Bidimensionalidade mundana no lado Coca-Cola da vida: um estudo arqueológico fotoetnográfico

Every organization, including food inspection bodies, can be examined in their formal and non-formal sphere. Though research concerning formal aspect of the inspection bodies functioning is definitely important it must be remembered that it is the non-formality and so called tacic knowlege that governs all organization members in their everyday practices. Formal aspect of the organization might be far from what is actually done in the inspection bodies since people working there treat law regulations in different ways. In the article I briefly describe the interpretiveparadigm of organization research and the methods of the in-depth individual interview used in the research and focus on the two level analysis (content and discourse) that is the basis of the outcomes presented earlier. Among the obstacles I mention two most important ones. First of which is defined the use of the category of “we vs they” that characterizes the narratives of the inspection bodies members. Opposition and the antagonism present in this category is – by no means – one of the most vital obstacle for real cooperation. The second category named “politicisation of hierarchical kingdoms” describes the phenomenon of inspection bodies being treated as completely separate, highly dependent on political powers, units in which any change or mobility is virtually impossible, and in which those who are at the top will not take into consideration the voice of those who are at the bottom. In this way a non-crossable boundary is being built in everyday institutional practices making it impossible to cooperate. In the summary, I suggest that before implementing any new law regulation these are the cultural factors that should be seriously taken into account.

The article is devoted to one of the paradoxes of the modern system of international relations: the desire of many countries to restore their political and economic sovereignty, combined with the rapid development of digital technologies and the formation of an increasingly homogeneous global cultural space. The phenomenon of “new nationalism” arose in connection with the obvious crisis of globalization led by the United States. At the same time, this “new nationalism” is fundamentally different from the classical models of the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, clearly visible is its weak connection with the ideas of a national cultural revival and the sphere of culture in general. The digital revolution that humankind is going through today creates favorable conditions for the “restart” of globalization. The locomotive of integration processes in the new conditions is mass culture — in the form of new consumption technologies and everyday practices. A global digital civilization is gradually taking shape. The struggle for economic influence and political dominance, particularly between states such as the United States and China, is complemented by the opposition of “Westernization” and “Easternization” as the leading trends in contemporary global culture. The arguments presented in the article allow us to make the following assumption: in several decades, China, the United States and other countries will occupy a place in the world political, economic and cultural hierarchy that is comparable not with the level of their sovereignty and national identity, but with the scale and quality of their participation in the global exchange of goods, ideas and cultural meanings.

Reviewed by: Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde Ilya Parkins Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. Paul L. Fortunato. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xi + 162. $110.00 (cloth). Paul L. Fortunato’s investigation of Oscar Wilde seeks to situate Wilde firmly as an exponent of what Fortunato names “consumer modernism.” Defining his project against Wilde critics who view the author’s work as a sustained critique of mass culture, Fortunato proposes that the development of an aesthetics and ethics of consumption is key to understanding Wilde’s trajectory. The book is thus primarily engaged in a retrieval of an “aesthetics of surface [that Wilde] theorizes by building a philosophy of art through an analysis of consumer fashion” (viii). To build a study that is rooted in mass rituals and everyday practices, Fortunato is largely concerned with those critical objects that are usually seen as peripheral to Wilde’s career. What this means is that several chapters of the book focus on the social milieus of which Wilde was a part, with Fortunato arguing that “Wilde was a professional networker,” (1) who depended for his success upon his contacts in the worlds of both mass culture and high society: “in order to be most fully himself, he needed an immediate relationship to the cosmopolis” as a commercial center (2). Discussion of social networks in Chapter One provides, for Fortunato, the necessary background to a study of the early years of Wilde’s career, with a focus on his much-neglected journalism. The analysis of Wilde’s journalism begins with Chapter Two, “Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884–1890).” Here, Fortunato’s primary interest is in situating Wilde in the context of the developing new journalism of the 1880s. He argues that an understanding of Wilde’s journalistic work is imperative for an accurate picture of Wilde: “We fail to understand what is most powerful about his well-known books and plays if we ignore their connection with his journalistic-critical work; both aspects of his career are animated by the self-same aesthetic concerns and the same engagement with mass culture” (17). Fortunato thus traces the contours of an ephemeral aesthetics of surface and sensation in Wilde’s popular criticism, aiming, one surmises, to connect these with the author’s later fiction and dramaturgy. [End Page 623] The interest in journalism is carried through Chapter Three, “The Woman’s World (1887–1889) as Fashion Magazine and Modernist Laboratory.” Fortunato traces Wilde’s relationship with female aesthetes and examines how their philosophies of gendered aestheticism—which he reads as validating feminized and trivialized activities such as interior decoration and self-fashioning—find their way into print in Woman’s World under Wilde’s editorship. Chapter Four, on “Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Baudelaire, Wilde, and Tomson/Watson,” is a closer examination of what Fortunato deems to be a coherent aesthetic philosophy in the popular criticism of these three figures, and proves to be the most suggestive chapter of the book. Moving away from journalism, Fortunato turns, in the final two chapters, to the operation of this aesthetics of fashionable surfaces in Wilde’s early play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. He posits that the work is “an explicitly anti-Ibsen play” (101), arguing that its popular form derives from Wilde’s interest in repudiating the gravitas associated with Ibsen’s dramas. The production of the play, a seemingly “conventional” study in self-fashioning, in fact is a potent social vehicle because of the connections it instantiates between drama and the fashion, design, and “star” industries. In the final chapter, Fortunato suggests that Lady Windermere’s Fan is a modernist innovation not only because of the circumstances of its production, but because the character Mrs. Erlynne is a modernist artist engaged in fashioning both herself and the play’s audience. This chapter seems, albeit implicitly, to bring elements of sociological analysis to bear on the philosophy suggested by the text; Fortunato theorizes about the social functions of ritual, “identity as a spectrum of performance,” and “the image as culture-shaper” (124, 132...

