SRC Newsletter 5 (2)

Annual Newsletter of the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University		SRC Home
	No.5 , December 1997	back to INDEX>>

From the Director	Symposia	Foreign Visiting Fellows	Our Current Staff	Exchange Programs with Overseas Institutions
Guest Lectures from Abroad	Visitors from Abroad	Publications	The Library	A day under the colorfol autumn trees in Takino Park ,Sapporo.

Essays by Foreign Fellows

Mordechai Altshuler

Boris N. Mironov

Volodymr A. Potulnytskyj

Vilmos Agoston

Oleg T. Bogomolov

Alfred F. Majewicz

Symposia

The annual Winter Symposium was held at the SRC on January 30 - February 1, 1997. Foreign guests were Konstantin Sarkissov (Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences), Nadezhda Mikheeva (Economic Research Institute, Far Eastern Branch of the RAS),

Katherine Burns (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Jan Kaja (Warsaw School of Economics, Poland), Antti V. Kujala (University of Helsinki, Finland) and the Foreign Visiting Fellows of the SRC. The proceedings of the symposium, Socio-Cultural Dimensions of the Changes in the Slavic-Eurasian World, published in June 1997, include 10 English language contributions.

The 1997 International Symposium, "Quest for Models of Coexistence: National and Ethnic Dimensions of Changes in the Slavic-Eurasian World," was held at the SRC on July 16-18, 1997. Overall, a hundred scholars participated, and in each session lively arguments were developed, searching for the "model of coexistence." Foreign guests included Boris P. Chichlo (CNRS, France), Henry Stewart (Showa Women's College, Japan), Anuar A. Galiev (Institute of Oriental Studies, Kazakhstan), Geoffrey J. Jukes (Australian National University), Vadim A. Turaev (Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far East, Far Eastern Branch of the RAS), Bakhtior Islamov (Tohoku University, Japan) and the Foreign Visiting Fellows of the SRC.
On the 17th, three sessions were held: "Coexistence of Nationalities," "The Politics of Coexistence," and "Language and Nationality Questions." In each session, ethnic and/or linguistic groups were used as the unit of coexistence, and the problems of the relationship among the groups and ethnic and language policies were discussed.

On the 18th, the following sessions were held: "Coexistence in the Russian Empire," "Region and Identity," and "Environmental Degradation and Coexistence." In each session, a new "model of coexistence" was proposed, considering areas (for example, in Central Asia and Siberia) where various peoples lived together as one unit.

It showed convincingly that it is not possible to cope with environmental destruction such as hazardous radioactive contamination and the Aral Sea catastrophe without establishing a new cooperation system across nation, region, and ethnicity.

Also, on the 16th, a joint symposium "Structural Changes in China and Slavic-Eurasia" was organized, which combined with two priority research projects financed by the Ministry of Education: "Changes in the Slavic-Eurasian World (headed by Professor Shugo Minagawa, SRC)" and "Structural Changes in Contemporary China (headed by Professor Kazuko Mouri, Yokohama City University)." In this panel discussion, a dialogue between researchers in both areas was held, producing fruitful results.

The proceedings of the symposium on the 17-18th will be published this year.

The annual Winter Symposium will be held at the SRC on January 29-30, 1998. The 1998 International Symposium being organized for July 23 - 24, 1998, in Sapporo will focus on the concept of "Region."

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