Textures of the Ordinary

Textures of the Ordinary PDF Author: Veena Das
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823287904
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.

Textures of the Ordinary

Textures of the Ordinary PDF Author: Veena Das
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823287904
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.

Ordinary Affects

Ordinary Affects PDF Author: Kathleen Stewart
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239040X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world. Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

Surfaces and Textures

Surfaces and Textures PDF Author: Polly O'Neil
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780713688597
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book aims to provide a wealth of visual imagery for ideas and inspiration. This collection of amazing images has been gathered over the last 10 years, showing details of surface textures of everything from rust and wood to lichen and old sails, and has been divided up into themes to make it more accessible. The author has captured fascinating aspects of both natural and man-made things otherwise overlooked, showing the reader their hidden qualities. Elements of skips, old paint, driftwood and stone walls from around the world all contribute to a range of beautiful patterns and samples which make up this selection of photographs. Every surface tells a story and these beautiful images provide a visual sourcebook for artists from all areas of the Visual Arts.

A Boy Named Isamu

A Boy Named Isamu PDF Author: James Yang
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593203453
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Awarded an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Picture Book Honor, this stunning picture book brings to life the imagination of Japanese American artist, Isamu Noguchi. (Cover image may vary.) If you are Isamu, stones are the most special of all. How can they be so heavy? Would they float if they had no weight? Winner of the Theordor Seuss Geisel Award in 2020 for Stop! Bot!, James Yang imagines a day in the boyhood of Japanese American artist, Isamu Noguchi. Wandering through an outdoor market, through the forest, and then by the ocean, Isamu sees things through the eyes of a young artist . . .but also in a way that many children will relate. Stones look like birds. And birds look like stones. Through colorful artwork and exquisite text, Yang translates the essence of Noguchi so that we can all begin to see as an artist sees.

Affliction

Affliction PDF Author: Veena Das
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823261824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal—putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy? A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.

Textures of Place

Textures of Place PDF Author: Paul C. Adams
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637560
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Annotation A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works. The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.

Everyday Life

Everyday Life PDF Author: Joseph A. Amato
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236638
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"In Everyday Life Joseph A. Amato offers a panoramic account of the evolution of our daily existence and reflects on the complex and changing textures of everyday life. Beginning with societies of scarcity and relative lack of change and ending with our own twenty-first-century lives, he ranges widely through topics as varied as dirt and muck, walking and the charm of spices, and through time from early agriculture to mechanization and the modern urban existence. Amato argues that what seems to be ordinary is in fact extraordinary, and shows how life, even in the very recent past, differed from life in our present-day societies of abundance and of remorseless change. The result is a challenging and thought-provoking introduction to change and continuity in daily life"--Publisher's description.

The Ordinary

The Ordinary PDF Author: Jim Grimsley
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765305299
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The Ordinary is a powerful and entrancing tale of magic, science, and the mysterious truth that binds them together. Jim Grimsley's novels and short stories have been favorably compared to the works of Samuel R. Delany, Jack Vance, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Now he unleashes an ambitious and audacious collision between science and magic. The Twil Gate links two very different realms. On one side of the portal is Senal, an advanced technological civilization of some thirty billion inhabitants, all cybernetically linked and at war with machine intelligences many light-years away. On the other side is Irion, a land of myth and legend, where the world is flat and mighty wizards once ruled. Jedda Martele is a linguist and trader from Senal. Although fascinated by the languages and cultures of Irion, she shares her people's assumption that Irion is backward and superstitious and no match for her homeland's superior numbers and technology. But as the two realms march inevitably toward war, Jedda finds herself at the center of historic, unimaginable events that will challenge everything she has ever believed about the world--and herself.

Tucks and Textures

Tucks and Textures PDF Author: Jennie Rayment
Publisher: J R Publications
ISBN: 9780952467564
Category : Needlecraft
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Suitable for both the beginner and expert needlewoman, this book is filled with practical diagrams and simple instructions for creating textural samples. It explores the versatility of cathedral windows, the diversity of log cabin corners, the dynamics of vandalism and interlooking shapes, discloses the secrets of sculptured spheres, unveils the magic of microwave dying and explains the mysteries of Fibonacci's rabbits. Amongst the designs included in the book are projects on the Pilgrim Scrip and other bags, textured landscapes and a calico hat.

Slum Acts

Slum Acts PDF Author: Veena Das
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509537872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which knowledge that is inordinate, excessive, and overwhelming comes to mark everyday life in low-income, poor neighborhoods in Delhi with crumbling infrastructures and pervasive violence. Based on long-term ethnography in these spaces, this book provides a detailed analysis of the institutions of the state, particularly of policing and law in India. It argues that catastrophic events at the national level and the techniques of governance through which they are handled secrete forms of knowing that get embedded into the nooks and crannies of everyday life, eroding trust, sowing suspicions, and leading to an exhaustion of capacity for care. Yet the paths to survival honed within these spaces generate critique that compels us to ask how punishment and torture become routinized in democracies. Following the paths of those who struggle with these questions in these neighborhoods, the book finds that deep philosophical questions, such as the inhuman as a possibility of the human rather than its boundary, arise in the weaves of these lives and are experienced as a dimension of the social. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology and throughout the social sciences and humanities.