bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
History and the Public Use of History
Authors: Gallerano Nicola
Published: March 2007

I intend to explore the relationship between the history of historians and the public use of history. This relationship, in my opinion, is both conflictual and convergent. As we shall see later on, this assertion is anything but obvious; among historians the idea of a neat opposition prevails, with no possibility of reconciliation, between professional practices of history (the profession of historians) and the extremely vast and confused domain of its “public use.”

Before undertaking an analysis, I must explain what I mean by the public use of history. I have adopted, at least initially, a purely extrinsic definition of the term. By the “public use of history” I am referring to all that is developed outside the domain of scientific research in its strictest sense, outside the history of historians which is usually written by scholars and intended for a very limited segment of the population. Public use of history includes not only the various means of mass communication, each with its own particularities (journalism, radio, television, cinema, theater, photography, advertisement, etc.), but also the arts and literature; public places such as schools, history museums, monuments and urban spaces, etc., and finally institutions, formal or otherwise (such as cultural associations, parties, and religious, ethnic and cultural groups, etc.), which, with more or less clearly partisan objectives, endeavor to promote a more or less polemic reading of the past as compared to the generally accepted common sense of history or historiography, a polemical reading based on the memory of their respective groups. Indeed, politicians have a large role in the most visible and most talked about manifestations of the public use of history and they have a particular responsibility in its degeneration (I shall return to this point in my conclusion).
Not to Know What One Knows: Some Paradoxes of Self-Deception
Authors: Dupuy Jean-Pierre
Published: March 2007

The problem of lying to, or deceiving oneself is currently one of the most debated in analytical philosophy. Now, since analytical philosophers are aware that Sartre defined "bad faith" as lying to oneself, as self-deception, and since moreover they find relatively coherent arguments in Sartre's text, they do not hesitate to include these arguments in their debates, if only to contest them. "To be dead is to be a prey for the living," one reads in Being and Nothingness (p. 695). One imagines Sartre rolling over in his grave. For this philosophy of mind is truly the Other of Sartre's philosophy. Yet, at the price of a treacherous translation, this philosophy gets something from Sartre, and perhaps gives him something in return.

In a slightly surreal, perhaps even monstrous way, I am going to make the two philosophies engage in a dialogue on the problem of lying to oneself.
The Line of the Horizon
Authors: Lynch Enrique
Published: March 2007

Let us think about metaphysics not as the subject matter of a discipline—as classical rationalism puts it—but as the “natural place” that arouses our curiosity. Let us see in it something that completes and exceeds, shelters and disables, inspires and invalidates all the questions raised by the effect of a primeval impulse. Rather than metaphysics we should hence speak of “the metaphysical,” a horizon rather than a form of knowledge which vainlessly tries to emulate divine wisdom, we are forced to ponder our point of view, the inquisitive gaze cast on that horizon, not so much as determining a position—since horizons tend to dissipate positions, to blur all point of references—but as a sign revealing a disposition, i.e., the trace of an attitude. As an attitude, this dis-position is a disruption or decentering of our habitual positions concerning the world and a bias that stimulates us to demand another kind of responses to questions which obviously are not those of every day.
Silence and Words in Zen Buddhism
Authors: Ueda Shizuteru
Published: March 2007

The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language.
Languages and Cultural Interchange along the Silk Roads
Authors: Sinor Denis
Published: March 2007

Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “silk”, name of a commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West.
East-West Borrowings via the Silk Road of Textile Terms
Authors: Hamilton James
Published: March 2007

The Silk Road, which began operating more than two thousand years ago, constituted certainly for many centuries the main cultural and linguistic highway between peoples of the East and peoples of the West, and to an even greater extent between the peoples of the East or West and those living along the Silk Road in Central Asia. This is reflected by the many loan words transmitted along the Silk Road from one end to the other, especially those connected with the textile trade.
Natural Substances and Artificial Products
Authors: Laszlo Pierre
Published: March 2007

