Articulating national identity in Turkmenistan: inventing tradition through myth,cult and language

A study of myth, cult, and language as tools of state power, this paper analyzes ways national identity was constructed and articulated in one state. When Türkmenistan became independent in 1991 its first president, Saparmyrat Nyýazow, promoted himself as the ‘savior’ of the nation by reconceptualising what it meant to be Türkmen. Myth, public texts and language policy were used to construct this identity. While they were the targets of the state's cultural products, Türkmen citizens contributed to the processes of cultural production. Nyýazow legitimised his authoritarian leadership, first by co‐opting Türkmen citizens to support his regime, and then by coercing them as participants in his personality cult. The paper concludes that Nyýazow used the production of culture, ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm's sense, to bolster his agenda and further his own power. It also argues that the exaggerated cult of personality Nyýazow cultivated limited his achievements, rather than solidifying them.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

四川汉代神话图像中的象征意义--浅析陶摇钱树座与陶灯台

本文对两件现流传至香港的四川汉代文物进行了研究.通过这两件造型独特的文物,可以反映出汉代四川浓厚的地域文化色彩,并在一定程度上显示出其与外域文化之间的联系.文章认为,以西王母和昆仑神话体系为中心,构成四川汉代神话图像中最具象征意义的特点.     

舜的神话及舜历史形象的的演变

舜是一个神,但同时他又是中国历史上的圣君典范,本文拟就综合各家所述,加之自己浅见,对舜神话及舜在中国历史上的贡献作一个综合阐释。     

MYTH IN HISTORY,PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS MYTH: ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF HANS BLUMENBERG'S INTERPRETATION OF ERNST CASSIRER'S THEORY OF MYTH

This essay explores the different interpretations proposed by Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg of the relation between Platonic philosophy and myth as a means of bringing to light a fundamental divergence in their respective conceptions of what precisely myth is. It attempts to show that their conceptions of myth are closely related to their respective assumptions concerning the historical significance of myth and regarding the sense of history more generally. Their divergent conceptions of myth and of history, I argue, are at the same time not simply matters of abstract speculation, but spring from fundamental presuppositions concerning myth's political significance. The present elucidation aims not only to set in relief one or another of the ways in which Cassirer or Blumenberg understood myth, nor even to present Blumenberg's critical reception of Cassirer's theories, but above all to contribute to the interpretation of the political implications of myth and of its historical potency in our contemporary epoch.     

Myths and symbols in the political culture of Catalan nationalism (1880–1914)

Historiography on the phenomenology of nationalisms has often pointed to the importance of myths and symbols in the construction of these political movements, underlining how the past is transfigured and/or particular historical episodes are recast for use in creating a given political discourse in the present. By adopting this viewpoint, the aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of historiographical thinking on the use of myths and symbols in contemporary politics, giving particular attention to how they were brought to bear in the early days of the Catalan nationalist movement. This initial period, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is of special interest in the case of Catalan nationalism because it was a phase of politicisation marked – much as it was in other nationalist movements across Europe – by a nationalisation of history, a selection of foundation myths and historical milestones, and a crystallisation of the movement's symbols.     

Science and secularization

ABSTRACT

According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have provided an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This narrative typically relies on progressive and teleological understandings of history, and commitment to some version of an ongoing struggle between science and religion. By way of contrast, recent theories of secularization, such as that of Charles Taylor, have suggested that the role of science in secularization has been greatly exaggerated. This article also offers a critique of the standard “science causes secularization” story. But in contrast to other critiques of this kind, it suggests that science nonetheless has a significant role in secularization – one that can be maintained without a commitment to a crude progressivist history or a narrative of science-religion conflict.     

Is Lévi-Strauss Still Good to Think?

The centenary of Claude Lévi-Strauss' birth, and his death shortly afterwards, have generated a spurt of publications ranging from biographies to collections of essays to unpublished works. Some of these works dwell on his worldview, his preoccupations with globalization, overpopulation, and the environment, albeit in ways that reflect the poverty of his sociological analysis. Reappraisals of his structural approaches to the study of kinship, myth, and aesthetics are more relevant to contemporary approaches in anthropology, especially those that stress his paradoxical wedding of primary sensuous experience to abstract patterns of thought.