scholarly journals Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 755-783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Finnane
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
English Language ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Point Of Departure

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.

The Death of Caucasus Philology: Towards a Discipline Beyond Areal Divides

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Academy ◽  
North American ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
The Cold War

This essay investigates the challenges facing Caucasus philology, by which I mean the institutional capacity to conduct deep research into the literary cultures of Azerbaijan Republic, Georgia, Daghestan, and Chechnya. I argue that the philological approach to the literary cultures of the Caucasus has been a casualty of the rise of areas studies in the North American academy during the Cold War, and that Cold War legacies continue to shape Caucasus Studies to this day. I conclude by offering three proposals for opening exchanges between the humanities and the social sciences within Caucasus Studies. More broadly, this essay argues for a rapprochement between the social sciences and philological inquiry vis-à-vis the Caucasus.

21. Does Strategic Studies Have a Future?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Academic Study ◽  
Strategic Studies

This chapter reflects on the question of whether strategic studies has a future as a field of academic study. It first considers the early development of strategic studies and how it became a broad enquiry by the end of the cold war. It then examines how the study of strategy posed a challenge to the social sciences and goes on to discuss the tensions that exist between the academic and policy worlds with respect to strategic studies. It also explores elements of realism that remain very useful in the study of strategy, particularly when it comes to the issue of armed force. The chapter concludes by explaining why strategic studies should be revived as a subject in the universities and how this might be achieved.

scholarly journals Social Sciences in Hungary During the Cold War and After

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktor Karády
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Thaw Period

Based on various types of recently explored empirical evidence, this study attempts to account for the complex and ever-changing relationship the social sciences in Hungary have entertained with their foreign counterparts, both institutionally and through their intellectual references since their birth in the early 20th century. Historically, up until Communist times, Hungary was a German intellectual colony of sorts while remaining receptive mostly to French and other influences as well. This changed fundamentally after 1948 with the process of Sovietization. This implied the outright institutional suppression of several social disciplines (sociology, demography, political science, and psychoanalysis) and the forceful intellectual realignment of others along Marxist lines. Contacts with the West were also suspended and the exclusive orientation to Soviet social science enforced through­out the long 1950s. A thaw period after this attempt at Russian cultural colonization followed the years after the 1956 anti-Bolshevik uprising. From 1963 on, the Hungarian social sciences saw the reestablishment and state-supported promotion of disciplines that were suppressed earlier, the softening of the ascendancy of official Marxism, and the opening of channels of exchange with the West. In spite of the continuation of political censorship, ideological surveillance, and occasional expulsion of politically dissident scholars until 1989, Hungarian social scientists could benefit more often and intensively from Western sponsorship (such as study grants from the Ford foundation) and collaborations. After the fall of Communism, the expansion and reorientation of the social sciences to the West, dominated by Anglo-Saxon contacts, are demonstrated by various indices, such as data on the book market of the social sciences and books purchased by libraries, translated, or cited in major reviews.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Cold War

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim B. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western Government ◽  
The Cold War

This article surveys the activities and funding priorities of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) during the first two decades of the Cold War, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s. Drawing on documents from the RF's own archive as well as Western government repositories, the article focuses on the foundation's support for research in the social sciences and the humanities. The article first gives an overview of RF policies and grants during the early Cold War and then discusses the political dimension of the foundation's philanthropic practices. The main part of the article looks in detail at two specific RF projects in the humanities and social sciences that exemplify the political and intellectual features of the early Cold War. The final section considers the nature of modernity, modernization, and the Cold War.

scholarly journals How Troubling is our Inheritance - A review of genetics and race in the social sciences

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip N. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Popular Book ◽  
The Social ◽  
Evolutionary View ◽  
Relative Status ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article addresses the argument that there is variation between races in the biological basis for social behavior. The article uses Nicholas Wade’s popular book, A Troublesome Inheritance, as the point of departure for a discussion of attendant issues, including the extent to which human races can be definitively demarcated biologically, the extent to which genetics is related to contemporary definitions of race, and the role of natural selection as a possible mechanism for change in modern societies. My critical review of the theory and evidence for an evolutionary view of racial determinism finds that genetics does not explain the relative status and well-being of today’s racially identified groups or their broader societies.

Becoming Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bogić
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Construction Of Nature ◽  
Important Exception ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum (“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) and The Second Sex appeared in Serbo-Croatian translation (Drugi pol translated by Zorica Milosavljević and Mirjana Vukmirović) in 1982 in Yugoslavia. Socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslav feminists at the time were an important exception to the trends and ideologies of both the Cold War East and West. In Yugoslav socialism, the meaning of “woman” was shaped by the Yugoslav government’s pursuit of the “women’s emancipation” project assigning women the triple role of mother, worker, and comrade. Despite this socialist project, Beauvoir’s Drugi pol was welcomed by Yugoslav feminists who denounced the continued patriarchal treatment of women under Yugoslav socialism. For these Yugoslav feminists, Beauvoir’s writing exposed the social construction of “nature” as the foundation for women’s subordination. The shifting meaning of “woman” and renewed women’s subordination in a post-socialist society only served to confirm the continued relevance of Beauvoir’s dictum.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document