It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, December 24, 2021
16-country study shows how news shapes governments' humanitarian aid
A new study shows that media coverage of crises can increase governments' allocation of emergency humanitarian aid—whether or not the crisis merits it.
This is because intense, national news coverage triggers other accountability institutions (the public, civil society, elected officials) who put pressure on governments to announce additional funding.
Dr. Martin Scott (University of East Anglia), Dr. Mel Bunce (City, University of London) and Dr. Kate Wright (University of Edinburgh) interviewed 30 senior policymakers in 16 of the world's largest democratic, humanitarian donors. In 2020, these donor countries were collectively responsible for over 90 percent of all humanitarian funding.
The researchers found that news coverage only appeared to influence emergencyhumanitarian aid budgets. These relatively small, emergency budgets are kept in reserve to respond to rapidly deteriorating, or sudden-onset crises.
According to their interviewees, governments' annual humanitarian aid allocations—which are much larger—are unaffected by news coverage.
However, the researchers found that a lack of news coverage did influence policy-making about annual aid allocations.
This was because policymakers assumed that other governments were much more influenced by news than they were. So, they tried to compensate for what they assumed would be less funding for these 'forgotten crises'.
Dr. Wright said: "These findings have important implications for government donors, news organizations and aid agencies, and for wider understanding of how news coverage may influence foreign policy".
Dr. Bunce explained, "If you wanted to influence donors via the news media, this research suggests you should target national news outlets (rather than international or local ones). You should also target countries that put more resource into untagged emergency aid (rather than annual aid allocations). And look at countries where there are career-oriented foreign ministers running aid agencies that have limited independence".
Dr. Scott added, "For government departments seeking to resist such media influence, and defend their needs-based decision-making, they should consider building stronger public (and ministerial) understanding of humanitarian principles".Mainstream media coverage of humanitarian crises falls short, new survey finds
More information:Martin Scott et al, The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats' Perspective,Journalism Studies(2021).DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2021.2013129
People whose moral beliefs and values align closely with other members of their online communities—including those on social networks Gab and Reddit—are more prone to radicalization, according to new USC research.
Researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences had theorized that a high level of consistency in similar moral concerns within online communities is linked to an increase in radical intentions—that is, readiness to participate in illegal or violent political action.
In new research published this week in Social Psychological and Personality Science, they found the degree of shared moral concerns or "moral convergence" within an online cluster predicts the number of hate-speech messages posted by members.
"Our research team has looked at how morality motivates people to engage in various types of behavior, from donation during a disaster to taking extreme actions, even violence, to protect their group," said study lead author Mohammad Atari, who recently defended his Ph.D. in the department of psychology at the USC Dornsife College and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. "They feel like others are doing something morally wrong and it's their sacred duty to do something about it, even if that means posting hate speech and committing hate crimes."
Scientists first analyzed posts on an alternative social media network popular with the alt-right and right-wing extremists called Gab. The platform, which claims to champion free speech and isn't moderated for hate speech, provided the researchers with a unique opportunity to investigate the dynamics that could lead to radicalization.
They found Gab users who had a similar moral profile with their immediate group—meaning they felt similarly about core moral issues including care, fairness, loyalty, purity and authority—were more likely to disseminate hate speech and use language intended to dehumanize or even call for violence against outgroup members.
The researchers replicated the observations in the Gab study by looking at another extremist network in the online community Reddit. They analyzed a subreddit called "Incels"—involuntary celibate men who blame women for their inability to find sexual partners—and found those who were more like-minded in their morality produced more hateful, misogynistic speech.
Working together, scientists at USC and other institutions a few years ago developed a model for detecting moralized language. It's based on a prior, deep-learning framework for a computer program that can reliably identify text evoking moral concerns associated with different types of moral values and their opposites. The values, as defined by the Moral Foundations Theory, are focused on care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation.