By way of a textual analysis of the reports on high fashion shows of the French newspaper Le Monde and the British newspaper The Guardian, this study is a reflection on Bourdieu's sociology of culture. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic production, I comment on the construction of fashion as popular culture in The Guardian and as high culture in Le Monde. The investigation of the versions of culture constructed by the two newspapers allows me to reflect on the theoretical framework Bourdieu has developed in his discussion of the field of culture and the traditional opposition between the high and the popular which structures it. Bourdieu's sociology is a product of a specific field of production, the French: like many French researchers, he shows little interest in mass culture - his sociology of the field of fashion is a case in point -, and privileges culture as high culture. Popular culture - working class culture - is not acknowledged as a culture per se. Many of Bourdieu's concepts, such as 'cultural capital' or 'symbolic production' can usefully be applied to an analysis of the field of popular culture, but this is a step he does not take. If adequate to understand certain cultural experiences and discourses, Bourdieu's model is inadequate to understand others, but proves to be a rigid theoretical model which fails to account for the complexity and diversity of the field of popular culture, and ultimately fails to break with the cultural doxa. Finally, although Bourdieu insists that sociologists should pay attention to the discourses of symbolic production of culture, he himself fails to engage with them, focusing on their field production rather than on the meanings they convey. In contrast, this study is concerned with the meanings created in the process of symbolic production of fashion.

