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From Utopian Hopes to Practical Politics: A National Revolution in a Rural Village

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Roert Roy Reed
Roert Roy Reed
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

To begin a revolution is very difficult. To sustain it is even more difficult. To win it is almost impossible. But once you have won, then your troubles really begin.

Stephen Bann states that Utopia “forms the concrete expression of a moment of possibility, which is however annihilated in the very process of being enunciated” (Bann 1993:1, emphasis added). He traces this characteristic to Sir Thomas More, whose neologism Utopia puns on being both the Good Place (eutopia) and No Place (Outopia), and to the modern denial of this No Place, which he labels ”a ritual of double negation” (Bann 1993:1). The present essay focuses on one ethnographic instance of Utopia's annihilation by enunciation. I will demonstrate that, when the enunciation of Utopia requires the implementation of public policy, the process of creating the Good Place is undermined by the mundane demands of practical politics.

Type
Post-Revolutionary Stress Syndromes
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 670 - 691
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1995

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