The Human Condition.
TL;DR: In some religious traditions, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness.
Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:
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TL;DR: The authors examines the temporal logics of contemporary disaster management and argues that disaster management projects a shallow future whose indeterminacy does not stimulate aspiration toward transcendence of the given, but rather motivates an endless procedural loop of anticipation and pre-emption to delay the destruction of the present order.
Abstract: This essay examines the temporal logics of contemporary disaster management. I discuss episodes from the expansion of the global disaster management complex—in the United States after WWII, and in Indonesia after the New Order—to characterize the form of futurity established through the technocratic administration of systematically-envisioned catastrophe. Disaster management projects a shallow future whose indeterminacy does not stimulate aspiration toward transcendence of the given, but rather motivates an endless procedural loop of anticipation and pre-emption in order to delay the destruction of the present order. Disaster management thus refashions “action” as the postponement of the future, and in doing so explicates a basic but neglected temporality of liberalism—that of vigilance toward continually-renewed danger.
13 citations
Additional excerpts
...Consider, for example, the work of Hannah Arendt, whose oeuvre offers an extreme instance of the modernist impulse to specify action in relation to futurity....
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...Consider, for example, the work of Hannah Arendt, whose oeuvre offers an extreme instance of the modernist impulse to specify action in relation to futurity. The first sentences of her Human Condition (1958) divide human activity into the ideal categories of labor, work, and action, with each corresponding to a fundamental register of human existence....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the concepts of interference and haunting illuminate how pasts and futures interact so that the past and the future interact in a way that is new to anthropology, and the concept of interference is introduced to anthropology.
Abstract: I consider three ways of thinking about time, especially the future, that are new to anthropology. The concepts of interference and haunting illuminate how pasts and futures interact so that consid...
13 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigates the meaning of food smells for issues of urban citizenship in the context of urban renewal in Mumbai and finds that the most prestigious and luxurious new apartments are sold exclusively to vegetarians.
Abstract: This paper inquires into the meaning of food – specifically of food smells – for issues of urban citizenship in the context of urban renewal in Mumbai. The city’s southern neighbourhoods are currently being transformed by a process of chawl-redevelopment. Chawl-redevelopment is the primary governmental tool to open these areas up for new residential developments by demolishing old structures and constructing new high-rise enclaves for the rich, while simultaneously promising to provide in situ rehousing to the old, lower middle-class residents. A common feature of these new building complexes is that the most prestigious and luxurious new apartments are sold exclusively to vegetarians. While segregation between vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the real estate market is anything but a new phenomenon in Indian cities, I argue that both popular understandings of this practice and scholarly debates about citizenship fall short of grasping its complexity by essentializing affects or effects of food-based exc...
13 citations
TL;DR: This essay is the honorary “Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture” for 2015, presented at the International Communication Association meetings in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 23 May 2015.
Abstract: This essay is the honorary “Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture” for 2015, presented at the International Communication Association meetings in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 23 May 2015. Internet technology is understood in social terms not just as tools. As a social/cultural phenomenon, the new media’s core ethical norm arguably becomes social justice. The global dynamics of the Internet system requires an international definition of justice as intrinsic worthiness, rather than the standard idea of justice as right-order legality determined by nation-state conventions. This understanding of justice is defended against relativism which claims that values are culture specific.
13 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...In the history of ideas, a prominent example of primary justice as inherent in our humanity is Hannah Arendt’s (1958) The Human Condition. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the concept of caritas in Augustine, under the philosopher Karl Jaspers (Arendt, 1996 [1929])....
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...In the history of ideas, a prominent example of primary justice as inherent in our humanity is Hannah Arendt’s (1958) The Human Condition....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe how the streets of Athens have been flaring up in scenes of protest for some time now, from the December 2008 "riots" to the Indignant protests and after the 2011 "Indignant protests".
Abstract: Athens for some time now has been an important site for civic protest. From the December 2008 ‘riots’ to the Indignant protests and after the streets of Athens have been flaring up in scenes of tur...
13 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Sticking with this social contract tradition, Arendt has argued about the importance of making and keeping promises (Arendt, 1958: 237)....
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...For Despoina, the infiltration of the movement by certain political ideologies was enough to make her stop participating in the protests....
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...Consequently, the aim of Arendt’s political hermeneutic phenomenology is to ‘save the appearances’ (Borren, 2010: 42) of political events, as they unfold in particular times and spaces (Arendt, 1958: 198), not only through their descriptive analysis, but also, by interpreting their meaning(s)....
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...This faculty of making promises is what sustains the power ‘generated when people gather together and act in concert’ (Arendt, 1958: 244) creating ‘islands of predictability’ and acting as ‘certain guideposts of reliability’ (Arendt, 1958: 244); the only thing is that promises have to be kept....
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...For Douzinas (2010), this revolt brought to the fore what was up to then ‘invisible, unspoken and unspeakable’ (Douzinas, 2010: 276)....
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References
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Book•
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27 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human are presented, with a focus on the life of lines.
Abstract: To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.
In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there.
In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere.
In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social.
This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.
410 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the fact that gender equality and women empowerment have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice.
Abstract: The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed, which can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.
271 citations
TL;DR: A network simulation model used to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions.
Abstract: The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media
223 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance and found that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision.
215 citations
TL;DR: The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies.
Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrialscale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.
204 citations