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Religious fasts and feasts in the representations of Seto culture

Religioossed paastud ja pidustused seto kultuuri representatsioonides

Author(s): Andreas Kalkun / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 01/2014

Keywords: Seto people; religious fasts; village holidays; representations of Seto culture;

The integration of the (orthodox) Setos into the Republic of Estonia established in 1918 soon revealed some conflicts due to cultural differences. The modernized Estonians tended to patronize their „lesser brothers” and to reform their culture and lifestyle, which was considered old-fashioned and reactionary. There was a change in attitude towards Seto religious practices in Estonia, namely, their traditional fasts became a public health issue, their food offerings were discussed in relation to economy and their celebration of church holidays all of a sudden belonged to the discourse of crime and alcoholism. The economic benefits or harms of Seto religious practices as well as their health effects were contemplated without considering the fact that for Setos the observation of traditional ritual practices, such as, for example, church festivals and commemoration of the departed was the only possible way and as such it did not partake of the categories of health or economy. Based on the material kept in the Estonian Folklore Archives the article discusses the role of Seto religious feasts and fasts in their self-image as well as in their early representations, especially in the texts of the discourse of Seto Estonization, which began in the 1920s. It is demonstrated how the modernized Estonians, who emphasized secularism, abstinence and Estonian nationalism, used to stigmatize the fasts and religious feasts of the Seto, which were the most conspicuous features of their religious and everyday ways.

The pleasure(?) of thinking. Some insights into the essays by Hando Runnel

Mõtelda on mõnus? Sissevaateid Hando Runneli esseistikasse

Author(s): Leo Luks / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 11/2018

Keywords: Hando Runnel; essayistics; fine arts; humans; society;

The article examines the essays by Hando Runnel with accent on the author’s worldview, fundamental beliefs and creative principles, in short, Runnel’s philosophical position. The approach used is inductive, as it is not based on a ready-made scheme of interpretation but is rather moving from text to text to collect keywords, which are eventually categorised into thematic groups. The first part of the article discusses artistic and literary issues, after which the focus shifts on to man and his big challenges such as individuality and collectivity, naturalness and estrangement, ethics and religion. The last part addresses social worries and community problems at large, including Runnel’s periodisation of history and predictions of the future. The article is mainly descriptive, with a few critical notes. The conclusion reads that the common denominator of Runnel’s essays is the experiencing of an intermediate, a cleavage even. This strain of splitting apart permeats Runnel’s cognitive experience from a personal level right through the ultimate local and global spheres.

THE FORMATION OF THE IRAN-PERSIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE TURKISH QUESTION: 1800-1940S

İRAN-FARS MİLLİ KİMLİĞİNİN OLUŞUMU VE TÜRK SORUNU:1800-1940

Author(s): Hossein Hassanpashaei / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 1/2022

Keywords: Iranianism; Qadisiyah; Chaldirani; Crusader-Racial; Turk;

The formation of the Iranian approach/mentality in the modern period and their attitude towards the “Turks”, who was chosen as one of the two main othernesses of Iranian nationalism, is the subject of this research. This research examines the historical roots of Iranianism, the three Qadisiyah, Chaldirani, and Crusader-Racial mentalities, and how these three discourses occasionally cooperate. From the Safavid period, Westerners enter the rivalry between Ottoman Turks and Safavid Turks as military advisers, and this entry manifests itself in a more complex and conscious way, in modern historiography. Finally, modern Iran emerges from these collaborations and conflicts.

Protests, Mobilizations, Movements and Rebellions: A Possible Route Guide

Protestas, movilizaciones, movimientos y rebeliones: una posible guía de ruta.

Author(s): Carlos Aguirre Rojas / Language(s): Spanish / Issue: 1/2022

Keywords: Social movements; anti-capitalist movements; anti-systemic movements; social protest; world-system;

This article makes a map in which the trend lines of contemporary social movements, their characteristics and the lessons of the predecessor movements in the 20th century are revealed. The text argues how these new movements go from having forms of individual and local protests to becoming much more permanent forms of protest in time-space with a marked anti-capitalist and anti-systemic character

Survey studies of post-Marxist theory

Pregledne studije postmarksističke teorije

Author(s): Zvonimir Glavaš / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 3/2022

Keywords: Intellectual History; post-Marxist theory; Jacques Rancièr; Critical Theory; Stuart Sim; Göran Therborn;

Iako nije sa sigurnošću utvrđeno tko je prvi uporabio pojam postmarksističkog u značenju makar približnom onom kako ga se danas razumijeva, uobičajeno se kao početna točka uzima 1985. i čuvena studija Laclaua i Mouffe Hegemonija i socijalistička strategija [Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985]. No suprotno očekivanjima koje izaziva ta informacija što je u pravilu ponavljaju pregledne studije postmarksističke teorije, Laclau i Mouffe (2014: xxiv) postmarksizam ne spominju naročito naglašeno, navodeći tek u uvodu svoje knjige kako je vrijeme da sasvim jasno kažu da su »trenutno situirani na postmarksističkom terenu«, nakon čega ublažavaju tu tvrdnju pojašnjavajući da je njihov »intelektualni projekt u ovoj knjizi postmarksistički, ali evidentno i postmarksistički. « (isto) Potom su se 2001. u predgovoru sljedećeg izdanja iste knjige pak otvoreno ogradili od nastojanja da tom tvrdnjom uspostave neku novu teorijsku kategoriju, premda je istovremeno nisu ni odbacili (usp. Laclau, Mouffe: 2014: ix).

“Dancing Queen”: The Court Ballets of Anne of Austria, Queen of France (1615–1635)

“Dancing Queen”: The Court Ballets of Anne of Austria, Queen of France (1615–1635)

Author(s): Marie-Claude Canova-Green / Language(s): English / Issue: 8/2021

Keywords: French court ballet; saraos, máscaras; comedias; saraband; pastoral plays; Queen consort; motherhood; beauty; dependence; submission; Salic law

This paper investigates the ballets danced by Queen Anne of Austria at the French court in the years 1615–1635 to show how their form and content were less the result of personal preferences, but had more to do with the queen’s naturalization and “domestication.” Anne was constantly reminded of her duties of loyalty and submission to her royal husband and made to pay homage to her mother-in-law in a show of subservience without precedent.

De/Colonisation and the Un/Doing of Critical Theory

De/Colonisation and the Un/Doing of Critical Theory

Author(s): Elba Ramirez,And Pasley / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2022

Keywords: trans/gender; Canary Islands; guanche; coloniality; agential realism; te Ao Māori; critical theory;

This paper explores the colonialities of trans/gender and the Canary Islands to interrogate the in/adequacy of critical theory as a tool applied to Global South issues. In both cases, critical theory is found to be lacking due to its compulsion to predetermine and essentialise relations, which undermines its capacity to engage with the multiplicitous im/possibilities of trans/gender and post/coloniality. In lieu of a critical approach, the authors each engage with relational ontologies that offer a more capacious relationship with their respective colonialities. In the case of trans/gender, agential realism offers Pasley a means to trace the entanglements, potentiating more response-able becomings. For Ramirez, te Ao Māori allows her to imagine a future reconfigured to account for the multiple tensions that co-constitute Canary Island relationships with colonisation. While trans/gender and the Canary Islands are perhaps not an obvious pairing, the im/possibilities offered by each are deeply entangled in colonisation and the ongoing reconfiguration of colonialities in the pursuit of more just worlds.

Behind the Mask of Masculine? A Poetical Approach to Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Sous le masque du masculin ? Approche poétique du roman Mémoires d’Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar

Author(s): Crina-Magdalena Zărnescu / Language(s): French / Issue: 43/2022

Keywords: Marguerite Yourcenar; Mémoires d’Hadrien; Masculine/Feminine; Me/I; Human Condition; Authenticity; Masculine Writing;

Marguerite Yourcenar could have said “Hadrian, it’s me” like Flaubert whose conception of impersonal narrator she shares, but she didn’t say it! She leaves behind her Me and all the emotions, feelings, life experiences which Me represents by replacing it with and auctorial and imperial I of Hadrian. She borrows Hadrian’s voice to convey her thoughts on human condition, liberty, authenticity, and truth. Her author traits meet the emperor’s traits which manifest themselves wonderfully in this novel by their capacity to access the essential, to immerse in the historical context to unveil in an a-historical way Hadrian’s eminent, august, and human personality.

