Cultural Upheaval Research Articles

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)

Mary Douglas’s masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book’s analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas’s thesis, “Dirt is matter out of place,” can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood by what they expel but also that the true power of dirt lies in the acts of cleansing. Cultural upheaval, decolonization, and war together appeared to render Douglas’s interest in social stability naive, however, and Purity and Danger languished following its publication in 1966. Today’s politics of purity, from white nationalism to rule by imprisonment, makes Purity and Danger more necessary than ever. The tension between the search for human universals and the social and historical particularism at its heart continues to haunt social inquiry today.

Addressing Perceptions of Bias in the Ivory Tower

Abstract Colleges and universities in the United States have always been at the forefront of political dialogue in society. In times of political and cultural upheaval in the country, they are institutions that come under fire for being politically biased toward liberal ideology. Despite the best efforts of university leaders to dismiss these claims, such perceptions are real, having resulted in growing distrust in the academy. Recognizing the gravity of this issue for higher education and the nation, this article calls for colleges to prioritize pedagogical practices that build skills in intellectual humility and ideological empathy among students. In emphasizing these cognitive skills and habits, university leaders can help students develop the capacity for civic imagination and productive engagement to address complex problems. Widespread adoption of such practices could help institutions regain public trust as places where political openness and the free exchange of ideas can flourish.

Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...

Agrarian landscapes: from marginal areas to cultural landscapes—paths to sustainable tourism in small villages—the case of Vico Del Gargano in the club of the Borghi più belli d’Italia

Agrarian landscapes: from marginal areas to cultural landscapes—paths to sustainable tourism in small villages—the case of Vico Del Gargano in the club of the Borghi più belli d’Italia

A Small Literature in the Service of Nation-Building: the Estonian Case

The idea of Estonia’s cultural and national self-sufficiency emerged in the nineteenth century. The contribution of writers and poets was essential to this development. Literature anticipated not only cultural, linguistic, and artistic, but also the economic and political emancipation of Estonians. Cultural practices leading to this emancipation were largely based on Baltic German models; many key elements to the independent Estonian national identity are of foreign origin. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century nationbuilding could therefore be described as self-colonization. On the other hand, it rather created a new nation than transformed a preexisting one, since the very concept of national identity was introduced by this process. Through various political and cultural upheavals, the most influential authors from this seminal period of the Estonian modern culture have remained iconic to this day. The traditional identification with them is so strong that the tentative origins of the nation and the identitary struggles of the national poets themselves may often be forgotten and the personal and individual nature of their contribution downplayed.

“The Operation of the Machine”

The Clark Kerr era in the history of the University of California (1952–1967) was marked by momentous social and cultural upheaval, much of which was fought out across the UC system's then eight campuses, particularly Berkeley and UCLA. No issue sparked greater student action than civil rights, which was a challenge that Kerr confronted first as Berkeley chancellor and then as president of the entire UC system. This challenge was met in every area of the university's affairs, including its athletics programs. Kerr demanded that the university's teams schedule games with the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, whose academic profiles matched its own. These included segregated southern institutions, whose varsity teams were still composed entirely of white athletes and, in some cases, demanded the segregation of competitors by race. These games presented unique challenges for a university that Kerr considered “a portal open to all able young people,” since such competitive and commercial affiliations with segregated institutions called into question the university's sincerity in committing itself to equal educational opportunity. By digging deeply in the university archives at both Berkeley and UCLA, this article reveals how Kerr and his administration promoted the university's affiliation with these southern institutions without taking the racial politics of these games into serious consideration. In turn, the article reassesses the university's racial record in the Kerr era and its commitment to protecting the civil rights of the black student athletes who competed on its varsity teams.

Los universos opuestos en El camino de regreso, de José de Piérola


 La novela El camino de regreso (2007) visibiliza el complejo y conflictivo entramado social de nuestra nación, donde las normas y las leyes operan de manera distinta en función de la raza, la clase social y el lugar de origen de los ciudadanos. La relación conflictiva entre los personajes centrales sirve como metáfora del fratricidio entre compatriotas. El conflicto armado interno conmociona a la nación, pero no afecta de la misma manera a todos sus ciudadanos. A través de sólidos y complejos personajes, la novela realiza una fuerte crítica a las estructuras que posibilitaron el conflicto armado, pero también anuncia épocas de cambio y desarreglos del statu quo. Por ello, en el presente ensayo propondremos que, en la novela, las clases populares, históricamente marginadas y las clases dirigentes, tradicionalmente irresponsables e injustas, finalmente enfrentan cambios de paradigmas sociales. El camino de regreso da cuenta de un nuevo paradigma que busca solucionar problemas, históricamente irreconciliables, a través de personajes de distintas clases sociales que comparten su interés por el progreso, la legalidad y la protección de las mayorías. La novela, desde un registro realista, aporta nuevas significaciones con respecto a lo acontecido a través de las experiencias de distintos actores sociales, por lo que puede afirmarse que están insertos en un proceso literario de verdad que muestra una toma de conciencia por parte del autor respecto del mundo representado y reflexiona sobre las coordenadas sociales y culturales producto del conflicto, posibilitando la revisión crítica de las mismas.

