Jan Ifversen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Jan Ifversen
Aarhus University Press eBooks, Nov 12, 2019
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be ... more Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.
Contributions to the History of Concepts, Jun 1, 2023
While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social histo... more While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as “meaningless” or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of what we call “the ungraspable.” It is further argued that Koselleck's conceptual mapping of European modernity can be fruitfully extended by bringing it into contact with the ideas of thinkers such as Michel De Certeau, Edourd Glissant, and Francis Affergan who have contemplated how especially “the colonial” both represents the outside to and is the site from which the limit of European modernity and its conceptual universe might be (re)thought.
AU Library Scholarly Publishing Services, 2018
In the 21 st century, business engagements are becoming increasingly global, and global teams are... more In the 21 st century, business engagements are becoming increasingly global, and global teams are now an established form of organising work in multinational organisations. As a result, managing cultural diversity within a global team has become an essential part of ensuring motivation, creativity, innovation and efficiency in today’s business world. Global teams are typically composed of a diversity of experiences, frames of references, competencies, information and, not least, cultural backgrounds. As such, they hold a unique potential for delivering high performance in terms of innovative and creative approaches to global management tasks; however, instead of focusing on the potentials of cultural diversity, practitioners and studies of global teams tend to approach cultural diversity as a barrier to team success. This study explores some of the barriers that cultural diversity poses but also discusses its potential to leverage high performance in a global context. Our study high...
Debat om statuekampe, kulturarvspraksisser og historieskrivning
Temp - tidsskrift for historie, Dec 20, 2020
Debat om statuekampe, kulturarvspraksisser og historieskrivning
Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, 2019
Constituting Communities, 2008
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2021
In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed aw... more In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed away. This sad occasion makes it timely in our journal to reflect on the process that turned national projects within conceptual and intellectual history into an international and transnational enterprise. The text that follows—published in two parts, here and in the next issue—takes a closer look at the intellectual processes that led up to the founding meeting of the association behind our journal, the History of Concepts Group. It follows in the footsteps of Melvin Richter to examine the different encounters, debates and protagonists in the story of international, conceptual history. The text traces the different approaches that were brought to the fore and particularly looks at Melvin Richter’s efforts to bridge between an Anglophone tradition of intellectual history and a German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte.
It is a serious question whether a political community can achieve political order without develo... more It is a serious question whether a political community can achieve political order without developing a foundation myth.1
Communities need history. History establishes what Paul Ricxur has called ‘the narrative identity... more Communities need history. History establishes what Paul Ricxur has called ‘the narrative identity of a culture’ (Ricixur 1987, 276). The narration of what the community ‘lives through’ is what constitutes identity over time. Through the narrative, the community stands out as a permanent entity despite all the changes it experiences. Narratives are made and told in the community. If narratives are broadly accepted by the community they become master narratives with a dominant status in a given society (Jarausch and Sabrow 2002, 16). Since the nineteenth century professional historians have played a decisive role in the making of master narratives; as Hobsbawm amusingly phrased it, historians are to national identity-building what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts (Hobsbawm 1990, 23).
Heritage & Society, 2020
This article investigates various heritage-related practices in the city of Shanghai since the en... more This article investigates various heritage-related practices in the city of Shanghai since the end of colonialism. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the dominant approach was to remove the colonial heritage and replace it with a communist narrative of the people and its heroes. The introduction of market socialism in the 1990s led to a revival of the colonial heritage, but in a form that presented the city as a cosmopolitan and consumer-oriented center. The role of the colonial heritage in the dramatic change in the cityscape since the 1990s has often been viewed as nostalgic. This article analyses nostalgia as a reframing of the colonial heritage, in which it reappears as the design of communist extravagance or “conspicuous communism.” Through an analysis of the newly opened Shanghai History Museum, this article demonstrates that the global design strategy imposed on the cityscape is losing momentum and is now being challenged by a more robust narrat...
Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics, 2007
Recently there has been much debate about whether Europe is old or new. The debate was ignited by... more Recently there has been much debate about whether Europe is old or new. The debate was ignited by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s casual remark in January 2003 that Europe could be divided into old and new. What Rumsfeld meant by this remark has been the subject of considerable debate. Among those appointed ‘new’ Europeans by Rumsfeld were the upcoming EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, as well as longer-standing members such as Spain, Britain and Denmark. The only apparent common trait among these ‘new’ Europeans was that their governments supported the American position on the Iraq crisis (and would sign the so-called ‘letter of the eight’ a week after Rumsfeld’s remark). At first glance Rumsfeld’s understanding of ‘novelty’ seemed to mean alignment with the US government on its Iraq policy.
Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, 2019
Creative tourism: activating cultural resources and engaging creative travellers, 2021
This study aims to provide interventions co-creating tourist destinations in Denmark. The first g... more This study aims to provide interventions co-creating tourist destinations in Denmark. The first goal of the study was to reconceptualize the attractive force of places. Instead of simply conceiving places as passively waiting to be visited, the researchers wanted to highlight their force of attraction. Since the municipality brands itself as 'the realm of nature', we set out to investigate how 'nature', always man-made to some extent, could be viewed as a force of its own. The second goal was to step away from the conventional understanding of tourists as simply consumers of places and treat them not as strangers and guests to the places, but as potential hosts and designers of place experiences. Furthermore, the researchers reversed traditional identity mechanisms by treating those tourists who returned year after year as part-time locals (GravariBarbas and Guinand, 2017). Creative, playful, and reflexive engagement with places is certainly present in the two interv...