Moral Foundations Theory is a social and cultural psychology theory that explains the evolutionary origins of human moral intuitions based on innate, gut feelings rather than logical reasoning.
"Morality binds us together and gives our society structure and direction for taking care of those in need, and a vision for a just and prosperous future for the group. But morality also has a dark side, in that extreme forms of it can lead to the opposite of a lot of these positive principles," said Morteza Dehghani, an associate professor of psychology and computer science. He leads USC Dornsife College's Computational Social Science Lab, where he, Atari and others investigate how morality intertwines with prejudice and hate.
Social media platforms allow extremists to find each other and, as Dehghani describes, "feed each other's visions of the world and anger towards the outgroup."
Experimental studies further revealed the role of morality
In three controlled experimental studies, the research team further demonstrated that leading people to believe that others in their hypothetical or real group shared their views on moral issues increases their radical intentions to protect the group at any cost, even by resorting to violent means. When U.S. study participants were led to believe that other Americans shared their moral views, they became more willing to "fight and die" for their country and the values it stands for.
"These findings highlight the role of moral convergence and familial-like bonds in radicalization, emphasizing the need for diversity of moral worldviews within social networks," said Atari.
But, he acknowledged, that's easier said than done. More study is needed to determine the most effective interventions for online communities to introduce different views, which may hold the key to stopping radicalization.
'Stop the Steal' had roots in online radicalization
The real-world threats posed by online radicalization were recently illustrated by the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Those who were convinced the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from former President Donald Trump organized online under the hashtag #StoptheSteal on Facebook and on Gab, which served as a hub for organizing the insurrection.
These radicalization studies were already well underway before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Even so, Atari said the events of Jan. 6 further motivated the research team that had been trying to understand online radicalization.
More information:Mohammad Atari et al, Morally Homogeneous Networks and Radicalism,Social Psychological and Personality Science(2021). DOI: 10.1177/19485506211059329
Capturing the public’s attention is about standing out in a crowd of influencers. Credit: Peshkova | Shutterstock
Our society is driven by social influence. The salesman who wants to sell you a car, the politician who wants your vote and the Tiktok influencer who wants you to "like" their videos have one thing in common: they are vying for your attention.
For scientists—in psychology, politics and computer sciences—understanding quite how we attract people's attention is a challenge. In a recent study, we found that social influence is best understood as a competition.
People often think of social influence as a one-to-one relationship between the influencer and their target. But every election has at least two candidates. Similarly, thousands of videos are uploaded on TikTok every day, each hoping to be the one that goes viral. And, every time a salesman sells a car, his competing colleagues lose a customer.
Influencing is a zero-sum game. More than how to influence people, the question is how to be more influential than others.
Game theory
We designed a laboratory model of social influence in the form of a game to be played by three people: one client and two advisers. The client has to buy one of two lottery tickets but has no information about which is better. The advisers, who have private access to such information, and compete for being hired by the client.
Our model, much like social influence in real life, is a zero-sum game: one adviser's success is the other's failure. This allowed us to use game theory to find an optimal strategy for the adviser.
Our analysis of game theory showed that a clear strategy can be formulated: if you already have influence (if you are hired), be vague and stay close to the truth. If, conversely, you are ignored, be loud, exaggerate and, if necessary, just lie to stand out.
We conducted seven experiments with more than 800 participants who played the role of the client. We found that strategic distortion of the truth outperformed honest advising in winning over and retaining individual clients in up to 80% of the time. When advisers were strategically dishonest, they also succeeded in swaying groups of clients who elected their adviser democratically in each round.
This strategy, of course, is familiar to anyone who lived through the Brexit campaign, as former UK prime minister David Cameron clearly describes in his book, For the Record. According to Cameron, Boris Johnson played precisely the card we would expect the disadvantaged candidate (the one challenging the incumbent) to play. Cameron advocated remaining in the EU, so Johnson embraced the leave campaign.
