We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Prisoners can reduce jail terms by 30 days for each work of ‘scientific value’ they publish.
More...
European Commission ponders disciplinary action; media watchdogs howl over Warsaw’s ‘violation of fundamental EU values.’
More...
The aim of this paper is to trace the correlations between socio-economic status and stereotypes in the construction of the identity of the Romani minority. To this end the paper will focus mainly on contemporary representations of the Romani people in American media, in particular the reality TV show My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding and other related shows, such as Jersey Shore and its British spin-off, Geordie Shore. In the analysis I will be interested mostly in how stereotypes are made to fit the general format of the show and, in the case of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, repackaged as authentic ethnic culture. The aim of the comparison is to illustrate the fact that, though both Jersey Shore and My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding claim to offer an insight into the everyday lives of a particular ethnic minority, both shows follow a similar frame that has little to do with their respective subjects’ ethnic background and more to do with their social and economic background. The overlap between social and ethnic background can prove to be particularly problematic in the case of the Roma, since there is a distinct lack of counter-narratives and, historically, Romani cultural identity has always been tied to a particular social and economic class. Thus I will also attempt to integrate these representations into a broader historical perspective on the formation of Romani identity in order to better understand the problematic nature of contemporary representations of the Roma.
More...
The article is devoted to the analysis of the dominant ideal of beauty in the Victorian period. The author defi nes mechanisms of repression and symbolic violence over the body of the Victorian upper-class woman, connected with the phenomenon of social control over the woman’s body and identity. The author assumes that the desire to achieve physical beauty has always been a source of a biographical experience that was constitutive for a woman, a source of a separate identity for her in comparison with a man. The historical changes of the ideals of the beautiful body are expressive of the complex interactions between the social roles of women and the dominant ideology of femininity as well as scientifi c and medical knowledge.
More...
Тhe work provides an overview of the history of the production, use of salt and beliefs connected to it in Europe, including folk medicine and magic. Further words denoting salt and idioms and formulae reffereing to salt are discussed on by juxtaposition of Slavic, Balkan, Germanic, and other languages.
More...
The main purpose of this article is to look at local politics from political sciences perspective and topropose the understanding of local politics as, quite opposite to the dominating political narratives,a field of ideological character. We divide the text into two main parts: in the first one we focusmainly the theoretical side of the whole issue with its specifics and the issues of the political and ideological character of this level of political scene. In the second part it is our intention to closelyexamine the current political practices in this matter – basing, most of all, on the phenomenon ofpolish „urban movements”, and draw conclusions on the actual essence of (non)political characterof Polish local politics.
More...
Current debates about racism seem to be dominated by two main approaches: theory of cultural racism and the Marxist problematization of racism as a result of contradictions in economic and political spheres. The most recent conceptualization of the first orientation build on anti-essentialist notion of culture and identity developed by a number of authors disputing the problem of multiculturalism in the 1990s. One can refer to researchers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ash Amin and Simon Weaver as representatives of this approach suggesting that race is a category constructed as the consequence of complex political and historical-cultural processes. Marxist perspective should be understood to a large extent as a criticism of the first orientation. Adherents of this camp (Edna Bonacich, Eric Hobsbawm or James Blaut) argue that all the „discursive strategies of racialization” analyzed within the cultural racism paradigm are a reflection of – or, more precisely: the façade hiding – more basic mechanisms in the sphere of production and productive relations (economic base): the exploitation of labor as a consequence of the capitalist pressure to minimize costs and maximize capital accumulation, made possible thanks to the existence (and maintenance) of „reserve army of labor” (displaced residents of villages during the industrial revolution as described by Marx; and cheap labor in the colonial plantation-slavery system and in peripheral zones and within postnational civic-immigrant societies of the contemporary world-system). I would like to emphasize a need to provide an approach combining, synthesizing together the two above theories where racism would be defined as a common thread of racist phenomena in concrete, historical narratives and practices. It is necessary to avoid both the „liquidation„ of the problem of racism, reducing it to a set of elusive tensions between social and discursive positions on one hand, and translating it exclusively (while looking for a „subject of emancipation”, ways to end the economic exploitation and complete the process of „national liberation”) onto the domain of instrumentalization of ethnic and cultural differences – on the other hand. This strategy may prove fruitful in reflections on contemporary racist tendencies avoiding oversimplifications on one hand and too hasty analogies – on the other.
More...
The text narrates the story of the printed edition of Andrzej Słowaczyński’s vaudeville Chłopiec studukatowy, which was the first to include the golden duck legend. It reconstructs the cultural and topographical context of the 1830 performance in Teatr Rozamitości in Warsaw (Variety Theater), and traces its phonological paradoxes. The vaudeville parodied Ferdinand Raimund’s Chłop milionowy, and today it remains a valuable testimony of both urban and regional folklore. Additionally, it exposes the social-spatial perceptions of the 19th-century Varsovians. Paradoxically, Chłopiec studukatowy owes its resulting commercial success to the literary, albeit cursory interpretations of the legend which followed.
More...
Communist ideology transformed the size, functions, structure and legal foundations of the family in Soviet Russia. There were objective and subjective factors which brought about active reforms of the family in the 1920s: the objective factors involved the modernization processes in the society, while the subjective ones were conscious attempts to construct the family institution in accordance with the idealized concept of the future society. The 1920s family reform generated multiple family types, shaped in particular by ideological concepts and beliefs. This paper analyzes the data from a unique source, the All-Russia Communist Party Census of 1922, which provides information about the number of people and the ratio of workers to dependents in Party members’ families. Party members constituted the social group which was the most susceptible to ideology, which renders their family structure particularly interesting. These data also reflect the general trends in the early Soviet society and their scale. We put a special emphasis on the analysis of new family forms such as communal family, ‘revolutionary’ family, and so on.
More...
Based on a variety of statistical sources the article explores demographic structure and origins of migrants in the post-WWII Soviet Union, using examples of the North Caucasus and the Urals. Next to post-war general population censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979, the research utilizes unique yearly reports of the local administration concerned with internal migration in the two areas under study. While general characteristics of the migration streams in those areas largely corroborate observations of an earlier research on the subject, the Author also unravels substantial inter-regional differences which so far have gone largely unnoticed. These differences were to a large extent path-dependent and related to peculiarities of the settlement patterns, and overall developmental differences between the regions. Given these divergences, the Author argues, a methodological reflection on the accuracy of crude comparisons of the migration streams in the regions under study seems inevitable.
More...