David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. ...
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What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.Less
What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.
Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107381
- eISBN:
- 9781526120694
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107381.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, ...
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This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?Less
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?
Tung-Hui Hu
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262029513
- eISBN:
- 9780262330091
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029513.003.0004
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Programming Languages
This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come ...
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This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come out of the same ideological apparatus as military targeting. Two oppositional groups serve as case studies for this argument: first, a group of radio-frequency hackers that data mined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and second, the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen, who photographs U.S. reconnaissance satellites and other covert military infrastructures. As this chapter argues, these oppositional tactics may be effective, but sometimes re-animate the very structures of power that they purport to expose or overturn. The reason is due to something this chapter terms the sovereignty of data, which both co-opts user participation and also gives practices such as torture and extraordinary rendition new life within the cloud.Less
This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come out of the same ideological apparatus as military targeting. Two oppositional groups serve as case studies for this argument: first, a group of radio-frequency hackers that data mined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and second, the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen, who photographs U.S. reconnaissance satellites and other covert military infrastructures. As this chapter argues, these oppositional tactics may be effective, but sometimes re-animate the very structures of power that they purport to expose or overturn. The reason is due to something this chapter terms the sovereignty of data, which both co-opts user participation and also gives practices such as torture and extraordinary rendition new life within the cloud.
Raminder Kaur
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199498710
- eISBN:
- 9780199099986
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199498710.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of ...
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The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.Less
The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.
Ian Finseth
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190848347
- eISBN:
- 9780190848378
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190848347.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and ...
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Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.Less
Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.
Anstett Élisabeth and Dreyfus Jean-Marc (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719096020
- eISBN:
- 9781781707876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719096020.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims ...
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Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? Indeed, in the context of mass violence and genocide, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Following the abuses carried out by the latter, their victims' remains are treated and manipulated in very particular ways, amounting in some cases to social engineering. The book explores this phase of destruction, whether by disposal, concealment or complete annihilation of the body, across a range of extreme situations to display the intentions and socio-political framework of governments, perpetrators and bystanders. The book will be split into three sections; 1) Who were the perpetrators and why were they chosen? It will be explored whether a division of labour created social hierarchies or criminal careers, or whether in some cases this division existed at all. 2) How did the perpetrators kill and dispose of the bodies? What techniques and technologies were employed, and how does this differ between contrasting and evolving circumstances? 3) Why did the perpetrators implement such methods and what does this say about their motivations and ideologies? The book will focus in particular on the twentieth century, displaying innovative and interdisciplinary approaches and dealing with case studies from different geographical areas across the globe. The focus will be placed on a re-evaluation of the motivations, the ideological frameworks and the technical processes displayed in the destruction of bodies.Less
Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? Indeed, in the context of mass violence and genocide, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Following the abuses carried out by the latter, their victims' remains are treated and manipulated in very particular ways, amounting in some cases to social engineering. The book explores this phase of destruction, whether by disposal, concealment or complete annihilation of the body, across a range of extreme situations to display the intentions and socio-political framework of governments, perpetrators and bystanders. The book will be split into three sections; 1) Who were the perpetrators and why were they chosen? It will be explored whether a division of labour created social hierarchies or criminal careers, or whether in some cases this division existed at all. 2) How did the perpetrators kill and dispose of the bodies? What techniques and technologies were employed, and how does this differ between contrasting and evolving circumstances? 3) Why did the perpetrators implement such methods and what does this say about their motivations and ideologies? The book will focus in particular on the twentieth century, displaying innovative and interdisciplinary approaches and dealing with case studies from different geographical areas across the globe. The focus will be placed on a re-evaluation of the motivations, the ideological frameworks and the technical processes displayed in the destruction of bodies.
Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781683401490
- eISBN:
- 9781683402169
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9781683401490.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural ...
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Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.Less
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.
Adrián Félix
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190879365
- eISBN:
- 9780190932084
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190879365.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican ...
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In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.Less
In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.
Anya Bernstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226072555
- eISBN:
- 9780226072692
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226072692.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, ...
