Search Results

You are looking at 41 - 50 of 1,035 items for :

  • Refine by Access: All content x
  • Refine by Content Type: All x
Clear All Modify Search
Open access

The antimonies of the PAH (Platform of Mortgage Victims) in Spain

Between solidarity and political effectiveness

Monique Nuijten and Pieter de Vries

compromise, and the political in the ontological sense, rupturing (bourgeois) morality and practice. The political, in short, rather than adjudicating between good and bad politics, stands for a break with the current state of things. Following this line of

Restricted access

Knowledge, Morality, and Causality in a 'Luckless' Society

The Case of the Chewong in the Malaysian Rain Forest

Signe Howell

In the absence of concepts that correspond to those of chance, luck, or fortune, how do people account for seemingly random desirable or undesirable events that occur? In this article, an examination is made of the Chewong—a hunting, gathering, shifting, and cultivating group of people in the Malaysian rain forest—and their theory of causality. It is argued that cause is a universal category of human understanding, but that an understanding of cause cannot be separated from a wider examination of the ontology and cosmology in each case. Chewong maintain that the occurrence of specific events may be traced to the correct application of relevant knowledge, that is, knowledge predicated upon a mutuality between humans and a variety of nonhuman beings that guides daily interaction between them.

Restricted access

Mandinga

Power and Deception in Afro-Brazilian Capoeira

Sergio González Varela

This article is about the meaning of mandinga in Afro-Brazilian capoeira as it is practiced in the city of Salvador, Brazil. Capoeira is an art form that combines elements of ritual, play, and fight. My main argument focuses on the mandinga as an indigenous form of power that shapes social relations, bodily interaction, magic acts, and the definition of a person. The concept of mandinga offers an understanding of the deceptive logic of capoeira and contributes to the development of an ethnographic theory of power. The emphasis here is on the importance of mandinga as a strategy for fighting and as a principle for social interaction with strong ontological implications. It is considered a cosmological force that affects the foundations of subjective reality and the perception of the world.

Restricted access

Yusuf Has

My aim in this article is to move the problematic of violence and its role in politics to a historico-ontological plane. I propose a perspective that breaks with the dominant subjectivist concept of human violence and its metaphysical foundations, which fail to distinguish this concept from that of aggression. According to this perspective, we are already in the field of violence in our everyday social existence, regardless of our personal choices or intentions, the sources of which are systemic. The ontological essence of this systemic violence lies in the fact that it is not external to human subjects but is engraved in their very social being by penetrating into the discourses, practices and frames of mind that make up their historical disposition, which makes it in many instances harder to escape than subjective violence. What I call from this ontological perspective the 'violence of closure' has the effect ultimately of suppressing the possibilities of social being open to human beings in their given historical situation, by normalising the existing way of social and political existence, and closing them off to alternatives. I argue that to this violence of closure must be opposed the violence of dis-closure, which, in its various particular intellectual and practical forms, can open up human social existence to its repressed possibilities.

Restricted access

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther and Jonathan Michael Kaplan

All eyes are turned towards genomic data and models as the source of knowledge about whether human races exist or not. Will genomic science make the final decision about whether racial realism (e.g. racial population naturalism) or anti-realism (e.g. racial scepticism) is correct? We think not. The results of even our best and most impressive genomic technologies under-determine whether biogenomic races exist, or not. First, different sub-disciplines of biology interested in population structure employ distinct concepts, aims, measures and models, producing cross-cutting categorisations of population subdivisions rather than a single, universal biogenomic concept of 'race.' Second, within each sub-discipline (e.g. phylogenetics, conservation biology), genomic results are consistent with, and map multiply to, racial realism and anti-realism. Indeed, racial ontologies are constructed conventionally, rather than discovered. We thus defend a constructivist conventionalism about biogenomic racial ontology. Choices and conventions must always be made in identifying particular kinds of groups. Political agendas, social programmes, and moral questions premised on the existence of naturalistic race should accept that no scientifically grounded racial ontology is forthcoming, and adjust presumptions, practices and projects accordingly.

Free access

Introduction

Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul

Katherine Swancutt and Mireille Mazard

take into account the influence that their own practice, theory, and epistemology are having on native ontologies, and vice versa? How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? Each of the case studies in this

Free access

Introduction

For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability

Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni

most well-researched areas of cognitive difference. We explore what this work might have to say to one recent anthropological attempt to understand difference – the so-called ontological turn. We argue that this movement, and thus anthropological

Open access

The Chicken and the Egg

Cracking the Ontology of Divination in Southwest China

Katherine Swancutt

generating new creation stories, introducing new ritual approaches, and absorbing ontological hybrids. This sets the scene for my ethnography of how Nuosu divine with chicken bodies or bones, as well as two more case studies from my 2019 fieldwork on the

Full access

Indian-Jewish Shrine Hopping in Israel

The “Multisensoriality” of Religiously Defined Practice, Emotion, and Belief

Gabriele Shenar

into the night, ready to reintegrate into their everyday lives. Traversing and Producing Multisensory Milieus: Ontology, Subjectivity, and Emotions The neoliberal era is often portrayed as one in which citizens are coerced into translating

Restricted access

Joseph S. Catalano

I understand Sartre's ontology to develop in three stages: first, through Being and Nothingness and Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; second, through the Critique of Dialectical Reason; and, finally, as it unfolds in The Family Idiot. Each stage depends upon the former and deepens the original ontology, while still introducing novel elements. For example, in Being and Nothingness, the in-itself, which is the source of our world-making, develops in the Critique into the practico-inert, which is the world made artifact, and in The Family Idiot, both the in-itself and the practico-inert unite to become the Spirit of the Age, joining our adventure with nature to that of our adventure with our family and our history. My reflection will be developed in four stages: first, a general overview; second, a more extended study of what Sartre calls the problematic of human reality; third, a brief reflection on Sartre's methodology; and finally, a concluding survey.