Socio-political Formation Research Articles

Individualismo, objetificação e ascensão social em <i>Nos embalos de Ipanema</i>

The text discusses how the pornochanchada Nos embalos de Ipanema (1978) by Antonio Calmon dialogues with the problematizations about individualism, narcissism, and objectification in historical and sociopolitical contexts, being divided into four parts. In the first one, this study describes the considerations by Holanda on the Brazilian sociopolitical formation and the importance of individualism in it — along with those of Sennett on the erosion of the public sphere. The next three parts articulate a methodological proposal of interlocution between theory and object, uniting the discussions of the previous part to the analysis of the interpersonal dynamics in the film.

Common animals: sedentary pastoralism and the emergence of the commons as an institution

Animal husbandry was of fundamental consequence in the planning and development of larger and more permanent communities. Pastoralism is often assumed to be highly mobile when considering social institutions and political formations, despite the diversity of husbandry practices that are either wholly, or largely, tethered to relatively sedentary social aggregations. Key tenets of more settled animal husbandry are intensive social relations between people, and between people, animals, and landscapes. This entails reciprocal, multispecies cooperative efforts to decide how to utilize pastoral resources, choose where to settle, and how to organize settlements with an eye for the animals. Yet, scholars have rarely considered how the logistics and social dynamics of pastoralism shaped the transition to sedentism and, particularly, the development of collective forms of governance in prehistory. In this paper, we re-center pastoralism in narratives of settling down, in order to recognize the critical ways that relations with animals shaped how humans learned to move and dwell in emergent grazing landscapes. We take an institutional approach to the concept of “the commons,” demonstrating the dynamics through 19th-century Irish rundale, then draw on case studies from Southern Scandinavia and the Carpathian Basin to consider the commons as a multispecies institution which resulted in variable sociopolitical formations of the European Bronze Age.

Overlapping Functions: Volunteering and Other Forms of Civic Participation in the COVID-19 Disaster

Functional motivations are closely linked to important volunteer outcomes, yet more socio-political forms of civic participation (CP) besides volunteering are growing. There is little attention on the applicability of functional motivations to such CP, including in disasters. Using a critical realist grounded theory methodology, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted with Singapore residents who had engaged in a diverse range of CP before and during COVID-19. A key mechanism, fulfilling personal functions, was found to relate to functional motivations. Overlapping functions were found, but there are differences in how these functions were fulfilled depending on the form of CP. Perceived accessibility, the subjective mental state about one’s potential to engage, mediated the effectuation of motivations in actual engagement. COVID-19 contributed to emergent CP by increasing perceived accessibility. Participating citizens pre-COVID-19 made adaptations to maintain perceived accessibility to continue CP during the pandemic. These theoretical developments inform policy and research agenda in understanding and leveraging CP.

Why kinship still needs anthropologists in the 21st century

With the rise of ancient DNA studies in prehistoric archaeology, terms such as matriliny and patriliny are commonly used in scholarly literature. From a sociocultural anthropological perspective, however, the two terms are not as simple and unproblematic as is widely accepted among archaeogeneticists. Matriliny and patriliny are umbrella terms for societies with a wide range of political and kinship practices, with or without a state. Moreover, archaeogenetic literature has assumed specific associations with matrilineal and patrilineal descent that are not supported by sociocultural anthropology. To properly understand the diversity of human sociopolitical forms in both the deep and recent past, archaeology – in its broadest sense, including archaeogenetics – must avoid essentializing prehistoric communities without exploring the empirical nuances that are well documented ethnographically. Finally, the article calls for more engagement in debates on kinship and sociopolitical organization in prehistory from sociocultural anthropological perspectives.

Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant–People Lifeworlds

Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living. The discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create sociopolitical formations—from low-impact hunting–gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture, to colonial plantations and runaway settlements, to contemporary agribusiness and alternative biodynamic agriculture. In this special issue, we propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis to highlight the ways in which plants and people are co-produced. We explore entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant–human lifeworlds co-produce one another—from the processes of racialization in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant–human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant–human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds.

