kennedy michael d. cultural formations of postcommunism. emancipation, transition, nation, and war. minneapolis - london, 2002

[...]... effort to center the cultural formations of postcommunism Cultural Formations I draw my sense of cultural formation from the work of Raymond Williams.12 “Structure of feeling,” or the ensemble of meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt, is one of his core concepts It enables his sociology to focus on practice and everyday life and not only expressed values and structures of meaning He is... Elster, Offe, and Preuss consider Slovakia and Bulgaria Both volumes emphasize the distinction of change in this region, elaborate some models of Soviet-type society, and compare modes of extrication from that system They both undertake path analysis to consider the impact of the past on postcommunism’s reform policies Both volumes explain and evaluate the variety of capitalisms and modes of democracy... capitalist and democratic transformations, but in their very debate with designer capitalists and transitologists, institutionalists join transition culture Two volumes published in 1998 illustrate this engagement.50 Both Stark and Bruszt and Elster, Offe, and Preuss address social change in Hungary and the Czech Republic, and Stark and Bruszt also devote considerable attention to Germany and some to Poland... work because of his stress on cultural formations. ” Formations are those “effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual and artistic life, which have significant and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture, and which have a variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions” (117) This emphasis is also linked to a focus on practice, or “social experi- Introduction... needs and wishes That mobilizing culture, in turn, structures transition Transition culture emphasizes the fundamental opposition of socialism and capitalism, and the exhaustion of the former and normative superiority of the latter It values broad generalizing expertise around the workings of market economies and democratic polities Culture and history are not especially difficult to understand in... projects of social intervention and cultural formations that I seek to explain Methodologies follow these alternative orientations toward culture too Concerns about the distribution of values, or the representativeness of dispositions, depend on visions of relatively fixed cultural formations For instance, there is a great deal of research on postcommunist societies that depends on the imagery of relatively... social transformations.42 This shift to variation is not only about the end to socialism, but also about the hegemony of liberalism Liberalism has historically sought to minimize the challenge of difference in favor of the interchangeability of citizens and nations, and/ or the desirability of com- Introduction 21 modifying and rationalizing more widely in order to facilitate the broadest exchange and markets... the mobilization of social movements It also means that the sense of social movements is discontinuous To study social movements before 1989 was central to understanding the reproduction and transformation of Soviet-type society After 1989, “transition” structures research and interventions, and it figures movements in terms of their contribution to the institutionalization of markets and democracy Introduction... must also develop a sense of how transition culture’s tradition was made out of a global heritage, constriction of emancipation, and casting of a barbaric alternative One must reconstruct its tradition, but in such a cultural system as transition, one cannot stop with tradition Like many others, Williams identifies traditions and institutions as part of what might be studied in cultural analysis, but... shape this articulation of transition and nation Gender is fundamentally important in forming the meaning of transition, as are class and regionalism.11 Although important, these other axes of difference and their cultural associations do not enjoy primary focus in this volume I would find, however, extensions to them entirely compatible with this treatment of transition culture and its national articulations . Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, Michael D. Cultural formations of postcommunism : emancipation, transition, nation, and war / Michael D. Kennedy. p. cm. — (Contradictions ; 15) Includes bibliographical. Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War Volume 14 Michèle H. Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie Volume 13 Pierre-André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its. of Postcommunism Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War Michael D. Kennedy Contradictions, Volume 15 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All