Cameron writes that Johnson was making a strategic choice to differentiate himself from the incumbents. Johnson, he says, "risked an outcome he didn't believe in because it would help his political career." And, he adds, because Johnson was certain the leave side would lose, backing it brought little risk of breaking up the government he wanted to lead one day. "It would be a risk-free bet on himself," Cameron writes.
Competition characteristics
Central to this model were the three hallmarks of competition for social influence: information asymmetry, delegation of future decisions and intractable uncertainty.
Information asymmetry occurs when influence seekers (politicians or advisers) know more about an issue than the people they seek to influence (voters or clients). In the political arena, the issues at stake are often multidimensional and too complex for people to be fully informed about. In the Brexit vote, for example, the regions most strongly favoring Leave were also—to the surprise of many voters—the most dependent on European Union markets for their local development.
Competition for social influence also often involves a delegation of power: voters or clients granting politicians or fund managers the power to make future decisions on their behalf.
Finally, predicting the future is hard. Political science writer Philip Tetlock, in his 2017 book, Expert Political Judgment shows how pundits who are regularly tasked to predict uncertain future events in finance, politics, or sports often turn out to be wrong. Competition for social influence thus tends to take place under high outcome uncertainty. Evaluating advice accuracy is difficult under high uncertainty. This creates opportunities for competing advisers to seek influence strategically because few would remember the failure of their radical but dishonest predictions.
Public support
Our findings suggest that the success of dishonesty is due to our willingness to jump to conclusions in hindsight. This chimes with what research shows on how we assess the choices we have made.
If an adviser was the only one to predict a bad outcome before it happened, we tend to think that they must have known something that others did not. While this may sometimes be true, often it is just pure luck. A strategic adviser takes advantage of this willingness we have to trust our hindsight to inflate their confidence or even, dishonestly advise against the available evidence simply to stand out.
An honest adviser, when ignored, is less effective (than their dishonest rival) in persuading the client to shift: commitment to honesty stops them from positioning themselves as a radical alternative if there is no evidence to justify it.
These kinds of strategies are repeatedly and ruthlessly employed by attention-hungry influencers because they work. Our analysis helps explain why politicians who are repeatedly found out to have lied could continue to enjoy public support. We hope that our work will generate awareness in the public and help us all to see through such manipulative and dishonest strategies and protect the citizens against them.Cheaters drawn to the opportunity to cheat
Social media was used to both spread misinformation and for fact-checking during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study which explores how individuals perceive and make sense of information they encounter during times of global crisis.
Psychologists at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) carried out 24 semi-structured interviews with people aged 18–56 to understand how they made sense of and interacted with news they suspected to be fake.
According to an Ofcom report commissioned in the first week of the UK lockdown, 49% of individuals used social media to access news and information about COVID-19, and 46% stated they had seen false or misleading information related to the pandemic.
Participants in the study described how they encountered information overload in the initial weeks of the pandemic and struggled with complex messaging from official sources, so turned to 'simplified' social media news feeds.
However, they would still use various sources to triangulate the trustworthiness of news stories. These included daily UK government briefings, the World Health Organization, traditional print and broadcast media, and the social media channels of reputable organizations.
They also on relied on opinion leaders within their networks, such as "experts" in the form of social posts from medics, patients and nurses.
Some revealed that they psychologically distanced themselves from people who were perceived as generating debate about news and fake news and would avoid platforms such as Facebook, where opinion and misinformation were seen to be more prevalent, in favor of those such as Instagram and Snapchat.
Their news consumption on social media was transformed from actively engaging in content creation and sharing, to instead observing news stories as they unfolded on their social media channels.
Despite this reluctance to engage with the spread of misinformation, some participants revealed that they too had shared content before assessing the validity of information. This happened when they judged information on its ability to support social connections and on whether it would offer new insights or an amusing or positive update. Common-sense assumptions and biases—such as political views—also impacted on information appraisal.
