scholarly journals Líkami drengsins sem aldrei var til

Ritið ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-126
Author(s):  
Kristín María Kristinsdóttir

Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (Mánasteinn: Drengurinn sem aldrei var til, 2013) by Sjón tells of three eventful months in the life of Máni Steinn in the fall of 1918. In this short period the volcano Katla erupts, the Spanish flu rages and Iceland regains its sovereignty from Denmark. Building on Judith Butler’s, Mary Douglas’s and Michel Foucault’s theories regarding the body as a cultural construct, this article focuses on body discourse as presented in Moonstone. According to Douglas there is a direct link between boundaries of the body and boundaries of society. Everything that endangers the stability of society’s boundaries is considered social pollution. Foucault’s theory on panopticism likewise identifies surveillance and discipline of citizens’ bodies as means of maintaining society’s social structure. Because Máni Steinn is queer, his body is considered abnormal according to the period’s definitions on what constitutes a healthy and stable body. Aberrations from the „healthy“, heterosexual body creates divergence within society's fabric. To regain the appearance of a „pure“ society Máni needs to be hidden or banished from it. Yet the arrival of the Spanish flu to Reykjavík deconstructs conventional definition of the body and unravels the social hierarchy. The distinction between the healthy and the infected is obliterated, as the body becomes a site where irreconcilable opposites merge. During the turmoil of the Spanish flu boundaries of the body become as unstable as society's boundaries become fluent.

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan C Clift

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana España Keller

This paper asks what is the value of transforming the kitchen into a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation. This platform becomes a collaborative social space, where somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools are built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical and the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. A Public Kitchen represents a pedagogical strategy for organizing and responding collectively to the local, operating as an independent nomadic event that speaks through a creative practice that is an unfolding process. (Re)imagining the social in a Public Kitchen produces noisy affects in a sonic intra-face that can contribute to transforming our social imaginations, forming daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies. This paper reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of the self, where language, meaning and subjectivity are relational to human difference and to what is felt from the social, what informs from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and diffractive perspective. The labored body is entangled with post-human contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics, and women’s oppression; and is resonant and communicates as a site where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Galbusera ◽  
Michael T. M. Finn ◽  
Wolfgang Tschacher ◽  
Miriam Kyselo

Abstract The social benefits of interpersonal synchrony are widely recognized. Yet, little is known about its impact on the self. According to enactive cognitive science, the human self for its stability and regulation needs to balance social attunement with disengagement from others. Too much interpersonal synchrony is considered detrimental for a person’s ability to self-regulate. In this study, 66 adults took part in the Body-Conversation Task (BCT), a dyadic movement task promoting spontaneous social interaction. Using whole-body behavioural imaging, we investigated the simultaneous impact of interpersonal synchrony (between persons) and intrapersonal synchrony (within a person) on positive affect and self-regulation of affect. We hypothesized that interpersonal synchrony’s known tendency to increase positive affect would have a trade-off, decreasing a person’s ability to self-regulate affect. Interpersonal synchrony predicted an increase in positive affect. Consistent with our hypothesis, it simultaneously predicted a weakening in self-regulation of affect. Intrapersonal synchrony, however, tended to oppose these effects. Our findings challenge the widespread belief that harmony with others has only beneficial effects, pointing to the need to better understand the impact of interaction dynamics on the stability and regulation of the human self.


Author(s):  
Chris Gilleard ◽  
Paul Higgs

This chapter draws the distinction between social divisions that reflect structural patterns of inequality and social differences that express social identity and the articulation of communities of interest. It then goes on to consider some of the distinct features of such divisions and differences that help define the social locations of later life. These include the impact of the transition from working to post working life, the intersectionality that exists amongst these divisions and the growing salience of the body as both a site and source of division.


AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Jacob Neusner

Mishnah's division of Damages presents a complete and systematic account of a theory of Israelite civil law and government. While drawing on diverse materials of earlier ages, beginning, of course, with the diverse Mosaic codes themselves, Mishnah's system came to closure after the Bar Kokhba War. Like its account of the Temple and its cult, Mishnah here speaks of nonexistent institutions and prohibited activities. There being no Israelite government, Mishnah's legislation for a high priest and Temple, a king and an army, speaks of a world which may have been in times past (this is dubious) but did not exist at the time of the Mishnaic discourse on the subject. The division of damages is composed of two subsystems which fit together logically, one on the conduct of civil society—commerce, trade, real estate, the other on the institutions of civil society—courts, administration. The main point of the former subsystem is that the task of society is to maintain perfect stasis, to preserve the status quo, and to secure the stability of all transactions. In the interchange of buying and selling, giving and taking, torts and damages, there must be an essential equality of exchange. No one should come out with more than he had at the outset. There should be no sizable shift in fortune or circumstance. The stable and unchanging economy of society must be preserved. The aim of the law is to restore the antecedent status of a person who has been injured. When we ask whose perspective is represented in a system of such a character and such emphases, we turn to examine the recurrent subject-matter of the division's cases. The subject of all predicates, in fact, is the householder, the small landholder. The definition of the problems for Mishnah's attention accords with the matters of concrete concern to the proprietary class: responsible, undercapitalized, overextended, committed to a barter economy (in a world of specie and currency), above all, aching for a stable and reliable world in which to do its work.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harvey

