Metaphor, magic, and mental disorder: Poetics and ontology in Mexican (Purépecha) curanderismo

2021 ◽  
pp. 136346152110437
Author(s):  
Louis Sass ◽  
Edgar Alvarez
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Traditional Healers ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Indigenous Group ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Ontological Dimension ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Illness Concepts

This article offers an epistemological, poetic, and ontological reading of the ways of knowing regarding mental disorders that are characteristic of the traditional healers ( curanderas and curanderos) of an Indigenous group in Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic interviews with traditional Purépecha (Tarascan) healers in rural Michoacan. Interviews focused on local conceptions of emotional and mental illness, especially Nervios, Susto, and Locura (nerves, fright, and madness). We discuss the conceptual structure of these Indigenous illness notions, the nature of the associated imagery and notions of the soul, as well as the general sense of meaningfulness and reality implicit in Purépecha curanderismo. The highly metaphorical modes of understanding characteristic of these healers defy analysis in purely structuralist terms. They do, however, have strong affinities with the Renaissance “episteme” or implicit framework of understanding described in The Order of Things, Michel Foucault's classic study of modes of knowing and experiences of reality in Western thought—a work profoundly influenced by Heidegger's interest in the historical and cultural constitution of what Heidegger termed “Being.” After examining the individual illness concepts, we explore both the poetic and the ontological dimension (the foundational sense of reality or of Being) that they involve, with special emphasis on supernatural concerns.

Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate History Texts

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-185
Author(s):  
Karen Hellekson
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Individual

Televisual alternate history texts concern themselves with not with history per se but rather the individual, agency, and self-contingency. In televisual texts including An Englishman’s Castle (miniseries, 1978), Sliders (1995–2000), Charlie Jade (2005), Fringe (2008–13), and Continuum (2012–15), individual characters are presented as being able to affect events by contingency—that is, an event that may occur but that is not certain to occur—and agency, or the capacity to act or exert power. History is used in only the most general sense to permit displacement; alternate worlds are a mode of this displacement. Contingency is used as a narrative and temporal construction to frame agency. Televisual alternate histories control the narrative so as to permit characters’ agency to permit causal, contingent events, resulting in a sort of feedback loop of contingency and agency.

scholarly journals (Re)storying Sustainability: The Use of Story Cubes in Narrative Inquiries to Understand Individual Perceptions of Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 5264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franzisca Weder ◽  
Stella Lemke ◽  
Amornpan Tungarat
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Environmental Communication ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Analysis And Evaluation ◽  
Individual Perceptions ◽  
Frame Work ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Individual

Narratives represent storied ways of knowing and communicating. Therefore, storytelling, framing and narrative analyses have always been a key feature in media and communication research. In this paper, an innovative approach to narrative inquiries is introduced to capture reflections on individual experiences of sustainability over time. Storytelling is perceived as an act of problematization and, at the same time, as method of analysis. Using Rory’s Story Cubes® (dices with pictograms), we stimulated 35 interviewees from various cultural backgrounds (Asian, European, Anglo-American) to story life events that they relate to sustainability and put it into order and meaning. Our analysis and evaluation of the interviews focused on the story as a whole, which was then linked to the individual biographical background to understand motives and the moral frame(work) for problematizing (un)sustainable behavior. In particular, we focus on problematization as core process of storytelling and complement existing approaches coming from actor-network theory and Foucault’s discourse analysis with Entman’s concept of framing. In this paper, this innovative form of a narrative inquiry is put up for discussion for environmental communication research in order to create a better understanding of individual perceptions of sustainability and sustainability related issues.

scholarly journals Backstaging the teacher: On learner-driven, school-driven and data-driven change in educational technology discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Felicitas Macgilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Educational Technology ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Contemporary Education ◽  
Printed Educational Materials

