“Suffer a Surrender … ? No, Never!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Talbot
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Multiple Meanings

This chapter shows how anti-polygamy legislation emerged from a particular imagining of the meaning of America. The Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker Acts of 1882 and 1887, respectively, mobilized a particular vision of the nation to drive into submission Mormonism's challenge to American political culture. Anti-Mormonism had therefore accomplished its cultural work by constituting Mormons as an un-American threat to the nation and its legal work by taking aim at the citizenship rights of Mormons. Ultimately, the controversy over polygamy helped formulate the multiple meanings of citizenship and national identity as the Mormon question became a location at which the gendered, marital, and religious limits of the body politic were tried.

Fear of the Thirty Years War

Facing Fear ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lederer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fear Response ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between fears and crises by focusing on the Thirty Years War. It considers how the war evoked a universal fear response and highlights expressions of preexisting apocalyptic fears in the material context of a long-term crisis. It also examines universal and traditional elements in contemporary portrayals of fear aroused by the specific events of the war. During the Thirty Years War, the body politic often appeared twisted, contorted, or monstrous in form, suggesting a fearful condition affecting society as a whole. In other words, the body functioned as a repository of fear during the conflict. The chapter argues that the linchpin of the relationship between crises and fear during the Thirty Years War was their literal embodiment by contemporary political culture and a peculiar understanding of history.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

Translating the Body Into Image. The Body Politic and Visual Practice at the Mughal Court During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Paragrana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-266
Author(s):  
Monica Juneja
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
The North ◽  
Multiple Regimes ◽  
New Ideas

AbstractThis article investigates the ways in which visual representations reconfigured the body in North Indian political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While images were meant to transmit and translate ethical conceptions of the polity, communicative modes of the visual medium followed a dynamic that was not a rehearsal of the path taken by texts. As images cut across distinctions formulated elsewhere and drew up new boundaries, they worked to refine and pluralise the understandings of political culture beyond the normative. Pictorial experiments at the North Indian courts involved negotiating multiple regimes of visuality and arriving at pictorial choices that ended up creating a new field of sensibilities, especially the corporeal. An argument is therefore made for the agency of the visual in defining new ideas of the political body that were constitutive of politico-ethical ideals in early modern North India.

Jacobitism in Scotland: Episodic Cause or National Movement?

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan I. Macinnes
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
National Movement ◽  
Area Of Study

The primary purpose of this article is to examine the strength in depth of Jacobitism within Scotland and to reappraise its national impact. Notwith-standing disparaging Whig polemicists and their apologists in Anglo-British historiography, there was undoubted political substance to the appeal of Jacobitism in Scotland that stretched over seven decades. But the search for this substance raises a series of questions. Was Jacobitism anything more than an occasional interruption in the body politic? Can it be viewed as a patriotic agenda that engaged Scots politically and culturally as well as militarily and subversively? Above all, was Jacobitism a sustained political movement or merely an episodic cause in Scotland? Accordingly, the distinctiveness of Scottish Jacobitism is explored through fresh archival research and extensive polemical material prior to determining whether this distinctiveness found expression more as a movement than as a cause. The focus of debate is shifted away from the Stuart courts in exile, from dynastic identification, and from espionage and diplomacy towards Jacobite communities at home and abroad, towards patriotic identification with Scotland and towards issuesof po litical economy. In the process, a political culture of Scottish Jacobitism can be sustained in terms of its confessional and intellectual development, its organizational structure and its commercial and social networking. Nevertheless, the argument favouring a movement over a cause remains finely balanced but is shaded by the distinctive capacity of Scottish as against English or Irish Jacobitism to form alternative governments, nationally and locally in the course of major risings. More than an episodic cause, Jacobitism's persistence provoked a counter movement in Scotland, that of antiJacobitism, a wholly worthwhile area of study that has yet to be examined systematically and with intellectual rigour. It is hoped that this article will provoke such an examination.

John of Salisbury and the medieval Roman renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene O'Daly
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Third Way ◽  
John Of Salisbury

John of Salisbury (c. 1120–80) is a key figure of the twelfth-century renaissance. A student at the cosmopolitan schools of medieval Paris, an associate of Thomas Becket and an acute commentator on society and rulership, his works and letters give unique insights into the political culture of this period. This volume reassesses the influence of classical sources on John’s political writings, investigating how he accessed and used the ideas of his ancient predecessors. By looking at his quotations from and allusions to classical works, O’Daly shows that John not only borrowed the vocabulary of his classical forbears, but explicitly aligned himself with their philosophical positions. She illustrates John’s profound debt to Roman Stoicism, derived from the writings of Seneca and Cicero, and shows how he made Stoic theories on duties, virtuous rulership and moderation relevant to the medieval context. She also examines how John’s classical learning was filtered through patristic sources, arguing that this led to a unique synthesis between his political and theological views. The book places famous elements of John’s political theory - such as his model of the body-politic, his views on tyranny - in the context of the intellectual foment of the classical revival and the dramatic social changes afoot in Europe in the twelfth century. In so doing, it offers students and researchers of this period a novel investigation of how Stoicism comprises a ‘third way’ for medieval political philosophy, interacting with – and at times dominating – neo-Platonism and proto-Aristotelianism.

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