Dr. Lee Hadlington, senior lecturer in Cyberpsychology at NTU's School of Social Sciences, said: "We know that the consequences of fake news are far from trivial. Research has already shown that it can lead to the misallocation of resources, foster feelings of inefficiency, alienation and cynicism, undermine the legitimacy of established organizations and, importantly, become a barrier to communicating essential information at a time of crisis.
"Our findings indicate that the coronavirus pandemic has acted as a perfect storm for fake news, with individuals using social media to stay social, engaging in some fact-checking and distancing themselves from people they see as "fake-newsers," or those who share fake news with their networks. However, we also saw that emotional reactions to the negative information, whether in humor, frustration, or in worry, led to information being shared."
Based on the results of the study, the researchers recommend that the social media industry, clinicians, researchers, governments, social media users and their communities join together to raise awareness of the impact of fake news on behavior and wellbeing. They also suggest that guidelines and policies are developed accordingly, including public awareness campaigns and strategies to identify fake news and curb exposure to it on social media platforms.
A study by the universities of Valencia (UV) and the Catholic University of Valencia finds that the harassment and the response it provokes is different among high school students depending on gender. It concludes that school bullying is not cross-cutting and that the reaction as a witness to the aggression is different: girlstend to seek outside help and boys either get involved at the time or do not act.
The most striking result for the authors is the verification that harassment is not cross-genre. Boys receive it from other boys and girls from other girls. In addition, the feeling of isolation or repetition in these behaviors does not change between them. That is, gender does not cause them to harass or be harassed to a greater or lesser extent.
According to Alguacil, "these data allow us not only to know the existence of situations of harassment in the secondary stage but also to quantify and classify these actions, so that we can know more what actions related to harassment are carried out by boys and girls, and what is their perception and reaction to both the harassment suffered and the one inflicted or witnessed."
"Specifically, this study provides information to better understand the differences in perception and action on gender-based harassment," says the FCAFE professor. "It's about knowing the problem more and better, as well as the variables that may be associated with it, to be more effective in both prevention and management of the actions that occur," he explains.
To achieve these results, the research group surveyed 318 high school female students and 274 high school male students. They were asked to complete a standardized, commonly used questionnaire for this type of study. Composed of 25 questions, organized in two blocks, information was obtained on the relational life of students and abuse between peers suffered, inflicted or witnessed and action taken.Teachers' sexist attitudes have a major impact on secondary education
Held up by history: Roman ruins provide building blocks for Serbian village
by Miodrag Sovilj
Archeologists work at the site right next to Stari Kostolac's coal mine and a power plant on the outskirts of what was once a major Roman settlement and military garrison.
Amid the devastation after World War I, Verica Ivanovic's grandfather used whatever construction materials he could find to build the family's home including, unbeknown to him, bricks from the Roman Empire.
The house and its ancient foundation are still used by the family in central Serbia's Stari Kostolac—on the outskirts of what was once a major Roman settlement and military garrison then known as Viminacium.
It was only years later that the family realised the bricks were cobbled together from the ruins belonging to structures from the once powerful empire.
Emilija Nikolic, a research associate from the Belgrade Institute of Archaeology, estimates that the bricks found on Ivanovic's house likely originate from the third or fourth century AD.
"It's kind of awkward, I know it's Roman. But everyone was doing it," Ivanovic, 82, told AFP.
The fields around Viminacium remain an archaeological gold mine teeming with ancient coins, jewellery, and other artefacts.
In an abandoned backyard near Ivanovic's home lies the remnants of an ancient Roman wall.
"We were ploughing potatoes in a field. I looked down and saw a cameo... When I turned it with my hoe, I saw a beautiful female face," said Ivanovic. "It's in a museum now."
According to archeologists, Viminacium was once the provincial capital of Rome's Moesia region and supported a population of roughly 30,000 inhabitants during its heyday.
