scholarly journals The Paleolithic imagination:Nature, science, and race in Anthropocene fitness cultures

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110043
Author(s):  
Gavin Weedon ◽  
Paige Marie Patchin

The widespread uptake of the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades has seen a concomitant rise in cultural forms that trade on nostalgia for Paleolithic life. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo diet exemplify this trend, with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer at the center of their popular prescriptions for healthy living. In this article, we identify these practices as embodying the anxieties of the Anthropocene as well as its historical and racial elisions. By focusing on the oblique and subtle racializations of Anthropocene health and fitness cultures, we contribute to understandings of the cultural significance of the human body in the Anthropocene and the relationship between the biopolitics of health and geological life, arguing that the body is a key site through which the tensions and inequalities of the Anthropocene are played out. And by unraveling how the Paleolithic imagination is rooted in a distinctly capitalist, Euro-American attitude to the body in nature, we show the Anthropocene to be defined by uneven distributions of health as self-optimization, and health as environmental risk. The Paleolithic imagination demonstrates the tangled politics of race, science, and nature in the twenty-first century, in which global ecological instability, the biopolitics of health, the shadows of colonialism, and consumer capitalism converge.

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Alexandru Cîtea ◽  
George-Sebastian Iacob

Posture is commonly perceived as the relationship between the segments of the human body upright. Certain parts of the body such as the cephalic extremity, neck, torso, upper and lower limbs are involved in the final posture of the body. Musculoskeletal instabilities and reduced postural control lead to the installation of nonstructural posture deviations in all 3 anatomical planes. When we talk about the sagittal plane, it was concluded that there are 4 main types of posture deviation: hyperlordotic posture, kyphotic posture, rectitude and "sway-back" posture.Pilates method has become in the last decade a much more popular formof exercise used in rehabilitation. The Pilates method is frequently prescribed to people with low back pain due to their orientation on the stabilizing muscles of the pelvis. Pilates exercise is thus theorized to help reactivate the muscles and, by doingso, increases lumbar support, reduces pain, and improves body alignment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.


Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Alberto Tondello

In Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland describes gesture as “a type of inscription, a parsing of the body into signifying and operational units”, considering it as a means to read and decode the human body. Through an analysis of James Joyce’s collection of Epiphanies, my paper will examine how gesture, as a mode of expression of the body, can be transcribed on the written page. Written and collected to record a “spiritual manifestation” shining through “in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself”, Joyce’s Epiphanies can be considered as the first step in his sustained attempt to develop an art of gesture-as-rhythm. These short pieces appear as the site in which the author seeks, through the medium of writing, to negotiate and redefine the boundaries of the physical human body. Moving towards a mapping of body and mind through the concept of rhythm, and pointing to a collaboration and mutual influence between interiority and exteriority, the Epiphanies open up a space for the reformulation of the relationship between the human body and its environment. Unpacking the ideas that sit at the heart of the concept of epiphany, the paper will shed light on how this particular mode of writing produces a rhythmic art of gesture, fixing and simultaneously liberating human and nonhuman bodies on the written page.


Author(s):  
Youn Kim

Listening is generally discussed in connection with auditory perception, with the ear as the primary perceptual organ. Recently, however, more comprehensive approaches are being emphasized along with the need to understand listening in the context of cultural and historical changes. This chapter investigates the plasticity of the idea of listening, both across disciplines and across historical contexts. By engaging with various discourses on seeing, hearing, and kinesthetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the present chapter examines how a holistic conceptualization of listening that goes beyond the ear and functions in the context of the whole human body emerged and argues how understanding the past can shed light on the current understanding of music and the body.


