Socio-political Currents Research Articles

Exploring the factors affecting undergraduate nursing students' migration intention: A qualitative study

BackgroundThe escalating global nursing shortage, fueled by the migration of healthcare professionals from resource-constrained nations to those with greater economic prosperity, presents a formidable challenge to healthcare systems worldwide. Nepal, grappling with a significant brain drain of its nursing workforce, serves as a poignant illustration of this phenomenon. The departure of skilled nurses not only jeopardizes the country's healthcare quality but also underscores the urgent need to address the underlying educational and systemic deficiencies contributing to this trend. AimThe study aims to explore the early formation of migration intentions among undergraduate nursing students in Nepal and identify key factors influencing their decision to pursue opportunities abroad. DesignA descriptive qualitative research design. SettingsThe study was conducted at two urban nursing colleges in Nepal. ParticipantsSeventeen nursing students in their final year of undergraduate studies. MethodsData were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. ResultsThe thematic analysis unearthed four principal themes: (1) Aspirations Beyond Borders: Structural and Systemic Catalysts; (2) Navigating Personal Ambitions; (3) Socio-Political Currents Influencing Career Pathways; (4) Economic Incentives and Realities: Weighing the Prospects. ConclusionThe study's findings highlight the need for systemic changes to retain nursing professionals in Nepal. There is a significant gap between policy initiatives aimed at improving the status of nursing and the persistent challenges nursing students face. This gap fosters disillusionment and drives migration intentions. The research underscores the urgent need to address systemic deficiencies, empower nurses, and ensure equitable recognition. These actions are crucial to cultivating a sustainable nursing workforce dedicated to advancing health equity.

Economic and Socio-cultural Changes at the Edge of Eras: Post-industrial Society

The article offers an analysis of the most famous scientific works of the 20th century (such as, С. Clark, J. Fourastié, D. Bell, T. Roszak, H.-M. McLuhan, T. Stonier, R. Katz, F. Webster, Z. Brzezinski, A. Toffler, A. Toynbee, J. Baudrillard, J.-F. Lyotard, etc.), related to the study of the key concepts of the information age, its objective foundations of development, which formed the main scientific, sociopolitical currents of the last century, opened perspectives for the development of modern political thought and possible ways of forming society in the 21st century. What happened at the end (or rather in the second half) of the 20th century, forcing even conservative skeptics to recognize the end of a long era of industrial development? The reasons for these processes, as shown by social and socio-political processes, must be sought in the economy. In addition to the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, there has always been a tertiary sector related to the sphere of services. In the second half of the 20th century thanks to the development of technology, the importance of the tertiary, service sector of the economy began to grow steadily, which marked the end of the era of industrial society and the beginning of a new, post-industrial history. The consequence of this was the emergence of new forms of culture and the transformation of social relations. The concepts of “post-industrial society,” “information society,” and “information age” are often mentioned in journalistic texts of the mass media and scientific publications. However, if you set yourself the goal of understanding what a post-industrial society or the information revolution is, it will not be so easy. Different authors often put their own meaning into these concepts, thus turning their texts into what is called in psychoanalysis a flow of free associations. The intention to make certain corrections to the concept of “post-industrial society,” to outline the main trends and features of the postmodern era, and explore the potential consequences of its influence on various spheres of life of modern civilization, became the reason for the creation of this article.

