Cultural Upheaval Research Articles

Cultural impacts of severe droughts in the prehistoric Andes: Application of a 1,500‐year ice core precipitation record

Abstract Late in the sixth century, Andean peoples experienced major cultural upheavals, including a notable settlement shift of the classic Mochica culture on the northern Peruvian coast. A recently established annual precipitation record derived from ice cores from the Quelccaya glacier in southern Peru allows assessment of the possible role of climatic disturbances in northern Peru. Both areas are in the same tropical climatic regime. A comparison between the archaeological record and the Quelccaya data suggests the Mochica upheaval was conditioned by a series of severe sixth‐century droughts, including one of the severest droughts of the past 1,500 years, spanning AD 562 to 594.

"Abandoned" Parents

Maternal incompetence in childrearing is described in three widely different cultural settings in the southern Negev area of Israel. It is suggested that this incompetence stems from "abandonment" of the parents by traditional family support systems and is reinforced by the inability or lack of readiness of the health system to supply the missing support mechanisms. This picture of parental "abandonment" in widely different cultural settings in Israel may represent an end result of cultural and social upheaval common to other communities in the world. Techniques for prevention include improving awareness of health workers to this problem, teaching appropriate strategies for improving parental confidence and competence, and ensuring that maternal and infant care focuses appropriately on issues of infant behavior and parental concerns.

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn.-Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again.-Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.

Nietzsche in Russia (review)

410Philosophy and Literature That separation, which could also be defined as "the incompatibility between man's being, the nature of things and language" (p. 1), constitutes, Wing contends , our modernity. The question his book addresses is, when did it all begin? Was it in 1886 when Mallarmé announced "the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words"? Or can its origins be traced, as Wing argues, back to Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud? In his opening chapter, allegory in Les Fleurs du mal "undermines the status of the textual first person as a stable subject" (p. 14) and "produces a radical loosening of the relationship between the signifier and signified" (p. 15) when it goes beyond its initially assigned limits into a vertiginous displacement of meaning. Flaubert's declaration that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" comes to mind as Wing focuses on "Emma's stories": her daydreams, letters, and lastditch attempts to talk her way out of debt. For there are "distressing similarities" between Emma's narratives and Flaubert's. If the former attempt to create an ordered subject, as well as to give meaning to such mysterious words asfélicité, then the story told by the novel's omniscient narrator "is also caught up with the complex of desires which motivate stories" (p. 76). In Une Saison en enfer, Wing finds Rimbaud "engaged less in a process of self-realization . . . than in writing the self in and as language" (p. 80), deprived of any other ground of being. Mallarmé's "L'Après-midi d'un faune" proves to be an allegory of its own production of meaning that never achieves totality, a constant "deferring of intentionality and interpretation" (p. 99). In the concluding chapter he cleverly maps Marx's 18th Brumaire onto Baudelaire's and Flaubert's obscenity trials, finding that what is really at issue is the lack of a "stable basis for interpretation " (p. 122)—announcing, avant la lettre, the death of the subject that Mallarmé was to pronounce in "Crise de vers." The Limits ofNarrative is an extremely closely focused and closely reasoned, not to say laconic, book, and presupposes a philosophical and critical vocabulary not all readers may share; but it proves its point. One could only wish that its tide were a litde less self-referential, that its author had yielded a bit more to the desire to tell a story. Miami University, OhioRandolph Runyon Nietzsche in Russia, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; xvi & 424 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Given that Nietzsche's philosophy was calculated to appeal to rebels, artistic, intellectual, or political, it is not of course surprising that he should have had a special attraction for Russians at a time when their country was in the throes Reviews411 of one of the most violent political, social, and cultural upheavals in all history. His impact on Russian thought and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is said to have been immense; most literary historians and scholars generally take this for granted. However, few of them have tried to investigate it in the kind of depth and detail attempted here. In Part I of the book the contributors cover aspects of Nietzsche's influence on religious thought in Russia, dealing in particular with Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and Fedorov. Part II focuses on literature, painting and music: the poets Bal'mont and Blok, Andrey BeIy as critic, the prose-writer Sologub, the composer Skriabin, and Vrubel the artist. Part III concentrates on Marxists: Gorky, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov. Part IV has a comparatively brief (too brief, in fact) contribution by Edith Clowes on the "vulgarization" of Nietzscheanism in stories by Andreyev and Artsybashev, while James Curtis brings up the rear with an interesting attempt to establish a firm connection between Mikhail Bakhtin's criticism and Nietzsche, notably via Tadeusz Zielinski, who was one of Bakhtin's classics teachers at St. Petersburg University. As a bonus there follows an extremely valuable chronological checklist by Richard Davies, comprising over three hundred items by and about Nietzsche published in Russia between 1892-1919. The book closes with an afterword by Susan Ray which briefly comments on Nietzsche...

Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices: <i>Gravity's</i> History and "The '60s"

Re-reading Gravity's Rainbow today, it is possible to see from a critical distance how much it is a product of its particular historical situation. Pynchon's text is a novel of '60s--not only because it is about that now mythic period, but because it is demonstrably of it as well. Specifically, many of text's obsessive concerns--with the War, with propaganda and psychological manipulation, with genocide and treatment of racial/ethnic subcultures, and with paranoiac entity called Firm or System--are concerns that reproduce in displaced forms anxieties of an America At War both at home and abroad, caught up in traumatic cultural upheavals of what we now nostalgically call '60s. It might seem excessively culturally deterministic to insist that structure of text, with its strange, destabilizing shifts in modes of cultural/textual production so blatantly at odds with each other, recapitulates historical conditions of period. But to say that chaotic clash and clatter of competing codes that intersect in the Zone of text reproduces similarly dispersed array of forms-in-conflict that traversed cultural field during period of its production is not only defensible but, once brought into focus, almost self-evident. The text, like decade it reproduces, is a conflictual site in which disparate discourses struggle to be heard against general cacophony of languages that is social text; and Gravity's Rainbow can most productively be examined, not as a fixed, static, and iconic text, but as a linguistic arena of contestation in which is enacted in dramatic form battle against hegemony that V. N. Volosinov calls the struggle for sign.

John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China

Part biography, part intellectual history, this book explores the emergence of 20th-century China as a political force and the rise of US-China relations through the life of one of the most celebrated American intellectual figures of modern time, John King Fairbank. The author reconstructs the central events of Fairbank's life and times, concentrating especially on his role as a scholar and shaper of public opinion and policy. He explores the policy issues and cultural upheavals that accompanied the rise of modern China and US-China relations by examining Fairbank's role in this historic period. He describes the young Fairbank's awakening, during the 1930s, to the realities of Chinese political culture, his advocacy of a liberal response to the Chinese Revolution, his reluctant conversion to the Cold War orthodoxy, his emergence as a belated critic of the Vietnam War, and his self-vindicatory trips to China after the rapprochement of the 1970s. The growth of 20th-century Western knowledge of China, beginning with the writings and activities of a small group of British and American sinologists, developed largely as a result of Fairbank's leadership into a broad and vigorous transnational intellectual community. In rounding out his portrait of Fairbank as scholar-activist and academic entrepreneur, Evans explicates the political and theoretical struggles which have shaped Western understanding of the emergent China.

Rachel's tomb: Societal liminality and the revitalization of a shrine

An examination of records left by pilgrims visiting Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem reveals flourishing themes and rituals during the 1940s. These years were also a time of major cultural upheaval for the Jewish community of Palestine. The author suggests that an increase in pilgrimage to shrines of saints can be seen as an attempt to make sense out of current reality by linking it to sacred history. An important impetus for the development of a pilgrimage site may be the perceived convergence of aspects of the saint's biography with current political and social conditions.

Tourism and world peace: Case of Turkey

The above introduction to a study on the social impacts of tourism captures the spirit and focus of much of the contemporary research that deals with how people are influenced by tourism. Tourism is all too frequently examined in the condemning light of social problems and induced cultural upheaval. Rarely is it considered in the positive (and, perhaps, naive) light of a social benefit that can promote a variety of advantageous human conditions, not the least of which is world peace. Not alone among world leaders in his perception of tourism as a promoter of world peace, John F. Kennedy declared:

School mathematics in culture-conflict situations

In times of cultural change, education plays an especially important role. The writer suggests that even mathematics curricula, which have traditionally been considered culture-free, have a role to play in fostering mutual understanding amongst members of different cultures, after a period of cultural upheaval. Anthropological and educational sources are used to suggest points of relevance when a mathematical curriculum is designed for multi-cultural classrooms.

Lost tribes?

