Finding Elusive Resonances Across Cultures and Time

Author(s):  
Gerald C. Cupchik ◽  
Despina Stamatopoulou ◽  
Siying Duan

This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of resonance during an era of social and technological acceleration. A hierarchical model is proposed with a desire for pleasure at the concrete foundation and an aesthetic appreciation of meaning at the more abstract and universal level. This range of experience is examined in the context of Greek and Chinese thinking about resonance. For Ancient Greeks, resonance describes interpretative and expressive events where concrete bodily and immersive practices shape experiences that may have ethical and sociopolitical effects. In Plato, it branched into (1) passive reception that mirrors a copy and offers no direct access to truth but might merely condition a person or (2) a communion that reveals the ideal. Aristotle stressed the dynamics of resonance in theater to build a relatively autonomous agent who appreciates and reflects on ways that causes affect human action in the social world. In the Chinese part of this chapter, we examine scholarship related to the concept of resonance during the Six Dynasties period (220–589 CE) as well as its intellectual roots from Confucianism and Daoism. Major issues explored include: the function of resonance in artistic creation and appreciation as well as its social function from a Confucian perspective; the method that helps people experience resonance with nature or cosmos from a Daoist perspective; and finally, the concept of vital energy across the cosmos which facilitates the more profound experience of resonance.

Author(s):  
Charles S. Campbell

Chapter 7 examines the intricate ways in which Philodemus, Crinagoras, and Antipater of Thessalonica engage with the poetry of Callimachus and Leonidas of Tarentum. The chapter finds that the three epigrammatists of Philip’s Garland use these two Hellenistic predecessors as positive or negative models of poetic values and ethical outlooks, upon which they define their own authorial self-representations as Greek poets operating in the social world of Roman Italy. Using techniques of imitation and variation, these authors blend Callimachean and Leonidean models to distil a poetics and ethics defined by the ideal of simplicity (litotes). As this ideal is thematized by successive generations of epigrammatists, it became a part of the generic tissue of epigram.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Maria Elena Ramos ◽  

The inclusion of ethics and politics into artistic creation process is for many contemporary creators/artists an essential motivation while they consciously act in an aesthetic space polluted with the realities of a world in crisis. Art, which produces visible and sensible forms, can reveal aesthetic ideas and fundaments through aesthetic objects: drawing, video-installing or poem/poetry. And artists can make someone feel with their creations—whether these are beautiful, sublime, tragic, or ironic—ethical contentions violated by human action or the exertion/exercise of political power. Works of art that are not only guided by the categories signed by beauty, because in artistic languages, violence and suffering also make/create form. And times of crisis are the ideal sphere/dimension for an art that gives a vivid way of seeing/watching the uncertainty, the perversion, the terrible. In bringing these philosophical—ethical, aesthetic and political—topics, I do it from an approach that departs form artistic creations and curatorial research. I try to penetrate the narrow thread between an ethical topic and the plastic form in which it incarnates/embodies itself, or between a political action and the aesthetic structure of language as a creative, expressive consequence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-39
Author(s):  
Carolina Miranda Cavalcante ◽  
Emmanoel De Oliveira Boff

The article considers the possible compatibility (in epistemological and ontological terms) of the conceptions of convention and institutions in the thought of John Maynard Keynes, Thorstein Veblen and Douglass North. We argue, first, that while Veblen suggests an approach to institutions based on instincts, North sustains an approach to institutions based on rational choice, which implies distinct conceptions about institutions and the social world. We then present Keynes's ontological commitments and the epistemological implications of his ontology. We conclude that there is a background ontological compatibility between Keynes and the late North in that both accept that the socioeconomic world is fundamentally uncertain and non-ergodic; also that Keynes is epistemologically closer to North than Veblen in studying the economy as a market system embedded in social institutions; and finally that Keynes's treatment of individual action is closer to Veblen’s than North’s, in that both Keynes and Veblen see human action as based on instincts and not only on rationality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.


Author(s):  
Shinyoung Kim

This article aims to explore the Japanese colonial government’s efforts to promote mass movements in Korea which rose suddenly and showed remarkable growth throughout the 1930s. It focuses on two Governor-Generals and the directors of the Education Bureau who created the Social Indoctrination movements under Governor-General Ugaki Kazushige in the early 1930s and the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement of Governor-General Minami Jirō in the late 1930s. The analysis covers their respective political motivations, ideological orientation, and organizational structure. It demonstrates that Ugaki, under the drive to integrate Korea with an economic bloc centered on Japan, adapted the traditional local practices of the colonized based on the claim of “Particularities of Korea,” whereas the second Sino-Japanese War led Minami to emphasize assimilation, utilizing the ideology of the extended-family to give colonial power more direct access to individuals as well as obscuring the unequal nature of the colonial relationship. It argues that the colonial government-led campaigns constituted a core ruling mechanism of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s.


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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine

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.


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