One of the defining features of the modern age is the apotheosis of natural history. Natural History is, of course, the title of Buffon's monumental work, written in the second half of the 18th century. Also, until the rise of the Industrial Revolution, natural history provided an integrated technology, stretching from the voyages of discovery to the establishment of colonies devoted to the cultivation of the resources discovered there, whether one considers sugar cane in its migration west, or vanilla plants on Reunion Island. Beginning in the 16th century, and in such works as Jean de Léry's The Singularities of the French Antarctic, voyagers described, in written accounts of what they saw in far-off lands, exotic substances with singular properties. Jean Nicot returned with tobacco. Parmentier took it upon himself to introduce the cultivation of the potato to France. From both Madame de Sévigné and a secular cantata of Bach we know of the immediate vogue that coffee enjoyed from its introduction in Europe. Later, in the 18th century, after his disastrous expedition to measure the meridian at the equator, La Condamine returned from the Amazon with two substances that would prove crucial to the technical development of the West: rubber and curare.
Ghost Dancing in the Salon
Authors: Hatt Michael
Published: March 2007

In May 1885, the Apache chief Geronimo, along with three other chiefs and a large band of adherents, absconded from their reservation in Arizona and fled to the mountains of New Mexico. The reservation life that had been imposed upon Indians by the United States government was a life that endeavored to mold them into good citizens; they attended school and church, wore European style clothes, farmed rather than hunted, and gave up many Indian traditions. It was a life Geronimo and his followers were unwilling to endure, and after some years of uneasy equilibrium, the chief led a revolt that turned into the so-called ‘Apache War.’ Geronimo held out for over a year, and it was not until the summer of 1886 that the war ended, and the chief surrendered. Eighteen years later, in 1904, the old Apache appeared at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great World's Fair held in St. Louis, one of the grandest of the many such expositions staged in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Here, he earned himself some money by charging fairgoers to have their photograph taken with him. There proved to be no shortage of whites eager to have a souvenir image of themselves posed with him; and others even bought the buttons off his coat as more tangible mementos of the old warrior.
Human Rhythm and Divine Rhythm in Ainu Epics
Authors: Macé François
Published: March 2007

The Ainu are still in existence, but their reduced numbers, now around 20,000, indicate how marginal their presence is even in Hokkaido, their ancestral territory. Moreover, they have undergone much metissage, in both ethnic and cultural terms. Legally, the Ainu do not yet constitute an indigenous ethnic minority; they have only recently obtained some gestures of recognition from the government, such as the interruption of a dam project on a ritual site. In 1994, for the first time in history, an Ainu, Kay ano Shigeru, was elected to the senate. The legislation concerning the Ainu lands, dating from 1899, has finally been revised. And with a boost from the International Year of Ethnic Minorities, in 1992, Ainu organizations managed to inflect the official Japanese doctrine that Japanese soil is home to only one community, that of the Japanese.
On Literary Subjectivity in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Jackson John E.
Published: March 2007

In psychoanalytic theory, the notion of the person inevitably evokes the notion of subjectivity. Not that the former can be reduced to the latter; but if psychoanalytic theory is anything more a certain type of therapeutic practice, it is indeed a theory of the subject or a theory of the subjective relation. We should perhaps begin by specifying that the subjective relation must be understood as a complex whole: an intrapsychic relation, that is, a relation between the various instances that make up the subject, and at the same time an inter subjective relation, that is, a relation between (at least) two subjects. These two aspects are both inseparable and conflictual. They are inseparable because the self cannot exist, cannot construct itself without the other (whether this be a parental other or a peer). They are conflictual for at least two reasons. On the one hand, because the intrapsychic relation is by definition an arena of conflict: the conflict that opposes the Ego to the contradictory but equally tyrannical demands of the Id - which translates its attachment to the body and testifies to its inherent drives - and of the Superego, which represents its rootedness in the social and cultural sphere. And on the other hand, because this subject, which is thus divided within itself, must undergo the trial of bringing its desire face to face with the desire of the others with whom it is destined to live. The psychoanalytic theory of the subject is therefore the theory of a doubly heterogeneous relation: there is the heterogeneity of the components of the self, which go, once again, from their anchorage in somatic drives to the most ethereal expressions of the ideal; and there is the heterogeneity of the relation between this self and the self of the other. Moreover, this double heterogeneity is not limited to the matter of components: after all, these, one might think, would ideally be open to reabsorption into the homogeneity of the individual. On the contrary, this heterogeneity gives rise to a double rationality or double logic. Psychic causality - to borrow André Green's expression - is also driven by the conflict that opposes what in psychoanalysis are known as the primary processes, which Freud has described in chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung and which govern the formation and organization of the dream images, to the secondary processes, which are those processes that govern our daytime thoughts. Psychic causality is formed by the struggle for hegemony between these two logics, each of which is itself acted upon by an antagonism between what Freud, at the end of his life, called Eros and Thanatos, the urge for Life and the drive toward death or destruction.
Dead World, Living Hearts
Authors: Starobinski Jean
Published: March 2007

