Fantastic and science-fictional narratives employ specific modes of representation. In both genres, figurative language can be used in a literal sense, so that symbols acquire a concrete ...representation in the text. The aim of this article is to examine how a specific image, the giant Leviathan as a metaphor for the aggregation of individuals in order to form the social body, is explored in two genre narratives. In the science fiction novel New Model Army, by Adam Roberts, the image of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is used to suggest the notion of a radical democracy in which all members of the community have an organic participation in the social body. In the graphic narrative The Unwritten, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross and Vince Locke, Hobbes’ Leviathan is explored in conjunction with Melville’s Moby-Dick in order to investigate the nature of symbolic representation and the relation between culture and objective reality. The appropriation of the metaphor of the Leviathan as a concrete symbol determines the way the two narratives develop their main themes and articulate their meanings. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a943.
The division of land and consolidation of territory that created the Greek polis also divided sacred from productive space, sharpened distinctions between purity and pollution, and created a ritual ...system premised on gender difference. Regional sanctuaries ameliorated competition between city-states, publicized the results of competitive rituals for males, and encouraged judicial alternatives to violence. Female ritual efforts, focused on reproduction and the health of the family, are less visible, but, as this provocative study shows, no less significant. Taking a fresh look at the epigraphical evidence for Greek ritual practice in the context of recent studies of landscape and political organization, Susan Guettel Cole illuminates the profoundly gendered nature of Greek cult practice and explains the connections between female rituals and the integrity of the community. In a rich integration of ancient sources and current theory, Cole brings together the complex evidence for Greek ritual practice. She discusses relevant medical and philosophical theories about the female body; considers Greek ideas about purity, pollution, and ritual purification; and examines the cult of Artemis in detail. Her nuanced study demonstrates the social contribution of women's rituals to the sustenance of the polis and the identity of its people.
The article presents the phenomenon of proletariat acting as a social body of Marxist utopian projects. Since socio-cultural reality at any particular historic period is already mature and quite ...stable structure arisen from social development throughout the course of history, meanwhile the utopia is considered as a phenomenon of the socio-cultural reality, reflecting salient features of the civilization it is based on, it seems possible to reveal the specifics of the Russian proletariat and practical methods of its consciousness formation. The author substantiates the position that specific features of socio-cultural reality caused state Marxism policy formation, emphasizing the need for a prompt transformation of spontaneous proletarian consciousness and its destructive origin into something positive through the development of its self-consciousness creating a positive type of a worker-proletarian. Peculiarities of the Russian reality gave rise to state Marxism formation with a particular focus on a rapid transformation of a spontaneous origin of the working-class movement into the organized class.
This essay develops the concept of the "social body" as a metaphorical representation of hierarchical relationships in Thailand, as well as the physical embodiment of social, religious, and political ...structures. To do so, I trace the symbolic coordinates of groups that correspond to conceptions of individual bodies, along with the habituated means of perceiving as part of a collective. I argue that conventional Thai social interactions involve active attention to and care of the "social body," in which differential roles are necessary for group functioning. Ethnographic descriptions of social interactions in public and semi-private arenas depict the spontaneous and embodied root of moral action in these contexts. The values thus enacted, however, challenge normative ideals of distributive justice and open up questions about "care" for a social body that validates unequal power and resource distribution.
Recent Work in Moral Anthropology Heim, Maria; Monius, Anne
The Journal of religious ethics,
September 2014, Letnik:
42, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This special focus issue brings to the Journal of Religious Ethics fresh considerations of moral anthropology as practiced by four emergent voices within the field. Each of these essays, in varying ...ways, seeks not only to advance an understanding of ethics in a particular time, place, and context, but to draw our attention to shared aspects of the human condition: its discontinuities and fractures, its practices of perception and attention, its interplays of emotion, intuition, and reason, and its thoroughly intersubjective nature. To learn something of Thai Buddhist life-worlds, contemporary Russian modes of being, or the experience of immorality in today's China, each essay argues in turn, is to gain new insight into ourselves.
Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a ...minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France-both by Gentiles and Jews themselves-Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory,Obstinate Hebrewsis a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the "other." Schechter argues that the French paid attention to the Jews because thinking about the Jews helped them reflect on general issues of the day. These included the role of tradition in religion, the perfectibility of human nature, national identity, and the nature of citizenship. In a conclusion comparing and contrasting the "Jewish question" in France with discourses about women, blacks, and Native Americans, Schechter provocatively widens his inquiry, calling for a more historically precise approach to these important questions of difference.
An adolescent girl is mocked when she takes a bath with her peers, because her genitals look like those of a boy. A couple visits a doctor asking to ‘create more space’ in the woman for intercourse. ...A doctor finds testicular tissue in a woman with appendicitis, and decides to keep his findings quiet. These are just a few of the three hundred European case histories of people whose sex was doubted during the long nineteenth century that Geertje Mak draws upon in her remarkable new book. How did people deal with such situations? How did they decide to which sex a person should belong? This groundbreaking analysis of clinical case histories shows how sex changed from an outward appearance inscribed in a social body to something to be found deep inside body and self. A fascinating, easy to follow, yet sophisticated argument addressing major issues of the history of body, sex, and self, this volume will fit advanced undergraduate courses, while challenging specialists.
Perceiving the Social Body Aulino, Felicity
The Journal of religious ethics,
09/2014, Letnik:
42, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay develops the concept of the “social body” as a metaphorical representation of hierarchical relationships in Thailand, as well as the physical embodiment of social, religious, and political ...structures. To do so, I trace the symbolic coordinates of groups that correspond to conceptions of individual bodies, along with the habituated means of perceiving as part of a collective. I argue that conventional Thai social interactions involve active attention to and care of the “social body,” in which differential roles are necessary for group functioning. Ethnographic descriptions of social interactions in public and semi‐private arenas depict the spontaneous and embodied root of moral action in these contexts. The values thus enacted, however, challenge normative ideals of distributive justice and open up questions about “care” for a social body that validates unequal power and resource distribution.
Revisiting the contributions of numerous foundational biocriminological works, this article uses the concept ‘bodily economies’ to analyze the emergence and solidification of criminological ...pathologizations of the bios dependent on the capture and analysis of human corporeal matter. The scholars we discuss (Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks) each causally equate some part of the body with inbuilt criminality. Through an exegesis of their work, we illustrate how the boundaries of the social body are constituted in and through corporeal capturings and classifications of ‘criminal man’. Our analysis investigates the biocriminological method of locating sources of criminality inside the body, which still permeates the new ‘science of criminals’ used as a tool to define and protect the social body. We conclude by discussing the renewed biocriminological interest in preventing criminality through forecasting it in various scientific constructs and visualizations of the inner body.
