{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2/context.json","@id":"https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/cantaloupe/iiif/2/manifest.json","@type":"sc:Manifest","label":"The Sacred and the Sovereign: A Historical Sociology of Martyrdom","metadata":[{"label":"dc.description.sponsorship","value":"This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree"},{"label":"dc.format","value":"Monograph"},{"label":"dc.format.medium","value":"Electronic Resource"},{"label":"dc.identifier.uri","value":"http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78129"},{"label":"dc.language.iso","value":"en_US"},{"label":"dcterms.abstract","value":"This dissertation is devoted to developing the first comprehensive historical-comparative study of the development of martyrdom in Western civilization. For more than a decade, martyrs have been a popular topic in the press; from terrorist suicide bombers to revolutionary self-immolators, these instances of ultimate sacrifice are often taken as paradigmatic of global conflict fueled by religion. However, in both academic and popular accounts, these figures have been described as characters seemingly unique to the story of Islamic fundamentalism.  Inevitably, contemporary discussions cast the martyr as something alien to Western life, an inheritor of faulty primordial passions. In these studies, martyrdom only relates to the West as a threat. This tendency is exacerbated by the predominance of methodological individualism in scholarly treatments of martyrdom, wherein martyrs are inevitably analyzed as individual actors engaged in macabre tactical calculations.  I argue that martyrdom is not an individual tactic, but an instance of the collective creation of sacrifice in instances of contested authority. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter Two develops a sociological theory of martyrdom. While much of the literature has focused on the internal motivations that drive an individual\u2019s sacrifice, the theory advanced here argues that martyrdom is a form of socially constructed sacrifice. In the wake of a violent death, a collective community commemorates the dead using the language of sacrifice. This sacrifice is composed of two principle components: (1) those higher goods for which the martyr died, and (2) the desecrating violence which initiates sacrifice.  Martyrdom is a form of contentious sacrifice because it condenses higher goods and values to the scale of a single, grieved corpse. At the same time, the martyr\u2019s sacrifice crystalizes social antagonism, identifying an opponent who is defined in terms of their opposition to cherished ideals. This theory of martyrdom provides insights into the nature of sacrifice as both a stimulant of solidarity and mechanism of contention by illustrating how the legacies of the dead have been leveraged in struggles over authority in different political and religious contexts. Ultimately, my goal with this theory is to arrive at an understanding of how the religious notion of sacrifice has been used in conflicts over authority across history, and how the notion of ultimate sacrifice has sustained its potency in contemporary cultures.  Chapters 3-7 pursue this goal by demonstrating this sociological theory of martyrdom at work throughout Western history. In selecting cases from Western history, this dissertation redresses current public anxieties, which have focused disproportionately on perceived associations between martyrdom and the Islamic tradition. At the same time, working within the confines of Western civilization provides the empirical grounds to answer two enduring theoretical questions which converge with the political and religious dimensions of martyrdom.  The first of these is the question of secularization. The theory of secularization has long dominated social scientific understanding of religious history in the West. Secularization theory suggests that the rise of modernity displaced religion from the public sphere. Yet recent history (particularly a perceived rise in \u2018resurgent\u2019 violent fundamentalisms) has challenged the assumptions of classical secularization theory. As an enduring form of sacrifice, martyrdom can provide a new perspective on secularization. In this dissertation I assess the changing nature of martyrdom across Western history in order to better understand how a form of sacrifice long embedded in religious discourse managed to migrate to the realm of secular politics. In using martyrdom to interpret the historical process of secularization, this dissertation offers a new perspective on the shifting boundaries of religion and politics in the West. The second theoretical concern which converges with martyrdom involves the topic of sovereignty. As a concept, sovereignty has long been associated with the political order of the modern, Western nation-state. Yet those same historical forces which have induced a skepticism toward secularization theory have also influenced thinking on sovereignty. What does it mean to call a state \u2018sovereign\u2019, if that state engages with ever-greater frequency in global war, its powers and authorities increasingly undeterred by the traditional limits of nationhood like borders?  