Making Meaningful Lives

Making Meaningful Lives PDF Author: Iza Kavedžija
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments PDF Author: Saidiya V. Hartman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393285673
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Traces a time of radical transformation of black life in early twentieth-century America, revealing how a large number of black women forged relationships, families, and jobs that were more empowered and typically indifferent to moral dictates.

Making Meaningful Lives

Making Meaningful Lives PDF Author: Iza Kavedžija
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena PDF Author: Anthony Marra
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448130859
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
*** Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 *** In a snow-covered village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as her father is abducted in the middle of the night by Russian soldiers. Their life-long friend and neighbour, Akhmed, has also been watching, and when he finds Havaa he knows of only one person who might be able to help. For tough-minded doctor Sonja Rabina, it’s just another day of trying to keep her bombed-out, abandoned hospital going. When Akhmed arrives with Havaa, asking Sonja for shelter, she has no idea who the pair are. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis, revealing the intricate pattern of connections that binds these three unlikely companions together and unexpectedly decides their fate. 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular' Ann Patchett

Reinventing the Good Life

Reinventing the Good Life PDF Author: Jeannette Pols
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800086024
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on ‘the invisible hand’ became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists have paid less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviours of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues. Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalisation and rationalisation. This shift has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern for everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them. By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analysing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life explores new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more

Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe

Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe PDF Author: Christina Bezari
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000828247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book explores women’s editorial and salon activities in Southern Europe and provides a comparative view of their practices. It argues that women in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece used their double role as editors and salonnières to engage with foreign cultures, launch the careers of promising young authors and advocate for modernization and social change. By examining a neglected body of periodicals edited between 1860 and 1920, this book sets out to explore women’s editorial agendas and their interest in creating a connection between salon life and the print press. What purpose did this connection serve? How did women editors use their periodicals and their salons to create opportunities for cross-cultural exchange? In what ways did women use their double role as editors and salonnières to promote modernization and social progress in Southern Europe? By addressing these questions, this monograph contributes to the recent expansion of scholarship on nineteenth and twentieth-century periodicals and opens new avenues for theoretical reflection on European modernity. It also invites scholars and non-specialist readers to question the center vs. periphery model and to consider Southern European counties as cultural hubs in their own right.

French Salons

French Salons PDF Author: Steven D. Kale
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

Proust

Proust PDF Author: Vincent Descombes
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804720007
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Through the voice of the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust observes of the painter Elstir that the paintings are bolder than the artist; Elstir the painter is bolder than Elstir the theorist. This book applies the same distinction Proust; the Proustian novel is bolder than Proust the theorist. By this the author means that the novel is philosophically bolder, that it pursues further the task Proust identifies as the writer's work: to explain life, to elucidate what has been lived in obscurity and confusion. In this, the novelist and the philosopher share a common goal: to clarify the obscure in order to arrive at the truth. It follows that Proust's real philosophy of the novel is to be found not in the speculative passages of Remembrance, which merely echo the philosophical commonplaces of his time, but in the truly novelistic or narrative portions of his text. In Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust sets forth his ideas about literature in the form of a critique of the method of Sainte-Beuve. Scholars who have studied Proust's notebooks describe the way in which this essay was taken over by bits of narrative originally intended as illustration supporting its theses. The philosophical portions of Remembrance were not added to the narrative as an afterthought, designed to bring out its meaning. What happened was the reverse: the novel was born of a desire to illustrate the propositions of the essay. Why then should we not find the novel more philosophically advanced than the essay? Reversing the usual order followed by literary critics, the author interprets the novel as an elucidation, and not as a simple transposition, of the essay. The book is not only a general interpretation of Proust's novel and its construction; it includes detailed discussions of such topics as literature and philosophy, the nature of the literary genres, the poetics of the novel, the definition of art, modernity and postmodernity, and the sociology of literature.

Facts and Fantasies

Facts and Fantasies PDF Author: D. Fatma Türe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443878790
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
The question of women and their rights was a prominent and ongoing topic of debate in the popular press of Turkey in the 1920s. This work presents an insightful analysis of those debates and follows its traces in obscene literature of the period, as a marginal, but influential branch of popular literature. Popular literature of the time carefully scrutinizes urban Istanbul women in particular, from their biological responsibilities to their behavior in the public arena, down to their clothes and their relations with the opposite sex. It was believed that it was urban women above all who threatened the contemporary social order. Bearing in mind that the traditional faith-based, patriarchal Ottoman social system began to disintegrate after the First World War, and was increasingly replaced by a nationalist and modern, but still patriarchal, structure, this book shows that the popular press sought to integrate women as individuals into the new social structure and define them according to common social perceptions. Women who defied society’s definition of the ideal woman were often depicted as heroines in popular obscene stories. While these stories offered a social fantasy in which society’s concerns and paranoia about women turned into reality, from another perspective, they also reflected the ongoing social disintegration after years of secrecy and seclusion, and the excitement and awkwardness felt both by men and women as a result of coexisting in the same environment.

The World of the Paris Café

The World of the Paris Café PDF Author: W. Scott Haine
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In The World of the Paris Café, W. Scott Haine investigates what the working-class café reveals about the formation of urban life in nineteenth-century France. Café society was not the product of a small elite of intellectuals and artists, he argues, but was instead the creation of a diverse and changing working population. Making unprecedented use of primary sources—from marriage contracts to police and bankruptcy records—Haine investigates the café in relation to work, family life, leisure, gender roles, and political activity. This rich and provocative study offers a bold reinterpretation of the social history of the working men and women of Paris.

Aspasia

Aspasia PDF Author: Krassimira Daskalova
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845456344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Aspasia is an international peer-reviewed yearbook that brings out the best scholarship in the field of interdisciplinary women's and gender historyfocused on - and produced in - Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. In this region the field of women's and gender history has developed uevenly and has remained only marginally represented in the "international" canon.