Contenu du sommaire

The state and social structure in URSS, 1929-1933 The first Soviet Five Year Plan, which succeeded the New Economie Policy (NEP) in 1928, was, as is well known, characterized by accelerated industrialization, the development of agriculture, and, more generally, by a profound transformation of Russia's social structure. It also constituted, however, a decisive stage in the formation of the Soviet political System. The critical economic situation created by premature and poorly conceived planning obliged the government to intervene more and more massively in the economic structures and to resort to political coercion in order to get individuals to carry out their tasks.This steadily expanding nationalization of the economy, which weakened the efficacy of moral and economie stimulants, entailed a proliferation of administrative bureaucracies responsible for directly supervising all sectors of the economy. The new state-dominated system thereby created was undoubtedly the most important result of the Five Year Plan that transformed a ruling party into a politico-administrative bureaucracy of an entirely new kind.

"Tristes Topiques" André Glucksmann's essay on 'Marxism, the State and Concentration Camps' -fêted as it has been by the left-wing or extreme left and right-wing press alike- must be situated within the tradition of false paradoxes presented by conservative revolutionaries, in the series of 'fin de siècle' works which expresses the disillusioned ideological mood of a new intellectual 'establishment' inclined to substitute for the vulgar opposition between right and left the opposition between the 'chic' left and the vulgar left.

Pratical logic The author shows, first, that the attempt to establish an agrarian calendar encompassing ail the information gathered from various informants necessarily leads to contradictions. These are the product of a synoptic representation that synchronizes and treats as a unified whole the results of successive applications of similar, more or less interchangeable generative schemes. Ritual practice is governed by a practical logic (practical in both senses of the word : non-theoretical and convenient). This is a logic of flux of the approximate, of the indetermined, and of the overdetermined, and it is rooted in the schemes of the body. Ritual mimesis brings into play the ambiguity of the basic actions of evereday life (opening-closing, ente ring-leaving, climbing-descending, etc.) in order to integrate symbolically various realms of practice. The logic of ritual is every where because it is really nowhere. Ritual displays a series of logical (and, though imitation,biological) operations of union and separation that enables the society to overcome the contradictions engendered by the mythical classification (diacrisis). For example, the agrarian year witnesses an opposition between, on the one hand, the "pure" periods, which are either feminine and moist, like the nights of midwinter, or masculine and dry, like the midsummer dog days, and, on the other hand, the transitional periods, spring and autumn, which are marked by rites de passage aimed at ensuring the masculinization of the feminine and the feminization of the masculine. This structure appears also in the cycle of women's tasks and of culinary practices and in the organisation of the day and of the cycle of life. The application of the same generative schemes to different domains yields homologies that, when pushed beyond their objective limits, i.e., those of practical logic, give rise to contradictions of the kind that thefirst philosophical Systems attempted to overcome.

Literacy and classification On the basis of examples drawn from Durkheim and Mauss, Griaule and Needham, Jack Goody analyzes the transformations to which the statements of the informant -and more generally an oral tradition as whole- are subjected by written transformation in the form of tables especially, tables establishing correspondences between parts of the world parts of the body, and so forth. Examination of the operations involved this translation leads to critique of the implicit presuppositions of structural analysis. First the author considers the difficulties that result from modelling the relationship : entire corpus of evidence/informer's statements on the relationship language/speech. Turning then to the postulate of the centrality and general applicability of the categories derived from the testimony, he finds that nothing prevents us from thinking that these are valid only in certain field. He next discusses how in the process of transcription the point of view becomes confused with that of the actor. Finally, he points out the paralogism of supposing that "La pensée sauvage", and practical thought in general, conforms to logical constraints (fixed correspondences and constant equivalents) that are in large part the product of the techniques used in transmitting and transcribing that thought (writing treated by the author elsewhere, and the synoptic table of correspondences studied here).

Overcrowding This research note analyses the relationship between the theme of overcrowding (roads, holiday resorts, schools... so frequent in the bourgeois criticism of modem times and the objective phenomena of concurrence between classes for the appropriation of space. The upper classes, in particular, who make the most intense use of cars, only criticize cars for lack of being able to criticize the access to cars.