Death of the Father

This international anthropological project is a study of the closure of political authority in the 20th century and consists of a Website, databases of research materials, an audio-visual essay, and a book. Six anthropologists, led by Cornell professor John Borneman, take up the end of an authority crisis that spanned most of this century, 1917-1991, and that crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the State Socialist regimes of East Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The authority of these political forms involved the shared exercise of sovereignty by a father and a leader who directed arbitrary and widespread killing, torture, and repression. Fathers and leaders sent their sons and followers to die in gruesome wars of massive destruction, and the sovereign's exercise of power was extremely intimate and invasive. Domestic authority and national political leadership together produced trauma--a temporally delayed and repeated suffering of events that can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of their occurrence. The end of these traumatic forms of national authority--the Death of the Father--has dramatic consequences for both the father and the leader. What were the modes of death--hanging, suicide, execution, old age--and the sequence of events following the collapse of authority? How do regimes end, and of what significance is the mode of death and the form of public encounter with the leader's dead body?

The Website for this international collaborative investigation of the societal effects of patriarchal dictatorships was initially developed by CIDC staff member Noni Korf Vidal. CIDC continues to host the site for the project participants. Since going “live,” it has won a number of awards, including the Internet Scout Outstanding Resource Award.

Participants in the project:

 

revolutionary headThe experience of image and sound have been narrowly studied as analogous to reading texts, but they must be studied as having their own visual and aural properties. They will not replace books or written texts, but neither have books been able to replace image and sound.

-John Borneman, Associate Professor of Anthropology