Executing executions: Aesthetics, identity, and the problematic narratives of capital punishment ritual

Theory and Society

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 235-261

  Smith, Philip ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039933569     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00161142     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. The best introduction to this literature is David Garland's Punishment and Modern Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
2. Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (London: Polity Press, 1985), 188.
3. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence, 188.
4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978);
5. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1984).
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977). See especially 3-31.
7. For a precise overview of Foucault's position, see 168-198 in Marc Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).
8. Discipline and Punish, 60-69.
9. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, provides an excellent discussion of this point.
10. See Spierenburg, 108-109.
11. There has been a significant intellectual movement on both sides of the Atlantic towards the analysis of the intersection of culture and agency over the past twenty five years. In France, the work of Bourdieu and Touraine reacted against the structuralist Marxism of Althusser and the more cultural structuralism of Levi-Strauss. In Britain, the agenda of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School was to develop Gramsci's hegemony theory so as to provide a more supple, but still neo-Marxian, alternative to the orthodox "dominant ideology thesis." Of particular relevance for this article is the notion of "oppositional readings," which was developed by the Birmingham School in order to explain subcultural variations in ideological reception. In the United States these European trends have been combined with aspects of the indigenous pragmatist tradition, in particular symbolic interactionism. Examples of the American style of empirical work on the reception and interpretation of cultural artifacts include: JoEllen Shiveley, "Cowboys and Indians," American Sociological Review 57/6 (1992): 709-724;
12. Nicola Beisel, "Morals versus art," American Sociological Review 58/2 (1993): 145-162;
13. Amy Binder, "Constructing racial rhetoric," American Sociological Review 58/6 (1993): 753-767;
14. Wendy Griswold, "The writing on the mud wall," American Sociological Review 57/6 (1992): 709-724.
15. Two prominent scholars applying this type of perspective to the production of ritual are David Kurtzer (e.g., "Politics and ritual: The communist festa in Italy," Anthropological Quarterly 47/4: 374-389)
16. and Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
17. Susan Gal provides a useful review of a substantial literature on language, oratory, and emergent meanings in "Language and political economy," Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 345-367.
18. See also Elinor Keenan's fascinating discussion of gender, language and ritual: "Norm-makers, norm breakers: Uses of speech by men and women in a Malagasy Community," in R. Bauman and J. F. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
19. The concept of narrative I use here has its philosophical foundations in the work of Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
20. and Jean-Marc Ferry (Les Puissances de l'Experience, Vol. 1, Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1991).
21. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957);
22. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
23. The concept of the "internal environment of action" comes from Jeffrey Alexander's Action and its Environments (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
24. See Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 278-283), for a fascinating empirical illustration of this theme.
25. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
26. Hayden White, The Content and the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
27. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish,
28. Douglas Hay, editor, Albion's Fatal Tree (New York: Partner Books, 1975);
29. and Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law (London: Stevens and Sars Limited, 1948).
30. Louis Masur, Rites of Execution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish,
32. J. A. Sharpe, "Last dying speeches: Religion, ideology and public execution in seventeenth-century England," in Past and Present 107 (1985): 144-167;
33. Robert Johnson, Death Work (Pacific Grove, Cal. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1990).
34. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, 253.
35. See J. Edgar Hoover, "Statements in favour of the death penalty," in Hugo Bedau, editor, The Death Penalty in America (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1964);
36. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1751]);
37. William Paley, "Of crimes and punishments," 131-136 in The Works of William Paley (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1831 [1785]);
38. cf. Arthur Koestler, Reflections on Hanging (New York: Macmillan, 1957).
39. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1964),
40. and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976);
41. Masur, Rites of Execution;
42. cf. Sharpe., "Last dying speeches"; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).