|
Papers and essays
|
9–43
|
Durkheim and his followers alerted us to the role of collective representations such as funerals, processions and parades in pre-literate societies. These classic studies, elegant and detailed, have stood the test of time. Goffman has asked whether these events, along with memory and tradition, produce social solidarity in the twenty-first century. Perhaps social solidarity is enacted by such events, rather than reflecting norms, values, and beliefs. If so, how is this new kind of solidarity accomplished over the course of these events? We have few close studies of these modern public events, other than Warner’s classic, the Living and the Dead (1959), and Bellah’s ideas, via Rousseau, of the role of “civic religion.” These ideas are inadequately articulated, given an ethnographic warrant to link structure and function. This paper begins with a description of a funeral of a police officer in 1974 (Manning, 1977), compares this with a police funeral in 2011, and addresses two questions: how are they different? And what do these collective representations tell us about modernity? Are police funerals different from others in the public sphere (not those honored who served in the fire service or the military)? The paper uses a semiotic analysis of funerals, police and public, as a window into the features of modern celebrations and processions. Given the relevant codes used to analyze the processions, the differences are salient. The contrast between these processions and their role in social integration in modernity raises the need for future research. |
|
44–67
|
The article discusses various “conspiracy theories,” considering them to be a special frame or paradigm of discourse. This frame considers long-term societal and global trends as consequences of a conspiracy aiming to shift power to its initiators. It has been shown that every “conspiracy theory” presupposes a specific marking of social space that can be viewed as an attachment to the “theatre metaphor.” This specific marking of social space does not occur in private by the founder of the method, but to situations of the public execution of power. This thesis discusses and proves the hypothesis that “conspiracy theories” are becoming functional constructs in crisis situations of a so-called “representative democracy,” in ensuring the legitimacy of a respective political regime, in the perspective of crisis management, and in the initiations of effective political actors. The conclusion is that “conspiracy theories” are rather typical for the late-modernity societies than for the politically archaic contexts. These late modernity societies are characterized by secularization, “public sphere” accessibility, influential media, representation crisis, and “shadow” practices. Additionally, it has been shown that totalitarian political ideologies and regimes can be considered as “conspiracy theories” derivatives, resulting in a valid projection of this specific frame or paradigm of discourse on real political conflicts which emerge from societal or global crises. |
|
68–104
|
It would not be an exaggeration to assume that the Begriffsgeschichte studies (history of concepts) are now spreading through practically all fields of the Humanities. Its initial proposal was to explore the sociopolitical lexicon as a tool for creating history. It paid attention to the idea of untranslatable concepts in particular languages, despite the fact that they often have the same Latin or Greek roots (like “society,” “société,” “società,” “sociedad,” etc.). But the cases where one word is supposed to convey the meaning of the Latin root by using a root original to this given language are still relatively unexplored. Such is the case of the Russian language where the concept of “society” was expressed initially by the word “obshchestvo,” derived from the Slavic root “obshch-,” meaning “common.” From the linguistic point of view, we suggest that the traditional question “When did the word ‘obshchestvo’ obtain its sociopolitical meaning?” should be replaced by the following: “What meaning of this Russian word has become a political one?” To answer this question, we should explore the proper linguistic conditions of this transition. This means finding out how it is possible to linguistically/politically arrive from the constructions like “the community of the wellness” (obshchestvo blaga) to the patterns of “the thoughts of the society,” “the soul of the society,” or “the suffering society.” |
|
105–119
|
The paper briefly analyzes the main aspects of the genesis of Arendt’s concept of natality, and the reasons that led her to claim natality as a fundamental concept of political thought. 'Natality' is defined as the “biological” birth of the man in the world, and/or the capacity of beginning something new. If the factual birth is defined naturalistically, it can contradict randomness of action as the capacity of beginning something new. The connection between the two aspects of natality goes back to Augustine who was Arendt’s interlocutor throughout all of her research life. The genealogy of natality allows us to subject the problem of participation and the relation of political thought of Arendt to the philosophical criticism of biopolitics. Two definitions of life, natural life (zoe), and life in its political measurement (bios), strictly correspond to the two main aspects of natality. Natality is a concept which allows to consider the political to be a function of life. The most probable explanation for paradoxicality of Arendt’s reflections on natality is their messianic orientation, which could be attributed to Arendt’s involvement into the theological subjects via Augustine. The stable relation between birth and possibility of free action arises only in the case of a normal theological ontologization of Christmas. |
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
|
120–141
|
