A window onto internal conflicts and social issues, Culture and Society offers a fresh perspective on the religious, ethnic, gender, class, and cultural divisions that characterize societies. Recent issues have included articles on American public diplomacy efforts in Iraq, the future of Afghan women's rights, and the new generation of American foreign policymakers. Analysts, journalists, scholars, and policymakers of diverse expertise are selected to contribute.

Issue 8.1 Rehearsing Revolution in Peru by Jill Lane Augusto Boal, a well-known Brazilian theater director, enjoys telling the story about the relationship between theater and politics in Latin America. In the mid-1960s when the political climate was increasingly hostile to the work of artists, Boal and his theater company set off for rural communities where their left-wing theater might escape the scrutiny of the censors. Avowed “revolutionaries,” the actors drew on the aesthetic and politics of an agitprop theater. Drawn in bold, minimalist strokes, their tale championed exploited farm workers and exhorted them to reclaim their dignity by taking immediate action against their landowners. On one occasion the audience of campesinos (peasants) invited the actors to stay for lunch. Over the meal, the campesinos came to a heated decision: that very day, they decided to take their rifles and machetes and head up to the landowners’ hacienda (estate) to claim their rights. They shared their plan with Boal, asking the actors to bring their weapons and join them in the revolt. While artist-worker solidarity and grassroots mobilization were principal intentions of the play, the actors were dumbfounded. Blanched with fear, Boal explained that they had no weapons since, after all, they were just actors performing a play. Horrified by his own hypocrisy, Boal swore to never again present or advocate anything on stage that he himself could not support offstage. Theater itself was not a space to orchestrate revolution, he decided, but it could be a space in which to rehearse revolution—to imagine and practice possible forms of action that could instigate social change. The goal of his theater was to shift the traditional role of the audience: Viewers would no longer be passive witnesses of a never changing storyline on a distant stage. Rather, in the “Theater of the Oppressed”—as his art has come to be known—the spectators would be encouraged to determine how the plot unfolds, thus becoming actors themselves. […] From Bread Dolls to Prostitutes: A Cultural Diagnosis of Post-Soviet Russia By Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover Postmodernism is a peculiar label. It is not a chronological concept in that “post” does not designate something that comes after a period called “Modernism.”  If “post” means anything at all, it signifies the “end of history” or “poste histoire,” which implies the demise of linear thinking about history as progress and human development as proceeding along a continuum. In fact, postmodernism is an umbrella term encompassing the thinking about culture in a post-industrial heterogeneous consumer society, which has been described by the American critic Frederic Jameson as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Though it was not given a name at the time, Russian postmodernism emerged in the 1960s as a challenge to the stagnant and closed nature of Soviet society. It was the first manifestation of genuine cultural criticism since 1934, when socialist realism became the dominant method of cultural production in the Soviet Union, stifling all other approaches to cultural disciplines. In the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost’ in the 1980s, postmodernism became the cultural paradigm of new Russia. Ultimately, postmodernism emerged not only as a cultural critique but also as a source of a new, postcommunist value system […]

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