Sympathy for the Occult

It was our third visit to Poland since July, 1958, and it lasted for the full month of May, 1965. As before, it was not limited to the stay in Warsaw or any other place. We travelled by car, by bus, on longdistance and on local passenger trains. We visited almost the whole of Poland including the western territories, in a group of five people. While travelling, we had, in addition to casual meetings, numerous conversations with various people, with those who occupy very high positions in the Communist Party and the government, as well as with those from the lowest social stratum. We enjoyed spontaneous meetings with agricultural and factory workers, and with a few representatives of so-called private enterprise in towns and cities. We met people who had suffered punishment for economic crimes. We saw former political prisoners belonging to the CommunistParty, and those who took an active part in anti-Communist movement. We met the generation which was born in the Polish People's Republic, as well as representatives of the generation which grew up in the interwar period. We compared the attitudes of the pre-war generation with the post-war one. We made a practice of comparing everything -statements and figures, declarationswith facts. Of course, even with the greatest effort, we could not cover everything, let alone delve deeply into everything. We had to limit ourselves to recognition and analysis of some problems, often by a sample method. Certain problems and priorities had to be given up completely, for we did not possess enough data to enable us to make a valuable analysis. It can, of course, be argued whether the problems selected below are the most essential to the appraisal of the Polish reality. They certainly do not exhaust all the characteristic elements of the situation in Poland. Yet, I am convinced that without a grasp of these problems, an understanding of the actual situation in Poland is impossible.

La I Guerra Mundial transformó por completo el contexto europeo, por lo que muchos la han denominado Guerra Civil Europea. El tablero tambaleado por ella modificó la posición de muchas fichas, y una de las que sufrió mayores cambios fue la tradición de pensamiento marxista-comunista. El surgimiento de la URSS y de la ideología fascista hizo cambiar la estrategia comunista al completo y en poco margen de tiempo. Ante esa situación Gramsci tuvo la capacidad de desarrollar un ideario estratégico diferente al que marcaban las direcciones de la Internacional Comunista, y mantuvo su posición crítica hasta su muerte. En la actualidad, muchos teóricos del posmarxismo y la nueva izquierda plantean una relectura del pensador sardo, en este contexto es necesario recuperar los elementos de su ideario -Partido como intelectual orgánico, estructura-superestructura y Estado- en su contexto, para tener un análisis certero del pensamiento gramsciano.

