![Elya Tzaneva. Ethnosymbolism and the Dynamics of Identity. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2015.](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2016_33645.jpg)
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In the folklore of many peoples, the luminous bodies and phenomena are related tothe traditional concepts of the world structure. In the Bulgarian popular astronomythe Milky Way is seen as a Straw Road. The folklore texts present the “road” as both aborder and a bond between the “own” and the “alien” space, between the earthly andthe “divine” world. It is a process of movement in the mythological space but it couldalso be a place where the worlds in this space meet. Such development of the conceptof the “road” in the Bulgarian popular tradition is related to liminal rituals typical ofcalendar festivals including Christmas.
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This article is part of ethnological research on the role and function of the public baths in the urban space. It was held in 2017 in the Gorna Banya district in Sofia. In this publication the public baths are seen as one of the markers that construct local identity. In the beginning of the 20th century, the old Ottoman baths were destroyed and new ones were built, which have been preserved to present day in the centre of Gorna banya. The baths are part of the everyday life of the local people. They use their resources for drinking, cooking, washing, but also for trade and medicinal purposes. Furthermore, they continue to observe some traditional family and calendar customs around the public baths.Although the doors of the baths are closed, the square in front of them continues to play a central role in public life. This is evidenced, on the one hand, by the annual celebrations, and on the other hand, by the ordinary people who organize gatherings in front of the public baths via Facebook. The public baths continue to be a central place around which life in the neighbouhood is organized. The local authorities are looking for different ways to fund the restoration of the old building.
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In Neoliberalism from Below—first published in Argentina in 2014—Verónica Gago examines how Latin American neoliberalism is propelled not just from above by international finance, corporations, and government, but also by the activities of migrant workers, vendors, sweatshop workers, and other marginalized groups. Using the massive illegal market La Salada in Buenos Aires as a point of departure, Gago shows how alternative economic practices, such as the sale of counterfeit goods produced in illegal textile factories, resist neoliberalism while simultaneously succumbing to its models of exploitative labor and production. Gago demonstrates how La Salada’s economic dynamics mirror those found throughout urban Latin America. In so doing, she provides a new theory of neoliberalism and a nuanced view of the tense mix of calculation and freedom, obedience and resistance, individualism and community, and legality and illegality that fuels the increasingly powerful popular economies of the global South’s large cities.
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This article addresses disability in a Middle Eastern context. It interrogates disability and identity from a Bedouin perspective. The author relays her experiences with a physical disability and society’s stigmatization of different bodies. More often than not, this usually creates psychological traumas and a complex terrain of emotional tensions when dealing with society’s oppression of individuals with disability. The author engages with a discursive discussion of the struggles of navigating spaces of shame, the traumas of stigma, and ultimately healing in finding a voice that is separate from the collective.
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States are today defined less by the nation(s) in them and more by nationhood – a term that subsumes complex and diverse societies characteristic of an age of global migration. Nationhood involves a process in which otherwise different people share some combination of a language, set of values, faith, culture, identity and ideals. When managed successfully, immigration offers an opportunity to give a state the opportunity to expand the nation beyond utilitarian considerations such as labour needs and demographic decline. It begins with immigrant inclusion in the receiving society and the social cohesion that follows. Failed social integration policy results in unachieved, fragmented nationhood leading to different social pathologies. Derived largely from the French Republican tradition, nationhood emphasizes social bonding of a cross-cultural kind. Eurocentric bias focusing primarily on the origins of the nation is examined, non-Western critiques are assayed, and nation branding as a substitute for nationhood is questioned. When nationhood allows locals and immigrants to develop partnership, it is on the basis of an equilibrium established between minority and majority rights regimes.
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Islam provides a perfect environment for the fast development of the Sharia law and the customary laws despite strong secularization efforts and pressure exercised by the government authorities. The Ottoman Empire was a multicultural society based on the principles of the Sharia law. The abolishment of the caliphate in Turkey and enforcement of the monogamy model of a family through the Kemalist revolution penalized the parallel Islam activities. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the millet system survived in Syria with its legal pluralism. Polygamy is currently on the rise in Syria as many men left the country or got killed in the fighting. The mass influx of Syrian women to Turkey results in the growth of parallel Islam de facto polygamous marriages in Turkey. The refugee women are looking for protection within the Sharia law family model, and the living law bypassed the Kemalist positive law secular principles. The same trend is visible in the countries that received many Muslim women that were claiming to the UNHCR their well-founded fear of persecution due to alleged transgressing of traditional social mores in their countries of origin. The same individuals sought later support and protection within the informal and effective parallel Islam networks in the resettlement countries. The legal pluralism is on the rise in the traditionally secular cultures due to the mass migration of single women preferred by the selection systems and resettlement criteria as agreed between UNHCR adjudicators and immigration authorities worldwide.
