Creative Resistance And Utopian Subjectivities: Zapatista Autonomy As Discourse, Power, And Practice

This thesis explores the Zapatistas’ autonomous project based on an alternative discourse that acts as resistance to the hegemonic system of neoliberalism and the regimes of power that maintain it. Drawing from Escobar’s (1995) post-structuralist discursive analysis, it traces the reinforcing relations of power in the hegemonic system through examining the development discourse, its connections to coloniality, and its privileging of Euro-centric forms knowledge which shape subjectivities to set the limits of possibility and, in that, assert violence towards non-dominant peoples and the environment. Thus, in order to change the dominant order and prevent this violence, there must be change at the level of discourse. The Zapatistas have created an alternative discourse (Zapatismo) that provides the basis for utopian creative resistance through opening the limits of possibility and capacitating people to create their ideal realities. The thesis explores the effects of this discourse on resistance through examining its new forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivities, and subsequent influence on the creation of Zapatista autonomous communities and the successes of the Zapatistas’ autonomous education and health systems. It argues that the Zapatistas’ emphasis on utopian creative resistance, autonomy, and pluralism can inform non-hegemonic, anti-systemic approaches in future resistance movements

Cultural Diffusion and Intimate Partner Violence in Malawi

I examine the spread and influence of cultural models about intimate partner violence in Malawi. Intimate partner violence is of primary concern to transnational organizations working in Malawi, leading them to implement a variety of cultural messaging campaigns. I track their efforts and evaluate their influence on lay people. I rely on five national surveys carried out between 2000 and 2016, which I combine with a database of newspaper articles that research assistants and I collected, an administrative database of human rights projects, many organizations’ official reports, and key informant interviews. Finally, I leverage the timing of a social movement to combat intimate partner violence that occurred during the middle of one of the surveys I use. I conduct three related, yet standalone empirical studies. I begin by addressing the flow of cultural models about violence against women through media and the implications this has for people’s attitudes. Analyzing media content, I identify the pathways through which transnational organizations circulate messages condemning violence against women while foreign media entertainment companies largely perpetuate gender stereotypes. The number of newspaper articles critical of violence against women published in the month prior to a respondent’s personal survey interview date is positively associated with their stated rejection of physical partner violence. In contrast, men’s personal use of television and movies—a key source of media content perpetuating gender stereotypes in Malawi—is negatively associated with rejection. This findings demonstrate how being specific about cultural content improves understandings of global cultural diffusion. In the second study, I analyze the influence of human rights projects denouncing violence against women on people’s stated attitudes. Transnational organizations channel funding to projects carried out in specific locales, which in turn exposes people there to the cultural messages promoted. Among projects focused on violence against women, I distinguish between bureaucrat-led projects, which reinforced (mostly male) community leaders’ purview over marital/partnership conflicts, from projects that supported and expanded domestic activists’ awareness campaigns around the country. District-level funding for activist-led projects successfully increased women’s probability of expressing rejection of physical partner violence against women. Aid for bureaucrat-led projects, conversely, decreased men’s rejection of such violence. Transnational organizations’ projects influence lay people’s attitudes, but in unique ways depending on how the projects are implemented. The final study examines how the effects of transnational organizations’ human rights messages on lay people hinges on meso-level actors. Human rights campaigns in Malawi translate “gender violence” as nkhanza, an existing cultural concept referring to the violation of expected relationship responsibilities. Physical partner violence is normatively defined as nkhanza but so is refusing sex with one’s partner. I show that individuals interviewed after the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign in Malawi in 2015, during which brokers denounced nkhanza, were more likely than individuals interviewed before the campaign to state they rejected physical partner violence. Women were also less likely to say they could refuse having sex with their partner. Additionally, women’s willingness to report physical partner abuse that they experienced long ago also increased following the campaign. These results emphasize the importance of vernacularization and human rights awareness. These studies clarify how human rights models are spread, interpreted, learned, and applied. Media, human rights projects, and social movements each serve as important diffusion mechanisms, shaping the cultural models people in Malawi know and use.PHDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162988/1/jswindle_1.pd

Oedipal Identity and the Freudian Construction of Orality in Okot p\u27Bitek\u27s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

In Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Ocol and Lawino, presenting themselves as a university-educated man and his non-literate village wife, argue the various merits and failings of traditional, Acholi village life and modern, Westernized life. Accompanying this sociopolitical argument is the personal, emotional conflict between the two: Ocol is rejecting Lawino in favor of a Westernized second-wife, but Lawino refuses to leave him, trying instead to coerce him into returning, body and soul, to her bed. The scenario seems straightforward. But below this superficial reading is a more complex one in which Lawino is Ocol’s mother rather than his wife. In this reading, Lawino has no voice of her own, being Ocol’s projection of his own repressed oedipal fixation, against which he reacts intensely both in the fictionalized Lawino’s presentation of him and in his own song. The first clue to this oedipal reality was revealed by p’Bitek in some of his interviews. He claimed to have based Lawino on his mother but Ocol on himself. Yet Freudian theory is Western, and it is not certain that it is universally valid. However, the Acholi proverb, Your first wife is your mother, seems to bridge the gap of uncertainty. And textual examination reveals, further, that Lawino is indeed Ocol’s mother and Europe his father. This disparity between self-presentation and reality suggests further doubt concerning the authenticity of Lawino as an oral villager. Indeed, some critics have claimed that p’Bitek made her exaggeratedly simple. But beyond such a complaint, an application of Walter Ong’s elements of orality to a critical evaluation of Lawino’s song shows that, despite heavy borrowing of techniques common in Acholi orature, Lawino sings in a style and with a consciousness which are necessarily literate. Furthermore, she fails to follow the basic rule for the Acholi woman: to obey and respect her husband. The Lawino presented in this song cannot be its singer. Ocol, however, does not refute Lawino on any of her points of inauthenticity. Furthermore, critics tend to agree that he, rather than Lawino, is insecure, unhappy, or psychologically afflicted. Freudian examination reveals that he is fixated in the oedipal stage of development, his true desire being for his mother Lawino. Yet, unable to accept this morally repulsive desire, he represses all conscious awareness of it. He then projects this desire onto a fictionalized image of Lawino, which accommodates the repression by making Lawino into his wife. Thus Song of Lawino is Ocol’s masked expression of his repressed desire. And similarly, Song of Ocol is his open reaction against that desire. Additionally, many of Ocol’s childish or violent actions and reactions which may otherwise be inexplicable can be seen as a Freudian regression. Ocol is a man ruled by the mechanisms to which he turned for psychological defense

Oedipal Identity and the Freudian Construction of Orality in Okot p\u27Bitek\u27s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

In Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Ocol and Lawino, presenting themselves as a university-educated man and his non-literate village wife, argue the various merits and failings of traditional, Acholi village life and modern, Westernized life. Accompanying this sociopolitical argument is the personal, emotional conflict between the two: Ocol is rejecting Lawino in favor of a Westernized second-wife, but Lawino refuses to leave him, trying instead to coerce him into returning, body and soul, to her bed. The scenario seems straightforward. But below this superficial reading is a more complex one in which Lawino is Ocol’s mother rather than his wife. In this reading, Lawino has no voice of her own, being Ocol’s projection of his own repressed oedipal fixation, against which he reacts intensely both in the fictionalized Lawino’s presentation of him and in his own song. The first clue to this oedipal reality was revealed by p’Bitek in some of his interviews. He claimed to have based Lawino on his mother but Ocol on himself. Yet Freudian theory is Western, and it is not certain that it is universally valid. However, the Acholi proverb, Your first wife is your mother, seems to bridge the gap of uncertainty. And textual examination reveals, further, that Lawino is indeed Ocol’s mother and Europe his father. This disparity between self-presentation and reality suggests further doubt concerning the authenticity of Lawino as an oral villager. Indeed, some critics have claimed that p’Bitek made her exaggeratedly simple. But beyond such a complaint, an application of Walter Ong’s elements of orality to a critical evaluation of Lawino’s song shows that, despite heavy borrowing of techniques common in Acholi orature, Lawino sings in a style and with a consciousness which are necessarily literate. Furthermore, she fails to follow the basic rule for the Acholi woman: to obey and respect her husband. The Lawino presented in this song cannot be its singer. Ocol, however, does not refute Lawino on any of her points of inauthenticity. Furthermore, critics tend to agree that he, rather than Lawino, is insecure, unhappy, or psychologically afflicted. Freudian examination reveals that he is fixated in the oedipal stage of development, his true desire being for his mother Lawino. Yet, unable to accept this morally repulsive desire, he represses all conscious awareness of it. He then projects this desire onto a fictionalized image of Lawino, which accommodates the repression by making Lawino into his wife. Thus Song of Lawino is Ocol’s masked expression of his repressed desire. And similarly, Song of Ocol is his open reaction against that desire. Additionally, many of Ocol’s childish or violent actions and reactions which may otherwise be inexplicable can be seen as a Freudian regression. Ocol is a man ruled by the mechanisms to which he turned for psychological defense

Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

Buddhist Ethics in Japan and Tibet: A Comparative Study of the Adoption of Bodhisattva and Pratimoksa Precepts

The religious traditions of Japan and Tibet are complex and unique, yet many interesting parallels may be drawn concerning the introduction of Buddhism and its subsequent development in the two countries. Although two very different cultural environments greeted the arrival of the imported faith, we find striking similarities in their early Buddhist history