Excluding Agency

Reviewed by: Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture Esther K. Bauer Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture. By Barbara Kosta. New York: Berghahn, 2009. xi + 195 pages + 21 b/w illustrations. $60.00. Located at the intersection of cultural, visual, film, German, and women's studies, and primarily pursuing a new historicist and feminist approach, Barbara Kosta's study traces key cultural discourses of the Weimar Republic in Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel. At the same time, the author pinpoints the role of notions of German national identity in the movie and in the perception of its lead actress, Marlene Dietrich, and explores the connection between national identity and Dietrich's iconic status in the reunified Germany. Kosta builds on the few existing analyses of The Blue Angel and draws on a number of well-known studies of Weimar and modern culture, for instance, by Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, and more recently, Petro and Bronfen. Kosta's work reveals that underneath the conventional plot presenting a reputable member of the bourgeoisie destroyed by his desire for a femme fatale, the film's thematic and narrative structure reflects its time's cultural rifts, most prominently the dualism of mass/modern/American vs. high/traditional/German culture. With culture a pillar of German national identity, this debate was directly related to the definition of Germany's self-image. Kosta shows that von Sternberg's film is a milestone in movie history, both as one of the first German sound films and as an example of the use of this new medium—a symbol of modernity, Americanism, and democracy that stood at the center of the time's cultural tensions—to explore these very controversies. [End Page 424] Kosta starts out proposing that in line with contemporary literary and cinematic conventions, the cabaret singer Lola Lola (Dietrich), a sexualized female offering her image for commercial consumption, represents mass culture and modernity. Her counterpart, Professor Rath, stands for nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals and patriarchy. Thus Rath's surrender to Lola betrays his gender, class, and, by extension, national identity and the associated notions of art and culture. Juxtaposed with Lola's iconic performance, Rath's death emphasizes the incompatibility of high and mass culture and the fears provoked by the latter's inexorable rise. In the second chapter, Kosta proposes that looking and displaying are key elements of the film's power structures, reflecting and subverting gender, class, and generational paradigms. Von Sternberg's film focuses on Lola's manipulation of her viewers, "exposing and even devaluing the very idea of a stable male gaze" (62). Illiterate in the visual conventions of mass culture, Rath takes the spectacle of Lola's body for real. His desires prompt him to ignore the boundaries between fantasy and reality—a mistake traditionally associated with female viewers—enabling his masochistic relationship with Lola. Chapter Three focuses on gender roles and on Lola as an independent modern woman. The Blue Angel responds to the time's notion of a crisis of male subjectivity, depicting Lola as the bread winner and Rath as the disempowered male, and staging women's increased visibility and their newly-found control over their images. In addition, it comments on the increasing instability of gender roles in the film's depictions of marriage and female promiscuity. The fourth chapter explores the role of sound, and especially music, in the seduction of Rath (and the spectator) and in the film's larger project "to amplify and conceal the tensions among notions of national culture, art, and mass culture" (112). Kosta highlights the function of sound as a narrative device that comments on, heightens, and subverts the images' effects. Thus Rath and Lola are identified with and characterized by distinct types of music—popular songs for Lola, "serious" music for Rath—stressing their incompatibility. As Kosta writes, "the aural structure [ … ] simultaneously produces and dispels illusions of unity and harmony and lends to sound the ambiguous task of communicating crisis and redemption" (121). In Chapter Five, Kosta turns to Dietrich as a cultural icon of the reunified Germany, suggesting that the actress's current stardom points to...

Публикация представляет обзор содержания специальной дисциплины праманавады (учения об инструментах достоверного познания), сформировавшейся в индийских системах мировоззренческого знания — даршанах. Обзор начинается с установления сходств праманавады с западными эпистемологией и логикой, определения её структуры и небольшого экскурса в историю её формирования; отмечается влияние грамматики Панини (IV в. до н.э.) на выбор концептуального каркаса дисциплины Акшападой (III–IV вв.). Структура праманавады определена на основе «Ньяя-сутр» Акшапады, сочинений буддиста Дигнаги (ок. 450–520 гг.) и джайнских канонических сочинений Умасвати (II–III вв.) и Кундакунды (III–IV вв.); содержание логико-эпистемологических концептов раскрывается по базовым сочинениям восьми даршан. Автор обращает внимание на роль концепта вьявахара (конвенциональное словоупотребление и повседневная практика), повлиявшего на специфику критического дискурса в Индии, описывает характерные для индийской традиции философствования представления о лингвистической референции. Содержание базовых концепций праманавады (субъект познания, познающее сознание, воспринимающие способности, сверхъестественные познавательные способности, идеалы познания, цель познания, истина, повседневная практика, инструменты достоверного познания, вывод у найяиков и буддистов, «точки зрения» джайнов, теория полемики) раскрывается через их сопоставление с западными логико-эпистемологическими идеями. Специфика праманавады усматривается наряду со своеобразием решения теоретических проблем в отсутствии символического языка для анализа рассуждений, в наличии особого формализма (закрепления традиционных способов ведения полемики) и в сохранении ограниченной свободы критического дискурса в формализованном скептицизме.

The object of the study is political habitus as a stable system of dispositions formed in everyday practices through rituals and discourse. The relevance of the work is determined by the need to understand the complex and contradictory processes in Russian socio-political life. At the same time, three interrelated elements play a key role in the mechanism of habit formation in the daily sphere: modern myth-making, rituals and discursive practices. Through their prism, the article explores how latent political attitudes and values are translated and fixed in the mass consciousness. In the study, these processes are analyzed using the example of the return of the Soviet legacy to Russian socio-political practice. In modern conditions, the specificity of these processes lies in the active mobilization of symbolic capital of the Soviet era to legitimize the current political order and consolidate society. Thus, the subject of the analysis is the mechanisms of constructing this habitus through the triad "myth-ritual-discourse", studied on the basis of the reception of the Soviet heritage. The theoretical and methodological basis of the article is the concept of habitus P. Bourdieu, as well as approaches to the study of political mythology and performative practices. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the proposed analytical tools that allow us to consider the construction of political habitus not through the prism of institutional politics, but through the triad of "myth-ritual-discourse" in everyday practices. Using the example of the reception of the Soviet heritage, it is clearly demonstrated how the reactualization of mythologies and rituals of a bygone era takes place. The main conclusions of the work show that the symbolic capital of the Soviet period is actively used in modern Russia to form an integral political habitus. The analysis shows that it is through routine everyday practices such as the use of specific vocabulary, participation in rituals, or consumption of media products that the mass consciousness learns key political dispositions. Thus, myth, ritual, and discourse are key mechanisms for the incorporation of the "Soviet" as an unreflected scheme of perception and action into the structures of modern political consciousness and behavior.