As digital technologies become more prominent in schools, and a host of new media products appear in classrooms, critical questions are being asked about the erasure of power and politics in contemporary education. To explore the discourse on digital education, this paper draws on discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews with for-profit and non-profit organizations in the field. It asks (i) what industry insiders describe as driving change in contemporary educational technology (edtech), and (ii) whether new actors/technologies shaping a novel educational hegemony, and if so, what this hegemony looks like. Initial findings suggest that while the teacher was seen as key to driving change in printed educational materials, three different discourses appear when describing change in today’s educational technology. In the first, learners drive change; the focus lies on the individual dimension. In the second, schools drive change; the systemic dimension. In the third, data drive change; the analytics dimension. Linking these three discourses is a shift from “education” to “learning”. The accounts of educational technology simultaneously advocate for improving opportunities for all students, especially weaker or disadvantaged learners, and also strengthen the hegemonic shift across policy and practice towards an instrumental understanding of education. Overall, the paper suggests that power and politics are by no means erased from the edtech industry’s accounts of digital technologies and datafication. The socio-material affordances engineered into the technologies invite particular teaching practices and thus affect power relations in education.

scholarly journals Exploring Experience as a Myriad Richness: Micro-phenomenology as a Transformative Approach to Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Magali Ollagnier-Beldame
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Knowledge Processes ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Transformative Approach ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Suspension Of Judgement

Over the last twenty years, researches within cognitive sciences has massively grown in the field of the ways of knowing. For instance, in recent years, the paradigm of 4-E cognition suggests that cognition involves the whole body, as well as the situation of the body in the environment. This article argues that a first-person approach enriches the understanding of the ways of knowing in their complexity - particularly by seeking to re-question classical dichotomies - through the re-integration of subjective experience. In the heart of first-person epistemology, the micro-phenomenological interview - based on the explicitation interview - consists in “guided retrospective introspections”, and allows to scientifically access subjective experience. This technique relies on the epoché – the suspension of judgement – a process at first investigated by philosophers that was made accessible to psychology to empirically investigate and study subjective experience. How does the epoché happen? What concrete acts make it up? More broadly, what is the relationship between the epoché and embodiment? This paper sheds lights on possible relations between researches describing concrete practices of the Husserlian epoché and Gendlin’s work concerning the process of Focusing, which aims at accessing the inner felt sense of experience. The process of Focusing, is a way of paying attention to one’s being-in-the-world, one’s interaction as it is experienced through the individual (but not separate) body. We will especially consider the process of “clearing a space” that Gendlin describes, as well as the rupture that occurs during the “bodily felt shift” which can be compared to the conversion happening within the process of epoché. Finally, we discuss how our proposition can allow the construction of new models of knowledge processes, the challenge of such a proposal being not only epistemological, but also ethical and societal. KEYWORDS Subjective experience, embodiment, micro-phenomenology, epoché, focusing.

scholarly journals Towards an Aboriginal Knowledge Place: Cultural Practices as a Pathway to Wellness in the Context of a Tertiary Hospital

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Vance ◽  
Janet McGaw ◽  
Jo Winther ◽  
Moira Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Tertiary Hospital ◽  
Traditional Healers ◽  
Cultural Safety ◽  
Care Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Major Teaching Hospital ◽  
Major Teaching ◽  
A Site

<p>The Indigenous community in Australia is beset by extraordinary disadvantage, with health outcomes that are substantially worse than those of non-Indigenous citizens. This issue has consequently been the subject of voluminous health research that has given rise to a range of affirmative action policies progressively implemented over the past decade. Statistics, however, remain dire. This paper argues that new models of research practice and policy are required that are inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being. It proposes a new framework to promote wellness in urban hospitals for Aboriginal young people and their families modelled on equal, 2-way dialogue between Western and Indigenous ways of doing health. Cultural safety is an essential starting point, but a range of other practices is proposed including oversight by a board of Elders, inclusion of traditional healers in treatment teams, and “space, place, and base” within the hospital building and its grounds so that it can be used as a site for culturally engaged Indigenous outpatient care. Practice approaches that embed culture into assessment, formulation, and treatment are being trialled by the authors of this paper, three of whom have Aboriginal heritage. Together the authors are working toward building an Aboriginal Knowledge Place within the major teaching hospital where they work.</p>

scholarly journals Choose your own adventure: Vocal jazz improvisation, conceptual metaphor, and cognitive embodiment

2021 ◽  
pp. 102986492110627
Author(s):  
Melissa Forbes ◽  
Kate Cantrell
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Vocal Jazz ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Musical Improvisation

