Moche Corporeal Ontologies

2019 ◽  
pp. 116-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Armando Muro ◽  
Luis Jaime Castillo ◽  
Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
San Jose ◽  
Andean Archaeology ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
Northern Peru ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Alternative Understanding

The body is an analytical category that has been very little problematized, and even less theorized, in archaeology. This limitation is particularly notorious in Andean archaeology. This chapter resonates with the current discussion of the ontological turn in the discipline and discusses how this paradigm offers new theoretical tools for an alternative understanding of the human body, its boundaries, and the various ways in which it manifests in the natural and social world. By using Viveiros de Castro´s Amerindian Perspectivism, this chapter re-evaluates the archaeological data from the Late Moche (AD 650–850) cemetery of San José de Moro, in northern Peru, and, thus, characterizes a Moche corporeal ontology, under which the body is conceptualized as an ever-changing entity with relational characteristics and transubstantiation properties. This conceptualization echoes the Andean notion of sami or vital essence, which transfigures, transmutes, and exerts significant influences on the social and natural world of Andean people.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Partnering with Pots: The Work of Objects in the Imperial Inca Project

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara L. Bray
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Ceramic Assemblage ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
Ontological Turn

New developments in the natural sciences are contributing to new thinking on the nature of matter, materiality and being. Such re-visioning of the natural world is, in part, responsible for ‘the ontological turn’, a trend clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. In combination with evolving relational and symmetrical approaches to investigating the constitution of ‘the social’, the door is open for exploring logics, taxonomies and understandings of reality different from our own in studies of the past. Applying these ideas to the investigation of early imperialism, this paper offers an analysis of a key element in the repertoire of Inca material culture that forwards the importance of human–thing relations in the context of early state politics. Working from the basis of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage, the study examines how these objects were deployed in the task of empire-building and what insights they provide into Andean ontological commitments during the late pre-Columbian period. An argument is developed that imperial pots were construed as animate beings and agents of the State. The study brings to the fore the mutually constituted nature of the imperial Inca project and suggests new avenues for future research that highlight the matter of early empires.

scholarly journals Memaknai Upacara Kematian dalam Bingkai Lokalitas Budaya Indonesia: Studi Kasus Tiga Cerpen Pilihan Kompas

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Awla akbar Ilma ◽  
Puri Bakthawar
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Death Event ◽  
The Social ◽  
Plural Society

Indonesian is a multicultural plural society. Therefore, almost every ethnic group in Indonesia has varied tradition and culture, especially in responding to the phenomenon of obsequies through unique ceremonies and symbols. The research aims to examine how people in several ethnic groups responded to the death event through traditional ceremonies represented by literary works, especially short stories in the 2014-2017 Kompas Selections. Samples to be used in this study are the short story "In the Body of the Tarra, in the Womb of the Tree" by Faisal Oddang in 2014, the short story "Linuwih Aroma Jarik Baru" by Anggun Prameswari in 2015, and the short story "Kasur Tanah" by Muna Masyari in 2017. Results research shows that the three short stories elevate and interpret the tradition of obsequies in Javanese, Madura, and Toraja cultures. In Javanese society, kawung batik is a symbol of man's separation from the natural world. In Madurese society, Sortana is a "gift" of human separation from the social environment. In Toraja society, the tradition of passiliran becomes a symbol of the reuniting of humans with nature as the original.

Who's come a long way, baby?

1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Bernard Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Research Priorities ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Men And Masculinities

How ‘progressive’ have archaeologists been in the progress made on gender studies during the 1990s? All archaeologists, male and female, must accept the need to theorize gender, and to rethink accordingly their traditional research priorities. Feminist theory is essential for the study of gender in archaeology because it has paid closer attention to gender as an analytical category than any other body of theory, and at the same time made important links within and between disciplines. Most male archaeologists have been recalcitrant if not loathe to focus on gender as a key concept in archaeological theory, even though writers treating ‘masculinity’ in the social sciences and literary theory have been active in this field for over a decade. This study discusses masculinist reactions to feminism and suggests that ‘masculinist’ approaches are derivative of feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important contribution of masculinist scholarship has been to insist upon the existence of divergent, multiple masculinities, and by extension femininities, as opposed to binary oppositions or ideal types. The study of men and masculinities, of women and femininities, involves consideration of social and gender issues that should not become the exclusive domain of either women or men – the goal is an archaeology informed by feminism, one that looks critically at theories of human action and allows archaeological data to challenge existing social theory.

scholarly journals Bodies in motion: spaces, emotions and representations that (de)construct realities

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Alonso Caravaca-Morera ◽  
Maria Itayra Padilha
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Costa Rica ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
San Jose ◽  
The Social ◽  
Study Population

Abstract OBJECTIVE To analyze the social representations of the body among Brazilian and Costa Rican transsexual people through their life stories. METHOD Qualitative and descriptive multicenter research. The study population consisted of 70 participants. Two organizations cooperated to collect the information, one in Florianópolis, SC-Brazil and one in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Content Analysis was used to analyze the data. RESULTS Based on the results, a single social representation of corporeality was unveiled: “Modeled bodies: about the elasticity of corporeality”. This representation described two clear elementary context units (discourse matrices). The first associates the body with an inconclusive, transitory, volatile, pliable, moldable and fluid object, while the second relates the body with a separate institution, but regulated and controlled by others. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the transsexual body is a volatile, transient, transformable institution, crossed by the marks of a historicizing and historicizable time, which comes within the scope not only of what can be named by means of linguistic signs, but also of what belongs to the unnamable in terms of sociocultural perceptions and feelings.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

Körpertechniken

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erhard Schüttpelz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Social

The contribution re-establishes Marcel Mauss's concept of body functional techniques: the social-anthropological basis, the theoretical technical position and the systematic programming of this term. According to Mauss, modern body functional techniques and their media inventions can be interpreted in different ways: as strategies for the reduction of the body and as a project of a reciprocal, psychosomatic, ritualistic and medial intensification.

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