UNESCO Courier articles from July 1994

UNESCO Courier archives from July 1994

Jose Donoso. (Latin American novelist) (Interview)
July 1, 1994... The Chilean writer Jose Donoso is a leading Latin American novelist. After teaching English literature in the United States and travelling in many countries, he lived in Spain until 1980, when he returned to Chile. His works have been translated...

Surprising strangers. (people from different lands and cultures)
July 1, 1994... Societies have always allocated a special place to the stranger who comes to them from elsewhere. In Antiquity he would have been a navigator, a merchant, or an exile. In Athens, before the city-state made a distinction between "barbariansans"...

Elvis the African: the return of the chief. (Elvis Johnson-Idan)
July 1, 1994... Elvis Johnson-Idan is a man with two lives. For eleven months of the year, he works as the parks manager of a London municipality, spending the weekends relaxing with his wife Elizabeth and their three children. In December and January, however,...

Lost illusions. (Hindu refugees)
July 1, 1994... As the twentieth century began, the people who, fifty-five years later, would become my ancestors, found themselves living not in India, the place of their birth, but in a new land, the Caribbean island of Trinidad, which they were learning to...

"Living like savages": the indianization of the whites in North America.
July 1, 1994... The mission of the colonizers was not confined to the occupation of land. They also had a wider social purpose: spreading Christianity, educating "savages", and civilizing what Montaigne called this "child's world", a malleable world offered up...

Inuit blues. (interview with Pavel Lounguine)(includes related article) (Interview)
July 1, 1994... Pavel Lounguine, director of Taxi Blues (1990), travelled to the polar regions to witness the collective suicide of a culture. He returned with a documentary film, A People too Many (1994). * What gave you the idea of making a film about the...

The Fulbe and the samurai code. (mixing the Japanese and African cultures)
July 1, 1994... Ryo Ogawa explains why a Japanese can feel at ease among Africans When I was doing research among the Fulbe of Dyolof, in Senegal, I had a faithful assistant called Awdi, an evocative name meaning "seed kept for the next sowing". He was ten...

The hornbill's quest. (a visit to the People's Republic of China)
July 1, 1994... A Dayak writer from Indonesia visits the Koreans of northern China I am a Dayak, one of the indigenous people of Kalimantan (Borneo) in the Indonesian archipelago. I was born in the heart of the island, which we call Tanah Dayak (Dayak Island),...

Tibet preserved in amber. (Illustration)
July 1, 1994... Paulius Normantas is a Lithuanian photographer who lives in Hungary. He is particularly interested in peoples whose traditional ways of life he believes to be threatened. A beautiful collection of his photos has appeared in a book whose title,...

Dreams of twenty young women.
July 1, 1994... Twenty women aged between eighteen and twenty-five. After not very successful school careers they are attending the Active Preparation Programme for Qualification and Employment (PAQUE) at the Parismedica centre. Set up by the French government...

'One turning planet.' (Beijing)
July 1, 1994... Australian writer David Harris set out to search for Lijien, a mysterious city built in China by Romans 1,300 years before Marco Polo reached Cathay. . . . Beijing. There are sixty-two people waiting at the stop for bus 375. As it comes around...

Mexico City: the shock of discovery.
July 1, 1994... THE existence of Mexico City, the world's largest city at that time, was totally unsuspected. Its name had a strange ring to it, like a place-name that might have been conjured up in the imagination or the garbling of the mysterious sounds of an...

My friends the gypsies. (Aleksandar Petrovic) (Interview)
July 1, 1994... Aleksandar Petrovic is a leading figure in Yugoslav cinema. His film I Even Met Happy Gypsies won the Palme d'Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. * Why do you like Gypsies? How did you get to know them in the first place? As far back as...

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants looks at the Palestinians.
July 1, 1994... How a writer of Jewish origin, a defender of human rights, came to know those he calls "exiles in their own country" For as far back as I can remember I have always pricked up my ears whenever I heard someone talking about Palestine, a...

