scholarly journals Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Hardin

Since the 1950s, Samoa has faced rapid changes in food systems and labor practices, creating an environment in which health conditions such as diabetes touch every individual. Through an ethnographic analysis of Samoan people’s attitudes toward the novel food category of vegetables, this article explores how intersecting health promotion and development discourses instrumentalize vegetables as a source of both health and sickness, and as signs of poverty or wealth. This dual instrumentalization simultaneously positions vegetables as objects of trade that may generate wealth for farmers and as objects of health that may accrue nutrition to combat chronic sickness. I introduce the notion of subjunctive health to analyze people’s preoccupation with vegetables, even when these are rarely eaten. In Samoa, subjunctive health frames the consumption of vegetables in several ways: as if vegetables were both plentiful and essential to a proper meal, as if people were not healthy before imported vegetables were introduced, as if it were possible to sustain one’s family through gardening alone. The subjunctive highlights how health is constructed as aspirational, relying on an as if logic that entangles economic and nutritional conditions. It operates through the daily acts of nourishing one’s family to erase from view those biocolonial processes that generated an environment in which chronic diseases flourish.

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.


Author(s):  
Andreas Blümel

AbstractThis article makes the novel observation that in German, CPs functioning as complements to nouns can appear to the left of their associated DP-internal gap position. It surveys the phenomenon and, based on a number of diagnostics, argues that the noun complement clause exhibits properties as if its surface position is movement-derived. Based on parallel observations in PP-extraction from DP, I show that the same constraints on movement apply modulo construction-specific properties of DPs with a noun complement clause. The findings buttress previous approaches to extraction from DPs that highlight differentiating and controlling lexical factors. Given the delicacy of the judgments involved in this phenomenon, the article is mostly devoted to laying out its descriptive properties. Tentative suggestions as to an analysis are offered in the end.


any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc­ tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap­ pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.


Paragraph ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CULLER

La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, and perversely takes Haiku as a model. This new project constitutes in many respects a regression to literary and cultural ideas Barthes had previously rejected. Most seriously, it involves a turn away from reflection on language, which had been crucial to Barthes's work. But there are other ways in which the change in approach brings new insights to a thinking of the novel and of literature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The Cost ◽  

Abstract J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”


Author(s):  
Supriyati Supriyati ◽  
Fitria Wulandari
Keyword(s):  

This research is aimed at describing the protagonist character in the film Kartini by  Hanung Bramantyo. This research is descriptive. The result of the research shows that: (1) the aspect of generosity found in the novel Kartini which means that she likes to give a help to other people. (2) the aspect of honesty found in the character Kartini who likes to be honest to other people. (3) the aspect of sincerity which means that she likes to be sincere towards people who give her compliments as if she is not a person with reputation while she is. (4) the aspect of smart in which she always knows how to make a decision to solve problems. (5) the aspect of independence in which she always tries to send scholarship proposal to continue her study in Netherlands without bothering others. (6) the aspect of loyalty to friends in which she (7) the aspect of defence in which she always defends and fights for woman’s and she is brave to say the truth whenever she faces problems. Based on the result of the analysis, it can be found that the most dominant aspect is sincerity and defend. Meanwhile the less dominant aspect is generosity and independence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Joyce Goggin

This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century – Francis Burney’s Cecilia – as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.


Author(s):  
Isabel Alonso-Breto ◽  

The ethics of care is a central element in the novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), written by Anuk Arudpragasam in response to the slaughter which the Tamil community suffered in the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. This article discusses the novel from this theoretical perspective, positing that care is played out as a strategy to enhance the jeopardised human condition of those involved. The narrative bears witness to the intense suffering of this community at a time when the situation was deadly for civilians, who were confined in the so-called “No Fire Zone.” Paradoxically, this area was systematically shelled, its conditions responding to what Achille Mbembe has described as necropolitics. In the midst of this horror, however, Arudpragasam’s novel finds a deeply moving ethics of care in people’s attitudes to one another, which signals a desperate attempt to keep the bereaved community together or at least maintain an essential sense of humanness. Care is also identified as intentio autoris since the novel becomes a powerful reminder of the huge toll of human lives and the immense pain that occurred in this dark episode, as well as the failure—or lack of interest—of the international community to intervene in order to save thousands of innocent lives.


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