For, in truth, fact whether and how an era is committed to an aesthetics, whether and how it adopts a stance toward art of an aesthetic character, is decisive for way art shapes history of that era-or remains irrelevant for it. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 The problem of haunts contemporary and theoretical debates: from postHeideggerian thought, Derrida, and various forms of poststructuralism to Critical Theory, cultural studies, and discussions of cultural modernity. Many of these polemics, even when they do not openly foreground or elaborate as an issue, implicitly engage in negotiation of nature, limits, and place of art in modern society. Positions on this issue range widely, from Habermas's reaffirmation of boundaries and functions of philosophical and literary discourses to Rorty's endorsement of an eclectic, multi-voiced, text that knows no generic or functional divides.' These disparate approaches reflect contentious debates about significance of modernism, about unsettling implications of proposed by art and literature, or, even more poignantly, of non-aesthetics advocated by Avant-garde. Is this polemics with and its metaphysical foundations of epochal significance, to use Heidegger's idiom, or is it just one more failed attempt at re-forming art, which, having produced a revolution in aesthetic sensibility and artistic and literary styles, comes short of renegotiating our understanding of art and its relation to thought? While many critics and thinkers deploy this modem aesthetics toward a critique of modernity, others reject it as a fetishization of art and an aestheticization of practice. With volumes written on this issue, responses to this crisis in and its effects upon postmodern scene will fall somewhere in between Habermas's denunciation and Rorty's optimistic embrace as long as we leave uninterrogated junction between experience and poetics of literary modernism. We need to inquire into possibility that this poetics contains a non-aesthetic or a post-aesthetic concept of art that pivots specifically on refiguring everyday as a critique of techno-metaphysical representations of experience. Putting in perspective historical determination of social function of art as a sector of cultural activity, itself an effect of confluence of representational models of art and divide between practice and theory, we can explore art as performative or enactive, as disclosive of world, and hence as of articulations that govern experience on level of both everyday practice and theoretical construct. If art is to remain relevant in age of technology and mass culture, it has to refashion its poetics to reveal its link to way experience takes place, and demonstrate how this revision of experience can reorient practice of thinking. This interest in locating critical potential in art at twilight of modernity and recognition in its poetics of paradigm of historical experience capable of inflecting metaphysical notions of history, and with them perhaps even history of metaphysics itself, binds otherwise quite different modernist projects of Benjamin and Heidegger.2 The meeting point between Benjamin and Heidegger describes juncture of art and experience: interface that constitutes itself as language, structured prior to, and therefore capable of restructuring and deflecting, aporias of practice and theory, experience and text, action and thought. Defining Surrealist experience, Benjamin indicates that this juncture is enacted in writings of Avant-garde, specifically in their departure from practice of aesthetically codified literature: the writings of this circle are not literature but . . . are concerned literally with experiences, not with theories and still less phantasms. …

Walter Benjamin’s posthumous reception was significantly broader than the one during his lifetime, par-ticularly in the one country he had never succeeded to visit (although he had intended to), the United States of America. In the current article, we suggest, that while beginning to widen in American intellectual circles, the acknowledgment of the philosopher’s legacy happened later in a narrower academic context, rehabilitating the philosopher who had never had the chance to work in a university due to a failed 1925 habilitation. The majority of Benjamin’s works were disseminated in various non-academic journals and magazines, making the process of translation and publication of his texts more difficult than it usually is for scientists. We suggest that, firstly, Benjamin’s reception in the USA established his image as a provoc-ative essayist stepping far beyond Marxist frameworks (as opposed to how his first publisher and friend Theodor Adorno presented him through a thoroughly-selected collection of writings that had been trans-lated into English for the first time), exploring such topics as Messianism, mass culture, and everyday practices. Our second suggestion is that Benjamin’s legacy appeared to be fruitful for American cultural studies whose representatives rejected ideas of the teleology of culture embedded in the original British program, and turned to “practice theories” which presented everyday practices significant in themselves, not as privileged sites of ideology.

