The Immune Home: Domestic Enclaves, Diffuse Protections

This essay tracks a paradigm shift in the use of chemicals to control malaria: away from insecticidal approaches, focused on killing mosquitoes within private domestic dwellings, and toward the creation of protective communal atmospheres. An ongoing study of the efficacy of spatial repellents to reduce malaria transmission in rural Tanzania provides an opportunity to rethink the oikographic assumptions of malaria control—and of many global health interventions—and to foreground the specific relationalities of peri-domestic spaces. Yet a sense of moral ambivalence permeates this inquiry, as malaria prevention becomes untethered from any long-lasting material improvement in the house. We reflect on the power of chemicals to reveal chronic forms of neglect and, just possibly, conjugate new, if diffuse, forms of communitas.

Moral ambivalence. A comment on non-invasive prenatal testing from an ethical perspective

Background Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has been available for almost 10 years. In many countries the test attracted considerable criticism from the start. While most critical comments in this context deal with the (alleged) problem of eugenic selection, I will concentrate on a somewhat broader issue. Content I will argue that NIPT clearly has the potential to increase reproductive autonomy and benefit expectant parents. However, NIPT can also put people in a situation that is morally overwhelming for them and from which there is no easy way out. In this sense, such tests can have a dilemma-generating effect. Summary and Outlook I will conclude that this can be adequately described by the term “moral ambivalence”.

Love, Mercy and Social Justice in the Context of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński’s Personalist Concept of Social Life

The article’s subject discusses love, mercy, and social justice from the perspective of Christian personalism presented by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The author’s interpretation of source materials aims to present the above values as fundamental Christian virtues of a complementary nature, shaping the good of the human person’s goodness, both in the individual and social dimension. In the personalist-praxeological sense, both love, mercy, and social justice, understood as attitudes that which mean commitment and fidelity, are formed primarily in the Christian reality of everyday life, particularly with regard to one’s family and nation. The author of this article asks whether the aretology of Cardinal Wyszyński’s personalist concept of social life can be applied to the specific realities of the contemporary social life. The answer to such questions is extremely important, especially in the context of the currently proclaimed “ideological pluralism,” characteristic of present-day postmodern culture, which emphasizes the moral ambivalence of “liquid” postmodernity.

Moral Ambivalence, Religious Doubt and Non-Belief among Ex-Hijabi Women in Turkey

This article investigates religious transformations in contemporary Turkey through the case of women’s unveiling. Drawing on 10 in-depth interviews with university-educated urban women who have recently stopped wearing the veil, the article examines their experiences and their motivations for unveiling. It asks to what extent and in what ways Muslim women’s decisions to unveil are a reaction against the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) shift towards electoral authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism. Some practicing Muslims, particularly youth, have withdrawn their support from the government because of its political authoritarianism and its abandonment of Islamic ideals relating to justice. Since the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the AKP has come under critical scrutiny, both economically (e.g., increasing youth unemployment rates, widening income inequality, the shrinking middle class, clientelism) and sociopolitically (e.g., gendered social welfare policies, pro-natalist campaigns, the discourse on creating a pious generation). However, although the current political atmosphere plays a significant role in women’s unveiling, the article also discusses women’s personal and theological motives. The article elaborates on how ex-hijabi women contest both Islamist politics and Islamic orthodoxy regarding female religiosity and how these women reinterpret dominant gender norms.

Navigating the Palace Underworld : Recreational Space, Pleasure, and Release at the Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent

This essay examines the material ornamentation and poetic description of garden-adjacent recreational spaces in the Magno Palazzo (main palace) of the Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent (1528-1536). Guided by instructions from Prince- Bishop Bernardo Cles, a team of sculptors and painters including Dosso Dossi and Girolamo Romanino constructed a complex visual itinerary to orient mobile beholders and choreograph their movement through the newly built palace. Grounded in the precepts of decorum and commensurability, this itinerary was codified in an ekphrastic poem written by Cles’s physician, the naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (published 1539). This essay traces the ways in which words and images prompt psychosensory response, revealing the moral ambivalence associated with marginal and unofficial interior spaces dedicated to refreshment, leisure, and entertainment.

Measuring the Stomach of a Gentleman with the Heart-Mind of a Pipsqueak

This article seeks to historicize the affinity between narrative fiction and the cognitive function known as theory of mind. The author believes this affinity holds true mostly in modern commercial societies structured by stranger sociality, cosmopolitanism, and social mobility. Elsewhere, both temporally and culturally, theory of mind is certainly present and useful but not always prized in social life and does not animate expressive culture to the same extent. Such societies are structured by kinship sociality that presumes relatively stable identity and valorizes guileless “characters” who effortlessly embody socially shared values. The hierarchical structures of these societies also place a greater premium on theory of mind for subordinates than for the powerful, hence attaching a tinge of opprobrium to its exercise. In literature this translates into the moral ambivalence concerning “crafty” figures. The author presents her arguments with reference primarily to premodern Chinese literary classics. For comparative purposes she also brings into discussion the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and a King Solomon legend. In the coda, she asks if the importance of theory of mind is overstated when in social life we resort to a much wider range of folk psychological heuristics.