How laws are interpreted can make a positive difference in de-normalizing violence: Revisiting the Hart-Dworkin debate

There are several long standing and interesting efforts to work for democratization in Latin America, including in public services sectors such as education. This includes notably efforts in which successful developments have drawn on the use of principles that align with post-structuralist discourses and interpretivist traditions in legal adjudication. The analysis presented in this article elaborates on the Hart-Dworkin debate in US legal philosophy and implications of positivist versus interpretivist approaches to legal decisions and education policy for professionals such as teachers in Latin America. The research question pertains to how two distinct approaches of legal interpretation impact the reproduction of cultural and structural forms of violence in societies. As a concrete example of this is discussed the impact that positivist and interpretivist legal traditions have by framing possibilities and limitations in the work of professional practitioners such as teachers. The analysis is contextualized using self-reported descriptive education data from Latin America and the Caribbean. Recent examples of empirical case studies relevant for education governance in Brazil and Chile are also noted. The analysis presented raises a few points about how effective organizations and professionals are constructed as an outcome of how laws are interpreted. This is explained as a contributing factor to normalizing practices in which the broader citizenry is excluded from deliberative practices. Such forms of exclusion have in the context of education been critically defined by scholars as a form of cultural violence. The article concludes by highlighting the role that interpretivist, negotiated and participatory approaches can play in enabling professionals involved in the everyday of citizens in local communities. An example of this is how teachers can work for de-normalizing socio-political forms of violence. Specifically, this article considers the normalization of structural violence that manifests itself in how we conceptualize what is an effective organization and what is the legitimate role of public service representatives such as teachers in de-normalizing structural violence.

Health policy counterpublics: Enacting collective resistances to US molecular HIV surveillance and cluster detection and response programs.

Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics: temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life.

Scientific and Educational Space and the Sovereign Future of the Russian State

The paper analyzes the actual content of the interdisciplinary concept «scientific and educational space of the Russian Federation», since the ongoing changes in the educational sphere of the Russian state, due to the new realities of the country’s foreign and domestic policy, require scientific justification and understanding. The author determines the tendencies of the development of the educational system of Russia. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the unity of society, the level of its interaction with the State, ideology and culture, being the sides of socio-political formation, are directly dependent on the level of the internal scientific and educational policy of each civilized country. The author concludes that it is necessary to continue using the full potential of the scientific and educational space to unite society, preserve the unity of the general cultural space of the State, prevent national-ethnic conflicts and social tension, taking as an alternative basis the priority of individual rights and minimizing social inequality in order to strengthen the national security of the sovereign Russian state. An urgent component of the vigorous development of Russian civil society should be the state policy in the youth sphere, based on creating conditions for the broad implementation of the potential of young citizens in generating their own future and the future of the sovereign Russian state.

A democracy built on communicative action: Bahá'í political practice as a prefigurative resource for institutional effectiveness, accountability, and inclusivity.

Goal 16 of the UN sustainable development goals, which calls on the global community to "build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels," can be conceptualized as aiming at fostering communicative action, a concept developed by Jürgen Habermas to describe a mode for coordinating society grounded in deliberation. However, Habermas simultaneously provides an account of the structural transformation of the public sphere that suggests a hard limit on the capacity of mainstream capitalist liberal democracies to foster genuine communicative action in the relationships between institutions, individuals and communities. This paper therefore argues for the critical role of prefigurative politics, in which communities strive to internally embody desired socio-political forms rather than focusing on changing the wider socio-political order, as a vital resource for generating examples to inform institutional progress. The prefigurative example of the Baha'i community demonstrates norms and practices that may illustrate a path out of the dynamic Habermas identifies of system colonizing lifeworld, by fostering and protecting communicative action as the mode of social coordination. The form of communicative action found in the Baha'i community is situated in a context of a telic-organic model of relationships between individuals, communities and institutions. The paper contrasts the conceptual underpinnings of this model with individualistic conceptions of human nature that are argued to undermine liberal democracy's capacity for communicative action. At the core of communicative action within a Baha'i context is a distinctive model of deliberation, known within the community as "consultation". The paper argues that rational-critical consultation can offer a vital nuance to Habermas' ideal of communicative action as rational-critical debate in the public sphere. The formal democratic structures and processes of the Bahá'í community are also explored as an institutional example that arguably meets the challenge of Goal 16. The paper concludes with initial reflections on a process by which the prefigurative example of a Baha'i model might be brought to bear on institutional performance in wider society.