Articult ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 137-148
Author(s):  
Evgenia I. Vinogradova ◽  
◽  
Evgeny V. Kilimnik ◽  

The article analyzes the work of Western and Russian scientists, conducted in the past three decades, on the relationship of psychology and architecture. It is shown that in the West, the neuropsychological aspects of the relationship of psychology and architecture are studied thanks to modern neurobiological equipment, while in Russia there is a clear gap between the representatives of neuroscience, their technical support, and the architectural scientific community. As a result of the analysis conducted in the article, it is concluded that two research blocks can be distinguished. The first of them highlights the relationship between the psyche of the viewer and architecture. This may include research, both revealing the features of the perception of objects, and the influence of an architectural object on the viewer. Another block of research is connected with the psyche of the architect: and here the features of the design process itself are examined, as well as the influence of the personality of the architect on the features of the architectural object. It is concluded that the topic of reflecting the individual or individually-typological psychological characteristics of the personality of an architect in a specific architectural work remains undeveloped both in the West and in Russia, although it is extremely relevant today.


Author(s):  
Jeehyun Lim

The epilogue reflects on the future of bilingual brokering in the twenty-first century through David Henry Hwang’s bilingual play, Chinglish. While Chinglish seemingly overturns the social construction of bilingual personhood along the terms of possessive individualism by championing interlingual lapses, irregularities, and mistakes, this attempt to free the linguistic subject from the constraints of language as capital is delivered through a careful rendition of English-Mandarin bilingualism, enabled through such institutional actors’ interest in the play as the Chinese state. These conditions of possibility for Hwang’s bilingual play serve as a reminder that while bilingual personhood may recede from cultural significance as a site of examining the relationship between racial subjectivity and capital, bilingualism in cultural politics is still enmeshed in the flows of capital.


Author(s):  
Okan Aksu

The relationship between humans and machines has been a controversial topic throughout history. In the past, technology was viewed as a mere change in people's living conditions while today it is evident that it affects the nature of humanity itself. This very change can range from microscale structures, such as human DNA, to bigger structures, such as limbs. We have been aware that it is just the beginning for this change. According to the theory of transhumanism, further changes on the human body are expected with the rapid developments in technology. These changes will naturally not be limited to the human body. The increasing amount of interaction between humans and machines will result in the execution of more complicated and difficult tasks by machines instead of humans, which is the focus of the present study. There are many points where the humans and machines meet with technological developments, one of which is the thinking function of humans and its possible transfer to machines. The thinking capacity of machines is known as artificial intelligence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-17
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Moeini ◽  
Ali Akbar Jafarian ◽  
Mohammad Kamalinejad ◽  
Nadjmeh Ale Taha ◽  
Mohammad Ali Yazdian

Ancient physicians deemedthe human body as a set of various interrelatedorgans. They believed that in dealing with patients a particular afflicted organ should not be consideredin isolation and treated exclusivelysincethe illnessmight occasionally originate from another organ’s dysfunction, which should be cured beforehand. Stomach is one of the organs that the physicians were very concerned about in the past. Since the first stage of digestion occurs in the stomach, gastric dysfunction will impair digestion and various organs of the body will not be well nourished and get sick afterwards. Among the organs affected by the stomach function is the eye the diseases of which may occur asnyctalopia, poor eyesight, visual hallucinations, and periorbital puffiness secondary to gastric dysfunction. This is a descriptive review of gastrointestinal procedures which can improve vision and treatsome eye diseases.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijls.v9i2.12057 International Journal of Life Sciences 9 (2) : 2015; 14-17 


2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 811-815
Author(s):  
Mary Bucholtz

The relationship between language and the body has become an increasingly prominent area of research within linguistics and related disciplines. Some investigators of this question have examined how facts about the human body are encoded in linguistic structure, while others have explored the use of the body as a communicative resource in interaction. Surprisingly little, however, has been written about the role of language in constructing the body as a social object. In Fat talk, Mimi Nichter, a medical anthropologist, addresses this issue by examining the discourse of dieting among American teenage girls. Although language itself is not the center of the analysis, Nichter draws on a wide range of sociolinguistic research to investigate how the body is constructed through talk – a question that will be of equal interest to scholars of language, culture, and society.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.


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