Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia

Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural exceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about British identity politics today. Set in an inward-looking, socially homogeneous, and postindustrial society somewhere in the colonial southern hemisphere, Erewhon provides an anachronistic simulacrum of both an isolationist “Little England” and an imperial “Global Britain,” critiquing the idea of the self-sufficient, ethnonationalist “island nation” by demonstrating the extent to which it relies on the racial logic of White utopianism, as well as on a disavowal of the non-British labor that supports and sustains it.

ОСВІТА ЯК ДИВО І РОЗЧАКЛОВАНА РЕАЛЬНІСТЬ

The article proposes an explanation of the essential distinction between wishful, possible and real options assigning the perspectives for the development of the education, what is especially important for spiritual and intellectual learning in the conditions of the postindustrial society. The European experience of the diagnostic of the cultural pathologies and deformations is analyzed as some side effect of the digitalization. Key words: education, digitalization, learning, forming, cultural pathologies.

In Nature’s Cathedral: Caminoization and Cultural Critique in Swedish Pilgrim Spirituality

Two parallel, interrelated waves of interest in pilgrimage on foot has surged in Sweden since the 1990s: participation in the international Camino pilgrimage and a vernacular pilgrimage movement in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden. In this article, the interconnections between the two strands are explored. In both settings, attention is paid primarily to walking itself, illustrating a key facet of Caminoization: the stress on the journey rather than the destination. It is argued here that the pilgrimage walks in the Church of Sweden are modeled on a Caminoized notion of pilgrimage, built into the Swedish word pilgrimsvandring. This notion of pilgrimage functions as an open category that can connect to both religious heritages and social and cultural trends in new ways. A key outcome of the spread of Caminoized pilgrimage is the rise of a pilgrim spirituality that celebrates simplicity and communing with nature, and carries with it a cultural critique of postindustrial society, further accentuated in the pilgrimage movement’s recent turn to ecology and climate action.

Cultural antinomies of the contemporary Serbian society: Premodern mentality vs. Postmodern identity

Globalization has permeated all aspects of social life (economic, political, cultural) and affected the daily life of people. Postindustrial society and postmodern culture have made a significant impact on the transformation of identities, which have truly become liquid - multidimensional, discontinuous, decentralized, fragmented, unstable and inconstant. Parallel with this, new tendencies in culture have almost completely narrowed the boundary between high and popular creativity, thus challenging the status of the established, until then recognized values. These changes have also become evident in the contemporary Serbian society, which is obsessed by preserving the tradition and long-developed identities. By chance, that society has had one foot in the postmodern information world, with the other stuck in the quagmire of old habits and misconceptions inherited from the period of premodern social awareness. By analysing crucial value aspects (traditionalism, conformism, authoritarianism and nationalism), the author of this paper attempts to provide an explanation (which is the basic precondition for the resolution) of the ambivalent and, seemingly, inescapable situation in which the culture of Serbian society finds itself.