This article deals with the Finnish-Swedish, Jewish composer and author Moses Pergament and his relationship with Wagner's theories, anti-Semitism in particular, and their influence on the development of modern Swedish classical music during the interwar period. The author emphasizes the importance of recognizing that Pergament's reaction to Wagner's cultural theories was part and parcel of his struggle for assimilation. The basis of Pergament's interpretation of Wagner was the notion that it is possible to separate life and belief: the anti-Semitism and enthusiastic lechery were part of Wagner's life, to which it was not necessary to attach much importance. The beliefs, on the other hand, were there to be analysed. Furthermore, an explicit and public critique of Wagner's anti-Semitism was inconsistent with an attempt to gain a foothold in Swedish cultural life. As Wagner's anti-Semitism was well known but was deemed either acceptable or irrelevant, paying attention to it was by definition proof of a Jewish identification. To be accepted as a Swedish music critic, Pergament had to follow the unwritten rules of the game, amongst them the requirement not to exhibit his ‘Jewishness’ openly. The actions of certain members of Föreningen Svenska Tonsättare (FST, the Association of Swedish Composers) indicate that Pergament's work was not thought to indicate a Swedish identification. On the contrary, his reviews were seen as a threat to ‘Swedish music’, and with implicit references to Wagner this was attributed to Pergament's supposed lack of feeling for the ‘spirit of the Swedish people’.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 389 images by Mumford, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn, and Sigfried Giedion during the interwar years when the visual representation of the modern in architectural discourse was a terribly important issue. Essays by Casey Blake, Robert Westbrook, and Richard Fox place Mumford in the larger context of American Left intellectuals, thus establishing Mumford’s relations with the Seven Arts critics, John Dewey, and Reinhold Niebuhr, among others. Rosalind Williams uses the Mumford archives with great effect, revealing in important ways how Technics and Civilization took the form that was published. Lawrence Vale undertakes what should be done more often with architectural critics: He reconsiders Mumford’s judgment of a par­ ticular building (the United Nations) from the perspective of a later generation and after the building has either worked or not worked. The best essay is by Leo Marx, who inquires into Mumford’s principle of synthesis. The essay is itself the most synthetic in the volume. Marx begins with the quite suggestive observation that Mumford’s success as a generalist may be at least partly explained by the fields he worked. During the interwar years Mumford wrote in areas in which academic specialization was very little advanced: history of technology, urban design, American literature and art, and American studies. After thus addressing the question of Mumford’s success as a “public intellectual,” he seeks the core idea embedded in all of Mumford’s work. He finds it in what he calls Mumford’s “romantic reaction.” The dialectic of organic and mechanical, Marx argues, organizes the vast terrain of Mumford’s scholarship. It gives the criticism its power and range, but it also accounts for the sense of tedium one too often feels in reading Mumford. Thomas Bender Dr. Bender teaches American history at New York University. His books include Toward an Urban Vision (1975) and New York Intellect (1987); most recently, he edited The University and the City (1988). Divided We Stand: Re-defining Politics, Technology and Social Choice. By Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Pp. viii-f-176; bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). In Divided We Stand: Re-defining Politics, Technology and Social Choice, Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson offer an intriguing and persuasive argument for a redefinition of the very terms of techno­ logical assessment as well as a theoretical basis for this redefinition. They claim their book is ambitious regarding technology and culture and indeed it is, for it challenges fundamental understandings and attempts to reorient an entire held. Schwarz and Thompson begin with a thoroughly sociological understanding of technology: viewing it as a social process, impossible 390 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE to disentangle from values and politics. Rather than attempt to divorce technology from its social embeddedness, they propose a “new synthesis” that recognizes and utilizes political diversity. Their analysis puts culture on center stage since it is the locus of all the connections among technology, values, and politics, and they turn to “cultural theory” for their framework. After identifying four “myths of nature,” four distinctly different political views of the world (nature benign, nature ephemeral, nature perverse/tolerant, and nature capricious), Schwarz and Thompson map these views onto anthropologist Mary Douglas’s typology of social relationships: the individualist, the egalitarian, the hierarchist, and the fatalist. They conclude that each myth is intimately connected with a certain type of institutional relationship and rationality. Those who view nature as ephemeral, for example, tend to be egalitarian groups (such as the German Greens) who have a communal and critical rationality and stress the importance of cooperation and voluntaristic relationships. Each has its own definition of the good, and each necessarily contradicts the others. Schwarz and Thompson do not aim to determine the “right” position. More interestingly, they argue that cultural pluralism is not only essential but beneficial. By acknowledging and utilizing diversity, distinctive approaches comple­ ment one another: divided we stand. Schwarz and Thompson claim that the dominant assumption of most theoretical models of public decision making is the pursuit of interest. They regard this approach as totally unsatisfactory: it fails to concern itself with the origins of interest or goal setting, it...

The aim of the article is to show the possibility of changing the angle from which we perceive Polish literature on World War I written in the interwar period. In Polish literary studies, there is a dominating tendency to see the Great War exclusively in terms of political event which led Poland to regain its independence; in other words, as a theme or motive of a politically oriented literature. Yet, there were many writers who considered the war a cruel and traumatic event which radically changed their ways of experiencing reality. Thus, the paper’s goal is to show how the Great War might be perceived as a modern even and how its influence on literary expression might be considered. Having provided an overview of trauma as a modern concept and basic premises of cultural trauma theory, the present paper subsequently investigates three specimens of interwar Polish literary production and discusses them within the framework of trauma studies so as to show how this kind of reading might prove beneficial to one’s perception of modern Polish literature.

Reviewed by: The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier Anne Garland Mahler Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 224 pp. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier resituates discussions of race and culture in the 1930s-40s in Latin America within the rise of anthropology in the region. Spanning broad geography and texts published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, each of the four chapters centers on an anthropologist-writer: Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, French Americanist Paul Rivet, Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. The book considers not only the less frequently studied works of these writers but also the networks and debates within anthropology through which each writer formulated his notions of race and cultural contact. In this way, Birkenmaier introduces readers to a number of lesser-known figures within these heavyweights' broader professional milieus. The four writers that structure the study, as Birkenmaier points out, "were temporary or permanent exiles" in the interwar years, a condition that "instigated new reflections on one's own culture and that of 'others'" (9). They all participated in an exchange among Latin American, US, and French Americanist anthropologists that would forge the "Americanist years," a reference to Paul Rivet's French Société des Américanistes that would profoundly influence the development of the discipline in Latin America. These anthropologists engaged in a hemispheric and comparatist dialogue, employed a varied range of methods, and founded their approach in an anti-racist politics intended to undermine the rise of fascism. As transnational American studies continues to gain ground within our contemporary academic sphere, Birkenmaier's study details a deep history of interdisciplinary methodology and political engagement that undergirds contemporary hemispheric approaches to cultural studies and critical race theory. Through the meticulous tracing of the formation of Latin Americanist applied cultural anthropology in the interwar years––such as in the founding of museums, the creation of journals, critical editions, excavations, conferences, and lecture series––the book's intellectual history of anthropology informs its insightful readings of both well-known and understudied texts. The writers at the center of the book, Birkenmaier argues, practiced the discipline in unique ways, relying on linguistic analysis and the study of colonial chronicles and writing in a style that "straddled the pamphlet and the scientific essay, the novel and the political speech" (144). Their fusion of humanistic and scientific approaches requires an equally interdisciplinary critical lens, which Birkenmaier––who significantly is a literary and cultural studies scholar and not an anthropologist––readily provides. Known [End Page 693] for scholarship on Caribbean literature and Latin American avant-gardes in such studies as Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (2011, co-ed. Esther Whitfield) and Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies Association, Birkenmaier's recent book exhibits an innovative cultural studies approach to the intellectual history of a social science discipline. In this way, The Specter of Races pushes against an Area Studies model of Latin Americanist scholarship––in which humanities-based literature departments and social science programs are kept separate––returning to a moment of scholarly "synergy among literature, linguistics, the visual arts, anthropology, and history in regard to Latin America" (144). Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Rivet, the intellectual on which the book hinges, is also the least known of the four within Latin Americanism. Rivet's comparatist model of material cultures, or "diffusionism," through which he studied American "culture areas," greatly influenced the development of a Latin Americanist regionalist anthropology (17). Birkenmaier links Rivet's impact in Latin America to the study of Chaco indigenous people in 1930s Tucumán, Argentina by Rivet's student Alfred Métraux. The book also considers Rivet's exile in Mexico and Colombia, where politically-engaged indigenista intellectuals criticized Rivet for his tendency to relegate the study of indigenous cultures to a removed and forgotten past. Whereas Rivet is lesser known, the chapters on widely-studied writers Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz...

Reviewed by: Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography* Regina Lee Blaszczyk (bio) Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xxii+351; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $55. In his contribution to W. David Kingery’s Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), Joseph Corn lamented the recent trend among historians of technology to embrace theory while ignoring artifacts. Patricia Johnston’s award-winning monograph on Edward Steichen’s advertising photography—pronounced the Best Communication History Book for 1997 by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication—demonstrates a key point understood by Corn and other proponents of object analysis. In the hands of a skilled interpreter, the combination of documentary and material evidence—in this case, the “artifacts” consist of some 130 advertisements from popular magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, all beautifully reproduced in color and in black and white—can augment our understanding of technology’s role in the transmission and reformation of cultural values. Johnston served her artifactual apprenticeship as a graduate student in art history at Boston University and a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery during the 1980s and as editor of exposure, a scholarly journal devoted to photographic history, in the early 1990s. As a result of her interdisciplinary background, Johnston’s work is informed by her knowledge of visual culture, American studies, American history, photo history, and cultural theory. A revised and significantly expanded version of Johnston’s dissertation, Real Fantasies examines Edward Steichen’s twenty-year career as America’s most successful commercial photographer, focusing primarily on his work in the interwar years [End Page 705] for the Manhattan-based J. Walter Thompson (JWT), one of the nation’s leading advertising agencies. Known today in scholarly circles for his art photography, Steichen earned this highbrow badge through his affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 studio, his fashion work for Condé Nast’s Vogue and Vanity Fair, and his later career as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. Rather than rehashing this arty oeuvre, Johnston digs deep into advertising agency papers, museum archives, trade journals, and business literature to provide a close-up view of the politics of cultural production at the intersection of commerce and art. In doing so, Johnston makes a stellar contribution to the historical literature on American advertising and consumer society; there is no other text on this subject that so effectively uses images as evidence. Johnston arranges her book into ten chapters that overlap thematically, chronologically, and methodologically; her narrative proceeds through biography, stylistic matters, cultural analysis, and a postmodernist consideration of audience response. Many chapters consider how Steichen adapted his medium, navigated agency politics, and evolved his style to suit the needs of corporate clients through in-depth case studies of particular campaigns; his photos appeared in ads for Pebeco toothpaste, Fleischmann’s yeast, Kodak Verichrome film, Ivory soap, Cannon towels, Oneida silver plate, Simmons mattresses, Steinway pianos, and Matson Line ocean cruises. In each instance, Steichen bent over backward to accommodate JWT art directors and account representatives, who represented clients’ interests. Here we find no temperamental starving artist screaming for creative license but a smart businessman who recognized that a comfortable livelihood could be earned through corporate patronage. Johnston’s book is as much a biography of a corporate actor as it is a synopsis of a photographer’s commercial career. As Johnston argues, photography came to be the preferred medium for images in mass-circulation advertisements for cultural rather than technological reasons. The technical capability for photographic reproduction existed for decades before ad agencies adapted it for mass-circulation campaigns. By the 1920s, the cultural imperatives of consumer society impelled agencies to find new ways to reach women visually—and ad men saw photos as the key to female hearts, minds, and dollars. One example from Johnston’s many case studies demonstrates how agencies used persuasive photographs to unlock markets. In her chapter on Steichen’s work for the Jergens Company, a lotion manufacturer, the reader is struck...

