Max Weber, die Ökologie und der Katholizismus by Peter Hersche (review)

Translating Race on the French Stage

هدف اصلی مقالة پیش رو بررسی نحوة برساخت مرز و مرزگذاری فرهنگی و اجتماعی در سفرنامة ظهیرالدوله (همراه مظفرالدین‌شاه به فرنگ) است. این سفرنامه که در بحبوحة انقلاب مشروطه نگاشته شده، از لحاظ جایگاه اجتماعی- سیاسی نگارنده حائز اهمیتی ویژه است. بحث توسعه‌یافتگی و مدرنیزاسیون جامعة ایرانی، لاجرم در ارتباط با کشورهای غربی پیوندی تنگاتنگ داشته است. به‌طور تاریخی و حتی در دوران معاصر، همیشه این سؤال مطرح بوده است که چگونه می‌توانیم ضمن برقراری و حفظ رابطه با غرب، الگویی مطلوب برای توسعة جامعة ایرانی فراهم کنیم؟ این رابطه برای جامعة ایران با مسائل و پیچیدگی‌های فراوانی همراه بوده و از دورة قاجار تاکنون هیچ‌گاه از این پیچیدگی‌ها و تنش‌ها کاسته نشده است. با جستن ریشه‌های تاریخی و فرهنگی و پژوهش دربارة اساس شکل‌گیری این رابطه در بستری تاریخی می‌توان به درک همه‌جانبه‌تری از هویت درحال شکل‌گیری جامعة ایران دست یافت. همچنین تلاش بر این است که با تحلیل محتوای قسمت‌های منتخب سفرنامة مذکور، نخستین لحظه‌هایی که در آن انواع مرزهای اجتماعی و فرهنگی به شکل‌دهی مفهومی «هویت ایرانی» دامن زده‌اند، ثبت شود. به‌علاوه نشان داده شده است که چگونه در این قبیل سفرنامه‌ها محور توجه از پیشرفت کشورهای مقصد به نقص‌های جامعة ایران معطوف شده است و بیشتر از آنکه دیگری ستایش شود، خود ملامت و سرزنش می‌شود.

The volunteer tourism program (VTP) is a popular form of travel for young tourists in which adventure travel is paired with short-term ‘volunteer’ placements in host communities around the countries of the global South. VTPs are now a routine mode of travel or pre-university ‘training’ for wealthy young people from across North America and Western Europe and exist outside of any historical or political context. They promise adventure travel, altruistic volunteer experiences, and an authentic experience of the other, whom the volunteer can help to transform. If not for the long history of intervention and domination that normalizes this new incarnation of the ‘civilizing mission’, the knowledge claims and authority asserted by the VTP would hardly appear so acceptable. The VTP exists in a cultural blind spot made possible by North–South relations structured on intervention and transformation of the other. This paper critically examines the promotional discourses of VTP providers and identifies the discursive strategies employed to normalize, encode, and legitimate the practice of volunteer intervention. VTP discourses legitimate volunteer intervention through representations of the host community that imagine poverty and authenticity as presenting a need for volunteers and through constructions of a volunteer identity that allows for travel outside of political and historical contexts. I suggest that the VTP can best be understood as a manifestation of continuing patterns of exploitation and domination of the global South, whereby VTP intervention discursively positions itself as ‘innocent’ of the very historical and political trends that make it possible.

School violence is a persistent international crisis, yet most analyses of the problem are very local in their focus. Many theories of school violence lack not only an international perspective but also political and historical contexts (Astor et al., 2006; Ohsako, 1997; Smith et al., 1999). This chapter argues two points. First, that theories stemming from work dating from the mid-twentieth century Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States are not always adequate in understanding school violence in a cross-national perspective in the early twenty-first century. Second, theories that account for historical and political contexts may be more valid in accounting for school violence in countries that are usually not at the forefront of theory development. In other words, though theories developed in the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States may have had validity in their own contexts, they do not necessarily transfer automatically to countries that have experienced vastly different histories and political situations.

