Nationalism,religion, and abortion policy in four Catholic societies

Over the last decade, a growing number of scholars have tackled the changing relationship between national identity and social policy. In this article, we explore the relationship between abortion policy and the historical and political construction of national identity as it relates to religious norms and symbols. Focusing on two main cases, Ireland and Poland, Catholic societies in which abortion rights are severely restricted, we argue that, in political discourse and institutions, a strong relationship between the Catholic Church and national identity helps opponents of abortion enact and maintain such restrictions in the name of religious norms embedded in strong claims about national identity. After exploring these two main cases, we briefly turn to Spain and Québec, Catholic societies that, in recent decades, have witnessed a secularisation of their national identity correlated to a liberalisation of abortion rights. This suggests that, at least in Catholic societies, the decline of a religious national identity is likely to favour a liberalisation of abortion rights.     

二战前后德国历史研究中的民族主义

第二次世界大战结束以后,西方史学研究的理论和方法发生了根本性的转变。自50年代起,美国史学界率先开始的新史学运动倡导结构一功能主义的历史研究方法,主张用系列数据研究人类社会中的各种传统的——不仅政治、军事和宗教的,而且经济、社会及普通民众日常生活的——功能作用,以达到在“总体”上理解和叙述人类过去的全部经历的目的。由此,改变过去的以政治事件和伟大人物串连起历史的方法,     

The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism: The Patagonia Plot of 1939

Abstract

When seizing control of the US embassy In Tehran in November 1979 during the Iranian revolution, militant students not only took sixty-one US citizens hostage, but also captured thousands of pages of official documents. During the 1980s, they published seventy-seven volumes of selections in order to prove to the world that the United States had colluded with the Pahlavi regime, and to discredit Iranian moderates by revealing their former ties to US officials. In keeping with the militants' perception of the embassy's role in Iran's domestic politics, they entitled the publications Documents from the US Espionage Den (Asnad-i Lanah-yi Jasusi).¹ Surprisingly, among the papers published is one by Harvard University anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer entitled ‘Religion and Progress in Iran’, apparently written for a state department colloquium on Iran held on 25 May 1979. In the introduction, Fischer characterizes the Islamic Republic as a ‘challenge to modernization theory’: ‘Iran has been a major test case for modernization theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was the case where the constraint of capital was theoretically removed, and therefore the case where transformation from the third world into the first world was expected to be most feasible.’²     

Presencing the divine: religion and technology in the Latin West

ABSTRACT

For over a millennium, Catholic and Protestant traditions have deployed technologies to address the central paradox of the Christian faith: God’s absence after Easter. The following essay brings together scholarship on religious technics in the Christian Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods with a focus on the performance of presence. Medieval actors utilized an array of techniques, instruments, and contraptions to manifest the divine power present in holy matter. The movement of artifacts and people across medieval and early modern horizons mobilized and multiplied the effects of sacred proximity. The Society of Jesus’ emphasis on sensuality in worship and spectacle linked older forms of ritual piety with routinized religion. The shift from a predominantly Christian to modern culture in the West did not terminate organized religion’s close association with technology, but extended the experience of spiritual presence in the West through industrial and post-industrial, digital means.     

Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism

Abstract. Accusations of Albanian rape of Serbs in Kosovo became a highly charged political factor in the development of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s. Discussions of rape were used to link perceptions of national victimisation and a crisis of masculinity and to legitimate a militant Serbian nationalism, ultimately contributing to the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia. The article argues for attention to the ways that nationalist projects have been structured with reference to ideals of masculinity, the specific political and cultural contexts that have influenced these processes, and the consequent implications for gender relations as well as for nationalist politics. Such an approach helps explain the appeal of Milo?evi?'s nationalism; at the same time it highlights the divisions and conflicts that lie behind hegemonic gender and national identities constructed around difference.