Andrei Cusco's Books

A Contested Borderland

Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

By: Andrei Cusco

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A Contested Borderland

Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

By: Andrei Cusco

Bessarabia?mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova?was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ?symbolic inclusion,? but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era. ÿ

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348

Publisher

Central European University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9633861594

ISBN 13

9789633861592

Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes

Studies in Interdisciplinary and Comparative History of Russia and Eastern Europe

By: Andrei Cusco,Victor Taki

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Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes

Studies in Interdisciplinary and Comparative History of Russia and Eastern Europe

By: Andrei Cusco,Victor Taki

Anchored in the Russian Empire, but not limited to it, the eight studies in this volume explore the nineteenth-century imperial responses to the challenge of modernity, the dramatic disruptions of World War I, the radical scenarios of the interwar period and post-communist endgames at the different edges of Eurasia. The book continues and amplifies the historiographic momentum created by Alfred J. Rieber’s long and fruitful scholarly career. First, the volume addresses the attempts of Russian imperial rulers and elites to overcome the economic backwardness of the empire with respect to the West. The ensuing rivalry of several interest groups (entrepreneurs, engineers, economists) created new social forms in the subsequent rounds of modernization. The studies explore the dynamics of the metamorphoses of what Rieber famously conceptualized as a “sedimentary society” in the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet settings. Second, the volume also expands and dwells on the concept of frontier zones as dynamic, mutable, shifting areas, characterized by multi-ethnicity, religious diversity, unstable loyalties, overlapping and contradictory models of governance, and an uneasy balance between peaceful co-existence and bloody military clashes. In this connection, studies pay special attention to forced and spontaneous migrations, and population politics in modern Eurasia.

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295

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Central European University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9633866278

ISBN 13

9789633866276

A Contested Borderland

Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

By: Andrei Cusco

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A Contested Borderland

Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

By: Andrei Cusco

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Page Count

348

Publisher

Central European University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9633861594

ISBN 13

9789633861592

The Beauty of the Primitive

Shamanism and Western Imagination

By: Andrei A. Znamenski

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The Beauty of the Primitive

Shamanism and Western Imagination

By: Andrei A. Znamenski

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.

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Page Count

453

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198038496

ISBN 13

9780198038498

Book's by Andrei Cusco

A Contested Borderland

A Contested Borderland

Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes

Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes

A Contested Borderland

A Contested Borderland

The Beauty of the Primitive

The Beauty of the Primitive

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