To Extract the Essence from this Essenceless Body

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiko Ohnuma
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Self Immolation

While ordinary suicide and ascetic self-torture are both condemned outright, and martyrdom seems irrelevant as a category, there are nevertheless several forms of elective death that are legitimated in Buddhist narrative sources from India, including self-sacrifice on behalf of others, and self-immolation as a religious offering. Both of these acts are generally attributed to the bodhisattva, or the being who is working to attain full buddhahood. Even so, while elective death in the form of either self-sacrifice or self-immolation can be rationalized and even celebrated, it is surrounded by ambivalence and anxiety, and accepted only with difficulty. This chapter focuses on the ambivalence surrounding self-sacrifice and self-immolation, an ambivalence that is particularly evident in these stories’ discourse of self and other, and in their discourse of the body that is sacrificed and the body one hopes to achieve.

scholarly journals Intersected ruralities: "Campeiro" youth and narratives of self and other in social media

Cadernos Pagu ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 141-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Adelman ◽  
César Bueno Franco ◽  
Andressa Fontana Pires
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Leisure Interests

This article presents current research on gender and identity among youth who take part in the campeiro cultural circuit in the Curitiba metropolitan area. We look specifically at the narratives that these youth formulate through use of social media, focusing on how they represent masculinity and femininity, sexuality and the body, consumption, cultural identities and leisure interests. Based on a study of young men and women and their Facebook profiles, linked to a broader project of ethnographic research, we argue that social media facilitate their participation in wider fields of discourse circulation, offering an opportunity and perhaps even encouraging them to express themselves in ways that partially disrupt conventional "traditionalist" patterns and ideals.

scholarly journals Throw Yo' Voice Out: Disability as a Desirable Practice in Hip-Hop Vocal Performance

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex S. Porco
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Recording Studio ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The Disabled

<p><span>Disabled bodies and disabling spaces&mdash; especially the recording studio&mdash; shape the sound iconicity of hip-hop vocal performances. The disabled voice is the audible sign by which hip-hop artists trouble cultural definitions of the self and other; exceptionalism and failure; the natural and techno-mediated; comedy and tragedy; and aesthetic play and seriousness. Hip-hop vocal performances also function as self-conscious acts of transvaluation that challenge the discursive dominance of ableism. A materialist approach to vocal performance resists reducing voice to a silent metaphor for race, oppositionality, or liberation; and it emphasizes, instead, the physiological and social processes that render hip-hop voices unique, particular, and audible. It emphasizes the agency hip-hop artists possess in seeking out disabled bodies and assuming disabled identities for aesthetic and political ends. Thus, the body is returned to the analysis of style.</span></p>

In Defense of the Body: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Female Body Objectification

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Grabe ◽  
Clay Routledge ◽  
Alison Cook ◽  
Christie Andersen ◽  
Jamie Arndt
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Terror Management Theory ◽  
Terror Management ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Body ◽  
Management Theory ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Body Objectification ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Self Objectification

Previous research has illustrated the negative psychological consequences of female body objectification. The present study explores how female body objectification may serve as a defense against unconscious existential fears. Drawing from terror management theory, an experiment was designed to test the potential functionality of female body objectification. Men and women were primed to think about either their own mortality or an aversive control topic, and levels of body objectification were then assessed for both self- and other (women)-objectification. Findings supported the hypothesis that priming mortality would increase both self- and other-objectification among women, and self-objectification among those who derive self-esteem from their body. Implications for this research are discussed.

Perspectives on Embodiment: The Uses of Narrativity in Ethnographic Writing

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Young
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
Scientific Epistemology ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Anthropological Discourse

Abstract Take as pivotal in anthropological discourse the invention of the category of the Other. Once invented, the category conjures up another realm, a realm inhabited by the Other and estranged from the realm of the self. Ethnographic writings are then constructed to get access to the Other. At issue, then, are how realms of experience are constellated with respect to each other, how they communicate, and how they coalesce. One name for these realm relations is dialogism. Under a dialogic description, the boundaries between self and Other become blurred, along with the boundaries between the universes of discourse they inhabit. Eth-nographic writings formulate relationships between realms in terms of conven-tions of perspective and voice. These conventions are anchored in the body. In particular, a hierarchy of modalities of perception informs a social scientific epistemology. In this article, the realm status of self and Other in anthropological discourse is investigated in three perspectives: the objective, the subjective, and what I call the intersubjective. Problems of access turn out to be artifacts of our invention of the category of the Other. (Ethnographic Writing)