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This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, historiographies, and cosmologies of time and space. While proposing to look at these phenomena in the context of the widely known Tibetan phenomenon of “treasures”— objects found underground that are accorded a revelatory status— the chapter expands the understanding of “treasures” through highlighting the special role of dead bodies as quintessential objects of the post-Soviet treasure hunt. It looks at the necropolitics that have developed around the bodies of two lamas: Itigelov who died in the 1920s and on whose “miraculously incorruptible” body, unearthed in 2003, the autonomy of Buryat Buddhism is said to currently rest; and Sodooi-Lama, at whose burial site, a new “self-arisen” image of the goddess Yanzhima had recently been discovered. Through making claims that these bodies and objects associated with them intentionally manifested themselves in these troubled postsocialist times, Buryat Buddhists create a renovated cosmology that overwrites their otherwise seemingly peripheral location in the Mongol-Tibetan world.Less
This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, historiographies, and cosmologies of time and space. While proposing to look at these phenomena in the context of the widely known Tibetan phenomenon of “treasures”— objects found underground that are accorded a revelatory status— the chapter expands the understanding of “treasures” through highlighting the special role of dead bodies as quintessential objects of the post-Soviet treasure hunt. It looks at the necropolitics that have developed around the bodies of two lamas: Itigelov who died in the 1920s and on whose “miraculously incorruptible” body, unearthed in 2003, the autonomy of Buryat Buddhism is said to currently rest; and Sodooi-Lama, at whose burial site, a new “self-arisen” image of the goddess Yanzhima had recently been discovered. Through making claims that these bodies and objects associated with them intentionally manifested themselves in these troubled postsocialist times, Buryat Buddhists create a renovated cosmology that overwrites their otherwise seemingly peripheral location in the Mongol-Tibetan world.
Carol Mason
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813175324
- eISBN:
- 9780813175676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175324.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: ...
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This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.Less
This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.
David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a ...
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This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a form of sovereignty that is distinct from biopolitics, necropolitics and the state of exception. Sacropolitics differs from biopolitics in the sense that it is not about the management of life. It differs from necropolitics in that it is not about the subjugation of life to death. Sacropolitics is neither about managing nor taking life but rather animating it. It is about bringing to life dead, dying or moribund populations and social formations. Sacropolitical efforts call upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice. These performances are intended to contribute to the creation of new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.Less
This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a form of sovereignty that is distinct from biopolitics, necropolitics and the state of exception. Sacropolitics differs from biopolitics in the sense that it is not about the management of life. It differs from necropolitics in that it is not about the subjugation of life to death. Sacropolitics is neither about managing nor taking life but rather animating it. It is about bringing to life dead, dying or moribund populations and social formations. Sacropolitical efforts call upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice. These performances are intended to contribute to the creation of new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.
David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.003.0010
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the ...
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The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.Less
The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.
Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107381
- eISBN:
- 9781526120694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107381.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either ...
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The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices? With explicit reference to each chapter, a historic and disciplinary background will be presented, raising issues such as the increased application of forensic sciences on the discovered dead body, the emergence of debates surrounding necro-political strategies by states and political communities, and the economy and chain of custody over human remains resulting from historic and contemporary forms of violence.Less
The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices? With explicit reference to each chapter, a historic and disciplinary background will be presented, raising issues such as the increased application of forensic sciences on the discovered dead body, the emergence of debates surrounding necro-political strategies by states and political communities, and the economy and chain of custody over human remains resulting from historic and contemporary forms of violence.
Michele Aaron
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748624430
- eISBN:
- 9780748697014
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624430.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Death and the Moving Image examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions to reveal the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and ...
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Death and the Moving Image examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions to reveal the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation and narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the political and ethical implications of mass culture's themes and imperatives, Death and the Moving Image takes this culture to task for its mortal economies of expendability. Ultimately, it also disinters the capacity for film, and film criticism, to engage with life and vulnerability differently and even generatively.Less
Death and the Moving Image examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions to reveal the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation and narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the political and ethical implications of mass culture's themes and imperatives, Death and the Moving Image takes this culture to task for its mortal economies of expendability. Ultimately, it also disinters the capacity for film, and film criticism, to engage with life and vulnerability differently and even generatively.
