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Political Hierarchies (political + hierarchy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

FLORENTINE CIVIC HUMANISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN IDEOLOGY

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2007
HANAN YORAN
ABSTRACT This article revisits the question of the modernity of the Renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans Baron's interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists' political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. The article's main contention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. This created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself. [source]

,A Natural and Voluntary Dependence': The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786,1797

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2010
SUSAN DEANS-SMITH
In this article, I explore the controversies that characterised the foundational years of the Royal Academy of San Carlos of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Mexico City (1786,1797). They provide provocative insights into questions of competing agendas and ambitions among the artists and bureaucrats of the royal academy. They also illuminate contemporary understandings about the hierarchical relationships between a metropolitan power, Spain, and its American colonies and their visual culture and artistic production, which mirror broader political hierarchies and relationships of power and subordination. [source]

The Death of the Collective Subject in Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2003
David Kenosian
In previous interpretations of Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob, critics have focused primarily on Johnson's relationship to socialism on the complex narrative structure of the novel. In this essay, I explore a topic that has received comparatively little attention: Johnson's notion of subjectivity. I show that Johnson's attempt to challenge Marxist concepts of the collective subject is inseparably linked to his views on representing history. Johnson's first move is to eliminate the omniscient Socialist Realist narrator who is supposed to have a greater understanding of societal forces than do the characters in the fictional world. But in Mutmassungen über Jakob, it is the protagonist (Jakob) who has a greater understanding of politics than the former Socialist Realist narrator (Rohlfs). Their relationship undermines the political hierarchy constituted by workers and party. In addition, history in the novel is not narrated from a privileged epistemological position. Rather, it is reconstructed in a negotiation among various subjects (characters) at the porous border between history and memory. This self-reflexive model of historiography is, as implied by Uwe Johnson, democratic, in contradistinction to Socialist Realism. Finally, I point out that this model of writing history in Mutmassungen über Jakob anticipates the polyphonic representation of the past in Johnson's Jahrestage (1970,83). In Johnson's final work, German history is consequently written in dialogues with Germans, immigrants from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors, and textual sources from various countries. [source]

The Expansion, Diversification, and Segmentation of Power in Late Prehispanic Nasca

ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2004
Christina A. Conlee
During the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1000,1476) the organization and foundation of power in Nasca was transformed from earlier times. Previously, religious resources were central to the development and maintenance of the political and social hierarchy. After the collapse of the Wari Empire and a period of balkanization, the resources used to establish and maintain power broadened considerably. The expansion of the power base into new realms coincided with an increase in the number of local elites in the drainage. There was no longer a focus on regional ceremonial centers; instead, elites were able to build power through a variety of activities including exchange, craft production (with a focus on utilitarian items), feasting, community-based ritual activities, and probably warfare and defense. During this period the levels of the political hierarchy grew and a more heterarchical type of regional polity developed. [source]