When the past haunts the present: Intergroup forgiveness and historical closure in post World War II societies in Asia and in Europe

The representational politics of European cinema and literature were effectively determinant in shaping and reflecting the values and the ideologies of the dominant parties in dealing with encounters and representing cultural difference. Conditioned by the synchronous historical and political contexts, the work of stereotyping has persisted and Continued in deploying almost the same tropes and metaphors of representation that have been in operation since the medieval ages, constructing a logic of binarization of encounters on asymmetrical grounds. This article explores the genealogy of representation of North Africans in European cinema and literature, focusing on the metamorphosis of its dominant tropes and stereotypes over centuries. It addresses the ways fictional representation of North Africans, especially Moroccans, reinforce the orientalizing discourse of power, domination, and hegemonic construction of cultural difference on stereotypical and judgmental basis. It suggests that the visual and literary representation of North Africans has constantly kept appearing, disappearing, shifting and redefining in response to the prevailing political and historical contexts that shaped encounters between Europeans and North Africans. To track the mutation of the stereotype, its intertextuality and its hierarchical structures of power, Edward Said’s colonial discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of the stereotype will be used as theoretical frameworks in this article.

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.

The History of Wage Inequality in America, 1920 to 1970

25 years of molecular mechanisms

Aim. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the spiritual values of sport evolved over time, from antiquity to the present. Religion and sport are interdependent in different social and historical contexts. The terms meanings over time are different and fine context differentiation is required. Methodology. Research is based on participatory observation, document study and meta-analysis. Results. From ancient times, sport was a way of venerating the gods, a way of expressing corporality, a means of expressing spirituality. In the current social context sport is not religious but personal and it is a means of social recognition by venerating the winners. In a political context, the great leaders politicized the games transferring the glory and grandeur of the games to their personal worship. In the Christian Age,the values of sport ashygiene, corporality, physical beauty displayed were replaced by new ideology with obedience, religious manipulation and obscurantism. In these conditions, sport and physical manifestations took place in a useful utility form: work, military training, horse and water transport, etc. Conclusions. In a historical and social context, sport has moved from a component of gods’ veneration rituals, expression of corporality and social representation, to a phenomenon of great magnitude, without religious valences and with great economic and social impact.

The aim of this book has been to show that war is always defined in relation to something else, what we have called its other. This other may vary: it may be society, sovereign authority, politics, love, peace, friendship or something else. What is important about this relationship is not that it defines what war is opposite to and distinct from nor does it simply identify what the mechanism is that uses war as an instrument. It reveals the context within which war must emerge. This is not simply the historical or political context. Historical context is important, of course. Each thinker that we have studied can be said to be reacting to the specific war that defined or dominated their era: Hobbes, the religious and civil wars of the seventeenth century; Clausewitz, the wars of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, in which the people became a major player for the first time; Freud, the First World War; Foucault, the war of the racial Holocaust; Virilio, the Cold War of Mutually Assured Destruction; Baudrillard, the First Gulf War; Žižek, the War on Terror and so on. Sometimes this address is direct and conscious; sometimes implicit and incidental. Their accounts, however, emerge in more than an historical context: they rely on a conceptual context as well, in which war is not just a literal material situation, but an abstraction or an idea. This is what makes war available as part of the unfolding of human meaning.KeywordsOfficial ViolenceConceptual ContextHuman MeaningSovereign AuthorityEthnic AllegianceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This essay represents the author's attempt to grapple with number of tensions inspired and enriched by Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This author's interest in history and historical context first engendered skepticism regarding Habermas's surprising discovery of the of the bourgeois public sphere (hereafter BPS) within the far less than context of eighteenth-century English politics and political discourse. Habermas critics have long noted that Structural Transformation often ignored many of the dreadful realties of the context of eighteenth-century political discourse (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 33, 239). There can be little doubt that the reality of politics and political discourse, at least in the English BPS, was antithetical to Habermas's ideal. According to Craig Calhoun (1992), for Habermas: The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as mode of societal integration. Public discourse ... is possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are non-discursive modes of coordination ... they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. (p. 6) In fact, public discourse of the period associated with the English BPS was thoroughly inundated with the influences of money and power. This period saw the rise and consolidation of modern financial institutions like the Bank of England and stock markets. And this timeframe also saw important developments in the growth of English political institutions--particularly political parties--that also exercised influence over policy outcomes and social coordination. In sum, the Structural Transformation may be said excessively to downplay the extent to which the power of emerging financial and political institutions, rather than the power of the better argument, shaped and guided English political discourse and policy--even during the time at which the BPS was allegedly in its prime. But alongside this longstanding unease with the manner in which Habermas may be said to have neglected historical accuracy in the service of his efforts to recover a valuable critical ideal (Calhoun, 1992, p. 29) from the BPS, my current ruminations on Habermas's Structural Transformation are informed not just by history, but by concerns about the hyperpartisan context of early twenty-first century political discourse in the United States. As corrective both to Habermas's downplaying of party and partisanship in the English BPS, as well as the seemingly unchecked partisanship of current political discourse, this essay uses Habermas's Structural Transformation as springboard for developing contextually based strategies for argument evaluation that view political parties and partisan discourse, not exclusively as distortions of rationality or culprits in the decay of an idealized BPS, but rather as potential agents of rational deliberation and discourse. Although Habermas (1989) maintained that the rise of modern interest-based political parties was contributing factor in the decline of the BPS (pp. 203-5), he recognized nevertheless that the rational critical debate of the English BPS was itself somehow structured by discursive tension between Robert Walpole's government and Bolingbroke's opposition. The English BPS, Habermas contends, resulted largely from the parliamentary opposition's attempt to influence the state by recourse to the umpire of public opinion. Opposition papers achieved the status of fourth estate; and the public sphere developed in confrontation between the press and the state: From 1727 on, under the impact of the Craftsman, systematic opposition arose which ... until 1742, via literature and press, informed the public at large about the political controversies in Parliament (Habermas, 1989, pp. 63-64). Habermas (1989) continues, through the critical debate of the public, it [political opposition] took the form of permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition . …

