The sacrificial emplotment of national identity. Pádraic Pearse and the 1916 Easter uprising
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2014, Vol 5, Issue 1
Abstract
A sense of national identification remains amorphous and inert unless it is cognitively structured and motivationally oriented. Perhaps the most consequential way of structuring and orienting nationalism is through emplotment (organizing in the form of a story). Emplotment commonly follows one of a few cross-culturally recurring genres. In nationalist contexts, the heroic genre—treating military conflict, loss or potential loss, and reasserted sovereignty--is the default form. However, this default may be overridden in particular circumstances. When social devastation precludes heroic achievement, a sacrificial emplotment—treating collective sin, punishment, sacrifice, and redemption—is often particularly salient. Earlier work has examined cases of sacrificial emplotment in its most extreme varieties (treating Hitler and Gandhi). The following essay considers a more ordinary case, the sacrificial nationalism of the prominent Irish anti-colonial revolutionary, Pádraic Pearse, as represented in his plays.
Authors and Affiliations
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP40997
- DOI -
- Views 178
- Downloads 0
When stuff gets covered in fluff in order to build up a paradoxical existence
Living immaterially in an over-materialized world seems to have become one of today’s paradoxes. More and more often what can’t be touched looks like getting greater “weight” than palpable things, commonly known as stu...
Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 1939, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, New York and London, McGraw – Hill Book Company Inc
Joseph Schumpeter’s economic thought is indissolubly linked to the study of entrepreneurship and innovation. In Business Cycles, the book planned to be ‘the crown of his work’, Schumpeter carefully crafted a theoretica...
What can co-ethnic immigrants tell us about ethnic visions of the national self? A comparative analysis of Germany and Greece
Nations with a predominantly ethno-cultural self-perception and citizenship based on jus sanguinis are under pressure today to adopt more civic-territorial ideas of nationhood, including elements of jus soli. Two natio...
Hermeneutics of reason: the principle of common rationality as premise of understanding the Other(s)
The central argument defended in this paper is made up of two interconnected statements: i) that a minimally defined rationality is an anthropological constant, being shared by all conceivable human cultures; and ii) t...
Narratives as instrumental research and as attempts of fixing meaning1. The uses and misuses of the concept of “narratives”
Narratives are the most important means of fixing the meaning of events and of the social and cultural construction of reality. This is the main assertion of this text, together with a detailed explanation of what is t...