Terrorism is a notoriously plastic word, depending on user, audience, and political context. This paper focuses on shifts in its meanings since the early 1970s. As federal statutes made terrorism a criminal offense, common usage changed from a broad meaning to one that specified terrorism as a political crime. The argument is that the state shapes meaning and public discourse through law. Peircean semiotics and the semiotic philosophy of Russian linguist Vološinov provide a framework to explore relationships among politics, law, (...) and civil life. Applied to the events of September 11, 2001 such an analysis further allows better understanding of certain interpreters of the September 11 attacks, notably Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction: dialectics and social thought -- Marx and the dialectic of capital -- Freud and the dialectic of psychology -- Peirce, Mead, Goffman, and interactional social science -- Culture and society -- Critical theories -- Rebellion -- The phenomenologists -- Contemporary social thought: Agamben to Zizek -- Dialectics of contemporary society and the present crisis -- References -- Index.

This methodological essay describes and advocates using certain psychoanalytic techniques for ethnography. It focuses on the self analysis of the ethnographer using evenly hovering attention, dream analysis, and free association. It presents an argument that using those techniques enhances the goal of ethnography as a human science and of social research. Fear of crime serves as a point of departure for the methodological argument. Finally, it links psychoanalytic ethnography to a fractal model of society and the self with reference to (...) C. S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics as a link between the individual and society. (shrink)