Buried treasure
For centuries, residents near Stari Kostolac have used the bricks and mosaic tiles and other pieces from antiquity that were found in abundance in the area to fill everyday needs.
"Historians in the 19th century noted that a peasant from a nearby village used a sarcophagus as a pig feeder," Nikolic told AFP.
Today, the sarcophagus—which features images from the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece—resides in a museum.
According to archaeologists, Viminacium was once the provincial capital of Rome's Moesia region and supported a population of about 30,000 inhabitants during its heyday.
Tens of thousands of artefacts have been unearthed from the area so far, including a Roman bath with heated floors and walls, a fleet of ships, and hundreds of sculptures.
The ancient city is also believed to have been home to one of the largest necropolises discovered in territory belonging to the former Roman empire, with about 14,000 tombs unearthed.
Viminacium started to decline following the Hun invasion in the mid-fifth century AD and was completely abandoned by the time Slavs arrived in the region at the beginning of the seventh century.
Tourists visit the necropolis at the site—scans show below lie the remnants of the entire ancient city—including temples, an amphitheatre, a hippodrome, a mint and an imperial palace.
What lies beneath
The archaeological site is also the only major Roman settlement that has no modern city built on top of it, according to experts.
"You can't see Londinium anymore because modern London is there. No Lutetia nor Singidunum—Paris and Belgrade are built on top of it," said Miomir Korac, director of the Belgrade Institute of Archaeology.
Sprawling underneath Stari Kostolac's corn fields are the remnants of the entire ancient city—including temples, an amphitheatre, a hippodrome, a mint and an imperial palace, according to extensive scannings, Korac said.
Just two to three percent of the area has been excavated and explored by experts to date.
But centuries after its fall, the ancient garrison city is under siege again.
For more than four decades, nearby mining projects, including the recent expansion of a coal project and a power plant, have increasingly encroached into the area.
Archeologist Dragan Jacanovic points out a brick bearing a Roman stamp—for centuries, locals have used the bricks, mosaic tiles and other pieces from antiquity found in the area for everyday needs.
Last year, miners unearthed several ancient ships during a dig, with archaeologists dating the oldest vessel to the first century BC.
A new theoretical contribution to the research literature published in the International Journal of Business Excellence looks at workplace "forgiveness" and employee wellbeing and happiness. The analysis of the various factors linking forgiveness to wellbeing and the role gender plays was carried out by Rinki Dahiya of the Indian Institute of Management Sirmaur, in Himachal Pradesh, India. It leads the author to offer some useful guidance for managers hoping to boost employee morale, happiness and nurture wellbeing.
The concept of positive organizational behavior has emerged in recent years as a component of understanding how to improve business practices with a focus on the wellbeing of the employees of the business in question. Over the years, researchers have thus looked at psychological wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, subjective wellbeing, physical wellbeing, and prosocial behavior in various environments and contexts. Moreover, recent research has homed in on the idea that determinants of life satisfaction can be seen in the context of optimism, humor, forgiveness, and finding meaning in life. The present paper looks at how forgiveness relates to happiness and wellbeing.
Dahiya found that forgiveness at work act is a predictor of happiness and also gender has a role as a moderator in this regard. The "findings suggest a need for psychological interventions to foster forgiveness and cultivate happiness in the organizational context," she writes.
Organizations might increase mistake tolerance and introduce earlier interventions when needed as well as promoting forgiveness in the workplace in order to cultivate happiness. If managers and supervisors can create a more forgiving work environment, then employee wellbeing should improve to the benefit of the workforce as a whole and to the organization's goals, and ultimately its outputs and profit margins.
More information:Rinki Dahiya, Refusing to forgive is your own loss: relationship between forgiveness and employee happiness,International Journal of Business Excellence(2021).DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2021.119459
Then-Secretary of State John Kerry praised the work of crisis archaeologists as ‘the gold standard’ in a 2014 speech about the looting of cultural artifacts. Credit: U.S. Department of State, CC BY 4.0
How can you know that science done quickly during a crisis is good science?