Aarhus University Press eBooks, Nov 12, 2019
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be ... more Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.
Contributions to the History of Concepts, Jun 1, 2023
While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social histo... more While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as “meaningless” or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of what we call “the ungraspable.” It is further argued that Koselleck's conceptual mapping of European modernity can be fruitfully extended by bringing it into contact with the ideas of thinkers such as Michel De Certeau, Edourd Glissant, and Francis Affergan who have contemplated how especially “the colonial” both represents the outside to and is the site from which the limit of European modernity and its conceptual universe might be (re)thought.
AU Library Scholarly Publishing Services, 2018
In the 21 st century, business engagements are becoming increasingly global, and global teams are... more In the 21 st century, business engagements are becoming increasingly global, and global teams are now an established form of organising work in multinational organisations. As a result, managing cultural diversity within a global team has become an essential part of ensuring motivation, creativity, innovation and efficiency in today’s business world. Global teams are typically composed of a diversity of experiences, frames of references, competencies, information and, not least, cultural backgrounds. As such, they hold a unique potential for delivering high performance in terms of innovative and creative approaches to global management tasks; however, instead of focusing on the potentials of cultural diversity, practitioners and studies of global teams tend to approach cultural diversity as a barrier to team success. This study explores some of the barriers that cultural diversity poses but also discusses its potential to leverage high performance in a global context. Our study high...
Debat om statuekampe, kulturarvspraksisser og historieskrivning
Temp - tidsskrift for historie, Dec 20, 2020
Debat om statuekampe, kulturarvspraksisser og historieskrivning
Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, 2019
Constituting Communities, 2008
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2021
In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed aw... more In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed away. This sad occasion makes it timely in our journal to reflect on the process that turned national projects within conceptual and intellectual history into an international and transnational enterprise. The text that follows—published in two parts, here and in the next issue—takes a closer look at the intellectual processes that led up to the founding meeting of the association behind our journal, the History of Concepts Group. It follows in the footsteps of Melvin Richter to examine the different encounters, debates and protagonists in the story of international, conceptual history. The text traces the different approaches that were brought to the fore and particularly looks at Melvin Richter’s efforts to bridge between an Anglophone tradition of intellectual history and a German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte.
It is a serious question whether a political community can achieve political order without develo... more It is a serious question whether a political community can achieve political order without developing a foundation myth.1
Communities need history. History establishes what Paul Ricxur has called ‘the narrative identity... more Communities need history. History establishes what Paul Ricxur has called ‘the narrative identity of a culture’ (Ricixur 1987, 276). The narration of what the community ‘lives through’ is what constitutes identity over time. Through the narrative, the community stands out as a permanent entity despite all the changes it experiences. Narratives are made and told in the community. If narratives are broadly accepted by the community they become master narratives with a dominant status in a given society (Jarausch and Sabrow 2002, 16). Since the nineteenth century professional historians have played a decisive role in the making of master narratives; as Hobsbawm amusingly phrased it, historians are to national identity-building what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts (Hobsbawm 1990, 23).
Heritage & Society, 2020
This article investigates various heritage-related practices in the city of Shanghai since the en... more This article investigates various heritage-related practices in the city of Shanghai since the end of colonialism. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the dominant approach was to remove the colonial heritage and replace it with a communist narrative of the people and its heroes. The introduction of market socialism in the 1990s led to a revival of the colonial heritage, but in a form that presented the city as a cosmopolitan and consumer-oriented center. The role of the colonial heritage in the dramatic change in the cityscape since the 1990s has often been viewed as nostalgic. This article analyses nostalgia as a reframing of the colonial heritage, in which it reappears as the design of communist extravagance or “conspicuous communism.” Through an analysis of the newly opened Shanghai History Museum, this article demonstrates that the global design strategy imposed on the cityscape is losing momentum and is now being challenged by a more robust narrat...
Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics, 2007
Recently there has been much debate about whether Europe is old or new. The debate was ignited by... more Recently there has been much debate about whether Europe is old or new. The debate was ignited by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s casual remark in January 2003 that Europe could be divided into old and new. What Rumsfeld meant by this remark has been the subject of considerable debate. Among those appointed ‘new’ Europeans by Rumsfeld were the upcoming EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, as well as longer-standing members such as Spain, Britain and Denmark. The only apparent common trait among these ‘new’ Europeans was that their governments supported the American position on the Iraq crisis (and would sign the so-called ‘letter of the eight’ a week after Rumsfeld’s remark). At first glance Rumsfeld’s understanding of ‘novelty’ seemed to mean alignment with the US government on its Iraq policy.
Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, 2019
Creative tourism: activating cultural resources and engaging creative travellers, 2021
This study aims to provide interventions co-creating tourist destinations in Denmark. The first g... more This study aims to provide interventions co-creating tourist destinations in Denmark. The first goal of the study was to reconceptualize the attractive force of places. Instead of simply conceiving places as passively waiting to be visited, the researchers wanted to highlight their force of attraction. Since the municipality brands itself as 'the realm of nature', we set out to investigate how 'nature', always man-made to some extent, could be viewed as a force of its own. The second goal was to step away from the conventional understanding of tourists as simply consumers of places and treat them not as strangers and guests to the places, but as potential hosts and designers of place experiences. Furthermore, the researchers reversed traditional identity mechanisms by treating those tourists who returned year after year as part-time locals (GravariBarbas and Guinand, 2017). Creative, playful, and reflexive engagement with places is certainly present in the two interv...