Obedience as Belonging: Catholic Guilt and Frequent Confession in America

From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the practice of private confession to a priest was a mainstay of Catholic parish life in the United States. By the 1970s, Catholics had largely abandoned the practice of private confession. One dominant narrative among Catholic theologians and clergy, identified chiefly with the papacy of John Paul II, attributes the decline in confession to the loss of healthy guilt that took place during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. In conversation with the work of psychologist and philosopher Antoine Vergote, the present article challenges this narrative, arguing that a collective and unhealthy Catholic guilt existed among American Catholics well before the 1960s and in fact characterized the period in which private confession was practiced most frequently. I contend that obedience to moral prescriptions was not, for ordinary Catholics, part of an ethical program of self-reform but the condition for belonging to a church body that emphasized obedience. Finally, examining the relationship between weekly reception of communion and confession, I suggest that private confession emerged to support frequent communion, persisting only until the latter became standard practice among Catholics in the United States.

Academies of hope: a transformative turn for person-centered practice

ABSTRACTIn the turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the US a cultural upheaval of predominantly young people challenged the structures, habits and institutions that underpinned the Modern industrial worldview that had originated in the Enlightenment. Though resisted by the establishment, the counter-cultural challenge nevertheless succeeded in loosening constraints of industrial consciousness and opened the way for new psychological attitudes or new ways of being that Carl Rogers suggested pointed the way to ‘persons of tomorrow.’ This article is adapted from a presentation given at the 13th World Conference for Person-centered & Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling ‘Facilitating Hope’ held in Vienna in July 2018 and describes a consciousness shift apparent among people engaged in transformative change projects in which Modernist consciousness is being expanded by reclaiming ways of knowing and acting left behind by the Enlightenment. Describing work by the International Futures Forum, examples are offered of transformative action projects where this new consciousness is at work. Such projects may function as academies of hope.

Individual and social fides: the contribution of Reformation to the ontology of economics

This essay wishes to address what is believed to be a central historical crossroad that allowed the development of economics, and other social sciences, in the modern era. Such development would not have been possible without the transformation of the fundamental ontology through which European and Christian societies understood the world around them and their own social structures. I identify the turning point of such transformation, as other scholars, philosophers and social scientists have done, with the Reformation, which was the center and cause of major cultural, political and scientific development. Philosophers and social scientists have developed such interpretation of the Reformation as the historical event in which the cultural and political landscape of western civilization has been utterly transformed. My interest in the Reformation as a religious, political and cultural upheaval lies in the fact that I identify Luther’s reforms not only as a shift in the landscape of political/religious authorities of the time, but also as a crucial moment in which the ontological landscape of western civilization has been radically changed. I am of the belief that the fundamental, ontological, assumptions of economics are based on the ontological revolution represented by Luther’s theology, and Reformation more generally, in a fundamental way. Such that economics would be unthinkable without the Reformation.

1968: Mythology Matters

We are now reaching the last flurry of half-century commemorations of the 1960s. What is striking in these backwards glances – most recently, fifty years since 1967’s Summer of Love, and fifty years since ‘1968’ – is the truncation of events, the conflation of ideas, the simplification of meaning. Years and eras are impossible to encapsulate in sound bites or longer narratives of public memorialization, so music often serves as a convenient shorthand; yet popular songs of 1967 and 1968 only occasionally spoke to contemporary events, and more often skated over the surface of deep cultural rifts and political upheaval. What we now retain is a sort of shared mythology – 1967 was peaceful, 1968 was violent – that complicates our ability to see the past in the present. As I aim to show here, the 1960s continue to resonate today in ways that force us to confront history, for as William Faulkner wrote, ‘the past is never dead. It's not even past.’

The Topos of Sarajevo in Prose of the Croatian Writer M. Ergović (Based on the Storybook Sarajevski Marlboro)

