Culture contacts and the making of cultures : papers in homage to Itamar Even Zohar

To speak of “Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures” is in fact to speak about the fundamental processes through which cultures are formed and maintained. There is a seeming contradiction between these two agendas of inquiry: while “the making of cultures” evokes the investigation of concentrated efforts invested in the creation of discrete social entities through marked cultural boundaries, “culture contacts” calls for the search of the fluidity of such entities and the constant complex transfer and exchange between them. But of course, it is the interplay between the two forces that underlie cultural dynamics in whatever social setting, from (what seem to be) the most rigidly closed and “uncontaminated” ones to those that seem extremely heterogeneous and unsettled. It is the understanding of this multifaceted culture dynamics as the machinery that makes social worlds going which has been the driving force of Itamar Even-Zohar’s life-long scholarly project, to which he has been dedicating his intellectual work for over forty years, in theory as well as a long series of case studies. Encompassing knowledge of so many different cultures, their languages, histories and everyday practices, from medieval Scandinavian and Russian speaking territories, through modern national Hebrew, Italian or Iberian cultures, to recent developments in contemporary Iceland and Newfoundland, Even-Zohar has collected enormously diverse evidence, all of which underlie his wide theoretical view of such processes of socio-cultural formation, change, consolidation or disintegration. This volume of papers by Even-Zohar’s colleagues is an expression of the latitude of his work. [Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, “Introduction”] Cover Page ......Page 1 Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures ......Page 3 Copyright_Page......Page 4 Table of Contents ......Page 5 To the memory of Robert Paine ......Page 9 Acknowledgements......Page 11 Sela-Sheffy: Introduction......Page 13 PART ONE......Page 29 Manfred Bietak ......Page 31 Robert Paine ......Page 79 Rakefet Sela-Sheffy ......Page 91 Wadda Ríos-Font ......Page 113 Israel Gershoni ......Page 143 Gisèle Sapiro ......Page 159 Nitsa Ben-Ari ......Page 231 Jón Karl Helgason ......Page 257 PART TWO......Page 265 Orly Goldwasser ......Page 267 Gabriel M. Rosenbaum ......Page 335 Gideon Toury ......Page 357 Panchanan Mohanty......Page 377 Thomas S. Harrington ......Page 403 Chang Nam Fung ......Page 423 Yaacov Shavit ......Page 449 Saliha Paker ......Page 471 Notes on Authors......Page 487