n the most recent edition (38.3) of American Ethnologist, which I’m just getting around to reading, I see this very interesting notion of the state as a metonym for the self.

It is worth considering the subjectivity that informs an understanding of one’s actions as heroic. I believe it is best described by what Gayatri Spivak (2004) calls the ability to “metonymize” the self, to imagine the self in an active relationship with the state, the opposite of…