Intricate relations between Western anthropologists and Eastern ethnologists

Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (63) ◽  
pp. 20-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Buchowski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Pecking Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Communist Past

Western representations of the Other are criticized by anthropologists, but similar hegemonic classifications are present in the relationships between anthropologists who are living in the West and working on the (post-socialist) East, and those working and living in the (post-communist) East. In a hierarchical order of scholars and knowledge, post-socialist anthropologists are often perceived as relics of the communist past: folklorists, theoretically backward empiricists, and nationalists. These images replicate Cold War stereotypes, ignore long-lasting paradigm shifts as well as actual practices triggered by the transnationalization of scholarship. Post-socialist academics either approve of such hegemony or contest this pecking order of wisdom, and their reactions range from isolationism to uncritical attempts at “nesting intellectual backwardness“ in the local context (an effect that trickles down and reinforces hierarchies). Deterred communication harms anthropological studies on post-socialism, the prominence of which can hardly be compared to that of post-colonial studies.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

scholarly journals Perepresentasian Liyan Dalam Novel Ushfur Min Ash-Sharq Karya Tawfiq Al-Hakim

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Hendra Apriyono
Keyword(s):  
Travel Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
East And West ◽  
The One ◽  
Western Hegemony

This research is motivated by the imbalance of relations between East and West in Arabic travel literature. The inequality is caused by the representation of the superior (West) and the inferior (East) which is constantly being produced. The novel Uṣfur min al-Syarq by Taufiq al-Hakim as one of Arabic travel literature is considered to offer a different view from other Arabic travel literature by proposing the value of equality between East and West. This research is expected to be able to resolve the problem of inequality in relations between East and West as represented in Arabic travel literature. This research uses another representation strategy from Carl Thompson's travel literary concept which consists of colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial strategies. The results of this study found that the representations of the others made by al-Hakim which were dominated by the use of colonial and post-colonial strategies showed that the author occupied two opposing positions. On the one hand, al-Hakim is still trapped in colonial discourse and on the other hand, al-Hakim is not entirely successful in bringing the post-colonial travel agenda to escape from Western hegemony. The equality proposed by al-Hakim regarding the East is inseparable from Western assistance. To realize the equality of the East and the West, al-Hakim used the superiority of the West to face the West in order to defend the East.

Limonov: vita e avventure di un teppista lirico

2012 ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Roberto Valle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Eduard Limonov, a maudit writer, idol of the Soviet and post-Soviet underground, is the Limonov's eponymous hero of Emmanuel Carrčre, a book that in France has been a literary and political event; a kind of anatomy of the innards of the thug that narrates the novelistic and dangerous life of a voyou, a rogue. From the adventurous life of Limonov you can take the narration of the not official but eccentric and infamous history of the Russia and the West by the Cold War to the rise of Putin. Limonov, National-Bolshevik thug, has joined the Other Russia, an heteroclite coalition, and considers Putin his sworn enemy to be destroyed by a revolution. But Limonov will forfeit the seizure of power and retire to Samarkand or like Rudin, superfluous man of Turgenev's novel, will be forced to die for a cause not his, for the hated democracy.

Power, knowledge, and pipelines: understanding the politics of Azerbaijan’s foreign policy

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-129
Author(s):  
Murad Ismayilov
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Exogenous Shocks ◽  
The One ◽  
Energy Diplomacy

This article examines the ways in which Azerbaijan’s energy abundance and the energy diplomacy the latter made possible—combined with inherent weaknesses attending the state’s young post-colonial polity—conditioned the limits of the desirable by which the country’s post-independence elite was guided and, as such, limited the range of directions—cognitive and spatial—in which Azerbaijan’s foreign policy evolved during the first decade following independence. The study then examines how energy-induced growth in state capacity on the one hand, and the perceived failure of the state’s previous practices to help resolve outstanding security problems on the other, coupled with the effects of a number of endogenous and exogenous shocks (particularly, the colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine; Kosovo’s recognition by the West; the Russia-Georgia 2008 war; global economic crisis; and Turkey’s short-lived attempt at rapprochement with Armenia) and the perceptual shifts those shockwaves worked to engender, served to broaden the spatial and conceptual boundaries within which Azerbaijan’s foreign policy practices were conceived and effected, including by virtue of the energy resources the country has got in possession. The paper concludes by tracing the particular ways in which the broadening and deepening of the country’s foreign policy practices have occurred.