The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:

Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world.
Postface
Authors: Dauzat P.-E.
Published: March 2007

From the jumping bean controversy, through his jousts with Malraux, to his charge against Picasso, Roger Caillois's attitude remained the same: a fear of the seductions of misunderstood originality, a condemnation of the fear of influence that characterized the moderns, and praise for imitation, conceived as the only true school of art. Originality, according to the formula he was fond of repeating time and again in the most varied contexts, consists not in refraining from imitating anyone else, but rather in beine inimitable.
Why Do We Write in French?
Authors: Bemba Sylvain
Published: March 2007

The controversy currently surrounding national literatures in foreign languages can be summed up by the famous statement: “to be or not to be, that is the question.”* But how is one to be oneself without having been that other whom one cannot deny (in the Marxist sense) since one sings as one grows? How, whatever effort one makes to deny one's father, can one fail to be presently what one is by separating oneself from the story of one's own birth or from the birth of one's own story?
Economic Models and Practice in Africa
Authors: Mafeje Archie
Published: March 2007

Economic models, like scientific paradigms, predispose actors towards certain patterns of behavior or practices. Over time these become accepted as normal practice which everybody is expected to observe or to follow. This is how theoretical orthodoxies are established. However, even orthodoxies rely on refinement of techniques. In economics this is widely recognized, as it guarantees competitiveness among various practitioners. The context within which this occurs is often taken for granted since it is implicit in given theoretical models. For instance, in development theory it is assumed that the prevailing Euro-American economic model is universally valid. It is more than likely that this itself has become a social value which the West wants to maintain. Consequently, as a scientific proposition, it cannot be clarified since the West uses its political and military power to guarantee the necessary conditions for the reproduction of the same globally. Insofar as this is true, it is only reasonable to grant the fact that economic models inevitably carry with them unacknowledged normative presuppositions. This is best illustrated by the fierce ideological battle that occurred between the so-called socialist and “free market” adherents during the cold war.
Palabre
Authors: Bidima Jean-Godefroy
Published: March 2007

What is palabre? Not only an exchange of words, but also a social drama, a procedure, and set of human interactions. Palabre is therefore a putting into scene, a putting into order, and a putting into words
'Sire, The People Are Hungry!' ‘Let Them Have Symbols!' Literary and Linguistic Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Authors: Kushner Eva
Published: March 2007

This title is playful, of course. It is designed merely to attract curiosity and attention … It dates back to a childhood game of which I have forgotten both rules and stakes. An imaginary sovereign was roused from his indifference and responded with an approximate repetition of Marie-Antoinette's suggestion that if the people were hungry, food should be thrown to them. I took such caricatures of kings as anti-models, replacing bread with symbols. Now we are all too disturbed, individually and collectively, by the economic discomfort which is a generalized hunger and, in too many parts of the world and - not only in the third world - by actual famines, not to be aware, on a daily basis, of the responsibility it is to cultivate and transmit to others substance which is purely symbolic. Certain statistics, which now form part of our daily life, are capable of discrediting definitively the ivory tower which our universities are accused of representing, or of having represented in the past. In my own country, Canada, one child in five lives in poverty. The economic worth of the poorest forty-eight countries in the world is equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals. There were twenty million refugees in 1997. One billion two hundred million human beings are short of fresh water this year, etc. This type of figure is, sadly, all too familiar. And it is a case of preaching to the converted to assert the extent to which culture, education and all their constituent disciplines are nourishment of a different order to physical food, because intellectual work is genuine work, providing a living for those who work at it professionally, and above all also those who benefit from its immediate and continuing fruits - i.e. ideally, the whole of society, and in all countries. In this respect - and this is implicit, but through depending habitually on what is implicit nothing is ever sufficiently explicit - it is generally acknowledged (thanks to UNESCO in particular) to what extent the development of economic resources is linked with the advancement and communication of knowledge, on a scale which is regional as well as national, within cities, rural communities, families.
The Criticism and Transmission of Texts in Classical India
Authors: Colas Gérard , Burrell Jean
Published: March 2007

