scholarly journals “The Infurnal Thing”: Autonomy and Ability in Narratives of Disabling, Self-acting, and Weaponized Prostheses

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-125
Author(s):  
Ryan Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Power Play

AbstractFocusing on the themes of agency and ability, this chapter examines the power play at work between person and prosthetic part in various nineteenth-century imaginaries. The chapter draws from mechanical and materialist understandings of the human body and attitudes to automatic machines to place literary and cultural representations within wider historical contexts pertaining to ability, autonomy, and wholeness. Exploring the extent to which artificial body parts were seen to enhance or assume the agency of the user, the chapter argues that a range of prosthesis narratives produce transgressive prosthesis users or false body parts that threaten the dominance of the physically whole. It investigates three key tropes: narratives of disabling, self-acting, and weaponized prostheses.

scholarly journals The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System, and the Reconstitution of Erotic Desire in Nineteenth-Century Japan

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-974
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Pflugfelder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Social World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender System

Put simply, hair and clothing make a difference. To phrase the matter another way, the presence of these material and visual forms, or alternatively their absence from the human body, embodies potent cultural meanings and has concrete effects in the social world. To be sure, more-hidden body parts may lurk below the surface that signal our membership in certain social categories—gender, to give a prime example. In practical terms, however, when we see strangers walking toward us from a distance, we are in the habit of assuming they are a man or a woman not because we have observed their genitalia (it would be strange indeed if that were the case) but rather because we recognize and extract meaning from a more readily visible set of identity markers—primarily clothing-related (sartorial) and hair-related (tonsorial)—whose semiotic rules must be learned culturally and which vary across space and time.

Property in Human Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
First Principles ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Law

This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials ‘as such’ to consider also (a) the availability of rights of personal and intellectual property in objects incorporating or derived from them, and (b) the reliance on quasi-property rights of possession and consent to regulate the storage and use of corpses and detached bodily materials, including so-called ‘bio-specimens’. Reasoning from first principles, it highlights the practical and conceptual, as well as the political and philosophical, difficulties in this area, along with certain differences in the regulatory approach of European and US authorities. By way of conclusion, it proposes the law of authors’ and inventors’ rights as simultaneously offering a cautionary tale to those who would extend the reach of property even further than it extends currently and ideas for exploiting the malleability of the ‘property’ concept to manage the risks of extending it.

3D-printing human body parts

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (10) ◽  
pp. 15-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Kirkpatrick
Keyword(s):  
3D Printing ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Body Parts

Polysemy of Words Expressing Human Body Parts of The Four Limb Area in Thai Language in Vietnam

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thanh Ha Thi Mai ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Thai Language ◽  
Unit Of Measurement ◽  
Semantic Transformation

The nomenclature and polysemiosis of body parts has constituted a central part of linguistics, and of Linguistic Anthropology. The ramifications of such work make inroads into our understandings of many fields, including language contact, semiotics, and so forth, This current paper identifies the structures and emerging denotations of expressions of human body parts (HBPs) in Thai language, and ways in which these dimensions reflect polysemy. The study thus applies the following methods: Field research methods of linguistics, description, comparison, and collation. As sources of data, this study surveys Thai rhymes, fairy tales, riddles and riddle songs, rhyming  stories, children’s songs and linguistic data of daily speeches in the  northwest of Vietnam. The paper uses theories on word meaning and the transformation of word meaning. To aid analysis, this paper applies methods of  analyzing meaning components so to construct significative meaning structures of words expressing HBPs in Thai language, thus identifying the semantemes chosen to be the basis for the transformation. In the polysemy of  words expressing HBPs of the four limbs, the polysemy of words expressing  the following parts were studied: khèn - tay, cánh tay (arm); mễ – tay, bàn  tay (hand); khà - đùi (thigh); tìn - chân, bàn chân (leg, foot). Directions of semantic transformation of words expressing HBPs in Thai language are as  diversified and as multi-leveled as Vietnamese. Furthermore, in Thai language, there occur differences in the four scopes of semantic transformation, as compared with Vietnamese, including “people’s characteristics,” “human activities,” “nomination of things with activities like HBPs’ activities,” and “unit of measurement.” This study contributes to Linguistic Anthropology by suggesting that the polysemy of words expressing HBPs of the four limb area in Thai language will outline a list of linguistic phenomena which serve as the basis to understand cultural and national features, in the light of perception and categorization of the reality of the Thai minority with reference to Vietnamese.

Bodily Dasein and Chinese Script Components

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwan Tze-wan
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Chinese Script ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Constitutive Principle ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractIn the Shuowen, one of the earliest comprehensive character dictionaries of ancient China, when discussing where the Chinese characters derive their structural components, Xu Shen proposed the dual constitutive principle of “adopting proximally from the human body, and distally from things around.” This dual emphasis of “body” and “things around” corresponds largely to the phenomenological issues of body or corporeality on the one hand, and lifeworld on the other. If we borrow Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as Being-in-the world, we can easily arrive at a reformulation of Xu Shen’s constitutive principle of the Chinese script as one that concerns “bodily Dasein.” By looking into various examples of script tokens we can further elaborate on how the Chinese make use not only of the body in general but various body parts, and how they differentiate their life world into material nature, living things, and a multifaceted world of equipment in forming a core basis of Chinese characters/components, upon which further symbolic manipulation such as “indication”, “phonetic borrowing”, semantic combination, and “annotative derivation”, etc. can be based. Finally, examples will be cited to show how in the Chinese scripts the human body (and its parts) might interact with other’s bodies (and their parts) or with “things around” (whether nature, living creatures, or artifacts) in various ways to cover the social, environmental, ritual, technical, economical, and even intellectual aspects of human experience. Bodily Dasein, so to speak, provides us with a new perspective of understanding and appreciating the entire scope of the Chinese script.