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE UKRAINIAN WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AT THE TURN OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Abstract
 The purpose of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the ideology of the Ukrainian women's movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, analyze the relationship between feminism and the classical ideologies of nationalism, liberalism, and socialism.
 Methodology. The study uses general scientific and special historical (historical-genetic, historical-comparative, historical-systemic) research methods that allowed to reveal the peculiarities of the ideology of the Ukrainian women's movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to determine the influence of Western European feminist thought on the Ukrainian public space. The methodology of intellectual history and gender studies is also used.
 Scientific novelty. The paper generalizes and refines the definition of the concept of «feminism» as a socio-political theory, demonstrates the interconnection between the ideology of feminism and socio-political currents of nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. It highlights the priority of national-patriotic ideals in the Ukrainian women's movement over gender issues, influenced by the colonial oppression of Ukrainian lands.
 Conclusions. Summarizing the research on the ideology of the Ukrainian women's movement at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the importance of considering feminism in the context of national and gender studies is emphasized. The study underscores the relationship between feminism and nationalism, as well as points out the similarity in the perception of feminism in third-world countries and Ukrainian lands. Liberal feminism played a key role in the development of the First Wave of feminism in Ukrainian lands at the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. The ideas of liberal feminism found expression in the analytical works of Natalia Kobrynska, defining the direction of Ukrainian feminist ideology. Supporters of socialist feminism at the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century, such as Mykhailo Pavlyk and Ivan Franko, argued that the development of society and the resolution of women's issues are linked to changes in social structure. Further study of the influence of classical ideologies on the formation of Ukrainian feminist ideology at the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century is crucial.

Deconstructing ‘Canadian Cuisine’: Towards decolonial food futurities on Turtle Island

As scholars and community activists, to secure a just food system, we must first acknowledge our complicity in hierarchal power structures that shape structural inequities by questioning the underlying socio-political currents and interrogating the dominant relationships within our food system. In this commentary, the authors reflect upon their intersectional lived experiences interacting with food systems in the settler nation of Canada. They explore the complex interplay of systemic racism, settler colonialism and neoliberalism within the Canadian food system by deconstructing the indefinable essence of “Canadian cuisine” and mapping these situated insights onto the process of gastronomic multiculturalism. The authors provide their perspective that an entry point along the ongoing process of securing decolonial food futurities on Turtle Island requires a conscious commitment to building interrelational solidarity across differences, reckoning with colonial land politics and supporting food sovereignty for both racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples.

80-річчя ТомашаМасарика крізь призму ужгородських і празьких видань 1930-1931 рр.

The article examines the Uzhhorod and Prague editions of 1930–1931, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Tomash Masaryk. The focus is on the work of Ukrainian researchers on the attitude of the Czech president to the Ukrainian question in the 1920s and 1930s. Determined the role in the organization of cultural and educational life of emigration in the Czechoslovak Republic and the attitude to the representatives of various socio-political currents in Transcarpathia. Much attention is focused to the activities of cultural and educational institutions in Transcarpathia («Tovarystvo «Prosvita» in Uzhgorod», «Tovarystvo im. A. Dukhnovycha»), as well as educational institutions and publishing houses of Ukrainian emigration in Czechoslovakia (Ukrayinsʹkyy Vilʹnyy Universytet, Ukrayinsʹkyy Vyshchyy Pedahohichnyy Instytut im. M. Drahomanova, Ukrayinsʹka Hospodarsʹka Akademiya, «Chesʹko-Ukrayinsʹka Knyha»). Keywords: Tomash Masaryk, ukrainian emigration, Prague, Uzhhorod.

The historiography of Indian education: 1920-2020: the socio-political influences on the growth of the discipline

ABSTRACT In India, the history of education has traversed a unique path in the last hundred years. The political influences guided the discipline, but at the same time, they were also contested and critiqued in equal measures. History of education as a discipline went through four distinct phases. The first phase coincided with the last stage of the freedom movement (1920–1947), which saw a new interpretation of what constituted education from the perspectives of Indian tradition and its contestations. The second phase (1947–1980) began with the collection and publication of official documents with strong introductions analysing the complexity of the history of education in the colonial period. The third phase (1980–1998) revived the arguments that took centre stage during the freedom movement based on literary texts and political speeches. The fourth phase (1998–2020) has witnessed a critical questioning of the historiography of the previous decades on the basis of archival sources and saw the publication of books and journal articles on various themes. This paper looks at these distinct phases and analyses the underlying socio-political currents that moulded the history of education.

