Scapegoat Research Articles

A Multimodal Metaphorical Representation of Selected Political Cartoons in Nigeria

Complementing studies on the representation of political cartoons which apply metaphorical representation in the portrayal of societal ills, this study explores a multimodal metaphorical representation of selected political cartoons in Nigeria to investigate how cartoonists employed metaphors to represent the current political situation in the country. In the face of the ongoing election petitions and handover of office to the President, among other activities within the political domain in Nigeria, a number of political cartoonists have flooded the online platform with cartoons depicting visual metaphorical representations of happenings within the nation. Such metaphorical representations are semiotically showcased via such cartoons as Go to Court, the Scape Goat, Buhari’s Pet, Corruption, and Original Wahala Received by Me in the portrayal of reality that Nigeria faces today. Given the foregoing, this study combines linguistic and visual modes to form a multimodal representation of the metaphors used in the selected political cartoons. The study adopts a qualitative analysis of 10 political cartoons in Nigeria. It uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006, 2020) approach to multimodality and Forceville’s (1996, 2016) view of visual realisations of conceptual metaphor in constructing meaning to investigate how visual images are constructed to cue conceptual metaphors. The results of the study suggest that Nigerian political cartoons rely mainly on visual metaphors as a means of communicating their messages. In addition, the metaphors used often rely on comic, exaggerated and simplistic depictions to convey their meaning effectively and to stir a strong emotional reaction from the readers. Furthermore, the findings of the study emphasise the importance of metaphorical representation in political cartoons and its implications for public discourse. The results reveal ways to improve the power of the metaphorical messages and the impact of the cartoons on public opinion. The study contributes to the multimodal metaphor research field and reveals the Nigerian public’s underlying beliefs and ideologies.

‘Moving grove’: Dionysian rites of passage in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth

The major English medieval pagan folk customs, feasts, and rituals that survived in early modern England share the death-resurrection motif of the Greco-Roman agrarian rites and mystery religions associated mainly with the myths of Dionysus. This comparative study between two generically different plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, purports to bring out, respectively, the degree of violence in a green comedy, and the effect of greenery in a tragedy of blood. It draws on René Girard's anthropological theory of sacrificial violence and scapegoating to examine the rites of passage in both plays through the archetype of the regenerative cycle of nature.

The translator and the scapegoat: On mimetic desire and intercultural mediation

In the summer of 1993, several poets and musicians, many of Alevi descent, were staying at the Madımak hotel in Sivas (Turkey) for a festival. One of the hotel guests was Aziz Nesin, a Turkish author who had controversially announced a translation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a book widely condemned for its alleged blasphemy. On July 2, a large crowd marched on the hotel after Friday prayers and set it on fire. Thirty-seven people were killed, and many others wounded. This article discusses the case of Nesin and his connection to what is known as the Sivas massacre. Our study of this event seeks to examine the multilayered relationship between acts of intercultural mediation and outbursts of collective violence. We argue that this relationship can be clarified by drawing on the work of René Girard, whose writings on scapegoating and sacrificial violence survey the multifaceted interaction between human aggression and imitation. We introduce Girard’s work and consider the assumptions behind it in the light of previous work on translation, narrative and conflict. Against this theoretical background, our discussion of the Sivas massacre in relation to the Satanic Verses seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the role of agents of translation as potential catalysts as well as victims of collective violence.A synopsis of this article can be found here.

From Scapegoating to the Culture of Cruelty: (Mis)Managing Mimetic Desire and Violence in Late Modernity

Due to the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias), the overall level of violence is decreasing; yet its transforming patterns persist. The article aims at examining the contemporary structures and mechanisms responsible for violence control, while also exploring the newly emerging, naturalized patterns of cruelty. Firstly, René Girard’s mimetic theory is overviewed: while in archaic societies, mimetic crisis is controlled by sacrificial rites, modernization reconfigures this paradigm. Secondly, these transformations are mapped: mimetic desire is channelled into the market processes, while mimetic crisis is managed by the state monopolizing violence. Thirdly, the structural transformations of late modernity upsetting the fragile balance of state and market are analysed: secular scapegoating becomes part of the political toolset, while the private sphere is overwhelmed by undetectable new forms of hurting and self-harming. As a culture of cruelty is naturalized, mimetic crisis becomes a continuous threat, which generates a need for the functional equivalents of sacrificial violence control.

