Music in migrant camps as a medium creating non-narrative human relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 347-360
Author(s):  
Julien Labia

A migrant camp is a ‘non-place’ where personal identity is put at risk. Music is a means of personal adaptation in camps, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. The present power of music in such a place is to create strong relationships, ‘shortcutting’ both narration and the longer time needed in order to create relationships. The kind of personal advantage it is for someone to be a musician is a topic surprisingly forgotten, obscured by theoretical habits of seeing music essentially as an expressive activity directed to an audience, or as being a communicative activity. Music has a performative power different from language, as a non-verbal art having a strong and direct relationship to the body. Musical interactions on the field give migrants the ability to balance their problematic situation of refugees, shaping a real present.

First Monday ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brusseau

Compartmentalizing our distinct personal identities is increasingly difficult in big data reality. Pictures of the person we were on past vacations resurface in employers’ Google searches; LinkedIn which exhibits our income level is increasingly used as a dating web site. Whether on vacation, at work, or seeking romance, our digital selves stream together. One result is that a perennial ethical question about personal identity has spilled out of philosophy departments and into the real world. Ought we possess one, unified identity that coherently integrates the various aspects of our lives, or, incarnate deeply distinct selves suited to different occasions and contexts? At bottom, are we one, or many? The question is not only palpable today, but also urgent because if a decision is not made by us, the forces of big data and surveillance capitalism will make it for us by compelling unity. Speaking in favor of the big data tendency, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promotes the ethics of an integrated identity, a single version of selfhood maintained across diverse contexts and human relationships. This essay goes in the other direction by sketching two ethical frameworks arranged to defend our compartmentalized identities, which amounts to promoting the dis-integration of our selves. One framework connects with natural law, the other with language, and both aim to create a sense of selfhood that breaks away from its own past, and from the unifying powers of big data technology.


Philosophy ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 51 (195) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Madell

In ‘The Concept of a Person’ Ayer presents a theory of personal identity which has never, to my knowledge, attracted the close attention which it deserves. The theory puts forward bodily continuity as the central criterion of personal identity. In this, of course, Ayer does not differ from many other philosophers who have written on this subject. The real interest of Ayer's view is that it is quite explicit that the body is taken as the principle of unity underlying one's experiences, as that in virtue of which a series of experiences are the experiences of one person. Without the body, ‘not only is it not clear how the individual experiences are to be identified, but there appears to be no principle according to which they can be grouped together; there is no answer to the question what makes two experiences which are separate in time the experiences of the same self’ (pp. 113–114). Some link between experiences there must be. Memory cannot serve as this link, since remembering an experience already implies thinking of it as one's own. The only acceptable candidate is the body.


1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Philip L. Quinn

Suppose that a person P1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P2 and P3, each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P1. You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with P1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P2 and P3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P11 contained when P1 died, and that P2's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death just in case P3's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P1 having happened to him, and that P3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P1 having happened to him just in case P2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P2 and P3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P2 and P3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned.


Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 308-317
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Thibodeau

In a recent article on the medieval dogma of transubstantiation, Gary Macy builds upon the works of Hans Jorissen and James F. McCue to question the validity of Jaroslav Pelikan's claim that “at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist achieved its definitive formulation in the dogma of transubstantiation.” Macy demonstrates that through most of the thirteenth century, the majority of theologians did not, in fact, consider Lateran IV's decree the final word on eucharistic theology. The debate over precisely how the real presence of Christ occurred in the eucharist was far from closed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Leonardo Mariano Gomes ◽  
Rita Wu

AbstractIn this article, we present TouchYou, a pair of wearable interfaces that enable affective touch interactions with people at long-distance. Through a touch-sensitive interface, which works by touch, pressure and capacitance, the body becomes the own input for stimulating the other body, which has a stimulation interface that enables the feeling of being touched. The person receives an electrical muscle stimulation, thermal and mechanical stimulation that react depending on the touch sensed by the first interface. By using the TouchYou, people can stimulate each other, using their own body, not only for sexual relations at a distance but for the production of affection and another way of feeling. We discuss the importance of the touch for human relationships, the current state of the art in haptic interfaces and how the technology can be used for the affection remote transmission. We present the design process of the TouchYou sensitive and stimulation interfaces, with a contribution of a method for developing custom touch sensors, we explore usage scenarios for the technology, including sex toys and sex robots and we present the concept of using the body as a remote sex interface.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-191
Author(s):  
Nicholas Xenos

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 21-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pramila Bakhati

Human beings are considered as the most intellectual living beings in this Universe because they are able to cope with all the natural resources for their personal needs and preserving the things as well. Due to the growing population and immense using of resources, the things which we get from the nature are being destroyed by using in improper way. Our common home: the Earth is now in crisis as a result of limited awareness, egotism and understanding about the real values of nature and natural resources. In this problematic situation, Sustainable Development (SD) is emerged as a window of hope and later Education for Sustainable Developed (ESD) is appeared to promote the SD. However, if the knowledge is not transformed into behavior and practical life, the knowledge will be nothing or the meaningless.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jtd.v1i0.13086 Journal of Training and Development Vol.1 2015: 21-26


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Maricica Munteanu

The present article explores the collective imaginary of the cenacle, referring to the case of Viața românească literary group from Iași, focussing on the bodily community and its representations in the common space, understood as space-in-common. This approach shifts the interest from the ideological component that is the ‘poporanism’, as promoted by Viața românească revue, to the ethical and social aspects of the community. This does not mean that the bodily community is “more real” than the ideological community, or that it translates with fidelity the common practices of the cenacle; the bodily community is in fact another form of representation, a phantasm of the living-together, analysed through Roland Barthes’s theory as the space where solitude and sociability coexist. The corporal representations of the community, always engaged in an ethical debate, is further discussed through two manners of the living-together: the gesture and the rhythm. The theoretical reference of this analysis is Marielle Macéʼs book Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie, which proposes a formal approach of life, concentrating on the ethical implications. The issues derived from this sort of reading state the relation between the body and the environment, the vicinities and the somatic interactions between the members of the cenacle, the adjustment of distances, and the maintenance of solitude inside the community. The gestures, attitudes, behaviour, verbal and non-verbal tics, clothing, the manners of speech or the rhythm of doing certain things are seen not as marks of personal identity that positions itself inside the spaces of power, but as collective signs, as form of encounter and interaction, of exposure to the others but also responsiveness of the others, of expropriation as well as appropriation, of affirmation as well as alteration of the forms of life.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 389-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine E. Sprague ◽  
Jim Parsons

In this paper, the authors discuss creativity and the impact it might have on teaching and learning. The authors believe that imaginative play, at all ages, helps all people (children especially) create healthy environments and spaces that expand their learning. The authors contend that teaching for imagination—which asks little more than creating and trusting an ecological space that engenders it—seldom is considered a priority. Given the emphasis on creativity in the real world and the virtual digital world, the authors believe it is important to add to the body of knowledge through continued research in this field.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document