Compared with the Greek and Latin fields, the systematic study of the concept of textual criticism in classical India has made little progress, despite the quality of work produced by specialists. And yet research of this nature would probably lead, paradoxically, to a clearer formulation of the aims and methods of modern critical editions of Indian texts.
At the Margins of Theatre. On the Connection Between Theatre and Anthropology
Authors: Giacchè Piergiorgio
Published: March 2007

Scanning the corpus and repertoire of anthropological science, insofar as we wish and are able to, we note that ethnological observations and studies on theatre are not lacking, but that they seem to have been isolated opportunities for investigation that have never grown into a research tradition.
From Postmodernism to Mutation: How the Twentieth Century Draws to a Close
Authors: Berardinelli Alfonso , Vale Juliet
Published: March 2007

Dear readers, perhaps you have not realized it, but your lives so far have been spent in a period called ‘postmodern’.

The word is well-known to you. It has been around for many years. It almost always occurs unexpectedly, half way through an article, in the middle of a conversation, in the course of an argument on radio or television. Something, when all is said and done, is postmodern, someone is what he or she is because he or she is postmodern; a strange and inexplicable phenomenon can be explained as postmodern. This changeable, suggestive, authoritative term, which seems to allude to something precise and technical and which, at the same time, suggests the epoch-making, says all that is good and all that is bad of something. Postmodern is an accusation. Postmodern is praise. What is postmodern is degenerate, has got worse, is hardly serious, of low quality, a poor imitation, irresponsible, frivolous. Nevertheless, what is postmodern is also still more topical, even more modern, forward-looking, amusing and light, cultured without being boring, sophisticated without being elitist, complex without being obscure.
Borrowings go Round and Round. Transcending Borders and Religious Flexibility
Authors: Luca Nathalie
Published: March 2007

‘Siberian hunters have never been able to get used to our insistence on pressing our God on everyone else, nor to our way of abasing ourselves before him when they see us as masters of all - conquering the bear and the elk with our rifles, using our knowledge and power to conquer the indigenous people, who have always been determined to hang on to what little they have. How crazy the shaman would be to put his penny in the collection during mass without knowing whether it would be effective or not, whether the ritual would “work” this time - since only the result, here and now, matters to him. Why thank the priest and his God, why let them prosper, when in the end the famine did take hold and the sick did die?’
Adaptive Strategies and Indigenous Resistance to Protestantism in Ecuador
Authors: Andrade Susana
Published: March 2007

During the last ten years I have been working on the process of conversion to Protestantism of the indigenous people in Chimborazo province, Ecuador. Protestant evangelization in Ecuador started in the early twentieth century, but it is only in the last thirty years that the process of conversion of the indigenous people has become a large-scale one. During the first sixty years of evangelical activity North American missionaries from the Evangelical Missionary Union baptized only four natives in Chimborazo province. This period was marked by strenuous resistance and rejection of the new religion. Accounts given by missionaries of the period describe the disasters and difficulties that the first evangelizing mission suffered. It was only the conviction that lost souls had to be saved that helped them overcome adversities and later achieve amazing results.
Rereadings and Transformations of Sufism in the West
Authors: Zarcone Thierry
Published: March 2007

In his study of the conversion of Westerners to Islam, a Turkish sociologist revealed in 1996 that it happened that a significant proportion of the converts had adopted that religion under the influence of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. Now Sufism, located at the meeting-point of the written and oral traditions of Islam, offers an original commentary on the Quran and a spiritual practice based on psychosomatic exercises close to yoga. Interest in Sufism among Westerners was revealed at the end of the nineteenth century and became considerable from the 1930s onwards, resulting in the foundation in Europe of Sufi groups directed by converts who very quickly became shaykhs (shaikh). These first groups, to which new ones were added, are still active today, although somewhat bruised by numerous divisions. The reasons for conversion to Sufism among Europeans, for the most part from intellectual milieux, rest on concerns of a spiritual dimension linked to the climate of religious crisis which the modern West has experienced since the end of the nineteenth century. To which should be added in recent decades the fashionable exoticism fostered by the development of means of transport and communication which have brought East and West closer.
From the Word to the Televisual Image: The Televangelists and Pope John Paul II
Authors: Gutwirth Jacques
Published: March 2007

