Unlearning The Soviet Tongue Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Unlearning The Soviet Tongue book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Unlearning the Soviet Tongue by Natalia Kovalyova Pdf
How do countries democratize? What route does the way out of totalitarianism take? Students of Russian politics have pursued answers to these questions by surveying Russians on a variety of attitudes, beliefs, norms, and practices. This bookattends to political discourse to demonstrate how it creates and constraints political opportunities. Itexaminesan important period of Russian political history: from Boris Yeltsin’s second presidential election in 1996, when democracy was pronounced victorious, through its gradual slide toward authoritarian practices during Vladimir Putin’s initial two terms in office, and to the election of his protégé Dmitry Medvedev in 2008. This analysis challenges the assertions ofRussian democracy as doomed by the governing rationalities of the elites. Likewise, it refutesthe notion of Russians as an apathetic nation in chronic need of a “strong hand.” It argues that if we are to understand how Russia lives, how it endures, and how it can change, we need to pay attention to the discourses that shape Russian political identities and the nation’s political future.
Russian Baptist Mission Theology in Historical and Contemporary Perspective by Andrey Kravtsev Pdf
Since the disintegration of the USSR many Russian Baptists have actively engaged in evangelism, church planting, and acts of social service. This book is a response to the need to critically evaluate the effectiveness of past mission efforts and their undergirding theology. In this detailed study, Dr Andrey Kravtsev combines historical and qualitative studies to outline the understanding of mission developed by Russian Baptists during the Soviet era when they were almost completely isolated from global missiological developments. First, Kravtsev identifies four key missiological concepts and uses them to analyze the history of mission theology in global evangelical mission movements and the Russian Baptists. He then interviewed thirty leaders from the Russian Union of Evangelical Christian-Baptists to find their view of these concepts, and their convictions of the need to reconsider traditional missiological views. From his findings, Dr Kravtsev suggests five themes for facilitating the transition of Russian Baptist mission theology from the late-Soviet model of eschatological escapism, to a holistic, missional evangelicalism. This book places evangelical mission in contemporary Russian socio-political and ideological contexts and provides an important contribution for leading churches to a renewed missionary encounter with culture.
Symbolism and Politics by Graeme Gill,Luis F. Angosto-Ferrandez Pdf
Symbolism and Politics is a timely intervention into ongoing debates around the function of political symbols in a historical period characterized by volatile electoral behaviour, fragmented societies in search of collective identifications, and increasingly polarized political models. Symbols are central features of organized human life, helping to define perception, shaping the way we view the world and understand what goes on within it. But, despite this key role in shaping understanding, there is never a single interpretation of a symbol that everyone within the community will accept, and the way in which symbols can mobilize antagonistic political factions demonstrates that they are as much a central element in power struggles as they are avenues to facilitate processes of identification. This dual potential is the object of discussion in the chapters of this book, which sheds new light on our understanding of the political function of symbols in a historical period. Symbolism and Politics will be of great interest to scholars working on Political Symbols, Nationalism, Regime Change and Political Transitions. The chapters originally published as a special issue of Politics, Religion & Ideology.
Colonial Legacies And Contemporary Studies Of China And Chineseness: Unlearning Binaries, Strategizing Self by Chih-yu Shih,Prapin Manomaivibool,Mariko Tanigaki,Swaran Singh Pdf
Colonial legacies in knowledge production affect the way the world is represented and understood today. However, the subject is rarely attended. The book, Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Studies of China and Chineseness: Unlearning Binaries, Strategizing Self, is about the colonial construction of intellectual perspectives of the colonized population in terms of the latter's approach to China and Chineseness in the modern world. Relying on the available oral histories of senior China scholars primarily in Asia, authors from various postcolonial and colonial sites present these multiple routs of self-constitution and reconstitution through the use of China and Chineseness as category. The revealed manipulation of this third category, romantically as well as antagonistically, is easier than straightforward self-reflection for us all to accept that, coming to identities and relations, none, even subaltern, is politically innocent or capable of epistemological monopoly. Through comparative studies, it shows a way of self-understanding that does not always require discursive construction of border or cultural consumption of any specific 'other'.With US-China rivalry possibly lasting for decades, this book offers extremely rich and contrasting practices from the subaltern worlds for anyone in a quest for humanist alternatives. This interdisciplinary and transnational project contributes to post-colonial studies, cultural studies, international relations, China and Chinese studies, and the comparative histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.
Religion and Language in Post-Soviet Russia by Brian P. Bennett Pdf
Church Slavonic, one of the world's historic sacred languages, has experienced a revival in post-Soviet Russia. Blending religious studies and sociolinguistics, this is the first book devoted to Church Slavonic in the contemporary period. It is not a narrow study in linguistics, but uses Slavonic as a passkey into various wider topics, including the renewal and factionalism of the Orthodox Church; the transformation of the Russian language; and the debates about protecting the nation from Western cults and culture. It considers both official and popular forms of Orthodox Christianity, as well as Russia's esoteric and neo-pagan traditions. Ranging over such diverse areas as liturgy, pedagogy, typography, mythology, and conspiracy theory, the book illuminates the complex interrelationship between language and faith in post-communist society, and shows how Slavonic has performed important symbolic work during a momentous chapter in Russian history. It is of great interest to scholars of sociolinguistics and of religion, as well as to Russian studies specialists.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.
British Travel Writers, 1940-1997 by Barbara Brothers,Julia Marie Gergits Pdf
Essays on British travel writers explores the political and social changes that occurred after World War II. Technology such as color television, home video, the Internet and CD-ROM's brought people pictures from around the world broadened their interest in travel. Includes discussion of the various types of travel literature, including political, scientific, historical, and adventurous as well as the role of women travel writers.
Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse by John Rodden Pdf
This is the first English-language study of GDR education and the first book, in any language, to trace the history of Eastern German education from 1945 through the 1990s. Rodden fully relates the GDR's attempt to create a new Marxist nation by means of educational reform, and looks not only at the changing institution of education but at something the Germans call Bildung--the formation of character and the cultivation of body and spirit. The sociology of nation-building is also addressed.
Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe as well as a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and an illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how members of this population have defined themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others have sought to define them. At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies globally could agree on the meaning of past history and a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the contradictions pertaining to terms like empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve a consensus. In refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and postcolonialism, Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.
Language Policy in the Soviet Union by L.A. Grenoble Pdf
Soviet language policy provides rich material for the study of the impact of policy on language use. Moreover, it offers a unique vantage point on the tie between language and culture. While linguists and ethnographers grapple with defining the relationship of language to culture, or of language and culture to identity, the Soviets knew that language is an integral and inalienable part of culture. The former Soviet Union provides an ideal case study for examining these relationships, in that it had one of the most deliberate language policies of any nation state. This is not to say that it was constant or well-conceived; in fact it was marked by contradictions, illogical decisions, and inconsistencies. Yet it represented a conscious effort on the part of the Communist leadership to shape both ethnic identity and national consciousness through language. As a totalitarian state, the USSR represents a country where language policy, however radical, could be implemented at the will of the government. Furthermore, measures (such as forced migrations) were undertaken that resulted in changing population demographics, having a direct impact on what is a central issue here: the very nature of the Soviet population. That said, it is important to keep in mind that in the Soviet Union there was a difference between stated policy and actual practice. There was no guarantee that any given policy would be implemented, even when it had been officially legislated.
Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia by Francisco Martinez Pdf
What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past. Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense. Praise for Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia 'By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.' Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL 'This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.' Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent