Search results

Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History. Michael Roberts"Who Is He, What Is He Doing": Religious Rhetoric and Performances in Sri Lanka during R. Premadasa's Presidency (1989‐1993).

In the history of brain research, the prospect of visualizing brain processes has continually awakened great expectations. In this study, Cornelius Borck focuses on a recording technique developed by the German physiologist Hans Berger to register electric brain currents; a technique that was expected to allow the brain to write in its own language, and which would reveal the way the brain worked. Borck traces the numerous contradictory interpretations of electroencephalography, from Berger's experiments and his publication of the first human EEG in 1929, to its international proliferation and consolidation as a clinical diagnostic method in the mid-twentieth century. Borck's thesis is that the language of the brain takes on specific contours depending on the local investigative cultures, from whose conflicting views emerged a new scientific object: the electric brain.

Résumé L'histoire contemporaine de l'Espagne est marquée par une succession de guerres civiles, coups d'États et autres soulèvements militaires. À une culture du conflit politique s'ajoute une « culture du pronunciamiento » qui donne à l'Espagne l'image d'un pays en proie au chaos, traversé par des périodes de violence politique extrême aux XIX e et XX e siècles. En réalité, les pronunciamientos ne sont pas tous violents ; il s'agit surtout pour leurs auteurs, militaires de carrière, de prendre position pour un leader ou un courant politique et d'appeler au changement et au sursaut national. Si le XIX e siècle a été le siècle des pronunciamientos – absolutistes, libéraux, progressistes, constitutionalistes ou républicains –, le XX e siècle est celui des coups d'État antidémocratiques, au moyen desquels les militaires s'emparent du pouvoir à deux reprises en 1923, puis à nouveau en 1939 à l'issue d'une terrible guerre civile. Au-delà, les questions relatives aux pronunciamientos conduisent à s'interroger sur le rôle de l'armée dans la société et dans la vie politique espagnoles ainsi que sur la faiblesse de l'État et la difficile construction nationale. La fréquence des pronunciamientos reflète bien l'exacerbation des luttes idéologiques en Espagne et l'absence de résolution des querelles politiques autrement que par l'appel aux militaires ou la menace de recourir à la force armée.

In this article, we provide a theoretical discussion of ressentiment within the emerging fields of the political sociology and political psychology of emotions and offer an empirical investigation of its political-cultural function. The complex emotion of ressentiment refers to a recurrent rumination on negative feelings and an affective compensation for life failures. Extant studies show ressentiment can be linked to electoral support for populist, anti-immigration and far-right parties, and can provide leverage for major sociopolitical upheavals. Using the World Values Survey 7th wave dataset for Greece we analyse the psychological components and political expressions of ressentiment testing three hypotheses on its relationship with efficacy and life satisfaction, value systems and political violence. The analysis is possible due to an original six-item ressentiment scale that we offer as a novel measure of this emotional phenomenon. We find a limited distribution of ressentiment in Greece concentrated among economically and socially disadvantaged segments of society. We also find that ressentiment scores link monotonically with overall life dissatisfaction and diminished political interest, lack of efficacy, low interpersonal trust and aversion for sociocentric and emancipative values. Traces of dormant support for violence are evident in responses about violence against others where ressentiment-ful participants score higher compared with their less ressentiment-ful counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for the quality of democracy, authoritarian populism and nationalism.

This article reads Lovecraft's weird fiction in relation to his historically-minded eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors. In Lovecraft's essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' (1927) the first text he focuses on at length is Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), a supernatural tale which, he claims, exerted a virtually unparalleled influence on weird literature. Forming a distorted mirror image of Georg Lukács's description of Otranto as a piece of costumery that nonetheless becomes the most famous historical novel of the eighteenth century, Lovecraft's equivocal praise places Walpole in a tradition of cosmic horror that also includes Clara Reeve, William Godwin, and Walter Scott (Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 19) . Yet the relationship between Lovecraft's fiction and these earlier writers of historical fiction has been more assumed than explored. Aware of history as a malleable and potentially destructive force, these precursors search for an alternative tradition to the 'divine right' of kings on which to base the British constitution. In the process, they both interrogate the idea of Anglo-Saxon liberty and exploit the progressive narratives of stadial history. Lovecraft follows their historical experiments in search of liberty, constructing a prosthetic past in an attempt to interpret the American people and their constitution. Despite Lovecraft's horror of labor unrest and miscegenation, his racist political vision is, as a result, haunted by the radical and progressive potential of these past traditions.

It is often said that history matters, but these words are often little more than a hollow statement. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the view that the economy is a mechanical toy that can be fixed using a few simple tools has continued to be held by economists and policy makers and echoed by the media. The paper addresses the origins of this unfortunate belief, inherent to neoliberalism, and what can be done to bring time back into public discourse.

The specialists note and highly appreciate the openness to creative dialogue with different European and regional cultures in their works about the artistic history of France. In the introductory section, the article is focused on the importance of the opposite trend, developed in the 19th — early 20th century in all spheres of art. The purpose of the new movement is "national revival", interest in the ori­gins of the great heritage of the French masters of past epochs. The author concentrates on the peculiarities of interaction between leading composers, musicians-performers and teachers with the traditions of music professionalism of the French compo­ser school. Furthermore, she explains the main reason of "back to the past" addiction by desire to preserve the unique distinction of artistic thinking in the terms of intensive cultural influences in Italy, Germany and Russia. The article provides the facts of creative activity of the leaders of "national renewal". There are presented some journalistic statements of the leading French composers to confirm their unanimous recognition of the actual value of national classics to the future of French culture. There is explicated the pa­norama of creative experiments (C. Franck, C. Saint-Saëns, E. Satie, impressionists and composers of the "young generation") on reconstruction of national traditions of distant epochs. The coverage of events and display of artistic phenomena of musical and cultural life of France allowed the author to form a context to consider the problem of aesthetic and stylistic character: new understanding of the phenomenon of "artistic tradition" and "dialogue with tradition" in the epoch of modernism. The comparison of diffe­rent forms of "dialogue with the past" in the Russian culture of the beginning of the 20th century and in creative works of the leader of European retrospectivisme I.F. Stravinsky gave grounds to use the concept of "passeism" to characterize the special French type of inheritance of the "lessons" of the predecessors. Introducing the concept of "passeism" in contrast to the accepted in Russian musicology "musical neoclassicism" and giving reasons of the effectiveness of its application, the author seeks to identify the idea of preser­ving soil foundations of tradition as a way of national self-identity (prosody, rhetoric, form) pertaining to the French composer school.

Explores the relationship between culture & capital, focusing on the commodification of certain types of cultural artifacts & events & the politicization of the "creative core" of artistic-cultural production & transmission by what Daniel Bell (1978) refers to as the "cultural mass." The significance of monopoly rents to the relationship between contemporary processes of economic globalization & special cultural forms or localities is discussed; the example is offered of the monopoly rent given by vineyards producing wines of "extraordinary" quality for the international market. Ways in which local cultural developments & traditions become part of the political economy through attempts to garner monopoly rents are described, highlighting the function of "urban entrepreneurialism." Continuing conflicts over the definition of monopoly powers accorded certain cultural locations & attempts to protect them via political means when the "natural monopolies" afforded by space & location become eroded are discussed. Claims to uniqueness, speciality, or authenticity made to capture monopoly rents are examined, offering the example of the collective symbolic capital acquired by certain world cities. Contradictions faced by capitalists as they attempt to capture monopoly rents are also described, along with the openings they offer to socialist alternatives. K. Hyatt Stewart