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This book enquires from a sociological perspective into contemporary corporeal transformations brought about by exoskeletal devices. Challenging material boundaries of human bodies, their capacities, (in)abilities and skills, exoskeletal devices question social norms of corporeal “deviance” and “extension.” Through multi-sited ethnography, interviews and analyses of contemporary science and technology studies (STS), sociological literature and current approaches from the phenomenology of the body, this book shows how exoskeletons contribute to forging three contemporary “corporeal worlds”: impairment, ability and above-average ability. The text questions deeply held ideas about enhancement and augmentation, corporeal deviance and “normality,” in the three studied fields of rehabilitation, industry and the armed forces. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students across the social sciences and humanities, including from sociology, philosophy, body studies, and science and technology studies.
‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The book’s most innovative features are its empirical focus and theoretical orientation. While ethnographic research is a widespread and popular approach within the social sciences, combat sports and martial arts have yet to be sufficiently interrogated from an ethnographic standpoint. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.
Emotions are a loaded topic. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective on emotions. It examines the fact that emotions are socially and culturally constructed, while highlighting problems of comparison and translation of local terms and emotional experiences. Are emotions cultural or universal? To what extent are there culturally distinct emotions? The Emotions closes the traditional Western gap where emotions are separated from rationality and thought: the heart versus mind debate. By presenting both classic essays and new cutting-edge chapters from anthropology, sociology and psychology with important contributions from philosophy and neuroscience, the volume connects a rich range of cross-cultural studies to form a thriving interdisciplinary debate on emotions.
Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other—anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume’s Preface, Introduction, and Postscript—it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes—definitively, albeit relatively—the being and becoming of the human.
Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision “on display” by...
Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays, edited by Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking. Handelman reconsiders his theory of the forming of form and how this relates to a new theory of the dynamics of time. This will be the definitive collection of articles by one of the most important anthropologists of the late 20th Century.
Without the State explores the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests – a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine – through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of "self-organization" and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it. Emily Channell-Justice reveals how self-organization in Ukraine came out of leftist practices but actors from across the spectrum of political views also adopted self-organization over the course of Euromaidan, including far-right groups. The widespread adoption of self-organization encouraged Ukrainians t...
ثمّة خطٌّ فاصل تاريخياً بين الأجساد «الجديرة بأن تكون محميّة»، وبين تلك التي تجرّد من السلاح ومن حقّها بالحماية وتترك عزلاء. هذا التجريد المنهجي من السلاح يعيد السؤال حول مسألة اللجوء إلى العنف دفاعاً عن النفس عند كل حركة تحررية. عام 1685، حظر «القانون الأسود» أن يحمل «العبيد أي سلاح هجومي أو عصا غليظة». وفي القرن التاسع عشر، منعت الدولة الاستعمارية السكانَ المحليين في الجزائر من حمل ...
This is the first book in English that adopts a critical socio-historical perspective to examine the important themes and challenges of Asian indigenous culture and sport. Written by leading sport historians and scholars, the chapters in the book contain real-life case studies and comparative studies in Asian sport. The book examines the history, contemporary governance and management, gender, and ethnic issues embedded in folk sports and physical culture, and the challenges faced by Asian indigenous sports and their evolution. Based on cutting-edge research from China, Japan, Korea, Israel and beyond, this book will be a valuable addition to any course in sport history, sport culture, sport development and sport sociology. It will stimulate those who are seeking ways to promote and develop indigenous sports, from intangible cultural heritage protection to global sport partnership. It will also be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners, who wish to understand the changing face of Asian society and Asian indigenous sport. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
This book provides an overview of the current state of knowledge of the genetics and genomics of the agriculturally important Cucurbitaceae plant family, which includes crops such as watermelon, melon, cucumber, summer and winter squashes, pumpkins, and gourds. Recent years have resulted in tremendous increases in our knowledge of these species due to large scale genomic and transcriptomic studies and production of draft genomes for the four major species, Citrullus lanatus, Cucumis melo, Cucumis sativus, and Cucurbita spp. This text examines genetic resources and structural and functional genomics for each species group and across species groups. In addition, it explores genomic-informed understanding and commonalities in cucurbit biology with respect to vegetative growth, floral development and sex expression, fruit growth and development, and important fruit quality traits.