Ideological Production Research Articles

Una decolonizzazione mai terminata. Il modello portoghese di colonizzazione in Brasile e la costruzione dell’Altro/a africano/a nell’immaginario razzista

In this paper I analys e how the narrative discou r se about t he presumed specific characteristics of Portuguese coloni zation in Brazil moulded racism in Brazil and Portugal. Recently in Portugal there have been episodes of police violence against black people. These episodes have to be considered not only as the product of contemporary racism and it s links with neoliberalism effects on marginalized groups , but also as the product of racist and colonial Portuguese ideology . In the case of Brazil, Portuguese colonization is a key element to comprehend the national ideology of mesticagem , and the false idea of inclusion of African descendants in Brazilian culture that it convey s. The restrictive valorisation ( Guillaumin , 1972) of black and indigenous people presents in Bra zilian racist ideology is in effec t rooted in the Portug uese model of colonization which has been represented as more “human” since the slavery time. Portuguese men are been described as particularly open to mingle with colonized people, especially women, of other cultures and “races”. The notion of lusotropicalism , with its celebrating spirit, has contributed to establish this representation and it has legitimized Portuguese colonization and e xploitation also in Africa. These harmful representation s of Portuguese colonization and lusotropicalism ideology have thus produced the double effect of negating racism in both Brazil and Portugal.

The Ideology of Korean Women’s Headdresses during the Chosŏn Dynasty

This article investigates nae-oe seugae, the institutionalized headdresses of Korean women during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). The ruling class of the Chosŏn era adopted Neo-Confucianism as the national religion and ideology. Nae-oe, a Confucian principle of modesty, emphasized a clear distinction between the domestic sphere for women and the public sphere for men, which led to strict confinement of women’s lives within the household. With the gradual Confucianization of Chosŏn society, Korean women had to wear headdresses to avoid exposing their faces to strange men when they went out. Social custom even went so far as to adapt the skirt and the overcoat from the women’s hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, to develop two kinds of veils: the suegaechima and the jangot. The other representative form of the nae-oe seugae, called the neoul, was passed down from the preceding epoch. As the authority of Confucian doctrines over women’s lives weakened during the early twentieth century, the custom of nae-oe seugae gradually disappeared and has never regained its cultural or religious significance. The process of institutionalization and vanishing, therefore, well illustrates that Chosŏn women’s headdresses were not a stylistic choice but an ideological product restricting women’s lives.

Insertion Des Jeunes Déscolarisés Dans La Médecine Traditionnelle En Côte d’Ivoire : Activation Des Ressources Relationnelles Et Ideologiques Comme Strategie

This study highlights the resources mobilized by school youth for their inclusion in the activities of traditional medicine. It presents the results of a survey conducted in the district of Abidjan in 2015, with a target population of 223 actors of traditional medicine and mobilizes interactionnist strategic analysis to make sense of the phenomenon under study. Thus it is clear from this study that the school youth encountered in this activity, mostly have primary education (60.54%), and to a lesser extent the secondary level (32.63%). They are also, traditional medicine sellers; and mostly professional experience of at least 5 years and over (65.92%). For inclusion in the traditional therapy, it appears that these have recourse to relational resources, as ideological resources or ideological productions. Thus, these resources together, are proving highly strategic for their integration into traditional therapy.

Rock of our salvation: ideological production at the Christian youth music festival

ABSTRACTChristian youth music festivals (CYMFs) are an important niche sector in the realm of large-scale leisure events. In line with the recent turn towards exploring festivals and events as spaces of cultural production and articulation, this compressed time ethnographic study analyses two very different Protestant CYMFs – one of which is affiliated with conservative Christianity and one of which is affiliated with counterculture Christianity – and investigates the way these leisure spaces function as sites where ideologies are produced and religious identities constructed. It concludes that, despite the festivals’ differences in ideological orientation, both events draw on the mechanisms of leveraged liminality, embodied performativity, and youthful impressionability to advance their respective ends. The paper thus seeks to highlight the ideological importance of leisure event management.

World Literature, by Any Other Name?

