Divinity, Ethnicity, Identity: “Religion” as a Political Category in Christian Antiquity

2021 ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Paula Fredriksen
Keyword(s):  
Political Category

Resilience and the Mobility of Identity: Belonging and Change among Turkana Herders in Northern Kenya

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-252
Author(s):  
Greta Semplici
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
External Support ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Northern Kenya ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Political Category

Ideas of resilience are not new; they have travelled across several disciplines, stretching their original meanings to a considerable degree, turning into a 'key political category of our time' (Neocleous 2013). For the case of pastoralist groups, discussions about resilience predominantly concern the state of pastoralism as a unitary and fixed entity and its prospects for survival in a world in turmoil (climate change, diseases and epidemics, conflicts, socio-economic transformations). In this context, references to resilience generally allude to local vulnerability, purporting the need for external support. These accounts tend to ignore local voices and perceptions and neglect the role of identity, culture and change in self-presentation and everyday life. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in the northern Kenyan drylands, this article flips dominant perspectives on pastoralism and resilience, following the herders' self-definition, their construction of a shared identity and their, at times contradictory, positioning as part of a broader society. It argues that part of their resilience rests in the feeling of belonging and solidarity around a collective identity, built in opposition to urbanities along symbolic boundaries. The article however shows how such identity remains nonetheless flexible and responsive to change, disrupting dichotomies and weaving different social worlds, such as rural and urban, together. Such flexibility is also an important element of resilience for the capacity to change, stay attentive, and mobile.

scholarly journals Naród ukraiński jako przedmiot powszechnego niezrozumienia

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Dariusz Wojakowski
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Local Discourses ◽  
State Factor ◽  
Integrating Factors ◽  
Southern Ukraine

The article contains an analysis of the academic and popular political discourses concerning the Ukrainian nation. Its aim is to point out atypical phenomena which could constitute little-known factors destabilizing or integrating national self-representation in Ukraine. The inconsistency of these concepts occurs above all at the level of macro-social discourses. What is involved is the presence in politics of content associated with the radical right and its primordial understanding of the nation, accompanied by low support for any sort of national or civil idea among the inhabitants of Ukraine. In the academic discourse the dominant western European theories of nation clash with a specific understanding of the terminology used in Russian scholarship. On the other hand, in local discourses at the meso-social level, there are phenomena that could be integrating factors for the image of the Ukrainian nation. There, language, popular culture, and various ideas about the past intermingle. In southern Ukraine, concepts can be found in which the nation is a political category quite aside from ethnic differences or the language of communication. Soviet times introduced the state factor, which is independent of ethnicity and which was later given content (rather worse than better) by the Ukrainian state. In these cases, Ukrainianness appears as a superior principle in regards to ethnic differentiation. The political situation of Ukraine since 2014, however, does not favor the development of this model of the Ukrainian nation.

Unparalleled Drudgery and the Deprivation of Freedom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Shared Humanity ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Labour Power

This book insists on the connections between freedom, belonging and labour for understanding the politics of slavery. This chapter seeks to show how constructions of race and labour were inextricable from one another, and how thinking about slavery as a labour system is inseparable from understanding freedom as a contested concept, forged out of experience and struggle. Part of that struggle was about trying to find and define the limits of enslavability, and its location in a constellation of concepts of self-possession, labour power, race and property. Labour as a moral and political category was caught up with ideas about autonomy, morality and honour that were deeply contested, and the mobile borders between free and unfree labour, labour and capital, persons and property were inseparable from questions about who belonged, and who was eligible to be incorporated into civil society. Through a focus on slave hiring and slave provisioning grounds, this chapter explores how and why the abolitionist arguments about freedom, rationality and shared humanity could not help them to escape the sheer adaptability of bondage, as it resurfaced in questions about the command over labour, trustworthiness, the appearance of inferior capacities, and the division between the industrious and the idle.