Mary Dougherty Bartlett, ed. The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress. University of the New Mexico Press, 1986. viii + 132 pp. Ralph T. Coe. Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985. University of Washington Press, 1986. 288 pp. Illus., & maps. Laurence M. Hauptman et al. Onondaga: Portrait of a Native People. Syracuse University Press, 1986. vi + 110 pp. Illus. Laurence M. Hauptman. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power. Syracuse University Press, 1986. xiii + 328 pp. Illus. One of the most enduring "fads" of the last twenty-five years in North America has been a fascination with Indians. "My favorite hobby is Indians," wrote third- grader Tom Boylan, his words immortalized in a painting by Mohawk artist Richard Glazer Daney. Tom's hobby has been adopted by a variety of groups. Indian cultural values are offered as an alternative to industrial capitalism. The Indian is presented as a victim by the promoters of cultural pluralism and opponents of imperialism. And in a fascinating revision of the cult of the Noble Savage, the Indian is presented as the original ecologist or environmentalist. Stimulated by this renewed interest among Americans and encouraged by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, Indian communities have been responding. There has been a flowering of the arts, widespread political activism and considerable experimentation with new forms of community expression such as the "survival school" movement.

Introduction: V. F. Pereverzev, 1882-1968

Valer'ian Fedorovich Pereverzev founded the Pereverzev School of Marxist poetics in the 1920s, one of the most turbulent periods in Russian letters. The decade immediately following the 1917 Revolution was a period of enormous social, political, and cultural upheaval. The breakdown of the old regime affected all areas of human endeavor as attempts were made to redefine and reevaluate traditional concepts and values in the new Marxist-Leninist society. In the sphere of literary criticism and theory an enormous variety of critical theories and styles based on them grew out of the search for new forms and possibilities in art. Experimentation and free competition among the many literary groups were encouraged by the Party's moderate position in the early and midtwenties. Party neutrality made it possible for both Marxist and non-Marxist critics to engage in serious literary work on poetics in an effort to solve complex problems in the theory of art.

The Emergence of Modernity: Patterns and People in Sociocultural History A Review Article

The early modern period of European history is one of striking political, social, and cultural upheaval, characterised by the emergence of political states out of the diffuse structures of feudalism and the emergence of religious confessions out of the universality of mediaeval Catholicism. Associated with these changes were changes in patterns of conduct and social relationships, as knights became courtiers, rulers sought increased central powers, bourgeois classes and artisans worked under new economic conditions. In different

The Christian Church and the New Religious Movements: Towards Theological Understanding

FOR MORE than a decade Western society, in particular the United States of America, has seen the rise and proliferation of religious and spiritual groups which the public has undiscerningly and indiscriminately labeled cults. Many of the adherents of these new groups have come from the background of the traditional Christian churches. Most of them, by abandoning the beliefs and practices of their forefathers, have passed a negative judgment on the Christian Church and its relevance to contemporary life. The so-called cults have often been in the public eye because of the legal actions and Congressional investigations instigated by anticult organizations. Anguished parents, whose children have become cult members, have turned to self-styled deprogrammera who have at times operated outside both civil and moral law. Yet the mainline Christian response to the new religions can, with few exceptions, be categorized as one of neglect and apathy. Though the churches have made extensive efforts to come to grips with the cultural upheavals of the mid-1960's, their attempts to meet the challenge of the cults have, on the whole, been slow, sporadic, and superficial. Many Christians, theologians included, have failed to grasp the significance of the new religious movements, which are already leaving an impact on society at large and on Christianity itself. It is unfortunate that we still lack a systematic treatment of the theological implications of these movements. The only concerted Christian response has come from evangelical Christianity, which has directed a considerable amount of literature to

