Cultures In Flux

The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and recall neglected stories about popular behavior, politics, and culture. What emerges is a new picture of lower-class life, in which traditions and innovations intermingled and social boundaries and identities were battered and reconstructed. The authors vividly convey the vitality as well as the contradictions of social life in old regime Russia, while also confronting problems of interpretation, methodology, and cultural theory. They tell of peasant death rites and religious beliefs, family relationships and brutalities, defiant peasant women, folk songs, urban amusement parks, expressions of popular patriotism, the penny press, workers' notions of the self, street hooliganism, and attempts by educated Russians to transform popular festivities. Together, the authors portray popular culture not as a static, separate world, but as the dynamic means through which lower-class Russians engaged the world around them. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Daniel R. Brower, Barbara Alpern Engel, Hubertus F. Jahn, Al'bin M. Konechnyi, Boris N. Mironov, Joan Neuberger, Robert A. Rothstein, and Christine D. Worobec.

The changing look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French culture since the 1980s. This collection of essays explores concern with space across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the fluctuating state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today's soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

The changing look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French culture since the 1980s. This collection of essays explores concern with space across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the fluctuating state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age.

This book describes strategic culture and its value as a methodological approach to the study of International Relations. In particular, the book uses strategic culture to illuminate a number of case studies on countries that have made decisions regarding the acquisition, proliferation or use of weapons of mass destruction.

A study of the region around the early historical Buddhist monastery in Bagh, in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India; a special focus is given to the local cave art. The author argues that the visual art represents the religious assimilation by Buddhism, an approach caused by the process of transformation through three successive phases. The evolution of a Brahmanic class is also traced, together with the impact of Brahmanic ritual and class structures on the artwork of the monastery.

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major pieces as well as works that have never been published in English. The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant contexts.