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Over a hundred years ago, Jan Stanislaw Bystron became the head of the Department of Ethnology at the University of Poznan (original name Wszechnica Piastowska). He has left a huge collection of books and articles as his scientific achievements, which still inspire new generations of ethnologists and social researchers. His most intense scientific activity was during the inter-war period, in which first as a professor at the University of Poznan, and then at the Jagiellonian University and the University of Warsaw, he co-formed the foundations of ethnological sciences in Poland. This article focuses on two main areas: institutional (vision of ethnology as academic science) and issues of cultural heritage. The presented text does not refer to the entire academic output of Bystron, but above all concentrates on the years 1919-1925 – the period when he managed the Department of Ethnography in Poznan. For Bystron it was a time of intensive scientific work and the beginning of formulating many research ideas that evolved later. Ethnology, in the understanding of Bystron, has made a kind of reorientation in the approach to the problems of the nation, folk, regionalism, language phenomena and history (for example Polish folk history). Many threads are also considered pioneering and sometimes controversial today. His theory of culture is also a pretext for reflection on the contemporary dilemmas of native ethnology, such as: the disciplinary identity, the boundaries between sciences, the role of cultural capital and knowledge transfers.

The UK rate of profit rose considerably over the inter-war period and hence this period was one of significant recovery for capital, albeit with some volatility. Several decompositions of the profit rate are explored in pursuit of proximate determinants of the rising profit rate. A Marxian decomposition shows that the 1920s were characterised by a rising rate of surplus-value and a falling composition of capital; and the 1930s by a constant rate of surplus-value and a falling composition of capital. A decomposition into the product of profit share and capital productivity shows that the profit share in the first half of the 1920s was driven upwards by the excess of productivity growth over real wage rate growth, but thereafter fluctuated inversely with fluctuations in the unproductive wage share; the predominant positive impact on the profit rate was rising capital productivity. This was due to rising labour productivity with constant capital intensity in the 1920s, and rising labour productivity with falling capital intensity in the 1930s. Some implications for both Marxian theory and historical interpretation are considered. Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the development of an iconic corporate brand by the General Post Office (GPO) in Britain in the 1930s by adapting the work of Douglas Holt (2004). Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a historical approach by developing a historical case study. It combines this historical approach with Holt’s theory and writing on iconic branding and the current literature on corporate identity, corporate branding and corporate communication. Findings The study argues that the GPO was able to construct an iconic brand in the interwar period (1918-1939) by responding to anxieties in British society generated by social tension and fears of decline. This was facilitated by the establishment of a public relations department, which created “myths” of national identity and imperial unity through telecommunications, and national strength through technology. These myths assuaged social anxieties and enabled the GPO to construct an iconic corporate brand. Originality/value This paper provides an important insight into iconic branding. It examines corporate rather than product branding, where research has predominantly focused. It also combines cultural branding theory with historical analysis and provides an adapted approach to Holt’s myth market model (1994, p. 58).

