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:
Citations
More filters
Book•
[...]
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
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...The disappearance of media intermediation seems not to have, as was believed, fostered a space for direct meetings in a sort of online Habermasian public sphere, but rather to have implied that the “world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them” [6] (p....
[...]
...But despite early optimism about this ostensibly decentralized and democratic meetingplace, the online world seems less and less like a common “table” that “gathers us together” [6] (p....
[...]
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
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Drawing on the communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958), we propose that humble CEOs do not stress power over other TMT members but, instead, have power to pursue goals for collective interest with the TMTs....
[...]
...In this sense, humble CEOs exercise power in a way that diverts from an interpersonal power perspective (Sturm & Antonakis, 2015) and complies with a communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958)....
[...]
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
References
More filters
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied online activities of mourners and the illness stricken, but also and more profoundly, the internet itself, become literal lifelines, both individual and collective.
Abstract: This essay aims to shed light on two online phenomena dominated by women in the contemporary Swedish context—blogs about terminal illness and support groups for the bereaved—and explore what they mean for those afflicted by suffering and loss. We will show that in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative itself is cut off because of imminent or sudden death—the studied online activities of mourners and the illness stricken, but also and more profoundly, the internet itself, become literal lifelines, both individual and collective. When they assume a salvific vital role this entails both possibilities and predicaments. Studying various renditions of lifeline communication both enables a re-conceptualization of our culture of connectivity as an existential and ambivalent terrain and requires an “upgrading” of the existential to our contemporary technological culture. In forging existential philosophy and the new materialism into a productive, if not tensionless, conver...
29 citations
31 Aug 2017
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the concept of voice should be seen as a political commons that has been expropriated from people in three ways: as a resource that is no longer relevant for the way neoliberal democracies are run; as a relationship curtailed by flawed space of mediation; and ultimately as a form of entitlement.
Abstract: This thesis is an in depth analysis of the communicative and media practices displayed by the Chilean students movement, in 2011, and the way these practices contributed to the building of a commons with capacity for the political to exist in Chilean neoliberal democracy. The thesis interrogates the concept of the commons and in the process questions literature on democracy, social movements, and media and communication studies. I argue that in the context of the Chilean student movement the concept of voice should be seen as a political commons that has been expropriated from people in three ways: as a resource that is no longer relevant for the way neoliberal democracies are run; as a relationship curtailed by flawed space of mediation; and ultimately as a form of entitlement. Under these conditions, this thesis investigates the ways in which the commons of voice can be rendered from below and the political can be opened up in spite of the hollowing out of democracies in (neo)liberal times.
Embracing a qualitative approach involving interviews and focus groups to approach participants and thematic analysis and grounded theory to analyse data, the research presents four communicative and media practices: the knitting of trust in the intimacy of households and walled spaces; the displaying and representing of bodies in the urban realm; the construction of an imagined commons and the confronting of adversaries in mainstream media; the diffusing of information on the Internet and the failings of communicative exchanges on the web. These practices show the construction of a momentary commons based on practices of affection, presence, ideological dispute and collective identification that subverted neoliberal logics of coexistence, albeit for only a short period of time. The thesis hopes to provide insights that point towards the overcoming of the limitations of the communicative ecology of neoliberal democracies for a more lasting political imprint as well as imagining how politics might be done better from daily life landscapes and beyond outdated liberal frameworks.
29 citations
Dissertation•
01 Oct 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a recent approach to writing compositions for the ensemble performance of computer music based on experimental music and improvisation, and highlight their engagement with Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ideology and community.
Abstract: This commentary describes my recent approach to writing compositions for the ensemble performance of computer music. Drawing on experimental music and improvisation, I contend that such music is best considered in terms of people’s situated and relational interplay. The compositional and performative question that permeates this thesis is ‘what can we do, in this time and space, with these tools available to us?’.
As themes of equality and egalitarian access underpin this work throughout, I highlight my engagement with Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ideology and community, reflecting on how this achieves my aims. I describe my writing of text score compositions, making use of the term bounded improvisation, whose purposeful requirements for indeterminate realisation extends most current computer-based performance practice. Though no single strand of this research is perhaps unusual by itself, such an assemblage as that outlined above (incorporating composition, computer coding and ensemble performance practice) is, when allied to an understanding of electronic and computer music praxis, currently an underdeveloped approach. Such an approach I have thus chosen to term free open computer music.
I incorporate two further pre-existing conceptual formulations to present a framework for constructing, reflecting on, and developing my work in this field. Firstly flow or 'immersed experience' is useful to explicate difficult to capture aspects of instrumental engagement and ensemble performance. Secondly, this portfolio of scores aims to produce well-constructed situations, facilitating spaces of flow which contain within their environments the opportunity for an event to take place.