There is a “World” of Difference Between the Benign Descriptive Tautology of the Phrase World Literature When it is Used to indicate, with its phenomenological innocence, literature from a variety of sites and in various languages and the same phrase when it is used to indicate a unitary mode. I distinguish between these concepts by placing quotation marks around the phrase when the second sense is meant. “World literature” indeed results from an act of ideological and hegemonic production: it is a tendentious, normative category with all the magisterial and juridical authority of a taxonomic rubric. In a classic Althusserian sense, the phrase, in quotation marks, actively interpellates the world and the world responds to the ideological hail. In so doing the world constitutes itself epistemologically as certain and determinate. The hail privileges and exemplifies a particular configuration of the world, inevitably alienating and “othering” the possibility of infinite alternative configurations and constellations as various and protean as the world itself. The crucial difference is that until the moment of the hail, world literature just “was,” doing its thing expressively, speaking profusely and in polyglot chaos and richness without necessarily speaking for itself in a unitary, prescriptive, representational, and representative mode. To put it simply, every literature in the world was in the world, and this fact needed no reiteration, no self-conscious validation. Where else would anything or any literature be except in the world? Why not just let world literature be in its various sites, languages, and configurations?

Hands from behind: an ideological probe into Taiwanese religious translation

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how differentiated (e.g. private publishers) and undifferentiated patrons (e.g. the government) exercise ideological control over the selection and the translation of Taoist poetic divination lots and Buddhist books in Taiwan. The article discusses a close correlation among patrons, poetics, ideology and translation within the framework of Lefeveré’s theory of patronage and poetics. Synchronic and diachronic analyses were carried out and the findings showed that undifferentiated patrons often treated religious translation as the source of epistemological input, disciplinary studies and culture education, but differentiated patrons used it as a tool of spiritual healing. Furthermore, a time-based probe found that pre-2000 patrons tended to publish and commission the religious translations that have disciplinary and theoretical values, and post-2000 patrons, those that carried out the practical and utilitarian functions for the public’s use. Despite its small sample size, this study suggests that Taoist and Buddhist religious translations are inevitably the ideological products that are created within a complex sociocultural network that is made up of the patron’s top-down control and the target audience’s bottom-up engagements.

Islamic Reformism as Networks of Meaning

This study focuses on the issue of Islamic reformism and provides insights to a highly diverse and ambiguous phenomenon. Located in contemporary Ethiopia, the case in point for the study is what I have labeled the Intellectualist movement. De-institutionalized and decentered in character, the movement was a major player on the Ethiopian religious and political scene, and contributed significantly to the shaping of generations of young Muslims from the early 1990s to up until today. The Intellectualist movement is a good example of a kind of reformism that often escapes analysts’ attention, and the argument is that movement’s informal character points to an important trend among many contemporary religious reformism: their appearance as social networks and the processural character of reform itself. Applying the concept of network of meaning, which points to how movements are loosely structured and constituted around personal and face-to-face interactions, the study emphasizes reform movements as venues for learning, for ideological production, and for the creation of new subjects. This means that they are more than instruments for direct action, but that they are fields for symbolic exchange and self-reflexive relationships engagement, which in turn constitute processes for the realization of alternative behavior and for the mobilization of action.

Post-Walrasian Economics: A Marxist Critique

Post-Walrasian economics is the result of a convergence among heterodox schools, such as new institutionalism, new Keynesian economics and radical political economics. The debate on power develops mainly within this methodological framework. Liberals and radicals have confronted each other harshly about the nature of power in capitalism, but their common method leads to the same mystified conception. Marx discussed the class nature of competition and explained how social coercion and individual freedom coexist in capitalism. Post-Walrasians represent competition as the highest expression of individual freedom and characterize power as its negation. Reality is thus turned upside- down, as in old vulgar economics: the power relation suffered by the worker is not caused by his/her social weakness, but by his/her individual strength. From the questions it raises to the answers it offers, post-Walrasian economics is only a product of bourgeois ideology and a tool to reinforce its myths.