Staging division: power, violence, and theatricality in The Baby of Mâcon

ABSTRACT Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon (1993) was highly controversial at the time of its release; its means for critiquing cinematic voyeurism and the exploitability of audiences were received as blasphemous and misanthropic. This essay shows that the politics of this film is more complicated, and more profoundly democratic, than has so far been acknowledged. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s work on the “symbolic dimension” of the political and on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on theatricality and “originary mimesis,” it argues that The Baby of Mâcon is a political-ontological fiction that holds a key to understanding the director’s democratic vision in the post-Thatcherite cultural climate of the early 1990s. In the process, not only does this essay advance a new perspective on the film’s complex structure and on the themes of corporeality and sacrificial violence and their place in Greenaway’s work, it also demonstrates the relevance of an ontologized concept of “staging” for reading this unique cult director’s political films.

"Beyaz Mantolu Adam" Öyküsünde Ötekileştirmenin Görünümleri

Oğuz Atay, build his works in context of stranger characters to the society they live in. The story “The Man in a White Coat” in the story book Waiting For Fear develops around an individual who is distant from the society to which he belongs, who exists as the “other” in the society due to the qualities he has or has not have. The subject, who is in a community, seems disconnected from the society because he can not communicate and exhibits an eccentric stance. The story centers conflict of society and individual by narrating tension between community and the subject. It is seen that the community tries to characterise and put the subject into some identities. However when the subject can not be included any social class, category and identify, it is seen that the community commence to be cruel and treats him unhuman. This behavior of the community become violent and they see the subject as a scape goat. It can be said that there is an increasing severity of othering violent. In this study, how othering takes place in the story as a sociological concept has examined and the appearances of othering in the story has revealed.

Greek Tragedy and Cathartic Violence in Leconte de Lisle’s Animal Poems

Abstract This article proposes a new understanding of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s famous animal poems. While recent studies have identified an innovative non-anthropocentric perspective in the texts – vivid snapshots of brute existence, without deeper meaning – we find that these animals function in a more complex manner. Locating them throughout his poetry, beyond the ‘portraits’ most readers are familiar with, we find that they are highly figurative participants in his extensive depictions of human history, lending a more visceral quality to this series of tragedies – recurring scenes that, with their sacrificial violence and devoured victims, indeed suggest an unexpected connection with this literary genre, in its earliest form. Equally unexpected, this connection appears most tenable not in those texts where humans share the stage (as in his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia), but where they are absent. Eliminating the figurative descriptions and impassioned dialogue of the historical and dramatic poems to focus on actual acts of predation, the poet allows the reader to experience these explosions of ‘purely animal’ violence as cathartic, tragic ritual.

Nietzsche, Hamsun, and Sacred Violence

This article deals with the analysis of neo-mythological and pantheistic subjects in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun. The analytical comparison of Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts and Hamsun’s literary psychologism is poised to find an underlying understanding of human nature at the confluence of ethics and aesthetics - of goods and beauty, of evil and ugly. A precise definition of the aesthetic categories “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” is carried out based on Nietzsche’s work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”. The relevance of the Dionysian culture’s phenomena is based on the Nietzschean belief in an Übermensch within the modern mindset. The concept of “Dionysus” finds its continuation in the postmodern philosophy of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, in such archaic emotional and aesthetic aspects of human essence as violence and sacrifice understood in an extremely abstract sense. The authors stress that modern culture’s interest in violence and sacrifice is rooted in Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysius in the meaning of one of the beginnings of any segment of European culture. The foundations for overcoming postmodernism in the 21st century and the subsequent development of aesthetic views can be found in an attempt to revise the foundation of European culture through rethinking the concept of Übermensch-Zarathustra-Dionysus.

