Recognizing secular defilement: Douglas, Durkheim and housework

Mary Douglas is generally regarded as a faithful disciple of Émile Durkheim. Yet her classic work Purity and Danger ([1966] 2002. London: Routledge) is best understood as premised upon a fundamental disagreement with Durkheim, who she accused of conflating purity with “the sacred” and impurity with “the profane”. Key to this disagreement was the theoretical status of the “busy scrubbings” of everyday housework. This disagreement has had a substantial legacy since, in turning her attention to purity and impurity in their specificity, Douglas bequeathed anthropology and sociology a theory of purity and impurity that has remained an important, perhaps even dominant, paradigm. This paradigm has been identified as an exemplar of synchronic analysis. Yet this paradigm itself is the product of a specific historical and intellectual context, little recognized today. Attending to this context holds open possibilities, which have otherwise tended to be neglected, for theorizing purity and impurity in their specificity

The Screaming Pope: Imagery and leadership in two paintings of the Pope Innocent X

A visual analysis of images of leadership, focusing on two paintings of the Pope Innocent X, one by Velazquez and other by Francis Bacon. This paper adds to an analytical framework to analyse images, specially paintings

Visual Political Communication in Italian Electoral Campaigns

After a brief introduction to the Italian political and communication scene, this chapter analyzes the electoral materials produced in the last four weeks of campaigning by the main political parties and candidates of the Italian general elections of March 2018. It focuses its attention on the forms and instruments of visual communication. The author highlights the evolution of the instruments and languages of electoral campaigns: the disappearance of the traditional forms of visual political communication, such as the street posters and TV ads, on the one hand, and the spread of new tools such as web cards, memes, and videos, on the other hand, with the latter closely related to the spread of social networks. What emerges is that the logic and rhetoric of social platforms is progressively changing the visual vocabularies and the strategies of engagement of politics and election candidates. The visual component is an increasingly important element in the process of emotionalization of political communication