Until the beginning of the twentieth century Christianity, in order to proclaim its message, was based above all upon the word, the substance of prayer and preaching; certainly manuscripts, with the Scriptures and other fundamental texts, long secured the foundations of the faith, but before the advent of printing their diffusion and reception remained the prerogative of lettered elites, most often clerics such as the Benedictines (remember Umberto Eco's famous novel published in 1980, The Name of the Rose). Moreover, the Catholic Church made extensive use of the image in the Middle Ages, above all in the gothic period, and created remarkable visual splendour in its holy places. Stained glass windows and paintings and sculptures with subjects from the Old and New Testaments reinforced the devotion and faith of the illiterate. It was only after 1450, with Gutenberg's invention of printing - which, moreover, immediately disseminated bibles, missals and prayer-books - that the text became a major means of transmitting the Christian message. From the sixteenth century onwards Protestant Calvinists (but not Lutherans or Anglicans) rejected religious imagery - even the crucifix - as a means of devotion, for they were considered idolatrous; on the other hand, the reformers, more than the Catholic Church, laid stress on the reading of biblical texts by the faithful, especially the Old Testament, henceforth much more widely distributed, thanks expressly to printing. Admittedly the word did not lose its rights; like Catholicism in its churches and cathedrals, the Reformation preached the Good Word in its temples. Yet paradoxically, the present return of the religious image - this time televisual - was to be first of all a Protestant occurrence, principally in the United States.
Two Thousand Years of Heresy: An Essay
Authors: Wackernagel Wolfgang
Published: March 2007

The source of my interest in the study of heresiology originates in many years of research on the work and life of Meister Eckhart. It is therefore in an Eckhartian perspective, which presupposes a certain leniency, and even sympathy, towards the phenomenon of heresy, that I am going to give a survey of ‘the other side of Christianity’, from the Acts of Simon Magus, ‘father of heresy’, to the dawn of the second millennium, while exposing the medieval period in greater depth.
Refutable Anthropology and Falsified Science
Authors: Guille-Escuret Georges
Published: March 2007

Is anthropology a science? To put the question today amounts to a reply in the negative. The representatives of the ‘true’ sciences are not alone in suggesting a conjunctural or crippling lacuna which would preclude membership by right of the prestigious world, which, however, the name ‘humanistic sciences’ seems to demand. We should remember that some years ago Claude Lévi-Strauss caused a shudder to run through his discipline by describing it as a ‘flattering imposture’. Since then denigration has spread constantly, and it no longer consists of deploring a slowness, an equivocation or a handicap which we would have the hope of remedying: it is definitely a fatality which we are from now on invited to confirm.
Material Culture, Cultural Material
Authors: Mintz Sidney
Published: March 2007

‘I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.’

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language.

When asked to write for a special issue of Diogenes to be entitled ‘Anthropology: The Reluctant science?’ I was reminded of a remark made to me over dinner by my friend of more than fifty years, the late Eric Wolf. It was the last time I saw him: the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, in November 1998.
Our Genius for the Equivocal
Authors: Benthall Jonathan
Published: March 2007

In 1987, Sir Edmund Leach, the most influential British social anthropologist of his generation, startled a conference in Norwich of the Association of Social Anthropologists by declaring that ethnographic monographs were essentially fictions, expressing the personality of the author. When asked what should be the goal of the anthropologist, he replied, ‘To write another War and Peace’. This and some similar papers were published by him and have come in for much criticism: for instance, from a leading anthropologist of the next generation, Adam Kuper, who has regretted that Leach made such a concession to fashionable post-modernism, the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, shortly before his death (Kuper, 1999: 15-35).
Hope Against Hope
Authors: Panoff Michel
Published: March 2007

Poor ethnology, never where it should be! One could almost believe that in the intellectual comedy it is always condemned to play the role of the incorrigible blundering fool.

Take a different view. Thirty years ago it was used for any job going, the indispensable commodity of the cultured milieux of the period. The opinion-shapers perfidiously reduced it to structuralism, which was then running out of steam and scarcely intimidated them any longer. Encouraged by this decline, they affected to believe that ‘structures’ had an empirical existence in society, indeed absolutely anywhere their limitations had made themselves felt for far too long, and that ethnology finally won its freedom at the same time as the various changes in custom and social practice which took place as a result of the huge emancipation movement of May 1968. At once ethnology, the sacred instrument of access — or a smattering of it — was to be found in the media, in the professional training of nurses, the therapies of Bonneuil, the fashion for water-bath deliveries, the electoral campaigns of informed politicians, the ‘spin-offs’ of the Second Vatican Council, and so on. Today, on the other hand, it is to be found nowhere at all, not even among ethnologists, who appear with any intellectual label whatever, but above all not as practitioners of a science. They are the new romantics, the new adventurers, the incredible travellers, all having to do no more than produce a strictly personal experience, or at least states of mind. In short, ethnology passed itself off the first time as a kind of panacea, and the next it was declared no use for anything whatsoever, being at best a pretext for narcissistic effusions and at worst a snare for the naive. The more they would have us believe it can do everything, the more nothing can be done for it.
Anthropologists Facing the Collapse of Yugoslavia
Authors: Baskar Bojan
Published: March 2007