For a new generation of theorists, sovereignty is not a concept bound to any particular political epoch, but a transhistorical tendency which runs throughout every society. From this perspective, sovereignty is the spirit which animates and binds raw power to authority. Sovereignty only came to be so closely associated with the nation-state because that particular political form perfected the concept\u2019s eternal ambition to assert increasing control over human populations. However, given the intense variation in social and political life, it seems fair to ask whether the animating spirit of power and authority has really remained constant across Western history. As a form of contested sacrifice, in which communities form contentious interpretations of a body, martyrdom can lend a new perspective on the history of sovereignty in the West. Specifically, this dissertation uses historical cases of martyrdom to investigate how communities have understood legitimate violence, and challenged violent over-reach, across time.  The goal of the empirical chapters of this dissertation (Chapters 3-7) is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate a theory of martyrdom, using that theory to identify changes in the nature of martyrdom across history, and (2) to use historical changes in the nature of martyrdom to reflect on macro-historical shifts in secularization (religious decline) and sovereignty (the spirit of domination which combines traditional notions of power and authority).  Chapter Three investigates the origins of martyrdom in early Christian communities during the first centuries of the Common Era. This chapter is motivated by two simple questions: what was it about early Christian communities that allowed them to articulate the concept of martyrdom, and how did the concept interact with social life in the Roman Empire? In order to answer those questions, I compare early Christian cases of martyrdom with Stoic exempla, stories of noble death which reflect generally similar social circumstances. I argue that while both the Stoics and the early Christians were motivated by an other-worldly ethic, only early Christianity encouraged an active rejection of the world. This world-rejecting asceticism was integral to the creation of early Christian martyrdom stories. It both stimulated a general detachment from creaturely life, but also induced radical social demands. As a consequence, early Christian martyrdom allowed commemorative communities to confront the sovereignty of the Roman Empire, articulated through practices of pagan civil religion, with a new understanding of sovereignty as transcendent. Chapters Four and Five analyze martyrdom in the context of a thoroughly Christianized civilization. Early Christian martyrdom was a product of a new religious imagination, conditioned in large part by a high degree of cultural tension with the reigning sovereignty of the Roman Empire. In contrast, martyrdom in medieval Christendom and early modern Europe emerged under social conditions in which all parties shared basic cultural assumptions. What did it mean to form narratives of contested sacrifice from Christian tradition even as antagonists could themselves claim Christian affiliation? Chapters Four and Five pursue these questions under vastly different circumstances.  Chapter Four considers two prominent martyrs from medieval Christendom: Joan of Arc and Thomas Becket. The martyrdom of Thomas Becket is often taken as a rebuke to the aspirations of the English king Henry II, while the martyrdom of Joan of Arc has sometimes been interpreted as act of propaganda favoring the French monarch Charles VII. Yet, in comparing these two cases I show that the disparate circumstances of these two cases gives way to a deeper truth regarding medieval martyrdom. Specifically, I argue that cases of medieval martyrdom drew on popular notions of the redemptive qualities of suffering in order to build a sacramental form of martyrdom. At the same time, the martyr\u2019s sacrifice exposed the sin inherent in temporal powers and rebuked monarchal over-reach. Chapter Five investigates how martyrdom changed under the conditions of early modernity. Specifically, this chapter investigates how communities in early modernity understood a martyr\u2019s sacrifice given both the rise of religious dissention and the birth of the early modern state. This