Jeffrey Bennett - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Jeffrey Bennett

This article explores some of the reasons the 1910 Republican revolution in Portugal failed to br... more This article explores some of the reasons the 1910 Republican revolution in Portugal failed to bring about the long-term changes in national life envisioned by Party Leaders. Specifically, I argue that the Portuguese Republican Party's anti-clerical and anti-monarchical disposition ensured the continued existence of religious and political schemas it sought to eradicate, setting the stage for counter-revolution.

This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to t... more This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to the present. It asks: What do recent shifts in mortuary practice and memor-ialization reveal about larger changes in American culture and society? And what is at stake in charting and understanding these changes for anthropologists interested in technology and culture change more generally? We argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from 'monuments' to 'megapixels', the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media. We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating the transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combatting death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today's virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss.

In 1964 Richard Hofstadter argued that American history was permeated with episodes when shared f... more In 1964 Richard Hofstadter argued that American history was permeated with episodes when shared feelings of persecution and forms of conspiratorial thinking dominated the political landscape. Hofstadter suggested that these episodes had a distinctive flavor, or style, that he described as 'paranoid.' Taking this suggestion as a point of departure, this paper examines the creation of the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, a Catholic organization that formed in 1947 to rescue humanity from a prophesied catastrophe. The paper ties the writings of Blue Army leaders to American Cold War politics, focusing on the ways Soviet communism was equated with Satanism, prompting calls for Blue Army members to wage spiritual warfare against their perceived enemies. The paper concludes with an exploration of the links between individual and group paranoia, and paranoid psychopathology and religious fundamentalism.

This paper integrates some of Anthony F. C. Wallace's most important ideas about culture change w... more This paper integrates some of Anthony F. C. Wallace's most important ideas about culture change with some of Melanie Klein's best-known work on psychologically primitive (or early) mental states. The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, viewing what Wallace termed 'revitalization movements' through a Kleinian lens reveals that such movements are often far less adaptive and therapeutic than Wallace's work generally indicates. 1 Second, and more importantly, viewing these movements from a Kleinian perspective highlights the parallels between them and contemporary religious movements frequently described as 'fundamentalist,' especially Christian, Islamic, and Jewish movements. 2 In the course of developing these arguments, the paper suggests that although the works of Wallace and Klein now appear dated, scholars interested in understanding new movements motivated by a felt need to purify and revitalize what some perceive as a corrupted culture might profit from revisiting and synthesizing these works.

This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to t... more This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to the present. It asks: What do recent shifts in mortuary practice and memorialization reveal about larger changes in American culture and society? And what is at stake in charting and understanding these changes for anthropologists interested in technology and culture change more generally? We argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from 'monuments' to 'megapixels', the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media. We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating the transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combatting death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today's virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss.