Tireless Translation

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Alison Rice
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
The Body ◽  
Adopted Child ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
The World ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Individual ◽  
As If

In Féerie d’un mutant, Abdelkébir Khatibi creates a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors declares that he is an “étranger professionnel,” a recurring expression in the Moroccan writer’s work that isn’t easily translated from French into English because of the multiple meanings of the first word: “étranger” is most often rendered as either foreigner or stranger, though these terms carry decidedly different connotations for Anglophone readers. This very resistance to translation may be what inspires the individual in the aforementioned textual exchange to specify that this self-description does not refer to a profession, but instead constitutes “a mobile position in the world” that entails “crossing borders: between languages, civilizations, markets.” (Féérie d’un mutant 2005, 38-39). This way of approaching the planet brings the “étranger professionnel” to embrace a stance that stands out in stark contrast to nationalist and xenophobic sentiments: “A foreigner, I must attach myself to all that is foreign on this earth.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The ever-moving, ever-adjusting position that Khatibi extolls has consequences on multiple levels, affecting the body and the relationships of the “étranger professionnel,” but the effects are perhaps most evident on the use of language, which is never taken for granted or considered to be a “given”: “Language belongs to no one […] Hadn’t I grown up, in my mother tongue, as if I were an adopted child? From one adoption to another, I believed I was being born to my own language.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The constant rebirth into language that characterizes Khatibi’s written work involves tireless translation in texts that depict travel as synonymous with self-creation and linguistic innovation that benefit from transnational perspectives that render all things foreign, in complicated but fruitful ways.

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-260
Author(s):  
Rim Feriani ◽  
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani ◽  
Debra Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Theories Of Meaning

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.

The transfusion of blood

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Richard M. Titmuss
Keyword(s):  
Blood Transfusion ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
The World ◽  
Blood Transfusion Service ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Circulation Of The Blood ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

This chapter discusses the transfusion of blood. Beliefs and attitudes concerning blood affect in varying degrees throughout the world the work of transfusion services in appealing for and recruiting blood donors. A deeply rooted and widely held superstition is that the blood contained in the body is an inviolable property and to take it away is sacrilege. In parts of Africa, for example, it is believed also that blood taken away cannot be reconstituted and that the individual will therefore be weakened, be made impotent, or be blinded for life. The growth of scientific knowledge about the circulation of the blood, the composition and preservation of blood, and the distribution of blood group genes throughout the human race has provided a more rational framework. However, it is only more recently that scientific advances have made a blood transfusion service an indispensable and increasingly vital part of modern medicine.

Languages and Idiolects: Their Language and Ours

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Higginbotham
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual

An idiolectal conception of language is compatible with a substantive role for external things — objects, including other people — in the characterization of idiolects. Illustrations of this role are not hard to come by. The point of looking outward from the individual is pretty evident for the case of reference to perceptually encountered objects: had the world been significantly different, a person with the same molecular history would have acquired, and called by the same familiar names, different physical and other concepts. An idiolectal conception of language is by no means committed, and has some reason to be opposed, to internalism, and to individualism in Burge's sense; that is, to the view that the organization of the body, abstracting from external things, is constitutive of any linguistically significant aspect of language.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

Masterpieces of Oriental Art. 7

1946 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 123-123
Author(s):  
Dora Gordine
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Slight Variation ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
As If

The border of this stone is composed of several rows of ornament. The outermost rim is carved in low relief that not only confines but gives width to the row of animals next to it. Those animals chase one another with the vigour of beasts in a circus ring, their exuberance apparent not only in the general rhythm but in the individual shape of every one of them. Each elephant is modelled with extreme sensitiveness in spite of his monumental form. The horses trot briskly with an air of concentration. The lions are alert and aggressive as if in. the presence of danger, while the cows are tame and placid. In every animal the massiveness of the body is a prominent feature, while sculptural stability is retained by the exaggerated shortness of the legs. The animals tread a row of foliated pattern, which gives the feeling of ground for their support and by its elaboration brings out the simplicity of the animals above and the geese beneath. The geese at first glance look symmetrical, yet they are not only pattern but alive, and the reason is that though they are subdued to an architectural purpose, there is individuality in every goose, and a slight variation in the gesture of every head. The lowest part of the border consists of two rows of lotus petals, delicate and faintly traced, the larger row climbing a swelling curve in the stone. The plain centre underlines the smallest modulation in the carving. This stone, which at first sight might be taken for decoration in the modern sense of a trade piece, proves on examination to be particularly rich and beautiful. How very different, for example, from Mestrovic's “Canadian War Memorial” illustrated in Some Modern Sculptors, by Stanley Casson.

scholarly journals Poetry Customs and Traditions of Shahriyar: Shahriyar and “Sahandim”

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 126-145
Author(s):  
Esmira Fuad Shukurova
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Art World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Content ◽  
Poetic Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Kind ◽  
As If ◽  
Sense Of Mastery

