Search Results

The Dutch language has become the key technology of the Netherlands' new integration and immigration policy regime. Given the impassioned debates that accompanied language-planning policies in the 1980s, what is most remarkable about the stringent new language policy initiatives is the consensus regarding their necessity. This article analyzes the most ambitious program of the integration regime, inburgering, in the context of the transition to a post-industrial economy and the concomitant restructuring of the labor market. Introduced under the Third Way social democrats in the mid-1990s, the inburgering program was designed to produce the literate laborer of late modernity. This article traces the shift from the 'one nation, one language' ideology associated with welfare state forms of governance to the 'language as commodity' ideology promoted by the Third Way regime. I argue that the inburgering program acted as the Trojan horse of integration politics, introducing the necessity for Dutch language skills into an integration regime that has become the basis for a new politics of exclusion under the current neo-conservative administration.

The article deals with the 1940 and the 1986 stagings of The Merchant of Venice in Hungary and with the forty-six-year gap between them. Comparing these events, the article draws attention to the ways in which the dominant ideology of these entirely different regimes influenced the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play and its staging.

In Israel, the contemporary Haredi kollel (institute for advanced Torah study for adult men) is caught between two institutional visions: one sees the kollel as a selective, temporary framework to train future educators, rabbis, and leaders, while the other views the kollel as a non-selective phenomenon of indefinite study for people who have few career options. This tension has resulted in several types of contemporary kollels and a number of religious ideologies that promote full-time study for adult men. The article examines three different models of Haredi kollels and analyzes how they manage the friction between temporary and permanent kollel study. It articulates an abstract typology of ideological justifications that are advanced to support long-term kollel study.

This paper traces the epistemic practices and ideologies that Stasi (East Germany's former secret police) used to construct the GDR peace and civil rights movements during the 1980s as one of the GDR's key enemies. In particular, the paper addresses the question of how communications in organized social encounters that are hierarchized by a cultivation of secrecy (legitimized by a Manichaean worldview) and corresponding myths about the distribution of knowledge and the proximity to an absolute social good have shaped interpretive processes. The particular epistemic style of Stasi is analyzed as a peculiar conflation of ethics and epistemology which was, ironically, profoundly undialectic, that is monothetic, and thus unable to react constructively to interpretive failures in response to a fast changing environment.

Using an ethnography of speaking approach, this article discusses the ideological aspects of language practices, as they are played out in a traditional Yupik (Eskimo) village in Chukotka, in the Far East of the Russian Federation. The article shows how local linguistic practices and language choices of individual speakers intersect with purist language ideologies, which frame certain beliefs about languages and ways of speaking, making them appear more normal and appropriate than others. Placing the “work of speaking” within the context of cross-cultural dynamics and purist language economies, this article challenges the basic assumption of linguistic purism about language and identity being intertwined.

This article discusses urban ethnic Sakha bilinguals and their language ideologies and choices, especially with regard to the language socialization of their children—both at home and within the educational system. The usage of the Sakha language within urban spaces has been on the rise in the post-Soviet years, but still tends to be acquired in the home environment as a first language, whereas Russian is acquired later in the public sphere and reinforced in the educational system. The article explores some of the ideological and structural barriers toward Sakha acquisition and maintenance that speakers face, with apprehension regarding bilingualism and the mastery of two languages in educational contexts being a key concern for many Sakha parents. The article also discusses language instruction—especially in schools—in light of the need to begin to accommodate those with little or no Sakha knowledge in order to continue to increase the usage of Sakha by urban speakers.

There is a widespread tendency to see the perils of postsocialism in the revival of the ghosts and myths from the past—namely ethnocentrism, nationalism, exclusiveness, bickering, collectivist-authoritarianism, expansionist chauvinism, and victimisation. I suggest that postsocialism's perils rest with a myth from the future, namely, the myth of capitalism. Those perils, I argue, are rooted in the fetishisation of capitalism by the postsocialist societies as a reflection of their deeply ingrained teleological way of perceiving the future. Political leaders are taking advantage of this situation by putting themselves in the position of those who would lead toward such a utopia. As a consequence, individual freedoms are sacrificed at the altar of communitarian bliss. I suggest that the only hope that we have to secularise the newly re-religiosised postsocialist societies rests with intellectuals.