Political Ethos Research Articles

Desde la periferia

Archives on Food, Culture and Nutrition (AFOCUN) was sponsored by the International Commission on Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF) with the firm commitment of a small Spanish university – the University of Extremadura – to what can be seen as an affirmation of its counter-current spirit. It is born in some way in the subalternity, located on the periphery of the great centers of knowledge dissemination, alien to the flows of exchange of broad academic capital. And it also did so with the aim of clarifying the category of Open Access (OA), offering researchers a space to disseminate their findings free of charge and without restriction of any kind. This assumption of subalternity as a political ethos also refers to the delimitation of the objects of study that can be addressed in this publication. In the first place, because of a firm commitment to interdisciplinarity, given that the journal is open to publications that address the food issue from different perspectives. But also, because of the firm commitment to offer a space for contexts of subalternity that have not been addressed with due attention. This issue largely addresses all these foundational ethos of the publication with which it intends to carve out a path. It combines research by authors of recognized prestige in the academic and cultural fields with incipient authors; It caters to different languages, such as English and Spanish, while opening its doors to European, but also Asian and American researchers. But, above all, this second issue of AFOCUN provides a space for multidisciplinary expression and reflection on food and nutrition, addressing classic topics such as indigenous ways of eating with other more innovative ones such as reflection on the "cultural sustainability" of food systems.

‘Let me tell you what I believe’: Narratives, storytelling and ethos building, the case of Tory leaders (2005–2023)

This article proposes a critical narrative analysis of the way recent Conservative leaders have used storytelling to talk about themselves and reinforce their political ethos during the annual party conferences. We will use David Cameron’s transformative tenure as a starting point, as he tried to usher in a new Conservative creed, more compassionate and voluntarily different from Thatcherism. We will then see how his successors have also resorted to narratives to establish a strong political ethos. The main objective of the article is to examine the evolution of the image of the Conservative leader and to assess the role storytelling has played in this important communicational process.

The Crisis of Democracy and the Legitimate Rule of Law: Kelsen, Populism, and the Politics of Recognition

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: This essay examines how deliberation and recognition contribute to our understanding of democracy as a form of government combining two sources of legitimacy, one based on a legal procedure and the other based on ideological faith commitment.
 THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Although joint deliberation about policy aims and recognition of person’s political identities are often assumed to be complementary (Habermas, 1996; Honneth, 2014; Taylor, 1994), I argue that this need not be the case. Political identities oriented by faith commitments pose a challenge to deliberation oriented by rational compromise. A one-sided emphasis on deliberation or recognition as exclusive sources of democratic legitimation threatens to debase the res publica to an arena of identity politics whose populist proclivities are antithetical to liberal democracy. Exacerbating this trend is the phenomenon of political polarization caused in large part by the economic stratification and socio-cultural fragmentation of a global, digital form of capitalism. My method for examining and resolving the problem relies on notable philosophers who have written about the legal and political implications of deliberation and the politics of recognition: Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans Kelsen.
 THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The paper begins by summarizing the importance of recognition for political life and its ambivalent humanistic and nationalistic (and sub-nationalistic) senses (Part 1). I then turn to Kelsen’s critique of recognition as incompatible with the rule of law, followed by his qualified endorsement of recognition, understood as a necessary political ethos underwriting a liberal, deliberative form of democracy (Parts 2 and 3). Turning to our contemporary democratic crisis, I show how structural transformations within and between political parties and the public sphere have given rise to authoritarian forms of populism (Part 4). I conclude by noting how imperatives within digital capitalism produce ambivalent effects regarding the restoration...
 

Closing the Gender Gap in Internal Political Efficacy? Gender Roles and the Masculine Ethos of Politics in Spain

AbstractGiven women’s gains in employment, education, and economic status, the persistent gender gap in internal political efficacy remains a puzzle for social scientists. We go beyond standard socioeconomic explanations and consider gender roles, which, unlike socioeconomic situation, are a slow-moving force constrained by gendered socialization. Stereotypically feminine traits jar with stereotypical notions of politics in general, as competitive, and leaders as power-seeking and assertive. Drawing on observational data from an original survey fielded in Spain, we show that this incongruence accounts for women’s perception of having a low capacity to participate in politics. Results from a survey experiment suggest that this relationship is not set in stone, however. When politicians’ motivation is framed in line with feminine traits—as a public service rather than a struggle for power—women consider themselves just as capable as men of participating in politics. The results have implications for women’s political participation and representation in politics.