“Communist Controlled Black Barbarism”: The Citizen’s Councils of America’s Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster and the Renovation of White Supremacist Ideology

Using insights from a content coding analysis of discourse from the most influential White supremacist segregationist organization of the early Cold War decades, Citizen’s Councils of America (CCA or Council), I argue that social movement organizations use a master frame cluster, a package of closely related, overlapping frames with a core master frame to adapt and update pre-existing, older ideology to contemporaneous sociopolitical currents and thereby mainstream, modernize, and streamline propaganda messaging. From its media outlets and White supremacist ideology, the Council deployed what I call its Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster, proclaiming that unrestrained Black savagery and misguided White sympathy, including liberals, leftists, and socialists, all followed a downward slope toward communist tyranny or what the Council called, “Communist controlled Black barbarism.” Twenty-first century conservative rightwing media has inherited the CCA’s master frame cluster to discredit Black Lives Matter protests, still using anti-communist messaging, but with a “Black-on-Black” crime narrative as the main propaganda weapon against Black protest.

Alliance of intellectual and social history in historical research

The aim of the article is to research one of the segments of modern historiographical situation. The use of methods of historiographical analysis allows to identify the state of development of the issue and to offer methodological recommendations for determining the prospects of historiographical synthesis. It is determined that the traditions of studying social and intellectual history in Ukrainian historiography began to develop in the second half of the 19th century. However, the evolution of these areas in the world humanities had a very superficial impact on it. Historiographic inertia still rather rigidly outlines the disciplinary fields. Thus, the key research object for intellectual history is still the history of political thought, for social history – the history of large social groups. Historians are still interested in socio-political currents, social and economic processes and phenomenon in frames established by Soviet and nationally-oriented historiography. Personological and ideological canons, formed in the early 20th century, with minor changes survived up to the 21st century as a set of ideas and figures responsible predominantly for the Ukrainian national revival. Insufficient basis on empirical material and superficial fascination with theoretical constructions did not allow reaching a more adequate level of understanding of past reality. Some attempts to overcome the disciplinary distinction and research inertia did not cause fundamental changes. The scientific novelty is connected with comprehension of practical experience and observations of the historiographical process, which led to the belief that the time of hermetic approaches has passed. Despite some doubts about potential of interdisciplinarity, that have emerged recently, we think that the unity of social and intellectual history may demonstrate a new quality in comprehension of the native past. In conclusion, it is emphasized that the interaction of these areas under the label of еру social history of ideas dictates the expansion of sources, personalities and methodological approaches, which allows neutralizing the beliefs that precede research and analytical categories to be born from empirical data. It turned out that the synthesis of mental and social-economic can be quite productive. It can essentially change the notions on both socio-economic peculiarities and intellectual situation in Ukrainian regions of the Russian empire. Type of article: theoretical and methodological.

Social Justice on the Couch: Collapse and Repair of Social Thirdness

How have the white, middle‐class, Eurocentric ideologies and practices of the Western psychoanalytic canon prepared us to make meaning of the complexities of our pluralistic world? Psychoanalysis has been criticized for its predominantly decontextualized and depoliticized perspectives that emphasize universal intrapsychic unconscious dynamics. In the context of a sociopolitically critical view of psychoanalytic theory and practice, I will reflect on what it means to keep conducting ‘business as usual’ in an era where movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, as well as the health inequities that became apparent due to the Covid‐19 pandemic are clear warning signs that our world is deeply troubled by injustice. I will argue that psychoanalytic theory and practice is not immune from this injustice. I will also contemplate aspects of a socially just psychoanalytic vision that may reverse decontextualizing, depoliticizing, and prejudicial trends using the principle of social thirdness, which expands traditional views of thirdness to include the patient's and therapist's embeddedness in the larger sociopolitical currents that inform and shape their engagement with each other. Reflecting on themes such as race, sexuality, gender, and sex/gender nonconformity, both the collapse and repair of social thirdness will be described and illustrated with relevant clinical examples.

Social Thirdness: Intersubjective Conceptions of the Experience of Gender Prejudice

ABSTRACT In the face of movements like #me too and Time’s Up, clinicians are challenged to navigate the intricacies of socio-political multi-dimensionalities of prejudice and the ways prejudice weaves through various aspects of psychological work. In this paper, I suggest that the intersubjective experience of prejudice is a collapse of thirdness, a collapse of the dialectical recognition of sameness and difference, or self and other. Furthermore, leaning on principles of intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis, I also offer a refinement of the concept of thirdness in relation to prejudice by pointing to the need to bring into focus larger socio-political currents and layers of experience that are intricately woven into the fabric of thirdness, thus constituting a social thirdness. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the clinical pertinence, as well as collapse and repair of social thirdness in the context of gender and sexuality. I will use several carefully disguised clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and their relevance to psychotherapeutic work.

