, 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
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
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2017
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 127–151
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
Matthew C. Eshleman and Ronald E. Santoni
Can violence ever be justified or is violence necessarily oppressive? Is self-defensive counter-violence or “revolutionary violence” aimed at human liberation, which Sartre defended, necessarily in bad faith? These questions form the crux of the debate between Matt Eshleman and Ronald Santoni. Is violence by nature Manichean, making the Other into an “object” and evil antagonist, and thus dehumanizing and oppressing the Other? Or can violence be liberatory when it is directed at oppressors? Both authors—but especially Eshleman, and Santoni reluctantly—agree that some forms of violence (such as self-defense) do not involve bad faith, but disagree about whether or when revolutionary violence can be justified.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 59–84
Mark Meyers
Despite their common roots in the phenomenological tradition, Jean- Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty differed markedly in the way they formulated the problem of being-in-the-world. As is well-known, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) emphasized the dualistic, oppositional, and even antagonistic relationship between human consciousness and the world inhabited by consciousness, while Merleau-Ponty, in texts such as Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1964, posthumous), conceptualised a kind of originary communion between consciousness and world that stressed their imbrication rather than their separateness.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–105
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'.
Chantal Mouffe
This article argues that John Rawls' liberal philosophising is an inadequate means of facing today's varied social and political challenges, both domestic and international, because it is incapable of grasping the antagonistic dimension which is constitutive of the political. Focusing first on Rawls' conception of politics in a well-ordered liberal society, and thereafter on his arguments pertaining to the field of international politics, it is shown how Rawls forecloses the recognition of the properly political moment by postulating that the discrimination between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate is dictated by morality and rationality. With exclusions presented as rationally justified and with the antagonistic dimension of politics whisked away, liberalism appears as the truly moral and rational solution to the problem of how to organise human coexistence, and its universalisation becomes the aim of all those who are moved by moral and rational considerations. Against this conception, it is suggested that a future, more peaceful world would be less a cosmopolitan and more a pluralist one.
Anna-Lisa Sayuli Fransson
When Sweden was confronted with the idea of building a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea, the Swedish government found itself in a paradoxical situation. Should it give in to strong foreign interests and abandon its proudly held line of environmental policy, or stick to its profile at the risk of earning a powerful adversary? This narrative analysis, building on the government's official narratives, explains how and why the self-proclaimed environmental guardian of the sea ended up having it both ways. By using strategies of depoliticization, polarization, and parallel storytelling, the Swedish government surrendered narrative power to its antagonist, alternated between incompatible views of its own political capability, and added a happy ending to the pipeline tragedy. These strategies enabled the government to make an environmentally controversial decision without losing prestige or abandoning its ethical profile regarding the Baltic Sea.