The article gives a brief analysis of the use of the term “topos” in the modern Russian history of literature, and explores the topos of the city of Sarajevo based on a storybook of the Bosnian-Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović. He manages to convey the originality of the city through the twin concepts of own / alien. The besieged Sarajevo in Ergović’s stories is filled with everyday, but important, symbolic objects, while the war plays the role of a magnifying glass, thanks to which everyday things come to the fore. These objects become the center of stories, acquiring allegorical meaning. Sarajevski Marlboro is not a collection of stories about the war, but it is about life, about people and their relationships, and the war itself is only the context of their interaction. The narrator is emotionally detached, but his voice breaks through the suffering and emotions of the characters. Building a story around everyday objects such as a cactus, writing or photography, the writer brings history closer to readers who do not know war, which allows everyone to at least get a little closer to understanding how it influenced the fate of people. Jergović’s narrative strategy is close to the tradition of the Bosnian story of the beginning of the twentieth century, which reflected the lives of individuals against the background of historical or cultural upheavals of Bosnian society at the turn of the twentieth century. The Sarajevski Marlboro endorsed a story of this type as an identification mark of Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature itself. Jergović made Sarajevo “a symbolic historical topos, showing the collapse of the basic moral and humanistic values of modern, technological and information civilization against the backdrop of a terrible war.” An analysis of the storybook Sarajevski Marlboro is the beginning of a study of the topos of Sarajevo, both within the framework of Miljenko Jergović’s work, and more broadly – the beginning of the study of the Sarajevo text in Bosnian (as well as Serbian and Croatian) literature. The literary embodiment of Sarajevo can act as a special object of artistic comprehension, providing a kind of integral unity.

The United States of Hippies

The United States of Hippies Roger Chapman (bio) AMERICAN HIPPIES. By W. J. Rorabaugh. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2015. AMBIGUOUS BORDERLANDS: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture. By Erik Mortenson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2016. Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, when you were the brightest star who were the shadows? —Natalie Merchant, "Hey Jack Kerouac" (1987) Every picture has its shadows And it has some source of light —Joni Mitchell, "Shadows and Light" (1975) The hippies were seemingly everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s, but in actuality their sense of presence in American society was greater than their number. The term "hippie" can be honorable, pejorative, or flippant, all depending on context and speaker. Everyone knows what is meant when "hippie" is uttered, [End Page 19] but the truth is no one precisely knows. According to W. J. Rorabaugh, in his very readable American Hippies, the hippie counterculture movement not only made a lasting impression on American culture, but it largely remains a work in progress. What the author hopes to convey is the hippie aspect of hippies; in other words, their diversity and complexity. Of course, it would be less than hippie for hippies to be uniform and standard. Rorabaugh approaches the topic with just the right flow, avoiding bogs of minutia, and he is to be congratulated for doing so while making use of archival material (including a finely selected array of photographs of the period). Appropriately for the "blast to the past," there are footnotes as opposed to endnotes. The organizational structure of American Hippies divides hippie culture into two broad categories: hedonism/spiritualism (covering drugs and music) and politics (covering the antiwar movement, the politically engaged/politically disengaged, and libertarianism). American Hippies is comprised of five chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, and index. In chapter one, the origins of the hippie movement is explained; and reasons are offered for why the counterculture movement is important history to study: first, it was a major contributor to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, including concern for social justice, civil rights, black power, feminism, environmentalism, and socially liberal politics. Second, for a period of time it held hundreds of thousands of young people in its sway. Third, its past is not past. Drugs, music, and spirituality are the topic of chapter two, and the keywords are "individualism" and "authenticity." The third chapter is devoted to the sexual revolution, emphasizing the advent of the birth control pill, the love of the naturalness of the naked human body, the natural "male wildness" (97) of beards and long hair, and also the imbalance of free love that led some female hippies, (the future feminists), "to reconsider whether the counterculture was nothing more than the creation of a male fantasy world at the expense of women" (130). Chapter four explores the political aspects of the counterculture movement, while communes are the topic of chapter five. Readers of wry humor will be amused by how communes were often places of refuge for hippies escaping the burdens of hedonism, but having all things in common did not extend to record albums. Communes allowed hippies space for exercising one of their important values: community. Hippies such as the freaks were apolitical; others, like the diggers, were socialistic. There was a tension between hippies and the New Left—Todd Gitlin, for instance, faulted hippies for their "frivolity" (133)—but in actuality the yippies, though claiming "no ideology" while promoting a "cultural revolution" (153), were in accord with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its opposition to the Vietnam War. Overall, Bruce Schulman is correct in his observation: "political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand."1 Hippies, it is self-evident, were too loose and free to subscribe to the dogmatic Marxism that typically animated lefties; indeed, the hippie embrace of anarchism and its skepticism of government anticipated the libertarian movement. In his conclusion, though conceding that the hippie legacy in American culture is ambiguous, Rorabaugh points to the counterculture's lasting impact with respect [End Page 20] to sexual practices, recreational drugs, music, fashion, individualism, and multiculturalism. Rorabaugh suggests that the values of the hippie movement are "still...