SCIENCE, COMMODITIES, AND CORRUPTION IN THE GILDED AGE

AbstractThis essay argues that categories of corruption and reform, so often used by historians to assess the Gilded Age, are themselves the ideological products of the period's struggles for political, economic, and social power. It does so by exploring fierce disputes over how to value sugar, a crucial commodity in the political economy of the late nineteenth-century United States. Confronted with evidence of massive fraud, the Treasury hoped that chemical techniques would rationalize the collection of sugar tariffs. Instead their introduction enabled the rise of the notorious Sugar Trust, by making it more difficult to distinguish corrupt influence from the legitimate exercise of expert judgment.Sugar exemplifies how Gilded Age battles over corruption should be seen in the broader and longer context of the history of capitalism, in which self-proclaimed reformers have used charges of fraud and adulteration to discredit the knowledge of artisans and workers while mantling themselves in claims to objectivity and reason. Scientific knowledge, far from being the inevitable ally of accountability and good governance, could just as easily be deployed to obfuscate and confuse, and thereby to wrest control of social and economic power.

Educating in economic calculus: the invention of the enlightened peasant via manuals of agriculture, 1830–1870

ABSTRACTThis study is concerned with the process of the economic normalisation of agriculture in nineteenth-century France. The manuals published for rural inhabitants and for use in primary schools between 1830 and 1870 are presented as a means of analysing attempts at economic rationalisation which were underway during this period, in particular as it would affect the peasantry. Drawing attention to the content of agricultural, the study sheds light on the educational forms in which economic precepts and accounting techniques were presented and the manner in which those techniques were employed to promote ‘best practices’, so as to tentatively orient farm management and the farmer’s decisions. It highlights the social work of ideological production and behavioural guidance that unfolded in the first part of the nineteenth century. Our research emphasises the ethics embodied in these agricultural manuals, ethics that were directed towards a greater focus on profit maximisation on the part of the small- and medium-scale peasantry in tandem with an idea of disciplined and prudent personal and professional conduct.

From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany

This article examines German colonial cultures in the post-World War I period following Germany’s loss of a colonial empire. Photography had long been embedded in both the practical and ideological production of empire, but after 1918 took on an especially significant role in constructing a ‘surrogate colony’ that kept the colonial idea alive in the absence of direct colonial rule. The dynamics of this surrogate colony are especially evident in the publications of the organised colonial movement. Drawing on these publications, I argue that the colonial movement produced a surrogate colony that was as much about the management of gendered and racialised German populations as it was about propagandising for a return to colonial rule. Photography played a key role in bringing together two areas that underlay this gendered and racialised dynamic: science and commercial culture. I thus begin by tracing the way in which photographic scientific cultures, in particular in the fields of medicine, anthropology, and racial science, shaped the contours of the surrogate colony. These scientific cultures emerged in an unstable relationship with mass commercial photographic cultures, with the article then turning to an exploration of ‘colonial fashion photography’. The foregrounding of clothing and bodies in this photography highlights the complex relationship between scientific and commercial photography, which is shown to be deeply implicated in the production of racialised and gendered forms of embodiment.

Juarez Távora e a organização do estado Brasileiro: racionalismo administrativo, sindicalismo-cooperativista e cristianismo social no pensamento militar pré-golpe de 1964

A Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) no momento da sua criação, ao final da década de 1940, deu início à sua atividade de produção ideológica inserida em um campo cultural específico. A proposta teóricoadministrativa de Juarez Távora, um dos principais membros e comandante da Escola nos anos de 1953 e 1954, contribuiu para a construção de um projeto de nação a ser apresentado pela ESG. Este artigo procura destacar da obra, e da trajetória política de Juarez Távora, alguns dos principais elementos dessa proposta, tais como a defesa da racionalização administrativa e as ideias de Sindicalismo-Cooperativista e Cristianismo Social.

THE EVOLUTION OF “THINK TANKS” IN THE U.S. FOREIGN POLICY MAKING (XX CENTURY)

The article deals with a role of “think tanks” and transnational corporation in making foreign policy of USA. The author looked through history of research items for better understanding of their phenomena. Besides that, there was a try of analysis of a state administration’s part in work of “think tanks” and their cooperation. "Think tanks" in the current sense of the word appeared in the United States at the beginning of the XX century. "Think tanks" - are organizations that are involved in the protection of public policy in the one-cal areas, as a political strategy, social policy, economics, science and technology, as well as industrial and business policies. This powerful re-generators of ideology, which create a subtle and indirect manner philosophical axiom of consciousness, their broad international figure-of substitutes and complements the work of diplomacy. Ideological products "Moss govyh centers" - applied political expertise, analysis of article, the fundamental theoretical works. The main purpose of these structures - depth study (in the framework of the state order with the corresponding pre-grant representation or on its own initiative) those or other relevant issues and make recommendations that can be considered American military and political leaders at the expression- processing practices.

