methodological scope by directing the scholars' typological interest to the traditional dialects, most of them transmitted orally only. Undoubtedly, there is a great potential in this effort. Most of the contributions in this volume, however, show, that the attempt to unify or perhaps rather to accommodate the methodologies of typological research and traditional dialectology needs to be further harmonised in future research in order to bear sound generalisable insights to the rich data available.
This essay focuses on the work of Mexican/Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose main aesthetic principle lies in the criss-crossing of cultural, geographic and linguistic borders. Through his unique fusion of genres, discourses and media, Gómez-Peña creates a hybrid art form that also transgresses more conventional definitions of what constitutes culture. One of the central features of his "New World Border" (1992-1994) performance is the artistic transposition of site-specific border identities and texts to a global level; i.e., the border (and its transgression) becomes a metaphor to address a multiplicity of aesthetic, cultural and socio-political agendas. His performance "Temple of Confessions" (1994) aims, among others, at debunking the rather celebratory discourse of mainstream U.S. multiculturalism. In addition, his project of "reverse anthropology", which informs a number of his performance pieces, seeks to retain the resistance potential of minoritarian art by subverting hegemonic power hierarchies. As will be shown, his representational strategy of "as if" is used by Gómez-Peña and his collaborators to envision a postnational and transcultural spaciousness of the Americas.