(Self-)Confidence, Migration, and the State: A Study of Emigration from Latvia

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Iveta Ķešāne ◽  
L. Frank Weyher
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Civil Discourse ◽  
Policies And Practices

How do Latvian emigrants’ emotional apprehensions of social and cultural change in post-Soviet Latvia, and the contrasting experience they gain abroad, affect their relationship with the Latvian state and their ongoing emigration status? By contrasting the personal narratives of 59 emigrants with the Latvian state’s public transformation discourse, we argue that the culture the sending state presents to its public—both in its official discourse and day-to-day interactions with civilians—and the emotions this triggers in people based on their everyday life experiences, deepens our understanding of the post-Soviet emigration regime. Specifically, how state discourse and interactions affect feelings of recognition and the related emotions of confidence (particularly, self-confidence), pride, and shame are important for understanding post-Soviet emigration. Exaggerated neoliberal notions of the “West” dominated both the post-Soviet civil discourse and the policies and practices implemented to guide the transition, fashioning an environment where people felt shamed, and their self-confidence was injured. However, emigration and growing confidence in receiving states helped many regain a sense of comfort, self-confidence, and empowerment.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Mei Zhan
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
Institutional Interplay ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Analytical Point ◽  
State And Market

This chapter reviews the collective exploration into the entanglements of science and technology, the state, the market, and everyday life in contemporary China. The chapter presents a compelling argument for why it is critical, at this particular moment, for anthropologists to step in and make their accounts and analyses of science in/of/and China relevant to academic and public discussions and debates. It emphasizes that China is not a place outside of the West where “usual science” proliferates and changes its forms in a non-Western national or cultural context. Rather, the translocal sociohistorical formation and the complex conceptual and institutional interplay of state, market, and technoscience shaping and shaped by post-Mao, post-socialist, and now Xi's authoritarian China demand thoughtful and experimental ethnographic engagement on the ground. The chapter also invokes governmentality as an analytical point of entry into the enmeshments of science, state, and market and as a way to forge a conversation with topics central to science and technology studies (STS) literatures.

Styles of Masculinity in the West German Gay Scene, 1950-1965

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton J. Whisnant
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Considerable Progress ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nazi Era

Since the end of the 1990s, the study of masculinity within German scholarship has made considerable progress, especially in moving beyond the close association made between German manhood and militarism.1 While the figure of the soldier remains crucial for an understanding of masculinity in Germany (as well as the rest of the Western world) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars have increasingly recognized that any culture includes multiple definitions and representations of manhood—even one so thoroughly saturated by the figure of the soldier as Germany was during the Nazi era.2 Increasingly, the goal of research has been to uncover how masculinity is not only represented in official discourse, but also constructed through social interaction and “performed,” to use Judith Butler's term, in the context of everyday life. Moreover, this research has increasingly taken into account “the relations between the different kinds of masculinity,” in the words of the sociologist Robert Connell—especially the relationships of power.3 In short, recent work has increasingly recognized that the meanings of manhood are constructed within a complicated socio-cultural matrix of gender whose points of reference include not only women and cultural definitions of femininity, but also various versions of masculinity that themselves very often reflect class distinctions and other kinds of social fissures.

scholarly journals Kotiseutu kulttuuriperintöprosessina – saksalainen kokemus

Elore ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Outi Tuomi-Nikula
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Home district as a process of cultural heritage – the German experience This article examines the interpretations of the home or home district (Heimat), and is based on the memories and experiences of the East Germans. The use of the concept ’home district’ has changed in the West German macro level discourse. Formerly one’s home district was the place in which an individual had domicile rights and duties. From this description there has been a gradual shift towards more diverse connections to personal identity. The concept of home district has changed in accordance with the ever-changing life situations of the post-modern individual. The author has used this conceptual shift as a background to the life experiences of her interviewees. The interviews were conducted in the Mecklenburg area in 2007–2008, in connection to a larger research project funded by the Academy of Finland, entitled ”At home in a conserved house – the East German experience”. The author is aiming to show that the ”secondary knowledge” as related by the inhabitants and the image provided by the official documents of socialist Germany did not meet in everyday life. People give meaning and significance to their home district according to their personal life history and also depending on the type of housing they live in. The three different interpretations of the ’home district’ that have been chosen from the data show that secondary knowledge provides new interpretations of the history of socialist Germany. It is history outside official documents.

We Are The State We Seek: Everyday Life in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1945–89

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNEMARIE SAMMARTINO
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Individual Preference ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Good Effect ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
East European ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
History Of

The study of everyday life has had a particular resonance for historians of state socialism for a variety of reasons. First, the study of everyday life promises to get beyond the notorious doublespeak and rosy scenarios of official discourse. Second, the history of everyday life makes use of the great boon of recent history: the availability of interview subjects. Historians of earlier periods can only look longingly at the surfeit of interview subjects available to those who work on more recent decades. While oral history can have its own problems, the works under consideration in this review largely use them to good effect to get at the lacunae and misrepresentations in official discourse. Third, the study of everyday life offers an important vantage point for understanding the vast majority of citizens who were not resistors and yet challenged the state in important ways. As Sandrine Kott has noted, ‘individual preference . . . constituted a third brake on the “perfect” working of the system’. Finally, the ‘interesting’ events in East European socialism are ones that are people powered, most famously the 1989 revolutions that spanned the region. The history of everyday life offers the promise of explaining the paradox of how supposedly stable regimes which experienced comparatively little open resistance in forty years of existence collapsed in a matter of weeks or even days.

