Abstract This paper looks at a set of documents produced in the early 1950s in the Gold Coast to establish land boundaries in a region and to contribute to the crystallization of customary law for future reference and use. The material is placed in a longer historical flow and seen as one of the results of transformations in the metropole, in the colony, and in their relationship over the first decades of the century, and as a significant landmark collection that has been used in land transactions ever since. The analysis pleads for treating the archives in an ethnographic and not just in an extractive manner (Stoler, 2002, 2009), suggesting that the making, the form, the authors’ stances and the use of the documents can be useful supplementary tools in making sense of the already heavily edited representations of the past that we have access to. The focus on this particular archival material contributes to the discussions about the pitfalls of basing land management on, as Sally Falk Moore would put it, “customary” law.
{"title":"How Foreign of a Country is the Past? Colonial Archives, Customary Law and Land Transactions in Ghana","authors":"Raluca Perneş","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper looks at a set of documents produced in the early 1950s in the Gold Coast to establish land boundaries in a region and to contribute to the crystallization of customary law for future reference and use. The material is placed in a longer historical flow and seen as one of the results of transformations in the metropole, in the colony, and in their relationship over the first decades of the century, and as a significant landmark collection that has been used in land transactions ever since. The analysis pleads for treating the archives in an ethnographic and not just in an extractive manner (Stoler, 2002, 2009), suggesting that the making, the form, the authors’ stances and the use of the documents can be useful supplementary tools in making sense of the already heavily edited representations of the past that we have access to. The focus on this particular archival material contributes to the discussions about the pitfalls of basing land management on, as Sally Falk Moore would put it, “customary” law.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45693676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thank you for your most-beautiful words and for this wonderful occasion. It is an unequalled honour, for which I am deeply grateful – especially to my fellow sociologists. Even though I call myself not a sociologist but a “social-cultural anthropologist,” my relationship with Sociology is a long and cordial one. It began at university when I took the course “Introduction to Anthropology,” only to learn that much of the material had been written by sociologists. For the rest of my career I have maintained a certain confusion about the division of labour between these two fields of investigation of human life. Today you confirm their resemblance, acknowledging the kinship relation between them. In a word, you have adopted me, and it’s good: I feel at home. If you do me this great honour, I should thank you in your own language. I apologize for the unavoidable mistakes and for the fact that this speech is given in a simpler language – a language that was learned not primarily from books, but in a village, talking with people. Because my audience today is mixed, I thought that rather than presenting a summary of my work in Romania, I would offer something more personal, about this work’s “infrastructure” in my relations here. Instead of giving a new interpretation of some material, I would like to present a brief homage to a few people in Romania who supported the career that I built here and without whom I couldn’t have advanced much in my projects. Because the list is very long, I will mention only a few names. You will see that my talk also concerns the methods of ethnography.
{"title":"Speech Given on the 12th of October 2017 on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca","authors":"K. Verdery","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Thank you for your most-beautiful words and for this wonderful occasion. It is an unequalled honour, for which I am deeply grateful – especially to my fellow sociologists. Even though I call myself not a sociologist but a “social-cultural anthropologist,” my relationship with Sociology is a long and cordial one. It began at university when I took the course “Introduction to Anthropology,” only to learn that much of the material had been written by sociologists. For the rest of my career I have maintained a certain confusion about the division of labour between these two fields of investigation of human life. Today you confirm their resemblance, acknowledging the kinship relation between them. In a word, you have adopted me, and it’s good: I feel at home. If you do me this great honour, I should thank you in your own language. I apologize for the unavoidable mistakes and for the fact that this speech is given in a simpler language – a language that was learned not primarily from books, but in a village, talking with people. Because my audience today is mixed, I thought that rather than presenting a summary of my work in Romania, I would offer something more personal, about this work’s “infrastructure” in my relations here. Instead of giving a new interpretation of some material, I would like to present a brief homage to a few people in Romania who supported the career that I built here and without whom I couldn’t have advanced much in my projects. Because the list is very long, I will mention only a few names. You will see that my talk also concerns the methods of ethnography.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47872582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The present article is focusing on hegemonic masculinity represented and expressed by the professional footballers. Based on the empirical study using text analysis of leading articles published in central Romanian sport newspapers I draw the ideal-typical picture of the normative model of Romanian hegemonic masculinity in which the domestic coaches play a determinant role. Their personal-individual and collective-professional features like determination, steadiness, honesty, pride, mutual respect, knowledge, tenaciousness, sense of vocation, solidarity, spirit of fighting are the corner points of the constructed Romanian manhood, or hegemonic masculinity during social change. The manliness is traced along the inner characteristic of the coaches but in strong contradiction with the foreign trainers. In this respect I can state that football is connected not only with masculinity but in some respect also with the national characteristics embodied by the Romanian coaches especially those working home.