“Happy Housewives”

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Jie Yang
Keyword(s):  
Self Help ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
The World ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Political Category ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyzes representations of “happy housewives” in popular psychological self-help media in order to examine the relationship between gender, psychology and privatization in China. Through analysis of media and ethnographic data, I demonstrate that while both gender and psychology are represented as sites of regulation and value extraction, the heart of the housewife is the true space of commodification, where emotions, value, and virtue are all generated. This felt space of possibility and potentiality, constructed by media in concert with state interests, intensifies women’s attachment to commodities and to the world, and enhances consumption and entrepreneurship. Happiness promotion, of which the figure of the happy housewife is a key part, not only objectifies women and renders invisible their complex subjectivities, but downplays the intensified gendered exploitation and class stratification since the mid-1990s when privatization began. In this context, I argue that unhappiness or anger can constitute a repoliticizing process that reinvigorates discussions of class as both an analytical and political category in China.

How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner, Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 659-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Category

This essay complements Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the political category of the person by outlining the role of literature, and especially the genre of the novel, in consolidating this category and allowing it to do its political and affective work. The essay shows how Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 dismantles three central features of the traditional novel’s poetics of the person: its investment in the notion of literary character, its use of fictionality, and its structural reliance on the narrative future. Lerner’s novel, like Esposito’s biopolitical work, aims to overcome the hierarchical divisions within human life that are endemic to the category of the person and that have historically fostered biopolitical violence. Both projects intimate a less destructive politics—what Lerner calls “the transpersonal” and Esposito “the impersonal.”

Adult Socialization and Out-Group Politicization: An Empirical Study of Consciousness-Raising

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Causal Inference ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Women Politicians ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Good For ◽  
Political Character

At the heart of the feminist theory of consciousness-raising is a very precise hypothesis about the conditions in which most women – and members of any other socio-political out-group – will overcome their socialization into the culture of the dominant in-group to acquire political consciousness. The hypothesis is that separate interaction directly among themselves in autonomous, all-female groups will lead women to develop a new consciousness of women as a political category with interests distinct from those of men. This article uses new data about local women politicians in Scotland to test the hypothesis that there will be a strong, symmetrical and independent relationship between a woman politician's political orientation towards women and her experience of separate interaction. This relationship holds good for experience of any kind of separate interaction, even if it is confined to groups of an entirely non-political character, thereby confirming the causal inference that politicization is the consequence of separate experience and not ils precondition.

scholarly journals Liberar las migraciones: la contribución de Abdelmalek Sayad a una epistemología migrante-céntrica

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Gennaro Avallone ◽  
Yoan Molinero Gerbeau
Keyword(s):  
Human Mobility ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
Migration Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Definition Of

The migrant category is linked to the origin of the State as the predominant political unit in the world. This is because, as Abdelmalek Sayad (2008, 2010a) pointed out, without a State, there would be no migrants, as they exist as a political category, referring to the nationals of a State who cross the borders to settle (temporarily or permanently). This functional and historical connection has had a decisive impact at the epistemological level on the discipline of migration studies, where hegemonic paradigms have used analysis categories that not only reproduced the tate framework, but have replicated principles such as coloniality, aimed at legitimizing their control over this population. The objective of this article is to propose an analytical framework on migrations that, following Sayad’s (2010a) and Fanon’s (2009) postulates, breaks with state hegemony in the definition of human mobility to point out the possibility of constructing analyses, which in contrast to the predominant State-centric approaches,start from a migrantcentric epistemology.

scholarly journals W poszukiwaniu rusińskiego separatyzmu

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Ewa Michna
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
National Group ◽  
In Trans ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Definition Of

In Search of Rusyn Separatism Separatism is both a social phenomenon and a political category employed in analysis of diverse types of phenomena by social sciences. Colloquially it is often used to label and deprecate emancipating aspirations of groups that strive for recognition. Whether such aspirations of a given ethnic/national group are, or are not, considered separatism depends on the accepted definition of the term as well as the vantage point assumed in description. This paper attempts to view the process of emancipation of Trans-Carpathian Rusyns from two perspectives: various ways in which this complex phenomenon is approached throughout social sciences as well as an intragroup perspective of the actual participants of the process: Rusyn activists in Trans-Carpathian Ruthenia.

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