“Mathematical Paradise”: The Parallel Social Infrastructure of Post-war Soviet Mathematics

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-128
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav Gerovitch
Keyword(s):  
Applied Mathematics ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Study Groups ◽  
Mathematical Community ◽  
Mathematical Truth ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Mutual Help ◽  
Post War

This article examines the response of the Soviet mathematical community to the geographical restrictions, physical barriers, political and administrative pressures, and conceptual constraints that they faced from the 1950s through the 1980s. Many talented mathematicians with “undesirable” ethnic or political backgrounds encountered discrimination in admission to universities, employment, travel to conferences abroad, etc. The mathematical community in response created a parallel social infrastructure, which attracted young talent and provided support and motivation for researchers excluded from official institutions. That infrastructure included a network of study groups (“math circles”), correspondence courses, math competitions, specialized mathematical schools, free evening courses for students barred from top universities, pure math departments within applied mathematics institutions, and a network of open research seminars. A community emerged in which mathematics became a way of life, work and leisure converged, and research activity migrated from restrictive official institutions to the private spaces of family apartments or dachas. In the informal community of Soviet mathematicians, a specific “moral economy” operated, which relied on a network of friendly connections and on an exchange of favors. The various external constraints further strengthened personal ties, encouraged mutual help, and fostered close friendships in the community. Although excluded from elite privileges, the “parallel world” of Soviet mathematics cultivated an ethos of noble rejection of career ambitions, material rewards and official recognition in order to pursue the highest ideals of mathematical truth. This way of life, which opposed the bureaucratic spirit of official institutions, was often perceived by its participants as a “mathematical paradise.”

scholarly journals Demographic and social degradation in the Lubelskie Voivodeship as a peripheral area of East Poland

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (41) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Flaga ◽  
Monika Wesołowska
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Peripheral Area ◽  
Population Structures ◽  
Natural Movement ◽  
Regional Factors ◽  
Post War ◽  
And Migration

Abstract Eastern regions of Poland are regarded as areas where numerous unfavourable socio-economic phenomena appear and accumulate. These are the results of historical conditions as well as post-war border localization and various processes, primarily in terms of economy. The consequences of the political transformation of the state in the 1990s and profound social and economic changes in recent decades are also crucial drivers of many disadvantageous changes in the region. The article shows population processes which can be recognized nowadays in Eastern Poland, and the attention of the authors is focused on the peripheral rural areas of the region. General tendencies reported in the text are based on the cases from the Lubelskie Voivodeship where concentration of the demographic and social problems is particularly noticeable. The analyses comprise changes of population growth and its components (natural movement and migration), population structures as well as some characteristics concerning the quality and conditions of inhabitants’ lives. The main causes of negative processes shaping the population, including domestic, regional and micro-regional factors, are also presented. The final part of the article deals with the most important outcomes of population changes which are reflected in the progressing ageing of society, the decline of villages and social infrastructure, among other facts. These unfavourable phenomena are shown in the context of the future development of the region.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-164
Author(s):  
Marie Muschalek
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Everyday

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of everyday violence in colonial Africa. Coming from multiple cultural groups, the African and German men of the Landespolizei shared a host of moral codes that can best be subsumed under the heading of honor. This study reveals significant similarities between policemen from Europe and those from Southern Africa. Out of the Landespolizei's distinctive racial and social composition unfolded a dynamic that made the police decidedly efficacious. Instead of a grand narrative of quantified violence, the chapter draws out the lives of people getting by, living with violence in the everyday. It tries to uncover how the dynamics of violence were inscribed into a moral economy of the accepted and normal. The chapter concludes that violence is not necessarily antithetical to community or social order. Indeed, it can be constructive. The daily brutality of modern colonialism was a horrific injustice. But it was also a way of life with its own rules and regularities.

Remaking the Post-War Colonial Order

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-76
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Mutual Obligation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Colonial Order

This chapter focuses on the question of colonial reform in interwar Algeria, asking how political actors sought to redefine their place within the imperial polity in the wake of the war. Through a close reading of the debates that surrounded the two major moments of prospective colonial reform, the Jonnart reforms (1919) and the Blum-Viollette Project (1936), it shows how activists across ideological and ethnic divides mobilized the memory of the war to reimagine the system of colonial rule in Algeria. Underlining the limited appeal of Wilsonian rhetoric in the colony, this chapter explores the dominance of arguments grounded in concepts of the ‘moral economy of wartime sacrifice’ and ‘mutual obligation’. It considers how political actors sought to legitimize their visons of a just post-war colonial order by maximising their contribution to the war effort while minimising the wartime participation of their opponents, thus undermining their rival claims on the post-war state.

The American Musical and the American Dream: from ‘Show Boat’ to Sondheim

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
David Hirst
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
International Success

The musical has long been recognized as one of the few distinctively American art forms. How far do these roots result in an ‘Americanism’ of ideological content – and how, indeed, does one measure the ‘content’ of a musical, with its fusion of the spoken word, song, and choreography? David Hirst, who teaches in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts of the University of Birmingham, here examines the problems of critical methodology posed by the musical form, and also traces the development of the musical as an expression (at times a critical expression) of the American way of life and the ‘American dream’. After demonstrating its reflection of themood of the Depression era, he analyzes its response to the social and political mood of the war and post-war years, and to the changing standards which made Hair an international success, yet which have consigned the work of Sondheim to Broadway failure – in a world where ‘failure’ and ‘success’ carry their own, pervasively American connotations.