DATING A PRE-IMPERIAL TEXT: THE CASE STUDY OF THEBOOK OF LORD SHANG

AbstractThis article explores the dating of theBook of Lord Shang(Shangjunshu商君書). Despite the importance of this text as one of major ideological products of the Warring States period (453–221b.c.e.), it remained largely ignored in mainstream Western Sinology, in part because of the confusion about the dates of its composition. The article analyzes different criteria employed by earlier scholars to ascertain the dates of individual chapters of theBook of Lord Shangand investigates the relative weight of each of these criteria. This results in a methodologically transparent discussion, which not only advances our understanding of the complex textual history of theBook of LordShang but also makes a step toward establishment of a commonly acceptable set of dating determinants which may be employed in investigating the dates of other pre-imperial (i.e. pre-221b.c.e.) texts.

Economic and environmental impacts of production intensification in agriculture: comparing transgenic, conventional, and agroecological maize crops

ABSTRACTContemporary society is characterized by faith in the technological paradigm as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. This has led to a lack of critical analysis toward the contradictions inherent to production systems. In the primary sector, this phenomenon is expressed by the creation of a productivist ideology in which “producing more is better.” The negative aspects of the production techniques are hidden or classified as necessary evils to be solved with more technology. A case study compared three corn production systems on family farming: a) organic agroecological maize with open-pollinated variety (OAM), b) conventional hybrid maize (CHM), and c) transgenic hybrid maize (THM). The CHM and THM had greater production costs and productivity driven primarily by high dosages of fertilizer and the price of GM seeds. The high doses of nitrogenous fertilizer contaminate water and food with nitrates and nitrites. Economic viability of CHM and THM depends on large-scale production and public subsidies to purchase inputs and outsource risks through crop insurance. This article demonstrates that increasing agricultural productivity through the intensive use of inputs contrasts with the diminishing return on invested capital, and increases the environmental impacts without changing the economic performance of the activity.

Towards a Critical Sociology of Dominant Ideologies: An Unexpected Reunion between Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski

This article aims to demonstrate the enduring relevance of Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski’s ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The production of the dominant ideology’], which was originally published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1976. More than three decades later, in 2008, a re-edited version of this study was printed in book format as La production de l’idéologie dominante, which was accompanied by a detailed commentary, written by Luc Boltanski and entitled Rendre la réalité inacceptable. À propos de « La production de l’idéologie dominante » [ Making Reality Unacceptable. Comments on ‘The production of the dominant ideology’]. In addition to containing revealing personal anecdotes and providing important sociological insights, this commentary offers an insider account of the genesis of one of the most seminal pieces Boltanski co-wrote with his intellectual father, Bourdieu. In the Anglophone literature on contemporary French sociology, however, the theoretical contributions made both in the original study and in Boltanski’s commentary have received little – if any – serious attention. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature, arguing that these two texts can be regarded not only as forceful reminders of the fact that the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ is far from obsolete but also as essential for understanding both the personal and the intellectual underpinnings of the tension-laden relationship between Bourdieu and Boltanski. Furthermore, this article offers a critical overview of the extent to which the unexpected, and partly posthumous, reunion between ‘the master’ (Bourdieu) and his ‘dissident disciple’ (Boltanski) equips us with powerful conceptual tools, which, whilst illustrating the continuing centrality of ‘ideology critique’, permit us to shed new light on key concerns in contemporary sociology and social theory. Finally, the article seeks to push the debate forward by reflecting upon several issues that are not given sufficient attention by Bourdieu and Boltanski in their otherwise original and insightful enquiry into the complexities characterizing the daily production of ideology.