scholarly journals Design of Novel BELBIC Controlled Semi-Active Suspension and Comparative Analysis with Passive and PID Controlled Suspension

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj SHARMA ◽  
Vinod KUMAR
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Active Suspension ◽  
Driver Model ◽  
Ride Quality ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Hybrid Techniques ◽  
Design Engineers ◽  
Mass Displacement

Passenger comfort, quality of ride, and handling have broughta lot of attention and concern toautomotive design engineers. These 2 parameters must have optimum balance as they have an inverse effect on each other. Researchers have proposed several approaches and techniques like PID control, fuzzy approach, GA, techniques with inspiration from nature and hybrid techniques to attain the same. A new controller based on the learning behavior of the human brain has been used for the control of semi-active suspension in this study. The controller is known as the Brain Emotional Learning-Based Intelligent Controller (BELBIC). A one-fourth model of car along with the driver model having 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) wasmodeled and simulated. The objective of the studywasto analyze the performance of the proposed controller for improving the dynamic response of the vehicle model coupled with complex biodynamic models of the human body as a passenger, making the whole dynamic system very complex to control. The performance wasanalyzed based on percentage reduction in the overshoot of the vehicle’s sprung mass as well as different human body parts when subjected to road disturbances. The proposed controller performance wascompared with the PID controller, widely used in semi-active suspension. The simulation results obtained for BELBIC controlled system for circular road bump showed that the overshoot of passenger head and body wasreduced by 18.84 and 18.82 %, respectively and reduction for buttock and leg displacement was18.87 %. The vehicle’s seat and sprung mass displacement displayedan improvement of 18.90 and 18.51 %. The overshoot of passenger's head and body displacement wasimproved by 19.79and 19.62 %,respectively, whereas improvement for buttock & leg, vehicle’s seat, and sprung mass displacement were19.81, 20.00, and 20.49 % against trapezoidal speed bump. The PID controlled suspension disclosed an improvement of 8.74, 8.53, 8.75, 11.11, 14.75 % against circular bump and 10.72, 10.33, 10.73, 11.11 and 11.75 % against trapezoidal bump for overshoot reduction of passenger head, body, buttock & leg, vehicle’s seat and sprung mass displacement, respectively. The proposed BELBIC controlled semi-active suspension outperformed the widely used PID controlled semi-active suspension and indicated asignificant improvement in the ride quality of the vehicle.

scholarly journals Somatic Lexemes in the Kartvelian Linguistic Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Rusudan Asatiani ◽  
Natia Dundua ◽  
Marine Ivanishvili
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
The People ◽  
Inner Organs ◽  
Core Vocabulary ◽  
Linguistic Units

Comparative-historical study of languages makes it possible to represent the diachronic process of structuring the world and forming the corresponding concepts. The abovementioned process is inherently integral and reflected in such socio-cultural areas of human life as language, art, religion, farming, ethno-traditional customs, culture (in its broadest sense), etc. The proto-language reconstructed as a result of the comparative-historical study and the picture of its diachronic development provide some information about the genetic relations between the people speaking the corresponding related languages, about their original homeland and the directions of their historical migrations, about their knowledge, ideas and representations. This time we have analyzed the semantic field of the lexemes denoting the human body parts, which are reconstructed at the Proto-Kartvelian language and exist in the contemporary Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Megrelian, Laz, and Svan) and some dialects (notably, Gurian, Rachian, Xevsurian, and Kiziqian). Our goal is to reveal the semantic structure of the mentioned field, to analyze the respective concepts as well as to outline processes of the development and the establishment of corresponding tokens (resp. lexemes). Vocabulary denoting a human body (resp. Somatic lexemes), its parts and inner organs is a constituent part of the basic core vocabulary of a language and presumably ought to be fixed in the ancient times’ reflecting data. Analysis of the lexical units, which have been reconstructed either at the Common-Kartvelian or Georgian-Zan level on the basis of regular sound correspondences between the Kartvelian languages, allows us to highlight the main course of forming and developing the linguistic units we are concerned with; namely, the accumulation of “knowledge” had been carried out due to the process of differentiation and detailed elaboration of the human body anatomy and respectively, the corresponding semantic field, somatic vocabulary, had been underway to be enriched based on the relation of cognitively interpreted markedness. Language changes and development, formation of new categories and concepts, and consequently, creation of new linguistic units is mainly carried out as the result of detailed elaboration, further specification and partition of unmarked categories: an unmarked category undergoes the division-differentiation on the basis of formally marked oppositions that leads to the formation of new linguistic units and structures and reflects the dynamic picture of enhancement of linguistic cognition of the universe. Dialectic material enriches the semantic space even more and specifies and fills the meanings of lexemes to be studied.

scholarly journals Collocations of dimension adjectives with the names of human body parts in Polish and Korean

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 329-358
Author(s):  
Emilia Szalkowska-Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
The World

This article presents the results of comparative research into the collocations of the names of human body parts with dimension adjectives. The aim of the analysis was to indicate the similarities, limitations and differences in the manners of conceptualising the world established in Polish and Korean, or more precisely: how both languages define the elements of the world of human body parts, and how they assign dimensions to the elements depending on the needs and experiences of native users of both. The results of the research could have a practical application in teaching both languages, facilitating students’ absorption of the lexis of the other language, and result in a deeper mutual understanding of linguistic and cultural differences..

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document