Protest Popular Culture And Tradition In Modern And Contemporary Western Europe

Mock funerals, effigy parading, smearing with eggs and tomatoes, pot-banging and Carnival street theatre, arson and ransacking: all these seemingly archaic forms of action have been regular features of modern European protest, from the 19th to the 21st century. In a wide chronological and geographical framework, this book analyses the uses, meanings, functions and reactivations of folk imagery, behaviour and language in modern collective action. The authors examine the role of protest actors as diverse as peasants, liberal movements, nationalist and separatist parties, anarchists, workers, students, right-wing activists and the global justice movement. So-called traditional repertoires have long been described as residual and obsolete. This book challenges the conventional distinction between pre-industrial and post-1789 forms of collective action, which continues to operate as a powerful dichotomy in the understanding of protest, and casts new light on rituals and symbolic performances that, albeit poorly understood and deciphered, are integral to our protest repertoire.

In this far-reaching work, Swen Hutter demonstrates the usefulness of studying both electoral politics and protest politics to better understand the impacts of globalization. Hutter integrates research on cleavage politics and populist parties in Western Europe with research on social movements. He shows how major new cleavages restructured protest politics over a thirty-year period, from the 1970s through the 1990s. This major study brings back the concept of cleavages to social movement studies and connects the field with contemporary research on populism, electoral behavior, and party politics. Hutter's work extends the landmark 1995 New Social Movements in Western Europe, the book that spurred the recognition that a broad empirical frame is valuable for understanding powerful social movements. This new book shows that it is also beneficial to include the study of political parties and protest politics. While making extensive use of public opinion, protest event, and election campaigning data, Hutter skillfully employs contemporary data from six West European societies--Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland--to account for responses to protest events and political issues across countries. Protesting Culture and Economics in Western Europe makes productive empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to the study of social movements and comparative politics. Empirically, it employs a new approach, along with new data, to explain changes in European politics over several decades. Methodologically, it makes rigorous yet creative use of diverse datasets in innovative ways, particularly across national borders. And theoretically, it makes a strong claim for considering the distinctive politics of protest across various issue domains as it investigates the asymmetrical politics of protest from left and right.

This innovative and widely praised volume uses the dramatic occupation of Tiananmen Square as the foundation for rethinking the cultural dimensions of Chinese politics. Now in a revised and expanded second edition, the book includes enhanced coverage of key issues, such as the political dimensions of popular culture (addressed in a new chapter on Chinese rock-and-roll by Andrew Jones) and the struggle for control of public discourse in the post-1989 era (discussed in a new chapter by Tony Saich). Two especially valuable additions to the second edition are art historian Tsao Tsing-yuan's eyewitness account of the making of the Goddess of Democracy, and an exposition of Chinese understandings of the term ?revolution? contributed by Liu Xiaobo, one of China's most controversial dissident intellectuals. The volume also includes an analysis (by noted social theorist and historical sociologist Craig C. Calhoun) of the similarities and differences between the ?new? social movements of recent decades and the ?old? social movements of earlier eras.TEXT CONCLUSION: To facilitate classroom use, the volume has been reorganized into groups of interrelated essays. The editors introduce each section and offer a list of suggested readings that complement the material in that section.

This book analyzes the individual and contextual determinants of protest politics in Western Europe. Building on different theoretical perspectives, from social movements theory to political behavior approaches, the author provides new empirical evidence on the patterns of protest politics. Readers will discover why some citizens are more likely to get involved in protests than others, and why levels of protest differ from country to country. The author illustrates that engagement in political protest is often rooted in the interplay of the protester's individual characteristics and their home country's contextual characteristics.

Protest is a ubiquitous and richly varied social phenomenon, one that finds expression not only in modern social movements and political organizations but also in grassroots initiatives, individual action, and creative works. It constitutes a distinct cultural domain, one whose symbolic content is regularly deployed by media and advertisers, among other actors. Yet within social movement scholarship, such cultural considerations have been comparatively neglected. Protest Cultures: A Companion dramatically expands the analytical perspective on protest beyond its political and sociological aspects. It combines cutting-edge synthetic essays with concise, accessible case studies on a remarkable array of protest cultures, outlining key literature and future lines of inquiry.

Contemporary popular culture is engaged in a rich and multi-levelled set of representational relations with austerity. This volume seeks to explore these relations, to ask: how does popular culture give expression to austerity; how are its effects conveyed; how do texts reproduce and expose its mythic qualities? It provides a reading of cultural texts in circulation in the present 'age of austerity'. Through its central focus--popular culture--it considers the impact and influence of austerity across media and textual categories. The collection presents a theoretical deconstruction of popular culture's reproduction of, and response to, mythical expressions of 'austerity' in Western culture, spanning the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and the Middle East and textual events from political media discourse, music, videogames, social media, film, television, journalism, folk art, food, protest movements, slow media and the practice of austerity in everyday life

A reconsideration of contemporary Chinese society and politics since the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. The book emphasizes the need to understand the vital role that a culture plays in shaping political action.

Viking Heritage and History in Europe presents new research and perspectives on the use of the Vikings in public history, especially in relation to museums, re-creation, and re-enactment in a European context. Taking a critical heritage approach, the volume provides new insights into the re-creation of history, imagining the past, interpretation, ambivalence of authenticity, authority of History, remembrance and memory, medievalism, and public history. Highlighting the complexity of the field of public history today, the fourteen chapters all engage with questions of historical authenticity and authority. The volume also critically examines the public’s reception, engagement with, and interpretation of the Viking Age and the concepts of who these individuals were. Each chapter illuminates an aspect of these themes in relation to museums, leisure activities, politics, tourism, re-enactment, and popular culture – all from the vantage point of Viking cultural heritage. Viking Heritage and History in Europe is one of the first volumes to examine the use and role of the Vikings within the field of public history, both past and present. The book will be of interest to those engaged in the study of heritage, public history, history, the Vikings, vikingism, medievalism, and media history.

Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.

Is there a moral economy of capitalism? The term "moral economy" was coined in pre-capitalist times and does not refer to economy as we know it today. It was only in the nineteenth century that economy came to mean the production and circulation of goods and services. At the same time, the term started to be used in an explicitly critical tone: references to moral economy were normally critical of modern forms of economy, which were purportedly lacking in morals. In our times, too, the morality of capitalism is often the topic of debate and controversy. "Moral Economies" engages in these debates. Using historical case studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the book discusses the degree to which economic actions and decisions were permeated with moral, good-vs-bad classifications. Moreover it shows how strongly antiquity's concept of "embedded" economy is still powerful in modernity. The model for this was often the private household, in which moral, social, and economic behavior patterns were intertwined. The do-it-yourself movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was still oriented towards this model, thereby criticizing capitalism on moral grounds.