Identities / Identités / Identidades – serie

This book contains selected papers from the meetings «To think the Identity» and «Identities on the move» held in the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida) during 2010. The aim is to understand the reasons that allow social cohesion throughout the creation of identities and its adaptation. Identity is individual and collective, momentary and secular, apparently contradictory terms that can only coexist and fructify if they entail a constant adaptation. Thus, in a changing world, the identities are always on the move and the continuity of society requires a permanent move. Values, Culture, Language and History show the societies in permanent evolution, and demand an interdisciplinary perspective for studying. Attending this scope, outstanding historians, sociologists, linguistics and scientists offer here a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon: how men and women have been combining the identity and the move in order to feel save into a social life from Middle Ages to current days, and how different items, in our present society, built the framework of identities.

The urgent need for the study of exclusive identities in conflict is ever more apparent in a globalizing world in which societies are becoming multicultural and complex and in which inter-cultural contact and the co-existence of languages and cultures comes increasingly to bear on the construction of plural identities. The present book considers perversion in the construction of identity and the perverse usage of identity in areas such as social cohesion – xenophobia, racism, ostracism, rejection, ageism, marginalisation – and the mismanagement of linguistic identity, language groups and associated discriminatory practise arising out of historical and culturally based discrimination. The texts were submitted in an international meeting held in the Institute for Identities and Societies of the University on Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) in November 2012.

This book contains selected papers from the meeting «Conditioned Identities. Wished-for and Unwished-for Identities», held in the Institute of Research in Identities and Society (University of Lleida) in 2013 and attended by participants representing different disciplines, discussing the imposition and acceptance of identities. The different chapters of the book, written by scholars and researchers from all over the world, analyse the conflict between attributed and chosen identities in History, Language, Literature, Sociology and Anthropology across various historical periods and geographical regions. Theoretical and practical studies are combined in order to contribute to a renewal of perspectives regarding a key issue for understanding the roots of our current society and the problems surrounding conviviality in today’s world.

Between 2010 and 2013 the European Science Foundation project «Cuius Regio» undertook a study of the reasons for cohesion of some European regions, including the analysis of the ways for cohesion of two peripherical Iberian entities: Portugal and Catalonia. A scientific meeting held in Lleida in 2012 facilitated the collection of contributions from outstanding researchers in order to analyse how specific identities in the periphery of the Iberian Peninsula were created in the Middle Ages and how they evolved until the 19th century. History, Literature and Language are being discussed in this book in order to understand the reasons for creating specific territorial identities and also to compare their different evolutions, that have resulted in different political realities in our current times.

The book derives from an European Science Foundation project about the cohesion of European regions developed between 2010 and 2013. Flocel Sabaté led into this framework a team of fourteen scholars looking for the reason of the cohesion and permanence of Catalonia from Middle Ages to current days. This collective book arrives at an updated explanation, far from neoromantic visions and attentive to social vectors, such as socioeconomical convergence, external and internal perception, social representation, institutional development, creation of a justificative discourse and influence of the law, the language, the art and other cultural items.

Archives are the documentary memory of each society and so they become one of the pillars of its identity. Its destruction is sometimes accidental, but it is often deliberate in order to remove the ties with the past. The new times that revolutions attempt to reach usually involve forceful and symbolic ruptures with former identity, including the destruction of the economic, administrative and historical documentation. This book collects updated texts written by outstanding researchers from an initial Congress held in Moscow in 2006 in order to analyze the causes and consequences of the destructive violence against archives boasted during revolutionary turmoils. The studies pay special attention to the first important contempt and destruction of documentation, during the French Revolution; continue studying the damages to archives during 19th century; and culminated analyzing the effects of Russian Revolution over the documentation and the evolution until the end of the Soviet period.

The book offers a historical and methodological update of founding historical themes and moments, and a methodological review more than ever necessary of current interpretations of the History of Sardinia between the Early Middle Ages and the Modernity from an identitarian point of view. And that by means of a greater interaction between History, History of Art, Geography, Archaeology and Architecture.Sardinia has been taken as a case study due to its island nature, with boundaries clearly determined by Geography and, moreover, by its extremely conservative nature. The authors’ aim is to provide scholars with new data and new reading keys to interpret Sardinian History and its Cultural Heritage. Both strongly conditioned by the permanence of Sardinia in Roman and Byzantine orbit, lato sensu, for more than a millennium (3rd c. b.C - 11th c. a.C) and by two other important elements: only about 80 years of a virtually irrelevant Vandalic domain and no Muslim lasting settlements throughout the High Middle Ages, not so far decisively confirmed by Archaeology.

The present book is a complex approach to the elements that built the Catalan national identity, which can only be analyzed through its complexity and longue durée historical times. Regarding medieval and early modern centuries, the territorial construction, law and state are presented, along with the complexity added by the appearance of composite monarchies in the 16th century, and taking into account the significance of constructing a literary and historiographic tradition to define national character.Regarding modern centuries, the authors do not ignore the importance of socioeconomic dimensions in a very complex diversity which flows both in the intellectual and political world and in the dissemination of identity through the mass media in an international level as well.

This book adopts a multidisciplinary and novel approach to the historical evolution of identities in Europe – identities connected with regions as a multi-layered and processual key concept in dialogue and/or conflict with the emerging nation-state. In the book, historical disciplines meet with anthropology, human ge-ography and cultural studies to discuss how regional identities of various kinds were created, challenged and redefined; how they were experienced and expressed and to what extent they produced feelings of attachment. Spatial, social, cultural and political manifestations of identities in Europe are historical phenomena. Their changes and forms help us understand the essential traits of European societies, in-cluding the development of differences and similarities, degrees of attachment and dynamics of physical and mental borders. Drawing on a wide range of sources – from historiography to in-terviews, hagiographical texts, images and songs – expressing evolving identities, this book presents an innovative approach to understanding identity formation in Europe.

This book is one of the publications of the bilateral Egyptian-Italianresearch project “Intercultural Relations between East andWest from the 11th to 21st century” funded by Academy of ScientificResearch and Technology (ASRT) and the National ResearchCouncil (CNR) (2019–2021). The book previews some ofthe research presented in the 2nd international webinar organisedby the project in May 2021 entitled “Art, Culture and Tradeas Evidence of Bonds between East and West: 11th to 21st century”.In that webinar, researchers from Italian, Egyptian, Hungarianand Belgian Universities highlighted some topics focusing onintercultural bonds between the Western and the Islamic worlds.In the book, we have chosen to deal with multi-layer conceptssuch as “Identity”, “Otherness”, “Diversity” and “Minorities” declinedin the relationships between East and West.