Nature and National Identity After Communism

Nature and National Identity After Communism PDF Author: Katrina Z. S. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973146
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Katrina Schwartz examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in a small East European country: modern-day Latvia. Based on extensive ethnographic research and lively discourse analysis, it explores that country's post-Soviet responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. These responses were shaped by hotly contested notions of national identity articulated as contrasting visions of the “ideal” rural landscape. The players in this story include Latvian farmers and other traditional rural dwellers, environmental advocates, and professionals with divided attitudes toward new European approaches to sustainable development. An entrenched set of forestry and land management practices, with roots in the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras, confront growing international pressures on a small country to conform to current (Western) notions of environmental responsibility—notions often perceived by Latvians to be at odds with local interests. While the case is that of Latvia, the dynamics Schwartz explores have wide applicability and speak powerfully to broader theoretical discussions about sustainable development, social constructions of nature, the sources of nationalism, and the impacts of globalization and regional integration on the traditional nation-state.

Nature and National Identity After Communism

Nature and National Identity After Communism PDF Author: Katrina Z. S. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973146
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Katrina Schwartz examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in a small East European country: modern-day Latvia. Based on extensive ethnographic research and lively discourse analysis, it explores that country's post-Soviet responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. These responses were shaped by hotly contested notions of national identity articulated as contrasting visions of the “ideal” rural landscape. The players in this story include Latvian farmers and other traditional rural dwellers, environmental advocates, and professionals with divided attitudes toward new European approaches to sustainable development. An entrenched set of forestry and land management practices, with roots in the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras, confront growing international pressures on a small country to conform to current (Western) notions of environmental responsibility—notions often perceived by Latvians to be at odds with local interests. While the case is that of Latvia, the dynamics Schwartz explores have wide applicability and speak powerfully to broader theoretical discussions about sustainable development, social constructions of nature, the sources of nationalism, and the impacts of globalization and regional integration on the traditional nation-state.

Cities After the Fall of Communism

Cities After the Fall of Communism PDF Author: John Czaplicka
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Cities after the Fall of Communism traces the cultural reorientation of East European cities since 1989. Analyzing the architecture, commemorative practices, and urban planning of cities such as Lviv, Vilnius, and Odessa, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how history may be selectively re-imagined in light of present political and cultural realities. These essays show that while East European cities gravitate nostalgically toward Habsburg, Baltic, Imperial Russian, and Germanic pasts, they are also embracing new urban identities grounded in ethnic-national, European, Western, and global contexts. Ultimately, the editors argue that one can see a "New Europe" taking shape in these cities, where a strained discourse between different versions of the past and variously envisioned futures is being set in stone, steel, and glass.

Britons

Britons PDF Author: Linda Colley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300107593
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
"Controversial, entertaining and alarmingly topical ... a delight to read."Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph

One Hundred Years of Communist Experiments

One Hundred Years of Communist Experiments PDF Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864062
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Why has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.

The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation

The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation PDF Author: Ladislav Holy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521555845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
When Ladislav Holy precipitately left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1968 he was already one of the leading anthropologists in Central Europe. In the following decades he made important field studies in Africa. Since 1986 he has been engaged in research in the Czech Republic, and he brings to this timely study of national identity the skills of a seasoned researcher, a cosmopolitan perspective, and the insights of an insider. Drawing on historical and literary sources as well as ethnography, he analyses Czech discourses on national identity. He argues that there were specifically 'Czech' aspects to the communist regime and to the 'velvet revolution', and paying particular attention to symbolic representations of what it means to be Czech, he explores how notions of Czech identity were involved in the debates surrounding the fall of communism, and the emergence of a new social system.

Civilizing Nature

Civilizing Nature PDF Author: Bernhard Gissibl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

European Cinema after the Wall

European Cinema after the Wall PDF Author: Leen Engelen Leen Engelen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442229608
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, transnational European cinema has risen, not only in terms of production but also in terms of a growing focus on multiethnic themes within the European context. This shift from national to trans-European filmmaking has been profoundly influenced by such historical developments as the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent ongoing enlargement of the European Union. In European Cinema after the Wall: Screening East–West Mobility, Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heuckelom have brought together essays that critically examine representations of post-1989 migration from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe, uncovering an array of common tropes and narrative devices that characterize the influences and portrayals of immigration. Featuring essays by contributors from backgrounds as divergent as film studies, Slavic and Russian studies, comparative literature, sociology, contemporary history, and communication and media studies, this volume will appeal to scholars of film, European history, and those interested in the impact of migration, diaspora, and the global flow of cinematic culture.

Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

Thank You, Comrade Stalin! PDF Author: Jeffrey Brooks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400843928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.

The Nature of Soviet Power

The Nature of Soviet Power PDF Author: Andy Bruno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714471X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Ideology and National Identity in Post-communist Foreign Policy

Ideology and National Identity in Post-communist Foreign Policy PDF Author: Rick Fawn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135757909
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A comparative analysis of the foreign policies of eight post-communist states which considers the extent to which official communist ideology has been replaced by nationalism and establishes how these states express their national identities through foreign policy.