In extreme situations such as war, genocide or refugee crises, anthropologists, who are usually closer to afflicted people than other scholars, face the crucial questions of the utility and responsibility of anthropology. However, anthropologists in particular are susceptible to the way of reasoning that concludes that anthropology as a science (or even as a technique or art) does not offer any answers to these questions. Some become engaged trying to help one way or the other, yet not as anthropologists, since they hold that as an anthropologist one is powerless to help …
The Formation of the State and the Oppression of Women: Some Theoretical Considerations and A Case Study in England and Wales
Authors: Muller Viana
Published: March 2007

This paper seeks to demonstrate the interconnection between the oppression of women and class formation. Primitive social formations, barbar ian chiefdoms, and emergent states are examined in the relation of human beings to land and in the changing status of women. The patron-client relationship is described as a social relation which, maintaining its form but changing its con tent, may facilitate a transition from an egalitarian to an exploitative social for mation. The relation of women to patron-clientage is discussed. The effects on non-elite women and men of the destruction of the productive-reproductive unity of society is examined through the history of England and Wales.
Municipal Ownership of Electrical Utilities and the Fiscal Problems of the Cities
Authors: Neuberg Leland Gerson
Published: March 2007

The author begins with a history of recent interest in municipally- owned electric utilities (MUNI's) and then argues that neither welfare economic theory nor empirical econometric work provide much of a case against MUNI's. After identifying three views on the municipal ownership issue, two interpre tations of cities' fiscal ills are distinguished: one which neglects and one which suggests MUNI's as remedies. Some new empirical evidence is presented on (1) the proportion, and change in proportion, of general revenues MUNI's generate for their cities and (2) the comparative Moody's bond ratings of cities which do and don't own MUNI's. The author closes with some ideas for further research and the suggestion that discussions of local fiscal policy options which neglect MUNI's may be ideological defenses of the owning classes.
The Structure of Race
Authors: Szymanski Al
Published: March 2007

An attempt is made to outline a systematic Marxist theory of race relations. Traditional leftist analyses of race and racism are criticized for relying on liberal idealist and conservative racialist notions. As an alternative, Althusserian structuralist notions of ideology and the logic of the mode of production are employed in the analysis of groups falsely considered to be races. It is argued that three specific positions in the capitalist mode of production structurally define "inferior races": the positions of special exploitation, exclusion and mediation. It is suggested that the tendency for black people to be increasingly defined as an excluded population and less as an especially exploited group may possibly establish the conditions for a radical increase in their vulnerability.
Profitability: The Soft Underbelly of South African Regulation/SSA Analysis
Authors: Natrass Nicoli
Published: March 2007

For regulation/SSA analysis to avoid the pitfall of functionalist methodology, argument must proceed from empirical evidence. An investigation of trends in profitability is particularly important. This paper subjects recent applications of regulation/SSA concepts in South Africa to empirical scrutiny. On the grounds that manufacturing net profit rates and shares fell steadily over the apartheid period (understood as 1955-74), it is concluded that there is little evidence to suggest the existence of a regulation/SSA in South Africa during that time.
Countertransference: The Conductor's Emotional Response within the Group Setting
Authors: Prodgers Alan
Published: March 2007

In the postwar years there has been considerable debate on the use and usefulness of the therapist's countertransference feelings in individual psychotherapy, whereas in group psychotherapy, at least in the UK, there has been comparatively little attempt to address these issues. This paper reviews countertransference in relation to the complexities of the group situation. In particular I argue that for the group the term `countertransference' is itself confusing, and this is reflected in its usage, which creates potential for misunderstanding.
Groups in Israel During the Gulf War
Authors: Rippa Ben
Published: March 2007

