Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself PDF Author: Lisa Stevenson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend’s newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else," and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.

Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself PDF Author: Lisa Stevenson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend’s newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else," and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.

Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself PDF Author: Lisa Stevenson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520282604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
"This ethnographic study examines two historical moments in the Canadian Arctic: the Inuit tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). The colonial Canadian North was imagined as a laboratory for a social experiment to transform Inuit into bona fide Canadian citizens by, among other things, reducing their death rate. This experiment demanded Inuit cooperation with the forms of anonymous care the state provided--including the evacuation of tubercular Inuit Southern Sanatoria, which left many Inuit families without the story or image of their loved one's death. A similar indifference to who lives or dies is manifest in the adoption of the "suicide hotline"--an explicitly anonymous form of care where caregivers exhort unidentified Inuit to live while simultaneously expecting them to die. Through attention to the images through which people think and dream, Stevenson describes a world in which life is "beside itself": the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. For the Inuit, life is "somewhere else," and Stevenson attempts to articulate forms of care adequate to that truth"--

Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself PDF Author: Lisa Stevenson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520282940
Category : Inuit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This ethnographic study examines two historical moments in the Canadian Arctic: the Inuit tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). The colonial Canadian North was imagined as a laboratory for a social experiment to transform Inuit into bona fide Canadian citizens by, among other things, reducing their death rate. This experiment demanded Inuit cooperation with the forms of anonymous care the state provided--including the evacuation of tubercular Inuit Southern Sanatoria, which left many Inuit families without the story or image of their loved one's death. A similar indifference to who lives or dies is manifest in the adoption of the "suicide hotline"--An explicitly anonymous form of care where caregivers exhort unidentified Inuit to live while simultaneously expecting them to die. Through attention to the images through which people think and dream, Stevenson describes a world in which life is "beside itself": the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. For the Inuit, life is 'somewhere else,' and Stevenson attempts to articulate forms of care adequate to that truth"--Provided by publisher.

Imagistic Care

Imagistic Care PDF Author: Cheryl Mattingly
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823299651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty. Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

Philosophy Beside Itself

Philosophy Beside Itself PDF Author: Stephen W. Melville
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719019203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Philosophy Beside Itself " was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests. Stephen Melville's aim in "Philosophy Beside Itself " is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline. Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight "and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism--radical self-criticism--is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement. Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Critical Inuit Studies

Critical Inuit Studies PDF Author: Pamela R. Stern
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803253788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Critical Inuit Studies offers an overview of the current state of Inuit studies by bringing together the insights and fieldwork of more than a dozen scholars from six countries currently working with Native communities in the far north. The volume showcases the latest methodologies and interpretive perspectives, presents a multitude of instructive case studies with individuals and communities, and shares the personal and professional insights from the fieldwork and thought of distinguished researchers. The wide-ranging topics in this collection include the development of a circumpolar research policy; the complex identities of Inuit in the twenty-first century; the transformative relationship between anthropologist and collaborator; the participatory method of conducting research; the interpretation of body gesture and the reproduction of culture; the use of translation in oral history, memory and the construction of a collective Inuit identity; the intricate relationship between politics, indigenous citizenship and resource development; the importance of place names, housing policies and the transition from igloos to permanent houses; and social networks in the urban setting of Montreal.

Living Life Backward

Living Life Backward PDF Author: David Gibson
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433556308
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
What if it is death that teaches us how to truly live? Keeping the end in mind shapes how we live our lives in the here and now. Living life backward means taking the one thing in our future that is certain—death—and letting that inform our journey before we get there. Looking to the book of Ecclesiastes for wisdom, Living Life Backward was written to shake up our expectations and priorities for what it means to live "the good life." Considering the reality of death helps us pay attention to our limitations as human beings and receive life as a wondrous gift from God—freeing us to live wisely, generously, and faithfully for God's glory and the good of his world.

Rituals of Care

Rituals of Care PDF Author: Felicity Aulino
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739751
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Aulino's work is a strong contribution to the study of aging in the field of medical anthropology specifically because of the focus on the embodied performativity of care evident in her research practice and analysis. Rituals of Care is an excellent book, which offers a thoughtful approach to everyday care in Thailand. ― Anthropology & Aging End-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Felicity Aulino's Rituals of Care speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased attention to care for the elderly, both personal and professional, Aulino challenges common presumptions about the universal nature of "caring." The way she examines particular sets of emotional and practical ways of being with people, and their specific historical lineages, allows Aulino to show an inseparable link between forms of social organization and forms of care. Unlike most accounts of the quotidian concerns of providing care in a rapidly aging society, Rituals of Care brings attention to corporeal processes. Moving from vivid descriptions of the embodied routines at the heart of home caregiving to depictions of care practices in more general ways—care for one's group, care of the polity—it develops the argument that religious, social, and political structures are embodied, through habituated action, in practices of providing for others. Under the watchful treatment of Aulino, care becomes a powerful foil for understanding recent political turmoil and structural change in Thailand, proving embodied practice to be a vital vantage point for phenomenological and political analyses alike.

A Life of One's Own

A Life of One's Own PDF Author: Marion Milner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040025102
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
'This is what I really want. I want to discover ways to discriminate the important things in human life. I want to find ways of getting past this blind fumbling with existence.' - Marion Milner, from A Life of One’s Own. How often do we really ask ourselves, 'What will make me happy? What do I really want from life?' In A Life of One’s Own Marion Milner, a renowned British psychoanalyst, artist and autobiographer, takes us on an extraordinary and compelling seven-year inward journey to discover what it is that makes her happy. On its first publication, W. H. Auden found the book 'as exciting as a detective story' and, as Milner searches out clues, the reader quickly becomes involved in the chase. Using her own personal diaries, she analyses moments of everyday life that can bring surprising joy, such as walking, listening to music, and drawing. She also records, in a disarmingly clear and insightful manner, the struggle between the urge to order and control one’s thoughts and standing back to let them wander where they may. A pioneering account of lived experience that also anticipates the contemporary phenomenon of mindfulness, A Life of One’s Own is a great adventure in thinking and living whose insights remain as fresh today as they were on the book’s first publication in the 1930s. This Routledge Classics edition includes a revised Introduction by Rachel Bowlby.

Ethnographic Sorcery

Ethnographic Sorcery PDF Author: Harry G. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894126
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery—for many of them, West’s efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In Ethnographic Sorcery, West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation. A key theme of West’s research into sorcery is that one sorcerer’s claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West’s attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.