The 1995 Democratic Constitution of Malawi

1996 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Peter Mutharika
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
The West ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Democratic Constitution ◽  
Law Commission

On 17 May, 1995, the Malawi National Assembly adopted a democratic constitution. In terms of Malawi’s post-colonial history, the adoption of the constitution was an unprecedented event. For a period of 30 years, Malawi had been subjected to a one-party dictatorship led by Dr Hastings Banda. Supported over the years by the West because of its anti-communist rhetoric, the Banda regime found itself abandoned with the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. Pressure from internal and external groups led to a referendum on the oneparty state in June 1993 which the Banda regime lost and to the first multi-party elections in May 1994 which the regime also lost. A day before the 1994 elections, the Malawi National Assembly adopted a Provisional Constitution for a period of 12 months. Pursuant to section 212 of the Provisional Constitution, the National Constitutional Conference was held in February 1995 for the purpose of making recommendations to the National Assembly on a permanent constitution. Rather than replace or repeal the Provisional Constitution, the National Assembly decided in April 1995 to make modest amendments to it in order to address some of the more blatant deficiencies that were identified at the Constitutional Conference. During the coming years, the Law Commission will make a detailed study of the entire document, make recommendations to the Minister of Justice and, it is hoped, address some of the obvious drafting oversights.

scholarly journals Reputation on the (green) line: revisiting the ‘Plaza moment’ in United Nations peacekeeping practice, 1964–1966

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Margot Tudor
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Member State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Green Line ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Member States ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cyprus Conflict

Abstract Appointing a United Nations (UN) mediator to work in tandem with the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in March 1964 led to fundamental shifts in how the UN Secretariat inner circle orientated the organisation’s presence in Cyprus. The escalating crisis between the two communities in Cyprus and political pressure from UN member states to respond before Cold War superpower nations became engulfed, prompted the creation of UNFICYP and the recruitment of a UN mediator on 4 March 1964. This article argues that the UN leadership intended to restore member state trust following the controversial Congo mission (ONUC) and expand the organisation’s diplomatic agency through the innovation of deploying the dedicated mediator alongside the armed mission. However, the success of the meditator was diplomatically limited by the localised dynamics of the Cyprus conflict and the willingness of the Guarantor parties to surrender their sovereign imaginaries of post-colonial Cyprus. Ultimately, the experiment in field-based mediation forced the UN Secretariat leadership to acknowledge the incompatibility of appeasing all member states on one hand whilst leading field-based political negotiations with the other.

scholarly journals Portuguese-speaking countries and the challenge of a technological circumnavigation

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 103-117
Author(s):  
Moisés de Lemos Martins
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
Financial Globalization ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Digital Repositories ◽  
Human Community ◽  
Virtual Museums ◽  
Colonial Studies

In this article, I propose the assumption that we are making a technological journey, analogous in many respects to European ocean voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries (Martins, 2015a, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). Thus, I confront the technological nature of the current financial globalization and the commercial nature of European maritime expansion. Whereas the first journey resulted in the colonization of peoples and nations, in the second journey we moved, in a century and a half, to that which Edgar Morin called the “colonization of the spirit” of the entire human community (Morin, 1962). Within this context, I took into consideration the consequences, for culture, of the acceleration of the time via technology, which has mobilized human beings, “totally” (Jünger, 1930) and “infinitely” (Sloterdijk, 2010), in view of the urgencies of the present (Martins, 2010). On the other hand, I will use post-colonial studies to situate transnational and transcultural identities, by examining Portuguese-speaking communities within the context of the “battle of languages,” to use an expression coined by Mozambican linguist Armando Jorge Lopes (2004). This is why I will consider “technological circumnavigation” (Martins, 2015a, 2017, 2018a, 2018b), to be undertaken by every Portuguese-speaking country, like a fight for the world’s symbolic ordering (Bourdieu, 1977, 1979, 1982), where we raise hegemony language-related problems and those pertaining to political, scientific, cultural and artistic subordination (Martins, 2015b). This is, therefore an electronic journey, using sites, portals, social media, digital repositories and archives, as well as virtual museums. What’s more, the viewpoint adopted is that which states a great language of cultures and thinking, such as Portuguese, likewise cannot avoid being a great language of human and scientific knowledge.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document