This preface to the translation of Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson’s paper “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation” discusses the conceptual and methodological foundations of conversation analysis. It shows that conversation analysis, which embodies the program of primitive natural social science formulated by Harvey Sachs, offers a revolutionary approach to the study of social phenomena, based on detailed analysis of naturally occurring everyday interactions. While remaining closely related to Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, conversation analysis shows how careful and detailed can be sociological descriptions that involve the discovery of general mechanisms (“machinery”) of the production of single events of conversation or any other social practice. This approach, however, risks losing the original purpose of studying the local concerted work of mutual understanding by the participants in social situations. The accumulation of the descriptions of general mechanisms of interactions’ production and perception brings the tendency of formalization into conversation analysis: analysts tend to collect the instances and properties of already known “interactional techniques.” The article considers the importance of “Simplest Systematics" in terms of the development of original program of conversation analysis, and discusses the peculiarities of translation of conversation analysis’s key terms into Russian. |
|
142–202
|
The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis (CA), written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: (1) the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; (2) if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; (3) if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, (4) with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. |
Russian Atlantis
|
203–223
|
University of Moscow Professor Vasily Leshkov constructed a theory of “social law” in the 1850s to provide an alternative theory to “police law”. He intended to go beyond the opposition between private and public law. Following German legal scholars, (most notably, The German Historical School of Law, he introduced a triadic distinction of civil, social, and state laws. This distinction enabled him to break the identification of public with political (polis). He described the sphere of “social law” as a “foundation for self-governance”. At the same time, Leshkov distinguished between political and non-political publicity, and thus showed the compatibility of self-governance with autocracy. His numerous publications in influential Russian magazines (“Russkiy Vestnik”, “Russkaya Beseda”, “Den’” etc.) indicate the increasing popularity of his views at the end of the 1850–60s. Within the academic system of that time, his ideas belonged to the vague discipline of “police law”. This belonging rapidly changed from the early 1870s when the discipline underwent doctrinal and institutional framing. “Police law” became a part of a conceptual model elaborated by Ivan Andreevskiy, whose debates with Leshkov are analyzed in my paper in order to describe their general views. While Andreevskiy’s model gained prominence, Leshkov’s views gradually became marginalized by the 1890–1910's. The paper describes this process through the analysis of the appropriate teaching materials. |
Review essays
|
224–273
|
The aim of the article is to reveal the modern autoethnographic approach to social research. The review of publications edited since the beginning of the 2000's has shown that autoethnography works as a planned, well-structured confession correlating with the outside world. The essentially open and uncompromising representation of each detail in the author’s personal story related to the subject matter, alongside with his/her shift away from neutrality and organized skepticism (according to Merton) in respect of the research issue, establish the principles for an autobiographical approach. The article reflects the peculiarities of modern autoethnographic schools, and describes the methods and techniques of autobiographical writing. There are two trends of autoethnography that are distinguished in Western tradition: evocative autoethnography, which is based on queer theory, and analytical autoethnography, traditionally oriented to conceptual apparatus. The first evocative trend is founded on the metaphors of emotional, authentic, and veracious representations of cultural realities through the autobiographical genre. The second trend, analytical autoethnography, is supported by three research prescriptions: the actual membership in the studied community, and avoidance of understatements, including the unspoken, non-prescribed details of ethnographic work; the desire for theoretical understanding of reality; and the rejection of any authentic reflection of the past. Over the past 20–30 years, there has not been any significant autoethnographic project implemented by the Russian research community appealing to the development of independent theoretical descriptive language. The only exception to the rule is Alexeyev’s so-called "dramaturgical sociology", adjacent to the queer ideology of some Western colleagues. The paper represents a detailed analysis of research innovation embedded by Alexeyev, as well as a logical and theoretical overlapping with the works of foreign authors. |
Book reviews
|
274–285
|
Review: Konservativnye modeli rossijskoj gosudarstvennosti[Conservative Models of Russian Statehood] by Alexander Repnikov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014) (in Russian) |
|
286–290
|
Review: Pravo i pravoprimenenie v zerkale social'nyh nauk: hrestomatija sovremennyh tekstov[Law and Law Enforcement in the Mirror of Social Sciences: The Handbook of Recent Texts] edited by Ella Paneyakh (Moscow: Statut, 2014) (in Russian) |
|
291–298
|
Review: Lekcii po istorii izuchenija obshhestvennogo mnenija: USA i Russia [Lectures on the History of Public Opinion Studies: USA and Russia] by Boris Doktorov (Ekaterinburg: URFU, 2013) (in Russian) |
|
299–304
|
Review: Sportsoziologie: Ein Lehrbuch in 13 Lektionen by Ansgar Thiel, Klaus Seiberth, Jochen Mayer (Aachen: Meyer & Meyer Verlag, 2013). |
|