{"title":"Football and Romanian Masculinity. How it is constructed by the Sport Media?","authors":"L. Péter","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article is focusing on hegemonic masculinity represented and expressed by the professional footballers. Based on the empirical study using text analysis of leading articles published in central Romanian sport newspapers I draw the ideal-typical picture of the normative model of Romanian hegemonic masculinity in which the domestic coaches play a determinant role. Their personal-individual and collective-professional features like determination, steadiness, honesty, pride, mutual respect, knowledge, tenaciousness, sense of vocation, solidarity, spirit of fighting are the corner points of the constructed Romanian manhood, or hegemonic masculinity during social change. The manliness is traced along the inner characteristic of the coaches but in strong contradiction with the foreign trainers. In this respect I can state that football is connected not only with masculinity but in some respect also with the national characteristics embodied by the Romanian coaches especially those working home.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44092952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It so happens that I am giving this laudatio towards the end of a semester when I teach a course on the History of Romanian Social Thought, in which I discuss the stages of thinking and the main accomplishments of the most remarkable Romanian sociologists. In the last lectures, I come to speak about the development of sociology in the years after the political changes of 1989 and I necessarily refer to the contributions of the numerous foreign researchers who have produced substantial studies from and about Romania. Their studies are already social documents. Their reports on the state of the Romanian society in the communist period, shared with the wider Romanian public only after 1989, are even more important for having been written under very particular circumstances, when autochthonous research was either repressed or distorted by censorship or self-censorship. These studies are embraced by the Romanian colleagues who salute in them an honest and objective reflection of the country under the communist regime observed by these professional witnesses. These analyses save the honour of the profession, partly lost and then partly regained after 1989, notably due to the essential contribution of these researchers. In a wider perspective, they continue along the lines of the Romanian sociological tradition and its production from even before 1945 – the field research of the Sociological School of Bucharest, of Gh. Em. Marica in Cluj and of others, work that has become today a collection of documents of an era and of the manner in which this era was able to gaze upon itself. All these
{"title":"Laudatio. In Honour of Distinguished Professor Gail Kligman, University of California, Los Angeles, on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca","authors":"M. Lazăr","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0001","url":null,"abstract":"It so happens that I am giving this laudatio towards the end of a semester when I teach a course on the History of Romanian Social Thought, in which I discuss the stages of thinking and the main accomplishments of the most remarkable Romanian sociologists. In the last lectures, I come to speak about the development of sociology in the years after the political changes of 1989 and I necessarily refer to the contributions of the numerous foreign researchers who have produced substantial studies from and about Romania. Their studies are already social documents. Their reports on the state of the Romanian society in the communist period, shared with the wider Romanian public only after 1989, are even more important for having been written under very particular circumstances, when autochthonous research was either repressed or distorted by censorship or self-censorship. These studies are embraced by the Romanian colleagues who salute in them an honest and objective reflection of the country under the communist regime observed by these professional witnesses. These analyses save the honour of the profession, partly lost and then partly regained after 1989, notably due to the essential contribution of these researchers. In a wider perspective, they continue along the lines of the Romanian sociological tradition and its production from even before 1945 – the field research of the Sociological School of Bucharest, of Gh. Em. Marica in Cluj and of others, work that has become today a collection of documents of an era and of the manner in which this era was able to gaze upon itself. All these","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45083215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this paper I regard the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) as an epistemic form through which the socialist state gathered knowledge about reality, while it also performatively sought to create reality in keeping with its ideological presuppositions. More generally I suggest that the Securitate was in fact a form of (social) science deployed by the state in relation to its subjects. Just as any instrument of knowledge, the work of the Securitate was not simply descriptive but also, in the process, it aimed to shape its very object of inquiry. The Securitate was one of the institutions, central no doubt, through which the Romanian socialist state sought to define and protect its own, new, version of reality and social order. From this perspective, far from being an outcome of the socialist power, the secret police was what constituted that power to define and bring into being a new reality. In this process the secret agents played the role of anthropologists of the new world.