“Catching butterflies”: Marion Milner and stream of consciousness writing

AbstractThis article explores the use of stream of consciousness writing in the early work of the British psychoanalyst, life writer, and artist, Marion Milner. Focusing on Milner's 1934 book, A Life of One's Own (first published under the pen name Joanna Field), the first part of the article situates Milner's use of stream of consciousness writing alongside the work of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson. Building on Vanessa Smith's recent archival work on Milner's reading of Woolf, this article provides further insight into previously unpublished archival material that reveals Milner explicitly identifying her “method” with that of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and commenting on Dorothy Richardson's rejection of the “omniscient observer” while she worked on A Life of One's Own. Reading A Life of One's Own alongside the writing of Milner's modernist contemporaries, I argue not only that Milner's writing contains striking formal and thematic echoes of modernist stream of consciousness prose but also that she uses forms of free writing as the basis for her own distinctive experiment in disentangling her own wants and desires from those manufactured by the forces of patriarchal capitalist modernity. The second part of the article demonstrates how Milner's experiments with stream of consciousness writing became, in the political context of the 1930s, fraught with an uncertainty about the boundaries of the individual mind. Examining Milner's anxieties about the forms of personal surrender solicited by modernist artworks, I show how Milner's own experiments with stream of consciousness writing became, increasingly in the 1930s, part of an experiment in trying to extricate the individual from the rising currents of fascism. Tracking Milner's, Richardson's, and Woolf's dramatisation of the pleasures and perils of aesthetic abandon, I argue that, although Milner struggles to negotiate her own immersion within the rising sociopolitical currents of history, the significance of her writing lies not only in the vividness with which it dramatises this fragile encounter but also in the argument that it makes for the value of creative and critical processes in an age of fascism.

Neurotic Fantasy: The Third Temple As a Metaphor in the Contemporary Israeli Art of Nira Pereg and Yael Bartana

In the political reality of Israel, some symbols lie at the heart of the political, religious, national, and historical discourse that characterize the peoples and cultures living on the Israeli-Palestinian soil. Among these, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the most complex and conflictual symbols. The multiple religious claims to the Temple Mount—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—are the subject of extensive study, but this article focuses on their reflection in contemporary Israeli art. In traditional Jewish art, the visual representations of the Temple or of Jews praying nearby expressed the longing of the Jews for generations to return to the Mount. In contrast, Yael Bartana and Nira Pereg view the multiple socio-political currents and religious rituals surrounding the Temple Mount as a reflection of the internal public debate regarding the face of the Israeli society today. This article discusses the contribution of their visual art to a conscious and aware discourse about the Israeli society and the underground currents that shape its contemporary identity. The analysis of their work tracks a “politics of aesthetics”—interpretation of the images within a socio-political context—and draws upon Israeli sociology, art history, and visual culture. In-depth personal interviews with the artists also inform the analysis.

How independent is India’s labour law framework from the state’s changing economic policies?

Judicial interpretation of statute law in common-law countries means that the judiciary may mediate the social impact of legislation. In the case of the protection of labour rights in India, this article examines the extent to which the judiciary acts independently from the government of the day, and the extent to which court judgements are swayed by prevailing administrative policies. Specifically, to what extent have economic liberalisation and labour market flexibility policies influenced court decisions in cases challenging worker dismissals? Drawing on a review of 270 judgements delivered by the Supreme Court of India and the state High Courts between 1950 and 2010, a relationship is traced between a shifting pattern of Courts’ judgements and policy changes initiated by the Indian government in response to economic conditions. The objective of the study is to understand the effect of a structural shift in the economy on the cases of consented and contested decrees related to dismissal of workers under the relevant laws in India. It is found that the specific statute has not greatly changed through legal reforms, but the judiciary’s interpretations of it have changed over six decades based on dominant socio-political currents, in tune with government economic policies. This raises profound questions about judicial independence in defence of labour rights.JEL Code: K31

Germaine Dulac: a cinema of sensations

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac's passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory. In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director's work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women's studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.

