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Smith and Nimmo assert that contemporary political conventions orchestrate an important legitimation ritual. Asignificant part of this ritual is composed of speechmaking. The 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions had a few notable speech moments. Specifically, the speeches by Illinois State Senator Barack Obama and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger garnered attention for both them and their party leaders. Along with the excitement these two speakers generated, they shared a common narrative thread in their two speeches. The difference between the speeches, the authors argue, lies in how the speakers enacted different elements of the moralistic and materialistic forms of the American dream. In accordance with Honig, the authors argue that Obama and Schwarzenegger functioned in this iconic way to reenchant, rescue, and reinvigorate each party's sense of purity, innocence, and goodness.

In recent years, a number of Iranian American women have written and published memoirs of a return to Iran. One motif that these memoirs share is their concern with language as a key element of cultural identity. The article examines these memoirs as negotiations of identity through language. Relying on Joshua Fishman's anthropological definition of language and ethnicity as being, doing, and knowing, and on Taghi Modarressi's notion of “accented writing,” this article examines these writers in terms of their relationship to Persian as a key component of the self. As these memoirists narrate their journeys between Iran and the United States, they perform a translation of self across the boundaries of language. Some narrate an “accented identity” that celebrates hybridity; others acknowledge their assimilation into American society and into the English language. All attempt to reclaim Persian as an artifact, if not a medium of cultural belonging.

Focusing on the notion of ‘green clothing’, this article shows how a sartorial aesthetic informs group cohesion for environmentalist activists. Using qualitative data gathered through open-ended questions posted on the Field Biologists’s Facebook group, which is no longer active, the article explores subjects’ memories and opinions on clothing and style covering the period from the late 1960s to the present. The article mixes this method with historical textual analysis of the tradition of frugality and asceticism back to nineteenth-century forerunners. This mixed method approach provides rich material on counter-consumerist aesthetics in both cultural and political contexts within a historical framework. Theoretically, the article revises the classic notion of clothes as a cultural membrane between body and society, showing how a third element – nature – works in certain ideological frames to dissolve that membrane between body and society. In this way, clothes are worn in order to demonstrate harmony between the wearer’s body and the environment. This dissolution of culture into ‘nature’ serves the collective pursuit of political community espoused by the Field Biologists. Through tracing a number of ‘vestemes’ (units of sartorial semiotics), this article decodes an identity formed around nature as opposed to culture; the old as opposed to the new; second- as opposed to first-hand; as well as around a complex relationship with gender.

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