Subjectivity is a central concept in post-seventeenth century Western thought. Stories about subjectivity concern a crucial figure in the modern West the subject. This subject is required to do an enormous amount of work. It plays essential roles in philosophy and politics. Philosophically, the subject grounds, represents or generates knowledge and our accounts of it. Politically, the subject grounds the possibility of freedom freedom from determination and domination, freedom to be self-determining and sovereign. As old ways of understanding subjectivity are thrown into doubt, crises of representation, interpretation, knowledge, power and legitimacy intensify. Contemporary psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodernist theorists both reflect and contribute to these crises.

The Body and Society

Multiples: On the contemporary politics of subjectivity

The dabki is a folkloric dance enacted by Lebanese migrants in Australia. This paper examines this dance and shows that it is invested with many issues pertaining to the harsh realities of Lebanese migrants in Australia. In doing so, it criticises the reified understanding of the dabki that reduces it to a mere spectacle and a metaphor for Lebanese identity. Our analysis of the dabki shows the irreducible complexity of this cultural practice deriving from social processes that surround its production. These processes pertaining to the experience of displacement, discrimination and a change in gender and class relations result in imputing new meanings to the dabki and transforming some of its formal aspects. Overall, these changes alter the dabki and make it a site of contradictory investments: an object of intrusive gaze by the dominant culture, a strategy of building the unity of the Lebanese community, a symbolic reversal of inequality between the migrant and the host society, a site of changing class a...

The Cultural and Affective Logic of the Dabki: A Study of a Lebanese Folkloric Dance in Australia

This study considers social contexts in which complementary and biomedical health care providers practice in common organizational structures. The empirical data are drawn from Israel where there has been an ongoing proliferation in the number and variety of practitioners as well as in the consumers of complementary medicine.

The Body and Society

Citations

Multiples: On the contemporary politics of subjectivity

The Cultural and Affective Logic of the Dabki: A Study of a Lebanese Folkloric Dance in Australia

Collaborative Relationships of Alternative Practitioners and Physicians in Israel: An Exploratory Study:

Der ärztliche Habitus in Venezuela

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