Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities

Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities PDF Author: Carrie B. Douglass
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816549427
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The matador flourishes his cape, the bull charges, the crowd cheers: this is the image of Spain best known to the world. But while the bull has long been a symbol of Spanish culture, it carries more meaning than has previously been recognized. In this book, anthropologist Carrie B. Douglass views bulls and bullfighting as a means of discussing fundamental oppositions in Spanish society and explains the political significance of those issues for one of Europe's most regionalized countries. In talking about bulls and bullfighting, observes Douglass, one ends up talking not only about differences in region, class, and politics in Spain but also about that country's ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition. She relates how Spaniards and outsiders see bullfighting as representative of a traditional, irrational Spain contrasted with a more civilized Europe, and she shows how Spaniards' ambivalence about bullfighting is actually a way of expressing ambivalence about the loss of traditional culture in a modern world. To fully explore the symbolism of bulls and bullfighting, Douglass offers an overview of Spain's fiesta cycle, in which the bull is central. She broadly and meticulously details three different fiestas through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a number of years, delineating the differences in festivals held in different regions. She also shows how a cycle of these fiestas may hold the key to resolving some of Spain's fundamental political contradictions by uniting the different regions of Spain and reconciling opposing political camps--the right, which holds that there is one Spain, and the left, which contends that there are many. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities is an intriguing study of symbolism used to examine the broader anthropological issues of identity and nationhood. Through its focus on the political discourse of bulls and bullfighting, it makes an original contribution to understanding not only Spanish politics but also Spain's place in the modern world.

Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities

Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities PDF Author: Carrie B. Douglass
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816549427
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
The matador flourishes his cape, the bull charges, the crowd cheers: this is the image of Spain best known to the world. But while the bull has long been a symbol of Spanish culture, it carries more meaning than has previously been recognized. In this book, anthropologist Carrie B. Douglass views bulls and bullfighting as a means of discussing fundamental oppositions in Spanish society and explains the political significance of those issues for one of Europe's most regionalized countries. In talking about bulls and bullfighting, observes Douglass, one ends up talking not only about differences in region, class, and politics in Spain but also about that country's ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition. She relates how Spaniards and outsiders see bullfighting as representative of a traditional, irrational Spain contrasted with a more civilized Europe, and she shows how Spaniards' ambivalence about bullfighting is actually a way of expressing ambivalence about the loss of traditional culture in a modern world. To fully explore the symbolism of bulls and bullfighting, Douglass offers an overview of Spain's fiesta cycle, in which the bull is central. She broadly and meticulously details three different fiestas through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a number of years, delineating the differences in festivals held in different regions. She also shows how a cycle of these fiestas may hold the key to resolving some of Spain's fundamental political contradictions by uniting the different regions of Spain and reconciling opposing political camps--the right, which holds that there is one Spain, and the left, which contends that there are many. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities is an intriguing study of symbolism used to examine the broader anthropological issues of identity and nationhood. Through its focus on the political discourse of bulls and bullfighting, it makes an original contribution to understanding not only Spanish politics but also Spain's place in the modern world.

Issues in the Spanish-Speaking World

Issues in the Spanish-Speaking World PDF Author: Janice Randle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313091285
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Spanish language classes now have a reference source to encourage critical thinking and debate important, current topics in Spain, Mexico, and the rest of Latin and South America. Issues in the Spanish-Speaking World offers 14 original and engaging chapters, each introducing a major issue in the headlines and providing pro and con positions for student debate, papers, and class presentations. Highlights include the Basque question, indigenous rights, the Christopher Columbus controversy, bullfighting, and the war on drugs in Colombia. Each chapter concludes with a Resource Guide and useful vocabulary to facilitate expression in Spanish.

