Suchergebnisse

The essay introduces five principles of an approach that helps to combine context sensitivity with generalizing ambition necessary for any serious comparative work. It also offers a list of five areas where East European experts are or should be making major contributions to the "general" knowledge while remaining attentive to the "specificities" of their region. It emphasizes a dialogue among scholars of several theoretical and methodological persuasions. Such synthetic/syncretic studies—also in the study of power and politics—may and often do begin with the work of researchers who construct panoramic vistas (via large-N statistical work) and/or reconstruct mechanisms of individual decision making (via game theoretic models). Nevertheless, they cannot do without the work of those who delve into the details of social processes (via sociological analysis); those who decipher the intricacies of meaning creation, transmission, and decoding (via interpretive work); and those who are able to place all of this in proper historical contexts.

Mark Lipovetsky's article confirms Jan Kubik's long-held assumption that we still do not think enough about the many differences between various types of state socialism. Each country had differently arranged social fields (products of their separate histories), in which various "classes" vied for power and influence in quite country-specific ways. Kubik suggests that the ITRs as a group should acquire a more distinct sociological "face," and proceeds with a comparison of the roles of intellectuals in Polish and Soviet socialist modernities. To the question: Were the technical intelligentsia - the key challenger to the communist power in Lipovetsky's story - as important in Poland as in the Soviet Union? − he responds with an unconditional "no." Although Kubik identifies individual phenomena similar to what Lipovetsky's describes as elements of the ITR culture, in the Polish context they did not produce a specific discursive community and a special brand of progressive ideology. The enormous unifying power of a common cultural resource of the nation (Catholicism in a country that is almost religiously homogeneous), the unexpected burst of charisma (John Paul II), the reluctance of the Polish state to use technical intelligentsia as a major carrier of its national or imperial project, and the preservation of some freedom of creativity prevented this development. Kubik concludes his essay with a defense of the Enlightenment paradigm, criticism of which, in his view, should be carefully calibrated. Ян Кубик увидел в статье Марка Липовецкого подтверждение собственного ощущения, что различия типов государственного социализма и опыта жизни в социалистическом обществе остаются по сей день не до конца осмысленными. В каждой стране соцлагеря социальная сфера имела свою конфигурацию (будучи продуктом особого исторического развития), и разные "классы" конкурировали за власть и влияние спец­ифическими для данной конкретной страны способами. Кубик считает, что для дальнейших исследований ИТР как группа должна быть более четко социологически очерчена. Сравнивая роль технической интел­лигенции в советской и польской версиях модерности, он задается во­просом, была ли эта группа столь же важна в польском контексте, как в советском. И категорически отвечает: нет. Хотя Кубик идентифицирует в польской культурной и политической жизни феномены, подобные тем, которые Липовецкий описывает как элементы ИТР-культуры, в Польше они не породили особое дискурсивное сообщество и спец­ифическую прогрессорскую идеологию. Огромная объединительная сила такого культурного ресурса, как католицизм (в конфессионально практически гомогенном обществе), неожиданное проявление хариз­мы Иоанна Павла II, нежелание польского государства использовать техническую интеллигенцию как основного агента национального или имперского проекта и сохранение некоторой свободы творчества в стране предотвратили возможность формирования консервативно-либерального прогрессорского дискурса. Кубик завершает свое эссе выступлением в защиту просвещенческой парадигмы, критика которой, как он считает, должна быть весьма осторожной.

In Kubik (2009), I reviewed the three basic types of ethnography and outlined their uses for political scientists. I begin by summarizing my conclusions.

In critiquing a recent book by Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism, this article addresses fundamental questions about collective memories of Communism and the Soviet bloc: Why and how is "the past" remembered selectively? What happens when forgotten events are brought back to the fore of collective consciousness? What are the actual mechanisms of remembering? Who are the often invisible gatekeepers that direct the paths of our memories? Who are the influential rulers of memory attempting to shape our mnemonic repertoire? Scribner's book indirectly touches on these issues, though not in a fully satisfactory way, especially with regard to working-class life under Communism. Although the book does have some strong points, it too often fails to take account of how people in the region (as opposed to leftist intellectuals in the West who "knew" Communism vicariously) experienced manual labor during the Communist era and how they remember it now.