South Sudan and the cultural politics of East Africa

South Sudan joined the East African Community (EAC), a regional economic and political organization in 2016. It 2011, it became the newest nation-state in the world when it seceded from Sudan. As a result, the new state of South Sudan is at a crossroads of multiple processes of unification and fragmentation. I analyze this moment of accession as one characterized by both substantive practices of political institution-building and intimate ideas about cultural belonging. In this context, a trans-border cultural imagination has become entangled with technocratic expertise committed to harmonious regional integration. The process of accession represents a broader socio-political formation that contains ideas about family, the colonial legacy, cultural continuity, and geopolitical relationships that are primarily narrated and experienced as transnational. Regional integration has therefore become a site of desire, frustration, futurity, and the production of normative ideals. To address these intersecting processes and ideas, the author develops region-craft and geopolitical intimacy to make sense of how they take shape on multiple scales of social and political life. The broader stakes of this process are making sense of the unequal dynamics of power that I argue emerge as intra-African discourses of asymmetrical competency and paternalism.

Hybrid Security Provision in African Post-colonial Settings: The Cases of Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT The Weberian paradigm’s ascription of a legitimate state’s provision of security and justice overlooks the role played by non-state actors in the post-colonial world. Adopting a hybridity framework enables scholars and practitioners to re-centre the focus from a state-centric view of states as fragile or failed to recognise the strength and resilience of alternative socio-political formations of order. Existing evidence on hybrid political orders demonstrates that community resilience and customary institutions should not be perceived as spoilers but understood as assets for constructive engagements between the customary and modern states. The cases of Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone highlight how the complex and interdependent interaction between modern and traditional systems of governance, through a combination of conflict and cooperation, can explain state resilience.

SOCIO-POLITICAL FORMATIONS OF THE TURKS AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE GOLDEN HORDE

The paper examines the peculiarities of socio-political formations of the Turks after the collapse ofthe Golden Horde. Different points of view on this problem are considered. The authors conclude that theMongolian influence in the Middle Ages on the neighboring peoples, in particular on the Turks and Slavs,was positive, rather than negative. Mongols became a factor in their ethnic, state-legal, spiritual, and culturaldevelopment. The elucidation of the specifics of the state system, politico-legal life of pre-Petrine Russiahelps to understand many of the peculiarities of the medieval Turkic-Mongolian statehood and the generaltendencies of the foreign policy of Russia in the 16th-19th centuries in relation to the Turks.

Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker

Reviewed by: Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker Dana Logan David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Railroading Religion describes Brigham Young not only welcoming the Union and Central Pacific railroads but also giving them one hundred and thirty-two acres of land and access to cheap Mormon laborers. This description is also an argument: Mormons built the railroads and the railroads built Mormonism. The narrative of these two institutions' mutual construction reveals that the term "western religion" obscures the substantial material and discursive labor that went into making Americans think of Mormonism as western and the West as sublime. Latter-Day Saints and railroad companies worked together to build these narratives because they felt a fundamental mutual recognition as corporations that were not strictly private or public, that built economies and culture, and that wielded a vertical form of power. In the last chapters of the book, David Walker speaks to historians of religion more broadly, providing a critical case study of humans constructing the sacred. The sublimity of Mormons' geographic settlement and the train's conquering of space and time were both laborious projects undertaken by humans in unlikely partnerships. These partnerships are the subject of each chapter, beginning with the failed partnership of railroads, the United States government, and anti-Mormon settlers in Utah. Focusing on a town called Corinne [End Page 134] that was settled by anti-Mormons in chapter one, Walker uses the town as a way to describe anti-Mormon fantasies (both local and national) of Mormonism's demise through economic development. Trains would bring more Americans to Utah, and Mormons would not be able to maintain their peculiarity in the face of progress. Walker spends quite a bit of time with these anti-Mormon dreamers, not as a study of anti-Mormonism, but as a study of failed visions of progress. Initially railroads were anti-Mormon allies, but in a surprising turn Brigham Young saw the coming railroads as an opportunity for Mormon expansion. Walker builds on scholarship that grapples with Mormonism as a socio-political formation that was both theocratic and communitarian. Young saw opportunity in the extension of federal land laws in 1868–1869 (passed in anticipation of the Transcontinental Railroad), and he directed high-ranking churchmen to file preemption claims and then act as trustees and parcel out land to their fellow congregants. The Saints thus beat the railroads to land claims, developed those lands, and then gave them to the railroads in exchange for making Mormon Ogden (rather than anti-Mormon Corrine) a major hub of the Transcontinental Railroad. If Mormonism is a "western religion," we should think of that category as inherently defined by land grabs, industrial development, and resource hoarding. Walker's point here is broader: how would we reread our definitions of any religion if we asked more about how that religion related to resource control and less about symbolic invocations of sacred space? In the second half of the book, Walker describes Mormonism as a form of spectacle that defies our typical definitions of the religious other. Mormon leaders utilized the train as a vehicle for tourism, inviting outsiders to come and see their services, admire their industry, and revel in their peculiar institutions. Leading American intellectuals clamored to meet with Brigham Young, who hosted approximately 615 visitors the first year after the Transcontinental Railroad was built and 1,700 visitors in the second year. Walker is not denying the stakes of anti-Mormon vitriol in nineteenth-century United States, but he is describing how Mormons were able to use attention in a way that differentiated them from other practitioners of so-called bad religion: namely, Native Americans and Muslims. Walker shows that both church leaders and railroad agents created spaces, museums, and observation cars on the trains, which allowed tourists to view Mormons as uniquely linked to the landscape of Utah. These displays also encouraged spectators to compare Mormons with Native Americans, Muslims, and other "pagan" religionists. By encouraging tourism, Mormons asked their detractors to gaze upon their difference, compare Mormon difference...

