Solitude and Meditation

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-161
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Perceptual Sensitivity ◽  
Pace Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time And Energy ◽  
Meditative Practices ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the role of solitude and meditation in Buddhism. Solitude does play an important role in many Buddhist practices. The problem one is out to solve is very difficult and the intellectual, perceptual, and emotional habits that stand in the way are deep-seated. This means that attacking the problem requires focused time and energy. Establishing some distance from the diversions and pace of life allows the space to confront the problem in a sustained way. Many practices involve not only sustained focus, but also a greater degree of perceptual sensitivity to what is happening in the body and mind. It is not just being away from distractions that helps, but being away from the demands of the social world. Buddhists, particularly those who specialize in meditative practices, can take retreats that last for years. For those just starting out, such long periods of solitude can be dangerous. There is a reason that solitary confinement can be traumatic: Being suddenly alone for long stretches without preparation is psychologically risky.

Colourful psi’s sleep furiously: Depicting emotional states in some African languages

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-83
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Figurative Speech

This study sets out to investigate the “poetry of grammar”, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

Why clothes matter: the role of dress in the everyday lives of older people

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Julia Twigg
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Frail Elders ◽  
Consumption Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

Dress is part of the material constitution of age, providing as it does the vestimentary envelope that presents the body to the social world. Drawing on a series of empirical studies, this chapter explores the role of dress in the embodied lives of older people. It argues that a focus on dress is relevant not just to the younger old and to arguments concerning the new role of consumption culture among this group, but also for the day to day embodied lives of frail elders, in this case those with dementia.

Trajectories of embodiment in Tourist Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879762199030
Author(s):  
Phoebe Everingham ◽  
Pau Obrador ◽  
Hazel Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tourism Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Body Practices ◽  
The Way

In this article we map the 20 year trajectory of theorising embodiment in Tourist Studies. From its inception in 2001, embedded within the turn in the social sciences towards embodiment, Tourist Studies has paved the way in pushing the boundaries of theorising the links between embodiment, sensuality and performativity. Tourist Studies has opened up novel trajectories in tourism research away from the traditional focus on vision, towards multi-sensual analysis including the role of taste, smell, touch and sound. In this article we draw attention to these important contributions in understanding the body-practices and body-subjects within tourism, including work that utilises non-representational analyses, relational materiality, affect, more-than-representational and more-than-human. About 20 years on we remind readers of what theorising embodiment can bring to understanding encounters in tourism spaces, and specifically how attention to embodiment moves analysis away from fixed and static notions of culture and power, towards dynamic interplays between bodies and more-than-human modalities.

Colourful psi’s sleep furiously

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Figurative Speech

This study sets out to investigate the “poetry of grammar”, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Civil Death

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

scholarly journals The confidence delusion: A sociological exploration of participants’ confidence in sport-for-development

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-398
Author(s):  
David S Scott
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Sport For Development ◽  
Development Capacity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology ◽  
The Impact

Although sport is widely utilised as a tool for personal development, capacity building, and fostering peace, there are still numerous theoretical gaps in our knowledge about how sport influences individuals’ identities, and how this translates into their everyday lives. Within the academic literature there has been seemingly little focus placed upon participants’ emotional and embodied accounts of their sport-for-development (SfD) experiences. This paper uses phenomenologically-inspired theory to explore individuals’ lived experiences of a SfD course, and their descriptions of the social interactions and feelings of confidence they encountered, in order to address this lack of experiential data. An ethnographic methodology was used to collect data through four sports leadership course observations, and cyclical interviews over 4–10 months with eleven course attendees, plus individual interviews with five tutors. Participants’ understandings of their course experiences and the subsequent influence these understandings had on their lives were described through their use of the term confidence. A further phenomenological and sociological interrogation of this term enabled confidence to be seen as being experienced as a ‘frame’ and ‘through the body’ by participants. This study provides original conceptualisations of confidence in relation to participants’ SfD experiences, as well as important discussions regarding the role of emotions and embodiment in understanding the impact of SfD on participants’ everyday lives.

The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Reischer ◽  
Kathryn S. Koo
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Social
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