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Chapter 4 - Shapes of Ideology

People, Texts and Ideas

from Part I - Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2025

Martin Holbraad
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.

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  • Shapes of Ideology
  • Martin Holbraad, University College London
  • Book: Shapes in Revolution
  • Online publication: 07 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009613101.006
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  • Shapes of Ideology
  • Martin Holbraad, University College London
  • Book: Shapes in Revolution
  • Online publication: 07 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009613101.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Shapes of Ideology
  • Martin Holbraad, University College London
  • Book: Shapes in Revolution
  • Online publication: 07 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009613101.006
Available formats
×