Mana, Macht und Mythen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bargatzky
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Universe

We should avoid the disrespect involved in giving mythic and religious facts less importance than they actually have in the life of non-Western indigenous peoples. This book deals with mythologic ideas which inhere in the ritual reproduction of the body politic in the actions of contemporary peoples in Australia and Oceania who still depend on the functioning of family and clan. By ritual fusion and compartmentalization, they successfully manage to live in the modern world without abandoning certain essential elements of their pre-European religious and civic cultures. By expediently switching codes, they can continue to act according to the rules of traditional society and perform as citizens of the contemporary world. The conception of myth as a rational way to explain the universe by rendering it meaningful is a necessary prerequisite for our understanding of the ways of peoples whose cultures are rooted in the past but who can perform successfully in the modern world.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

Gender, Race, and Political Representation in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Piscopo ◽  
Kristin N. Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Action Measures ◽  
National Legislatures

Women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendant populations remain underrepresented in the national legislatures of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. The descriptive (or numeric) representation of marginalized groups in national legislatures matters because legislatures make policy, check the president’s authority, and communicate who has full membership in the body politic. The inclusion of women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants in legislatures sends information about the overall depth and quality of the democratic regime. Most legislatures have become more representative of women, primarily due to affirmative action measures designed to raise descriptive representation. As of October 15, 2019, every Latin American country except Guatemala and Venezuela had a statutory quota law for women candidates, resulting in women holding nearly 30% of seats in the region’s legislatures. However, such gains have not come without costs, including rising violence against women candidates and elected officials. Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela also use affirmative action to incorporate indigenous peoples into the national legislature, using reserved seats. However, reserved seats typically elect lower proportions of indigenous peoples relative to their population percentage. Afro-descendants face more barriers, as they must largely win legislative elections without the benefit of affirmative action. Afro-descendants remain excluded from formal politics even in Brazil, where the majority of the population self-identifies as black or brown. Indigenous and Afro-descendant women face barriers that emerge from both their gender and their race/ethnicity.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

JeungSanDo and the Great Opening of the Later Heaven: Millenarianism, Syncretism, and the Religion of Gang Il-sun

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pearson Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
New Age ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Compensatory Response ◽  
The Past ◽  
Joseon Dynasty ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Central Belief

ABSTRACT: Korea's JeungSanDo is a syncretistic religion in which elements of religious Taoism, Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, Roman Catholicism, and Korean shamanism are combined with a unifying millenarian vision that was initially formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the late Joseon Dynasty. JeungSanDo is based on the teachings of Gang Il-sun (1871––1909), who was/is regarded by his followers as the incarnation of SangJe (Shangti), the Ruler of the Universe in religious Taoism, as well as Maitreya, the Future Buddha of Buddhist eschatology. The religion of Gang Il-sun arose as a compensatory response to the defeat of the Donghak Revolution in 1894. The central belief of JeungSanDo is Hu-Cheon GaeByeok, the Great Opening of the Later Heaven, the new age of JeungSan Gang Il-Sun's millenarian vision. A glossary of Korean and Chinese terms follows the endnotes. No religion is completely ““new,”” no religious message completely abolishes the past. Rather, there is a recasting, a renewal, a revalorization, an integration of the elements——the most essential elements——of an immemorial religious tradition. ——Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy1

scholarly journals Amendment of State Constitutions

1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wilford Garner
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
The Right

The right of the people, acting within the bounds of the law and through organs constituted in conformity with the prescriptions of the existing constitution, to alter, amend, or abolish their form of government whenever they deem it necessary to their safety and happiness is, in effect, declared by practically every American bill of rights to be not only fundamental but inalienable and indefeasible. The phraseology differs in some of them but the substance is the same in all. Without such a right the mistakes and errors of the past could not be eliminated from the body politic nor the accumulated wisdom and experience of other States utilized. Without it, the fundamental maxim that constitutions grow instead of being made would be meaningless and political development impossible. An acute thinker has well observed that no constitution can expect to be permanent unless it guarantees progress as well as order. Political conservatism is a virtue too often trampled upon by statesmen, but it has its limits, and, in its exaggerated form, becomes a source of revolution. The amending power has been aptly compared to a safety valve which ought to be so adjusted as not to discharge its peculiar function with too great facility lest it become an escape pipe for party passion and political prejudice, nor with such difficulty that the force needed to induce action will explode the machine.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Core ◽  
System P ◽  
Conceptual Thought ◽  
Finite Subjectivity ◽  
Final System

This book challenges the unanimous rejection that has followed Hegel’s Naturphilosohie (1830). Systematically reconstructing Hegel’s conception of nature, the book explores the ways in which it functions as a ground that, nevertheless, perpetually poses problems for human freedom. The book starts by taking seriously Hegel’s characterization of nature as monstrous, a register at odds with the comprehensive order demanded by conceptual thought. The book then critically reads Hegel against Hegel: it analyzes what such a conception of nature must mean in terms of his notions of finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom. The book reveals that Hegelian nature holds a paradoxical status in his late philosophy. As an anterior precondition, it is crucial to the emergence of free self-relating subjectivity. Yet, it also threatens freedom’s subjective structure with destruction: biological disease, psychopathology, and symptomatic tensions within the body politic. The book demonstrates the importance of the ambivalent significations of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie for the entirety of his final system. Indeed, the problem of nature resides at the core of his project of freedom. Hegel, therefore, presents our contemporary world with a strikingly relevant position, one that forces us to rethink not only our received understanding of his philosophy, but our situation within the world. His system can be used to think the timely philosophical problems revolving around the nature-culture distinction to great effects that are still to be exhaustively explored. This potential constitutes the intrinsic merit of the book.

Closing statement

1963 ◽  
Vol 159 (974) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
The Past ◽  
System Building ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practical Implications

During the past two days we have seen how well the study of human population combines the interests of the founders both of modern demography and of the Royal Society. We have had abundant evidence that the study of population organizes the materials of the natural and social sciences in ways that give them both scientific and practical significance. The programme, I suspect, would have given our predecessors satisfaction, for the organizers of this Society, and of its daughter organizations around the world, were not just detached scholars of academic halls. Nature was to be studied for its beauty, of course, but also for the service of man. The practical implications of science for society, the economy, and the body politic were not considered inappropriate for the inner temple of science. They were drawn without apology; occasionally they were even correctly drawn. Perhaps I am overimpressed by the pragmatic stream in the Royal Society’s early work because I am most familiar with Franklin's interests. Both in this Society, and in its daughter organization, The American Philosophical Society, * his emphasis was always on careful observation, limited generalization, and practical application. The dividing line in the early histories of both our societies was not that between the natural and the social sciences, or between science and action. If there was a division it was between science and a system-building kind of social philosophy.

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