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1 " A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term " we" or " us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that " we" are all agreed on " our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics (" our sensibilities are enraged..." ) Always ask who this " we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron " Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called " US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was " Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves. "
2 " 1. Santa Claus is real. However, your parents are folkloric constructs meant to protect and foritfy children against the darknesses of the real world. They are symbols representing the return of the sun and the end of winter, the sacrifice of the king and the eternal fecundity of the queen. They wear traditional vestments and are associated with certain seasonal plants, animals, and foods. After a certain age, no intelligent child continues believing in their parents, and it is embarrassing when one professes such faith after puberty. Santa Claus, however, will never fail us. "
― Catherynne M. Valente
3 " Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Musa Shanib from Abkhazia, the leading intellectual of this turbulent region whose incredible career passed from Soviet dissident intellectual through democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist war leader up to respected professor of philosophy, his entire career marked by the strange admiration for Pierre Bourdieu's thought. There are two ways to approach such a figure. The first reaction is to dismiss it as local eccentricity, to treat it with benevolent irony - " what a strange choice, Bourdieu - who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu..." . The second reaction is to directly assert the universal scope of theory - " see how universal theory is: every intellectual from Paris to Chechenia and Abkhazia can debate his theories..." The true task, of course, is to avoid both these options and to assert the universality of a theory as the result of a hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory: the point is not (only) that Shanib had to do a lot of work to break the constraints of his local context and penetrate Bourdieu - this appropriation of Bourdieu by an Abkhazian intellectual also affects the substance of the theory itself, transposing it into a different universe. Did - mutatis mutandis - Lenin not do something similar with Marx? The shift of Mao with regard to Lenin AND Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasants: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasants, they saw as one of the main tasks of the Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to land, to " proletarize" them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (from 1958) remarked that " Stalin's point of view /.../ is almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants." The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of proletarian position as the position of " substanceless subjectivity," of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity. "