This study delves into the transformation of women’s political discourse in Albania amidst significant political and technological shifts in recent decades. Its objective is to systematize the understanding of women’s political discourse within the Albanian parliament, examining its evolution across various historical-political periods and the influence of modern information processes in democratic Albania. Utilizing theoretical methodologies, the research scrutinizes political discourse as a dynamic facet of political communication, with a particular focus on its gender dimensions and its impact on political engagement. The analysis spans several eras: the communist regime, the initial formation of democracy, and the current democratic consolidation phase. It employs a comparative approach to highlight distinct and common features of women’s political discourse across these periods. The study identifies contemporary challenges in female political communication within the Albanian parliament and proposes strategies for their improvement, emphasizing the need to enhance the role of women in Albania’s socio-political sphere. Key lexemes indicative of different historical and political contexts are analyzed to understand the influence of regime shifts on political discourse. The study differentiates between the concepts of political discourse and political communication, offering nuanced insights into these areas. This material reveals the intersection of political, social, and cultural changes in Albania as seen through women’s political discourse. It demonstrates how shifts in political regimes and societal norms have redefined political communication, particularly for women, highlighting their growing involvement and impact in Albania’s political arena. The conclusions provide a comprehensive view of Albania’s evolving socio-political landscape, underlining the increasing significance of women in shaping the nation’s future.

In the colonial context, the legal institution of citizenship often assumed a bio-political meaning; in this way ethnic and racial differences became legal categories. A look at the citizenship policy in German East Africa confirms this and offers a new perspective on the relationships between the colonized and the colonizers. This article concentrates on the occupation and establishment of German rule in East Africa at the turn of the 20th century, a period marked by a crisis caused by the new regime's impact on the local population. On the one hand, colonial rule quickly sought to fragment the local society and assign its different parts a broad multiplicity of juridical statuses, seeking to divide the colonizers from the colonized on a racial basis; on the other hand, this operation also created margins of negotiation for sectors of colonial society that hoped to position themselves in this new political context. The article highlights the necessity of placing the issue of colonial citizenship in a broad postcolonial interpretative framework that takes into consideration the local actors and does so by joining together issues of (internal) colonial and international policy and those of economic interests and cultural dimensions.

In 1948, democracies were still being established across the world, rendering the historical foundation of the Median Voter Theorem a pivotal point in the evolution of political thought. This research paper delves into the intricate relationship between the Western and European political context surrounding the emergence of the Median Voter Theorem in 1948 and its reception by historical and modern scholars. This research paper also explores how these criticisms reflect the changing relevance of the Median Voter Theorem. By doing so, we scrutinize assumptions such as people’s clear preference for candidates, single-peaked voter preferences, the one-dimensional nature of policy space, and the rationality of the voters. By examining how those premises have evolved over time and considering changes in political discourse and technology, we can see how the Median Voter Theory is regarded from its genesis to this day. Through offering a comprehensive examination of the historical and contemporary contexts surrounding MVT, this paper also underscores the importance of considering historical foundation in the assessment of political theories and provides insights into the enduring relevance of the Median Voter Theorem in the study of electoral behavior and democratic governance.