Where Does the Body End? Artaud’s Materialsymbolic Theatre

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-279
Author(s):  
Hedwig Fraunhofer
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Use Of Space ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd ◽  
Production History ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter offers a descriptive reading of Artaud’s most famous play, The Cenci (1935), that respects the materiality and temporality of Artaud’s text, while also including a discussion of the play’s sparse production history. Breaking down immunitarian walls between self and other, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty provides a performative assemblage of human and nonhuman actors or actants, (human) spectators, non-verbal theatrical tools, and forces and energies that transverses the binary distinction between materiality and mind, aesthetic perception and meaning. Together with Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd, Artaud’s use of space and the mythical and ritual dimension of his theatrical vision constitute the end of “fourth-wall realism,” prefiguring the postdramatic, “dialogue-less” theatre of the 1960s to 90s. Inspiring Deleuze’s view of art, Artaud’s theatre brings us to the limits of what our embodied selves can endure and to the limits of representation, opening the horizon of death. In this sense, as the experience of limits, theatre is again what theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri calls “boundary work”.

The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-217
Author(s):  
Michael Feola
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
Self Immolation ◽  
Civic Discourses ◽  
Image World

This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances represent a standing challenge to democratic theory and demand a more richly sensuous approach to how political claims are made. Such forms of bodily theatre do not only “speak” in ways that exceed official civic discourses but, in so doing, they unsettle the space of citizenship. Ultimately, these bodies do something in being undone.

The Epistemology of Humanism

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 127-152
Author(s):  
Burkhard Mojsisch
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The Mind

Abstract This essay explores the interconnections among the humanistic epistemological theories of Ficino, Pomponazzi and Cusanus apparent in the context of their reception of ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, especially Plato's Theaetetus and Aristotle's De anima. It shows that preceding the opposition between the (Neo-)Platonic scheme of knowledge favored by Ficino and the Aristotelian account of the intellect championed by Pomponazzi, Cusanus attempted to articulate the nature of the mind (mens) as such which all modes of knowledge presuppose. Central to this project is his work De coniecturis with its theory of the unity of the divine, reason, the understanding and the body, by means of which Cusanus undertook to show how all modes of knowledge are immanent in the mind even as knowledge itself is a process. Concluding critical remarks expound upon the principal significance for knowledge of the thought of nothing, which fundamentally defines the relation to self and other and therewith the horizon of the possible truth of knowledge.

Re-thinking the relationship between self and other: Levinas and narratives of beautifying the body

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annamma Joy ◽  
John F. Sherry ◽  
Gabriele Troilo ◽  
Jonathan Deschenes
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The Relationship

scholarly journals The Unruly, the Mut(ilat)ed, the Ailing: Corporeality as a Space of Subversion in J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation &amp; Literary Studies ◽  
Kamel Abdaoui
Keyword(s):  
Active Site ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Textual Construction ◽  
Waiting For The Barbarians

This paper addresses corporeality as a space of subversion to hegemonic discourses in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction. The body is not only elusive to representation but it is also entrusted with a certain degree of authority that allows it to contravene the systems of normalization imposed by dominant discourse. The paper tends to appropriate poststructuralism and postcolonialism as its main theoretical grid to argue that corporeality in Coetzee’s novels is deployed as a fluid construct that offers a space of interaction between subjectivities beyond the rigid contours of discursive representation. In Dusklands, the clear-cut demarcations erect between the Self and the Other often blur and disintegrate while facing the permeability and extensiveness of the body. In Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, however, the mutilated and silenced body of the Other is presented as a space of resistance to the Empire’s attempts to inscribe its statement of powerviolently. It is only the diseased body of Mrs. Curren, in Age of Iron, which transforms into an intersubjective space of reciprocity between Self and Other that is capable of overcoming the fixed barriers between subjects. Being an active site of contestation between subjectivities, the textual construction of corporeality in Coetzee's aforementioned novels offers creative opportunities of becoming and grants an imaginative understanding of otherness outside the limits of the logic of binarism encapsulated in colonial and imperialist discourses.

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