Flowers that kill : communicative opacity in political spaces / Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Symbolism in politics--Japan--History.

Symbolism in politics.

Symbolism in politics--Europe--History.

Symbolism in communication--Japan--History.

Symbolism in communication.

Symbolism in communication--Europe--History.

Flowers--Symbolic aspects--Japan--History.

Flowers.

Flowers--Symbolic aspects--Europe--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (297 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Flowers are beautiful. People often communicate their love, sorrow, and other feelings to each other by offering flowers, like roses. Flowers can also be symbols of collective identity, as cherry blossoms are for the Japanese. But, are they also deceptive? Do people become aware when their meaning changes, perhaps as flowers are deployed by the state and dictators? Did people recognize that the roses they offered to Stalin and Hitler became a propaganda tool? Or were they like the Japanese, who, including the soldiers, did not realize when the state told them to fall like cherry blossoms, it meant their deaths? Flowers That Kill proposes an entirely new theoretical understanding of the role of "idian symbols and their political significance to understand how they lead people, if indirectly, to wars, violence, and even self-exclusion and self-destruction precisely because symbolic communication is full of ambiguity and opacity. Using a broad comparative approach, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney illustrates how the aesthetic and multiple meanings of symbols, and at times symbols without images become possible sources for creating opacity which prevents people from recognizing the shifting meaning of the symbols.

Contents:

Introduction : opacity, misrecognition, and other complexities of symbolic communication

Japanese cherry blossoms : from the beauty of life to the sublimity of sacrificial death

European roses : from 'bread and roses' to the aestheticization of murderers

The subversive monkey in Japanese culture : from scapegoat to clown

Rice and the Japanese collective self : the purity of exclusion

The collective self and cultural/political nationalisms : cross-cultural perspectives

The invisible and inaudible Japanese emperor

(Non-)externalization of religious and political authority and power : a cross-cultural perspective.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780804795944

0804795940

OCLC:

932322491