Remains Of The Everyday

Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling. Over the last century, waste recovery and secondhand goods markets have been integral to Beijing’s economic functioning and cultural identity, and acts of recycling have figured centrally in the ideological imagination of modernity and citizenship. On the one hand, the Chinese state has repeatedly promoted acts of voluntary recycling as exemplary of conscientious citizenship. On the other, informal recycling networks—from the night soil carriers of the Republican era to the collectors of plastic and cardboard in Beijing’s neighborhoods today—have been represented as undisciplined, polluting, and technologically primitive due to the municipal government’s failure to control them. The result, Joshua Goldstein argues, is the repeatedly re-inscribed exclusion of waste workers from formations of modern urban citizenship as well as the intrinsic liminality of recycling itself as an economic process.

Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from the socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the effects of these artifacts, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts.

Day-to-day activities are important in the development of social identities, the establishment of social standing, and the communal understanding of societal rules. This perspective is broadly referred to as practice theory and relates to the power of an overarching social structure and the individual actors that exist within it. Practice theory has made an important contribution to anthropological and archaeological research as these fields are particularly interested in daily life and the importance of these actions. This volume argues that practice theory can also be used in a bioarchaeological context through the examination of human skeletal remains and the archaeological context in which they were excavated. Bioarchaeology offers a unique perspective on these day-to-day experiences—skeletal tissue is constantly undergoing a process of change and, as a living biological system, it can adapt to external forces. Furthermore, bioarchaeological studies are multi-scalar and can examine individuals, groups, or entire populations. Using osteological indicators of activity patterns (entheseal changes, osteoarthritis) and dietary isotopes (carbon, nitrogen) as examples, this book addresses patterns of everyday life in the ancient past. Physical activities and food consumption are actions that are carried out on a daily basis. While bioarchaeology does not have the ability to recreate specific day-to-day activities, we can assess broad trends in everyday life. The volume illustrates these points using examples from the Ancient Nile Valley. Through the examination of over 800 Egyptian and Nubian individuals from five different archaeological sites, the research addresses patterns of everyday life as they relate to social inequality, agency, and practice. Beyond osteological indicators of activity and dietary patterns, this book also discusses additional methods that can be pursed to draw attention to daily life. Lastly, this book also highlights the applicability of and potential contribution that practice theory can make to this area of research.

Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger argues that mortality is a fundamental structuring element in human life. The ordinary view of life and death regards them as dichotomous and separate. This book explains why this view is unsatisfactory and presents a new model of the relationship between life and death that sees them as interlinked. Using Heidegger's concept of being towards death and Freud's notion of the death drive, it demonstrates the extensive influence death has on everyday life and gives an account of its structural and existential significance. By bringing the two perspectives together, this book presents a reading of death that establishes its significance for life, creates a meeting point for philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives, and examines the problems and strengths of each. It then puts forth a unified view, based on the strengths of each position and overcoming the problems of each. Finally, it works out the ethical consequences of this view. This volume is of interest for philosophers, mental health practitioners and those working in the field of death studies.

Mourning Remains examines the attempts to find, recover, and identify the bodies of Peruvians who were disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru's central southern Andes. Isaias Rojas-Perez explores the lives and political engagement of elderly Quechua mothers as they attempt to mourn and seek recognition for their kin. Of the estimated 16,000 Peruvians disappeared during the conflict, only the bodies of 3,202 victims have been located, and only 1,833 identified. The rest remain unknown or unfound, scattered across the country and often shattered beyond recognition. Rojas-Perez examines how, in the face of the state's failure to account for their missing dead, the mothers rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human to bring the disappeared back into being through everyday practices of mourning and memorialization. Mourning Remains reveals how collective mourning becomes a political escape from the state's project of governing past death and how the dead can help secure the future of the body politic.

When Sadie Novak is hired to clean up after the murder-suicide of Trudy and Grant Toth, she meets the spirit of Trudy, who, determined to prove her husband's innocence, inspires her to find the real killer, until she realizes that she in way over her head. Original.

Andrew Christiansen, a war photographer turned cabdriver, is having a bad year. His mother has just died; his father, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gets arrested; and hes married to a woman he doesnt love. Keeping Andrew sane is his beloved camera through which he captures the many Torontonians who ride in his taxi.

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.