chapter compares cases of martyrdom in 16th century England and France. This comparison reveals that cases of martyrdom in early modernity were increasingly preoccupied with conscience. Across confessional traditions, commemorative communities came to associate a martyr\u2019s sacrifice as a product of an individual\u2019s adherence to truth. This sacrifice for personal conscience was contrasted with the desecrating violence of heresy, which early modern martyrologists depict as an ever-present threat. The interiorized quality of truth and divine goods, coupled with the unique threat posed to individual truth by heresy, meant that early modern martyrologists increasingly looked to the sovereign as a source of deliverance. This conclusion offers a new perspective on the seemingly paradoxical historical coincidence of modern notions of individualism with the absolutist state.  Chapter Six investigates martyrdom within the increasingly secularized culture of the modern West. Contemporary theorists have tended to be divided on the relationship between politics and religion in modern Western societies. On the one hand, some see this relationship as one off \u2018sacralization\u2019, in which the state is imbued with the qualities of a traditional religion. Yet in many societies traditional religion continues to influence social life. To account for this seeming divergence, some theorists suggest that under modernity religion becomes politicized. These theorists of politicized religion argue that precisely because the modern state cannot effectively displace traditional religion, some communities may turn to traditional religion as a political resource. In order to evaluate these competing claims, I compare cases of martyrdom from the French Revolution and the Easter Rising of the Irish revolutionary period. This comparison suggests that despite many differences, modern \u2018religious\u2019 and \u2018secular\u2019 martyrdom is defined entirely in terms of national sovereignty.  Finally, Chapter Seven investigates the recent martyrdom of the French Catholic priest Jacques Hamel in order to assess the possibilities of commemoration in a world that is both increasingly globalized, increasingly secularized, and also increasingly subject to the capricious violence of religiously-infused terrorism. I argue that under contemporary conditions it has become increasingly difficult to articulate a meaningful form of sacrifice that exists beyond the logic of sovereignty. However, I conclude by identifying rare and fleeting instances of martyrdom which seem to promise a return to the concept\u2019s counter-sovereign heritage."},{"label":"dcterms.available","value":"2018-03-22T22:39:03Z"},{"label":"dcterms.contributor","value":"Levy, Daniel."},{"label":"dcterms.creator","value":"Fordahl, Clayton"},{"label":"dcterms.dateAccepted","value":"2018-03-22T22:39:03Z"},{"label":"dcterms.dateSubmitted","value":"2018-03-22T22:39:03Z"},{"label":"dcterms.description","value":"Department of Sociology."},{"label":"dcterms.extent","value":"422 pg."},{"label":"dcterms.format","value":"Application/PDF"},{"label":"dcterms.identifier","value":"http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78129"},{"label":"dcterms.issued","value":"2017-08-01"},{"label":"dcterms.language","value":"en_US"},{"label":"dcterms.provenance","value":"Made available in DSpace on 2018-03-22T22:39:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1\nFordahl_grad.sunysb_0771E_13256.pdf: 2162674 bytes, checksum: 44f0c09fdc6ff3aa6d9552c95811a61a (MD5)\n  Previous issue date: 2017-08-01"},{"label":"dcterms.subject","value":"Martyr"},{"label":"dcterms.title","value":"The Sacred and the Sovereign: A Historical Sociology of Martyrdom"},{"label":"dcterms.type","value":"Dissertation"},{"label":"dc.type","value":"Dissertation"}],"description":"This manifest was generated dynamically","viewingDirection":"left-to-right","sequences":[{"@type":"sc:Sequence","canvases":[{"@id":"https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/cantaloupe/iiif/2/canvas/page-1.json","@type":"sc:Canvas","label":"Page 1","height":1650,"width":1275,"images":[{"@type":"oa:Annotation","motivation":"sc:painting","resource":{"@id":"https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/cantaloupe/iiif/2/88%2F47%2F95%2F88479512568628791616868808478196622110/full/full/0/default.jpg","@type":"dctypes:Image","format":"image/jpeg","height":1650,"width":1275,"service":{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/image/2/context.json","@id":"https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/cantaloupe/iiif/2/88%2F47%2F95%2F88479512568628791616868808478196622110","profile":"http://iiif.io/api/image/2/level2.json"}},"on":"https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/cantaloupe/iiif/2/canvas/page-1.json"}]}]}]}