Books published by Peter Lang GmbH

By bringing together three different academic disciplines ¿ anthropology, political science and history ¿ and covering a variety of different parliamentary assemblies, both in Europe and in the United States, this book aims to offer a fresh approach to parliamentary studies. The authors assess the importance of ritual and symbolic communication in different parliamentary settings. The underlying question that each practitioner and scholar addresses is: Do parliamentary rituals really matter? Some of the contributors argue that legislative procedure is more telling of the role and reputation that a parliament has in a given society than its rituals and ceremonies. Others stress the relevance of these ritual expressions for conveying political sense and meaning to the public.

The contributions in this volume examine literary and other texts as well as cultural and political discourses in relation to issues of identity formation and dis-formation, of self and society and of the socially local within the global. All these issues come into play through the exploration of the fantasmatic space of mutual mis-recognition and mythmaking between coloniser and colonised, between ¿Africä and ¿Europe¿.