Overview
This stimulating and well-written text is particularly suitable as a subsidiary text for courses in politics, sociology and ethnic studies. It analyses one of the most critical issues exposed by the political changes since 1989, namely the position of minority populations in the former Eastern bloc, including Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, and looks at their interactions with majorities. These questions are explored in terms of historical, sociological and political processes. The volume breaks new ground by providing information from local scholars and new theoretical insights, including extended comparisons with Western Europe. This text would be excellent for undergraduate courses. It includes a foreword by Sir Peter Ustinov.Synopsis
The strain that questions of national identity experience in the face of ethnic and/or religious minorities is the central premise of this series of essays. Lord (philosophy, Charles U., Prague, Czech Republic) has included a long (125 pp.) and somewhat rambling paper (it's a transcript of a lecture originally given at a convention in 1998) on parallel cultures worldwide. The remaining five papers discuss identity, ethnicity, and culture in Transylvania, among the Bulgarian Pomaks and the Poleshuks, in the Donetsk Region of the Ukraine, and in Russia. The contributors teach sociology and history at universities in central Europe.
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Andr Liebic
'Parallel cultures' may well become a catchword in discussion of identity, nationalism, or minorities as much as, say, <%REVIEW%> imagined community<%REVIEW%> or <%REVIEW%> invention of tradition...Lord's essay founds a moral anthropology.