Publisher's Synopsis
Gender and sex are categories typically ignored in comparative studies of nationalism. The author explores these relations in the context of the Olympic victory ceremony, a globally familiar rite of deceptive simplicity and transparency. Focusing on gender asymmetries overlooked in popular and professional discourse, he shows that the rite encodes the Stranger-King mythic structure renowned among anthropologists, classicists and scholars of religion, but never previously recognized in such a transnational, mass public setting.;Combining historical methods with the results of his ethnographic research, the author reverses the classic ritual theory of the myth. Building on recent research, which sees in the myth a theory of the origins of political power, the volume explores the political unconsciousness of liberal democracies.