Cautionary notes on power steering for psychotherapy.

Power steering enables the driver to turn the steering wheels in contact with the road not just with his or her own strength applied to the steering wheel but with extra power from the engine which moves the wheels to where the steering wheel says the driver wants them. Applying this principle to psychological therapies is a new area that is developing fast and showing interesting potential. This has obvious appeal for therapy commissioners and researchers, particularly in financial recession as it appears to provide a very low cost route to high volume data collection, improved outcomes and shortened therapies. This article argues that these methods need to be evaluated more carefully to avoid problems seen when the physical health field used proxy outcome measures and sought zealous control and normalization through use of measurement and corrective action. The article suggests mat psychotherapy and psychotherapy research methods are bound up with social, political and technical change that have unintended direct consequences and wider sociopolitical ramifications than intended. The author argues that development of servo-control methods in psychological therapies must be tempered by consideration of their compatibility with therapy theories and practices and with research methods and theories and seen as part of a host of complementary and interwoven paradigms in our field, not as a dominant new paradigm used to denigrate and disenfranchise work that does not fit with a rationalist Zeitgeist. Finally, this article argues that practitioners, and particularly trainers and trainees, need to be very careful that the uniqueness of the individual, and of every single client-therapist relationship, is not sidelined by a reassuring focus on the score data that replaces attention to the feelings and challenges of empathy. Keywords: progress tracking, CORE system, progress monitoring, psychotherapy, assessment This issue of Canadian Psychology is devoted to the very important new development in which psychotherapists use information from client self-report measures to provide a servo-control mechanism to help the psychotherapies. I believe that this can be genuinely useful for appropriate tiierapies. However, I suggest diat, as with many well-intended developments, we must beware problems. I first spell out the extent to which change in this area is shaped by - but also shapes - sociopolitical currents, and then spell out concerns in relation to specific areas: routine clinical work; training of therapists; and research, bodi empirical and theory related. My own interest in self-report outcome measures is shaped by my enthusiastic involvement over the last 18 years in coaudioring and the continued development of the CORE system: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (inter alia, Barkham et al., 1998; Evans et al., 2000; Gray & Mellor-Clark, 2007). The CORE system is one of those associated with this servo-control approach to psychotherapy and rightly so: we originally built two short forms, the CORE-SFA and CORE-SFB, into the system for session by session measurement of change. However, I have substantial concerns about too uncritical an acceptance of power steering for psychotherapy. This article approaches these concerns partly through discussion of the CORE system. A great strength of the CORE system has been mat the original authors, and now the CORE System Trust that holds the copyright on the measures, have always been a diverse group and have tolerated and gained from diverse views; it should be understood that what follows is a personal view and is not representative of the view of anyone else involved with the CORE system. The CORE System The CORE system was launched in 1998 and comprised a small set of instruments designed to provide a minimal common set of tools to help therapists measure change across a wide diversity of therapies and to be acceptable to clients, practitioners, and commissioners as a useful but always approximate index of change. …

From social pathologies to individual psyches: psychiatry navigating socio-political currents in 20th-century Latvia

The paper explores psychiatry's responses to the twentieth-century socio-political currents in Latvia by focusing on social objectives, clinical ideologies, and institutional contexts of Soviet mental health care. The tradition of German biological psychiatry in which Baltic psychiatrists had been trained blended well with the materialistic monism of Soviet psychoneurology. Pavlov's teaching of the second signal system was well suited to Soviet ideological needs: speech stimuli were seen as a vehicle for moulding the individual's mind. The transformation in diagnostic practices during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the demise of optimism about the capacity of the self to model itself to the needs of the society. Latvian psychiatry was prepared to embrace more individualistic and pessimistic theories of the self.

