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Individual Subjectivity (individual + subjectivity)
Selected AbstractsMediating "The Voice of the Spirit": Musical and religious transformations in Nigeria's oil boomAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010VICKI L. BRENNAN ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a musical recording made by a Yoruba Christian church in the context of Nigeria's oil boom in the 1970s. I focus on the recording as a node of mediation: a site at which multiple forms of mediation converge to bring together institutional orders and individual subjectivities. Those responsible for the recording drew on meaningful cultural forms,in this case, religion, music, and electronic media,to make authoritative claims about morality and experience in the context of profound social change. I seek to understand how religious groups use media to create links between political-economic transformations and individual experience. [Nigeria, Christianity, mediation, music, religious authority, political economy] [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 5.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2010October 2010 Front and back cover caption, volume 26 issue 5 Front cover RETHINKING SUICIDE BOMBING The body is a key focus for anthropological research and analysis. The cover photographs highlight the way multiple aspects of life, including political life, are mapped onto the body, and the emergence of a collective, as well as individual, identity through these experiences. The front cover shows a young Palestinian boy staring at an Israeli guard's gun, inches from his face, while waiting at the Abu Dis checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Although the scene is calm, the photograph captures an implicit violence (any step out of line can and will be punished) and reveals the daily reality of political and structural violence in the lives of Palestinians. In this image, the child can be seen as an individual who may experience personal trauma as a result of these daily encounters with violence. But he can also be seen as representing a collective Palestinian body which, under the occupation, is humiliated and forced into a childlike position, with daily decisions, including over movement, entirely in the control of Israeli forces. In her article in this issue, Natalia Linos calls on anthropology to offer a critical analysis of suicide bombing and examine the central role of the body in this act. She posits that in a context of political and structural violence that encroaches on both individual and group identity, suicide attacks may be considered an extreme form of reclaiming the violated body through self-directed violence. Through suicide attacks in public spaces, the body may be used to contest physical barriers imposed by an oppressor, resist power imbalances, and reclaim authority over one's body as well as geographical space. Back cover ASSEMBLING BODIES The back cover shows a South African ,body map', on display at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) until 6 November 2010 as part of the exhibition ,Assembling bodies: Art, science and imagination', reviewed in this issue. This self-portrait by Babalwa depicts her life as an activist and epitomizes the ethical and political negotiations that surround definition and treatment of particular bodies in contemporary South Africa. Babalwa was a member of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which successfully campaigned for the widespread availability of antiretroviral treatment therapies. Her self-portrait is one of a series of life-sized body maps made by members of the Bambanani Womens Group in 2003, as part of a project documenting the lives of women with HIV/AIDS. The body maps and associated narratives trace the co-existence of multiple ways of understanding and experiencing bodies and disease in these women's lives. The imagery , referring to family and friends, political life, biomedical science, anatomical details, moral pollution and religious beliefs , suggests many bodies existing within a single corporeal form. In addition to revealing individual subjectivities, the body maps also highlight the shifting dynamics of sociality. Behind each self-portrait is the outline of another shadowy form, a reminder of the help received and the potential for future support. [source] Boredom, "Trouble," and the Realities of Postcolonial Reservation LifeETHOS, Issue 1 2003Assistant professor Lori L. Jervis Perhaps because of its reputation as an inconsequential emotion, the significance of boredom in human social life has often been minimized if not ignored. Boredom has been theoretically linked to modernity, affluence, and the growing problem of filling "leisure time. "It has also been attributed to the expansion of individualism with its heightened expectations of personal gratification. Whether a reaction to the sensation ofunderstimulation or "overload," boredom appears to be, ultimately, a problem of meaning. In this article, we consider the applicability of these notions to the contemporary American Indian reservation context, examining discourse about boredom as expressed in interviews with members of a northern plains tribe. Of special interest is how boredom figures into the phenomenon of "trouble" (e.g., alcohol and drug abuse, violence, and illegal activities). Although boredom is certainly familiar to various strata of contemporary U.S. society,and arguably part of what it means to be human,we propose that the realities of postcolonial reservation life provide an especially fertile and undertheorized breeding ground for this condition, and our examination of the relationship between boredom and trouble suggests that boredom's implications for both individual subjectivity and group sociality are far from trivial. [source] Masculinity and the Biographical Meanings of Management Theory: Lyndall Urwick and the Making of Scientific Management in Inter-war BritainGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 2 2001Michael Roper This article explores the biographical shaping of management theory. Using the British management theorist Lyndall Urwick (1891,1983) as a case study, it argues that existing understandings of the history of management studies are limited by their lack of attention to the emotional a priori of theory production. For men such as Frederick Taylor or Urwick, the work of composing management theory for a public audience was intimately connected to events and experiences in the private life. Theorizing addressed emotional dilemmas even while it strove to construct a separation between the personal and the organizational. Management theories are not only historically, socially or discursively constructed, but can be read in terms of the evidence they provide about individual subjectivity. Psychoanalytic concepts can help illuminate such relations. Theorizing can be seen as a form of play: as something which, in D.W. Winnicott's terms, takes place in the space between the psychic reality of the ,me' and the external world of the ,not me'. The ,classical' administrative theory represented by Taylor, Fayol and Urwick sought to create organizational structures which could stand apart from, and allow the management of, individual personalities. It simultaneously insisted on the status of theory as the ,not me'; that is, as a product which was not shaped by personal experience, but which constituted objective knowledge. The illusion of theory as a largely external, social product persists in much management and organization studies today. This article challenges that social determinism, first, by showing how Urwick's theories addressed issues of separation and intimacy, and second, by placing Urwick's work in the context of his relations with women. [source] Is there a place for individual subjectivity within a social constructionist epistemology?JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY, Issue 4 2010Sim Roy-Chowdhury The epistemological turn towards social constructionism has become well established within the field of family systemic therapy. Social constructionism has provided therapists with a theoretical rationale for the concentration upon the social context within which individuals and families live their lives. This is a philosophical position that pushes to the margins the positivist premise that individuals have fixed and measurable personalities in favour of a discourse which proposes that the person is encountered differently within different social contexts. Prompted by the growing interest in systemic practice with individuals and by the rediscovery of the psychoanalytic canon within family therapy literature, the adequacy of this position is examined and an attempt is made to open up a space within social constructionist discourse for a theory of individual subjectivity. Findings from a research project are the starting point for this venture. These findings are understood through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, with particular reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. [source] Visual imagery and historical invisibility: Antonia Torelli, her husband, and his mistress in fifteenth-century ParmaRENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 3 2009Timothy McCall Antonia Torelli, married to the signore Pier Maria Rossi, remains historically invisible, generally ignored by scholars and obscured by the frescoed image of Rossi's mistress Bianca Pellegrini decorating Torrechiara castle, south of Parma. In this paper, I investigate the networks and spaces of power, at once personal and multilineal, that Torelli accessed, navigated, and created. Antonia's wealth enabled her to exercise considerable authority and to foster remarkable patronage in and around Parma while living between convent and cittą. Though her construction of camere at San Paolo, for instance, is significant in the context of interventions by the Rossi and Torelli in Parma's ecclesiastical networks, it is of even greater art historical importance when viewed as originating a series of aristocratic apartments at the convent culminating in Giovanna da Piacenza's camera painted by Correggio. Modern constructions of individual subjectivity, together with bourgeois notions of family and heteronormative love, have defined Antonia and Pier Maria as autonomous subjects acting only according to personal desires (read through an efficacious campaign of chivalric imagery); this study, however, underscores Antonia's agency and power even in the face of her ostensible representational absence and historical invisibility. [source] | ||||||||||