Description
Book Synopsis This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.
Trade Review “This volume’s editors, Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron, along with their contributors, have produced a rich source of ideas for ethnographers of political economy. The introduction and conclusion are extraordinarily powerful in themselves, and the contributors respond sensitively to that framing, making for an unusually unified collection.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“Each of these essays makes ‘visible’ just how entrenched modernity has become in a globalized society. Hariman and Cintron’s volume provides access points for uncovering the depths of modernity’s reach through a variety of methodologies. For those who study public rhetoric, this collection demonstrates how we might more productively study the local vis-à-vis the global by taking into account how rhetoric responds to moments of ‘catastrophic’ contingency.” • Rhetoric & Public Affairs
“The undoubted value of this book is how it shows a variety of actions, which can be understood as rhetorical.” • Res Rhetorica
“…the contributors here have given us a great deal to think about, especially the importance of rhetoric in the ‘texture’ of political discourse, and anthropologists can apply our methods and concepts to further elucidate and elaborate those processes and their rhetorical and practical consequences.” • Anthropology Review Database
“…an excellent collection and a fitting contribution to both the Rhetoric + Culture series and to the field as a whole… The range and inventiveness of methodological innovations in the volume is one of its primary strengths.” • Michael Kaplan, Baruch College, City University of New York
“This is a splendid collection, coherent and framed in two magisterial overviews, and so is greater than the sum of its parts. It has the capacity to enhance the subtlety and clarity of argument in the study of politics and political action across a wide variety of sites in today’s world. Both of the key ideas, the texture of political action and the primacy of catastrophe over revolution in today’s world, are very well argued and richly illustrated throughout.” • Michael Carrithers, Durham University
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Robert Hariman
Chapter 1. The Communal Dilemma as a Cultural Resource in Hungarian Political Expression
David Boromisza-Habashi
Chapter 2. Chronotopes of the Political: Public Discourse, News Media, and Mass Action in Post-Conflict Macedonia
Andrew Graan
Chapter 3. The In-Between States: Enduring Catastrophes as Sources of Democracy’s Deadlocks in the Balkans: The Case of Kosovo
Naser Miftari
Chapter 4. Occupy Wall Street as Rhetorical Citizenship: The Ongoing Relevance of Pragmatism for Deliberative Democracy
Robert Danisch
Chapter 5. Contemporary Social Movements and the Emergent Nomadic Political Logic
Peter N. Funke and Todd Wolfson
Chapter 6. “Project Heat” and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing
Catherine Fennell
Chapter 7. Reading between the Digital Lines: Narrating the Political Rhetoric of Ethical Consumption
Eleftheria J. Lekakis
Chapter 8. The Uncertainty of Power and the Certainty of Irony: Encountering the State in Kara, Southern Ethiopia
Felix Girke
Chapter 9. Grassroots Discourses in Times of Scarcity: Debating the 2004 Locust Plague in Northwestern Senegal and the World
Christian Meyer
Chapter 10. Too Too Much Much: Presence and Catastrophe in Contemporary Art
Monica Westin
Conclusion: What Next? Modernity, Revolution, and the “Turn” to Catastrophe
Ralph Cintron
Contributors
Index