and monolithic characterizations of the “market revolution” that recently have dominated our picture of antebellum America. By exploring the problem of a book’s value at their center, McGill uses the debates over copyright as a case study of how the very concept of the “market” took shape 363 AUGST / Antebellum Authorship at a pivotal moment in the evolution of federal power in the United States: “at stake in the struggle over international copyright is not simply authors’ and publishers’ profits, or the nature of intellectual property, but the place of print in market culture at a moment when the shape and fate of markets was anything but assured” (p. 85). If, as McGill persuasively demonstrates, copyright was another battleground in a protracted war between Republican and liberal ideologies, then “the circulation of print raised questions about the compatibility of democracy and market revolution” (p. 86). Reviving the creative and vigorous arguments of opponents of international copyright, McGill allows us to understand how, at least throughout the antebellum period, the logic of market expansion was contested by an avowedly political vision of the instruments and artifacts of the print medium—where the consolidation of capital and the supposedly natural right to private property would be offset by the widest ownership of texts, where “the mass produced book would be an exception to the rules of market exchange” (p. 63). For literary critics, McGill offers an especially useful analysis of the “strong half-life of the Republican understanding of print as public property” (p. 14). By framing this study around legal and congressional debates about the economic status and cultural significance of literary property, McGill suggests how we might rethink the study of American literature once contemporary scholars set aside their own ideological, and anachronistic, attachment to the development of a national literature and the suppositions about the unity and coherence of an author’s work on which it depends. It is remarkable that, given the extraordinary revision of the literary canon that has taken place over the last thirty years, the methods and concepts we use to study texts from the past have remained relatively oblivious to the actual conditions of reading, writing, and publishing from which they emerged. Not unlike the historical profession’s preoccupation with Great Men prior to the advent of social and cultural history, the discipline of literary studies is poised finally to break with its own outworn values and methods. McGill’s work and other innovative scholarship in the history of the book have opened up new opportunities for us to rewrite the history of literature, indeed literacy and culture more generally, from the bottom up—to reckon with everyday practices and objects from the old media that are every bit as revolutionary and mundane as those that now bind us to the new. Thomas Augst, associate professor of English, University of Minnesota, is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), and is writing a new book about mass culture and political change, The Sobriety Test: Temperance and the Melodramas of Modern Citizenship. REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2004 364 1. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979). For influential early works in the American history of the book in literary criticism, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: oPublication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. (1990). For recent work on the history of reading, authorship and publishing in nineteenth-century America, see Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993); David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999); Scott Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1999); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival On the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (2000); Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002); and Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003).

Student protests and massive strikes, Soviet troops moving into Prague and American ones leaving Saigon, rising oil prices and endless gas lines, soaring inflation and collapsing economic growth, arms control and renewed missile crises, detente in Europe and hot Cold War conflicts in Africa and Asia. These contradictory events from the tumultuous late sixties and seventies threw transatlantic relations into turmoil. The postwar economic order descended into crisis due to the collapse of Bretton Woods, the exhaustion of Fordism, and the ineffectuality of Keynesianism. The Cold War political consensus frayed, creating stormy domestic politics and opening the way for a renegotiation of East–West relations in Europe as well as for new social movements and transnational alliances. A weakened and less confident United States sought to reassert leadership in Europe and globally, while Western Europeans strove for more autonomy. American hegemony – economic, cultural, military, and political – faced a serious challenge for the first time. The American Century in Europe rested on five pillars. The first was American economic prowess, embodied in Fordist mass production, technological innovation, unmatched productivity, and high wages that enabled the mass consumption of cars, consumer durables, and mass culture. The second was America’s unchallenged military might, conventional and nuclear, and the presence of American weapons and military personnel across Western Europe. The third was the transatlantic consensus about anti-communism and containment but also about Keynesianism and generous social policies. The fourth pillar was widespread Western European admiration for America’s political values, global presence, and popular culture. Finally, Western Europe accepted, if at times grudgingly, its role as the junior partner in an American empire built largely by invitation but supplemented by American pressure, threats, and covert intervention when necessary. How did the challenges and crises of these years erode the hard and soft power on which America’s postwar dominance had been built?

