Mythologies

mythologiesThere are few more relevant books for those interested in how systems of representation — in the most mundane and thus often unnoticed places — enable historical happenstance to be portrayed/perceived as timeless necessity than Roland Barthes‘s (d. 1980) classic collection, Mythologies. Originally published in the newspaper as brief commentaries on popular French culture, the short chapters have appended to them a lenghty theoretical essay, “Myth Today,” in which Barthes explains his approach to studying the multi-layered semiotic systems that we routinely see in daily life. In many ways, Mythologies, and the companion collection, The Eiffel Tower, model in their brevity but theoretical consequence what blog posts such as this site aspire to.

Shifting Identification Strategies

Individual Identity title image (3)

 

The identifications people make are strategic and context specific, as this article by Gibler, Hutchison, and Miller suggests:

[I]nternational conflict exerts a strong influence on the likelihood and content of individual self-identification, but this effect varies with the type of conflict. Confirming nationalist theories of territorial salience, territorial conflict leads the majority of individuals in targeted countries to identify themselves as citizens of their country. However, individuals in countries that are initiating territorial disputes are more likely to self-identify as members of a particular ethnicity, which provides support for theories connecting domestic salience to ethnic politics.

Being attacked leads you to identify with the nation. But if your nation is the one doing the attacking, all of the sudden you’d rather make alternate identifications …

The Race Card

Have you seen The Race Card Project online? It is a site that solicits your six words about race, such as:

racecard

Those interested in considering popular understandings of this one identity domain may find this website to be a rich resource–such as the above sample which presupposes the common notion of a deeper, stable subjectivity that transcends identifiers.

Visit the site here or listen to a National Public Radio segment on it from earlier today.

The Evidence of Experience

scottJoan Wallach Scott, the well known historian, wrote a provocative and lengthy essay on the manner in which social historians and many area specialists have mistakenly drawn upon experience as if it was the evidence/starting point for their work (that is, material culture is seen an expression of a prior experience) rather than problematizing how public claims of having had an experience are themselves social and historical products. The essay was published in Critical Inquiry 17/4 (1991): 773-797 and is posted online as a PDF. Those wishing to rethink identity studies will benefit from this essay.

Learn more about Scott’s recent book on the politics of the issue of Muslim women and veils here.

Religion is Nothing Special

Picture 3The anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, published an important article in 2008 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B [Biological Sciences], 363: 2055–2061; critiquing recent energy spent on developing an evolutionary, cognitive science theory of religion, it opens the way toward working not on a theory of religion but, instead, taking that which we normally call religion as but an instance of a wider, mundane, but no less interesting cognitive event that we might simply call signification–which itself ought to be the object of our studies.

Obtain a free PDF of the article at the publisher’s website here.