Island Between by Margret E. Murie

Reviews Island Between. By Margaret E. Murie. Illustrated by Olaus J. Murie. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1977. 228 pages, $9.95.) The documentary novel, like jazz and modem dance, is an American contribution to art which reached its full development in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. And now here is another, not as dramatic but certainly more worthwhile. Margaret E. Murie has blended archeological investigations to create a timeless leader-hero in her recent novel Island Between, the island being the St. Lawrence (Sevuokuk in Eskimo) between Alaska and the U.S.S.R. in the Bering Sea. The prince figure, Toozak, is shaped- by ice, snow, sunshine and the very exacting rules of the Eskimo society. The son of a leader of the Eskimo island community, Toozak and cast lived at the time of the arrival of the first white men (Russians) in the Arctic, an event from which they suffered cultural upheaval and tragedy. Mrs. Murie’s documentary material is from the 1926 notes of Dr. Charles E. Bunnell and field-man Otto Wm. Geist, collaborators in the St. Lawrence archeological investigations of the University of Alaska, as well as from her own poetic observations and accurate knowledge of the natural history of Alaska. Amid bird wings, pounding waves and island quietude Mrs. Murie steers Toozak up the social ladder of his society to top man. His primary antagonist is the climate, a force which becomes a living and moody char­ acter with Mrs. Murie’s handling. The weather is on one hand cruel and insufferable, and on the other brings in the ice floes on which rest walrus and seal, and around which swim the whales; life for the people. Occasionally the Eskimo-like language dominates the writing too much, particularly in the first chapters of the book, but as Toozak and the other characters are developed the writing becomes less stylized and cleaner. The tale begins as Toozak at sixteen kills his first walrus and enters the society of hunters. Painfully he learns to respect their rigid rules, and in doing so becomes more skilled and acquires the fearless initiative of leadership. An adventurous young man, he discovers a cove on the island that is rich with whales and polar bears, a discovery that leads to the 268 Western American Literature establishment of a new village. When he is fully mature and a legendary hunter, Toozak selects a bride, or rather she is selected for him, and works his way through the complex but fascinating rules of courtship to win his wife. The birth of Toozak’s son is a fine piece of writing as is the death of an old person, the mother of the head of another household. In classic Eskimo tradition she asks her son to release her to the spirits when she is terminally ill. Obeying, he carries her outside into the dark and slips a noose over her head. Through a tragic misjudgment Toozak and five other hunters are carried out to sea on an ice floe. He and three others survive to reach land and find their way home two years later. The year is 1878, the year that the Russians arrive in tall sailing vessels and exchange beads, whiskey and guns for baleen and ivory. The Eskimos spend the summer in drunken carousals, an object lesson to Toozak. Food supplies are diminished by the time the winter sets in and when the harshest storm in anyone’s memory sets in for months, starvation strikes. The return of spring does not bring the food-bearing ice floes until almost too late. When they finally do arrive there are not enough men and boys left alive for three whaling crews and Toozak and his father set out for the mainland to recruit people. As Kaka walks with his wife-to-be along a high cliff, the history of the island is repeated before their eyes. Several boats full of people arrive on Sevuokuk as they did in the beginning. Margaret Murie has taken on thirty-three characters, the history of a remarkable people, birds, waves, winds and blizzards, and has turned out a beautiful book infused with her own...

The Secret Religion of the Educated Classes

The religiosity of sixties is identified as corresponding to Troeltsch's Spiritual and Mystic Religion. Its rise to prominence is thus associated with gradual displacement of church religion, an interpretation of contemporary events that is consistent with data on secularization and with evidence infavor of a religiosity. An explanation for this transition is sought in Troeltsch's observation that this form of religion possesses greater congruence with values of students and educated middle classes than either church or sect type. As a consequence, religiosity is described, following Troeltsch, as secret religion of educated classes. The cultural upheaval of 1960s and associated growth of and spiritual movements has presented sociologist of religion with particularly acute problems of analysis and interpretation. Prior to this decade, image of modern society that was most widely accepted was one in which secularization, variously conceived, was considered to be prevailing feature, although it was recognized that this process did not proceed evenly and could be interrupted by periods of revival such as occurred in United States in mid-fifties. The various phenomena, such as rise of Eastern religion, occult revival, astrology craze and Pentacostalism, which can collectively be called new religiosity, did not, on face of it, fit into this picture. For they did not resemble standard pattern of revivals, as they were all too often in stark opposition to established churches and denominations, while at same time, it required a fairly convoluted form of argument to maintain that such movements were evidence of continuing secularization. Hence there arose major problems of interpretation. Basically, response to this problem has been to make only small modifications to predominant image, such that religiosity could more easily be fitted into one or other of two primary categories of the or the religious. On one hand, for example, it is argued that this phenomenon is only superficially and that fundamentally it manifests many of characteristic commercial, self-centered and manipulationist concerns of a post-industrial society (Wilson, 1976). In this view it is secular masquerading as religion and not only does it not constitute evidence of revival, but its long-term effects will be to strengthen processes of secularization. On other hand, there are those who take contrary view and regard religiosity as evidence of genuine revival, a reformation in Western society destined to effect a marked and perhaps permanent reversal of trend toward ever greater secularization (Robinson, 1970; McGlothlin, 1967). These contrasting positions necessarily involve conflicts at descriptive, conceptual and interpretative levels and have led to revival of such thorny problems for discipline as question of definition of religion itself (Shepherd, 1972; Bellah, 1972; Baum, 1972; Lidz, 1972). Neither of these starkly opposing views can be said to be especially convincing. Rather one seems to exaggerate differences between religiosity and old at expense of their underlying similarity, and other exaggerates their similarity while downplaying significance of very real differences that exist between them. What this strongly suggests is inadequacy of a simple dichotomous conceptual scheme such as that represented by contrast between religious and secular. Some conceptual

Desertification, Development, and the "Admirals" of Manchar Lake in Sind, Pakistan

