Author: Julie Avril MinichPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
National Bodies/embodied Nations
Author: Julie Avril MinichEmbodied Nation
Author: Simon CreakPublisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824875125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the country's extraordinary transitions—from French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development state—through the lens of physical culture, Simon Creak's lively and incisive narrative illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. Creak argues that sport and related physical practices—including physical education, gymnastics, and military training—have shaped a national consciousness by locating it in everyday experience. These practices are popular, participatory, performative, and, above all, physical in character and embody ideas and ideologies in a symbolic and experiential way. Embodied Nation takes readers on a brisk ride through more than a century of Lao history, from a nineteenth-century game of tikhi—an indigenous game resembling field hockey—to the country's unprecedented outpouring of nationalist sentiment when hosting the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. En route, we witness a Lao-Vietnamese soccer brawl in 1936, the fascist-inspired body ethic of the early 1940s, the novel modes of military masculinity that blossomed with national independence, the spectacular state theatrics of power represented by Olympic-inspired sports festivals, and the high hopes and frequent failures of socialist sport in the 1970s and 1980s. Of central concern in Creak's narrative are the twin motifs of gender and civilization. Despite increasing female participation since the early twentieth century, he demonstrates the major role that sport and physical culture have played in forming hegemonic masculinities in Laos. Even with limited national sporting success—Laos has never won an Olympic medal—the healthy, toned, and muscular form has come to symbolize material development and prosperity. Embodied Nation outlines the complex ways in which these motifs, through sport and physical culture, articulate with state power. Combining cultural and intellectual history with historical thick description, Creak draws on a creative array of Lao and French sources from previously unexplored archives, newspapers, and magazines, and from ethnographic writing, war photography, and cartoons. More than an "imagined community" or "geobody," he shows that Laos was also a "body at work," making substantive theoretical contributions not only to Southeast Asian studies and history, but to the study of the physical culture, nationalism, masculinity, and modernity in all modern societies.
Embodiment of a Nation
Author: Cecelia TICHIPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.
Maximum Embodiment
Author: Bert Winther-TamakiPublisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861132
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Maximum Embodiment presents a compelling thesis articulating the historical character of Yoga, literally the “Western painting” of Japan. The term designates what was arguably the most important movement in modern Japanese art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most critical marker of Yoga was its association with the medium of oil-on-canvas, which differed greatly from the water-based pigments and inks of earlier Japanese painting. Yoga encompassed both establishment fine art and avant-gardist insurgencies, but in both cases, as the term suggests, it was typically focused on techniques, motifs, canons, or iconographies that were obtained in Europe and deployed by Japanese artists. Despite recent advances in Yoga studies, important questions remain unanswered: What specific visuality did the protagonists of Yoga seek from Europe and contribute to modern Japanese society? What qualities of representation were so dearly coveted as to stimulate dedication to the pursuit of Yoga? What distinguished Yoga in Japanese visual culture? This study answers these questions by defining a paradigm of embodied representation unique to Yoga painting that may be conceptualized in four registers: first, the distinctive materiality of oil paint pigments on the picture surface; second, the depiction of palpable human bodies; third, the identification of the act and product of painting with a somatic expression of the artist’s physical being; and finally, rhetorical metaphors of political and social incorporation. The so-called Western painters of Japan were driven to strengthen subjectivity by maximizing a Japanese sense of embodiment through the technical, aesthetic, and political means suggested by these interactive registers of embodiment. Balancing critique and sympathy for the twelve Yoga painters who are its principal protagonists, Maximum Embodiment investigates the quest for embodiment in some of the most compelling images of modern Japanese art. The valiant struggles of artists to garner strongly embodied positions of subjectivity in the 1910s and 1930s gave way to despairing attempts at fathoming and mediating the horrifying experiences of real life during and after the war in the 1940s and 1950s. The very properties of Yoga that had been so conducive to expressing forceful embodiment now produced often gruesome imagery of the destruction of bodies. Combining acute visual analysis within a convincing conceptual framework, this volume provides an original account of how the drive toward maximum embodiment in early twentieth-century Yoga was derailed by an impulse toward maximum disembodiment.