Negotiating spaces and voicing resistance: Nireeksha and women’s theatre in India

Indian theatre has a long and rich tradition of adapting theory and practice from a variety of representational modes from western theatre that subsequently played key roles in major political and cultural upheavals and provided fodder for social changes and progress in Indian social and cultural life. Feminist theatre practice in India clearly demonstrates this cross-cultural interaction, and Nireeksha from the southern state of Kerala is one among them. As a women’s theatre, Nireeksha has a unique history of survival not only through its theatre productions but also through its committed social work in bringing women and children together as part of its community projects. This article focuses on Nireeksha’s incessant struggle to build resistance and find a creative space within the main stream theatre and patriarchal society of Kerala. I do a close analysis of Nireeksha’s performances and its methodology of practice to understand and explain how aesthetics and ideology inform the practice and processes of the leading women’s theatre groups in Kerala.

Writing the therapeutic waterscape: Bodies, memories, and nature in post-socialist Chinese texts

This article takes an ecocritical approach that challenges the urban imaginary informing the notion of place and the identity of inhabitants in mainland China. It explores an alternative mode of imagination, symbolized by the flow and instability of water. The work of documentary filmmaker Dong Jun and renowned writer Su Tong can be seen as attempts to evaluate and revisit history and memories through a reconnection with water, whether it be the Yellow River in Dong Jun’s Flood or the river/water world in Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption. Instead of commenting directly on the destruction of nature as a result of human development and cultural upheaval, both works use water as an indirect means to raise these issues.

Publishers’ Spring

The years around May ’68 (c. 1965 – c. late-1970s) are widely understood to represent a watershed moment for children’s books in France. An important factor was the influence of a new fringe of avant-garde publishers that attracted attention across their trade in and beyond France. Using archives and interviews and accounts of some of the books produced and their reception, this article presents case studies of the most influential publishing houses as a series of three snapshots of the areas of movement in the field. At the same time, it evaluates the extent to which the social, cultural and political upheavals in France in the wake of May ’68 helped to alter the shape of book production for children and to bring about a ›radical revolution‹ in the children’s publishing trade.

BOOK REVIEW | Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism

What do school reform, presidential elections, LGBTQ rights, globalization, police brutality, and a Boston casino have in common:? They have all been the impetus behind youth participating, communicating, and practicing forms of connective journalism in the United States. This, in brief, is the main argument Lynn Clark and Regina Marchi present in their book Young People and the Future of News published by Cambridge University Press in their Communication, Society & Politics series. The book traces how young people engaged with news in the U.S. between 2006-2016, and documents political, economic, and cultural upheavals.

Fondling the Lemur’s Tail: A Discussion of Book Reviewing in Which Lemurs Figure Only Metaphorically

The book review is a remarkably durable form of criticism. It has survived perhaps threehundred years of cultural upheaval and philosophical turbulence with almost no alteration of spirit or basic format. We’re so used to this piece of cultural furniture in its accustomed place that we neglect to ask the obvious questions. What is this thing? Is it functional or decorative or pointless?

A Decorated Bronze Belt from Gargul, Iran

ABSTRACTDuring the early first millennium BC, the southern Lake Urmia basin in northwestern Iran was in the throes of political, military and cultural upheaval. Its material culture, as exemplified by the finds at Hasanlu, Marlik and in Luristan, suggests the elite in the area were consumers of fine, locally produced metalwork. This paper discusses the discovery of an artifact that expands our understanding of the material culture of northwestern Iran during the ninth century BC: a decorated bronze belt found at Gargul, Iran. The chance discovery of this belt, which is closely related to a type known only from the most elite contexts at Hasanlu, Iran, provides a hint of the richness and complexity of the entire region. This belt demonstrates that Hasanlu was not the only regional polity wealthy and powerful enough to employ skilled artisans for the creation of sophisticated luxury goods. While the craftsmanship of this belt does not match that of exemplars from Hasanlu, it clearly evidences similarly advanced metallurgical skills, awareness of a range of contemporary and ancient iconographic traditions from the highest reaches of power in Assyria to local sites like Hasanlu, and the means and desire to combine them to aggrandise the bodies and identities of the local elite.

Portuguese ambitions vs Japanese tradition

The article aims at exploring the particularly enchanting – in terms of scientific research – historic area of the Nanban art period in Japan during which a new type of Japanese art emerged reflecting the scopes and intentions of the first European traders / Christian missioners who arrived in the southern part of the country in the mid sixteenth century. More precisely, it focuses on some of the most characteristic artifacts of the Portuguese daily way of life or religion which played a particularly important role in the imagination, ideology, consciousness and creativity of the locals who seemed to assimilate this new type of practical, aesthetic and religious information by transforming it to a new type of art and craft. But under which conditions were all these happened and what did these new objects mean? Were these objects used by the local communities or were they exported to Europe? What were the social and political, conditions in traditional Japan during this ‘cultural upheaval’ caused by the Portuguese traders and Jesuits? The article aims also at exemplifying questions of this type as the moving and transforming of objects in history is always associated with changes in the cultural physiognomy of societies.