In Pakistan's extremely arid to seasonally dry, sub-humid climate, rainfall is generally unreliable. Its failure in single years is common, and droughts lasting several years are the fate of every generation. At the same time, floods and torrential storms are of frequent occurrence, indirectly promoting desertification through erosion or deposition of sterile sediment. Meanwhile, there is a legacy of desertification going back at least 5,000 years. Although some is attributable to climatic change, deterioration is often associated with human mismanagement of precarious rainfall, fragile vegetation communities, and exotic surface waters [22, p. 7; 4; 20; 9; 19; 5; 7]. None of the major types of economy seem immune from blame here: not the nomadic herdsmen nor the peasant agriculturalists; not the cultivators of the irrigated Indus lowlands nor of the terraced mountainsides of the north. Least of all are the various civilizations blameless. Ancient Harappa, once a flourishing city of the Second Millennium B.C., is now a waste saline alluvium probably induced by irrigation. Recently, away from the richer and fast developing zones of intensive irrigation agriculture, overgrazing, destruction of vegetation cover, and accelerated erosion have been increasing sharply [6; 15; 21]. The age-old and continuing complexities of social and cultural upheavals in and around the Indus valley are an important factor in the failure to establish land-use systems that have demonstrable long-term stability [11]. It seems that. whether under conditions of shortage or incentive to increase production, to open new land, or to abandon the old, most types of human occupance have tended to create a sequence of events whose net result is an enhancement of the effects

Radicalisme et permissivité sexuelle : contribution à l'étude de la contestation des jeunes en milieu urbain

Political radicalism and sexual permissiveness: a contribution to the study of contestation on the part of young people living in an urban environment, by Janine Mossuz With regard to contestation on the part of young people, what is the relationship between political and cultural upheaval? The interaction between radicalism and sexual permissiveness is studied on the basis of data collected by questionnaire from 470 young people from Boulogne-Billancourt aged between 16 and 34. The hypothesis to be verified is that the more permissive one is with regard to sexual questions, the more radical one is politically. [Revue française de science politique XXIV (1), février 1974, pp. 52-79]

On Entering Adolescence: Continuity, Crisis or Chaos

Adolescence has long left the silent zone and is a well studied phenomenon. The child entering this extended developmental stage is confronted by a world of rapid uncertain change, social and cultural upheaval, expanding technology with complex vocational pressures. In his search for identity, he can expect and is expected to go through a period of turmoil, where the boundaries of normality and pathology are notoriously indefinite to health professionals, society and even to the adolescents themselves. The family of the adolescent and society itself, responds to the unfolding development, the sexuality, the drive for independence, the emerging intellectual and vocational potential, the search for trustworthy humans and belongingness with peers, society, and humanity, with responses ranging from healthy empathy to seduction, envy, and undue expectations often of stereotypic proportions. From a controlling apprehension about this emergence, the child can often be viewed with unreal dependence as the new hope for the better world. Entry to puberty and adolescence has deep significance throughout the history of mankind. The modern day child may well approach the task with more anxious expectations, and may well wonder what roles he will have to fulfil, what options will be possible, and what lies ahead. He has been drafted compulsorily—how will he serve? In the biologically intact child, where there has been a nurturing and facilitating environment developmental lines flow in genetic continuity. Physical, intellectual, emotional, and social parameters each show spurts and lags varying in timing and intensity. Earlier delays, deviations and defects may become relevant once more or be relegated to the past by new healthy adaptations. In this period the child is vulnerable from within and without to the manifestation of intensified biological drive, psychological growth and social demand. Family and social responsiveness must be matched by competence and availability of health professionals. Crises—whatever their origin—are a turning point between further continuity or pathological development.—and require the establishing of healthy adaptive inter-relationships with family, peer groups, school and community. This paper will illustrate current crises and clinical disorders which necessarily present to paediatric psychiatric services whose role may be crucial in offering diagnostic and therapeutic intervention for the child and family, ranging from crisis intervention models to extended care for the child and family.

MASTURBATION AND CLITORIDECTOMY. A NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEW.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, which saw the industrial revolution merge into the technological revolution and witnessed profound developments in the sciences and social sciences, was one of many contradictions. Precisely why, in the midst of this cultural upheaval, the century should have produced its own peculiar attitude towards sex is difficult to say. Whatever the reason, among English-speaking peoples the name of the Victorian Age has become synonymous with prudery. Sexual desires, if properly controlled, were acceptable in the male as necessary for procreation, but it was unthinkable that any decent woman should derive pleasure from sex. A physician writing in a New Orleans medical journal in 1883 declared that he did not believe that one bride in a hundred accepted matrimony from any desire for sexual gratification. He conceded, however, that some of the lower elements might admit to wanting sexual gratification. The modest woman, he concluded, submitted to her