Decolonising the Civilian in Third World National Liberation Wars

Within international humanitarian law (IHL) the legal figure of the civilian is conceived as a passive victim of war in need of protection, while civilians who become actively involved in hostilities lose their protections. The distinction between civilians and combatants is accordingly a fundamental principle informing IHL and is considered a standard of civilisation and humane warfare. This paper interrogates what happens when this standard is applied to anticolonial wars, where entire civilian populations participated in self-emancipatory violence and actively blurred this distinction in order to advance their own liberation. Advancing a theory aimed at decolonising the legal figure of the civilian, I analyse the specific nature of anticolonial violence and the call of anticolonial thinkers to deliberately undermine the distinction between civilians and combatants. Building on the ethos of civilian participation articulated by different anticolonial thinkers and adopting a ‘revisionist’ approach, I argue that the passive conception of the civilian at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols faces the risk of outlawing anticolonial violence and its political ethos of liberation. Décoloniser la figure du civil dans les guerres de libération nationale du tiers monde

«КАК ЖИЛ, КОГО ЛЮБИЛ, КОМУ РУКИ НЕ ПОДАЛ...» «КАК ЖИЛ, КОГО ЛЮБИЛ, КОМУ РУКИ НЕ ПОДАЛ»: К ВОПРОСУ ОБ ЭТИЧЕСКИХ ОЦЕНКАХ ПОВЕДЕНИЯ СТУДЕНТОВ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОГО ФАКУЛЬТЕТА МГУ НАЧАЛА 40-Х ГОДОВ ХХ ВЕКА

In the article on the material of memoirs of graduates of the Faculty of History of the Lomonosov Moscow State University the specific ethos characteristic of this subculture in the second half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s is considered. The author describes this ethos as complex, including academic ethos, political (or civil) ethos, and ethos of interpersonal relations. The analysis of sources shows that often these three elements were not separated in students' ethical perceptions and discourse. This syncretism of ethos brings them closer to the pre-revolutionary liberal Russian intelligentsia, although the political orientation of these two groups was different.

Dialogue, Knowledge, Press and Citizens

The public domain is the fundamental institution in a society. A society can only exercise its political activity when allowing the free dialogue in this arena. Legitimacy rests on rational public agreement. To realize its nature, this dialogue needs to be carried out with the participation of equal and autonomous beings whose contributions to the debate are based on information and reflection. Manipulation and the promotion of particular interest erode the legitimacy to be achieved in this dialogic exercise. Education helps society for a responsible dialogue in which human capacities flourish. On the other hand, the free press warrants a political ethos where ideas and reflections are shared without undue restrictions. The promotion of a free, informed and rational dialogue directs society towards rational decisions not based on the narrow conceptions of instrumental rationality.

An Updated Overview on Personalized Medicine: The Next-Gen Paradigm

Personalized medicine is a translational approach that utilizes an individual’s genetic profile to guide illness prevention, diagnosis, and treatment choices. The human genome project data is being used to enhance personalized treatment. “Personalised” medicine is beneficial over “individualized” medicine as it suggests that future hazards may be predicted based on the individual’s genes. The advancement of technology for personalized medicine depends heavily on standardization, integration, and harmonization. The scientific practices at various research sites, the connection between science and healthcare, and the relationship between science, healthcare, and broader society, including the legal and ethical paradigms, the dominant cultural and political ethos, and the expectations of patients and citizens - all need to be in harmony. There are several descriptions of the current existing legislation that regulates genetic screening and genomic medical services in various countries around the world, highlighting discrepancies and specifying areas of law where harmonization may be needed to enable the use of individually tailored medication globally. The promise of personalized medicine can only be fulfilled by placing the individual at the centre of personalized medicine and tailoring care to each patient’s unique psychological and social needs in addition to their biological profiles.