{"title":"The Knowledge of the Securitate: Secret Agents as Anthropologists","authors":"Florin Poenaru","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper I regard the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) as an epistemic form through which the socialist state gathered knowledge about reality, while it also performatively sought to create reality in keeping with its ideological presuppositions. More generally I suggest that the Securitate was in fact a form of (social) science deployed by the state in relation to its subjects. Just as any instrument of knowledge, the work of the Securitate was not simply descriptive but also, in the process, it aimed to shape its very object of inquiry. The Securitate was one of the institutions, central no doubt, through which the Romanian socialist state sought to define and protect its own, new, version of reality and social order. From this perspective, far from being an outcome of the socialist power, the secret police was what constituted that power to define and bring into being a new reality. In this process the secret agents played the role of anthropologists of the new world.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46507452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Suppressed on ideological grounds, banned as academic discipline, and dismantled as scientific infrastructure in the first postwar years, sociology was re-institutionalized in communist Romania during the 1960s, largely on political grounds. Subsequently, the discipline developed and augmented within an impressive scientific infrastructure - several university departments were established, research centres and facilities initiated, and specialized periodicals issued. Still, the prosperous period of Romanian sociology concluded after just one decade, through another political decision, which confined the study of sociology to post-graduate specialization and restricted research. My paper explores sociology’s institutional infrastructure, as it was established after the discipline’s renewal, focusing on the institutions created, but also on the biographical analysis of those involved within these processes. My paper will address the matter from a historical perspective, discussing the developments and the evolutions in the field by circumscribing to the political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.
{"title":"Sociology in Communist Romania: An Institutional and Biographical Overview","authors":"Ștefan Bosomitu","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Suppressed on ideological grounds, banned as academic discipline, and dismantled as scientific infrastructure in the first postwar years, sociology was re-institutionalized in communist Romania during the 1960s, largely on political grounds. Subsequently, the discipline developed and augmented within an impressive scientific infrastructure - several university departments were established, research centres and facilities initiated, and specialized periodicals issued. Still, the prosperous period of Romanian sociology concluded after just one decade, through another political decision, which confined the study of sociology to post-graduate specialization and restricted research. My paper explores sociology’s institutional infrastructure, as it was established after the discipline’s renewal, focusing on the institutions created, but also on the biographical analysis of those involved within these processes. My paper will address the matter from a historical perspective, discussing the developments and the evolutions in the field by circumscribing to the political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49412074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The paper combines the historical analysis of the social transformation of rural Hungary with the evolution of the sociological concept of ‘peasant embourgeoisment’. The authors highlight the long lasting impact of the concept in the understanding of academic knowledge production. The concept was the product of thorough ethnographic studies in the inter- and postwar periods by scholarly intellectuals, whose aim went beyond academic purposes and translated into a political agenda of rural modernization. To make such a methodological combination the authors demonstrate that the global historical context is necessary in the understanding of how knowledge production occurs and interacts at various historical conjunctures, especially during periods of crises.
{"title":"The Concept of ‘Peasant Embourgeoisement’ in the Perspective of Different Historical Conjunctures","authors":"András Vígvári, Tamás Gerőcs","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper combines the historical analysis of the social transformation of rural Hungary with the evolution of the sociological concept of ‘peasant embourgeoisment’. The authors highlight the long lasting impact of the concept in the understanding of academic knowledge production. The concept was the product of thorough ethnographic studies in the inter- and postwar periods by scholarly intellectuals, whose aim went beyond academic purposes and translated into a political agenda of rural modernization. To make such a methodological combination the authors demonstrate that the global historical context is necessary in the understanding of how knowledge production occurs and interacts at various historical conjunctures, especially during periods of crises.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45380458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this paper I argue that sociology was a key discipline in producing relevant knowledge for managing and reimagining the socialist economic development in Romania. It played a central role in placing economic development at the subnational level, since much of the everyday economics unfolded at the level of the regions, which formed around the emerging cities. I analyse the birth of the ‘urban area’, an academic concept and a policy tool, as it was developed by Miron Constantinescu and his associate Henry H. Stahl. This was the main device that shifted economic growth to the subnational level and allowed the planners to regulate the economy as a set of inter-connected production chains. Sociology was disbanded as an academic discipline in 1948; nonetheless, through the figure of Miron Constantinescu, a key member of the Political Bureau between 1945-1957, it remained a central producer of knowledge through complex institutional arrangements, put in place in the 1950s. These institutions employed sociological figures from the inter-war sociological establishment. Their methodological skills and theoretical endeavours were put to work in applied research. I argue that some strategic developmentalist policies in socialist Romania were strongly shaped by the reworking in Marxist terms of certain key ideas of the Gustian school of a ‘sociology of the nation’.
{"title":"The Politics of Mobilizing Local Resources for Growth: ‘Urban Areas’ in Romania","authors":"N. Petrovici","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper I argue that sociology was a key discipline in producing relevant knowledge for managing and reimagining the socialist economic development in Romania. It played a central role in placing economic development at the subnational level, since much of the everyday economics unfolded at the level of the regions, which formed around the emerging cities. I analyse the birth of the ‘urban area’, an academic concept and a policy tool, as it was developed by Miron Constantinescu and his associate Henry H. Stahl. This was the main device that shifted economic growth to the subnational level and allowed the planners to regulate the economy as a set of inter-connected production chains. Sociology was disbanded as an academic discipline in 1948; nonetheless, through the figure of Miron Constantinescu, a key member of the Political Bureau between 1945-1957, it remained a central producer of knowledge through complex institutional arrangements, put in place in the 1950s. These institutions employed sociological figures from the inter-war sociological establishment. Their methodological skills and theoretical endeavours were put to work in applied research. I argue that some strategic developmentalist policies in socialist Romania were strongly shaped by the reworking in Marxist terms of certain key ideas of the Gustian school of a ‘sociology of the nation’.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47923508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thank you for these laudatory words, deeply appreciated if perhaps unmerited. I am profoundly honored by this extraordinary recognition of my academic contributions. For forty-one years, I have been doing research in Romania. How did I then a doctoral student from the United States of America, an imperialist country, end up doing research in a formerly communist one? I would like to take advantage of this special occasion to share with you some thoughts about my intellectual history, as well as some of my experiences while I pounded the streets of Romania’s cities and wandered about the paths of its villages. I would also like to reflect briefly upon the impact my research here has had on my understanding of what is currently happening in the United States. Knowing that some of you are not English speakers, I will give my talk in Romanian, asking your indulgence for whatever mistakes you hear and for my accent, most surely a mixture of American English and the vernacular speech of the region to which I will always remain affectively attached, „my” Maramureș. I proudly refer to it in this possessive form my because in 1994, I was made an honorary citizen of Ieud, a large village with a rich history, located in the Iza Valley. A question is often posed to me, both here and in the US, „why Romania?” As far as I know, my family has no roots in Romania. What then accounts for my having come here? When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I wanted to pursue my dissertation research on the medical system in what was then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. At the time, the Yugoslavs were seemingly suspicious of the work of two American anthropologists, in consequence of which they
