This paper analyses certain contemporary narratives among Buryats of Russia and China. At issue is the nature of responsibility for the campaigns of terror, in particular the devastation of the Buddhist church in the 1930s. In these accounts political leaders appear as reincarnations, destined to unleash terrible events. Stalin, for example, is said by Buryat Mongol villagers to have been the reincarnation of a Blue Elephant which lived in ancient times in India. I examine local discussions around these stories to suggest that the narrators, themselves having been caught up in the seemingly objective and transparent, yet deeply irrational, accounts of the Party-State, do not (at any rate at present) confront actions in which they were both perpetrators and victims ‘matter-of-factly’. Having been a particular target of the Stalinist all-pervasive organisation of suspicion and punishment, Buryat Buddhists today are creating ‘paranoid narratives’ of their own to explain the repressions - a narrative of displacement, in which the actions attributed to an other (in this case Stalin) are in some way ‘about’ oneself. The reincarnation stories point up the crucial moral issue erased by socialist metahistory, the ethical problem of individual accountability. They are about complicity, for they reveal an uneasy, and probably unconscious, identification with Stalin.

Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault's contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals.

The word “revolution” has acquired, of recent years, a very broad meaning. It has been applied to any innovation entailing substantial economic and social change. For example, the term “neolithic revolution” is currently used to designate the transition from a hunting and gathering the fruits of the soil type of economy to the relatively sedentary life of the agriculturist. The acquisition of metal—copper, bronze, and, later, iron—also gave rise to all kinds of technical as well as social transformations. The patient researches of archeologists enable us to assess the impact of this “revolution of metal” which so profoundly altered the life of our ancestors. We have a general notion of the social changes that resulted from it, thanks to our knowledge of such things as the layout of villages or cities and the details of funeral accoutrements. Here again ethnology comes to the aid of archeology.

A notable aspect of contemporary fiction is the increasing importance acquired by the detective as a literary figure. From World War II up to today he has transcended a narrow role played in a narrow genre to become the symbol for man's existential quest and puzzlement in the face of mystery. If science fiction is the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the future of our technological society, the detective and a new form of literary detective fiction have lately become the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the present, since mystery is not only, too obviously, in the future but, more subtly, in the present. While science fiction lacks a character typical of the genre who may embody and possibly transcend its purposes, the detective novel thanks to the multifold aspects of its “ordainer”—the detective—has progressively risen to literary prominence through the apparently paradoxical negation of its original functions.

Brain functions are stochastic processes without intentionality whereas mind emerges from brain functions as a Hegelian “change from quantity”, that is, on the order of 1012 profusely interconnected neurons, “into a new quality”: the collective phenomenon of the brain's self-experience. This self-referential and self-observing quality we have in mind is capable of (recursively) observing its self-observations, i.e., interpreting change that is meaningful in relation to itself. The notion of self-interpretation embodies the idea of a “hermeneutic circle”, that is, (in interpretation theory) the treatment of the whole in relation to its parts.

In the short decade between 1985 and 1995, the dominant cultural movement of our time, hip-hop culture, has become, seemingly overnight, mainstream American popular culture. This centering of hip-hop art, most specifically rap music, in American popular culture has given young African Americans unprecedented national and international visibility, at a historical time when images via the 21st century's public square of television, film and the internet are more critical to identity than ever. This visibility, and most certainly the often anti-Black and stereotypical images that accompany it, forces distinctions to be drawn between today's Black popular culture and traditional ideas of Black culture, including what is art and what's at stake in cultural commodification.

An attempt is made here to consider poetry as one of the aspects of language. It is not the first attempt and certainly not the last.

At first glance we are startled by the multiplicity of additional formal laws restricting the poet's free choice of expressions: intricate rhyming schemes, equal number of syllables in a line, regular distribution of short and long, stressed and unstressed syllables, alliteration, prevailing in both ancient Germanic and modern American poetry:

(E. E. Cummings, All in green)

Over the past few years postmodernism has been gaining popularity. Because the works of writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari, for example, are now readily available to the English reader, a novel intellectual force is present that must be assessed (Hassan, 1985). Terms such as “mise en abîme”, “libido”, “schizo-analysis”, “undecidables”, and so forth must be explained and their relevance for social analysis deciphered. Furthermore, a conception of knowledge, a research methodology, and an image of social order that are consistent with these somewhat odd ideas have been introduced, and thus must be evaluated with respect to their sociological importance. At first, due to the strange language that is adopted and the nature of the philosophy offered, postmodernism appears to the uninitiated as an attempt to subvert rational discussion.