Creativity in the form of musical improvisation has received growing attention from researchers informed by the literature on embodiment. To date, this research has focused on the embodied experiences of improvising instrumentalists rather than those of improvising singers. This article investigates the experience of embodiment during improvisation through a systematic analysis of the metaphorical language used by an artist-level jazz singer in her reflections on practice. Extensive interview data with the participant were analyzed to identify and reconstruct metaphorical expressions into conceptual metaphors. In this process, the metaphor of IMPROVISATION IS AN ADVENTURE was identified as the overarching conceptual structure that the participant used to make sense of her experiences of improvisation. This metaphor and its mappings illuminate the cognitively embodied dimension of vocal jazz improvisation. These findings will be of interest to jazz singers and vocal jazz educators who are encouraged to explore more fully the role of the body–mind’s interactions with its environment in order to establish expertise in improvisational ways of knowing. This research illuminates the multidimensional nature of an expert singer’s experiences of improvisation and is presented as a provocation for future research to include singers as participants when investigating musical improvisation and cognitive embodiment.

Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Struck
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
General Sense

This chapter attempts to lay out a general sense of how divination functions in Plato's work. It focuses not on how seriously Plato takes divination, but rather on how he takes it. Irrespective of any endorsement he may have hinted at toward the idea of knowledge arriving via traditional divinatory pathways, in what particular ways does he talk about it? The analysis proceeds from a sense that Plato uses divination as an authoritative piece of his cultural context, to specify with greater precision his own ideas about ways of knowing; and as he is doing this, he helps us understand the nature of divination, as it is understood in his time. In general in his corpus, it is argued that Plato treats divination (in a rainbow of tones from irony to seriousness) as being based on a claim about a particular form of cognition, one marked especially for being nondiscursive.

Organizational Knowledge

2015 ◽  
pp. 127-156
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Transfer ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Tacit Knowledge ◽  
Organizational Knowledge ◽  
Business Development ◽  
Sustainable Competitive Advantage ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
Individual Knowledge ◽  
Ontological Dimension ◽  
The Individual

Organizational knowledge is a conceptual construct that reflects the convergence of all individual knowledge fields in an organization. That means all explicit and tacit knowledge fields, or changing the paradigm all cognitive, emotional, and spiritual individual fields of knowledge. The result of this integration process is performed in interactive and iterative modes by organizational integrators. Although there are many debates concerning the building up of organizational knowledge from the individual fields, the practice demonstrates that such a dynamic does exist and it encompass knowledge transfer processes from individuals to groups, and from groups to the whole organization. It is a synchronization between individual knowledge fields and the organizational knowledge along the ontological dimension. Organizational knowledge became a strategic resource in the last decades of business development and intelligent managers can transform it into a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization.

5. Reanimating the World

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-74
Author(s):  
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Individual

This chapter advocates for integral ecological healing, particularly by attending to the practices of indigenous Amazonian communities. The use of psychedelic plant medicines in Amazonian shamanism exemplifies the kind of non-rational ways of knowing that expand human consciousness beyond the individual ego and into intimate communion with the more-than-human world.

scholarly journals Rethinking Consumerism from the Perspective of Religion

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko Kurenlahti ◽  
Arto Salonen
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Multidimensional Approach ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Holistic Analysis ◽  
Implicit Religion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Similar Kind

Due to the global challenges that are posed by the Anthropocene and the academic focus on the fragmented state of modernity, we extend an invitation for shared dialogue on the all-pervading nature of consumerism as the seemingly problematic ethos of Western consumer culture. To this end, we outline a way to approach consumerism as an implicit religion, theorized as having adopted functionalities related to explicitly faith-based traditions within secular settings. We suggest that a similar kind of holistic and multidimensional approach might be of great benefit in the implementation of sustainability, as this would allow, e.g., (i) a more holistic analysis of the all-pervading nature of consumerism; (ii) acknowledgement of the functional diversity of the phenomenon; (iii) recognition of the shallowness of the critique of consumerism as a way of life; and, (iv) shared dialogue across a spectrum of academic perspectives under a unified model. This approach problematizes standard interpretations of consumerism as being about the promotion of the individual against the collective and as leading to a general sense of purposelessness. The perspective of religion reveals how patterns of consumption become illuminated with meaning and connected to a shared way for individuals to articulate a sense of purpose in contemporary contexts.

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