Bodily Selves: Identity and Shared Realities among Humans and Spirits in Zanzibar

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjersti Larsen

AbstractThe paper explores the ways in which spirits calledmasheitaniormajinni(singl.sheitaniorjinni)engage in people’s daily lives in Zanzibar Town, Zanzibar. It is argued that the phenomenon of spirits and other forms of ‘spectral’ beings may offer clues to an improved understanding of society and a more precise perception of the various concerns and paradoxes people cope with in their everyday lives. Reflecting on matters of identity, the concept of the person, and the human condition, it is suggested that to most people the human world appears to be rather unpredictable and chaotic while the world of spirits, in contrast, is seen as stable and predictable. The spirits’ involvement in people’s everyday lives and, moreover, the extent to which peoples’ relationships with different kinds of spirits affect negotiations of identity and social positioning are discussed with reference to the ethnographic material.

Author(s):  
Ellen Cristina Gerner Siqueira

O discurso publicitário está presente no cotidiano das pessoas por meio de diversos tipos de mídia: anúncios na TV, impressos, outdoors ou nas redes sociais. Entre os recursos utilizados pela publicidade para convencer as pessoas sobre os produtos, serviços ou ideias que se deseja vender nos interessa estudar o uso da linguagem verbal, mais especificamente a maneira com que a publicidade constrói sentido por meio da linguagem. Assim, este artigo pretende analisar alguns enunciados de uma campanha publicitária realizada pela instituição financeira Citibank sob o olhar da teoria enunciativa desenvolvida por Oswald Ducrot. A campanha serve como  exemplo do jogo argumentativo que pode ser criado por meio da linguagem verbal, enredado em si mesmo, onde o locutor não fala sobre o mundo, mas fala para construir o mundo e explicitar a sua verdade por meio de argumentação linguística e não, necessariamente, retórica. Abstract: Advertising speech is present in people's daily lives through various types of media: TV ads, print ads, billboards, or social networks. Among the resources used by advertising to convince people about the products, services or ideas they want to sell we are interested in studying the use of verbal language, more specifically the way in which advertising builds meaning through language. Thus, this article intends to analyze some statements of an advertising campaign carried out by the financial institution Citibank under the view of the enunciative theory developed by Oswald Ducrot. The campaign is a great example of the game of argumentation that can be created through verbal language, entangled in itself, in which the speaker does not speak about the world, but speaks to build the world and to explain its truth through linguistic argumentation and not , necessarily, rhetoric.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Beltrán Undurraga ◽  

This article expands Patchen Markell’s (2011) seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own.


wisdom ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Georgia APOSTOLOPOULOU

After the alleged ‘ends’ of metaphysics, of history, and of art, aesthetics reorganises the field of its enquiry. While retaining the question of the meaning of art for the human as the background justification of its theorising, aesthetics meets philosophical anthropology and enlarges its field. Philosophical anthropology explains that the instability of the human condition demands culture as the artificial stabilisation of the human world as well as of the human in the world. Expressivity, artificiality, and the aesthetic are interweaved with the meaning of the human world. In this context, pictures have priority over concepts and justify art as the eminent pictorial form of meaning. Since the human lives in nature and culture, the stabilisation of its open world is possible through creation of spatial correlates and of objects as well. Thus, aesthetics does need to expand enquiry beyond the discourse on art, so that it includes the issues concerning the aesthetic character of the human world and its spatial correlates. While Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman argue for a revision of aesthetics, Joseph Margolis and Helmuth Plessner support the stronger dialogue between philosophical anthropology and aesthetics in different ways. Further, Arnold Berleant explores aesthetics of human space.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Igliński

The aim of this article is to determine the frequency of occurrence of the terms “worm” and “insects” in the works of Władysław Syrokomla. An assumption is made that these themes have animportant function in the poet’s works, and that their occurrence indicates something of significance. The article considers both the functionality and repeatability criteria, which is the necessary foundationfor recording these items. The conducted analyses indicate that Syrokomla’s insects (regardless of whether they have a literal or metaphorical meaning) in most cases signal something evil. Sometimes it is an ordinary pest (insect) damaging plants, but more frequently the insect refers to the human condition, characterising it in three dimensions: as the worm of death, as the worm of internal suffering or as the worm of insignificance. In other cases, worms or insects represent curses or sin. The diversity of how such zoomorphic connotations are presented and applied deserves attention. Moreover, although the majority of them have long-established cultural and literary traditions, in Syrokomla’s works they gain a new context (for example, historical, folk or social). They indicate sensitivity to injustice and evil. The poet frequently presents the human world by analogy to the world of nature.


Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110146
Author(s):  
Ananta Kumar Giri

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.


1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Thiboutot ◽  
A. Martinez ◽  
David Jager

AbstractGaston Bachelard's thought remains a continual source of inspiration for a phenomenological psychology that takes human habitation as a fundamental given and as an abiding mystery of the human condition. the following essay explores the ideas Bachelard developed in the course of his study of poetry. It examines in particular his vision of imagination as a unique passage way by means of which we reach an inhabitable, intersubjective and fully human world. Within that perspective, our lives are constantly renewed by the appearance of a revealing image or a telling metaphor. Each time that we are awakened by this appeal we commemorate the birth and rebirth of a human world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Eduardo Costa Laurindo ◽  
Ivan Rodrigues de Moura ◽  
Carleandro De Oliveira Nolêto ◽  
Flavio Sergio da Silva ◽  
André Luiz Almeida Cardoso

Currently, tour guides can be implemented through mobile technologiessuch as smartphones and wearable devices. The penetrationof these technologies into people’s daily lives has made it possibleto implement more sophisticated and personalized services, revolutionizingthe tourism industry. However, the process of developingsuch applications is complex and involves the knowledge of variousexperts, such as programmers and designers. So this article devisedan authoring tool titled inTourMobile, which allows non-expertpeople to develop their mobile tour guides easily and intuitively.The usability of the designed tool was evaluated, in which it wasobserved its efficiency to assist in the development of mobile tourguides.


2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 30-36
Author(s):  
Minoru Kobayashi

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