Sign Posts

By Suzyika Nyimbili

Sourced from Google

Its 8th December, 2019. I am still in Budapest. One semester done! yay! Well, not really done as I still have papers to write and a meeting to discuss my thesis topic. Looking forward to finishing off all my papers and have a break from writing before the winter semester in Vienna starts. 

There is one thing that has stood out for me for this semester, 'Presenting oneself". Presenting ones ideas or whatever one would like to put across. Its a pretty hard task. Even harder in an environment where all everyone seems to be focusing on different topics and coming from different backgrounds.

In all this, I have come to learn to think more about the audience of my writing or presentation. As the presenter, its not enough to understand what you are presenting, its crucial that you present your work in a manner that helps your audience follow and understand. Of course your starting point should be making sure you understand your work and know the points you would like to put across.

In presenting ones work, "sign posts" are crucial, the audience should be guided. Something we talked about in our "Presenting Cultural Heritage Class. Not everyone might go the same way but your sign posts will help in giving direction. If your audience gets totally different ideas of what you are trying to communicate, its a sign to you and that maybe you need to rethink what or how you are communicating.  You might not necessarily be wrong but you might not  have put up your sign posts in the right points to guide your reader or audience.

It can be frustrating when you try to communicate something but it doesn't get to your audience. Try again, check your sign posts. How are you guiding your reader? Or maybe do you need to rethink your work?

I look forward to learning more and getting better at my writing in the coming months!

A Narrow(er) Topic and a New (?) Passion

(by Bori Mohácsi)

Maybe if I were still younger (ok, boomer) and attending a more old-fashioned institution, it would still be reason enough for me to start a new research topic that 'my supervisor suggested so'. So when this happened (the suggestion I mean), why did I dive headfirst (okay, sink gradually) into something seemingly completely new? (In this post, I'll explain that it's not so new, and I've done this before in practice, I just didn't know what it was exactly.)

How I've started out

I wouldn't want to bore anyone with the details of Hungarian legislation concerning archaeology from 2001 onwards – wait, I did that anyway, to most of my classmates, at several classes so far. Although at first I was somewhat baffled that nobody shares my outrage and curiosity towards a bunch of (alright, a huge amount of) legal paragraphs, and narrowing down the noble task of pointing out what's wrong with them felt like betraying what I've always believed in (yeah, it's a bit of correcting people when they're wrong, but also a lot of trying to save what's left of my country's archaeological heritage one article at a time). 

So why did I leave behind all this?

First, because as harsh as it is to admit it, I'm not a lawyer – and when people say that I should have been one, I should never, ever interpret it as a compliment. Second, because – and this is obvious for anyone not immersed in it – it was a huge topic. Pointing out what's wrong with the law of cultural heritage protection, addressing how it affects the practice of archaeology and giving it a new direction would be a several-year project for a team. And I'm only one person, and I have ~2 years (not even full time), so at some point, I had to do the math. Third, I've always gone for the hard stuff. And by hard stuff I mean subjects that barely anyone had dealt with before, and I've had to investigate 19th-century books and re-interpret artefacts for. But I didn't do that in 30 years like a German classicist some 200 years ago: I wanted immediate results.

No wonder it never worked as I wanted it to.

An academic breakdown

I don't know if that's a thing. Maybe it sounds way too dramatic. But when I've considered the topic my supervisor suggested (community archaeology), it sure felt like it.

Why?

Because it was too easy. It was too obvious. It was a soft topic and an idealistic one at that. And it's about actual living people, for crying out loud. I don't do that. I'm not a fluffy idealist, I'm a cold-hearted scientist who deals with facts, like dead people. And what they might have done, and how they might have behaved, which has nothing to do with...

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

Of course, I wasn't logical. 

And of course, by studying cultural heritage, I knew I'd have to deal with the living at some point. But community archaeology is exclusively about them, and I thought I wasn't ready for that.

So there's the breakdown.

Because any major change to an academic subject of your choosing, whether it's because of a suggestion, whether it's because you hit a wall, whether it's because data points to a different direction – does, in the end, make you re-evaluate your identity as a researcher. Most of the time, it's not a drastic change, but sometimes it's a sucker punch to your ego. But since what you've already tried wasn't working, you decide to go with it anyway.

Me? Community? No thanks. Yes, please!

So besides being afraid of starting a new subject that I knew nothing about, and for which I'd have to look at my whole profession from the outside, using methods I haven't used before (interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and evaluating them – you know, stuff you don't do with the dead), and dreading talking to actual living human beings, I was trying to keep an open mind.

I've tried to re-think my short professional life so far and to my shock, I realized I've already done a bit of community archaeology, as well as public archaeology. Mostly interpretation, as I've talked about exhibitions, excavations, concepts in archaeology and in Roman religion for people who didn't know anything about them, and at times weren't even interested. And I wasn't bad at it, moreover, I've genuinely enjoyed it.

I've also realized, that I'm interested in getting people involved in archaeology, and how my colleagues do that all over the country. I'm curious about good and bad practices, new initiatives, old ideas, and can't wait for observing it closely.

