Bodies Inhabiting The World

Bodies Inhabiting the World: Scandinavian Creation Theology and the Question of Home offers a multidimensional investigation of how houses, bodies, communities and the whole universe may be conceived and refigured as places where we belong—where we are at home in God’s creation. In this way, revisiting the tradition of Scandinavian creation theology provides profound resources to make theological affirmations of God’s omnipresence in the human condition we all share. The emergence here of an exciting new theological program can be recognized—beyond the limitations of other contemporary agendas' cul-de-sacs, blind spots and diffidence. What it is to have a home is a universal question closely connected to what it means to be human and to live a good, flourishing, life. But the negative experiences of homelessness, broken homes, statelessness and alienation always lurk in the background of the universal quest to find one's home in the world. This book contains fourteen essays exploring the dynamics of the human experience of finding, losing and finding again a home.

An illuminating account of how early medicine in Greece and China perceived the human body Winner of the William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But when we look into the past, our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds. How can perceptions of something as basic and intimate as the body differ so? In this book, Shigehisa Kuriyama explores this fundamental question, elucidating the fascinating contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. Revealing how perceptions of the body and conceptions of personhood are intimately linked, his comparative inquiry invites us, indeed compels us, to reassess our own habits of feeling and perceiving.

Feminist science fiction that anticipates a post-patriarchal future. Our Fatal Magic is a collection of feminist science fiction by contemporary artist Tai Shani. Foregrounding explorations of sensation, experience, and interiority, these twelve fantastical prose vignettes refract their ideas through a series of curious characters, from Medieval Mystics to Cubes of Flesh, from Sirens to Neanderthal Hermaphrodites. Drawing on the speculative narrative strategies pioneered by writers like Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler and others, Our Fatal Magic metabolizes new and necessary fictions from feminist and queer theory to propose an erotic, often violent space of critique in which gender constructs are destabilized, alternative histories imagined, and post-patriarchal futures proposed.

The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation examines contemporary political violence and atrocity in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. It explores the way violence is used to unmake the social world and how its product: suffering, is used to try to remake the social world. Humphrey considers both the unmaking of the world through torture, war, urbicide and ethnic cleansing and the resultant remaking of the world through testimony and witnessing in the forums of truth commissions and trials. The discussion thus moves from terror to trauma.

Shakespeare on the Ecological Surface uses the concept of the ‘surface’ to examine the relationship between contemporary performance and ecocriticism. Each section looks, in turn, at the 'surfaces' of slick, smoke, sky, steam, soil, slime, snail, silk, skin and stage to build connections between ecocriticism, activism, critical theory, Shakespeare and performance. While the word ‘surface’ was never used in Shakespeare’s works, Liz Oakley-Brown shows how thinking about Shakespearean surfaces helps readers explore the politics of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. She also draws surprising parallels with our current political and ecological concerns. The book explores how Shakespeare uses ecological surfaces to help understand other types of surfaces in his plays and poems: characters’ public-facing selves; contact zones between characters and the natural world; surfaces upon which words are written; and physical surfaces upon which plays are staged. This book will be an illuminating read for anyone studying Shakespeare, early modern culture, ecocriticism, performance and activism.

This book explores the concept of cyberplace as a mode of inhabiting the contemporary world. As a result, it suggests that, for many communities, unlocking cyberspace and inhabiting cyberplaces is now an integral part of their coming-to-the-globalised-world. Boos reviews in the detail the existing academic literature from cultural anthropology, human geography, and sociology on “cyberspace”, concluding that a phenomenological perspective on cyberspace provides the possibility of gaining a deep understanding of our contemporary lifeworlds, in which on- and offline practices constantly intermingle. In four chapters, he applies the developed theoretical and methodological approaches to the case of Siena’s neighbourhoods, the contrade, analysing their websites and discussing the implications of his findings for understanding contemporary processes of community building and for future research on cyberspace. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in cultural anthropology, human geography, media studies and sociology.

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.

Pt. 1. The dying body -- 1. Terminal illness and the gaze -- Shifting the gaze -- The death-watch in Sharon Olds's The father -- Sympathetic seeing -- 2. Haunted images -- Seeing AIDS -- Billy Howard's epitaphs for the living -- Nicholas Nixon's people with AIDS -- 3. The body in the waiting room -- "Empty" spaces -- Johnnies and handbags -- Literary representations of the medical waiting room -- pt. 2. The body of grief -- 4. The contours of grief and the limits of the image -- Hands -- Unraveling the chiasm -- Images of grief in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping -- Camera Lucida and the body of the photograph -- Disembodied spaces in the images of Shellburne Thurber -- Remembering the body -- 5. Teaching the body to talk -- The language of grief -- Words and flesh in Carolyn Parkhurst's The dogs of Babel -- The ghost of the body in Don DeLillo's The body artist -- 6. Objects of grief -- The object embrace -- A sensory semiotics -- Bodies and objects in Mark Doty's "The wings" -- The AIDS memorial quilt -- Postscript : laying the body to rest -- Bringing the dead to life in popular culture -- September 11 and beyond.