This paper - as stated in the title - covers theory, research and practice of cultural pedagogy in Poland, especially at the beginning of 3rd decade of 21st century. It consists of 2 parts concerning the following issues: History until the end of 20th century Tradition, origin, subject and philosophical assumptions Cultural pedagogy in the interwar period in Poland Cultural pedagogy as a humanistic pedagogy after 2nd World War 2. Return of cultural pedagogy after 1995 and it’s further development Cultural pedagogy, it’s humanistic-anthropological character Important publications and academic centers which popularize cultural pedagogy Summary Connecting theory and practice is a requirement for effective education and development of humanistic-anthropological cultural pedagogy which is open to „real world” and „symbolic world”. The last statement, justified in the Summary, is the main thesis of this paper.

It is an irony of the interwar years that an American, T.S. Eliot, became the most influential tastemaker in England. More surprising than Eliot’s didactic ambitions, however, was the way that English writers and critics actually listened, taking up Eliot’s call for innovation through continuity. This chapter demonstrates that Eliot was able to produce such a compelling theory of culture because he both recognized the increasingly transatlantic character of modern England and devoted himself to repudiating America, an effort marked by his adoption of British citizenship in 1927. Exploring such works as Eliot’s Notes toward the Definition of Culture, his early Colombo and Bolo verses, and his late Four Quartets, this chapter argues that a crucial aspect of Eliot’s attempt to renew English culture arises from the intimate way in which he negotiates the threat of Americanization.T.S. Eliot

This Chapter addresses differences in agrarian structures, politics and policies between Norway and Scotland. It identifies four key processes: (1) agrarian improvers acceleration of the first agrarian revolution in Scotland through forced enclosures and the dispossession of the peasantry (2) the impact of the free trade period and war time food shortages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (3) the elaboration of agrarian policy and state interventions in the interwar period, and (4) the consequences of the second agrarian revolution following the Second World War, including the Mansholt plan and subsequent EU policies. These processes help explain the emergence of a dual agrarian structure in Scotland as opposed to the smaller farm size and greater pluriactivity in Norway. Neither history corresponds either to Marxian theories of agrarian change or to those of ‘Modernisation’, but reflects a series of critical junctures and context-specific politics and contests between interests.

Since 1970 there has been in Australia considerable feminist interest in searching out the female past in a specifically national framework. There, as elsewhere, the initial Women's Liberation Movement contained many highly educated women, many of whom were working as students and teachers in some field of tertiary education. The Women's Movement has always been concerned to publicize and publish itself, and very early there were women's newspapers, notably Vashti's Voice in Victoria and Me Jane in New South Wales, joined subsequently by Mabel, another national paper. These papers were populist and eclectic and widely read. There also exist several feminist journals which deal with the study of women: Refractory Girl, which began as 'a women's studies journal', and in 1976 became 'a journal of radical feminist thought'; Hecate, a women's interdisciplinary journal, and most recently Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture which is concerned with recent Marxist theories of ideology and psychoanalysis. Feminist writing and publishing, both academic and journalistic, are flourishing in Australia. The political developments and splits within the Women's Movement are reflected in newspapers and journals, but in general publications have retained their collective organisation and are pluralistic, even contradictory, in the feminist views they present. One thing has remained consistent, however; the majority of feminist writers are both political activists and possess university education and many are still working within universities or similar establishments. During the past seven years many feminists have produced theses, journal articles and monographs which examine specific instances of women's struggles, in the workforce, in unions, in political parties, for the vote and education, as well as other issues affecting women. Feminists have sought out and interviewed women who were politically active during the interwar period and earlier in strikes, and in various other trades union struggles and campaigns. Much of this oral history has been published in Me Jane and Mabel as short feature articles. The overwhelming interest of women historians has been in urban women and women in the workforce. In 1975 My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, by Beverly Kingston, and Gentle Invaders: Women at Work in Australia 1788-1974 by Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, were published, and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History published an anthology of feminist labour history entitled Women at Work, edited by Ann Curthoys, Susan Eade and Peter Spearritt. The first two books may in some ways be considered complementary.