Emotion, as a “suprarational” property, transcends rationality in that it can be thought of as a group, contextual rather than as a solely individual trait, and thus is a higher order property, as the above quote suggests. This proposal arises from a metatheoretical analysis of models available to broach questions of emotion. I use metatheoretical in the sense of both the context of theory production and the theory of theory. From the first arose the idea that emotion, through the use of irrationality, has surfaced as a working equivalent to inexplicability or rational relativity, and can be modelled more adequately as suprarational, with a unique nature in its own right. The latter led me to propose that the concept of emotion as contextual, a higher order group level property, is possible and tentatively profitable.

The unity and continuity of Indian civilization is both a commonplace and a problem. It is usually taken for granted as a truth too evident to require proof. Yet when scholars begin to inquire into the exact nature of this unity and continuity and into the ways in which it is attained, they quickly encounter many unanswered questions. In a recent paper on “The Content of Cultural Continuity in India,” the American indologist Professor W. Norman Brown concludes that, while there has been a highly developed civilization on the Indian subcontinent since the third millennium в. с. with many elements of cultural continuity, it remains a problem to say what has given this Indian civilization its distinctive character and vitality. He himself does not believe that this question will be answered by making a catalogue of the hundreds of cultural traits (such as the use of the swastika, the sacredness of the pipal tree and of the cow, the joint family and the caste system, ascetism, the doctrines of karma and rebirth and of ahinsā) which persist across large spans of Indian civilization. Even if the historical and ethnic origins of these traits could be traced, this knowledge would not be sufficient, he thinks, to discover the vitalizing principle of Indian civilization. That principle, he suggests, lies in the field of values and attitudes and not in the material productions of arts, literature, and the sciences, or in particular skills, customs, institutions, or forms of thought. He analyzes, as one example of such a basic value, the notion of duty and the stress on correct action.

An inquiry into the rhetorical aspects of history may seem paradoxical, given that historical discourse is not typically included among those types which, since Aristotle, have been understood to be governed by rhetoric; these types being the deliberative council, the tribunal and the commemorative assembly. It was to these specific audiences that the three kinds of discourse—the deliberative, judiciary, and panegyric—were addressed. However, are the boundaries of the historian's audience sufficiently delineated in order to allow us to identify it as a specific addressee? This first objection, which regards the very legitimacy of the subject of these remarks, can be met by noting a common trait that links history to the above-mentioned three types of discourse; that is, competition between opposed discourses requiring a choice. In each case the aim is to structure a debate that calls for a clear-cut decision. Yet a major problem of the discipline of history is that it allows both for widely varying descriptions of the same series of events, and sanctions the use of a variety of equally acceptable rules or preferences for interpreting a given slice of the past.

Von Frisch's discovery of the methods by which bees communicate is a landmark in human achievement comparable with Champollion's elucidation of hieroglyphics, and Professor Benveniste has performed a service in introducing it to the notice of readers of Diogenes. Nevertheless the very importance of the facts discovered makes it desirable to discuss their interpretation from a somewhat different standpoint.

The image of the city has always been an important source and tool for defining cultural communities that dwell within. Distinctive street patterns as well as the building scenographies in different cultures and periods document the technological, economic, and cultural capacities of the cities’ inhabitants. From Aristotle’s practical philosophy up to the current tourist view of the city, where the relics of the past – cathedrals, castles, or town halls – serve as symbolic attractors, the heterogeneous image of the city reveals interesting insights into the history of civilization. Beyond the abstract data used in economic or social sciences research – numbers of inhabitants, income, productivity, and other statistical information – the image (and also the imaginaries) of the city with its high cultural complexity is a topic of research for critical art history which offers unexpected and refreshing material for a transdisciplinary dialogue on the city as the most essential form of human culture. Since the beginning of the 21 st century, the city form and image have changed considerably, in quantitative and qualitative terms. The increasing number and size of the world’s megalopolises (cities with more than 10 millions inhabitants), mainly in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, marks a new epoch of city culture with different structural and aesthetic parameters than those of traditional Old European cities.

This article reviews, first, the new visual constructions of the megalopolis, second, its transformation into artistic and documentary images (photograph, film, digital art, etc.), and third, how they are catalysed into collective mental imaginaries. As an example, I examine Mexico City, a megalopolis of about 20 million inhabitants where cultural fragments of the prehispanic past, the colonial period, and the modern epoch have left their visual traces, to constitute a vital collage; one that has many contrasts as well as the occasional clash in cross-cultural processes. Supported by the recent tendencies of Bildwissenschaft (visual studies), this article tries to develop new perspectives of research on the critical phenomena at the beginning 21 st century from within the current polycentric and hyperurbanized world.

The notion of ‘gentle barbarism’ was developed during our critical analysis of the discourses and mechanisms of ‘modernisation’ that emerged in the context of the movement for permanent reform (in education, the public services and business management), in which public bodies and businesses have been engaged since the 1980s. These discourses and mechanisms of modernisation seem to us to represent a blind spot where sociological analysis is concerned.