So as I got worked up, I had all kinds of ideas about how to approach my new topic, and although I'm 100% sure I won't be able to use all of them, I'm really excited to try as many as possible.

But am I allowed to pursue something fun and current and exciting as an academic subject?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is this egotistic rambling of a blog post, to which I hope some of the readers can relate.

I promise you the next one will be about my actual topic. At least I hope so.

Revelation’s Nostalgia - Nasser Alhamdi

Revolution’s Nostalgia

Nostalgia evokes the overwhelming past, regardless of whether they were bad or good moments, and it makes us feel them in an indescribable sensation. The odor, songs, places, and remembering are triggering the memories, and in one second or less, it is transferring us to the past and swirling us as autumn leaves in for a blow. There are always times when I feel very nostalgic, whenever I feel so, I think of jumping to feel I am still alive. However, I still remember the Lorenzo de' Medici Quote which I used to repeat: “How beautiful is youth, that is always slipping away! Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so: of tomorrow there's no knowing”.

My story is my country which is my family, friends, people, markets, streets, buildings, restaurants, mountains, stones, winds, rains, sunset, sunrise, and conversations. Unfortunately, nostalgia has been the only thing left whenever my country crosses my mind.

When the Arab Spring Revolutions started, I was very enthusiastic to participate in youth Yemeni revolution, we have had dreams to change the situation which was getting worse because the wars taking place in the north of Yemen, southern protests, poverty increasing, unemployment, corruption, lack of services, poor infrastructure, education weakness, and the absence of management in all institutions sectors, all these factors pushed us to go to the streets and demand for a better life.

I still remember how we would gather raising the slogans that asked the regime to leave, and sue the corrupted officials. I still remember the times we faced death while we were shouting in the streets, showing our faith in our revolutions and in its goals to construct the state institutions in my country. Once, I was with my friend and we decided to go for protesting against the regime, and while we were marching along the streets, the soldiers were waiting for us with their guns, and they started to shoot at us with tears gas. That time, I could not find my friend among the crowds. I ran away from those soldiers who attack us, and I climbed the fence with a two-meter height. I saw many people suffocate from the gas, I tried to help them and gave them some Oxygen spray. The demonstrators managed to repel the assaulters, and we could find a way to complete our protest. I was very worried about my friend because he moved to the first line against the soldiers after we separated, and I had news that five of the demonstrators were killed. When we finished the protest, I tried to call him, and I had the fear to hold the phone, I did not want to hear someone else answer me. As I heard the phone buzzer, my heart was beating so hard, I heard the voice, and It was him. We met after that, and we were very happy because we were totally fine although I inbreathed a lot of tears gas. We got back to our homes like heroes, and we were waving the Yemeni flag.

A lot of youth people believed in struggling to accomplish their dreams and Yemen’s future, but we realized that a sudden revolution it does not work enough, and everything has beginnings such as a volcano revolution. Of course, if we go back to history, almost all revolutions took a long time to set, but some of them took the wrong direction, and it has severe consequences. That is what I felt after a while because we missed the essential beginnings such as, awareness in our community, new thoughts and Philosophies, and writers that can correct the revolution path.

Now, the war destroyed every beautiful thing, especially good human manners and values. Heraclitus said “All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things”, and some thinkers and Philosophers are agreed with him, and it could be if we learn from our mistakes in the past.

“I’m surprised that it still stands”, or the Case of the Formerly “Red” Latvian Riflemen

(Károly TÓTH, 2YMA Comparative History, 2nd year)

Albergs–Driba: Latviešu strēlnieku piemineklis (1970–1971)
(own work)

Valdis Albergs’ 13-meters-high statue made of red granite – supported by a purist pedestral designed by Dzintars Driba –, originally entitled as Latviešu strēlnieku piemineklis (“Monument to the Latvian Red Riflemen”) stands in the central district of Riga, called Vecrīga (“Old Riga”) since 1971; in the year following its erection both of them received the prestigious State Prize of the USSR for this monument.

The “red” is dropped from the name, but the stars remained on the hats – Historical idiosincrasy or national reconciliation?
(own work)

Some Latvians think that the monumental statue on the Latviešu strēlnieku laukums (“Square of the Latvian Riflemen”) is a symbol of the Soviet past, while others claim that it is a necessary tribute to their own compatriots, who fought in the early period of the First World War. While checking the reviews of the monument on Google Maps, I found a comment of a Russian traveler as probably the most representative one: “Udivlyon chto on yeshcho stoit.” (“I’m surprised that it still stands.”)

To the Latvian R̶e̶d̶ ̶Riflemen?
(own work)

The Latvian rifleman regiments were originally formed in 1915 to defend Riga from the German Imperial Army. Later the total of about 40 000 troops were became a core of the future Red Army, and some of them became Lenin’s personal bodyguards. 

In 2000 the original inscription of the monument was altered from “Latviešu sarkanajiem strēlniekiem 1915-1920” ([Dedicated] to the Latvian Red Riflemen 1915-1920) by deleting the word red.