This article analyzes Venezuelan Chavismo as an unstable formation gnawed by the unsolvable contradiction between, on the one hand, the politico-theological ambition to totalize sociality as a visible ‘people’ collected around the invisible ‘Spirit’ of Venezuela’s ‘Founding Father’ Simón Bolívar and, on the other, the non-totalizable theopolitical energies of a social field suffused with myriad globalized ‘spirits’ that admits no clear-cut demarcation between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’. Incapable of totalizing sociality as a discrete ‘society’, the political logic informing Chavismo, as with other recent populisms, shifts from hegemony to ‘dominance without hegemony’, a situation where, à la Humpty Dumpy, the ‘people’ is whatever is ‘lovingly’ decreed as such from above, always in tension with a host of deconstructive, often theopolitically imbued agencies and spirits.
{"title":"Humpty Dumpty Populism","authors":"R. Sánchez","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640408","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Venezuelan Chavismo as an unstable formation gnawed by the unsolvable contradiction between, on the one hand, the politico-theological ambition to totalize sociality as a visible ‘people’ collected around the invisible ‘Spirit’ of Venezuela’s ‘Founding Father’ Simón Bolívar and, on the other, the non-totalizable theopolitical energies of a social field suffused with myriad globalized ‘spirits’ that admits no clear-cut demarcation between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’. Incapable of totalizing sociality as a discrete ‘society’, the political logic informing Chavismo, as with other recent populisms, shifts from hegemony to ‘dominance without hegemony’, a situation where, à la Humpty Dumpy, the ‘people’ is whatever is ‘lovingly’ decreed as such from above, always in tension with a host of deconstructive, often theopolitically imbued agencies and spirits.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80199116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A set of notarial documents from colonial New Spain (Mexico) offers a view of the long-distance Jesuit missionary network as anchored in a dense local network of intimate relationships. Following the arrest of members of the Society of Jesus in 1767 at the Colegio Espíritu Santo in Puebla de los Ángeles, a scribe is tasked with noting Jesuit belongings. He records unique objects held in safekeeping for local people in Puebla. Using the lens of a theopolitical anthropology, we see how the idea of a God-present in the Eucharist is central not only to the way that the Spanish Crown was prevented from taking the silver items from the chapel, but also to how these sacramental logics account for the accrual of disparate items in each Jesuit’s room.
{"title":"God in All Things?","authors":"J. Molina","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640404","url":null,"abstract":"A set of notarial documents from colonial New Spain (Mexico) offers a view of the long-distance Jesuit missionary network as anchored in a dense local network of intimate relationships. Following the arrest of members of the Society of Jesus in 1767 at the Colegio Espíritu Santo in Puebla de los Ángeles, a scribe is tasked with noting Jesuit belongings. He records unique objects held in safekeeping for local people in Puebla. Using the lens of a theopolitical anthropology, we see how the idea of a God-present in the Eucharist is central not only to the way that the Spanish Crown was prevented from taking the silver items from the chapel, but also to how these sacramental logics account for the accrual of disparate items in each Jesuit’s room.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85794403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body’s wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the mortandad, the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. The ‘mysterious materiality’ of the New World corpus mysticum points to signs of Mexican Indigenous communities’ theopolitical refusal to be subsumed into the Spanish colonial flesh-body.
{"title":"The Colony as the Mystical Body of Christ","authors":"J. Hughes","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640402","url":null,"abstract":"In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body’s wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the mortandad, the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. The ‘mysterious materiality’ of the New World corpus mysticum points to signs of Mexican Indigenous communities’ theopolitical refusal to be subsumed into the Spanish colonial flesh-body.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74088397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
{"title":"On the Touch-Event","authors":"V. Napolitano","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640405","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85491097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My aim in this article is threefold. First, to identify the function of tautology in Catholic Charismatic religious practices. Second, to analyze the formal structure of tautology as an embodied regime of citationality. Third, to expose how Charismatic practice both mirrors and anticipates the unfolding dramaturgy of sovereignty within current populism in Brazil and elsewhere. These aims converge in a reflection on the nature of political theater within and beyond political theology.
{"title":"Acts Is Acts","authors":"M. D. Abreu","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640403","url":null,"abstract":"My aim in this article is threefold. First, to identify the function of tautology in Catholic Charismatic religious practices. Second, to analyze the formal structure of tautology as an embodied regime of citationality. Third, to expose how Charismatic practice both mirrors and anticipates the unfolding dramaturgy of sovereignty within current populism in Brazil and elsewhere. These aims converge in a reflection on the nature of political theater within and beyond political theology.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90044211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates the role theology plays in generating political action inlas Américasthrough research on the School of the Americas Watch. It commends theopolitics as a lens for analyzing the competing projects of US military training and protests against that training, both of which work under the sign of redemption. The materiality of these signs can be apprehended by asking who is saving whom from what, by what means, and for what end. Anthropological analysis of these redemption narratives reveals the regimes of the invisible that animate opposing political projects—redemption for one through imperial formations enabled by the messianic figure of the white, male, heterosexual warrior, and redemption for the other through the agential presence of the dead who haunt empire’s wake.
