A Spiritual Atomic Bomb? : Discourse analysis on Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book as a political religious work
Karmisto, Tuomas (2024-11-06)
A Spiritual Atomic Bomb? : Discourse analysis on Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book as a political religious work
(06.11.2024)
Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
avoin
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on:
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2024112195873
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2024112195873
Tiivistelmä
Quotations from Chairman Mao or more collegially known in the west as The Little Red Book, is the world’s most printed book second only to the Bible with little over a billion copies printed. The book contains over 400 quotations from Mao collected from various speeches, interviews, essays and other quotes by the Chinese Communist party in 1966. It is seen as the embodiment and essence of the Maoist ideology, that has its roots in Marxism–Leninism. The book arose in prominence during the chaotic cultural revolution of China (1966–76), when the people were subjected by the ruling regime to study the Quotations by heart. The cult of Mao became more akin to a religious system than that of purely secular performance.
The ideology of Maoism along with communism and fascism was part of major academic interest in the field of studying the sacred in the modern world. One such proposed theoretical category for explaining the seemingly religious nature of the phenomenon, is the theory of political religion, which according to the famous political historian Emilio Gentile (2001) is adequate in its explanation power to help understand the religious mechanisms and aspects, that give rise to such totalitarian ideologies like that of Nazism, fascism and bolshevism.
My research involved analyzing how Quotations construct discourses derived from the chosen aspects of Gentile’s formulation on the theory of political religion, and what kind of totalitarianism they postulate. The aspects are discriminatory nature, utopian aspirations and collective ethos. The whole of Quotations is my primary source, in making the research material.
The analysis is qualitative, and the research approach is both empirical and theoretical. The chosen analysis method is a hybrid of textual-driven critical discourse analysis and a context driven meaning-oriented discourse study, in which the parallels, consistency and similarities of the meanings are brought up from the research material by me as the interpretative researcher, and then discussed with the guiding theory.
The findings validated the hypothesis about the political religious nature of the Quotations. The discourses were further elaborated by me to convey transcendent immanence: The totalitarian essence created as part of a political religion through binding its ideology with familiar cosmology. Gentile’s formulation was confirmed to be useful tool in analyzing single-party propagations and ideological textual sources. This thesis hopes to encourage similar research positions in analyzing any totalitarian regime and ideology through theoretical framework of religion as a system of meaning-network.
The ideology of Maoism along with communism and fascism was part of major academic interest in the field of studying the sacred in the modern world. One such proposed theoretical category for explaining the seemingly religious nature of the phenomenon, is the theory of political religion, which according to the famous political historian Emilio Gentile (2001) is adequate in its explanation power to help understand the religious mechanisms and aspects, that give rise to such totalitarian ideologies like that of Nazism, fascism and bolshevism.
My research involved analyzing how Quotations construct discourses derived from the chosen aspects of Gentile’s formulation on the theory of political religion, and what kind of totalitarianism they postulate. The aspects are discriminatory nature, utopian aspirations and collective ethos. The whole of Quotations is my primary source, in making the research material.
The analysis is qualitative, and the research approach is both empirical and theoretical. The chosen analysis method is a hybrid of textual-driven critical discourse analysis and a context driven meaning-oriented discourse study, in which the parallels, consistency and similarities of the meanings are brought up from the research material by me as the interpretative researcher, and then discussed with the guiding theory.
The findings validated the hypothesis about the political religious nature of the Quotations. The discourses were further elaborated by me to convey transcendent immanence: The totalitarian essence created as part of a political religion through binding its ideology with familiar cosmology. Gentile’s formulation was confirmed to be useful tool in analyzing single-party propagations and ideological textual sources. This thesis hopes to encourage similar research positions in analyzing any totalitarian regime and ideology through theoretical framework of religion as a system of meaning-network.