MARTYROLOGY AND CONCEPTIONS OF TIME IN HIZBULLAH'S WRITING PRACTICES

AbstractSoon after its founding in the early 1980s, the Lebanese political organization Hizbullah developed a specific practice of remembering its dead. In this article, I argue that through this practice Hizbullah constructed an elaborate conception of time and history that gave ideological coherence to the movement's main political project,al-muqāwama al-islāmiyya(Islamic Resistance). Examining early writings in the Hizbullah weeklyal-ʿAhdpublished during the organization's formative period, I show how such writings were instrumental in producing ideological templates that have continued to be replicated until today. Through a set of ritualistic practices, Hizbullah-affiliated intellectuals have archived everything related to martyrs and other kinds of human legacies, a process that has fed into the notion of an ever-present, and at times anticipated, era (ʿahd) of resistance. Moreover, the project of Islamic Resistance has gained salience each time the past is relived in the present, producing political action. Hizbullah's efforts at history writing have involved a transmission of ethics through martyrs' act of witnessing and their testimony to a way of life. Analyzing this phenomenon sheds light on the way political Islamic groups such as Hizbullah articulate national imaginaries through specific kinds of ideological production.

Cultural pluralism?

This article is an analysis of the ideological production of the idea of cultural pluralism. It points at the impossibility of inhabiting two or more civil societies at once. It points at the fact that culture alive cannot be accessed. It recommends attention to the ungeneralizable huge subaltern populations of the world that often also constitute an electorate. It recommends linguistic rather than cultural pluralism and a nurturing of the understanding of the right to intellectual labor in education practice.

La enseñanza de la Independencia Americana en Colombia y España 2009-2011

La investigación “La independencia americana en la enseñanza en Colombia y España 2009-2011”, analizó las maneras cómo el tema de la independencia americana, desde la institución educativay el aula escolar, (con los contenidos, mensajes, iconografía de los textos, guías procesos de enseñanza aprendizaje) originó unos imaginarios sociales en los estudiantes de educación básica primaria y secundaria (4, 5, 7 y 8 grado), que asimilaron como una nueva identidad los ideales de la nación en la región cundiboyacense de Colombia, y en los grados 2 y 4 de la Secundaria Obligatoria (conocidacomo la ESO) de la Comunidad de Andalucía, España. Reconoce la historia de la educación dentro del contexto socioeducativo local, donde se delimitan los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje eninstituciones escolares públicas y privadas que vehiculan contenidos, mensajes, representaciones sociales e iconografía sobre el tema de la independencia americana. Se pensó en los problemasrelacionados con la producción de ideologías y de mentalidades, es decir, problemas propios del campo de las representaciones sociales. En la metodología, se utilizó la comparada con aproximación a la cartografía social. Se concluyó que los contextos socio-culturales de la institución y país conllevan a diferentes apreciaciones e interpretaciones sobre el tema de la independencia americana en los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje de Colombia y España.

Why do we believe in competition? A historical-sociological view of competition as an institutionalized modern imaginary

The article attempts to identify the particular type of competition that is at the heart of the modern faith in competition and develops a sociological research perspective on this type of competition. The first section builds on Georg Simmel's formal sociology to suggest a basic understanding of competition as a social form. The second section offers a sociological review of the modern discourse on competition since the mid-to-late eighteenth century that leads to two major insights: it shows how competition has developed into an institutionalized modern imaginary, i.e. a taken-for-granted part of our modern world-view; and it highlights that this imaginary is concerned with a particular type of competition, where suppliers are supposed to be disciplined and motivated by competition for an audience. The third section develops a sociological concept of, and an empirical research perspective on, this particular type of competition. Combining a Simmelian understanding of ‘pure’ competition (i.e. competition as a struggle for the favor of third parties) with recent constructivist insights on publics/audiences and comparisons as social practices, it defines modern forms of competition as competitions for the favor of an audience that are (re-)produced by public comparisons of performances. It then uses this concept to distinguish and explain a number of research questions that may guide empirical studies on prerequisites and effects of the expansion of this type of competition in different societal fields. The article concludes that, rather than believing in competition or criticizing it as a recent product of neo-liberal ideology, we should study the long-term institutionalization of modern forms of competition in various societal fields in more detail.