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The constitutional changes of 1989 in Kosovo, in addition to physical, political andpsychological pressure, exerted social pressure through job dismissals. Job dismissalsbecame a “normal” process, becoming a common way of exercising social pressure.In all these impossibilities in front of which a whole society is placed, self-organization oropposition through self-acting is expressed.In this course, the collapsed life on every sphere, and precisely this collapse burdened evenmore the daily life of these citizens, imposing reflection on these inabilities.While therepressive state was exclusive, degrading, and denigrating for a category of the society,precisely this category got self-integrated through resistance, which can not be calledotherwise but self-organization.In this flow, many subsequent developments came to the fore,such as the comprehensive mobilization of the society, so that individual tasks became selfvoluntarycollective duties and obligations.To this society, faced with such a situation, Solidarity was undoubtedly imposed in every areaof life, having the course from similarities, and “solidarity that comes from similarities is atits maximum when the collective conscience completely wraps up all our conscience andcomplies with it on all points” (Durkheim, 2004).
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As some researchers note, national identity is probably the only form of identity forwhich people are ready to give their own lives. Deprived of the experience of personalcontact, the strong sense of belonging to the national group must consist of imagining oneself as entwined with crowds of anonymous compatriots in an invisible, butrealistically experienced bond. Though, the concepts of national identity and national identification are often treated interchangeably. they are not equivalent. Group identitymeans the fact of belonging to a specific group, combined with having its cognitive representation. Identification refers to the individual-group personal relationship, and describes the strength of the emotional bond felt with other members and the importance of a given group identity. This paper presents psychological origins of national identification, linking them to the deepest and most basic epistemic, motivational and existential human needs. Awareness of identification with the national group determines the whole range of psychological phenomena from various levels of analysis. From relatively simple manifestations of affect to complex ideological orientations – they all have specific relationships with how people understand democracy and what type of democracy they prefer. The empirical evidence cited in this text proves that the strengthening of the liberal democracy and its cultural values is accompanied by the devaluation of national/patriotic identification in the utilitarian (as a socially dysfunctional phenomenon) as well as in moral sense (as a source of hostility and intolerance). However, other empirical results show national identification as a necessary component of social bonds, and a basis of social mobilization around important collective goals.
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This text aims to analyse the project of elite change implemented by the United Right in Poland in the field of cultural production. The authors argue that culture is recognized by right-wing politicians and intellectuals as a particularly important way of legitimizing its domination also in other fields. The special role of culture can be interpreted by the nature of the public sphere in Poland and the importance of the intelligentsia, who converted cultural capital into other types of capital (the political, the social, and especially the symbolic capital). The authors argue that the replacement of cultural elites serves the revision of history and assertion of power. Although, the elite change project is conducted not only within the cultural field, however, the latter is seen as a particularly important for the right-wing intelligentsia. We argue, that this exchange is based on the long-formulated announcements and is justified by the right-wing intellectuals and politicians who argue for a traditional, Polish model of culture. However, it also conceals political goals. The main goals of the replacement are to change the old elites with people favouring new order and, in the long run, to form right-wing elites, who, referring to the one-dimensional model of culture, will play a hegemonic role in the social life.
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In face of the global economic and climate crisis, a growing consensus of green, feminist and left movements converges around the idea of a reproductive, democratic economy. This article reviews the specific new models that have gained currency in recent discussions due to support by new Western movements, and then places these models in global and Hungarian contexts. First, it shows how new streams of thinking about reproductive autonomy in economy fit into a long-term tradition of critical thought on capitalism - and particularly, the tradition of critical research and strategic organizing that conceived capitalism not only in its relation to wage labor, but in terms of long chains of accumulation that reach from wage labor to various forms of informal, free and bonded labor, and “cheap” nature. Then, the article shows how system-level contradictions between capital’s limited accommodation capacity and labor’s reproduction have played out in the long crisis of the postwar global cycle starting from the 1970’s. It shows how labor’s capacity to reproduce itself outside of capitalist relations has served both as a puffer and a resource for maintaining relations of accumulation despite a decline in accommodation capacity, and as a new ground for anti-capitalist political organizing. The last part of the article looks at Hungary. It reviews the main shifts through which reproductive labor has been incorporated into accumulation streams throughout the history of modernization, and how growing areas of informal reproductive labor have been part of the social negotiation of the global crisis since the 1970’s locally. The article concludes that informal reproductive labor works as a systemic component in today’s accumulation regime. On the one hand, this shows its power - without the bottom-up subsidies informal reproductive labor provides to capital, systemic structures of accumulation would collapse. On the other hand, this shows that the capacities of reproductive labor are subordinated to accumulation streams. The question of solidarity economy, from this perspective, is how this existing capacity for reproduction can be organized in such a way that connects its power in growing reproductive circuits, and shields them from extraction.
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The paper analyses asynchronous and synchronous forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC), their educational potentials and the advantages of using them in foreign language teaching. The paper shows the previous experiences of foreign and domestic teachers. The conclusion is that synchronous virtual encounters improve the skill of oral expression and vocabulary, while asynchronous electronic correspondence is more suitable for developing writing skills and directing attention to specific language rules. Successful use of CMC will depend primarily on the knowl- edge of the advantages and disadvantages of available communication technologies, the experience of teachers and students, and the setting of clear teaching objectives.