I present the outcomes of my practice as place-forming tactics that catalyse something to do, but not what to do, in performative spaces such as those described above. Such intentions define my aims for composition. These theoretical concerns, together with an allied consideration of the underpinning themes highlighted above, is a useful framework for refection and evaluation of this work.
29 citations
03 Nov 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the relationship between the meaning of the trabajo asalariado and the construccion de identidad in the Grecia of hoy.
Abstract: Estudios en varias disciplinas de las ciencias sociales han senalado que se esta desarrollando una despolitizacion estrategica del trabajo remunerado, junto con la constitucion del sujeto como emprendedor autosuficiente y la remodelacion de sociedad de acuerdo con los principios del mercado. Desde una perspectiva critica, esta tesis doctoral se centra en el punto de union entre la configuracion discursiva del significado del trabajo y la construccion de identidad, en la Grecia de hoy. Mas especificamente, explora las formas en las que los empleados griegos construyen el trabajo asalariado en su habla, las redes de significados en las que sus construcciones se basan y sus posibles implicaciones en un nivel micro- y macrosocial. En la misma linea, ilumina las posiciones subjetivas que los individuos adoptan en su comunicacion coloquial, asi como los discursos que han logrado establecer sus definiciones de la relacion laboral como evidentes. El estudio utilizo un diseno de investigacion cualitativa. En este marco, llevamos a cabo 22 entrevistas semiestructuradas en profundidad con 11 mujeres y 11 hombres, entre 23-43 anos; las sesiones de entrevistas fueron enriquecidas con material visual generado por los participantes, quienes contribuyeron con fotografias tomadas por ellos, respondiendo a la pregunta: "?Que significa para ti ser un empleado?". Las entrevistas fueron grabadas y se analizaron discursivamente fragmentos seleccionados, a partir de perspectivas socio-construccionistas, en base de premisas post-estructuralistas sobre el uso de lenguaje, el sujeto y lo social. En cuanto a la configuracion discursiva del si como empleado, se identificaron tres patrones discursivos contextualmente performados y flexibles; los llamamos: el "empresario de si mismo", el "determinado socio-economicamente", y el "centrado en la profesion". En cuanto a los recursos discursivos mobilizados en el habla sobre el trabajo asalariado, se identificaron tres repertorios interpretativos: la "escuela", el "viaje" y la "esclavitud", manteniendo diferentes presuposiciones sobre la identidad y las relaciones sociales. Mediante la identificacion de patrones de comunicacion en el nivel local, nuestro estudio tambien llama la atencion sobre las redes de conocimiento y poder mas amplias, que permiten que estas practicas argumentativas resulten inteligibles; se podria argumentar que, aunque las formulaciones discursivas neoliberales y capitalocentricas parecen haber establecido sus significaciones como naturales, existen tambien discursos contra-hegemonicos, liberando espacios para la promulgacion de identidades alternativas.
29 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a rethinking of community through a re-emphasis on the communal, that is the action of communing, and through this, upon relationality and sociality as primary for social analysis.
Abstract: This special issue started life as a seminar organized under the auspices of the Sociological Review. Entitled ‘Towards a Micro-sociality of Austerity: Community and Possibilities for Localism’, it was held in Cardiff in April 2014. Its aim was to rethink social scientific approaches to community. By making sociality and being-ness the centre of an approach to community, this special issue seeks to ask what it would mean to rethink our approach to community and in the process imagine a social sciences where community was both the key term and starting point. This rethinking owes a great deal to the work of David Studdert, who has consistently sought to challenge existing conceptualizations of, and approaches to, community (Studdert, 2006; Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016). In critiquing what he calls ‘the state/individual axis’, Studdert has proposed a rethinking of community through a re-emphasis on the communal, that is the action of communing, and through this, upon relationality and sociality as primary for social analysis. At first, he described this as micro-sociality (Studdert, 2006), but it was agreed that this begged the question of the macro and thus this was dropped in favour of an understanding of sociality as primary. Given that this was the term in use during the seminar, this term is referred to by many of the contributors to this issue. It is important also to mention the context of the renewed interest in and funding of community research within the UK in recent years. The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Programme championed and funded research across the arts, humanities and social sciences, focusing on communities. At one point in the programme, they also championed research co-produced with communities, which they called ‘co design and co-creation’, a very bold step for an academically oriented research council. Several of the authors in this special issue had research funded in this way or in ways related to it. In creating this programme, the AHRC made new kinds of research innovation in relation to community, possible.
29 citations