Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present - Softcover

Geltner, G

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9089647864 ISBN 13: 9789089647863

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, 2014

Synopsis

history, identity, corporal punishment

About this title

Review:

"Geltner's striking account powerfully and convincingly challenges conventional assumptions of a chronologically linear progress away from punitive violence inflicted upon the body to various ameliorated forms of punishment in the contemporary world. The range of time and social changes he covers makes this volume necessary reading well beyond the history of criminology itself and across several disciplines and overturned master narratives."--Ed Peters, University of Pennsylvania

"Brilliant! A short, sharp, and often shocking corrective to conventional penal history and western cultural categories. Geltner's little book mobilizes an abundance of comparative evidence to challenge our historical understanding of bodily punishment and to point up the invidious cultural uses of that history. An object lesson in scholarly provocation."--David Garland, New York University, author of Punishment and Modern Society

From the Back Cover:

Nederlandse editie leverbaar: De gesel en de ander (ISBN 978 90 8964 787 0). Corporal punishment is often seen as a litmus test for a society's degree of civilization. Its licit use purports to separate modernity from premodernity, enlightened from barbaric cultures. As Geltner argues, however, neither did the infliction of bodily pain typify earlier societies nor did it vanish from penal theory, policy, or practice. Far from displaying a steady decline that accelerated with the Enlightenment, physical punishment was contested throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, its application expanding and contracting under diverse pressures. Moreover, despite the integration of penal incarceration into criminal justice systems since the nineteenth century, modern nation states and colonial regimes increased rather than limited the use of corporal punishment. Flogging Others thus challenges a common understanding of modernization and Western identity and underscores earlier civilizations' nuanced approaches to punishment, deviance, and the human body. Today as in the past, corporal punishment thrives due to its capacity to define otherness efficiently and unambiguously, either as a measure acting upon a deviant's body or as a practice that epitomizes - in the eyes of external observers - a culture's backwardness.

About this edition

• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 9089647864
• ISBN 13: 9789089647863
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112