scholarly journals The discussion of body in 'Every Day' by David Levithan

Author(s):  
Tifanny Tanuwijaya

In the novel Every Day by David Levithan, there exists a profound discussion about body through its protagonist A’s life, its plot, dialogues, and events that unfold. This paper uses qualitative textual analysis as its methods in order to obtain relevant data to be further analyzed using the theoretical framework from Stuart Hall (theory of representation (2013)) and Chris Shilling (The Body and Social Theory (2003)). Through the indexical signs from the text, there are discussions of how the body is represented, which are as something superficial, as a mask, and as something temporary. Through the analysis of the social body, it is also found that the body has become a social asset in which it could also contribute to one’s self-identity, creating the body as a project that one could work on throughout one’s life. Consequently, the metaphor of body as a machine appears, as well as the revelation that there is also a close relation between death and the body. Through death, the social body is reduced into individual body, where the living often avoids the dead, fearing subconsciously of their own. These aspects could be observed from A’s life and Rhiannon’s response towards it.

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Ye. I. Kirilenko

In the modern science, the body is an object of interest not only to the natural science and medicine, but also the humanities. Of special interest, in particular, for the medical discourse, is the ethnic body experience. The paper reveals features of the body experience in the east-slavonic culture from the analysis of the mythological tradition. This experience is characterized by the pronounced interest and ambivalent attitude to the body’s life, natural body standards; and emotional intensity. The experience of the social body is of highest priority in the culture.


1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Smith

As in the Middle Ages in the West, so in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) men were fond of explaining the hierarchical society in which they lived by comparing it to an organism. Social classes, Confucian scholars said, were like parts of the body: each had a vital function to perform, but their functions were essentially different and unequal in value. In this scheme the peasants were second in importance only to the ruling military class. Just as the samurai officials were the brains that guided other organs, so the peasants were the feet that held the social body erect. They were the “basis of the country,” the valued producers whose labor sustained all else. But, as a class, they tended innately to backsliding and extravagance. Left alone they would consume more than their share of the social income, ape the manners and tastes of their betters, and even encroach upon the functions of other classes to the perilous neglect of their own. Only the lash of necessity and the sharp eye of the official could hold them to their disagreeable role. They had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptation to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of what they produced to let them continue producing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hidefumi Nishiyama

The recent proliferation of the securitization of crowded places has led to a growth in the development of technologies of crowd behaviour analysis. However, despite the emerging prominence of crowd surveillance in emergency planning, its impacts on our understanding of security and surveillance have received little discussion. Using the case of crowd surveillance in Tokyo, this article examines the ways in which crowds are simulated, monitored and secured through the technology of crowd behaviour analysis, and discusses the implications on the politics of security. It argues that crowd surveillance constitutes a unique form of the biopolitics of security that targets not the individual body or the social body of population, but the urban body of crowd. The power of normalization in crowd surveillance operates in a preemptive manner through the codification of crowd behaviour that is spatially and temporarily specific. The article also interrogates the introduction of crowd surveillance in relation to racialized logics of suspicion and argues that, despite its appearance as non-discriminatory and ‘a-racial’, crowd surveillance entails the racial coding of crowd behaviour and urban space. The article concludes with the introduction of crowd surveillance as a border control technology, which reorients existing modalities of (in)securitization at airports.


1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Scribano

A central issue in the social sciences today is the analysis of complex society, and topics like globalization, identity and self-identity, transformation of self and collective action become more and more important in social theory. This article intends to show (a) how the diagnosis of complexity affects the constitution of the topics at the heart of social theory and (b) what its major implications are from a theoretical and epistemic standpoint. Alberto Melucci and Anthony Giddens being among the most representative social scientists in this field, I examine each one's approaches and argue that we are in the presence of an “existential turn” in social theory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Ricardo Iglesias García