On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by Emily Sun

Reviewed by: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by Emily Sun Shuyu Guo (bio) Emily Sun. On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham, 2021. Pp. x + 176. $105.00 hardcover / $30.00 paperback / $29.99 eBook. In On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, Emily Sun examines the literary affinities between British Romanticism and Republican China (1912–49), the latter representing a transitional period that links the imperial regime to modern republicanism. In analyzing the texts written by authors such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Lu Xun, Sun explores the common ground between British Romantic literature and modern Chinese literature while paying attention to historical actuality and the local details that animate respective languages. Indeed, the notion of world literature provides the framework for analyzing literary histories and literary modernities across multiple time periods and locations. The “world” of “world literature” is continually “activated and reactivated in processes of exposure and exchange” (3). Through four sets of comparative analysis, she investigates how particular literary forms of modernity serve as the testing grounds for the enactment of sociopolitical forms of life, and how various aesthetic and literary endeavors play a role in the formation of world modernity across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Chapter 1, “Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice: Defenses of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun,” begins with discussions of literary manifestos—a form of solidarity and poetic emancipation—with an emphasis on the problem of voice. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley shows “the principle of cyclicity” (41) and how it plays a role in poetry that “takes place as reorigination” (40). In 1821, he wrote Defence of Poetry, which showed how poetic voices worked as emancipatory power. Shelley was partly inspired by the tradition of mythology. Likewise, 鲁迅 Lu Xun composed his 摩罗诗力说 “On the Power of Mara Poetry” that assimilated the impacts from the European Mara poets. In the text, Lu Xun looks for the power from the renewal of classical poetics and languages. Besides, 破恶声论 “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” written in classical Chinese that mixes new neologisms with “an archaic style” (34), exemplifies the possibilities of language itself. In his manifestos, Lu Xun expresses his own xinsheng 心声 (voice of the soul) in classical Chinese. Through reading the Japanese translations of Shelley, Lu Xun’s [End Page 461] poetics was heavily influenced by Shelleyan mythmaking in terms of the emancipation of voice. He “combines elements of the ethereal aestheticist Shelley with the convention-defying aspects of the Byronic hero” (25). The transcultural and translingual nature of Lu Xun’s poetic voice is consistent with that of modern Chinese literature which has been affected by world literatures. Their literary manifestos perform “the work of emancipatory renewal within and across literary modernities” (49). On the horizon of world literature, the concept of literary modernity is deeply global and mediated; it suggests, rather than denying the common ground between literatures. Translation facilitated resonances across languages and the process of forming world modernity; Lu Xun read Shelley in Japanese and Lu Xun’s work was later translated into various languages. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales are known for their literary characterization of social structures. The Tales were translated into Chinese in 1904, entitled Yinbian Yanyu 吟边燕语, by ᷇林纾 Lin Shu. The text was adapted to the classical Chinese narrative form of chuanqi 传奇 (transmission of the strange) with a new episodic structure, supernatural narratives, and exotic hints. In chapter 2, “Shakespearean Retelling and the Question of the Common Reader: Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu,” Sun argues that Lin’s retelling manipulates the form of the tale collection to address an imagined “common reader” in “heterogeneous, asynchronous, but connected scenes of global literary modernity” (51). Chuanqi previously existed in Chinese traditional operas and dramas and had not been employed in literary texts. On the one hand, though Lin’s domesticated translations nonetheless mediate each retelling of Shakespeare, the idiosyncratic form chuanqi—a stylistic alternative— will not hinder common readers’ understanding of the...

Riding, Ruling, and Resistance

Horses have had a singular impact on human societies. Beyond increasing interconnectivity and revolutionizing warfare, reconfigurations of human-horse relationships coincide with changes in sociopolitical formations. How this occurs is less well understood. This article proposes that relationships of equestrianism transform people and horses reciprocally, generating new possibilities for both species. Focusing here on human benefits, equestrianism affords differential and increased mobility, access, and experience for people, which translate horse power into human power. This has particular consequences for how political authority is negotiated. I use the tell societies of Bronze Age Hungary (ca. 2300/2200–1600/1500 BC) to model how horses were harnessed in resistance to centralized rule and social inequality as much as they were used to assert power. This interpretation challenges traditional grand narratives for the European Bronze Age, which see male elite warriors driving chariots, desirous of bronze, and instituting hierarchical, complex societies. Rather, ordinary women and men riding horses built these long-lived communities and were variously able to resist chiefly authority because of the power offered by horses. The theory starts disentangling mechanisms between local equestrianism and long-term historical changes.