A. Naomi Paik
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469626314
- eISBN:
- 9781469628097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469626314.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter examines the prisoner practices of self-harm at Guantánamo, including suicide attempts and hunger strikes, as well as the efforts of the camp administration to forcibly keep the ...
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This chapter examines the prisoner practices of self-harm at Guantánamo, including suicide attempts and hunger strikes, as well as the efforts of the camp administration to forcibly keep the prisoners’ bodies alive via force-feeding and suicide restraints. It reads detainee testimonies, including op-ed articles, poetry, suicide notes, and statements given to legal and media advocates, as well as statements from the U.S. government defending its practices as the ethical preservation of life. The chapter examines the prisoner body as a site of power and struggle waged between the U.S. state and its prisoners. While the camp seeks ever-increasing control, prisoners assert their agency through that same body—the body that has been disappeared, obscured, and rendered invisible and unhearable, in part through its forced living. These acts diagnose the camp as a space of living death, communicate with audiences to which they have few avenues of access, and subvert their captors’ authority.Less
This chapter examines the prisoner practices of self-harm at Guantánamo, including suicide attempts and hunger strikes, as well as the efforts of the camp administration to forcibly keep the prisoners’ bodies alive via force-feeding and suicide restraints. It reads detainee testimonies, including op-ed articles, poetry, suicide notes, and statements given to legal and media advocates, as well as statements from the U.S. government defending its practices as the ethical preservation of life. The chapter examines the prisoner body as a site of power and struggle waged between the U.S. state and its prisoners. While the camp seeks ever-increasing control, prisoners assert their agency through that same body—the body that has been disappeared, obscured, and rendered invisible and unhearable, in part through its forced living. These acts diagnose the camp as a space of living death, communicate with audiences to which they have few avenues of access, and subvert their captors’ authority.
Anthony Ryan Hatch and Kym Bradley
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781479833498
- eISBN:
- 9781479842308
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479833498.003.0014
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
In this chapter, we theorize the ways in which the use of prescription psychotropic drugs in U.S. prisons creates forms of material existence in which prisoners’ bodies become silenced. Beyond their ...
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In this chapter, we theorize the ways in which the use of prescription psychotropic drugs in U.S. prisons creates forms of material existence in which prisoners’ bodies become silenced. Beyond their ostensibly legitimate purpose to treat psychiatric disorders, psychotropic drugs are also a part of the field of technocorrections, the strategic use of biotechnologies to manage prisoners’ bodies and to facilitate unjust policies that reproduce mass incarceration. First, we sketch two political contexts, biopolitics and necropolitics, which can account for the new realities of technocorrections in prisons. Psychotropics transform the silencing function of prisons by manufacturing a new kind of interior silence within the spirit/soul/psyche of prisoners. This experience of spirit murder is mediated through a necropolitics that fosters a violent separation of human material existence from the spirit/soul/psyche of the prisoner, a new form of material existence that we both illuminate and challenge. Then, we develop an interpretation of the trope of silence within feminist and critical race theories as a framework for analyzing the distribution of psychotropics as a process within the domain of technocorrections. To accomplish these aims empirically, we analyze a brief series of case studies where psychotropics perform this silencing function within the prison system.Less
In this chapter, we theorize the ways in which the use of prescription psychotropic drugs in U.S. prisons creates forms of material existence in which prisoners’ bodies become silenced. Beyond their ostensibly legitimate purpose to treat psychiatric disorders, psychotropic drugs are also a part of the field of technocorrections, the strategic use of biotechnologies to manage prisoners’ bodies and to facilitate unjust policies that reproduce mass incarceration. First, we sketch two political contexts, biopolitics and necropolitics, which can account for the new realities of technocorrections in prisons. Psychotropics transform the silencing function of prisons by manufacturing a new kind of interior silence within the spirit/soul/psyche of prisoners. This experience of spirit murder is mediated through a necropolitics that fosters a violent separation of human material existence from the spirit/soul/psyche of the prisoner, a new form of material existence that we both illuminate and challenge. Then, we develop an interpretation of the trope of silence within feminist and critical race theories as a framework for analyzing the distribution of psychotropics as a process within the domain of technocorrections. To accomplish these aims empirically, we analyze a brief series of case studies where psychotropics perform this silencing function within the prison system.