Sacred violence and spirited resistance: on war and religion in African history

ABSTRACT This paper surveys the relationship between warfare and religion in precolonial Africa, with a particular focus on Eastern Africa, including the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian Highlands. It is argued that religion played a central role in the legitimization of violence as well as in its memorialization. In the Great Lakes region of East Africa, warfare involved spiritual observance as well as sanction, and in general the evidence suggests that religion involved the exercise of restraint in violence. However the irruption of external dynamics – specifically the introduction of new religions – involved heightened levels of violence in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Reinvigorated and repurposed cosmologies, moreover, often underpinned anticolonial resistance. In the case of Ethiopia, deep-rooted Abrahamic faiths facilitated greater levels of violence and a steady expansion in the scale and scope of the war, compared to local cosmologies further south. Ethiopian state-building projects involved warfare sanctioned by God against an array of non-believers.

For the Greater Good: Sacrificial Violence and the Coronavirus Pandemic

For the Greater Good: Sacrificial Violence and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Taming Dragons: The Buddhist Mythmaking of Sacred Violence in Medieval Buddhist Tales Samgukyusa and Konjaku Monogatarishū

The insights available in Japanese medieval Buddhist narratives on the appropriation and reconstruction of various non-Buddhist divine characters has long been overlooked. Yet an examination of these narratives reveals Buddhist thinkers’ endeavors to reconfigure the religious and cultural roles of folk religious worship and related figures into essential tools through which they could popularize Buddhism, legitimize Buddhist cosmology, and, ultimately, to dominate the religious and cultural milieu of medieval Japan. This essay compares such medieval Buddhist narratives of Japan with Korean mythic tale literature. It pays particular attention to representations of folk religious figures in the works, and in particular, the dragon, an exceptionally prominent character associated with particular roles and symbolism in the simplified, popularized Buddhist framework represented in the dragon character in Korean literature Samgukyusa (三國遺事) and Japanese Konjaku monogatarishū (今昔物語集). The essay investigates various representations of the dragon, which was apparently understood in ambivalent terms—as both a sacred figure and a being inferior to Buddhist figures. Moreover, the way in which such representation is related to medieval Japanese discourse of defilement and threatening power is illuminated. Consequently, the essay discusses how Buddhist mythographers in medieval Japan devised a sophisticated literary strategy to accommodate non-Buddhist religious symbols and, simultaneously, to marginalize them.

Brexit: The scapegoating of the EU for the failures of British Neoliberalism?

Brexit: The scapegoating of the EU for the failures of British Neoliberalism?

The Human Rights Violation A Study of the Indigenous People of Biafra Agitation (IPOB)

The proliferation of ‘violent-oriented' ethnic organizations and agitation groups operating in Nigeria, is a result of the inability of the Nigerian state to resolve the questions of citizenship, resource control, federalism and political representation. This, of course, is an expression of sub-nationalism and irredentism, hence posing a threat to the survival of the fragile democracy and nation-building in the country. No doubt, the Igbo people who bore the brunt of the Nigerian Civil War has been relegated to the background and are being treated as a minority group in the country, even though they are one of the three major ethnic groups in the country. Another problem is the fact that they have been used as scape goats in any political crises in Nigeria. They have been extra-judicially killed and their property wantonly destroyed. All these infringed on their fundamental human rights. These are the factors that have fuelled the recurrent agitation and demand by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) for a separate state was their rights can be protected. This study, therefore, concludes that the development of Nigeria will remain a mirage, and Nigeria, making a positive impact in international politics, a white goose chase, should the country fail to tackle her internal political problems.

The Suñawa Monolith and a Genre of Extended-Arm Sculptures at Tiwanaku, Bolivia

From pre-Columbian times until today, monolithic stone sculptures have constituted the public face of Tiwanaku. Researchers, however, have nearly exclusively focused on the sculptural class that we term “presentation monoliths”: anthropomorphic lithic beings that hold a chicha goblet in one hand and a snuff tablet in the other. Here, we direct attention to a complementary set of sculptures we designate “extended-arm monoliths,” focusing specifically on a sculpture known as the Suñawa Monolith. We argue that the Suñawa, together with its likely companion sculpture, the Pachakama, was one of several monoliths that belonged to this class, which constituted figures positioned to guard or accompany presentation monoliths. Accordingly, the iconography of the Suñawa Monolith depicts themes of sacrificial violence and vegetative generation. We suggest that Tiwanaku monumental sculpture encompassed an entire “society” of animate, differentiated, transacting monoliths that included not just presentation figures but also other beings, including attendant extended-arm monoliths.