Reality's dramatic events sometimes provide the researcher with a natural laboratory in which human processes can be looked at from different perspectives. The Gulf War was one of these events and this paper describes some of the experiences related to Jews and Arabs and their relationships in groups. More specifically, it deals with problems of trust and mistrust between people living in a shared physical space but belonging to different ethnic groups, and the effect of this on issues of national leadership, communication and secrets. I describe the influence of secrets in a small group we were leading at the time, and point out the effects of secrecy on the nation as a whole.
`Parallel Process' in Supervision when Working with Psychotic Patients
Authors: Voorhoeve Jacob N. , van Putte Floor C.A.
Published: March 2007

Supervision can be used to place the dyadic patient-therapist relationship in a new perspective by the creation of a more reality-tested, triadic relationship. This article deals in particular with the way in which facilitator or therapist interaction with seriously ill psychiatric patients is heavily influenced by dyadic processes related to early development. A third party is needed to free therapists from this dyadic/symbiotic bond, a party that can add an element of reality-testing. The `parallel process' is discussed as an important aid in the practice of supervision.
Group Analysis with Ulcerative Colitis and Regional Ileitis: The Discovery of the Scream
Authors: Janssen P. L. , Wienen G.
Published: March 2007

Patients suffering from chronic physical disease or facing recurrence of disease within the foreseeable future usually experience in their conscious ego an intense desire to rid themselves of the disease. This desire is not a very helpful motivation for trying out something new in a group not directly orientated to the somatic disease but a group does give the prospect of not having to deal with everything on their own. In analytic group psychotherapy it can also mean re-finding connections in a supportive environment, creating links between somatic and mental processes, and the choice between staying as they are (which is familiar, and gives security) and being different.
Narcissistic Isolation and Change in the Median Group
Authors: Pisani Rocco
Published: March 2007

According to Patrick de Mare the median group places the cultural object at its centre as the object of therapy, so that culture and social myths (social unconscious) can be understood in a situation that approaches that of the community. The objective is not so much to socialize the individual as to humanize the sociocultural context. The primary mutual hatred engendered by the larger setting is gradually transformed, through dialogue, into impersonal fellowship (koinonia). This article reports the author's own experience with a median group, which dealt with difficulty in speaking and fear of losing identity, leading to narcissistic isolation. In the koinonic atmosphere of social interaction dialogue became possible and personal identities were affirmed.
Foreigners and `Foreignness' in a Group
Authors: Weston Marisa Dillon
Published: March 2007

This article focuses on a group which had great difficulties in becoming the kind of group where members feel they belong. It looks at how one group member acted out the feelings of estrangement and foreignness' for the whole grouip by remaining a foreigner in the group as she was in real life. It examines the group conductor's collusion with the group, and in particular with this member, which led to the conductor's inability to accomplish what Marrone (1994) calls `Task 1. To increase (through analytic means) cohesiveness and a sense of affiliation so that the group can become a secure base from which it is possible to explore the members' inner worlds.' In this case it required the arrival of a new g0oup member to free the group from its split.
Remembrance of Things Past: Reflections on the Analytic Process
Authors: Campbell Jane
Published: March 2007

As Freud said, as far as `the ultimate things, the great problems of science and life' are concerned, `each of us is governed... by deep-rooted internal prejudices, into whose hands our speculation unwittingly plays' (1922/1985: 333). This article offers a very brief series of reflections on the different treatments offered by two great writers at the beginning of this century to the perennial human problems of how to understand and manage the complicated business of living. Their individual authorial solutions are placed in the context of some of their own life experiences and some attention is paid to the implications of this for the practice of group analysis at the end of this century.
There's no Point Raging on Your Own: Using Art Therapy in Groups for People with Eating Disorders
Authors: Johnson Karen , Parkinson Sarah
Published: March 2007

This article is an outline of our work running art therapy groups for people with eating disorders. We aim to show that the process of group art therapy, with its unique interplay between making art objects and coming together as a group, can be of therapeutic value to these patients. We look at ways in which both art materials, and the images that the group members produce, are used together with the psychodynamics of the group process. Within this, we explore the movement between concrete expression in art, and the ability to symbolize. Our definition of `eating disorders' for the purposes of this article and most of our work is `the use of food as an alternative to feeling'. In this way, we have seen how people can remain preoccupied with themselves, rather than relating to others.
Russian democracy and social capital
Authors: Nichols Thomas M.
Published: March 2007