The Possibility of Making a Muslim Philosophy of Religion with the Concepts of the West: How Possible is it to Relate the Concepts of Theism, Atheism and Deism to Islamic Thought?

Batı’nın Kavramlarıyla Müslümanca Din Felsefesi Yapmanın İmkânı: Teizm, Ateizm ve Deizm Kavramlarını İslam Düşüncesiyle İlişkilendirmek Ne Kadar Mümkün?

Author(s): Hasan Er / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 3/2022

Keywords: Philosophy of Religion; Islamic Thought; Western Metaphysics; Theism; Deism; Atheism;

Almost all theses produced in the name of religion in modern thought and later in the West were realized in the form of a reckoning with the thought of the Middle Ages. The deism and atheism of the Enlightenment, which saw all kinds of reference sources other than natural theology, which is directly related to the scientific revolution, rational theology, which is the extension of the rationalist philosophy of modern thought, and reason, were produced because of the reckoning with the understanding of medieval religion. For this reason, the positive or negative discourses produced about religion in the mentioned periods should be understood by considering the tension between these two periods. It is obvious that religious philosophies, produced in a period when the understanding of the geometric universe and philosophies centered on the mind were widely accepted, could not remain indifferent to these developments. For example, deism is, on the one hand, the result of the search for an alternative to the elimination of the medieval church institution, on the other hand, it is the theoretical extension of rationalist discourses that eliminates all sources of reference other than reason. The same interactive situation is valid for the discourses produced about religion in the contemporary Western thought. However, this time, although the tradition of criticism regarding the understanding of religion of the Middle Ages continues to a certain extent, rational religious philosophies produced within the framework of the claims of modern thought and the Enlightenment that prioritizes reason were also criticized. For example, Nietzsche's (d. 1900) "God is dead" statement and Heidegger's (d. 1976) concept of "onto-theology" are criticisms of the absolute acceptance of the metaphysics of being constructed within the epistemic boundaries of man. Apart from this, Marx's (d. 1883) determination that "religion is opium" is directly related to the social processes of Western thought. As a matter of fact this interactive situation, which we have expressed in the examples, is quite normal when the Western thought's own adventure is taken into account. However, when the mentioned problem and the solutions produced for these problems are generalized to include other societies and thoughts, a reduction problem is experienced. Nietzsche's statement "God is dead", Heidegger's critique of "onto-theology" and Marx's statement that "religion is the opium" does not seem to be meaningless reactions when their historical context is taken into account. Furthermore, deism is not very strange belief for the society lived in the Middle Ages. However, if these discourses about religion are abstracted from their own climate of thought and accepted as a common problem or solution for all cultures and religions other than the West, confusion of meaning will be inevitable. The allegations in question should be understood within the framework of the theoretical, historical and social background that is the source of the problem, and should not be considered general determination that deny all religions and God. The same is true for the terms deism and atheism, which have a meaning and integrity in the tradition of Western thought and are directly related to the West's own religious and philosophical past. Treating these two terms as if they are the common problem of Islam or any other religion without considering the historical ties will not go beyond being a reduction that does not consider the particular existence conditions of other religions. In addition to the examples we gave, the concept that we want to focus on and which we see as a more chronic example of the insertion of a concept that was formed depending on certain historical or social conditions into the meaning world of another religion is theism. The reason why we define theism as a more chronic problem is that it is accepted as a concept compatible with Islamic belief, unlike the concepts of deism and atheism. In this study, the drawbacks of direct use of the concepts of deism, atheism and especially theism, produced in the tradition of Western thought, as a specific form of the problematic, which is defined as the transfer of a concept that emerged in certain cultural atmosphere to another cultural atmosphere, will be discussed. First, by reviewing the philosophy of religion studies conducted in Turkey, the fact that three concepts mentioned are directly transferred to the philosophy of religion studies carried out in the Islamic world will be presented as a problem and this situation will be defined as the reduction of Islamic belief to some other concepts. The aim to be achieved by emphasizing such a problem is to remind the importance of understanding the principles of Islamic belief in its own meaning, without reducing it to other meanings. This is because every concept produced within the tradition of Western thought is directly related to its own intellectual and practical history. For this reason, when a solution or criticism that is formed in a different sense or dependent on a certain practical past is brought to Islamic thought, the philosophical and practical past of those concepts will also be transferred. However, every belief should be evaluated by considering its own meaning and history. Evaluating this problem through concepts that Islam directly rejects, such as deism and atheism, is more understandable than the concept of theism. However, when it comes to the concept of theism, problem becomes quite complex. Because in almost all sources, Islam is defined as a theistic religion and this is considered as a necessary pre- suppossion for the Islamic belief. However, theism is the understanding of God in modern Western thought, in which Descartes’s rationalism and Newtonian mechanics are accepted as the dominant element. Such an understanding of God, built within the epistemic boundaries of the thinking agent, is incompatible with the Islamic conception of God.

