Still Life, With Lobster

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Kelly Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Food Politics ◽  
Symbolic Gesture ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
Existentialist Philosopher ◽  
Swiss Government

On March 1, 2018, the Swiss government enacted a ban against boiling live lobsters to death. This article explores the significance of that ban: Is it a political statement, a symbolic gesture, or both? In asking those questions, the author seeks to understand what kind of food politics are at play when a country bans a cooking technique. Drawing upon such seemingly disparate works as David Foster Wallace's landmark essay “Consider the Lobster,” the author's own ethnographic fieldwork in an haute cuisine restaurant in Europe, and the teachings of the French existentialist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this article argues that regulations over how we kill the animals that will become our food are ripe for reconsideration.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

LÉVINAS Y CIORAN: UNA EXPERIENCIA DEL INSOMNIO

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Cristóbal Cea Bustamante
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Il Y A ◽  
Emil Cioran

<p>Desde el pensamiento ontológico de cautiverio que realizó Emmanuel Lévinas, es decir, desde su concepto de Il y a y su descripción de la experiencia más próxima al ser anónimo e impersonal, el insomnio, el presente artículo tiene el propósito de efectuar una conversación o un acercamiento con el pensamiento pesimista de Emil Cioran.<br />Todo para graficar el horror de esta patología y de la importancia del sueño o el inconsciente frente a ella, presentado este, el inconsciente, como una salida necesaria.</p>

Deus, Ética e Ontologia em Levinas

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
José Tadeu Batista Souza
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas

O texto se propõe apresentar as preocupações de Emmanuel Levinas sobre a intrigante questão de Deus apresentadas no curso que ministrou em Paris, nos anos de 1975 e 1976. Tomamos com base o fragmento intitulado “Deus e a onto-teo-logia”, que corresponde a segunda parte da obra, Deus a Morte e o Tempo. O pano de fundo da problemática é a preocupação de Heidegger com a “constituição onto-teo-lógica da metafísica”. O nosso texto tem por objetivo apresentar a sua tese de que a ética se constitui em um modelo de racionalidade capaz de evidenciar a inteligibilidade da compreensão de Deus. Inicialmente, faremos esforço de expor a reflexão levinasiana sobre as contribuições de Heidegger ao colocar em tela de juízo o problema do ser. A seguir, apresentaremos a tese de que a “ética como filosofia primeira” possibilita uma modalidade de racionalidade que permite compreender a Deus para além da inteligibilidade do ser, da diferença ontológica, da identificação de Deus com o ser e, portanto, da onto-teo-logia. Por fim, concluiremos que as pretensões de compreensão de Deus a partir do modelo de razão grega resultam na sua redução a um dado objetivo e, portando, na eliminação de sua transcendência. A ética como relação com o outro concretiza a abertura para o divino que se eleva na sua transcendência infinita na justiça e no acolhimento aos outros homens. Assim, a relação com os outros se converte em ótica e na possibilidade do dizer humano à Deus.

Linguagem Simbólica e Racionalidade (profética): Um Retorno Filosófico à Religião à Luz de Ricoeur e Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Elvis De Oliveira Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Paul Ricœur

É possível um retorno filosófico à religião?  A fim de tentar refletir acerca dessa difícil questão, o presente estudo pretende focar-se no confronto com os desafios do fenômeno religioso que se configura na contemporaneidade, tomando como ponto de referência o encontro entre as contribuições do pensamento filosófico de Paul Ricoeur – que recupera a textualidade da expe-riência religiosa e a fecundi-dade do pensamento ético-filosófico de Emmanuel Lévinas que, por sua vez, propõe o retorno à ética encontrada na tradição talmúdica, a fim de repensar o fenômeno religioso na atualidade.

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