A European artist discovers the salt of the earth. (Lake Sayula, Mexico; Jean-Charles Pigeau)
July 1, 1994... Countless are the representations of the Other, and infinite the choice of ways that lead to them. The artist is like the traveller, always tuned into a world that speaks the language of the body, of space, of the wind that sweeps through...

We are Siamese if you please. (includes related article)
July 1, 1994... In his novel Persian Letters (1721), the French philosopher Montesquieu gave a satirical portrait of the society of his time, supposedly seen through the eyes of two visitors from the East. Did he know that some fifty years before, three...

Cafe society. (Egyptians in France)
July 1, 1994... In the nineteenth century a group of Egyptians in Marseilles discover European ways of life. One of them is Rifa'ah Rafe' el-Tahtawi (1801-1873), a pioneer of modern Arabic literature. He lived in Europe between 1826 and 1831. On the very...

Getting to know Chief Iamory. (Sudanese tribal chief)
July 1, 1994... Louis Gustave Binger (1856-1936) was a French officer who explored the Niger bend and the hinterland of Cote d'Ivoire in 1887-1889 Thursday 9 February 1887 In the Sudan, the chiefs' power over their subjects is limitless. Since they are to...

When the Mombuttu women cried hosanna.
July 1, 1994... The German botanist and traveller Georg August Schweinfurth (1836-1925) explored the reaches of the upper Nile and was the first European to discover the Uele River in what is now Zaire. My relationship with the natives became closer with each...

Coral: taking the pulse of the planet. (Greenwatch)
July 1, 1994... CORAL reefs are one of the wonders of the world. And one of its most useful. This is how Professor Jean Jaubert, director of the European Oceanological Observatory (l'Observatoire Oceanologique Europeen) at the Monaco Museum, sees them: "Coral...

Japan: new approaches to the environment. (Greenwatch)
July 1, 1994... JAPAN is an archipelago of more than 3,900 islands stretching over 3,000 kms. to the east of the Asian continent. It is a largely mountainous country, two-thirds of which is covered with forests. Most of the 124 million Japanese live on the...

Social development and quality of life.
July 1, 1994... THE World Summit for Social Development that will be held in Copenhagen early next year will be an opportunity for the international community to search for a new approach to a very wide range of questions of fundamental importance to all of us....

The rescue of the Bulgarian Jews in 1943.
July 1, 1994... On 8 March 1994, a ceremony was held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris under the patronage of M. Francois Mitterrand, President of France, to commemorate the saving of the Bulgarian Jews during the Second World War. The Bulgarians were one of the...

Olexander Dovzhenko: poet of the seventh art.
July 1, 1994... The pioneering film-maker once dubbed "the Homer of the cinema" dominated the Ukrainian cinema for three decades OLEXANDER Dovzhenko was one of the giants of Ukrainian cinema. He was born in the town of Sosnytsia on 30 August 1894, shortly...

The dawn of serenity: letter from Borobudur. (Indonesia)
July 1, 1994... The Buddhist sanctuary of Borobudur (Indonesia) is one of the jewels of the world cultural heritage. Eiji Hattori, a specialist in Buddhist art and thought, has long been fascinated by this great monument. Here he suggests a new interpretation of...

Thomas Mann: the new obscurantism.
July 1, 1994... This is the third and final instalment of Thomas Mann's address to a meeting organized in Nice in 1935 by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation on the theme of "the education of modern man" (see our two previous issues). This...

The Delhi Declaration.
July 1, 1994... From 13 to 16 December 1993, the leaders of nine high-population countrIes--Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan--gathered in New Delhi for the world's first Summit on education for all. The goal of the...

The U.N. goes to school.
July 1, 1994... An American school whose pupils are drawn from many countries has modelled itself on the United Nations THE Northeast International Magnet School in Montclair, New Jersey (U.S.A.), is a publicly funded school with approximately 375 boys and...

The Sun: Eternal Flame of Creation.
July 1, 1994... Although not many of those who watched last February's Winter Olympics may have been aware of it, the Olympic flame that burned in Lillehammer (Norway) was a legacy of an ancient solar cult. The sun is an omnipresent symbol in the history of...