No account or discourse on Kāśī goes without claiming the extraordinary status of the place; the city is considered the eternal tīrtha, where all notable places of Indian sacred geography are represented by local replicas; moreover, according to Puranic tradition Kāśī dwells on Lord Śiva triśūla, surviving the universal dissolution for it exists outside space, beyond time. The perception of the historical place gets often confused with the mythical image forged by the māhātmya tradition and supported by different actors in the course of time (sacred specialists, “new Hindūs”, nationalists, orientalists and tourists). The paper deals with the image of Kāśī beyond time and space and analyses its construction through history and society. Basing our reflections on the phenomenological approach to the study of spatial dimension, we want to highlight the interactions between the struggle of creation of a mythic space of the city and the inevitable intrusions and contributions of lived places and their practices, as depicted in the visual sources on Banāras.
The essay depicts the representations of the public image of Arthur Greiser, the Governor of Reichsgau Wartheland and a war criminal, tried and sentenced to death in post-war Poland in 1946. The author analyzes visual sources, such as photographs and films. The post-war images of Arthur Greiser suggest a different figure of the Nazi leader who tried to create his own, well-considered public image as a beginner member of the Nazi party, and later — as the leader of an occupied territory. The Polish discourse, as the anti-war and anti-Nazi one, broke the majestic and proud figure of Greiser, presented him as a ruthless war criminal responsible for persecutions and genocide, an unhuman being without compassion and a monster with specific physiological features. Simulta-neously, the official mass media rhetoric and visual narratives strived to take over the body of Greiser, deprived him the right to dispose of it. The author describes and interprets the pictures of the trial and execution where Greiser is considered as the accused and a dead body/corpse. The visual representations uncover the practice of subjugating the perpetrator’s body in public discourse, as well as the social behaviour and attitudes in the liberated communist country.
The aim of the study is to compare the types of visuals (as means for didactical transformation of educational content) in Czech and German geography school textbooks and to interpret the results with regard to educational goals of school geography. First, the contemporary progress of geography school textbooks is contemplated which is implied by the arising complexity of geographical knowledge. Then the role played by textbook visuals in this context is described. The theory of textbooks and the concept of representation are used for explanation. Educational goals of school geography are also considered and subsequently used as context for interpretation of the results. Regarding the methodology, the study was realized as content analysis of 2 Czech and 2 German geography school textbooks (ISCED 2) in which 1140 visuals were analysed. The results showed that pictorial types of visuals (photo, realistic drawings) still predominate in current Czech school textbooks. In German school textbooks, however, the distribution of the types of visuals is better balanced. It could be therefore concluded that in Czech geography school textbooks the types of visuals which may encourage pupil’s emotional reactions towards educational content predominate, but these facilitate cognitive elaboration of content only to a limited extent. They may thus serve as didactical means for educational goals in affective domain, rather than in cognitive or psychomotoric domain.
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