Scientists are called on to come up with answers under pressure whenever there is a crisis, from the Challenger space shuttle explosion to the 2020 California wildfires. As they shift from "regular" to "crisis" research, they must maintain rigorous standards despite long hours, mentally demanding tasks and persistent outside scrutiny. Thankfully, science produced under urgent conditions can be just as robust and safe as results produced under normal conditions.
In a recent study, we focused on "conflict archaeologists," an interdisciplinary group tasked with rapid assessments of archaeological destruction in Syria during the war between 2014 and 2017. Observers feared that one particular form of destruction, artifact looting, was a major source of revenue for terrorist groups, including the Islamic State. Prominent policymakers, security officials and a worried public wanted clear answers, quickly.
By any measure, conflict archaeologists succeeded. They produced findings that improved scientific knowledge. Their research led to a landmark bipartisan bill signed by President Obama. Perhaps most importantly, they raised public awareness of the problems associated with looting and smuggling archaeological materials.
Our latest research aimed to understand how work cultures played a role in these achievements—and what lessons can be applied in crisis science across disciplines.
What worked for conflict archaeologists
To investigate, we interviewed 35 conflict archaeologists and other scientists who worked with them. We also observed work in satellite labs and team meetings, and talked to people who used the data and analysis created by conflict archaeologists.
Those we interviewed worked in different physical locations and across multiple disciplines. If they met, they would do so remotely. And yet they were generally aware of what others in this research area were doing. Collaboration is central to doing good urgent science, and we found three key factors behind successfully working together during a crisis.
First, the percentage and distribution of effort matters. We call this "temporal control." We found that full-time devotion to crisis science was not necessarily the only way to produce good work. In fact, researchers involved on a part-time basis expressed higher confidence in the quality of other collaborators' work. We think part-timers were able to maintain a more comprehensive perspective on the collaboration overall.
And keeping a hand in their usual scientific practices seemed to help researchers stay sharp. It meant that when they turned to urgent science tasks, they could do so with fresh eyes and renewed attention to methodological precision.
Second, sharing responsibility for outcomes motivated researchers to generate rapid findings for policy and public-interest needs. We call this "responsibility control." Effective conflict archaeologists distributed credit among collaborators. They translated their objectives and priorities for policymakers and set boundaries and expectations for understanding and using their findings. As a result, they could do their work with the knowledge that they stood with a team—producing accurate findings that could be used to combat artifact looting and trafficking was not any one individual's sole responsibility.
Finally, it was important to have limits around the extent of an individual's personal involvement. This is "scope control," a work environment that helped scientists set boundaries between the research and their personal lives. "It was exhausting," one respondent told us. "I tried not to take the work home with me, but I know it was starting to affect my family life."
Scientists who were able to control the scope of their work, and to speak openly about their challenges, were more likely to stick with the project and express confidence in the strength of the research. We hypothesize that those who are able to set borders around what and how much work they took on were in a better position to assess the strength of both their own research and that of others—and thus feel confident in it.
Creating the conditions for good crisis science
Generating high-quality, safe and reliable scientific research under pressure is not a matter of having a heroic personality or superhuman stamina. It is a matter of thoughtful, deliberate work environments and being part of professional fields that support their members even as they hold them to high standards of rigor and ethics.
To be sure, no two crises are identical. At the same time, crisis science best practices can be adapted to fit the specific circumstances of the project. Global pandemics or imminent environmental catastrophe may require short, intensive, full-time bursts of work. Some research projects are lab- or equipment-sensitive and require specific personnel. As our findings show, science conducted with a supportive infrastructure, with rigor and ethics built into the process, can produce reliable results under pressure.
Like COVID-19 researchers, conflict archaeologists worked with tight deadlines under intense scrutiny. Both groups also emphasized the need for researchers to continue to employ high ethical standards in the research process.