The object of this research is the mass culture and art of China in the second half of the XX – early XXI centuries. The subject of the study is the calligraphic graffiti of Tsang Tsou Choi, the so–called "king of Kowloon", as a phenomenon of art and mass culture in modern China. During the consideration of the topic, questions are raised about the degree of study of the issues under consideration, the problems of research are outlined, the stages of formation of Tsang Tsou Choi as an icon of culture and art of Hong Kong are analyzed. The article traces the content of the artist's work, gives an idea of the specifics of the perception of his works in the mass consciousness, in addition, describes the transformation of the perception of his street calligraphic inscriptions in the context of historical and cultural processes that took place in Hong Kong in the second half of the XX – early XXI centuries. The main methods of the study were historical, cultural, systemic and functional analysis, which allowed us to create an idea of the calligraphic graffiti of Tsang Tsou Choi as a phenomenon of art and mass culture in modern China. For the first time in Russian science, the work attempts to highlight the phenomenon of calligraphic graffiti of King Kowloon and trace their influence on the art world and mass consciousness of Hong Kong in the context of historical and cultural processes that took place in Hong Kong in the second half of the XX – early XXI centuries. The study concludes that for Hong Kong residents, Tsang Tsou Choi's street calligraphy has become a discovery and inspiration, inspiring perseverance and determination in the struggle for their ideals in an era of great change. It is also important that his inscriptions embodied a unique collective memory: they touched on topics that traditionally remained unspoken, such as, for example, the history of mass dispossession. They became a statement that nothing is forgotten. Despite being declared an outsider in academic calligraphy circles, his fame only grew on the streets. Obviously, in the years leading up to the handover of Hong Kong to China, his naive activism became an expression of the general mood of the era. Thus, his figure gained importance not so much as a calligrapher, but as a pioneer of political graffiti.

The article belongs to the field of ethnogrammar, a branch of linguistics founded by Anna Wierzbicka, and the main goal of which is the reconstruction of cultural specificity on the basis of grammatical analysis. The analysis of grammar in the ethnocultural aspect enables us to reveal the ethnocultural factors which might have served as the backbone of certain grammatical categories or might explain the grammatical changes happening here and now. The aim of the article is the analysis of the category of voice in the ethnocultural aspect and elucidation of the ethnological factors which determine the choice of voice forms in various types of discourse. The choice of this category as the object of study is determined by the fact that it presents one of the most culture-sensitive categories and it reflects most fully the specificity of the nation’s mentality, its cultural values as well as the specificity of communication ethnostyle. The author shows the evolution of views on the essence of the category of voice in the context of changing paradigms of scientific knowledge, presents the essence of voice relations viewed from the functional and cognitive-discursive points of view and attempts to elucidate the ethnocultural factors which determine the choice of both categorical and noncategorial voice forms in various types of discourse. One of these factors is the ‘doing’ type of Anglo culture, and especially American culture in which a human being is presented as an active agent, a creator of his/her destiny and it finds reflection in the language consciousness and in the language units, including the choice of voice forms. Among other important factors which determine the necessity and expediency of using the passive constructions the author points out the following:a deliberate wish not to point out the agent of the action in accordance with the politeness principle;an attempt to avoid responsibility for one’s actions; 3) the intention to impart a generalizing meaning to one’s own opinion by disguising it as a general rule. All this enables the author to make a conclusion about the significance of discourse culture for the realization of voice forms as well as about the discourse variability of voice functions.

In the context of social sciences the victimization means that the process of formation of sacrificial consciousness and behavior becomes part of a person's everyday world. The authors believe that the sacrifice in modern society is in many respects a rather habitual form of human behavior, which often initiates a person to unconscious and conscious acts of sacrifice and manifestation of it in various modifications and spheres of life. Sacrifice in human life, its importance in the processes of reproduction of cultural processes, the distribution of its states in the age and gender dimensions can be traced, from the ancient world to today. In many cases, this phenomenon contains a large manipulative potential and leads the individual to a subconscious desire to be a victim, an incorrect identification and a cultural reference. According to the authors the desire of modern culture to interpret victimization as a socially desirable phenomenon is marked by two contradictory trends: these are improvements in the life of society as a whole, as well as processes of deterioration of the person's personal life, manipulation of it. There is an active inclusion of sacrificial forms of behavior in the mass culture, their introduction into patterns of thinking and behavior. The diverse processes of cultural massization lead to a constant increase in the victim's behavioral patterns of individuals of different age groups. Victimology today becomes an attractive trend for study in a multidisciplinary discourse.