This article argues that the most significant problem facing Russian democratic consolidation is a lack of social capital, the values and relationships based on trust that undergird stable democracy. This lack is a direct result of policies executed in the Soviet period that were designed specifically to suppress those relationships. This represents a novel approach (there have been to date no applications of the concept of social capital to the Russian case) that is intended to move discussion about Russian democracy towards a fundamental re-examination of the social environment in which Russian democratic consolidation is occurring.
Southern Thought
Authors: Cassano Franco
Published: March 2007

For a long time the south has been seen like an error, a negation, or a delay. To reverse this picture, the first thing that is required is to give back to the south the ancient dignity of being a subject of thought, rather than being thought of from the standpoint of others. In a similar manner, the Mediterranean has long been regarded as a sea of the past. It is in fact a central place of contemporary history - a place in which the north and the west meet the east and the south of the world, and a model for understanding how multiple faiths, cultures and economies can coexist peacefully.
The Problem of `Crony Capitalism': Modernity and the Encounter with the Perverse
Authors: Kahn Joel S. , Formosa Francesco
Published: March 2007

This article provides some reflections on the problem posed by ostensibly perverse phenomena like political patronage, corruption and crony capitalism for modernising narratives, which are currently enjoying a renewed popularity. In the light of an ethnographic example from Indonesia, it is argued that the continual attempt to relocate such phenomena to terrains not properly modern precludes the possibility of serious analysis or moral/political assessment of these phenomena. The starting point for any genuine engagement with these issues is the recognition that these phenomena are as internal to modernity as the modernist discourses that seek to externalise them.
The End of the Utopias of Labor: Metaphors of the Machine in the Post-Fordist Era
Authors: Rabinbach Anson
Published: March 2007

Are we rapidly approaching the end of the work-centered society? This article contends that at the century's end we may witness the disappearance of the great productivist utopias of the 1920s and 1930s. The crisis of productivist systems and ideologies may be far more significant than the more narrowly defined crisis of communism, or of `Fordism', that many critics have identified. Shifts in the forms of metaphor and the technology of work are taking place which call into question traditional notions of the biopolitics of work. Modern productivism - the productivism of the industrial revolution - was governed by the belief that human society and nature are linked by the primacy and ultimate interchangeability (convertibility) of all productive activity. It presupposes a metaphor of the motor which first appeared during the first quarter of the 19th century. With the eclipse of the metaphor of the human motor, we can ask whether the end of the `work-centered model of society' might be attributed to the decline of its most compelling metaphor. If the body no longer occupies the central metaphor of productivism, what does this mean for the new configuration of labor and the model of labor based on information processing rather than the generation of things or the conversion of force?
The Last Days of the Post Mode
Authors: Smith Bernard
Published: March 2007

Evidence evinced primarily from the visual arts suggests that the term `postmodernism' is unlikely to survive as a general description of contemporary culture beyond the year 2000. The concepts of both post-industrialism and postmodernism are examined as presented by six major writers. None makes a convincing case for the establishment of an historical disjunction that separates modernism from postmodernism either during the 1960s or at any other time. There is a need to recognize that the modernism of the late 19th and early 20th century is no longer modern. It would be better described as the formalesque. This will make it possible to recognize the `postmodern' as the true modernism of the 20th century, the prime sources of which lie in Dada, surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.
“Provided Only that their Voice was Strong”
Authors: RUBIN BETH A. , GRIFFIN LARRY J. , WALLACE MICHAEL
Published: March 2007

Students of the labor movement have been fascinated with the years between 1933 and 1946 for the impact they had on the experiences of workers in subsequent years, and because they redefined the possibilities for concerted working class action. In this article we present quantitative historical analyses to address the following issues: (1) In what ways did the various modes of worker action stimulate mass unionization efforts? (2) Under what conditions was strike activity enhanced or dissipated by existing levels of organization? and (3) How do rare events—such as sitdown strikes—sustain more normal expressions of working class action?
Sex Differences in the Choice of a Male or Female Career Line
Authors: LYSON THOMAS A.
Published: March 2007

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, this article identifies similarities and differences in social background characteristics, academic ability, and work values among men and women in sex-typical and sex-atypical curriculums. The research was designed to examine two implicit assumptions in the literature about the choice of a sex-atypical major: (1) that women in traditionally male areas manifest characteristics more closely associated with men in these same areas than with women in traditionally female areas; and (2) that men in traditionally female curriculums are more like women in these areas than they are like men in traditionally male areas. Results show that men and women in sex-atypical majors are more like their sex peers than like their curriculum mates. The implications of these findings for maintaining gender inequalities in the labor market are discussed.