Marvin, Carolyn

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  • Publication
    Your Smart Phones Are Hot Pockets to Us: Context Collapse in a Mobilized Age
    (2013-01-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual’s coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research.
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    Embracing the Written Word
    (1981) Marvin, Carolyn
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    Fresh Blood, Public Meat: Ritual of Totem Regeneration in the 1992 Presidential Race
    (1994-06-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    An election campaign serves ritual functions for the American political system, beyond its manifest functions of determining which persons and interests will govern the country. The campaign ritual is analyzed in terms of Durkheim’s concept of the totem, including its regeneration and sacrifice. The dirty campaign is a sacrificial feast that establishes conditions for a proper mating between the candidate and the electorate. Voters declare their fidelity to the totem victor and receive a sacrificial promise in return.
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    Fables for the Information Age: The Fisherman's Wishes
    (1982-09-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    The computer revolution is less a revolution in the usual sense of the word than the announcement of a glamorous marriage between two powerful promises in the history of the modern West, the Enlightenment, the impulse to encompass the entire world in a rational system of knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution, the fruit of an ancient impulse to reduce the demands of nature to insignificance. By now we know that some of the fondest legacies of the Enlightenment, such as the belief that the world is fully knowable and that nothing more than rational knowledge is necessary to make us free, are ambiguous ones, but it is still difficult for us to admit that the vision of the Industrial Revolution was naive. In many ways we still believe that utopia is available to everyone who has the right equipment.
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    A New Scholarly Dispensation for Civil Religion
    (2002-01-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    Rod Hart's rhetorical notion of civic piety is hard pressed to explain what makes U.S. civil religion so compelling that citizen believers will offer their lives to it on a well-defined ritual occasions. I propose that U.S. patriotism is a full-blown religion defined, like all religions, by a transcendent god of principle with the authority to deal life and death to its own believers. The nation as the transcendent god principle that demands the sacrificial offering of believers' lives s the basis of patriotism. It follows that patriotic rhetoric alone without citizen obligation and commitment to the act of bodily sacrifice would be indistinguishable from advertising. I discuss the relationship of civil religion to antecedent religious traditions and, what seems at first glance to be an anomaly, why the sacred status of U.S. nationalism is regularly concealed or denied in official and unofficial rhetoric.
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    To Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion
    (1996-10-01) Marvin, Carolyn; Ingle, David W
  • Publication
    Religion and Realpolitik: Reflections on Sacrifice
    (2014-11-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim’s totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.