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Author: Michael J. Blain
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581121318
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
This dissertation reports the results of a sociological analysis of the narrative form and functions of revolutionary discourse. Chapter I poses two questions: How do representations of death function in political processes? How do signifiers of violent death function in the structure of revolutionary statements? Chapter II reviews relevant sociological concepts and articulates a dramatistic political-sociology of death, concepts mainly derived from Emile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, and Arnold van Gennep on death and the sacred, Max Weber on violence and politics, and Burke, Duncan, and Edelman's view of politics as symbolic action. Chapter III presents the results of a formal, narrative, and semiotic analysis of a large sample of revolutionary statements ( Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Foucault). Two symbolic complexes were clearly evident. First, revolutionaries employ a tragic narrative form, employing "the blood" of innocent victims and heroic martyrs to construct the villainy of their enemies, to provoke moral outrage, and to legitimate acts of righteous retaliation against established authority. Second, metaphors of fire, storm, explosion, and eruption are used to infuse revolutionary acts with powerful, impersonal forces. Chapter IV validates these results through an exploratory study of political meanings employing Osgood's semantic differential technique. Chapter V concludes that in revolutionary discourse, at least, revolutionary action is a form of tragic drama, an violent appeal to a 'public' audience made on behalf of 'powerless' people, a statement that one is willing to kill and die in the name of the ultimate principles of social order. The results of the semantic differential analysis show that these meanings can be studied empirically employing this technique. They also illustrate the validity and usefulness of the analytic framework, suggesting future avenues of research.
Author: Michael J. Blain
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581121318
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Get Book
Book Description
This dissertation reports the results of a sociological analysis of the narrative form and functions of revolutionary discourse. Chapter I poses two questions: How do representations of death function in political processes? How do signifiers of violent death function in the structure of revolutionary statements? Chapter II reviews relevant sociological concepts and articulates a dramatistic political-sociology of death, concepts mainly derived from Emile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, and Arnold van Gennep on death and the sacred, Max Weber on violence and politics, and Burke, Duncan, and Edelman's view of politics as symbolic action. Chapter III presents the results of a formal, narrative, and semiotic analysis of a large sample of revolutionary statements ( Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Foucault). Two symbolic complexes were clearly evident. First, revolutionaries employ a tragic narrative form, employing "the blood" of innocent victims and heroic martyrs to construct the villainy of their enemies, to provoke moral outrage, and to legitimate acts of righteous retaliation against established authority. Second, metaphors of fire, storm, explosion, and eruption are used to infuse revolutionary acts with powerful, impersonal forces. Chapter IV validates these results through an exploratory study of political meanings employing Osgood's semantic differential technique. Chapter V concludes that in revolutionary discourse, at least, revolutionary action is a form of tragic drama, an violent appeal to a 'public' audience made on behalf of 'powerless' people, a statement that one is willing to kill and die in the name of the ultimate principles of social order. The results of the semantic differential analysis show that these meanings can be studied empirically employing this technique. They also illustrate the validity and usefulness of the analytic framework, suggesting future avenues of research.
Author: Peter Wehner
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062820818
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
The New York Times opinion writer, media commentator, outspoken Republican and Christian critic of the Trump presidency offers a spirited defense of politics and its virtuous and critical role in maintaining our democracy and what we must do to save it before it is too late. “Any nation that elects Donald Trump to be its president has a remarkably low view of politics.” Frustrated and feeling betrayed, Americans have come to loathe politics with disastrous results, argues Peter Wehner. In this timely manifesto, the veteran of three Republican administrations and man of faith offers a reasoned and persuasive argument for restoring “politics” as a worthy calling to a cynical and disillusioned generation of Americans. Wehner has long been one of the leading conservative critics of Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican Party. In this impassioned book, he makes clear that unless we overcome the despair that has caused citizens to abandon hope in the primary means for improving our world—the political process—we will not only fall victim to despots but hasten the decline of what has truly made America great. Drawing on history and experience, he reminds us of the hard lessons we have learned about how we rule ourselves—why we have checks and balances, why no one is above the law, why we defend the rights of even those we disagree with. Wehner believes we can turn the country around, but only if we abandon our hatred and learn to appreciate and honor the unique and noble American tradition of doing “politics.” If we want the great American experiment to continue and to once again prosper, we must once more take up the responsibility each and every one of us as citizens share.
Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500432
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.