Sense of Duty and Pedigree Obsession: A Comparative Look at Murtaza and Zebercet

Görev Duygusu ve Soy Takıntısı: Murtaza ve Zebercet Tiplerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir Bakış

Author(s): Nuriye Ballıkaya,Seyit Battal Uğurlu / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 111/2022

Keywords: Murtaza; Homeland Hotel; citizenship; protagonist; ancestry; belonging;

The starting point of this article is to compare a novel chosen from two important writers of the Turkish novel of the Republic period through the protagonists. While the protagonists of Orhan Kemal's (1914-1970) Murtaza (1952) and Yusuf Atılgan's (1921-1989) Anayurt Oteli (1973) works, they have an obsessive mood about the past while continuing their work is the subject. The main problem of this article is to try to understand the socio-cultural and historical contexts of the dissatisfaction caused by the fact that the role of the protagonist in both novels is doomed to remain unrequited. Here, the main focus is to try to analyze the similar and divergent aspects of the social and social identities of Murtaza and Zebercet, the effect of their memories stuck in the past on their present, and finally the deficient or faulty aspects that are reflected outside with the awareness of duty and responsibility. Although the writing times, scope, and contexts of the two works, the first of which were written with a social realist and the second with modernist sensitivity, are different, the dilemma of belonging and temporality they focus on is a situation that is much more exposed today, since it is one of the main problems of humanity. It seems like the common statement of the two texts is that the absence of class and ethnic 'principle' of Murtaza and Zebercet, which is inherited from the long past, is a legacy that is carried to the future. Another finding of this article is that the job that the two protagonists have or aspire to and the social belonging they represent are condemned to remain outside the category or norm. The fate of the two protagonists in the tragic face of life, dragging them into the vortex of nothingness stands before us as another result. The implicit codes of this otherness, which are not seen in the normal flow of daily life, but can be exposed with all their clarity when experienced with close contact, are deciphered with an analytical, analytical, critical, and comparative approach through the two works mentioned. This article also examines the ancestry obsession behind the existential understanding of the duty responsibility of the protagonist of these two works.

The Terror of History at the Time of its Death – A Contribution to the Critique of The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

The Terror of History at the Time of its Death – A Contribution to the Critique of The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