Interpreters—Enslaving/Enslaved/Runagate

The colonial world is a Manichean world. -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth Big Jim Todd was a slick black buck Laying low in mud and muck Of when sun went down In gold, and buzzards tilted down A windless vortex to black-gum trees To sit along quiet boughs, Devout and swollen, at their ease. . . . . . . . . Past midnight, when moccasin Slipped from log and, trailing in Its obscured waters, broke The dark algae, one lean bird spoke. . . . . . . . . your breed ain't metaphysical. The buzzard coughed. His words fell In darkness, mystic and ambrosial. we maintain our ancient rite, Eat gods by day and prophesy by night. We swing against sky and wait; You seize hour, more passionate Than strong, and strive with time to die- With Time, beak-ed tribe's astute ally. . . . . . . . . Nigger, regard circumstance of breath: 'Non omnis moriar,' poet saith. Pedantic, bird clacked its gray beak, With a Tennessee accent to classic phrase; Jim understood, and was about to speak, But buzzard drooped one wing and filmed eyes. . . . . . . . . -Robert Penn Warren, Pondy Woods Negro folklore . . . [was] not . . . a new experience for me. . . . But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was . . . away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. . . . -Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men I am not unaware that on occasions such as this references to personal and even embodiment are quite rare. Yet I can hardly avoid transgressing in this and likely other regards before end of this address. In spite of what may be testimonies of my remaining parent and other elders, and notwithstanding certifications state may present, my beginnings are not here in this city in sixth decade of twentieth century. In respects more profound and disturbing and poignantly ramifying for professional interpreters, my beginnings should be understood to be in that more expansive period and fraught situations of North Atlantic worlds between fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, moments and situations in which the West and the rest were coming into fateful first contact. With such contact many social and political formations, sentiments and orientations of the West were (re-)forged and (re-)defined. Contact is of course studied euphemy, rhetorical repression meant to veil violence and hegemony of West's large-scale triangular Atlantic slave trading in dark peoples. This is time and situation of my beginning and framework for consciousness that I bring to this podium. And almost all of you have beginnings like my own. The dynamics of this period now still largely determine, even haunt, our sometimes different but also often common positionalities and orientations, practices and discourses, ideologies and politics and social formations. Included in haunting are profound shifts in understandings of self, including ideas about freedom and slavery of self that mark period. Although differently named and tweaked from decade to decade since 1880, those practices and discourses that define this professional Society have always been and are even now still fully imbricated in general politics and emergent discourses of larger period to which I refer. And cultivated obliviousness to or silence about-if not also ideological reflection and validation of-the larger prevailing sociopolitical currents and dynamics marks beginning and ongoing history of this Society (among other learned and professional societies, to be sure). …

India: Bhabani Bhattacharya: Socio-Political Currents in Bengal: A Nineteenth Century Perspective. Vikas Publishing House, Ghaziabad, 1980, 147p., Rs. 60

India: Bhabani Bhattacharya: Socio-Political Currents in Bengal: A Nineteenth Century Perspective. Vikas Publishing House, Ghaziabad, 1980, 147p., Rs. 60

Men, Monuments, and Political Systems

ONE OF THE PROMINENT THEMES running through recent comparative work on ancient state-or statelike-societies has been the relationship between the construction and maintenance of large-scale public works and the emergence of centralized, bureaucratic political systems (e.g., Steward and others 1955; Wittfogel 1957). To account for the widespread appeal this thesis has commanded, I suspect one would have to look beyond the internal development of anthropology as a scientific discipline, probably to the sociopolitical currents of our own time. Each epoch, as philosophers of history have reminded us, tends to view the past in the light of its own social and political experiences; thus the writing and rewriting of history is itself a historical phenomenon. My purpose in this paper, however, is not to produce an exercise in the sociology of knowledge but rather to explore briefly the role that this relationship between large public works and political systems has played in our thinking about the cultures of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. I particularly want to raise some questions-without performing the more difficult task of answering them-about the assumptions which underlie extrapolations from the magnitude, number, and artistic elaborateness of large monumental structures to such socio-cultural features as the size and character of the political systems required to build them.

Some recent books on the attitude of Pope Pius XI and his predecessors towards the socio-political currents of their time

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