Economic and Legal Support for Commercialization of Intellectual Property in Russia

2003 ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
I. Dezhina ◽  
I. Leonov
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
The State ◽  
Commercial Application ◽  
The West ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Legal Context

The article is devoted to the analysis of the changes in economic and legal context for commercial application of intellectual property created under federal budgetary financing. Special attention is given to the role of the state and to comparison of key elements of mechanisms for commercial application of intellectual property that are currently under implementation in Russia and in the West. A number of practical suggestions are presented aimed at improving government stimuli to commercialization of intellectual property created at budgetary expense.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

How to Define the Czechoslovak Underground

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-46
Author(s):  
Barbara Bothová
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The West ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Third ◽  
Key Events

What is an underground? Is it possible to embed this particular way of life into any definition? After all, even underground did not have the need to define itself at the beginning. The presented text represents a brief reflection of the development of underground in Czechoslovakia; attention is paid to the impulses from the West, which had a significant influence on the underground. The text focuses on the key events that influenced the underground. For example, the “Hairies (Vlasatci)” Action, which took place in 1966, and the State Security activity in Rudolfov in 1974. The event in Rudolfov was an imaginary landmark and led to the writing of a manifesto that came into history as the “Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival.”

The Munich conference of Minister-Presidents of German lands in 1947

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Ivan Popov
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
State Governments ◽  
The West ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

The paper deals with the organization and decisions of the conference of the Minister-Presidents of German lands in Munich on June 6-7, 1947, which became the one and only meeting of the heads of the state governments of the western and eastern occupation zones before the division of Germany. The conference was the first experience of national positioning of the regional elite and clearly demonstrated that by the middle of 1947, not only between the allies, but also among German politicians, the incompatibility of perspectives of further constitutional development was existent and all the basic conditions for the division of Germany became ripe. Munich was the last significant demonstration of this disunity and the moment of the final turn towards the three-zone orientation of the West German elite.

To the Travelers’ Service or True Stories about Foreigners in the Russian Province (After the PatrioticWar of 1812 until the End of the 1830s)

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Anastasiya Тikhonova
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Psychological Factor ◽  
The State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Business Activity ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Life Circumstances

In the article the author mentions some modern publications on this issue in the era of Alexander I and Nicholas I in connection with the description of the travelling theme in the context of everyday life history. As an example of the Russian Province, the article considers Smolensk Governorate which was located at the crossroads of routes from Europe to the center of Russia through Baltic, Belarusian and Ukrainian Provinces. On the basis of the materials of the State Archive of the Smolensk region (GASO) from the funds of the Chancellery of Smolensk Governor, the Smolensk Oblast Duma, metric books of Roman Catholic Church in Smolensk and published memoirs (Eugene Hess’ diary and E. Montulé’s notes) the author of the article reconstructs foreign hotel owners’ biographies (S.I. Chapa, D.K. Nolchini, V.I. Gaber), masters of carriage business (D.I. Graf, K.B. Weber), a city coachman, the owner of a coffee house (H. Podrut). All these people were united by their origin (they came from European countries) and their involvement (due to their professional activities) in servicing travelers who found themselves in the Russian Province. Life circumstances and development of their own business forced them to settle far away from their homeland; most of them became citizens of the empire, having connected themselves with Russia forever. In the article it is underlined that foreigners’ involvement in «tourist business» of the considered epoch testifies not only to the benefit of their business activity, but also to the importance of the psychological factor – the very possibility of meeting with compatriots and representatives of other European countries.

scholarly journals “Crazy Jack” and the “Gay CEO”: Visions, Entrepreneurship, and the Chinese State in the New Digital Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
Marina Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
The State ◽  
Business Leader ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
To Receive

This article analyses the visions, careers, and companies of Jack Ma of Alibaba and Geng Le of Blue City. Jack Ma is a well-known business leader and visionary, whereas the less well-known Geng Le only began to receive more attention since launching a successful gay dating app in 2012. The article focuses on the personal narratives and visions of these two IT entrepreneurs. It provides new perspectives on the role of individual entrepreneurs in relation to the Chinese state’s global ambitions and vision of creating a “strong internet country.” It argues that the commercialisation and platformisation of the Chinese internet, and the growing transnational nature of Chinese IT companies, serve to make them more, not less, co-dependent of the state and its visions. The internet’s emancipatory potential is today increasingly conflated with consumption, and online spaces and social relations are subject to both commodification and datafication.

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