Healthcare of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and its Politicization, 1970–1991: Treating the Body Politic

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Clarissa Charlotte Hjalmarsson
Keyword(s):  
Health Service ◽  
Healthcare System ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Population Groups ◽  
National Community ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Way

Abstract:This article explores the health service provided by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) during the Eritrean Liberation War, and its political dimensions and implications. The EPLF used healthcare to define itself politically against its rivals and to penetrate communities. It aimed to incorporate population groups into the struggle, to inculcate EPLF ideology, and to transform the national community. EPLF practitioners were most successful when they cooperated with existing structures of power. The progressive, dynamic, and transformative nature of the healthcare system is inextricable from the coercion sometimes used to achieve the ideals of the EPLF, and the way in which healthcare became an instrument of biopolitical control.

Classical Daoist Meditation, 400–100 bce

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemplative Practice ◽  
Meditative Practice ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Daoism is the indigenous Chinese religious tradition that has been a major feature of this culture for over two thousand years. It is grounded in a comprehensive cosmology of the Way (Dao) that derives from the ancient practice of a meditation that emphasizes attentional focus and mental tranquility attained through an apophatic (self-negating) practice of systematically emptying consciousness of its normal contents. These foundational ideas are present in a series of surviving works that include the famous Laozi and Zhuangzi, which have recently been supplemented by newly excavated texts and newly appreciated extant ones known for millennia. They contain a meditative practice that has been called “inner cultivation” and that emphasizes methods that develop concentration in order to empty the mind of all common thoughts, desires, emotions, and perceptions. These lead ultimately to self-transcending experiences in which adepts experience a complete union with the non-dual Way. The return to dualistic consciousness is accompanied by a fresh and transformed cognition in which adepts are able to spontaneously and effortlessly act in harmony with all new circumstances. This flowing cognition is able to effect transformations in other people and in the body politic and so becomes part of the arcana of government advocated to local kings by the scholar-practitioners of this tradition. These apophatic methods constitute one of the main contemplative practice streams within the Daoist religious tradition and its continuities with later Daoism are detailed by Louis Komjathy in another chapter of this volume.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-240
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Objective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

scholarly journals Beyond the Veil. A Comparative Study between France and India

2020 ◽  
Vol Varia (Articles) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Lécuyer
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
North India ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The Way

International audience The ghunghat is a veiling practice of North India. Its peculiarity holds in the fact that it is not linked to a religion. It reveals the social and family organisation in India, is tightly linked with marriage practices and mirrors the representations of the self and of the body. An anthropological analysis of this practice reveals its multiple dimensions, especially a social, aesthetic and sacred dimension. A comparative study between the way the veil is conceived both in India and in France will allow to rethink the veil beyond the religious and political dimensions in which it is crystalized in the French context. Le ghunghat est un voile du Nord  de  l’Inde. Il a pour particularité d’être non confessionnel. Son lien est étroit avec les systèmes de parenté, d’alliance, d’organisation familiale d’Inde du Nord, et reflète les systèmes de représentations et de constructions du corps. Une analyse anthropologique de ce voile fait ressortir ses dimensions sociales, esthétiques, et son lien au sacré. Le voile en tant qu’objet polysémique doit être repensé selon une perspective comparative qui permet de sortir des cristallisations autour des seules dimensions religieuses et politiques dans lesquelles le voile a été enfermé dans le contexte socio-politique français.

Politicizing the Body: Property, Contract, and Rights

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira Gatens
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
The West ◽  
The Way

This article examines the politicization of the human body focusing on the way this issue was conceived in the West. The human body has long been used as a source of metaphor for political theorists and the very notion of body politic leans on the image of a unified and discrete entity that has commanding parts and obeying parts that may be robust or ailing, strong or weak. This article suggests that aside from political theory with a rich source of metaphor, the human body also serves as the nexus where political conceptions of the universal and the particular meet.

Sudanese Women’s Groups on Facebook and #Civil_Disobedience:Nairat or Thairat?(Radiant or Revolutionary?)

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nada Mustafa Ali
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Way

Abstract:The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed expanded digital connectivity, with important political implications, evident in the way activists used Facebook and Twitter to mobilize for political change in North Africa and beyond in 2010/2011, and in Sudan, including in 2018 and 2019. These platforms are also often sites where women may articulate narratives on the body and the body politic. Through digital ethnographic research, this study explores social and cultural narratives on everyday body aesthetics that Sudanese women articulate in selected groups on Facebook. I argue that the role some of these groups played in organizing civil disobedience in Sudan in November 2016 disrupts the binary inherent in the question:Nairat or Thairat?

Reification of the Human

Reified Life ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 227-248
Author(s):  
J. Paul Narkunas
Keyword(s):  
Health Service ◽  
Organ Transplantation ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
The World ◽  
British Health ◽  
The Way

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go follows a group of genetic clones who are created as wards of the British health service because they serve a utilitarian function: They are manufactured for the purpose of having their vital organs harvested until their death. The world he envisions of a grouping of humans reproduced to be a living warehouse of organs while certainly dreadful is nowhere near as horrific as when organ transplantation and global uneven development intersect in our neoliberal present. Ishiguro shows how humans who view their humanity instrumentally expedite a world that is ready to slice them into shares, monetizing all the parts along the way. Through Ishiguro’s text, I diagnose the reification of the body as an aggregation of fungible body parts. Human reification challenges bioethicists and cultural critics alike to reflect on how human dignity and bodily integrity no longer serve as barriers for marking the species-limit due to new advances in biotechnology.

scholarly journals The ‘body politic’ in ancient China

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-chieh Huang
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Chinese Philosophers ◽  
State Functions

The ‘body politic’ occupies the core position in traditional Chinese political thinking. This is strongly supported by the fact that, for most ancient Chinese philosophers, self-cultivation was taken as the starting point of a programmatic way leading to the management of the world. The aim of this essay is to analyze the meaning and significance of the prevailing ‘body politic’ of ancient China.In section two, the Chinese ‘body politic’ is placed within a comparative frame with the ideas of Plato (428–347 BCE) and Hobbes (1588–1679). It is argued that the ‘body politic’ in China is far from an abstract or theoretical discourse; the state was epistemologically taken as an extension of the human body, which is integral and organic in itself. Thus the body served as a metaphor or symbol to explain the organization and functionality of the state.Section three details the ‘body politic’ in three ways. First, due to the comparability between the state and the body, the ruling of the state, as that of the body, should also commence with a kind of inside-out, morality-concerned self-cultivation. Second, there is a complicated interdependency between state functions, which are similar to those of the body. Third, if there is a center of dominancy gathered through the interactive process of the body, then a kind of political autocracy can thus be extrapolated in by the ‘body politic’.The conclusion points out that, in ancient Chinese body-thinking, the mind-heart had its socio-political dimensions, and the ‘body’ is no less than a psychosomatic one. Since the unification of China in 221 BCE, Confucianism had gradually gained the political vantage and become the imperial ideology. However, the ancient ideal of the ‘Confucianization of politics’ was thus transformed to the reality of the ‘politicization of Confucianism’.

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