Author(s): Tomislav M. Pavlović / Language(s): English / Issue: 176/2022

According to most critics, The History Man is the best work of Malcolm Bradbury, the celebrated 20th-century English novelist. Composed as an academic or campus novel, it does not differ at first glance from the academic novels his fellow contemporaries wrote. The dominant realism and the highly effective parody made it very popular among the readers of the time. Later readings, however, drew attention to the fact that the novel, in many aspects, exceeds the boundaries of the genre it belongs to. Composed in the period when postmodernism in literature was beginning to take its turn, the novel conveys the sentiment caused by the so-called end of history, mainly on account of the author’s tendency to express his anxiety regarding the downfall of his liberal views. All the events in the novel before 1968 are reported in the past tense, whereas everything that happens after the period is spoken of in the present. Designating 1968 as a kind of crossroads in time, Bradbury implies that this outstanding time point represents the spiritual peak reached by his ideals before their downfall. The paradox of the whole situation lies in the fact that the ideals in question are endangered by the main character, a hard-line Marxist, a representative of the abstract notion of history, ironically clad in the vestiges of the Marxist thought on history. By creating his own “historical” plots and by reversing the “flow of history” for his own benefit, he denigrates all academic values. A genuinely Machiavellian type, he works against students, his fellow professors, as well as against the University of Watermouth itself. Ostensibly respectful of liberal values, he is constantly engaged in a kind of verbal duel with the people who could hinder his aspirations. His favourite weapons in the duels are the statements that, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s classification of agonal games, figure as denotative, performative, prescriptive and technical. The majority of the statements, especially those containing the names of Marx, Hegel and other philosophers, subvert, in a minimalist manner, the so-called grand narratives dealing with the Absolute, which is the genuinely postmodern feature of Bradbury’s work. The three analysed agonistic situations, revealing the total destructiveness of the triumphant main character, assume the ironic contours of deep ideological conflicts. The paper also deals with some controversies regarding the presence of some postmodern traits in Bradbury’s novel (Widdowson). At the same time, the attention is drawn to the critics such as James Acheson and Robert A. Morace, who contributed significantly to clarifying some of the novel’s crucial aporias. On the other hand, some parts of the author’s prose strategy, identifying him as a postmodernist, are correlated with the postulates of Francis Fukuyama, Francois Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson. The fact that the qualities of The History Man make it superior to all other Bradbury’s campus novels leads us to believe that the novel will continue to challenge the imagination of both critics and audiences.

Poor Women and Prostitution Regulations in the Ottoman Empire during the Years of Abdlhamid II and the Committee of Union and Progress (1876-1918)

II. Abdülhamid ve İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti Yıllarında Osmanlı’da Yoksul Kadınlar ve Fuhuş Düzenlemeleri (1876- 1918)

Author(s): Burcu Belli / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: Sp. Issue/2022

Keywords: Ottoman Empire; Committee of Union and Progress; Women; Prostitution and Regulation;

Prostitution is one of the most neglected topics in Ottoman and Turkish historiography. However, many recent studies have changed this taboo. The aim of this study is to evaluate the two prostitution regulations published in the last period of the Ottoman Empire in terms of content and purpose. The first prostitution regulation was published in 1879, just after the 1877-78 Ottoman-Russian War, but it is a very short and experimental publication. The 1884 Regulation is actually the first comprehensive prostitution regulation of the Ottoman Empire. One of the aims of this study is to figure out why Abdülhamid II’s government needed such a regulation. The second importantpart of this article is the 1915 Regulation published by the Committee of Union and Progress at the beginning of the First World War. It will be searched in this study why no other regulations were published from 1884 to 1915. In addition, it is obvious that the CUP aimed for social changes, this study looks at the changes from the perspective of poor women and will focus on the goals of various associations and societies established under the power of the CUP in terms of women and young girls.

Disease, Healing and Medical Knowledge in an Old Bulgarian Collection of Miracle Stories

Disease, Healing and Medical Knowledge in an Old Bulgarian Collection of Miracle Stories

Author(s): Yanko Hristov,Dafina Kostadinova / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2022

Keywords: hagiography; healing dreams; Old Bulgarian collection of miracle stories; health problems; disease; medical knowledge; treatment

The Old Bulgarian hagiographical collection of miracle stories, named A Tale of the Iron Cross, is relatively well known among the scholars, but a sufficient number of its details still has not been studied properly. In fact, such a peculiarity seems somehow strange, especially if we take into consideration that the mixture of translated and original strata in the present Tale’s version does not hinder its significance as a valuable primary source of historical information. There can be no doubt that the religious aspect in the hagiographical collection in question is the leading one in the foreground. On the other hand, however, the records of the daily life activities should not be underestimated either. Their presence within the frames of the Tale helps a lot in the scholars’ attempts to reconstruct the knowledge, skills, habits or principles of social behaviour in the Bulgarian society in the late 9th – early 10th century.

