Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease

Technocratic Mimetism
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-20190-0
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 521 g

Reihe: Contemporary Liminality

Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease explores the phenomenon of ‘liminal politics’: an open-ended ‘state of exception’ in which normal rules no longer apply, and things which were previously unimaginable become possible – even appearing remarkably quickly to represent a ‘new normal’. With attention to the emergency measures introduced to counter the spread of Covid-19, it shows how the emergency suspension of democratic accountability, ordinary life and civil liberties, while accidental, can lend itself to orchestration and exploitation for the purpose of political gain by ‘trickster’ or ‘parasitic’ figures. An examination of the cloning of political responses from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with little consideration of their rational justification or local context, this volume interrogates the underlying dynamics of a global technological mimetism, as novel technocratic interventions are repeated and the way is opened for new technologies to reorganise social life in a manner that threatens the disintegration of its existing patterns. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social theory and anthropological theory with interests in political expediency and the transformation of social life.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Horvath, Agnes

O'Connor, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figures
List of contributors
Preface

- Introduction: liminal politics in the new age of disease: Technocratic mimetism

- Liminality and modernity in sickness and in health

- Rulers of liminality: on imbecility, or contemporary modes of gaining and operating power

- ‘The most despotic of all regimes’: Covid-19 and the political anthropology of expertise

- Pandemonium: authority and obedience under lockdown

- ‘No human’s land’: comparing war rhetoric and collective sacrifice in the Great War with the pandemic

- Corruption and the firefighter effect: on the commodification of liminal professions

- Sovereign power and the politics of the pandemic as elementary parasitic social relation

- Trickster parasite: about the snake pit of oozing disease

Conclusion

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, she was an affiliate visiting scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013) and Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded (Routledge, 2021), the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality; Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations; Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion; and Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery.

Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, and is a main editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology. His research and writing are centred on the anthropological foundations of home and community, the dynamics of modernity and globalisation, the intersection between society and its physical environment, the emergence and disintegration of structures of meaning, and the mediatisation and virtualisation of contemporary social life. He has published articles in journals including Memory Studies, Mobilities, International Political Anthropology and the Irish Journal of Anthropology, as well as in the Dark Mountain Anthology of ecological writing. He is the author of Home: The Foundations of Belonging (Routledge, 2018), which examines the idea of home from an anthropological and historical perspective as a centre around which we organise routines and experiences, endowing the world with meaning and order. With Marius Benta, he is co-editor of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine (Routledge, 2022), exploring how technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality.