Suchergebnisse

This article aims to tease out the transformation of communist identity and the sense of legitimacy within the ruling parties of the Eastern Bloc (particularly Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR) in 1956. It explores how communist identity was negotiated and reshaped beyond the highest level of party leadership and prominent communist intellectuals and how ordinary party members perceived this ideological turnabout. It seeks to demonstrate how the sense of belonging was articulated in the reflection of the parties' recent past by ordinary party members on a local level: functionaries, apparatchiks, propagandists and local party historians. In the aftermath of 1956, communist and working class identities were seriously challenged by renewed national, ethnic, confessional or regional identities in a steady process of exclusion and inclusion. Examining the de-Stalinization "from below", the study concludes that despite the earthquake-like ideological upheavals a new form of identity emerged among the parties' rank-and-file that, centered around the parties as an imperfect yet heroic collective, secured the sense of legitimacy for the decades to come.

The paper focuses on the Latin American perspective on modernity, especially on the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano's notion of coloniality. Coloniality is explained as a theoret- ical framework for critical reflection of modernity with an emphasis on the forms of knowledge (episteme) and on non-Western, more specifically Latin American historical experiences and perspectives. The aim is to introduce some Latin American efforts to critically understand coloniality as the other face of modernity and to develop a distinctive critique of capitalism, globalisation and Eurocentrism in their historical dynamics, In the first part, the paper briefly introduces Latin America as a geocultural place and a object of social research in a historical perspective. Special attention is paid to the question of racial classification and authenticity. In the second part, the paper focuses on the notion of coloniality as it was conceptualised by A. Quijano and by other Latin American authors. In the third and fourth parts, the paper deals with the problem of coloniality in wider epistemic contexts of modern social sciences and in relation to the notion of alterity and to the question of decolonisation of social scientific thinking. The final discussion addresses some of inspirational and problematic points of this conception such as problems of decolonisation, intellectual dependency and critique, and the problem of conceptualisation of differences in scientific discourses.