Author: Gary Winslett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047213227X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Competitiveness and Death examines the increase and reduction of regulatory barriers to trade across three industries: environmental, labor, and safety rules on automobiles, consumer protection regulations on meat, and intellectual property regulations on medicines. The fundamental negotiation in trade and regulatory policymaking occurs between businesses, activists, and government officials. Gary Winslett builds on new trade theories to explain when and why businesses are most likely to lobby governments to reduce these regulatory trade barriers. He argues that businesses prevail when they can connect with broader concerns about national economic competitiveness. He examines how activist organizations overcome collective action problems and defend regulatory differences, arguing that they succeed when they can link their desire for barriers with preventing needless death. Competitiveness and Death provides a political companion to new trade theories in economics, questioning cleavage-based explanations of trade politics, demonstrating the underappreciated importance of activists, suggesting the limits of globalization, providing in-depth examination of previously ignored trade negotiations, qualifying the California Effect (the shift toward stricter regulatory standards), and showing the relative rarity of regulations used as disguised protectionism.
Author: Micki McElya
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Arlington National Cemetery is America’s most sacred shrine, a destination for four million visitors who each year tour its grounds and honor those buried there. For many, Arlington’s symbolic importance places it beyond politics. Yet as Micki McElya shows, no site in the United States plays a more political role in shaping national identity.
Author: Jay D. Aronson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch proclaimed that his staff would do more than confirm the victims’ identity. They would attempt to return to families every human body part larger than a thumbnail. As Jay D. Aronson shows, delivering on that promise proved to be a monumentally difficult task.
Author: John Troyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542315
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
“One of our greatest thinkers” on death presents a radical new approach to thinking about dying and the human corpse (Caitlin Doughty, mortician and bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes). A fascinating exploration of the relationship between technology and the human corpse throughout history—from 19th-century embalming machines to 21st-century death-prevention technologies. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.
Author: Carl Death
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134684134
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486
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Book Description
The aim of this book is to review central concepts in the study of environmental politics and to open up new questions, problems, and research agendas in the field. The volume does so by drawing on a wide range of approaches from critical theory to poststructuralism, and spanning disciplines including international relations, geography, sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political science. The 28 chapters cover a range of global and local studies, illustrations and cases. These range from the Cochabamba conference in Bolivia to climate camps in the UK; UN summits in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg to climate migrants from Pacific islands; forests in Indonesia to Dutch energy governance reform; indigenous communities in Namibia to oil extraction in the Niger Delta; survivalist militias in the USA to Maasai tribesmen in Kenya. Rather than following a regional or issue-based (e.g. water, forests, pollution, etc) structure, the volume is organised in terms of key concepts in the field, including those which have been central to the social sciences for a long time (such as citizenship, commodification, consumption, feminism, justice, movements, science, security, the state, summits, and technology); those which have been at the heart of environmental politics for many years (including biodiversity, climate change, conservation, eco-centrism, limits, localism, resources, sacrifice, and sustainability); and many which have been introduced to these literatures and debates more recently (biopolitics, governance, governmentality, hybridity, posthumanism, risk, and vulnerability). Features and benefits of the book: Explains the most important concepts and theories in environmental politics. Reviews the core ideas behind crucial debates in environmental politics. Highlights the key thinkers – both classic and contemporary – for studying environmental politics. Provides original perspectives on the critical potential of the concepts for future research agendas as well as for the practice of environmental politics. Each chapter is written by leading international authors in their field. This exciting new volume will be essential textbook reading for all students of environmental politics, as well as provocatively presenting the field in a different light for more established researchers.
Author: Peter Dale Scott
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520917842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a wholly new perspective—that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes—Scott examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies. Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the "structural defects" within the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces. Revisiting the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam—offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political coalition—were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in 1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why. Scott presses for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of American politics. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK shatters our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.
Author: Margaret Schwartz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145294539X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
Taking as its starting point the significant role of the photograph in modern mourning practices—particularly those surrounding public figures—Dead Matter theorizes the connections between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is simultaneously thing and representation. Arguing that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in death than others. To begin interpreting the corpse as a representational object referring to the deceased, Margaret Schwartz examines the association between photography and embalming—both as aesthetics and as mourning practices. She introduces the concept of photographic indexicality, using it as a metric for comprehending the relationship between the body of a dead leader (including Abraham Lincoln, Vladimir Lenin, and Eva Perón) and the “body politic” for which it stands. She considers bodies known as victims of atrocity like Emmett Till and the Syrian boy Hamsa al-Khateeb to better grasp the ways in which the corpse as object may be called on to signify a marginalized body politic, at the expense of the social identity of the deceased. And she contemplates “tabloid bodies” such as Princess Diana’s and Michael Jackson’s, asserting that these corpses must remain invisible in order to maintain the deceased as a source of textual and value production. Ultimately concluding that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, Dead Matter outlines the new politics of representation, in which death is exiled in favor of the late capitalist reality of bare life.
