Dear Johannes, I wish I had had the ability of reading you entirely :) When I was writing about mourning I was not writing "against" you but "with" you, I mean trying to add some personal reflections on the subject/topic exhumation/death/mourning/performance And by the way I feel this month's discussion has been a kind of "polyphonic" discussion in Bachtin's terms, adding new dimensions and new voices, I have not heard/read a post opposing another, arguing, fighting but adding, completing, making the posts richer and more enjoyable. The atmosphere of this month's has been rich and dense and layered with many interesting and important issues. I have particularly enjoyed your comments and insights. Going back to our exchange, I don't remember myself making any post or writing something related to ethnic belonging or national identities. What do you mean with "your typecasting of national or ethnic identities"? I was very clear when I wrote the Nazis and not the Germans (as someone raised by nuns from Paderborn and Munich I will never use Germans as synonyms of Nazis, I love the German culture and Caroline von Gunderrode and Brentano and Chamisso are still some of my housegods :) or when I wrote about the Balkans. In South America we had something called Plan Condor, it was the brainchild of Pinochet, made with the approbation of Kissinger, and it was the intimate collaboration between the armies and the police of the whole continent, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina traded information about political dissents and exchanged prisoners, Uruguayan officers killed and tortured in Argentinian soil, Argentinian officers killed Uruguayan prisoners, etc. They proofed the national state is a myth. And the ethnical identities are only raised when you perform some kitsch folkloristic dance or when you try to reclaim ownership of some obscure dish :) The Scottish haggis, the Italian lampredoto, the Japanese sushi, so on :)
Ana
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