I am an historian in a country in which it is not only impossible to say what the future will be, but in which the past itself—as someone put it—is susceptible to change. This country is currently going through an unprecedented crisis that has turned both its material and political as well as spiritual life upside-down. The crisis, the roots of which stretch back over decades, has made life virtually unbearable for many of its citizens. Yet for the historian, and for the philosopher and sociologist, this crisis affords an unusual opportunity. As a result of the earthquakes that have shaken the former Soviet Union, formerly hidden layers of history—and the forces that underpin them—have been revealed. Such cases do not often arise. To a scholar endeavoring to discover the secret springs of unfolding events, Russia represents a gigantic and unique “laboratory.” Although it is easier to judge the extent of a cataclysm, to comprehend its deeper import, after the event, this does not relieve the contemporary—who participates in historical events—of the duty of trying to understand, to the extent possible, the nature of the changes taking place.

For most people the city, particularly the industrial city, is the antithesis of the aesthetic. While there may be sections that have their charm, trucks and automobiles have conquered the urban streets and pedestrians scurry before them like vanquished before a victor. Gardens and parks are occasional oases amidst the stone desert of concrete and asphalt, but the dominating features of urban experience remain mechanical and electronic noise, trash, monolithic skyscrapers, and moving vehicles. The personal and intimate are swallowed up in mass structure and mass culture. And the human place—precarious and threatened.

Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois's book, Man, Play and Games, to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. As far as I know, Caillois's book is not quoted in the literature dealing with income distribution theories, although the comparison with play and games is, for limited purposes, interesting. In play and games we find almost all elements which play a role in theories of just income distribution: equality of opportunity, chance, talent, competition and skill, reward, entitlement, winners and losers, etc. These are not chance similarities, for “… games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practised. They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs … One … can … posit a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play”. Moreover, as we will see, superstars combine the four basic characteristics of play that make their activities a special kind of play.

Exorbitant attention has been paid to the nature of gods, whose character it is to be inacessible to examination, but relatively less attention has been paid to the impresarios of gods, viz. prophets and shamans and priests—the de facto sources of all our religious information—who are available for study. It is our contention that the nature of deities is to be sought in the psychic disposition of their exponents and, more than this, that the ancestor of the god is the shaman himself. The vatic personality is often known to be psychologically abnormal, or perhaps only temporarily in such a state as the dream or the vision, and doubtless often in response to the pressure of some current crisis, personal or social or both. But the conditions for hallucinatory contact with spirits and gods may easily be gained by psychically quite ungifted persons, through the use of psychotropic drugs. It is this second situation we would wish to examine in the present study.

Reading and study were among the central values of traditional Jewish society. Indeed, it is impossible to explain the continuity of the Jewish people without reference to the unique status of the book. Any analysis of contemporary Israeli culture, therefore, must look first to the fate of the book as it is affected by the weight of tradition and of modernity. This task is attempted here. It is part of a comprehensive national study of the sociology of Israeli culture in the ‘70s.

In traditional Jewish society, the book refers, of course, to the Holy Scriptures and the body of rabbinic literature that was built upon them throughout the ages. The Jews came to be called the “People of the Book” by virtue of living according to the rules of the Book with which they were so preoccupied.

In the Soviet Union, structural research has had certain distinctive features. Structural research, not only in language, but in literature and art too, is deeply rooted in Russian science. Quite apart from such distant forerunners as the Kharkov philologist Potebnia, one cannot forget the great group of philologists of the twenties, who dealt with questions of poetics, and whom contemporary criticism to a greater or lesser extent identifies with “formalism.” Soviet literary criticism of the twenties is well-known throughout the world; it has many times been discussed, from various points of view, in the press, and there is no need to dwell on its characteristic features. We need only emphasize the variety of theoretical standpoints that marked the Soviet philologists of the twenties and the differences between their subjective views, and also the fact that there are differences of principle that divide the majority of these workers from the “structuralism” of the fifties. Let us bear in mind that in the twenties V. M. Zhirmunsky and V. V. Vinogradov (who are usually numbered among the “formalists”) were in fact in dispute with the real members of Opoyaz (and subsequently adopted a reserved attitude towards structuralism as well). M. M. Bakhtin, who in his brilliant works has given a complete analysis of the complex semantic structure of great literary works, does in fact make use of the concept of a world image, and has a fine understanding of the “play” of oppositions at different levels, etc. His influence on structuralist research in modern literary criticism is undeniable; but he can certainly not be numbered among the “formalists” of the twenties, whom he vigorously opposed. It is noteworthy that even today both the structuralists and certain of their direct adversaries invoke the authority of Bakhtin.