Search results for "body politic"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Toxic Theisms? New Strategies for Prebunking Religious Belief-Behaviour Complexes
2020
This article offers a brief epidemiological analysis and description of some of the main cognitive (and coalitional) biases that can facilitate the emergence and enable the maintenance of a broad category of toxic traditions, which will be referred to here as “religious” belief-behaviour complexes (BBCs) or “theisms”. I argue that such BBCs played an “adaptive” role in the Upper Paleolithic and have continued to “work” throughout most of human history by enhancing the species’ capacity for material production and promoting its biological reproduction. However, today the theist credulity and conformity biases that surreptitiously shape these kinds of social assemblages have now becom…
Autobiographical Ecocritical Practices and Academic Environmental Life Writing: John Elder, Ian Marshall, and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands
2011
As ecocriticism emerged as a distinct discourse in literary and cultural studies in North America and in Great Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many scholars working in this burgeoning field were compelled to reconsider the viability of contemporary critical and theoretical frameworks and tried to establish new analytical paradigms that would be appropriate for ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ (Glotfelty xviii). In a 1994 proposal for the future direction of the increasingly interdisciplinary and institutionalized field, influential first-generation ecocritic Scott Slovic urged his peers to practice narrative scholarship, that is, to …
Money in the "Body Politick" : The Analysis of Trade and Circulation in the Writings of Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmeticians.
2005
International audience; This article discusses the analysis of trade and circulation in the writings of seventeenth-century political arithmeticians. Political arithmetic was in its way an anatomy of the social body. William Petty titled his 1672 book The Political Anatomy of Ireland. In his preface he explicitly claimed to be following Francis Bacon, highlighting the experimental method and the idea that analytical methods can be transposed from one discipline to another. He thus drew a parallel between the natural body and the body politic. It was a widely held idea that money guaranteed the nation's health; conversely its poor state of health could lead to the wasting away of the body po…
The Body Politic from Medieval Lombardy to the Dutch Republic: An Introduction
2020
States of Exception: Auto-immunity and the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
2010
The essay starts by referring to a central moment in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, when the Roman hero reacts to his banishment by banishing: “I banish you!" (3.3.123). These lines, the essay argues, provide, in a condensed form, a radical shift of perspective on the question of the boundaries of Rome: how far does Rome extend? Can Rome banish herself ? Does Rome move with Coriolanus as he moves “elsewhere” (3. 3. 135)? They also force the audience to reconsider the "nature" of the political decision that leads to the ban. Taking its cue from this line, the essay shows that the question of boundaries in Coriolanus is intimately connected with the uncanny logic of "auto-immunity" which affects R…
Body Politics and Fat Shaming
2020
Fat shaming as a concept captures all the bias ingrained in cultural values, economic orders, and hegemonic ideals that stigmatize overweight or obese bodies. From a cultural perspective, media analysis of fat shaming allows us to address the body stratification that societies have produced, that is, what now is generally known as a somatic order. The entry analyzes the cultural effects of normalization and body politics.