Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 11: The Future of the Idea of the Left (2015)

Identities “is a peer reviewed international journal that seeks to serve as a platform for the theoretical production of Southeastern Europe and enable its visibility and an opening for international debate with authors from both the ‘intellectual centers’ and the ‘intellectual margins’ of the world. It is particularly interested in promoting theoretical investigations which see issues of politic, gender and culture as inextricably interrelated.”

With contributions by Jacques Rancière, Katerina Kolozova, Oxana Timofeeva, Craig Gent, Creston Davis, Artan Sadiku, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Tibor Rutar, Zdravko Saveski, and Richard Seymour.

Edited by Katerina Kolozova and Žarko Trajanovski
Publisher Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, 2015
Open Access
ISSN 1857-8616
129 pages

Publisher

PDF

Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community (1986–) [EN, ES, CR, RO]

“In this powerful work, Jean-Luc Nancy examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual. Contrary to popular Western notions of community, Nancy shows that it is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power.”

Publisher Christian Bourgois, Paris, 1986
New edition, 2004
ISBN 22670008939
278 pages

English edition
Edited by Peter Connor
Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney
Foreword by Christopher Fynsk
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Theory and History of Literature series, 76
176 pages

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (FR)
WorldCat (EN)

The Inoperative Community (English, ed. Peter Connor, 1991)
La comunidad inoperante (Spanish, trans. Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer, 2000)
Dva ogleda. Razdjelovljena zajednica. O singularnom pluralnom bitku (Croatian, trans. Tomislav Medak, 2003)
Comunitatea absentă (Romanian, trans. Emilian Cioc, 2005, 69 MB)

Victor Turner: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969–) [EN, PT, ES, DE, CZ, PL]

“In The Ritual Process, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of “Communitas.” He characterizes it as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure.

The Ritual Process has acquired the status of a small classic since these lectures were first published in 1969. Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep’s notion of the “liminal phase” of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the “vestigial” organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice.

As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: “Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner’s range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports.””

First published by Aldine Publishing, New York, 1969
Publisher Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991 (Seventh printing)
ISBN 0801491630
213 pages

Review (Theodore Schwartz, American Anthropologist, 1972)
Review (Anthony Graham-White, Educational Theatre Journal, 1975)
Review (Volker Barth, FQS, 2002, in German)

The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (English, 1969/1991)
O processo ritual: Estrutura e antriestrutura (Portuguese, trans. Nancy Campi de Castro, 1974)
El proceso ritual: Estructura y antiestructura (Spanish, trans. Beatriz García Ríos, 1988)
Das Ritual: Struktur und Anti-Struktur (German, trans. Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff, 1989/2000)
Průběh rituálu (Czech, trans. Lucie Kučerová, 2004, no OCR, added on 2014-8-13 via Michal, updated on 2016-9-18)
Proces rytualny: Struktura i antystruktura (Polish, trans. Ewa Dżurak, 2010, updated on 2016-9-18)

See also Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982. (added on 2014-2-25)