Raminder Kaur
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199498710
- eISBN:
- 9780199099986
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199498710.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
Chapter 10 concentrates on the ways the people’s movement was contained and crushed by ‘political (re)actions from above’. Subaltern communities and their allies against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power ...
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Chapter 10 concentrates on the ways the people’s movement was contained and crushed by ‘political (re)actions from above’. Subaltern communities and their allies against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant were subjected to ‘death conditions’ by way of three overlapping modalities—silent and encroaching, quick and punitive, and dismissive, deflective and demonizing. Victims, suspects, and/or targets were somatically, socially, and politically created as a consequence. The modalities of death conditions demonstrate varying syncretic subjugations to do with ‘let die’ and ‘make die’ These modalities include ecological toxicity entrenched in social hierarchies that are compounded by the neglect of low caste-class casual labourers working for the nuclear industries; more punitive and direct intentions to suppress and extinguish dissent though the actions of particular agents or agencies; and more covert, demonizing and snowballing strategies to outcaste victims of political abuse as anti-national or seditious suspects so that they can become socially tabooed and targets of further intimidation.Less
Chapter 10 concentrates on the ways the people’s movement was contained and crushed by ‘political (re)actions from above’. Subaltern communities and their allies against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant were subjected to ‘death conditions’ by way of three overlapping modalities—silent and encroaching, quick and punitive, and dismissive, deflective and demonizing. Victims, suspects, and/or targets were somatically, socially, and politically created as a consequence. The modalities of death conditions demonstrate varying syncretic subjugations to do with ‘let die’ and ‘make die’ These modalities include ecological toxicity entrenched in social hierarchies that are compounded by the neglect of low caste-class casual labourers working for the nuclear industries; more punitive and direct intentions to suppress and extinguish dissent though the actions of particular agents or agencies; and more covert, demonizing and snowballing strategies to outcaste victims of political abuse as anti-national or seditious suspects so that they can become socially tabooed and targets of further intimidation.
Karma R. Chávez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479845194
- eISBN:
- 9781479846306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479845194.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Health, Illness, and Medicine
This chapter explores how biocitizenship works to maintain national borders and relegate certain populations—in this case, immigrants with HIV/AIDS—to death. Although immigrants are not citizens, ...
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This chapter explores how biocitizenship works to maintain national borders and relegate certain populations—in this case, immigrants with HIV/AIDS—to death. Although immigrants are not citizens, they and their biological conditions are placed under perhaps more scrutiny than those with citizenship status, making the framework of biocitizenship an appropriate one for understanding how decisions regarding how immigrants with HIV/AIDS should be treated were made and also how people responded to aspects of those decisions. To provide this exploration, this chapter examines the controversy, protests and boycott surrounding the 6th International AIDS Conference (IAC) held in San Francisco in 1990 to demonstrate an often uncommented upon aspect of biocitizenship: its necropolitical functions.Less
This chapter explores how biocitizenship works to maintain national borders and relegate certain populations—in this case, immigrants with HIV/AIDS—to death. Although immigrants are not citizens, they and their biological conditions are placed under perhaps more scrutiny than those with citizenship status, making the framework of biocitizenship an appropriate one for understanding how decisions regarding how immigrants with HIV/AIDS should be treated were made and also how people responded to aspects of those decisions. To provide this exploration, this chapter examines the controversy, protests and boycott surrounding the 6th International AIDS Conference (IAC) held in San Francisco in 1990 to demonstrate an often uncommented upon aspect of biocitizenship: its necropolitical functions.
