At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.     

周代籍礼“风土”考

《国语》所载周代"籍礼",是一种具有巫术特征的礼仪活动。其意义是疏导土壤中的阳气,使之顺利地播散。籍礼中,以瞽为首的乐官们所从事的"风土"活动,并不是韦昭注所以为的观察土壤中的气脉,而是通过乐舞鼓动风气,帮助土壤中的气脉顺利播散。它是这一土壤巫术中的重要组成部分。     

高职院校强化实践教学的思考

目前,高职院校毕业生就业难与某些岗位空缺并存。造成这种局面的原因是多方面的,其中一个重要原因是高职院校的培养计划与培养目标错位,实践教学力度不够,导致培养出的毕业生不能满足社会对人才的需求。文章对高职院校实践教学存在的问题进行分析,提出对策性建议。     

约翰·穆勒的心理主义辨析

约翰·穆勒的逻辑哲学一直被当作心理主义的主要代表.但是近些年来,西方哲学界越来越多的学者指出,穆勒的观点和立场实际遭受了误读.事实上,只要更仔细地研读穆勒本人的经典文本,我们就不难发现,穆勒对自己的心理主义做了严格的限定:他一方面断言,作为一项技艺的逻辑学从作为一门科学的逻辑学那里获得全部的理论基础,而作为科学的逻辑学广义上乃是心理学的一部分;另一方面他又断言逻辑学可以从心理学那里获得理论构造方面的启示.但是他并未一般地主张逻辑学必须从心理学那里寻求理论奠基.     

影视文化与和谐文化的构建

和谐文化是构建社会主义和谐社会建设的精神支柱和道德保障,影视文化则在促进和谐文化的形成、推动和谐文化的发展、确保和谐文化的传播中发挥着极为重要的作用.面对当前全球金融危机,影视文化可以潜移默化地增强受众战胜困难的勇气和信心,用暖心来暖经济.     

祖先崇拜与人类主体地位的觉醒——以《诗经》为中心的考察

《诗经·商颂》与《诗经·大雅》中带有史诗因素的祭祀祖先的诗歌,集中体现了商、周部族对自己始祖的歌颂,以及对人类自身价值的发现和尊重,反映了这一时期人们主体意识的进一步提高——由自然主体转变为社会主体,有了明确的"类"意识。但这种意识是是群体的,因为,这时的个人还没有能力离开集体独立生存,也就不可能产生个体意识。     

The Peasant World in the Discourse of Generational Sorrow

This article spells out the methodological considerations and various procedural and methodological subtleties developed over the author's quarter century of sociological field studies of Russia's peasant worlds. Particular attention is paid to “voices from below”—peasant discursive formats that capture, in natural and undiluted form, the evolution of peasant practices constituting the core of everyday life. In particular, the phenomenon of generational sorrow and a special chronological nostalgia that functions as a “social gyroscope” is identified and discursively captured. This phenomenon is noteworthy and useful for its ability to retain a record of the productively longed for past in a rural community's collective memory and thereby influence new peasant worlds taking shape today.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

从《多余的话》看文人瞿秋白的荒诞存在体验

《多余的话》是文人瞿秋白面对死亡考量自己短暂一生的荒诞体验书写。瞿秋白站在死亡的边缘,终于从"沉沦"中解放,获得了彻底的自由,发现了自己的荒诞性生存状态。命运的左右,主观愿望与客观现实的对立,真实自我与社会身份的疏离,失去了精神故乡的流浪,与现象生活的隔膜,所有这些都构成了瞿秋白的荒诞感。《多余的话》超越了阶级、政党和各种"名目",是文人瞿秋白源于生命存在的自由言说。     

“恩格斯的国家祸害论”确实应该重视——回应夏美武等先生

无产阶级政党夺取政权后,为了镇压资本家阶级的反抗和按新的方式组织社会,保留国家机器是必要的。然而,在自我赋予执政权力、自我传宗接代、一党专政的条件下,已经夺得政权的党如果不下力改造这种国家机器,却会成为凌驾于整个社会之上的官僚特权阶级,同无产阶级相异化。在中国大陆现有的条件下,要想除去国家这个祸害的最坏方面,必须推行政治民主化。兑现宪法已有的民主承诺应该是第一步。