Betraying Dignity

Betraying Dignity

Author: Orit Kamir

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1683932048

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What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago. Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure. Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect. Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom.


The Origins of Macho

The Origins of Macho

Author: Sonya Lipsett-Rivera

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0826360408

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Lipsett-Rivera traces the genesis of the Mexican macho by looking at daily interactions between Mexican men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


The Production of Knowledge of Normativity in the Age of the Printing Press

The Production of Knowledge of Normativity in the Age of the Printing Press

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9004687041

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This volume explores the production of knowledge of normativity in the age of early modern globalisation by looking at an extraordinarily pragmatic and normative book: Manual de Confessores, by the Spanish canon law professor Martín de Azpilcueta (1492-1586). Intertwining expertise, methods, and questions of legal history and book history, this book follows the actors and analyses the factors involved in the production, circulation, and use of the Manual, both in printed and manuscript forms, in the territories of the early modern Iberian Empires and of the Catholic Church. It convincingly illustrates the different dynamics related to the materiality of this object that contributed to “glocal” knowledge production. Contributors are: Samuel Barbosa, Manuela Bragagnolo, Christiane Birr, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Idalia García Aguilar, Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Natalia Maillard Álvarez, César Manrique Figueroa, Stuart M. McManus, Yoshimi Orii, David Rex Galindo, Airton Ribeiro, and Pedro Rueda Ramírez.


The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacán, Mexico

The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacán, Mexico

Author: Jeffrey R. Parsons

Publisher: U OF M MUSEUM ANTHRO ARCHAEOLOGY

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0915703629

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Based on his study of the nearly vanished aquatic economy of Chimalhuacán in the Valley of Mexico, Parsons describes the surviving vestiges of aquatic insect collection and fishing and considers their developmental and archaeological implications within a broad context of historical, ethnographic, biological, ecological, and archaeological information from Mexico, North and South America, the Near East, and Africa. Activities, implements, artifacts, and landscapes are richly illustrated, in many cases with the author’s own photos and a number of vintage photographs. The study concludes that aquatic resources were fully complementary with agricultural products during prehispanic times in Mesoamerica where a pastoral economy was absent.


The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

Author: Barbara E. Mundy

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0292766564

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"In 1325, the Aztecs founded their capital city Tenochtitlan, which grew to be one of the world's largest cities before it was violently destroyed in 1521 by conquistadors from Spain and their indigenous allies. Re-christened and reoccupied by the Spanish conquerors as Mexico City, it became the pivot of global trade linking Europe and Asia in the 17th century, and one of the modern world's most populous metropolitan areas. However, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and its people did not entirely disappear when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed it. By reorienting Mexico City-Tenochtitlan as a colonial capital and indigenous city, Mundy demonstrates its continuity across time. Using maps, manuscripts, and artworks, she draws out two themes: the struggle for power by indigenous city rulers and the management and manipulation of local ecology, especially water, that was necessary to maintain the city's sacred character. What emerges is the story of a city-within-a city that continues to this day"--


Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Author: Peter B. Villella

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-01-25

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1316679446

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Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.


The Blood Contingent

The Blood Contingent

Author: Stephen B. Neufeld

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2017-04-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0826358063

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This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz’s army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks—not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy—reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later.


Houses in a Landscape

Houses in a Landscape

Author: Julia A. Hendon

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-04-22

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0822391724

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In Houses in a Landscape, Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains of their dead, remnants of their daily life, intricate works of art, and fine examples of craftsmanship such as pottery and stone tools, they left only a small body of written records. Despite this paucity of written information, Hendon contends that an archaeological study of memory in such societies is possible and worthwhile. It is possible because memory is not just a faculty of the individual mind operating in isolation, but a social process embedded in the materiality of human existence. Intimately bound up in the relations people develop with one another and with the world around them through what they do, where and how they do it, and with whom or what, memory leaves material traces. Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects—the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard—help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how “memory communities” assert connections between the past and the present.