{"title":"Speech Given on the 25th of May 2017 on the Occasion of Being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca","authors":"G. Kligman","doi":"10.1515/SUBBS-2017-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/SUBBS-2017-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Thank you for these laudatory words, deeply appreciated if perhaps unmerited. I am profoundly honored by this extraordinary recognition of my academic contributions. For forty-one years, I have been doing research in Romania. How did I then a doctoral student from the United States of America, an imperialist country, end up doing research in a formerly communist one? I would like to take advantage of this special occasion to share with you some thoughts about my intellectual history, as well as some of my experiences while I pounded the streets of Romania’s cities and wandered about the paths of its villages. I would also like to reflect briefly upon the impact my research here has had on my understanding of what is currently happening in the United States. Knowing that some of you are not English speakers, I will give my talk in Romanian, asking your indulgence for whatever mistakes you hear and for my accent, most surely a mixture of American English and the vernacular speech of the region to which I will always remain affectively attached, „my” Maramureș. I proudly refer to it in this possessive form my because in 1994, I was made an honorary citizen of Ieud, a large village with a rich history, located in the Iza Valley. A question is often posed to me, both here and in the US, „why Romania?” As far as I know, my family has no roots in Romania. What then accounts for my having come here? When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I wanted to pursue my dissertation research on the medical system in what was then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. At the time, the Yugoslavs were seemingly suspicious of the work of two American anthropologists, in consequence of which they","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45444288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas Glaeser (2011:XV) defined state socialism as an ‘unacknowledged attempt to perform a revolutionary self-fulfilling prophecy’. For Glaeser, state socialism failed because its elites failed to produce adequate understandings of the everyday operations of socialism so as to device timely reforms of the system. In short, socialism came tumbling down because of an epistemic failure. Irrespective of the validity of Glaeser’s conclusion it has the merit that it raises the point about the generation and certification of knowledge about the social life in socialism. How was this knowledge produced, by what means, to what ends, in which institutional settings and what mechanisms of feedback did it generate? This issue takes knowledge production during socialism and its instantiations in various institutional settings as its starting point and seeks to trace its antinomies. The socialist state apparatus was a systematic producer of knowledge. The bureaucratic machine often employed the methods of the social sciences to gather and classify information, hypothesise contending interpretation, and suggest policy prescriptions. A vast array of activities benefited from the integration of these methods in the everyday state operations. Minute knowledge was needed in economic and spatial planning, or in demographical, educational, and health policies. Concurrently, the secret police also deployed observational techniques and made use of field notes that had a strong resemblance with those of the ethnographers. At the same time, the social sciences per se produced a vast array of analysis of the very same society. During the four decades of socialism in Eastern Europe there were significant variations in the type, quantity, and quality of scientific literature produced. These variations were strongly interlinked with the state apparatus’ needs for knowledge and societal projects. But the knowledge
{"title":"Antinomies of Knowledge Production and Social Sciences During Socialism","authors":"Florin Poenaru, N. Petrovici","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2017-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2017-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Andreas Glaeser (2011:XV) defined state socialism as an ‘unacknowledged attempt to perform a revolutionary self-fulfilling prophecy’. For Glaeser, state socialism failed because its elites failed to produce adequate understandings of the everyday operations of socialism so as to device timely reforms of the system. In short, socialism came tumbling down because of an epistemic failure. Irrespective of the validity of Glaeser’s conclusion it has the merit that it raises the point about the generation and certification of knowledge about the social life in socialism. How was this knowledge produced, by what means, to what ends, in which institutional settings and what mechanisms of feedback did it generate? This issue takes knowledge production during socialism and its instantiations in various institutional settings as its starting point and seeks to trace its antinomies. The socialist state apparatus was a systematic producer of knowledge. The bureaucratic machine often employed the methods of the social sciences to gather and classify information, hypothesise contending interpretation, and suggest policy prescriptions. A vast array of activities benefited from the integration of these methods in the everyday state operations. Minute knowledge was needed in economic and spatial planning, or in demographical, educational, and health policies. Concurrently, the secret police also deployed observational techniques and made use of field notes that had a strong resemblance with those of the ethnographers. At the same time, the social sciences per se produced a vast array of analysis of the very same society. During the four decades of socialism in Eastern Europe there were significant variations in the type, quantity, and quality of scientific literature produced. These variations were strongly interlinked with the state apparatus’ needs for knowledge and societal projects. But the knowledge","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43282610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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