How Can We Get There From Here? Thoughts on the Integration of American and Comparative Politics

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. 558-560
Author(s):  
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph ◽  
Lloyd I. Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Policy Alternatives ◽  
Institutional Determinants ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Third World

The bifurcation of political science into American and comparative politics impoverishes both. The division parochializes them by encapsulating the study of politics within national boundaries. The result is to deprive each of the theoretical contributions generated by the other and to cut them off from the institutional and policy alternatives each has devised. The loss to the study of American politics is probably the more severe because its practitioners have not been prepared to recognize the limitations of their “area specialty.”Historical and institutional determinants help to explain the bifurcation. Because academic political science, that is, political science as a discipline and a profession is, as Bernard Crick has shown, American in its origins and early development, it has been less attentive to non-American contexts. More than other academic social science disciplines, political science's intellectual provenance is located in the new world. Unlike the other social sciences, political science lacks eighteenth and nineteenth century European masters. In the belief that America was showing the world its future, post-war behavioral political science like other aspects of the American way of life became an American export to Europe and the third world.

Violence as Usual

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Muschalek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Face ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Informal Practices ◽  
Southwest Africa

Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, this book uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives. The book begins by providing a background on the power of everyday violence in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa. It explores the violent acts orchestrated by the police force (Landespolizei). Instead of being built primarily on formal, legal, and bureaucratic processes, the colonial state was produced by improvised, informal practices of violence. The book concludes with reflections on the nature of everyday violence in colonial Africa. Coming from multiple cultural groups, the African and German men of the Landespolizei shared a host of moral codes. The dynamics of violence were inscribed into a moral economy of the accepted and normal. The daily brutality of modern colonialism was a horrific injustice, but it was also a way of life with its own rules and regularities.

Tripod Scheme in Flood Disaster Management in Japan

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 582-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hirotada Matsuki ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Disaster Management ◽  
Arable Land ◽  
Rice Paddy ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Mutual Help ◽  
Management Scheme ◽  
The Social

Japan has suffered from natural disasters but sustained economic activity on not so commodious islands. This social resiliency is based on a time-honored risk management scheme that, like a tripod, consists of self-help, mutual help, and public help. This study analyzes the social infrastructure from Japan’s disaster-fighting history. Japan’s first political documents tell how the ancient Japanese people broke ground on floodplains to develop rice-paddy agriculture and underwent repeated water-related disasters after the Nara era (710-794). People had to deal with flooding and commence risk management to survive in flood-prone areas. During the Edo era (1603-1868), people expanded paddy agriculture to all arable land in the islands and tried to protect rice production from endless flood disasters in the same places. An effective flood-fighting scheme was then invented and expanded to nationwide. Its essence was coalition among people, a primary community and a local government. In Japan’s modernization since 1868, traditional social rules have been enshrined into laws. The indigenous scheme for anti-flood measures has been translated into 3 major acts: the Disaster Management Basic Act, the Flood Fighting Act, and the River Act. These acts have been working and evolving, during qualitative transforming of Japanese society due to industrial restructuring, rapid urbanization, population fluidity, etc. Under such a legal infrastructure, the MLIT Himeji Office conducted a pilot program in an inundated community just after a downpour disaster in 2009 to improve local anti-flood measures. Output has indicated the importance of independency and interdependency of self-/mutual/public help. The “tripod” scheme provides recommendations for living with disaster not only in Japan but also in other countries in Asia.

Imagining Rabbits and Squirrels in the English Countryside

2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Kean
Keyword(s):  
Red Squirrel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Grey Squirrel ◽  
Red Squirrels ◽  
The Past ◽  
Country Life ◽  
Post War

AbstractDrawing on contemporary coverage, particularly in The Field and Country Life, this article considers the construction of rabbits and squirrels as images of the past in England. By the 1930s, the red squirrel had become increasingly rare in the English countryside. Particularly in towns and suburbs, the population of the grey squirrel was growing rapidly. Those who saw themselves as the custodians of the countryside depicted the grey squirrel as a foreign force inimical to a mythical English way of life as epitomized by the red squirrel. In the post war period, the debate resurfaced about the nature of the countryside and who had a right to defend it. The focus then was upon the spread of myxomatosis from France, which was depicted as a foreign disease. Wild rabbits, who died in the thousands from this infection, became appropriated, as red squirrels before them, as symbols of a lyrical and ordered past in the countryside.

scholarly journals COVID 19, communal capital and the moral economy: Pacific Islands responses

2021 ◽  
pp. 092137402110143
Author(s):  
Steven Ratuva
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Subsistence Farming ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Moral Economies

One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various forms of communal capital such as kinship exchange, subsistence farming and strengthening of social solidarity have become features of this bourgeoning moral economy. In the post-COVID era, there needs to be a major rethinking of how community-based moral economies can be mainstreamed as assurance for resilience and as a responsive mechanism against future economic calamities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document