Hollywood Blockbusters

Sutton, D.; Wogan, Peter

doi:10.4324/9781003085560

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Willerslev asserts that anthropology is an ethnographic discipline and that ethnography is about discovering cultural incommensurabilities. I argue that anthropology can discover integrated value theories in everyday ethics and fictional narratives (see Sutton and Wogan, 2009). These implicit value theories succeed in defining the world by what has worth and what does not, in the way that Graeber (2005) envisions it.…”

Section: Beyond the Great Riftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema

Ecks

2023

Economic Anthropology

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Is life "priceless," or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists-not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie Titanic, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time, reveals a comprehensive ideology of how life and material wealth should be valued. Titanic works through key themes in economic anthropology: social inequality, class struggle, gift/ commodity distinctions, the meaning of money, and inalienable possessions. Titanic demonstrates that the tension between ethical values and economic value can be resolved when short-term individual gains are transcended by a mutuality of being that reaches beyond death. Titanic proposes that American capitalism can integrate core cultural values with economic freedom and self-realization.

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Section: Beyond the Great Riftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema

Ecks

2023

Economic Anthropology

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“…At the same time, a multitude of Greek taverns and restaurants around the world bear the name Syrtaki, Zorba and/or Zorba the Greek, which highlights its enduring nature sixty years after its first release. Zorba's cinematic dance 11 highlights that certain performances are culturally significant at critical moments (Pateraki 2017) and have the power to move the world and cultivate relationships that speak to the heart for many years (Sutton and Wogan 2009), cause re-signifiers of the past in the present (Knight 2012), and can transform individuals and collectivities, among others, in sports (Ottosson 2019).…”

Section: Sport Dance and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sport and Nationalism in Celebrations of Mega Events. Dancing victory with Zorba the Greek

Pateraki

2023

Studia Ethnologica Croatica

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The present paper explores the negotiation of national identity in contemporary mega sporting events. The study focuses on certain performances of Greekness through Zorba’s dance in national sporting victories, especially in basketball. The attention shifts onto wider nationalisation processes by highlighting the socio-political relations of sport. The fieldwork took place in the broader area of Athens (Attica) and Patras (Peloponnese), between September 2020 and September 2022. It was based on Visual Anthropology methods, working with interlocutors who are engaged with sports in various ways. Through endearing habits, athletes and fans can constitute different embodied performances inside and outside the stadiums, where sport as a performative place of collectivity and solidarity invites a continuous embodied creative action highlighting how complex, versatile, and political it can be.

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“…This explains an attendant feature explored in symbolic studies of gun culture: namely, its capacity to invoke a range of ideational concepts. In particular, it invokes a norm of masculinity (Anisin, 2017; Arjet, 2007; King, 2007; Mencken & Froese, 2019; O’Neill, 2007; Springwood, 2007; Sutton & Wogan, 2020). Mencken and Froese (2019) find that, “white men in economic distress find comfort in guns as a means to reestablish a sense of individual power and moral certitude” (3).…”

Section: Gun Culture As Contesting the State Monopoly On Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

U.S. Gun Culture as a Martial Culture Within a Weberian Framework: Disrupting the State’s Monopoly on Force

Harmon

2022

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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This article proposes a new analytical framework to understand U.S. gun culture and its attendant cultural identifiers. It uses the Weberian concept of the state, in which the state’s monopoly on force is the basis of its legitimacy. Using this theory of the state, my key theoretical contribution is that gun culture is a contestation of the state’s monopoly on force. Relatedly, I argue that the system of cultural identifiers attached to gun culture competes with state power. In this way, gun culture asserts a devolved, local and patrimonial system of social power. I use this synthetic context of U.S. gun culture to understand theoretical issues of citizen–state relations and the role of identification in envisaging local power while offering narcissistic compensations to disenfranchised people. This descriptive theory argues that the state monopoly on force constitutes a central clause of the social contract between state and citizen, and the breach of this monopoly within gun culture challenges the contract itself. Identity and its conceptual markers, then, have a political end as a surrogate for social authority and personal-local power. This political function is hinted at but not adequately theorized in gun culture literature, certainly not using a Weberian, ‘monopoly on force’ framework. I propose that gun culture signals an antagonism within the social contract, in which citizens cede use of force to the state. This antagonism is activated in this case but theoretically latent in citizen–state relations. This article builds on the Hobbesian–Weberian premise to propose a model of Martial Culture Theory (MCT) to describe U.S. gun culture and those political movements that seek to reduce through force the state monopoly on power by diminishing its legitimacy and claiming theirs as a legitimate exercise of force.Through this process occurs a renegotiation of socio-political power distribution with the state. I submit this insight has valuable implications for state theory and citizen–state relations. In addition, it offers the most complete theory of how small government conservatism aligns with identity politics in U.S. gun culture, and how the prevailing mode of identitarian politics can manifest and be harnessed toward contestations of state power in Hobbesian-Weberian thought.

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Hollywood Blockbusters

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema

Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema

Sport and Nationalism in Celebrations of Mega Events. Dancing victory with Zorba the Greek

U.S. Gun Culture as a Martial Culture Within a Weberian Framework: Disrupting the State’s Monopoly on Force

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