Cock and Bull Stories

Cock and Bull Stories PDF Author: Robert Zaretsky
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803249202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In the French Camargue?the delta surrounding the mouth of the Rhone River and part of the southern ?nation? of Occitania?the bull is a powerful icon of nationalism, literature, and culture. How this came to be?how the Camargue bull came to confront the French cock, venerable symbol of a unified and republican France?is the story told in this ingenious study. Robert Zaretsky considers how in fin-de-si_cle France the young writer Folco de Baroncelli, inspired by the history of the American West, in particular the fate of the Oglala Sioux and other Native American peoples, reinvented the history of Occitania. Galvanized by the example set by Buffalo Bill Cody, Baroncelli recast the Camargue as ?le far-west? of France, creating the ?immemorial? traditions he battled to protect. Zaretsky?s study examines the creative tension between center and periphery in the making of modern France: just as the political and intellectual elite of the Third Republic ?invented? a certain kind of France, so too did a coterie of southern writers, including Baroncelli, ?invent? a certain kind of Camargue. The story of how the Camargue bull challenged the French cock in this ideological and cultural Wild West deepens our appreciation of the complex dynamic that has created contemporary France.

The Animal Substitute

The Animal Substitute PDF Author: Marjolein Efting Dijkstra
Publisher: Eburon Uitgeverij B.V.
ISBN: 9059724224
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Presents an interdisciplinary study that combines art history, ethnology and sociology to examine the ways in which such "animal substitutes" as North American duck decoys and other utilitarian objects from a variety of cultures have influenced modern and contemporary art practices.

Framing Majismo

Framing Majismo PDF Author: Tara Zanardi
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271076682
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.

Regeneration through Sport

Regeneration through Sport PDF Author: Andrew McFarland
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000801349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book examines how and why sport in general, and football in particular, entered the country and developed successfully between 1890 and the 1920s, while placing that growth within the context of Spain’s larger historical experience. The introduction of sport in the late 19th century permanently changed the day-to-day lives of thousands of Spaniards. Initially, the country’s growing urban middle-classes embraced the new activity as they built community identities and were introduced to it through economic and educational connections to foreigners. To justify this, these proponents argued that the adoption of physical education and sport would physically regenerate the nation. In response, well-rounded sporting communities grew, developed medical arguments, and even debated the activity’s appropriateness for different groups like women. As sport spread, it produced the first football clubs around the turn of the century. Subsequently, in the 1910s and early 1920s, football established the structural institutions, like stadiums, stars, regulatory bodies, and a press, that enabled its rapid expansion as a mass consumer activity in the late 1920s. Regeneration through Sport looks at how this process embedded the sport within the national culture and established itself as a politically neutral activity before the Spanish Second Republic, allowing it to become almost ubiquitous today. This book will appeal to researchers, students and scholars alike who are interested in the history of sport, Spain, and European history.

Performing Animality

Performing Animality PDF Author: Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113737313X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

The Four Horsemen

The Four Horsemen PDF Author: Richard Stites
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199981485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
In a series of revolts starting in 1820, four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain, Naples, and Russia; and national independence to the Greeks. The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine--Colonel Rafael del Riego, General Guglielmo Pepe, General Alexandros Ypsilanti, and Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol--all hoped to overturn the old order. Over the next six years, their revolutions ended in failure. The men who led them became martyrs. In The Four Horsemen, the late, eminent historian Richard Stites offers a compelling narrative history of these four revolutions. Stites sets the stories side by side, allowing him to compare events and movements and so illuminate such topics as the transfer of ideas and peoples across frontiers, the formation of an international community of revolutionaries, and the appropriation of Christian symbols and language for secular purposes. He shows how expressive behavior and artifacts of all kinds--art, popular festivities, propaganda, and religion--worked their way to various degrees into all the revolutionary movements and regimes. And he documents as well the corruption, abandonment of liberal values, and outright betrayal of the revolution that emerged in Spain and Naples; the clash of ambitions and ideas that wracked the unity of the Decembrists' cause; and civil war that erupted in the midst of the Greek struggle for independence. Richard Stites was one of the most imaginative and broad-ranging historians working in the United States. This book is his last work, a classic example of his dazzling knowledge and idiosyncratic yet accessible writing style. The culmination of an esteemed career, The Four Horsemen promises to enthrall anyone interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the history of revolutions.

Rights as Weapons

Rights as Weapons PDF Author: Clifford Bob
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691166048
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
An in-depth look at the historic and strategic deployment of rights in political conflicts throughout the world Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak. Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights. Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.

Bloom's how to Write about Ernest Hemingway

Bloom's how to Write about Ernest Hemingway PDF Author: Kim Becnel
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791097463
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Offers advice on writing essays about the works of author Ernest Hemingway and lists sample topics from his novels and stories.