{"title":"Redemption Contests","authors":"Kyle B. T. Lambelet","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640406","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the role theology plays in generating political action inlas Américasthrough research on the School of the Americas Watch. It commends theopolitics as a lens for analyzing the competing projects of US military training and protests against that training, both of which work under the sign of redemption. The materiality of these signs can be apprehended by asking who is saving whom from what, by what means, and for what end. Anthropological analysis of these redemption narratives reveals the regimes of the invisible that animate opposing political projects—redemption for one through imperial formations enabled by the messianic figure of the white, male, heterosexual warrior, and redemption for the other through the agential presence of the dead who haunt empire’s wake.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73155311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in water’s oscillations between non-life and the divine. Exploring these oscillations in a dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia, I argue that they allowed a flooding phenomenon on a river threatened with damming to be heard as a prophetic call to action. The uprising that followed produced a rare victory for dam opponents, suggesting that a theopolitics of life has powers that exceed vitalism.
{"title":"No One Can Hold It Back","authors":"Carlota Mcallister","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.640407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.640407","url":null,"abstract":"The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in water’s oscillations between non-life and the divine. Exploring these oscillations in a dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia, I argue that they allowed a flooding phenomenon on a river threatened with damming to be heard as a prophetic call to action. The uprising that followed produced a rare victory for dam opponents, suggesting that a theopolitics of life has powers that exceed vitalism.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73418621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A statue of stainless steel cast in China and placed at the entrance of the new National Stadium in Mozambique sparked controversy between Chinese donors and Mozambican recipients in the period leading up to the stadium’s 2011 inauguration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Mozambican and Chinese nationals involved in the project, we explore the multiple misunderstandings surrounding the statue and show how they came to define Sino-Mozambican relations. Entextualized through materiality, the misunderstandings assumed a monumental form in the statue, and the message of mutual incomprehension continued to reverberate across the social terrain of Sino-Mozambican relations long after the statue itself had been removed. Misunderstandings, we argue, should not be dismissed as ephemeral communicative glitches, but seen as productive events that structure social relations.
{"title":"Monumental Misunderstandings","authors":"M. Nielsen, Mikkel Bunkenborg","doi":"10.3167/sa.2020.640302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640302","url":null,"abstract":"A statue of stainless steel cast in China and placed at the entrance of the new National Stadium in Mozambique sparked controversy between Chinese donors and Mozambican recipients in the period leading up to the stadium’s 2011 inauguration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Mozambican and Chinese nationals involved in the project, we explore the multiple misunderstandings surrounding the statue and show how they came to define Sino-Mozambican relations. Entextualized through materiality, the misunderstandings assumed a monumental form in the statue, and the message of mutual incomprehension continued to reverberate across the social terrain of Sino-Mozambican relations long after the statue itself had been removed. Misunderstandings, we argue, should not be dismissed as ephemeral communicative glitches, but seen as productive events that structure social relations.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76940478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others. The analysis is based on research in an Indian scrap metal yard, where work entails disassembling things that other people no longer want. In spite of the demanding conditions of the labor and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction with the work process. This observation raises questions about theories of labor, which see satisfaction as arising from work that is creative, skilled, and task-based. The article argues that transformation is a social process that should be used as the primary analytic for explaining work satisfaction. Theories of creativity, skill, and task are secondary analytics that describe subsets of transformative action.
{"title":"Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work","authors":"Andrew V. Sanchez","doi":"10.3167/sa.2020.640305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640305","url":null,"abstract":"This article suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others. The analysis is based on research in an Indian scrap metal yard, where work entails disassembling things that other people no longer want. In spite of the demanding conditions of the labor and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction with the work process. This observation raises questions about theories of labor, which see satisfaction as arising from work that is creative, skilled, and task-based. The article argues that transformation is a social process that should be used as the primary analytic for explaining work satisfaction. Theories of creativity, skill, and task are secondary analytics that describe subsets of transformative action.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79021965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Judith M. Bovensiepen, M. Holbraad, Hans Steinmüller
During the current global pandemic, a series of transitions have taken place at Social Analysis. Judith Bovensiepen from the University of Kent and Hans Steinmüller from the London School of Economics have joined Martin Holbraad, University College London. The three of us will edit the journal from this issue onward as a team, supported by our editorial assistant, Alonso Zamora Corona, and the staff at Berghahn.
{"title":"Editors' Note","authors":"Judith M. Bovensiepen, M. Holbraad, Hans Steinmüller","doi":"10.3167/sa.2020.640301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640301","url":null,"abstract":"During the current global pandemic, a series of transitions have taken place at Social Analysis. Judith Bovensiepen from the University of Kent and Hans Steinmüller from the London School of Economics have joined Martin Holbraad, University College London. The three of us will edit the journal from this issue onward as a team, supported by our editorial assistant, Alonso Zamora Corona, and the staff at Berghahn.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81921944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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