Marina Levina
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479845194
- eISBN:
- 9781479846306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479845194.003.0012
- Subject:
- Sociology, Health, Illness, and Medicine
This essays analyses Lab Animal, a trade magazine, which markets the production and acquisition of animal bodies for research and experiments. Through an analysis of advertisement images, research ...
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This essays analyses Lab Animal, a trade magazine, which markets the production and acquisition of animal bodies for research and experiments. Through an analysis of advertisement images, research photos, and editorial content, the chapter argues that the journal integrates, rather than obscures, the tensions between stylized pictures of animals and the bloody work of surgery and experimentation. Lab Animal therefore functions as a performative space which interpellates animals and researchers as biocitizens in the mutual enterprise of the biomedical laboratory—the search for the “cure.” However, because a laboratory functions within the logic of cruel optimism, biocitizenship is therefore based not in politics of hope, but rather in politics of death, or necropolitics. By examining how non-human animals are constituted as biocitizens within the conditions of cruel optimism and necropolitics, we can extend the argument to human animals, or to those who strive to be a part of the search for the “cure.”Less
This essays analyses Lab Animal, a trade magazine, which markets the production and acquisition of animal bodies for research and experiments. Through an analysis of advertisement images, research photos, and editorial content, the chapter argues that the journal integrates, rather than obscures, the tensions between stylized pictures of animals and the bloody work of surgery and experimentation. Lab Animal therefore functions as a performative space which interpellates animals and researchers as biocitizens in the mutual enterprise of the biomedical laboratory—the search for the “cure.” However, because a laboratory functions within the logic of cruel optimism, biocitizenship is therefore based not in politics of hope, but rather in politics of death, or necropolitics. By examining how non-human animals are constituted as biocitizens within the conditions of cruel optimism and necropolitics, we can extend the argument to human animals, or to those who strive to be a part of the search for the “cure.”
Catherine Zimmer
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479864379
- eISBN:
- 9781479876853
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479864379.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter shows how narrative structure, surveillance practice, and rhetorics of national security have become co-immersed in a construction of historical time as subject to the laws of desire and ...
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This chapter shows how narrative structure, surveillance practice, and rhetorics of national security have become co-immersed in a construction of historical time as subject to the laws of desire and disavowal that characterized the political melancholia of the post-9/11 era in the United States. Films from this era that focus on a fictionalized version of a traumatic terror attack tend to become narrative explorations of the melancholic logic of surveillance and counterterrorism, in primarily symptomatic forms. Déjà vu and Vantage Point organize their narratives around the prevention of a terrorist attack that has already happened, exhibiting a formulation of surveillance methodology and technology as both retroactive and pathologically circular. The chapter argues that the production of such temporal systems is central to the surveillance and surveillance cinema explored in earlier chapters, but also goes on to examine how such films—and the politics they reflect—contain the seeds of their own critique within them. Source Code, which at first glance seems to repeat the exact narrative formation of other cinematic fantasies of preempting terrorist attacks, instead highlights that retroactive-preemptive security practice and counterterrorist fantasies are built upon a scaffolding of necropolitics.Less
This chapter shows how narrative structure, surveillance practice, and rhetorics of national security have become co-immersed in a construction of historical time as subject to the laws of desire and disavowal that characterized the political melancholia of the post-9/11 era in the United States. Films from this era that focus on a fictionalized version of a traumatic terror attack tend to become narrative explorations of the melancholic logic of surveillance and counterterrorism, in primarily symptomatic forms. Déjà vu and Vantage Point organize their narratives around the prevention of a terrorist attack that has already happened, exhibiting a formulation of surveillance methodology and technology as both retroactive and pathologically circular. The chapter argues that the production of such temporal systems is central to the surveillance and surveillance cinema explored in earlier chapters, but also goes on to examine how such films—and the politics they reflect—contain the seeds of their own critique within them. Source Code, which at first glance seems to repeat the exact narrative formation of other cinematic fantasies of preempting terrorist attacks, instead highlights that retroactive-preemptive security practice and counterterrorist fantasies are built upon a scaffolding of necropolitics.