Imperial Remnants of a Contested Alpine Border Region: Encountering Bolzano’s Ambiguous Monuments

Italian cities are full of public inscriptions and monuments that praise not only fascism but also its brutal expansionist wars. This situation is especially true in Bolzano, the capital of a formerly contested border region in the north of the country, where such symbols were crucial to claim political and cultural domination over conquered territories – not only in the Mediterranean and Africa, but also within Italy’s own national borders. This essay examines monuments, street names and other material legacies of fascist imperialism in Bolzano and reflects on the meaning given to them by the fascist regime at the time of their erection. It reveals why these symbols were placed at specific points in the city as imperial landmarks and questions the regime’s representative intentions behind it. This essay intends to provide a historical starting point for an overall examination of imperial monuments in Bolzano and, based on this, to enable research on their reception history in further studies. To this end, it examines articles from fascist South Tyrolean newspapers reporting on the inauguration ceremonies of the monuments. In addition, fascist laws and city government protocols provide information about the political ethos under which the regime erected them. Finally, the imperial remnant’s symbolic content will be analysed and compared with the research literature on Italian colonialism and its wars of aggression.

Geometry in Art? Scenes of a Colonisation of the Look and the Thinking in Mathematics Education

Background: Wouldn’t the transformations of artworks over time be the most convincing record of how geometry was historically practised and transformed? Now, it seems that research on geometry, whether as a theory or a school subject, leads us to a no less important problem linked to its effects and modulations on subjectivity. In mathematics education, one sees the agency of art for a very specific purpose: learning geometry through art. However, geometry is not just a set of theorems, concepts, and forms to be apprehended; it is also a device that, imprinted on our thinking, makes us talk about the world and its things. That is, it participates in the game of relations of power, knowledge, being, life, and nature, producing truths reiterated and subordinated by the ways of looking, thinking, and representing. Objectives: This article aims to analyse aspects of the relationship between geometry and art that put into practice a colonial matrix of power in mathematics education. Design: To do so, some scenes are presented, such as body-scene, space-scene, and nature-scene, considering geometry and art in its historical and educational forms. Setting and Participants: It is supported by art, art history, and research that articulates art and geometry. Data collection and analysis: Examples of the use of geometry in art are raised, analysing, through visuality, the functioning of a practice that produces and reproduces the presence and effects of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Results: A geometrised fictional reality is revealed and conditioned by the ways of looking, thinking, and representing, in which geometry, operated with art, conforms and puts into practice a colonial thought, fostering the destabilisation of power and knowledge relations. Conclusions: Finally, the question is: Are we creating in our educational practices possibilities of deterritorialisations, lines of flight, decoloniality, to venture with other attitudes within the disciplinary devices in mathematics education? Therefore, it is necessary to think more about the truths put forward than to affirm them: for a new ethical, aesthetic, and political ethos in mathematics education.

Forsaking the Market

A central component of the American political ethos has been that there ought to be a complementary relationship between the liberal polity and free-market capitalism. When such a relationship exists the distinction between the two spheres is presumably dissolved by the liberty guaranteed by each to the other. This paper consists of an analysis of editorials and columns in the American prestige press on the question of the desirability of price and wage control during the 1940s and 1970s and assumes that such an issue highlights the relationship of politics and economics. The analysis reveals that the editorial position of the New York Times had changed from reluctant to strong support for controls based on a perceived crisis of fairness in the American political economy during the early 1970s. The concern with fairness during the 1970s was mirrored in reverse in Wall Street Joumal editorials and columns opposing controls and suggests that a scramble for economic shares had taken precedence over the more traditional concern to preserve political and economic liberty.

Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, by William Robin

<i>Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace</i>, by William Robin

Rimal and Writing the Nation: Building Democracy in South Asia

In his play Masan (1946), the modern Nepali playwright Gopal Prasad Rimal (1918–1973) captures the national aspiration for political change in the 1940s. He weaves a narrative in and around the protagonist Krishna as the typical member of the ruling elite. The play explores his inability to understand the dynamics of conjugal and family life at the personal level, representing the failure of the rulers to grasp the changing spirit of the society. The play sets Krishna in a politically analogous situation of the nation in which the repressive order dominates the people. Consequently, the nation searches for a new form of governance to get rid of the repression of the Rana rule. At the same time, Rimal grasps the spirit of the awakening of the South Asian countries in the process of democratization during the 1940s. He uses a very personal narrative of Krishna to discuss the impacts of larger political ideology of patriarchy in the formation of self like Helen, Bagmati, or the Bride. Presenting Krishna’s world as a microcosm for the whole nation, the playwright depicts the national political ethos in the play. The victimization of the innocent characters and the tension resulting from therein parallel the suffering of the nation. The denial of creative potential appears as the central device through which he approaches the national quest for change. Giving a new historicist reading to the play, this paper argues that Rimal’s play prepares a ground to justify the call for radical change in the existing order of the Rana regime in the 1940s in Nepal.

Un ethos politique féminin ? Le discours de l’extrême droite en Espagne ou la porosité des frontières discursives

"After being considered a kind of weakness for a long time, femininity seems to have reversed. its stigma and has become a positive value in the political discourse due to the stereotypes usually related to it, which allow to define the female political ethos in terms of empathy, affectivity and non-aggressive behaviour. However, the women of the emerging right-wing party in Spain, VOX, contradict this trend by assuming an extremely polarized anti-feminist discourse. Based on a fourhour corpus of public speeches, this paper aims to analyse the topics and the rhetorical strategies used in those speeches, which will show how porous the dichotomy “male-female” can be when it comes to political discourse."

Caste, then Class: Redistribution and Representation in the Dravidian Model

Dravidian parties believe that changes to the economic structure will not lead to social justice if the upper/dominant castes continue to exclusively possess social capital. To them, and later, to the successive Dravidian party governments, economic justice was not possible without first ensuring social justice. This view was held by the stalwarts of the Dravidian movement such as Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar henceforth), the subject of this engagement, and actualised by leaders such as C.N. Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi, whose electoral politics was a means to empower subaltern groups in Tamil society. We contend that Periyar was the chief aggregator of the ideas put forth by earlier social justice ideologues, and an effective disseminator of the Dravidian political ethos among the masses, making his contribution comprehensive and unique. Through an analysis of the approach of Dravidian party governments towards affirmative action, administrative reform and legislation, and through comparisons of the performance of Tamil Nadu in terms of development indicators with other states, we reveal the profound influence of Periyarist thinking on the Dravidian movement and State praxis. The quest of the Dravidian movement for social justice did not just focus on class inequalities but on caste inequalities, which it saw as a propagator of class inequalities.

Biopolitics of Invulnerability

ABSTRACT In the course of their nation building, most Southeast Asian countries worked among other things on setting governmental policies on their respective highly developed martial arts practice groups. These groups relate to diverse structures: initiation communities, security agencies, militia organisations. The Southeast Asian governments strove to standardise the martial practice, to ‘sportivise’ them, and to integrate them into the school education curricula. The federations are the subject of massive programmes for physical and ideological formation, designed to incorporate a patriotic political ethos and the interiorisation of nationalist values. However, by fostering the construction of ‘strong bodies’, these state biopolitics also contribute to (re)generating regional groups concurrent to the central power. Through several examples in the Malay world and with a particular focus on Indonesia, this article describes that these groups constitute political networks that are relatively autonomous, and convey alternative models for the expression of the agonistic body.

A View from the Heart of Europe

Abstract There are at least three ways of understanding “criticism”: 1) as literary scholarship; 2) as teaching; 3) as a way of engaging the general reading public regarding the significance of literary and cultural matters. Every country has developed its own traditions in each of these three areas. This brief essay focuses on the Italian case, arguing that teachers of American literature need to make the most of their role as cultural mediators and translators, as in the formative years of Italian American Studies. The influence of the corporate model on the Italian public university, along with other factors, has made relations between literary scholars’ and the nonacademic public sphere tenuous. Unless the democratic political ethos that presided over the birth of the discipline is rediscovered, the future for Italian “American literary criticism”—in all the three articulations mentioned above—will be rather bleak.