Alfredo Gangotena: the "non-Ecuadorian" poet in the trance between two languages

Alfredo Gangotena: el poeta «no ecuatoriano» en el trance entre lenguas

Author(s): Pablo Larreátegui Plaza / Language(s): Spanish / Issue: 2/2021

Keywords: modernity; Ecuadorian literature; Gangotena; poetry; between spaces;

The introduction presents the poet Alfredo Gangotena (1904-1944) as a case of an author who located himself in the interstices between the French and Spanish languages and who appears outside the Ecuadorian literary canon in the middle of the defining process of national literary modernity in the early twentieth century. Methodologically, the period of the definition of Ecuadorian literary modernity is briefly contextualized, resorting to different publications from between 1910 and 1950. As for Gangotena's work, dispersed in various publications since 1920 in Ecuador and France, it has been compiled, as well as letters and translations dating from after 1950. The textual analysis shows the process of the poet, in which he defines his place and his literary language in the interstices between languages, revealing a conflictive dialogue with the Ecuadorian cultural field in the process of defining national literary modernity between the decades starting in 1910 and 1940. The conclusions summarize what was stated in the previous sections. On the one hand, the importance of literary and critical production that gave rise to Ecuadorian literary modernity is highlighted, as a process that included languages and realities traditionally excluded from the literary and the political. On the other hand, it is evident that this process affected the reception of Gangotena, moving his work to a non-central place. Thus, the need to review the gaps or second lines behind a predominant political canon or discourse arises.

ISSUES OF IDENTITY IN TRILOGIJA O BOSNI BY VALERIJA SKRINJAR-TVRZ

PITANJA IDENTITETA U TRILOGIJI O BOSNI VALERIJE SKRINJAR-TVRZ

Author(s): Vildana Pečenković / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 21/2022

Keywords: Valerija Skinjar-Tvrz; Trilogija o Bosni; identity construction; war; otherness;

The paper questions the construction of identity in the novels of Slovenian-Bosnian authoress Valerija Skrinjar-Tvrz: Na svojoj, na plemenitoj, Jutro u Bosni and Bosna i Soča, which were combined and published as a trilogy this year. Integrating the period of medieval Bosnia, the First World War, and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992-1995 into one whole, the trilogy achieves multiple coding. Although distant in time, driven by different motivations, and intersected by different ideologies, wars shape the lives of the heroes of this trilogy. In this unique poetic entity, the authoress managed to show the complexity of common life through individual destinies and “small stories” and to deconstruct the conception that history is made up of “big stories”. The identities of individuals in the novels represent the identities of communities whose borders are porous and threaten to destroy the established systems, while individual unfortunate destinies are a mirror of collective traumas from the Middle Ages to modern times. The Trilogy covers almost the entire Bosnian history, trying to include identity constructions and their associated identification features, which the authoress considers representative of contemporary identity re/configurations.

A Career in IT? The Meanings of a Career at Business Process Outsourcing Centers in Poland from a Biographical Perspective

A Career in IT? The Meanings of a Career at Business Process Outsourcing Centers in Poland from a Biographical Perspective

Author(s): Szymon Pilch / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2023

Keywords: Careers; Biographical Experiences; Business Process Outsourcing, IT Specialists; Software Developers; Software Engineers; Poland; Work;

The paper reconstructs the ways of attributing meanings to IT specialists’ careers at BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) centers in Poland. The findings rely on empirical data, collected through autobiographical narrative interviews. The technique of analysis applied in the study was inspired by grounded theory methodology and allowed for the identification of a basic social process at the analytical stage, namely, “career planning.” On the one hand, the analysis also showed how IT specialists’ careers are given meanings concerning career planning; there seem to be three main ways of understanding one’s career in IT: (1) in terms of reaching economic and social stability, (2) as a tran- sition period in a career as an IT specialist, (3) with regard to becoming an expert in IT. On the other hand, the second axis of analysis has been conceptualized, which is comprised of other subjective and objective elements that may shape career planning. These include the biographical experiences of work, the context of the Polish BPO industry, and career planning resources. Furthermore, a typology consisting of three ways of attributing meanings to IT specialists’ careers at BPO centers has been put forward and analyzed.