Kentos: Socio-ecologies of care

What is the relation of humanity to the ‘rest of nature’? Situated in the epoch of the Anthropocene and as concerns about climate emergency dramatically rise, the paper looks beyond the human/nature ontological separation and narratives of domination, in order to investigate the possibility of alternative worldviews and practices, instrumental for socio-ecological repair. Kentos, deriving from the greek verb kentaw (embroider or sting), describes the harvest practice of mastiha tree, which grows solely on Chios island. In the precision of the manual labour and the rituality of Kentos, one can read beyond pure production, a relationship of mutuality and a socio-ecological bond unfolding between human bodies, trees and their environment. The paper revisits the mastiha landscapes of Chios island, at North Aegean in Greece and narrates the story of relations that have occurred between humans and a tree native to the island, the Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia. It unpacks this socio-ecological bond and its various social, political and economic extensions, investigating how this interspecies relation has operated in history as a productive force and how it has survived in the present time, entangled in capitalist flows, climatic and urban pressures. The aim is to explore knowledge latent in interspecies relations that occurre in territories entangled in capitalist processes of extended urbanisation. Gathering this knowledge aims at informing alternative concepts and strategies for dealing with the contemporary socio-ecological challenges. The paper employs a methodology of relational thinking: it problematises and retracts strict ontological boundaries between human and ‘the rest of Nature’. By doing so it reveals a whole new space of relations between species and sets for an exploration of the relations that we encounter there. This space is examined and conceptualised through qualitative ethnographic work, analysis of documentary sources, oral history and secondary sources that have captured intentionally or unintentionally facets of the socio-ecological bond. Concluding, the paper identifies a socio-ecology of care nested in interspecies relations. It reveales care as a latent interspecies practice, as situated knowledge, as a more-than-human collective, and as an intrinsic value of reciprocity between forms of life, within and beyond capitalism, generating alternative socio-political formations and alternative vision. The paper ends with a proposition: care is a choice, a valid alternative option for design space, strategy and practice to re-engage productively with the ‘rest of nature’, material and living world.

Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

Re-Thinking of History in Glasnost-Period Georgian Official Press

This article represents the independent part of the broad academic project conducted by the author at Tbilisi State University. The article, on the basis of triangulation content analysis of four official publications of the Glasnost-period Soviet Georgia during 1986-1990, studies the trends of the process of re-writing of the past declared by the last Soviet Authorities. The main focus of the article is an inter-replacement of official and unofficial versions of histories in Georgia, or expressing more imaginably—yesterday as today or restoration of historical truth and justice as ideological change. The author concerns discursive and non-discursive realities in Glasnost-Period official press in Soviet Georgia. The term “official publications” implies newspapers that were official bodies of the Soviet and communist-party authorities of Georgia. The range of these publications in the article includes Georgian-language and Russian-language dailies, as well as the official youth press in both languages. The hypotheses of the study are posed to: 1) the time dimension of the re-assessment of history; and 2) the ideological platform of the re-interpretation of history. The article studies a really unique historical period when the official Soviet power and the informal power of the National Liberation Movement, official communist publications and the party press of newly established parties with different political ideologies coexisted in the conditions of one sociopolitical formation. The main findings of the article can be formulated as follows: 1) the official press of Georgia, despite the freedom of speech allowed from above and the vaguely restricted boundaries of this freedom, did not use the strategies of time-shifting discourse in reproducing history in constructing the Glasnost narrative, and 2) the official press of Georgia still covered historical events from the Marxist-Leninist platform.