Mujeres, acción y diferencia. Esbozos para un feminismo crítico

¿Cómo pensar lo femenino? ¿Es posible ubicar allí algo del orden de lo identificable que permita inscribirnos como parte de un conjunto? ¿Cómo tramitar las diferencias? ¿Cómo articular una propuesta de acción que soporte lo inasible de la subjetividad misma?¿Cómo desplazar esta esfera de inscripción moderna de la violencia sacrificial que produce día a día cada vez más cuerpos desechables? El presente trabajo pretende abordar estos interrogantes dando cuenta de la necesidad de forjar un feminismo crítico que sitúe los discursos de género lejos de toda lectura fácil y simplista. Este desafío supone consolidar un movimiento feminista que problematice y desarticule ciertas categorías medulares de la teoría jurídica de nuestra modernidad occidental. Categorías que han imposibilitado comprender la complejidad y desplazamientos de los procesos de constitución subjetiva; han ignorado las micropolíticas de la diferencia y las disputas/ renegociaciones que éstas implican; han presupuesto una temporalidad teleológica como marco de acción y fundamentalmente no han dado cuenta cómo los paradigmas de excepción se han convertido en formas paradigmáticas de gobierno, constituyéndose en una de las esferas de inscripción moderna de la violencia sacrificial.

Sacrificial violence and gift exchange: Two anthropological/sociological theories for understanding the coronavirus crisis

Sacrificial violence and gift exchange: Two anthropological/sociological theories for understanding the coronavirus crisis

Cyber Forensic Challenges: Escaping Holes for Cyber Attackers Series 01: Extracting Forensic Evidences from Non- Functional Computer Devices

According to Forensic Terminology, Cyber Forensic Challenge is a state, a competitive situation, unavailability of reliable evidences and bottleneck constraint in Computer Forensic Investigation and its Procedures. A Forensic Challenge can either be Technical, Admistrative or Legislative/Legal and Anti-Forensic is an example of Technical Challenge, it adds complexity in acquiring and accessing an evidence or sets of evidences during Forensic Investigation. In real-world scenarios, it hurdles Forensic Examiners from acquiring an image of evidences to continue with Forensic Examinations and makes the Attackers or Adversaries "Scape Goats" during Criminal Prosecution or in a Corporate Forensic Investigation, as where it arises. In Public Computer Forensic domains, one of the Challenges is unavailability of Public Repositories of MACs, Bluetooth, IMEI and NFC Addresses -of Mobile Phones, WiFi Routers, Printers, Biometric Scanners and other IOT Devices(such as Amazon Alexa, Smart Watch and FitBit). Globally, not adequate, but there are reasonable numbers of such Repositories to overcome the challenges in the concerned fields and countable numbers of systems dedicated to such collections and innovative ones to name are CEIR(Central Equipment Identity Repository) for IMEI Databases(India), WIGLE for WiFi SSID(Global) but there is still shortfalls of ethical Repositories of Bluetooth Addresses (Private and Public) and Identifiers associated with NFC and RFID !

Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster

Reviewed by: Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster E. J. Kent Juster, Susan, Sacred Violence in Early America (Early American Studies), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; paperback; pp. xiii; 288; 17 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $26.50, £19.99; ISBN 9780812224191. This is a book that recommends itself to scholars in all fields of early modern European research, but particularly to those who consider the early modern Transatlantic. While it focuses on the Anglosphere, the themes of the book are relevant to the entire European encounter with the New World. Sacred Violence in Early America is, Susan Juster writes, 'a deep cultural history of the theology of violence: the presuppositions, referential chains, and linguistic homologies that structured how early Americans narrated, rationalized and fantasized about, and occasionally apologized for violence against a variety of religious "others"—heretics, sectarians, and, especially, Indians' (p. 3). Juster shows, clearly and vividly, that the violence inherent in the European religious contestations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries moved with them to the New World. Once there, far from becoming a new people as was once supposed, they continued the patterns of thought, behaviour, and belief structured and attuned to violence as fundamental to their religious project, and thus to all other habits of life. Juster goes about 'unearthing the logics that sustained such paradigmatic acts as warfare, captivity, conversion, heresy-hunting, and iconoclastic attacks' from 'English justifications for their own actions with an ear attuned to the rich semiotic and devotional traditions' of Western Christianity (p. 3). Through an 'archaeology of discourse' Juster examines the 'distinct theological paradigm' of 'blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction and iconoclasm' (each a chapter) and 'peels away the discursive layers to reveal the medieval and early modern antecedents' that provided 'form and meaning for […] colonial violence' to 'reconstruct the grammar of religious encounter' (p. 4). Her method is to 'identify and then tug, sometimes vigorously, at the ideological and rhetorical threads that bind early American religious violence […] to Europe's wars of religion' (p. 4). This enables Juster to follow the 'bright red line' of blood sacrifice, or the more episodic appearance of cannibalism, or concern about unruly tongues, through 'the entire corpus of colonial texts' (p. 4) to show that violence was in the very bones of the European encounter with 'America'. Juster's literary methods may not please all readers, particularly those attuned to the traditional political and religious histories of Puritanism. But what Juster offers here is not 'individual findings, many of which have been known to scholars for some time, but the assembling and juxtaposing of these historical fragments [End Page 264] to create a discursive map of early Anglo-American encounter with the religious other' (p. 5). Juster's work particularly reveals how the language of religious violence saturated everyday religious life for early Anglo-Americans. Her contention is that understanding this aspect of their religious mentalities enables comprehension of 'the combustible mixture of sacred and profane fears and desires that led English men and women to behave […] in such a savage manner toward their enemies in the New World' (p. 7). In calling this 'sacred violence' Juster is saying that even quotidian violence (against Quakers, Native Americans, African-Americans, other Anglo-Americans) was 'motivated and justified in significant part by religious aversion and/or desire' (p. 6) intended to 'restore the boundary between the sacred and the profane or to render profane what others find sacred' (p. 7). While not saying religious motivations were the only motivations to violence in early Anglo-America, Juster (with a nod to Natalie Zemon Davis, p. 7) demonstrates that the 'conquest and settlement of the New World was in fact the final bloody chapter of the Reformation Wars' (p. 13). If there are any concerns about this work, they would relate to what it does not include. This is in no way a criticism of Juster's study, which, in addressing the continuity of paradigms of religious violence from Europe to the New World, is a major contribution to the historiography of the early modern Transatlantic World and provides an important new perspective. But in taking her insights further, scholars must...

Lost without Breadcrumbs: Family, Scapegoating, and the Rationalization of Abuse in Robert Eggers's <em>The Witch</em>

Lost without Breadcrumbs: Family, Scapegoating, and the Rationalization of Abuse in Robert Eggers's <em>The Witch</em>

Trump Döneminde Diplomatik Aktör Olarak Çevirmenler

Bu çalışmanın amacı Trump döneminde çevirmenlerin diplomasi karşıtlığı geleneğiyle anılan ABD dış politikasına etkilerini araştırmaktır. Uluslararası İlişkiler ve Çeviribilim literatürlerinde çevirmenlerin etki alanı çok dar bir çerçevede tartışılmış ve çevirmenler bir aktör olarak görülmemiştir. Bu bağlamda, çevirmenlerin Trump döneminde diplomasi dili, teamülleri ve aktörleri açısından oluşan boşluğu doldurmaya yönelik girişimleri incelenecektir. Makalenin ilk bölümünde çevirmenlerin ve diplomatların işlevleri karşılaştırıldıktan sonra ikinci bölümde çevirmenlerin diplomasiye etkileri iletişim filtresi ve uzlaştırma olmak üzere iki ana başlık altında incelenecektir. Çevirmenler, iletişim filtresi olarak zaman kazandırma, moderatörlük ve eşik bekçisi rollerini üstlenirken, uzlaştırma kapsamında günah keçisi, kriz önleyici ve arabulucu olarak diplomatik süreçleri etkilemektedirler. Uluslararası İlişkiler ve Çeviribilim disiplinleri arasında bağlantı kurarak çevirmenlerin varsayılandan çok daha geniş bir etki alanı olduğunu gösteren bu çalışma, çevirmenlerin önemli bir diplomatik aktör olarak ele alınıp alınamayacağı tartışmasına yön veren öncü çalışmalar arasında yer almayı hedeflemektedir.