Russia, Polizeistaat Doctrine, and the Boyar Reformism

Rusia, doctrina Polizeistaat și reformismul boieresc

Author(s): Cristian Ploscaru / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: XIX/2022

Keywords: Organic Regulations; Polizeistaat doctrine; reformism; institutions; governance;

The question of the ideological features of the reformism that inspired the substance of the Organic Regulations has not received adequate attention in the historical research. The Organic Laws, which were made under Russian patronage, were a work of synthesis involving both the native boyars of the Romanian Principalities and Russian officials. The ideological profile of local elite reformism is well known in Romanian historiography, but less research has been done on the ideological features of Russian reformism. The main currents of political thought in the Russian Empire, including in the area of diplomatic elites, had a heterogeneous and unstructured character, explicable not only by the ambiguities of Russian political culture (autocracy versus "constitutionalism"), but also by the presence of factional tendencies, according to the criteria of political choice, influence and interests. Nevertheless, the reforms carried out in Finland and Poland, together with those introduced in Novarussia and Basarabia, have been highly coherent and show serious affinities with the Polizeistaat model, of Central European extraction. In addition to a rather clear conception of the nature and role of the reforms, with the aim of conferring a more centralized organization to the state institutions, the reorganization of the state structures through the application of the Organic Regulations was also possible due to the political and administrative skills of Pavel Kiselev, patient, but determined, moderate but with a well developed plan, intelligent and clever, managing to overcome the resistance of the nobility, which was seriously affected by the new institutions, practices and procedures.

‘Mother Knows Best’

Мама знае най-добре.

Author(s): Milena Iakimova / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 55/2021

Keywords: vaccine hesitancy; intensive mothering; immunity (strong; natural; individual); mother-doctor relationship; responsibilization

This article outlines the figures of childhood vaccine hesitancy among affluent urban mothers in Bulgaria and the context of these figures. This context is dominated by the intensification of parenting and the centering of care in the children themselves – raising children according to their (rather than their parents’) best interests. This pattern of parenting prevails among the mothers whose interviews are analysed here: semistructured interviews with middle-class well-educated parents (mostly mothers) with stable incomes and one or two children. The primary task is to listen to and take seriously their hesitancies, concerns and anxieties, which are encouraged and directed by certain active minorities on social media. The mothers are interpellated in the responsibilizing discourse, they identify themselves with the position it places them in and, through this position, seek social recognition. Against this background, the article outlines their notions of ‘immunity’, of ‘life’ reduced to ‘health’ terms, of naturalness, of questioning the universalistic claim of science.

Michel Henry on Religious Experience

Michel Henry o náboženské zkušenosti

Author(s): Jan Černý / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 1/2023

Keywords: Michel Henry;religious experience;phenomenology;philosophy

This paper summarizes Michel Henry’s thinking on religious experience. It describes the two phenomenological interpretations of religious experience found in his last three philosophical books: the first, universalist interpretation is linked to the belief in the transcendental relationship of the human self to God; the second, particularist interpretation concerns the story of salvation as told in Henry‘s Christian trilogy, and uses the metaphor of the “second birth” to portray the new self-discovery of the human self in Christ. The paper also notes some problematic or surprising moments in Henry’s thinking about religious experience: his provocative rejection of all hermeneutics in relation to religious experience, and a certain closeness of his conception of human subjectivity to that of his poststructuralist contemporaries, from whose thought Henry at the same time seeks to distance himself.

FROM LILITH TO FAIRIES

ОД ЛИЛИТ ДО ВИЛИ

Author(s): Leni Frčkoska / Language(s): Macedonian / Issue: 83/2023

This article analyzes the similarities between the fairies of Southern Slavic tales and legends with the Hebrew Lilith. The subjects of analysis are those aspects of the patriarchal pedagogical background and narrative when these characters are portrayed as women. Special attention is focused on the different forms through which these females manifest their resistance to the patriarchy’s attempts to mold and subordinate them. This resistance to the patriarchy is an expression of women's millennial struggle for equality, emancipation and freedom.