Abstract
Cross-cultural research challenges the foreign researcher’s ability to identify political patterns, partly because the insertion of one’s own cultural conceptualizations into the interpretation and analysis of these patterns is difficult to avoid. Most obviously, outside researchers should never assume the cultural meanings of particular events, political figures and societal issues, but instead should investigate them.
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Notes and References
G. Kress and R. Hodge, Language as Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979), p. 63.
See also M. Urban, ‘The Politics of Identity in Russia’s Post Communist Transition: The Nation Against Itself’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, no. 3 (Fall 1994), 733–65.
While Lenin adapted Marxist ideology to Russian political culture, it is debatable whether Soviet political institutions were an extension of that political culture or a negation. Nicolai Petro contends that the Soviets repressed the democratic political culture that had been developing in the imperial period. Ironically, while accepting that the Soviets had altered Russia’s political roots, Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev conceded a connection between Soviet communism and Russian indigenous communist traditions. See Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995);
and Berdiaev, The Origins of Russian Communism (London: The Centenary Press, 1937).
J.J. Rousseau, ‘Discourses on the Origin of Inequality’, in D.A. Kress, ed., The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 55. Rousseau claimed that the golden rule is a self-interested conceptualization of freedom.
Interview with Velena Pimenova, 23 October 1993, Syktyvkar. For a brief discussion of her husband, see A. Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 314–18.
For theoretical explanations of workplace democracy, see C. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1970);
and, P. and A. Botwinick, Power and Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1992).
A. Swidler, ‘Inequality and American Culture: The Persistence of Voluntarism’, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 35, no. 4/5 (March/June 1992), 606–29.
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© 2000 James Alexander
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Alexander, J. (2000). Concepts in the Making: How Russians Define their Political World. In: Political Culture in Post-Communist Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507913_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507913_5
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