Neo-populist Fables: The Other World of A.V. Chayanov

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110492
Author(s):  
Tom Brass

The political importance of Chayanov transcends his own time and space, influencing as it has done – and continues to do – both the debate about rural development in Third World countries and – more broadly – resurgent agrarian populist interpretations in academia and elsewhere. Less well known, but epistemologically as revealing of his politics, are his non-economic writings, particularly his contributions to the Gothic literary genre. Examined here, therefore, are three stories written pseudonymously by Chayanov, each of which is structured by the same discourse. All were composed over a short period just after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, and reveal as a sub-text the political divergence and concomitant struggle between neo-populist and Bolshevik versions of societal development.

Author(s):  
Igor G. Petrov

On the basis of literary, archival, folklore sources and expedition materials, the article examines such a little-studied genre of Chuvash folklore as prohibitions (taboos). Special attention is paid to the systematization and analysis of behavioral prohibitions that have long existed and continue to exist in the funeral rites of the Chuvash. By behavioral prohibitions, the author means a set of well-established and generally accepted prescriptions and rules that regulated the everyday and ritual behavior of an individual and a collective within the framework of a funeral and memorial rite – family members, relatives, as well as other members of a rural community. Their observance was due to the fear of the society members before the deceased and death, the desire to appease the deceased and secure his protection, as well as the desire to protect themselves from the deceased and ensure his safe transition to the other world. By adhering to the prohibitions, people ensured their own safety and well-being, and in general secured the protection of the deceased as a representative of the ancestral world. Despite the superstitious nature of most of the prohibitions, they still exist nowadays. On the one hand, this indicates the antiquity of their origin, on the other – their stability in time and space.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stan Draenos

Andreas Papandreou’s exile politics, following his December 1967 release from Averoff Prison, have stereotypically been seen as simply adopting the neo-Marxist ideologies associated with the Third World national liberation movements of the era. In narrating the initial evolution of his views on the “Greek Question” in exile, this study attempts to surface the underlying dynamics responsible for radicalizing his politics in that direction. Those dynamics reflect, on the one hand, the relentless will-to-action informing Papandreou’s political persona and, on the other, the political upheavals, headlined by the protest movement against the US war in Vietnam, in which his politics were enmeshed.


Africa ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas S. Hopkins

IntroductionThis paper examines the role of the small urban center in promoting rural development through an analysis of two cases, one West African and the other North African. Kita (Mali) and Testour (Tunisia) are approximately the same size, have something of an urban atmosphere in contrast to their surrounding countryside, and play a roughly analogous role within the political economy of their nations. Both were in single-party states at the time of research; had had French colonialism for about the same period; and have modern institutions that owe something to the French pattern. Both have experienced attempts to build socialism.


Slavic Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 513-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oskar Gruenwald

They [prison and camp authorities] wanted to lower men to the animal level. And they succeeded. There, I realized that life should not be lived for its own sake. Life should be lived for the sake of a goal, faith, freedom, and truth.Radoslav Kostić-Katunac, Look, Lord, To the Other Side: Yugoslavia's GulagAleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.


Res Publica ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-306
Author(s):  
Marc Platel

The article describes the political crises of June and October 1978 in Belgium.For reasons connected with time and space, this contribution ends with the formation of the Vanden Boeynants transition-government, although even with the formation of the Martens-cabinet in April 1979the problems are not yet solved.The formation of this cabinet has been a long-drawn effort, hampered by substantial obstacles, that have been present since June 1978: the difficulties to elaborate both a crisis-management-policy and a consensus concerning a new constitution. Moreover, all this remains overshadowed by fear and distrust from the other political parties towards de Flemish christian-democrats, who usually succeeded in keeping their internal quarrels a really inside affair. The crisis of 1978 has proved on the other side, that the Egmont-Stuyvenberg agreement on the federalisation of Belgium was neither well-balanced nor mature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239-248
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury

According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Roman trial of Jesus is the origin of Christian Europe’s fissile politics. Yet it seems to have gone unremarked in the literature on Rousseau’s thought that he rejects the Christian political legacy on the strength of his interpretation of Jesus’ Roman trial. Rousseau cites this trial at a critical moment of his Social Contract: “Jesus came to set up on earth a spiritual kingdom, which, by separating the theological system from the political system, led to the state’s ceasing to be one, and caused the internal divisions which have never ceased to convulse Christian peoples.” Salient in Rousseau’s theory of history is the moment when Jesus testifies to what he calls a “so-called kingdom of the other world” (prétendu royaume de l’autre monde). And when is that? None of Rousseau’s eighteenth-century readers could have failed to hear, in this, Jesus’ utterance before Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). This is Jesus’ world-historical idea which, in Rousseau’s words, “could never have entered the head of pagans”.


1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Friedmann

The problem addressed is one of strategy and practice: how to promote agricultural and rural development in peasant societies in ways that will benefit the large majority of the people. In a number of earlier essays, the author had proposed what he called a strategy of agropolitan development which would stress the importance of linking a self-generated process of dynamic change from within agricultural communities to the larger processes of central guidance by the state. The strategy involved a substantial devolution of power to small territorial units within the overall system of societal guidance. In the present paper the desirability of such a devolution is considered in terms of political, ecological, and technical–administrative arguments. As a political strategy, agropolitan development requires a commitment on part of national elites, and this may be difficult to obtain. Alternative strategies, on the other hand, although possibly successful when measured in terms of production, are unlikely to involve more than a small proportion of the peasant population. The political choice, then, would seem to be between planning for equality and political self-determination at the lowest levels of territorial governance or planning for inequality and political autocracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-123
Author(s):  
Jocelyne Cesari

Abstract The main argument of this paper is that the sacred time and space of the nation has displaced the meaning of sacredness of the religious sites, and legitimized the national community. By comparing the Temple Mount and Ayodhya disputes, the paper exposes the tensions between two polarities, sacred/profane and religious/political, which helps explain the influence of national identities on the contested sacredness of religious sites. The competition over the Temple Mount is nested within a “thicker” context of conflicting political claims over Jerusalem and national territory between Jewish groups on one hand and between Jews and Muslims on the other. The Ayodhya disagreement is related to the political tensions between the dominant and the minority religions, which have turned the religious dispute over a holy site into a debate on the sacredness of the national community.


Dialogue ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfe

The so-called ‘cyclical argument’ for immortality in the Phaedo represents an endeavour to give philosophical respectability to the ancient religious doctrine of the cycle or wheel of rebirth. According to this, the soul is reincarnated after the death of its body and a short period in the ‘other world’ in a purely disembodied state. Socrates sets himself the task of proving that a soul animating a new body must previously have animated another body whose death antedates the life of the new body.


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