I was particularly interested by what you have to say at the start about anxiety. It immediately made me think of a book by Mark Breitenberg called Anxious Masculinity. It’s on gender hierarchies rather than hierarchies per se, but he argues that since masculine identity is constructed through a patriarchal culture, infused with patriarchal assumptions about the power and the body, and the premise of unequal distribution of power, will inevitably produce some anxiety about the threat to that power. By anxiety he means anticipating dangers in advance, whether they are real or not. He follows Freud that in arguing that anxiety actually protects its subject – in the repetition of anxiety, men compensate for an anticipated danger that derives from patriarchy in the first place.

The upshot of all this is that anxiety doesn’t just signify cultural tensions - it actually enables the continuation of a certain set of hierarchical assumptions. A quote from Stephen Greenblatt probably sums it up: Stephen Greenblatt. “Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange or hostile. This threatening Other must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed”.

I think this gives us an interesting way to read “anxiety tests” such as those that were common during the civil wars. Are they actually a weapon in preserving a certain kind of social order - through creating or exaggerating disorder - as much as a lament for the decline or order? It’s an interesting conundrum…

(Fixed - but I had to go into the database in PHPmyadmin!)