The body has become a major focus of attention—both theoretically and politically—over the past twenty years. In much of this literature it is presumed that the body is some kind of social construct at the same time as it is a locus and a measure of both the material and the social world we inhabit. The author situates this idea against the background of Marx's representations—too often by-passed in recent literature—in order to show how Marx's concept of variable capital contains a theory of body formation under capitalism at the same time as it lays the groundwork for understanding how political persons act as moral agents to try to change the conditions under which laboring occurs. The struggle for a living wage in Baltimore is then used as a concrete example of how this form of body politics operates under contemporary conditions, illustrating how the body that is to be the measure of all things is itself a site of political-economic contestation over the very forces that create it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 01030
Author(s):  
Jana Kissová ◽  
Gabriela Dubcová

Over a short period of time, individual countries in the world face a common problem that affects them and adversely affects the lives of individuals. In connection with the current emergency situation related to the corona virus pandemic, it is possible to notice fundamental changes and enormous impact in the social or economic dimension. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the current situation in selected countries and to compare the system of measures in the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic that were adopted in order to stabilize or retain workers or aimed at elimination of imminent damage.


2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 622-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceren Özgül

AbstractOver the last fifteen years, hundreds of Muslim citizens claiming Armenian descent have submitted petitions to Turkey's secular legal authorities asking for changes to both their name and religion in the public record. In this article, I discuss the name-change cases of Armenian return converts to further the debates on Turkish secularism and to critique the body of scholarship that welcomes the governing Justice and Development Party's legal reforms as a measure of growing religious tolerance. In the article's first part I analyze the historical foundations of the regulation of religion and name changes in Turkey by fully and explicitly engaging with law as a site where minority difference is constructed, authorized, and challenged. The article's second half offers an alternative reading of how tolerance functions as an aspect of the Justice and Development Party's reforms. Based on my investigation of specific legal forms of argument that converted Armenians and their lawyers put forward in today's secular courts, and how legal officers of the state respond to them, I demonstrate that legal reform has shifted the definition of religion as a marker of minority difference in legal space. I argue that the historical context of name change and religious conversion forces the limits of existing understandings of freedom of religion in Turkey, and that this renders visible historical injustices that cannot be resolved simply through the notion of “religious tolerance” in the courts.


2019 ◽  
pp. 63-86
Author(s):  
Islam Hassan

This chapter examines the question of how the ruling family proactively continues to consolidate its own position within Qatari society. The state adopts three primary means to reproduce and stimulate the existing inclusion and exclusion schemes in Qatari society. First, it promotes the dominant Arab social values, culture, traditions, and customs that perpetuate a scheme of inclusion and exclusion and secure the position of the ruling family and Arab tribal social actors at the apex of the social hierarchy of the state. Second, it narrows down the definition of national identity in order to limit vertical social mobility in society only to certain tribal families. Third, through articles of the Constitution, the legal system and implicit family policies related to marriage and nationality, the state has been influencing individuals, insofar as marriage choices are concerned, as a further means of preventing social mobility to wider strata of society.


2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN GERRING

A widespread turn towards mechanism-centred explanations can be viewed across the social sciences in recent decades. This article clarifies what it might mean in practical terms to adopt a mechanismic view of causation. This simple task of definition turns out to be considerably more difficult than it might at first appear. The body of the article elucidates a series of tensions and conflicts within this ambient concept, looking closely at how influential authors have employed this ubiquitous term. It is discovered that ‘mechanism’ has at least nine distinct meanings as the term is used within contemporary social science: (1) the pathway or process by which an effect is produced; (2) an unobservable causal factor; (3) an easy-to-observe causal factor; (4) a context-dependent (bounded) explanation; (5) a universal (or at least highly general) explanation; (6) an explanation that presumes highly contingent phenomena; (7) an explanation built on phenomena that exhibit lawlike regularities; (8) a distinct technique of analysis (based on qualitative, case study, or process-tracing evidence); or (9) a micro-level explanation for a causal phenomenon. Some of these meanings may be combined into coherent definitions; others are obviously contradictory. It is argued, however, that only the first meaning is consistent with all contemporary usages and with contemporary practices within the social sciences; this is therefore proposed as a minimal (core) definition of the concept. The other meanings are regarded as arguments surrounding the core concept.


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