Історія майбутнього як футурологія в дискурсі сучасної китайської фантастики

Introduction. The article considers the historical, philosophical and ideological implications of the concept of the history of the future in the context of the development of modern Chinese fiction. The history of the future is interpreted as a conceptual tool for influencing culture and mass consciousness in the context of transformations of modern history and historiography. Fiction is seen as the development of social expectations in the field of mass culture and collective consciousness. The urgency of the article. The relevance of the article is due to the formation of the latest paradigm of historical narrative and discourse in modern information culture and their impact on the mass consciousness and correlation with ideology. The aim of the study. The aim of the article is to study the peculiarities of the interpretation of the functioning of the concept of the history of the future in modern historical narrative and discourse, as well as to clarify the intentionality of this process and its effects on mass consciousness and ideology. Methods used in the study: textual analysis of sources, historical and philosophical analysis, analytical and hermeneutical methods in combination with contemporary history of ideas and culturological approach. The results research is based on the following considerations. The concept of the history of the future in the context of the research topic is interpreted not only as a form of representation and translation of historical knowledge and ideas, but also as a marker of the meaning-generating potential of the philosopher of history within the picture of the human world and his life (lebenswelt). Chinese fantasy discourse is interpreted not only as a part of literature and culture, but also as a necessary structural element of ideological constructions and the basis for the formation of worldview knowledge in the modern media space. The ambivalent nature of the instrumental humanism of modern Chinese fiction and its affinity with the ideology of transhumanism are emphasized. Particular attention is paid to fantastic discourse as a space for formalizing negative social, environmental and security expectations. There is a well-founded connection between the peculiarities of modern Chinese fiction and the mythology of the collective ancestral consciousness, which is inherent in the Eastern tradition in general. The ethical and ontological ambivalence of the ideological approach to history as the history of the future is formalized. It also points to the paradoxical nature of futurological prognosis in the latest Chinese fiction discourse, associated with the critique of Western anthropocentrism, which may justify the superiority of the total approach to social reality and the devaluation of fundamental humanistic values. The originality and novelty of the study is based on the interpretation of the concept of future history as a marker of transformations of modern history, philosophy of history and historiography, as well as the impact of these transformations on mass consciousness and culture, social ideology. Conclusion. The effectiveness of the concept of the history of the future as a cognitive tool and at the same time a marker of ontologization of the narrative of literature and culture in general is determined by the methodological foundations of the latest theoretical historical research. Liu Qixing’s Futurological and Social Problems in Memory of the Earth’s Past (2006-2010) and Contemporary Chinese Fiction in general cultivate a kind of non-anthropocentric humanism that can be greatly simplified and reduced to a set of social imperatives and ideological clichйs. In our opinion, such a critique of anthropocentrism can reduce the problem of choosing the future to agnostic-fatalistic worldviews. In the social dimension, this could mean the inevitable crisis of the model of democracy in societies and socio-political formations of cosmic proportions and those that have gone beyond the planetary cradle.

Characteristics of Psychological Readiness for Social Activity as Determinants of Different Forms of its Manifestation among Russian Student Youth in the Saratov Region

In modern studies, there is a contradiction between the passivity of young people in the manifestation of their social activity and the ideas of society about their progressive role in the development of civilization. In this regard, it becomes especially relevant to solve the problem of increasing the involvement of student youth in social processes through the search for factors that determine their psychological readiness for social activity, as aimed at being included in socially transformative activities, allowing young people to realize their potential in various spheres of life. In order to find a solution to this problem, a study aimed at analyzing the determinants of psychological readiness of Russian students to manifest various forms of social activity was conducted. The empirical study was carried out on a sample of students who live in the Saratov region and study in organizations of secondary vocational and higher education (Russian Federation, Saratov, N = 197; aged 18 to 23). The characteristics of psychological readiness were identified using the following methods: Personality Emotional Orientation Assessment (B.I. Dodonov, verified by N.A. Belskaya), General Self-Efficacy Scale (R. Schwarzer, M. Erusalem, adapted by V.G. Romek), Readiness for Self-Development (V.L. Pavlov) and Personal Change-Readiness Survey (A. Rolnik, S. Hezer, M. Gold, K. Hull, adapted by N.A. Bazhanova and G.L. Bardier). The intensity of social activity and different forms of its manifestation was determined using a questionnaire developed by a team of authors (R.M. Shamionov et al.). The study revealed some specific features in the determination of various forms of social activity by characteristics of psychological readiness for their manifestation among Russian students. It is shown that social activity in different forms of its manifestation can be determined by personal emotional orientation as a characteristic of emotional readiness, self-efficacy as an indicator of readiness to overcome difficulties in a social context, and characteristics of personal readiness for change, among which passion (energy), confidence and ingenuity dominate. It is found that, among young students, psychological readiness to the greatest extent determines the intensity of subcultural, altruistic and educational-developing forms of social activity, minimally associated with the manifestation of socio-political and Internet network forms of activity and is not associated with religious activity.