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The paper deals with the public sociologists of the former Julian Hochfeld’s circle in the time of the political system change in Poland. Among the sociologists of that school Jerzy J. Wiatr played the most important role as both a traditional and an integral public sociologist involved in the Left-wing party politics. The paper depicts his activities as a public intellectual who became an eminent political leader, as well as his work as a social and political analyst. The paper confronts his vision of the political system change, as presented in the writings of the 1989–1991 period, with the work of another eminent sociologist of that school, Zygmunt Bauman. The latter did not play any political role and was much less involved in commenting the political change that was happening at that time, being a lot more skeptical about its result.
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Lipset and Rokkan’s theory of cleavages as well as its interpretation and continuation of Bartolini and Mair became the basis for formulating the concept of the communist and post-communist cleavage. The concept of the post-communist cleavage gained solid empirical confirmation for the period from 1989 to the middle of the parliamentary term of 2001–2005. However, significant changes have taken place on the Polish political scene since then. The article, referring to the indicated authors, attempts to answer the question whether the post-communist cleavage in Poland lasts and if it will stay. The analysis focuses on the crisis of the post-communist side and the conflict on the post-Solidarity side of the cleavage. Empirical analyses show that as a result of the political conflict, the electorates of the two post-Solidarity parties – Civic Platform and Law and Justice – have clearly grown apart, and that the post-communist side is also divided, certainly on the level of political parties. The article describes various possibilities of a further development of the socio-political situation, but does not propose a definitive answer to the question of what to do with the post-communist division in Poland.
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The article has intended to study the action of Twitter-based media advocacy promoted by the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Government of India, and World Health Organization (WHO) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its goal was to assess the degree of the WHO and MOH's media campaigning for Covid-19, as well as the public's perception of this advocacy. In this regard, mixed methods have been used for data collection where a survey has been conducted with 125 respondents, who use Twitter, from Kolkata (India) with the help of random sampling. A content analysis of two well-known Twitter accounts was conducted, which helped to reflect the current trends that they follow. The findings of this research have reflected the choice of medium preferred by the respondents for receiving news and information during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also helped to identify the Twitter handles and tweets they mostly follow and thereby the major factors influencing their choice. The outcome of this research has helped to study whether Twitter can be used for institutionalized health communication or not in the future.
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Our study demonstrates that the analysis of culture should be embedded into the history of capitalism. Through this understanding of culture's materiality, we highlight that culture is not only a spiritual but also a materially embedded phenomenon. We argue that this analysis is also essential to outline culture's role in a post-capitalist world.Our study offers four perspectives to analyze the diverse, often indirect, relationship between culture and capitalism. We show how the diversity of culture is more than heterogeneity but rather part of class conflicts and struggles. By examining the cultural institutions, our paper points out that they play a crucial role in the reproduction of the laborforce. It also points out that global and nation-state-led cultural production are not contradictory but entangled phenomena. Finally, our paper emphasizes that the relationship between culture and capitalism cannot be understood as abstract laws but must also always consider the social trajectories of professional cultural producers, who are a central but often invisible dark matter.
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The main objective of this study was to determine the cost-effectiveness of green spaces in controlling environmental and health risks in residential areas. The study aimed at comparing the costs of using green spaces and the costs of conventional infrastructure in controlling environmental and health risks. Many scholars have qualitatively reported that residential home greenery is recognized as an important component for the control of environmental and health risks. However, the cost-effectiveness of green spaces relative to man-made solutions for the same is not documented with certainty. The study deployed a questionnaire, field observation and measurement methods for data collection. The study revealed that, depending on location, residents face five major environmental and health risks; fugitive dust, violent wind, runoffs, animal habitat deterioration, soil erosion and flood water. The percentage of households using green spaces as a strategy for controlling the aforementioned risks is still minimal despite the high monetary saving. The majority of the respondents’ home greeneries are incorrectly orientated and home entrances appear to be more of a factor in determining where green space is located. With exception of risks of run-offs, utilization of green spaces in controlling environmental and health risks saves more than 90% of costs compared to costs for a man-made solution and 61% for run-off control. Results imply that there is a need for advocacy for greater realization of green space as a cost-effective strategy in controlling environmental and health risks among residents, environmentalists, planners and disaster risk practitioners in Dar e salaam City, Tanzania.
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The present article examines Józef Tischner’s idea of upbringing (wychowanie) in establishing the new awareness of solidarity among the Polish workers and people through an awakening to conscience. The present moment served as a revolutionary alternative to socialism. I look at Tischner’s critique of Marxism and the central issue surrounding base and superstructure. Then I turn to his recovery of the Polish tradition of ethical ideals, especially in the person of Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II. The text provides a detailed analysis of the chapter on upbringing in The Spirit of Solidarity. Tischner’s notion that upbringing is a personal bond established in trust to live in hope for improvement in mind and heart is placed in the context of the solidarity as a social bond establishing an ethical community transcending the political quest for power and the need to find an enemy. The text analyzes the various counterfeit forms of education in order to deepen our awareness of the meaning of authentic upbringing. Salient points of his teaching are discussed in conclusion.
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