Caste and the Issue of Radical Alterity

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
V. Geetha ◽  
Nalini Rajan
Keyword(s):  
Radical Alterity

Ethics and entangled embodiment: Bodies–materialities–organization

Organization ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Dale ◽  
Yvonne Latham
Keyword(s):  
Disabled People ◽  
Material World ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Disabled

In this article, we are concerned with the ethical implications of the entanglement of embodiment and non-human materialities. We argue for an approach to embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with multiple materialities. From this, three ethical points are made: first, we argue for an ethical relation to ‘things’ not simply as inanimate objects but as the neglected Others of humanity’s (social and material) world. Second, there is a need to recognise different particularities within these entanglements. We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to think through how the radical alterity of these Others can be acknowledged, whilst also recognising our intercorporeal intertwining with them. Third, we argue that recognition of this interconnectedness and entanglement is a necessary ethical and political position from which the drawing of boundaries and creation of separations that are inherent in social organising can be understood and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human Others. In order to explore the ethical implications of these entanglements, we draw upon fieldwork in a large UK-based not-for-profit organisation which seeks to provide support for disabled people through a diverse range of services. Examining entanglements in relation to the disabled body makes visible and problematises the multiple differences of embodiments and their various interrelationships with materiality.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Relevance for Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
The West ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Spivak is one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although a literary critic, her work can be seen as philosophical as it is concerned with how to develop a transnational ethical responsibility to the radical “other,” who cannot be accessed by our discursive (and thus institutionalized) regimes of knowledge. Regarded as a leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak is probably best seen as a postcolonial Marxist feminist theorist, although she herself does not feel comfortable with rigid academic labeling. Her work is significantly influenced by the deconstructionist impulses of Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the influence of Gramsci and Marx is prominent in her thinking. Spivak’s work has consistently called attention to the logics of imperialism that inform texts in the West, including in Western feminist scholarship. Relatedly, she has also written significantly on how the nation, in attempting to represent the entirety of a population, cannot access otherness or radical alterity. This is best seen in her work on the subaltern and in her intervention into the famous Indian group of Subaltern Studies scholars. Other related foci of her work have been on comprehending translation as a transnational cultural politics, and what it means to develop a transnational ethics of literacy.

scholarly journals The face-to-face encounter in indigenous health care: a perspective in Lévinas

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (suppl 6) ◽  
pp. 2848-2853
Author(s):  
Diomedia Zacarias Teixeira ◽  
Nelson dos Santos Nunes ◽  
Rose Mary Costa Rosa Andrade Silva ◽  
Eliane Ramos Pereira ◽  
Vilza Handan
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Health ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Reflective Study ◽  
Outpatient Settings

ABSTRACT Objective: To reflect on the sensitive behaviors of indigenous healthcare professionals based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, to ratify completeness, equity, and humanity. Method: reflective study. Reflection: Studies have identified inadequacies in meeting the indigenous singularities. In the hospital and outpatient settings, they are diluted in the search for care. The difficulty of the professionals to admit them generates conflicts and non-adherence of indigenous individuals to treatments that disregard their care practices. In Lévinas, consciousness requires, "a priori," sensitivity to access the Infinity on the Face of the Other, which in the face-to-face encounters is presented to the Self as radical Alterity, proposing an Ethical relationship through transcendence. The freedom of the Self as to the Other is finite, as the Self cannot possess the Other, and infinite for its responsibility for the Other. Final considerations: The Self builds essence and existence in responsibility. In the Ethics of Alterity, in Lévinas, reflections are proposed that influence sensitive behaviors.

The Rosamond Plots

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca N. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Radical Revision

Abstract In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocation of Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away from models of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way in which character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity of the other.

scholarly journals VII Zverev International Conference at RSUH: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in American Literature, Culture, and Politics: Pro et Contra

2021 ◽  
pp. 437-449
Author(s):  
Irina V. Morozova ◽  
Victoria I. Zhuravleva
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Literature Culture ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse ◽  
Critical Discourses

The review outlines the major topics of the conference on American Studies held by RSUH in May 2021. Colonial and postcolonial discourses, their intervention and interpretation are still simultaneously extraordinarily enabling and theoretically problematic. The question is how literary and historical texts as well as cultural and political representations could be analyzed from colonial and postcolonial point of view. The conference topics integrated colonial and postcolonial discourses into a wide range of humanitarian fields in order to understand their common elements, which make a contribution to an identifiable American national outlook. Themes of interest included colonialism as a discourse of domination; hybrid modalities of identity and their difference; ethnographic translations of radical alterity; postcolonialism and feminism as critical discourses; the relationship between race, language, and culture; global history and postcolonialism; postcolonial discourse in the US foreign policy.

scholarly journals Towards a (radically) decolonial anthropology: revisiting the Iberian school of peace’s encounter with (the rights of) Amerindians / Rumo a uma antropologia (radicalmente) decolonial: revisitando o encontro da escola ibérica da paz com (os direitos d)os ameríndios

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethânia De Albuquerque Assy ◽  
Florian Fabian Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Reception History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ius Gentium ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Resumo: A resposta da Escola de Salamanca à crise cognitiva gerada pelo encontro entre europeus e ameríndios no século XVI tem se convertido em um dos momentos mais referenciados na historiografia colonial devido ao papel que desempenhou na formação do direito internacional (europeu). Embora a posição tradicional sobre o uso dos direitos naturais da Escola para enquadrar o relacionamento com os ameríndios tenha mitigado a universalidade colonizadora do incipiente ius gentium (europeu), (re)leituras post/descoloniais mais recentes expuseram esse movimento como uma mera estratégia para a subjugação epistêmica dos ameríndios. No entanto, de acordo com suas premissas historicistas, ambas as posições se concentraram no impacto da doutrina de Salamanca sobre a história europeia das ideias e deixaram (relativamente) sub-explorado seu significado como resposta à experiência de alteridade radical em relação ao encontro ameríndio. O recurso a linguagem de direitos dos salamanquianos também pode ser visto como uma maneira de lidar com o desafio perspectivista fundamental que a “razão” culturalmente diferente, ainda que epistemologicamente equivalente, dos ameríndios representou. A sua “solução” de um jusnaturalismo pluricultural historicamente concretizado não era inteiramente coerente nem livre do eurocentrismo. Mas sua gênese contrafactual por meio de uma combinação de realismo universalista escolástico tardio e de multinaturalismo indígena mostra que o encontro ameríndio era intelectualmente muito menos unilateral do que a recepção europeia histórica reconheceria. No entanto, essa abordagem exige não apenas uma virada (sutil) para uma perspectiva etnográfica, mas também uma reconstrução antropológica radical da historiografia do início da era moderna do direito internacional.Abstract: The School of Salamanca’s response to the cognitive crisis which the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians in the sixteenth century generated has become one of the most referenced moments in colonial historiography for the role it played in the formation of (European) international law. While the traditional position on the School’s use of natural rights to frame the relationship with Amerindians argued that it thereby sought to mitigate the colonizing universality of the incipient (European) ius gentium, more recent post/decolonial (re-)readings have exposed this move as a mere strategy for the epistemic subjugation of Amerindia. However, in line with their historicist premises, both positions have focussed on the impact of Salamancan thought on the European history of ideas and have left its significance as a response to the experience of radical alterity vis-à-vis the Amerindian encounte (relatively) underexplored. For the Salamancan’s resort to rights language can also be seen as a way to grapple with the fundamental perspectivist challenge that the culturally different yet epistemically equivalent ‘reason’ of the Amerindians represented. Their “solution” of a historically concretized pluricultural jusnaturalism was neither entirely coherent nor free from Eurocentrism, but its counterfactual genesis through a combination of late scholastic universalist realism and Amerindian multinaturalism shows that the Amerindian encounter was intellectually much less one-sided than its European reception history would acknowledge. Yet, this approach requires not only a (subtle) shift towards an ethnographic perspective but also a (radically) anthropological reconstruction of the historiography of early modern international law.

When Is a Thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual; or, ANT in Matanzas, Cuba, Summer of 1948

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 786-809 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Palmié
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Urban Site ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ontological Turn

AbstractRevisiting William R. Bascom's 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba's Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment. As such it seeks to re-describe some of Bascom's data in terms of Actor-Network Theory, to see if his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors’ statements concerning the liveliness and even personhood of mineral objects—stones that embody, rather than represent deities—can be resolved that way. At the same time, I offer a critique of current attempts to redefine our discipline's mission under the sign of an “ontological turn” that recurs to notions of radical alterity that strike me as potentially essentialist, and certainly profoundly ahistorical. Drawing on Karen Barad's theories of “agential realism,” I suggest that contemporary concerns with post-humanist anti-representationalism need to be tempered by a view of our epistemic pursuits, including those of anthropology, as embedded in thoroughly historical—and so fundamentally emergent—ontologies. In light of such considerations, the essay concludes with a vision of anthropology as a form of knowledge that cannot afford to evade the historical transformations of the social worlds it aims to illuminate, nor those of the concurrent transformations in its own epistemic orientations. Instead, it must reframe its goals in terms of conjunctures of ontologies and epistemologies of mutually relational and, most importantly, historical scope.

The Broken Mirror: A Lacanian Perspective on John Trengove’s Film Inxeba (The Wound)

Imbizo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Andrews
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Other ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Film Study ◽  
Radical Alterity

John Trengove’s film Inxeba (The Wound) was met with public outcry as it represented the sacred tradition of ulwaluko (“initiation”). The film was effectively banned in mainstream South African cinemas following a ruling by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) to assign a rating of X18 to the film. Many rights groups and activists were troubled by the FPB’s decision and argued that the outcry against the film was due to homophobic reactions to the representation of same-sex sexualities within hypermasculine Xhosa spaces. However, this paper argues for a more nuanced reading of the protests against the film, taking into account the symbolic aggression that the act of “truth-telling” in the film seemed to enact on traditional Xhosa people. I analyse the controversy by using ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis as it relates to film study. I explore the film itself as analogous to Lacan’s concept of the mirror, creating tension between subject (in this case, traditional South Africans) and the image, or the representation of black individuals and cultural practices in the film. Additionally, I explore the radical alterity of the Other in the film, the seat of revulsion, threat and hostility, represented simultaneously by the queer characters and at times by constructs and images of whiteness, the whiteness of the director of the film and the whiteness represented in the text which is seen as threatening to Xhosa culture and values. I argue that the reactions to the film speak to deep psychic tensions in South Africa in terms of culture, sexuality and representation, and I explore how the controversy constitutes a pivotal moment in rethinking and reconfiguring South African queer representations, particularly concerning black subjects.

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