This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro‐American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00154.x

Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect

The present study builds on earlier work by Meyer and Land (2003) which introduced the generative notion of threshold concepts within (and across) disciplines, in the sense of transforming the internal view of subject matter or part thereof. In this earlier work such concepts were further linked to forms of knowledge that are ‘troublesome’, after the work of Perkins (1999). It was argued that these twinned sets of ideas may define critical moments of irreversible conceptual transformation in the educational experiences of learners, and their teachers. The present study aims (a) to examine the extent to which such phenomena can be located within personal understandings of discipline-specific epistemological discourses, (b) to develop more extensively notions of liminality within learning that were raised in the first paper, and (c) to propose a conceptual framework within which teachers may advance their own reflective practice.

Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning

Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.I thank Robert Art, Mia Bloom, Steven Cicala, Alex Downs, Daniel Drezner, Adria Lawrence, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Mearsheimer, Michael O'Connor, Sebastian Rosato, Lisa Weeden, the anonymous reviewers, and the members of the program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago for their superb comments. I especially thank James K. Feldman and Chaim D. Kaufmann for their excellent comments on multiple drafts. I would also like to acknowledge encouragement from the committee for the Combating Political Violence paper competition sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, which selected an earlier version as a winning paper.

/pdf/the-strategic-logic-of-suicide-terrorism-1yczn9yt08.pdf

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.

National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life

This article explores the metaphor of performance to investigate how tourism can be conceived as a set of activities, imbricated with the everyday, whereby conventions are reinforced and broken. By looking at the contexts in which tourism is regulated, directed and choreographed or, alternatively, is a realm of improvisation and contestation, I will consider the constraints and opportunities which shape the ways in which tourist space (here considered as ‘stages’) and performance are reproduced, challenged, transformed and bypassed. A range of examples will be used to exemplify the ways in which tourism is staged and performed. I will also focus on how the global proliferation of tourist practices and attractions acts to theme tourist space in highly commodified ways and simultaneously decentre normative modes of performing tourism.

Performing tourism, staging tourism (Re)producing tourist space and practice

This important new introductory textbook by a prime mover in the emergent field of Performance Studies is a defining moment for the discipline. It provides a lively and accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. It includes discussion of the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of every day life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the performing arts, anthropology, post-structuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy and aesthetics. The text has been fully developed with input from leading teachers and trialled with students. User-friendly, with a special text design, it also includes the following features: Extracts from primary sources giving alternative voices and viewpoints Biographies of key thinkers 'Things to think about' and 'things to do' to stimulate fieldwork, classroom exercises and discussion Key reading lists for each chapter 20 line drawings and 173 b+w photographs drawn from private and public collections around the world.

Performance Studies: An Introduction

How is social action related to aesthetics, and anthropology to theatre? What is the meaning of such concepts as \"work,\" \"play, \"liminal,\" and \"flow\"? In this highly influential book, Turner elaborates on ritual and theatre, persona and individual, role-playing and performing, taking examples from American, European, and African societies for a greater understanding of culture and its symbols.

Toward a Definition of Performance Studies, Part I@@@Between Theatre and Anthropology@@@Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance@@@From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Between Theater and Anthropology

In The Future of Ritual, Richard Schechner explores the nature of ritualised behaviour and its relationship to performance and politics. A brilliant and uncontainable examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of 'culture' in today's intercultural world. An exciting new work by the author of Performance Theory.

The Future of Ritual : Writings on Culture and Performance

List of figures Notes of contributors Introduction 1. Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama? 2. Magnitudes of performance 3. Liminality: a synthesis of subjective and objective experience 4. The Yaqui deer dance at Pascua Pueblo, Arizona 5. The Yaqui point of view: on Yaqui ceremonies and anthropologies 6. Performance of precepts/precepts of performance: Hasidic celebrations of Purim in Brooklyn 7. The significance of performance for its audience: an analysis of three Sri Lankan rituals 8. What does it mean to 'become the character': power, presence, and transcendence in Asian in-body disciplines of practice 9. Korean shamans: role playing through trance possession 10. The practice of noh theatre 11. The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances 12. Ethnographic notes on sacred and profane performance 13. The spatial sense of the sacred in Spanish America and the American South and its tie with performance 14. Space and context 15. The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions 16. Universals of performance or amortising play Appendix Bibliography Index.

Richard Schechner

Papers

Performance Studies: An Introduction

Toward a Definition of Performance Studies, Part I@@@Between Theatre and Anthropology@@@Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance@@@From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Between Theater and Anthropology

The Future of Ritual : Writings on Culture and Performance

By means of performance : intercultural studies of theatre and ritual