Whether it's the tsunami in Japan, the MH17, Bali bombings, Breivik's massacre, or corona, rituals have been devised for disasters worldwide since time immemorial to commemorate the victims. Martin Hoondert, of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, one of the compilers of the just-published "Handbook of Disaster Ritual," collected stories of rituals, their history and their function with a team of international scholars.
Emeritus Professor of Rituals Paul Post took the initiative for the book, which is a triptych with a multidisciplinary section, including case studies and analysis. "We boldly put it down as a handbook, because many administrators don't think about rituals, while people immediately ask for them after disasters and also start ritually marking the site of a disaster. The Handbook not only provides a framework for further research, but also for policy on rituals after disasters."
One of the most impressive rituals, in Hoondert's opinion, is that in Namibia, of the commemoration of the mass murder committed by the German colonists at the beginning of the last century. Germany apologized and offered compensation a few years ago. "It may seem strange to us, but the Herero walked a memorial march, donning brown uniforms of the German army. It's a reverse symbolism: that uniform is me. That was their way of dealing with the past. Another thing I appreciated was the art exhibition in Venice where a wreck of a rubber refugee boat was on display. Barca Nostra, our boat, it was called. Again, the symbolism was very strong, what do we really know about the crisis, about how people perish while fleeing? This boat made a whole journey from Africa, to Europe, to the Venice Biennale, becoming a collective monument."
What exactly do rituals do?
First of all, rituals have no use. You don't buy anything for them. But we also can't live without them. People can't bear to put loved ones in the ground just like that. Rituals are necessary to deal with grief, to make suffering and victims visible, to acknowledge them. And they also sometimes function as a request for help and a form of protest. When I look at the protests of young people at climate demonstrations, you see ritual acting against danger. Commemorations often include monuments, symbols of what people need to know, of staying informed, and not allowing to forget. The Holocaust museum, or monuments in Rwanda or Srebrenica, aim to remind us never to let these genocides happen again. Yet rituals are culture-specific. In Bali, for example, in 2002, during the commemoration of the bombings, there was no remembrance, but rather praise for the beauty and future of the island. Mentioning the disaster could evoke a new one.
You research funerals and now disasters and rituals, heavy topics all, with a lot of human, personal suffering, does that affect you personally?
My next research project is about divorces, not a happy subject either. But these are subjects that matter, they concern death, which of course occupies people. Furthermore, we are in the middle of so-called slow disasters, such as corona and global warming, subjects surrounding death that demand answers. If done properly, rituals can offer comfort and help, and if I can contribute to processing them, I am happy to do so. I am now supervising, together with a colleague, a Ph.D. project in Rwanda. I am amazed at how the hatred between the various population groups grew, but also how people got over it. Of course I am involved in what people are going through, for example the contacts in Sebrenica affect me enormously. I also realize that I live at a distance and that these people are right in the middle of it. I follow a Bosnian woman who made a play with a Dutchbatter, she was so brave, it may sound pathetic, but my heart goes out to those people. Of course that keeps me busy, you're involved, you can't help it.
And I like to translate my research into practice. They may be drops in the ocean, but I did research in Sebrenica on an exhibition about the massacre and was able to give advice to the board of this memorial site to take more account of the many schoolchildren who visit when setting up the exhibition. Sometimes it is enough for me to listen to these people. I interviewed a survivor, she thanked me, that I pay attention to this case so that it is not forgotten. So that applies not only to individuals but also to collective thinking; that a people is seen and heard.
How have rituals developed?
In the last 10 years, there has been a very clear shift from the ecclesiastical domain to the secular, although the latter still includes many religious elements, think of candle burning and processions that translate into silent marches. What strikes me is that rituals are becoming less linguistic, in fact the action aspect has increased. Less words and speeches, more action, marches, monuments at the locations involved so that a connection is made between past and present.Marriage or not? Rituals help dating couples decide relationship future
