Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

:Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology

20th anniversary edition of "The End of History and the Last Man", a landmark of political philosophy by Francis Fukuyama, author of "The Origins of Political Order". With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 the threat of the Cold War which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century vanished. And with it the West looked to the future with optimism but renewed uncertainty. "The End of History and the Last Man" was the first book to offer a picture of what the new century would look like. Boldly outlining the challenges and problems to face modern liberal democracies, Frances Fukuyama examined what had just happened and then speculated what was going to come next. Tackling religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes and war, "The End of History and the Last Man" remains a compelling work to this day, provoking argument and debate among its readers. "Awesome ...a landmark ...profoundly realistic and important ...supremely timely and cogent ...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." (George Gilder, "The Washington"). Post Francis Fukuyama was born in Chicago in 1952. His work includes "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy" and "After the Neo Cons: Where the Right went Wrong". He now lives in Washington D.C. with his wife and children, where he also works as a part time photographer.

http://library.um.ac.id/free-contents/downloadpdf.php/buku/the-end-of-history-and-the-last-man-kemenangan-kapitalisme-dn-demokrasi-liberal-oleh-francis-fukuyama-penerjemah-m-h-amrullah-10836.pdf

The end of history and the last man : kemenangan kapitalisme dn demokrasi liberal / oleh Francis Fukuyama, penerjemah M.H. Amrullah

Time MapsTime Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, by ZerubavelEviatar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 180 pp. $25.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-98152-5.: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past

Italy's national calendar has undergone a marked transformation in the last 10 years, with the inclusion of new holidays and the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones. This article analyses these changes by focusing on the recent debates about a shared past, involving state leaders as well as intellectuals. After an analysis of the forms of symbolic conflict concerning memory and the relevance of cultural constraints in shaping this conflict, and a brief assessment of the new form of the Republic's calendar, the article examines three major days that deal with the State's treatment of the past: 25 April (Liberation Day); 2 June, seen as the birthday of the Republic; and the recently introduced national Remembrance Day (10 February), which remembers the foibe or killings and emigration of Italian people on Italy's eastern frontier with former Yugoslavia. The article concludes by identifying the major trends in the public management of memory in the context of Italy's Second R...

Memory, symbolic conflict and changes in the national calendar in the Italian Second Republic

The intellectual trajectories of social scientists Robert N. Bellah and Clifford Geertz are compared as a case study in the production of successful interdisciplinary work. Geertz and Bellah starte...

In the field but not of the field: Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah, and the practices of interdisciplinarity

The focus of the article is the analysis of a particular site of collective memory (one state’s system of national holidays condensed in a calendar) from a perspective that highlights its relationa...

From lines to networks: Calendars, narrative, and temporality:

Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.

Andrea Cossu

Papers

Memory, symbolic conflict and changes in the national calendar in the Italian Second Republic

In the field but not of the field: Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah, and the practices of interdisciplinarity

From lines to networks: Calendars, narrative, and temporality:

Clifford Geertz, intellectual autonomy, and interpretive social science

Italian Sociology,1945–2010