scholarly journals A Bundle of Rods: Transmigration of Symbols and Spatial Rhetoric in the Architecture of Modernity

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Vadala'
Keyword(s):  

Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resource distribution. This book takes advantage of a diversity of geographic perspectives as it analyzes the political processes of war and their spatial expression. Contributors to the volume examine particular manifestations of war in light of nationalism, religion, gender identities, state ideology, border formation, genocide, spatial rhetoric, terrorism, and a variety of resource conflicts. The final section on the geography of peace covers peace movements, diplomacy, the expansion of NATO, and the geography of post-war reconstruction. Case studies of numerous conflicts include Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina, West Africa, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 250-274
Author(s):  
Johannes N. Vorster

In the construction of spatiality, “partitioning” (as Foucault would have it), or the formation of the “enclosure,” allows not only for the production of an object of knowledge, but prompted by the regulative procedures of a social order, also invests spaces with an almost inherent valorisation. The relations of power active in the production of demarcated space, not only allows for the disciplined production of knowledge within the boundaries of the enclosure, but it also enacts the principle of hierarchy, rendering some parts of more value than others, evoking reasons for boundaries, evaluating types of movement and mobility, thereby reproducing social order. How a version of an interior body was embedded within a rhetoric of spatiality in antiquity is the objective of this essay. The point of departure is not a pre-discursive interior body upon which a rhetoric of spatiality has been inscribed, but an already rhetorically constructed object of knowledge in interaction with a rhetoric of spatiality. Besides exploring the interaction of bodily and spatial rhetoric with reference to specific prominent issues in the Dei Opificio Dei of Lactantius, the question whether a version of Roman masculinity tropologically functions as proposal for the construction of social order is also posed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Richards

AbstractIn writing ancient Egyptian social and political history, we take for granted that we should privilege neither textual nor material cultural evidence; rather, we should weave narratives incorporating both strands in weights commensurate with the actual profile of available data in a specific time and place. The mosaic of data available from the later Old Kingdom provides an especially compelling rationale for adopting this multidimensional approach. Earlier accounts of this pivotal era in ancient Egyptian history have relied most heavily on textual evidence ‐ not least because for the first time there existed lengthy biographical inscriptions of government officials providing tantalizing detail on individual political careers and legitimizing verbal rhetoric regarding possible historical events. In this particular period, however, the amounts of such textual data are outweighed in sheer quantity by contemporary archaeological remains. I have previously argued that spatial patterning, both in the synchronic distribution of these remains and (perhaps more compellingly) in the shifts of these patterns over time, should play an equal or even more prominent role in writing a socio-political history of this particular period. A primary case study explored in this essay is the late Old Kingdom mortuary landscape at Abydos where new data has emerged strengthening the diachronic evidence for the manipulation of a spatial rhetoric of political ideology, providing further insight into ancient Egyptian elites’ responses to perceived or real crises in centralized control of the country. This phenomenon at Abydos was only one part of a broader program of materializing central authority throughout the Egyptian Nile Valley at a time when the verbal rhetoric of royal power was limited in voice, audience, and context.


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