Language, myths and rhetoric

Political language can evoke a set of mythic beliefs in subtle and powerful ways. Murray Edelman is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a consultant to various national and state commissions concerned with economics planning and collective bargaining. He has published widely in the fields of political psychology, labor management relations and public policy. His recent workds include The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescenceand American Polities: Public Policy, Conflict and Change.     

Four myths in the history of social thought

Four commonly held interpretations of the development of European social thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are analysed and criticised, with particular reference to Durkheim's writings. These four myths are: the notion that Durkheim's sociology developed in substantial degree as a response to the ‘problem of order’; the conception that Durkheim's work is to be understood in terms of its origins in ‘conservative’ social thought; the view that Durkheim's writings, together with those of some of his contemporaries, mark a radical break in the transition from ‘social philosophy’ to ‘sociology’; and the idea that the type of intellectual tradition represented by Durkheim, concerned with the ‘problem of order’, can be usefully compared with a divergent tradition concerned with ‘conflict’ and ‘change’. It is argued that while these myths each contain a kernel of truth, this can only be extracted if Durkheim's writings are examined in relation to the historical context in which he developed his sociological concerns.     

Resisting the resistible: re-writing myths of partition in the works of Ritwik Ghatak

For all of the individual, collective and national trauma caused by the Indian Partition, perhaps the most significant legacy has been the way the two new nations of India and Pakistan have written the (hi)stories of Partition to serve contemporary political needs. Both countries have a huge amount of investment in their versions of the past, and public dissemination of knowledge of the past amply demonstrates this. This article will examine the way Partition has featured in the work of Bengali cinema-director, author and playwright Ritwik Ghatak and the way Ghatak resists and rewrites in various ways this state-sanctioned version of his country's and his own past. The Bengal Partition provides the context within which all of Ghatak's work is situated. Interestingly, however, Ghatak never depicts the act of partition itself, choosing instead as his subject the streams of refugees who left what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, and came to Kolkata in West Bengal. Ghatak's most characteristic story, then, is the story of the educated, middle-to-upper-class East Bengali refugee, who has lost everything by having to move west. This story is the story of Ghatak's own family and the family of the thousands of others, including the present writer, and, as such, it is not surprising that it has become the predominant Bengali narrative of Partition. By focusing on Ghatak's oeuvre, then, this article will examine this narrative of partition, thereby showing how Ghatak uses it to resist the most pernicious, and also most permanent myth of the Indian Partition – that it was an act which led to two different, mutually exclusive, heterogeneous but unified nations.     

Impacts of abstinence education on teen sexual activity, risk of pregnancy, and risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

This paper examines the impacts of four abstinence-only education programs on adolescent sexual activity and risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Based on an experimental design, the impact analysis uses survey data collected in 2005 and early 2006 from more than 2,000 teens who had been randomly assigned to either a program group that was eligible to participate in one of the four programs or a control group that was not. The findings show no significant impact on teen sexual activity, no differences in rates of unprotected sex, and some impacts on knowledge of STDs and perceived effectiveness of condoms and birth control pills