Forms And Imaginings

The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from leading experts. It showcases a rich and detailed analysis on how the imagination is understood across several disciplines of study, including anthropology, archaeology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. An integrated theoretical-empirical-applied picture of the field is presented, which stands to inform researchers, students, and practitioners about the issues of relevance across the board when considering the imagination. With each chapter, the nature of human imagination is examined - what it entails, how it evolved, and why it singularly defines us as a species.

Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) is a 16th-century spiritual treatise by Spanish Catholic mystic and poet St. John of the Cross. The book is a systematic treatment of the ascetical life in pursuit of mystical union with Christ, giving advice and reporting on his own experience. It is part of four works by John dealing with the so-called Dark Night of the Soul, when the individual Soul undergoes earthly and spiritual privations in search of union with God. Along with the other three, The Dark Night Of the Soul, The Living Flame of God and the Spiritual Canticle, it is regarded as one of the greatest works of mysticism in Christianity and in the Spanish language.

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

Using empirical research to explore medieval writers' imaginings of time, this study presents a new morphology by which to study narratives of time in fifteenth-century literary culture, focusing on poems of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Karen Smyth begins with an overview of medieval time-keeping devices and considers collective and individual attitudes and perceptions of time. She then examines a range of Middle English authors' appropriations and innovations in relation to such perceptions, identifying competitions of tradition and innovation, allowing for an interrogation of commonly accepted medieval theories of time. An empirically based morphology emerges and is used to examine narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's work. Through a series of close readings of selected short poems and Lydgate's Troy Book, Fall of Princes, and Siege of Thebes and of Hoccleve's Regiments of Princes and Series, Karen Smyth looks at expressions of time and examples of the authors' negotiation of time consciousness, illustrating how both poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple and sometimes competing temporalities within a single poem. Smyth simultaneously draws attention to Lydgate's and Hoccleve's underestimated artistic skills and lays out a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time.

Alexithymia is an inability to identify and describe both one's own, and other people's emotions. Although individuals with alexithymia display the typical physical responses associated with emotions - such as tears, butterflies in the stomach or an increased heart rate - they are unable to recognize these responses in terms of the emotions they might be signifying. Emotionally Dumb describes the nature of alexithymia and includes therapeutic and self-help suggestions for overcoming some of the difficulties that alexithymia presents. The author discusses the possible causes and associated conditions, including Asperger Syndrome and posttraumatic stress disorder. The book provides details of the diagnostic tests available and includes an informal questionnaire, developed by the author, for people who believe they may have alexithymia. Written in accessible language, this book is ideal both for professionals and for anyone with an interest in the subject.

With the global expansion of reproductive technologies, there are ever more ways to create a family, and more family types than ever before. This book explores the experiences of those persons - whether single, in a couple, or part of collective co-parenting arrangements; whether hetero- or homosexual; whether cis- or transgender - who are creating what has been termed ‘new family forms’ with reproductive ‘assistance’. Drawing on qualitative research from around the world, the book is particularly anchored in two bodies of social science scholarship - sociological and anthropological inquiries into the cultural impact of reproductive technologies on the one hand, and parenting culture studies on the other. It seeks to create fertile conversations between these scholarships, highlighting the intersections in the ways we think about conceiving and caring for children in today’s ‘reproductive landscape’. Focusing specifically on persons whose reproductive journeys do not conform to dominant scripts, the book traces the many ways in which intentions, expectations and technological developments contribute to changing and enduring conceptions of good parenthood in the twenty-first century. Taking a holistic perspective, the book presents deep insights into the experiences not only of (intending) parents, but also of donors, surrogates, medical professionals and activists. The collection will be of interest to an international readership of scholars of gender, reproduction, parenting and family life. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.