Abstract
This article is focused on problematic distinctions of difference among animals in the lineage of great apes. It combines several theoretical perspectives on evolutionary relationships, ...technological innovation, the development of body parts as tools, and a semiotic interpretation of what André Leroi‐Gourhan called technicity. Foundational questions in social theory are developed using biosemiotics, particularly as concerns a materialist understanding of religion and the magical aspects of cultural representation. This, it is argued, provides a framework for theorizing social history in terms of real ecological relations, embodied meaning, and the transference of meaning onto objects. Understood semiotically, the material history of Hominidae, encompassing animals with different kinds of motility, dexterity, and techno‐semiotic orientations towards the world, is inclusive and relational rather than exclusively anthropocentric, as is the case for social theory based on the artifice of language and articulations of belief, creativity, and cultural distinction that are thought to be distinctive of the genus
Homo
.
Abstrait
Biosémiotique et histoire des hominidés : technicité, animaux et limites de l'exceptionnalisme humain
Résumé
Le présent article est consacré à des critères de distinction problématiques entre les espèces de la lignée des grands singes. Il combine plusieurs approches théoriques des relations évolutionnaires, de l'innovation technologique, du développement de parties du corps pour servir d'outils, avec une interprétation sémiotique de ce qu'André Leroi‐Gourhan appelait la technicité. Des questions fondamentales de théorie sociale sont développées à l'aide de la biosémiotique, notamment la compréhension matérialiste de la religion et les aspects magiques de la représentation culturelle. L'auteur avance que l'on dispose ainsi d'un cadre pour théoriser l'histoire sociale en termes de relations écologiques réelles, de signification incarnée et de transfert de la signification dans des objets. Sous l’éclairage de la sémiotique, l'histoire matérielle des hominidés, qui incluent des espèces diverses par leurs modes de motricité, leur dextérité et leur orientation techno‐sémiotiques vers le monde, est inclusive et relationnelle, et non exclusivement anthropocentrique comme l'est la théorie sociale basée sur l'artifice du langage et les articulations de croyance, de créativité et de distinction culturelle dans lesquelles on voit une caractéristique distinctive du genre
Homo
.
An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions ...are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships.
Nature cure is a globalized system of nineteenth century European medicine that developed synergistically in opposition to biomedicine, and that has become popular in India. This essay examines the ...question of how anthropologists should understand claims that all diseases can be cured with earth, air, sunlight, water and raw food. The question is complicated by a paradox of relativism deeply embedded in the desire to find cures, to articulate those cures as panaceas, and to the way illness narratives personalize and essentialize contexts of meaning that resolve sickness and suffering with experiential healing. Focused on suffering that motivates people to experiment on themselves and engage in exotic cures, this essay presents an argument for extending skepticism concerning claims of efficacy to a politics of medicine and public health that is ecological rather than phenomenological, medical or biological. Suffering, as well as empathy for those who suffer, transforms radically relativized personal convictions into forms of embodied, existential activism that relate to, but extend beyond, the hegemony of biomedicine and institutionalized public health.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient ...and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized for its health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine.Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power.The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today.
Medical systems function in specific cultural contexts. It is common to speak of the medicine of China, Japan, India, and other nation-states. Yet almost all formalized medical systems claim ...universal applicability and, thus, are ready to cross the cultural boundaries that contain them. There is a critical tension, in theory and practice, in the ways regional medical systems are conceptualized as "nationalistic" or inherently transnational. This volume is concerned with questions and problems created by the friction between nationalism and transnationalism at a time when globalization has greatly complicated the notion of cultural, political, and economic boundedness. Offering a range of perspectives, the contributors address questions such as: How do states concern themselves with the modernization of "traditional" medicine? How does the global hegemony of science enable the nationalist articulation of alternative medicine? How do global discourses of science and "new age" spirituality facilitate the transnationalization of "Asian" medicine? As more and more Asian medical practices cross boundaries into Western culture through the popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east, these systems of meaning become inextricably interrelated. These essays consider the larger implications of transmissions between cultures.
Drawing on Weber's classic study of religion, salvation, and the motivation to be a successful capitalist, this article problematizes the relationship among competition and the embodiment of success ...in the practice of yoga in modern India. Contemporary postural yoga has been popularized in ways that fetishize the body and the relation between the body and enlightenment. It has become a sign of self-realization in a mode that reflects the possibility of transcendence. So-called godmen in India, who embody this possibility, popularize yoga in different ways. Contrasting Swami Sivananda's brand of twentieth-century yoga in the context of Nehruvian modernity with Baba Ramdev's yoga as an expression of free market religious nationalism, this article examines the work that embodied competition does in different ideological contexts.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the view of many people, Baba Ramdev embodies the practice of modern yoga in twenty-first century India. A tremendously successful entrepreneur, infamous ‘godman’ with political ties, and a highly ...visible TV personality, he is also a vocal supporter of pahalwani (Indian wrestling) as a way of life and of wrestling in India as a national sport. Beyond sponsorship of tournaments and support for a new professional wrestling league, he promotes a form of modern, nationalistic masculinity that draws on the ‘ideals’ of yoga, competitive athleticism, ‘Hindu’ conceptions of embodied power, and fetishized Vedic asceticism. In complex and often contradictory ways, Baba Ramdev's embodiment of these ideals shapes the bio-morality of wrestlers as they train, compete, and endorse his products. Critically analysed in terms of gender theory, his sponsorship of wrestling belies deep contradictions in religious nationalism, middle-class modernity, and in the gendered morality of both wrestling as a sport and yoga as a form of practice.
The history of modern yoga is rooted in the history of alchemy and the practice of magic in medieval India. In physiological terms it is also intimately linked to tantric ideas concerning the ...immobilisation of semen. However, modern yoga as a form of practice which emphasises physical fitness, wellness and holistic health, emerged more directly out of the early twentieth-century yoga renaissance. Leading figures such as Shri Y ogendra and Swami Kuvalyananda sought to purge yoga practices such as asana, kriya and pranayama of all things esoteric, mystical and magical and establish practice on the basis of pragmatic, rational, scientific principles. They did this within a framework of what can be called secularised spiritualism. Since the early part of the last century yoga has been popularised, systematised and routinised on these terms, as reflected in countless schools founded by teachers with various degrees of training and experience, as well as in thousands of popular, scientific and academic publications. In all of these schools and publications—both more and less spiritual and philosophical—there is, it will be argued, a degree of profound ambivalence if not explicit contradiction between a secularised, 'sanitised' scientific ideal of medicalised practice, and the 'other history' of sex, magic, and alchemy. This 'other history' both undermines and authorises the idea of yoga as medicine, and, it will be argued, the tension between pragmatic rationalism and esoteric magic makes yoga powerful.
Nature Cure and Ayurveda Alter, Joseph S
Body & society,
03/2015, Letnik:
21, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in ...terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely linked to nationalism in India, this article presents an analytical perspective on the embodiment of viscerality to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these experiences blur distinctions of cultural continuity and how an ecology of the body shapes the cultural politics of tradition in India.
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