The poem which made Shahriyar popular among all Turkic people in the art world was “Hello to Heydar Baba”. It was translated to 76 languages. This masterpiece of poetry written by the “Heydar Baba Poet” as he was called by various masters of word, has given him an unprecedented glory not only in Southern Azerbaijan and Iran, but also in the Middle East and in a number of countries around the world. The majority of literary critics consider the poem "Hello to Heydar Baba" as a poet's masterpiece. However, the poem "My Sahand", written in his mother tongue, is a special era in the poet's creativity, with a sense of mastery, poetic structure and meaning, as well as an improved work in terms of social content. All natural events taken place in the poet’s poetic description are related to the human kind and the living creatures are compared namely with the man. At the same time, the poet transfers the qualities of the human kind’s spirit, such as sorrowing, laughing, crying, fighting and to be a prisoner, in short, all qualities that are inherent in human beings on the nature of the native lands with an artistic perfection, as a result of which he creates strong smiles, metaphorical periphrasis, as if carrying a pick on his hand is drawing colorful landscapes with charming beauty, inimitable tableau.

scholarly journals "Det føles ikke-mandigt på en måde"

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Generational Differences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fertility Treatment ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Infertile Men ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Ability ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual

The article addresses the theme of "masculinities" from the perspective of infertile men and their partners. It argues that experiences of infertility should be understood as disruption in relation to the body and in relation to the narrative of life that is informed by cultural notions of kinship and gender. These notions are closely connected to a culturally specific story of coming-into-being, which gives symbolic priority to biological procreation and genetic connectedness. Being a real father and a real man depends on procreative abilities. In order to come to terms with infertility, infertile men try to redefine such ideologies of authenticity. The article illustrates how infertile men are confronted by strong cultural associations between fertility, sexuality and masculinity, and how these notions are related to other ideas of masculinity such as independence of the individual, ability to be a provider and a conception of the "intact" body. Finally, the article demonstrates how men and women differ in coping with infertility, childlessness and fertility treatment, and their longings for parenthood. However, gender is not the only difference, which makes a difference in the world of infertile and childless people. The ideas of masculinities unfold through men's relations with other men and through generational differences and similarities.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

scholarly journals Place Memory and the Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
Margaret Kerr
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Altered States Of Consciousness ◽  
Altered States ◽  
Psychological Pain ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
At Will

Christopher Bache’s work, Dark Night Early Dawn (2000) draws on his experiences in altered states of consciousness to illustrate how the individual psyche is deeply interlaced with the minds, emotions and life events of others across time and space. He suggests that this interconnectedness enables us to go beyond healing personal psychological pain, to help heal individual and collective suffering. Bache’s account concentrates on what might be called the world of “spirit” rather than matter. The current paper is an endeavour to extend his work into the world of matter through theoretical exploration and physical engagement with body and land. To this end, I present a heuristic enquiry into two psycho-geographic journeys made at sites of collective suffering in rural Scotland. While working in altered states of consciousness and engaging in somatic practice, I felt residues of what seemed to be this suffering, coming to consciousness through my body. The work of understanding and honouring this involved performance, ritual and artwork. My suggestion is that such embodied practice allows both a profound acknowledgement of historical events and a therapeutic release of pain. Working in this way may also show us how deeply our bodies and minds are woven into the rest of nature. Once we experience this, places can come alive to us in a different way. Matter is no longer a dead substance for humans to use at will. It is a mystery that we are all part of, and one that invites our deepest respect and care. KEYWORDS interconnectedness, parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, ecopsychology, place memory.

scholarly journals Ken Donald and Muscular Christianity

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Mark Loane
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The World ◽  
Muscular Christianity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind

?MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY? was a system which relied upon sport to allow people to grow in a moral and spiritual way along with their physical development. It was thought that . . . in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still temper, self restraint, fairness, honor, unenvious approbation of another?s success, and all that ?give and take? of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial [Kingsley cited from Haley, in Watson et al].1 This system of thought held that a man?s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes [Hughes, cited in Watson et al].1 The body . . . [is] . . . a vehicle by which through gesture the soul could speak [Blooomfield, cited in Watson et al].1 In the 1800s there was a strong alignment of Muscular Christianity and the game of Rugby: If the Muscular Christians and their disciples in the public schools, given sufficient wit, had been asked to invent a game that exhausted boys before they could fall victims to vice and idleness, which at the same time instilled the manly virtues of absorbing and inflicting pain in about equal proportions, which elevated the team above the individual, which bred courage, loyalty and discipline, which as yet had no taint of professionalism and which, as an added bonus, occupied 30 boys at a time instead of a mere twenty two, it is probably something like rugby that they would have devised. [Dobbs, cited in Watson et al]1 The idea of Muscular Christianity came from the Greek ideals of athleticism that comprise the development of an excellent mind contained within an excellent body. Plato stated that one must avoid exercising either the mind or body without the other to preserve an equal and healthy balance between the two.

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