La evolución del concepto de cuerpo individual/cuerpo social, específicamente desde la modernidad, la industrialización y la actual implementación de las tecnologías nos conduce hacia una visión del sujeto humano en un continuo proceso de progreso ‘egoísta’, con sus correspondientes repercusiones en la totalidad del ecosistema terrestre. Según algunos científicos es necesario plantearnos la posibilidad de unanueva época geología: el antropoceno. La idea del cuerpo autómata persiste en nuestro imaginario occidental. Es notable, además, que el cuerpo se proponga como máquina y no como forma natural, cuestión que no dejará de traer consecuencias al momento de ejercer actividades con/sobre el cuerpo y sobre su espacio vital. Las nuevas tecnologías ofrecen la posibilidad de superar los límites impuestos por nuestra herencia biológica en una especie de deseo explícito de no aceptar nuestro pasado, ni nuestro origen natural-orgánico, frente a una automejora y modificación en un sistema de progreso ad infinitum. En este sentido, una serie importante de pensadores, científicos y artistas han generado relecturas el cuerpo como algo completamente obsoleto, como una cáscara vacía que debe ser abandonada paratecnológicamente dar paso al siguiente nivel en la evolución humana: el Techno Sapiens o el Cyborg. Seaboga para que el objeto de estudio de la antropología pase del ser humano al cyborg, considerado éste como un representante más idóneo de nuestro presente y, sobre todo, de nuestro futuro. Paralelamente en la esfera del arte aparecen figuras que buscan representar esta tecnoevolución como Stelar, Marcel·lí Antúnez, o Carlos Corpa, entre otros. The evolution of the concept of the individual body / social body, specifically from modernity, industrialization and the current implementation of technologies, leads us to a vision of the human subject in a continuum of ‘egotistic’ progress as well as its corresponding repercussions in the totality of its natural environment. According to some scientific, it is necessary to consider the possibility of a new geology era:the Anthropocene. The idea of the automaton body persists in our Western imaginary. It is also remarkable that the body is proposed as a machine and not as a natural object, an issue not without consequences, when exercising activities with / on the body and on its vital space. The new technologies offer the possibility of overcoming the limits imposed by our biological inheritance in a sort of explicit desire to accept neither our past, nor our natural-organic origin, in the face of self-improvement and modification in a system of progress Ad infinitum. In this sense, an important series of thinkers, scientists and artists have produced new approaches of the body as something completely obsolete, as an empty shell that must be abandoned to technologically give way to the next level in the human evolution: the Techno Sapiens or the Cyborg. It calls for the object of study of anthropology goes from human being to cyborg, considered as a more suitable representative of our present, and above all, of our future, with all its positive and negative consequences. At the same time in the realm of art, some figures who want to represent this techno-evolution have appeared such as Stelar, Marcel·lí Antúnez, Carlos Corpa, among others.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-628
Author(s):  
Peter G. Pandimakil

Contemporary challenges on religious belief and practice occur often within democratic polities; they do appear as advocates for equality before law, state neutrality and for freedom of conscience. Such claims perceived as demands for equal justice mark the public sphere of the West thanks especially to an expanding consciousness of individual rights and increasing religious cultural diversity, a phenomenon due also to immigration. These are obvious signs of the Western society becoming more and more pluralistic, but in a way distinct from such traditional polities elsewhere. Whatever the advantages of a pluralist society, it is also seen as a potential threat to entrenched values. How would then a democratic regime deal with multiculturalism and religious freedom, guaranteeing social coherence and security, becomes a crucial contemporary issue. Employing the Quebec Charter of Values as a case in point, this essay highlights the importance of re-defining the public sphere. It has to be a discursive sphere which would only materialize when rationality and emotions play an equal role, in shaping the social body, especially through narratives. And religions do seem to have an important role to play here, not only in shaping a strong, open self-identity, but also in recognizing the common, human vulnerability.


Author(s):  
Bokshan Halyna

The purpose of the paper is to examine the specificity of the modeling of the character-narrator’s body identity in B. Hrabal’s novel “I Served the King of England”. Firstly it stresses on the body-centered nature of the narration in this literary work, in which the evolution of personality is represented as “a history of the body”. The study focuses on the techniques of restructurizing “the body scheme” and the manifestation of psychophysiological transgression caused by the existing “archetypal canons”. It traces the correlation of the semantics of the body identity with the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the ugly and with gender differentiation. The paper also considers gastronomy as one of the aspects of bodiliness in B. Hrabal’s novel. It details the poetics of grotesque which manifests itself in the descriptions of the body emphasizing its objectiveness. The study looks at the Rabelaisian traditions followed by the writer in the depiction of the scenes connected with eating both everyday food and exotic dishes. The research underlines that the body in B. Hrabal’s novel is displayed as a genetic data medium, visualized through physical characteristics, that highlights the social arrangement of the body identity problems. It pays attention to the social function of a human face in archaic societies originally interpreted in the novel. The research determines the peculiarities of the space marking of the body in the literary work and its correlation with the binary opposition “top–bottom”. It looks at the formation of the body identity by means of a mirror reflection and the image of the double. The conclusions of the research emphasize the specificity of the modeling of the body identity in the novel of the Czech writer. The results of this scientific paper can be used in further research on B. Hrabal literary prose and in comparative studie


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