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment
Author: Natalie BoeroPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190842482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 752
Book Description
In popular debates over the influences of nature versus culture on human lives, bodies are often assigned to the category of "nature": biological, essential, and pre-social. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment challenges that view, arguing that bodies both shape and get shaped by human societies. As such, the body is an appropriate and necessary area of study for sociologists. The Handbook works to clarify the scope of this topic and display the innovations of research within the field. The volume is divided into three main parts: Bodies and Methodology; Marginalized Bodies; and Embodied Sociology. Sociologists contributing to the first two parts focus on the body and the ways it is given meaning, regulated, and subjected to legal and medical oversight in a variety of social contexts (particularly when the body in question violates norms for how a culture believes bodies "ought" to behave or appear). Sociologists contributing to the last part use the bodily as a lens through which to study social institutions and experiences. These social settings range from personal decisions about medical treatment to programs for teaching police recruits how to use physical force, from social movement tactics to countries' understandings of race and national identity. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Body also prioritizes empirical evidence and methodological rigor, attending to the ways particular lives are lived in particular physical bodies located within particular cultural and institutional contexts. Many chapters offer extended methodological reflections, providing guidance on how to conduct sociological research on the body and, at times, acknowledging the role the authors' own bodies play in developing their knowledge of the research subject.
Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel
Author: Renée DickinsonPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136603522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
This study considers the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual experimentation. Dickinson proposes that the ways Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Spleen and Fugue by Olive Moore reflect, expose and criticize physical, geographical and national bodies in the narrative and form of their texts reveal the authors’ attempts to try on new forms and experiment with new possibilities of female embodiment and subjectivity.
Risk and Sociocultural Theory
Author: Deborah LuptonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521645546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This 1999 book presents a variety of exciting perspectives on the perception of risk and the strategies that people adopt to cope with it. Using the framework of recent social and cultural theory, it reflects the fact that risk has become integral to contemporary understandings of selfhood, the body and social relations, and is central to the work of writers such as Douglas, Beck, Giddens and the Foucauldian theorists. The contributors are all leading scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies and cultural anthropology. Combining empirical analyses with metatheoretical critiques, they tackle an unusually diverse range of topics including drug use, risk in the workplace, fear of crime and the media, risk and pregnant embodiment, the social construction of danger in childhood, anxieties about national identity, the governmental uses of risk and the relationship between risk phenomena and social order.
Affective Nationalism
Author: Elisabeth MilitzPublisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643802781
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165
Book Description
This book develops the concept of affective nationalism - the banal affirmation of the national emerging in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects. Based on eight months of ethnographic field work, conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Azerbaijan, the book examines the ways in which moments of bodily encounter perpetuate banal enactments and experiences of national belonging and alienation. The book advances scholarship on nationalism and affect by suggesting to study nationalisms not as given, but as potential and emergent experiences of differently positioned bodies in a world divided into nations.
Metaphors and Analogies in Sciences and Humanities
Author: Shyam WuppuluriPublisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030906884
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 590
Book Description
In this highly-interdisciplinary volume, we systematically study the role of metaphors and analogies in (mis)shaping our understanding of the world. Metaphors and Analogies occupy a prominent place in scientific discourses, as they do in literature, humanities and at the very level of our thinking itself. But when misused they can lead us astray, blinding our understanding inexorably. How can metaphors aid us in our understanding of the world? What role do they play in our scientific discourses and in humanities? How do they help us understand and skillfully deal with our complex socio-political scenarios? Where is the dividing line between their use and abuse? Join us as we explore some of these questions in this volume.
A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment
Author: Frances E. Mascia-LeesPublisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444340468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 563
Book Description
A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment offers original essays that examine historical and contemporary approaches to conceptualizations of the body. In this ground-breaking work on the body and embodiment, the latest scholarship from anthropology and related social science fields is presented, providing new insights on body politics and the experience of the body Original chapters cover historical and contemporary approaches and highlight new research frameworks Reflects the increasing importance of embodiment and its ethnographic contexts within anthropology Highlights the increasing emphasis on examining the production of scientific, technological, and medical expertise in studying bodies and embodiment