, a necessary condition of villainy. We see this if we compare the narrative functions of antagonists such as Godzilla from the eponymous film franchise or the Frankenstein's monster of the 1931 Universal Pictures classic Frankenstein (directed by
Antagonistic Insights
Evolving Soviet Atheist Critiques of Religion and Why They Matter for Anthropology
Sonja Luehrmann
This article offers a critique of the common notion in contemporary anthropology that a positive attitude toward the people under study is a necessary precondition for a sophisticated understanding of their social world. The empirical sociology of religion that evolved during the last decades of the Soviet Union's existence started from the premise that religion was a harmful phenomenon slated for disappearance. Nonetheless, atheist sociologists produced increasingly complex accounts of religious life in modern socialist societies. Their ideological framework simultaneously constrained Soviet scholars and forced them to pay closer attention to religious phenomena that contradicted political expectations. Drawing on this extreme example of militant atheist scholarship, I argue that studying 'repugnant cultural others' always requires some form of affective motivation. Antagonism can be as powerful, and as problematic, a motivating force as empathetic suspension of judgment.
Violence and Identification
Everyday Ethnic Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Torsten Kolind
-cut. Therefore, I will examine how the Muslims of Stolac, when identifying themselves as Muslims, often refrained from exclusive ethnic antagonistic identifications, but instead highlighted coexistence and interethnic respect, which constitute patterns of
Ambivalent Anticipations
On Soldierly Becomings in the Desert of the Real
Thomas Randrup Pedersen
landscape of the war's aftermath, an uneventful and thus bleak adventure with virtually no real deal in sight. Accordingly, anticipation, I argue, can paradoxically hold ambivalent, even antagonistic, yet simultaneous expectations of what the future has in
The Gods of the Hunt
Stereotypes, Risk and National Identity in a Spanish Enclave in North Africa
Brian Campbell
’ emerges as a bloodthirsty antagonist – in clerical and stately texts, and in popular tales and ballads – in the final stages of the Reconquista. This form changes little over the next three centuries, as Barbary pirates repeatedly scourge Spain’s shores
Randolph Miller
Française de Spiritualité and Sacred Heart, which made it especially antagonistic to their ideals for masculinity. This piety was also unattached to the rigid male-female binary the cult of nature of the Enlightenment had produced. 28 After the Wars of
Philip J. Hohle
distinction, monstrous qualities can be placed upon almost anyone considered an antagonist while the favored characters can be perceived as simply human. 14 In UF , the sheriff Little Bill is commonly perceived as the antagonist. As a result of a brutal
Imagined Germany and the Battle of Models in South Korea
Rival Narratives of Germany in South Korean Public Spheres, 1990–2015
Jin-Wook Shin and Boyeong Jeong
developmentalism that pursued a “compressed modernity,” 15 a “productivist welfare” state, 16 and a “division system” 17 sustained by the antagonistic co-existence of the two Korean regimes. In many respects, the South Korean version of modernity, which has such
Love and Violence
Sartre and the Ethics of Need
Katharine Wolfe
basis of shared need in a milieu of scarcity. 1 As a form of interiorized scarcity, need is what makes everyone a potential threat to everyone else's life, and ignites the engine of history by motivating antagonistic clashes between counter
The Girl in the Mirror
The Psychic Economy of Class in the Discourse of Girlhood Studies
Valerie Hey
This article questions Angela McRobbie's recent text The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change because it creates some interesting new vocabulary for understanding late modernity's revised sexual and cultural politics. Whilst acknowledging the sophistication of its cultural studies-inspired argument, I consider some consequences of this reading. If theory also performs as a politics of representation, I ask what happens if, in accounting for post-feminism, the theoretical status of class as an antagonistic relation is diminished. I suggest what gender and education discourses can add to a reading of 'new times'.