“The Walls Have Fallen”

In 2021, June 19 (Juneteenth) became a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Prior to Juneteenth gaining official status, January 1 (Emancipation Day) was the de facto national holiday on which African Americans celebrated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. From 1863 until the late twentieth century, African Americans throughout the nation celebrated what the black-owned journal The Elevator called “the greatest event in the history of the Colored people of America.” While several scholarly works focus on Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the United States, these studies have largely ignored how black westerners celebrated what was essentially “independence day” for African Americans. This essay examines Emancipation Day celebrations in the African American communities of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Emancipation Day celebrations illustrate how black Californians in the state’s largest African American communities used ritualized celebration and public dialogue to construct their new civic identities as free black men and women. Emancipation Day celebrations provided black Californians opportunities to testify to their aspirations as members of the American polity, and to their vision of themselves as upholders of liberty and beacons of freedom in post–Civil War America. Black Californians forthrightly used public commemorations of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to illustrate black community consciousness through the spirit of public festivals and civic celebrations, otherwise known as “public festive culture.” These public rituals did more than celebrate liberty: they legitimated black freedom and citizenship, honored the memory of Abraham Lincoln as God’s servant, and elaborated a political ethos powerful enough to unify African Americans as members of the American polity.

Part Typewriter, Part Divination: A Black Feminist Approach to Black Digital Archives and Preserving the Papers of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

Black Digital Humanities in the hands of Black Feminist and Black Women’s Studies scholars enables historiography and open access pedagogy about Black liberation thinkers in the tradition of the Black Studies Movement.1 Furthermore it is a subversive model of archiving which produces a counter-narrative to traditional and canonical ways of thinking, producing, and storing work that is coming out of Black liberatory movements, praxis, creative social visions, and knowledge production. For our purposes we describe this as the myriad valences of Blackness experienced, encompassed, and reproduced. This paper theorizes the ways in which Black Digital Humanities can be used to preserve historical documents that would otherwise be repressed and erased in the evolving world of online databases, open access and for-profit library packages. It examines these questions by discussing the creation of the Activist Studio West (ASW) and its efforts to preserve the history of The Campaign to Bring Mumia home. We deploy Black Feminist praxis through collaborative interventions into historiography as a key feature of political consciousness raising. The stakes of this article (and archive) call into question the fundamentals of digital humanities and what it means to develop a digital repository to document Black Radical Political movements as Black Feminists. Research team members, historian Jessica Millward, political scientist Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Black cultural studies scholar LaShonda Carter, visual culture scholar Ella Turenne, and ethnic studies archivist Krystal Tribbett prioritized introducing students to the major scholarship on creating community based archives, the ethical concerns around this particular type of Black Radical archive, and the political ethos involved in initiating an archive around a figure that has been consistently threatened by state sanctioned historical record. As a research methods driven paper we have focused on concept and theory-building toward curriculum development.

(Un)Expected Soviet Nostalgia? Complex Memory of the Soviet Past and the Improbable Democratic Discourse in Russian Orthodoxy

ABSTRACT: This article examines the current ethos of Russian Orthodox culture in terms of its correspondence to democratic values by analyzing the structure of memory of the Soviet past in the Orthodox milieu and among the Church’s leadership. The premise is that collective memory of this kind can be a criterion in assessing the political ethos of a community. The memory of the Soviet past includes such elements as hagiography of the martyrs who died in the Soviet anti-religious terror; the issue of the Church’s strategy of loyalty toward the repressive regime; the hermeneutics of trauma as providential sacrifice; and attitudes toward the Soviet past in view of Orthodox sociopolitical ideals. This article shows ambiguities in Orthodox assessment of the Soviet regime; but even the direct rejection of the Soviet past rarely translated into an engagement with a democratic agenda. This attitude is in line with the official endorsement by the Church leadership of Putin’s authoritarian regime and of the Russian war in Ukraine started in 2022.