Nature Embodied
Nature Embodied

Author: Anthony Corbeill

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0691187800

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Bodily gesture. A Roman worshipper spins in a circle in front of a temple. Faced with death, a Roman woman tears her hair and beats her breasts. Enthusiastic spectators at a gladiatorial event gesticulate with thumbs. Examining the tantalizing glimpses of ancient bodies offered by surviving Roman sculptures, paintings, and literary texts, Anthony Corbeill analyzes the role of gesture in medical and religious ritual, in the gladiatorial arena, in mourning practice, in aristocratic competition of the late Republic, and in the court of the emperor Tiberius. Adopting approaches from anthropology, gender studies, and ecological theory, Nature Embodied offers both a series of case studies and an overarching narrative of the role and meanings of gesture in ancient Rome. Arguing that bodily movement grew out of the relationship between Romans and their natural, social, and spiritual environment, the book explores the ways in which an originally harmonious relationship between nature and the body was manipulated as Rome became socially and politically complex. By the time that Tacitus was writing about the reign of Tiberius, the emergence of a new political order had prompted an increasingly inscrutable equation between truth and the body--and something vital in the once harmonizing relationship between bodies and the world beyond them had been lost. Nature Embodied makes an important contribution to an expanding field of research by offering a new theoretical model for the study of gesture in classical times.

Embodied Collective Memory
Embodied Collective Memory

Author: Rafael F. Narváez

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2012-12-16

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0761858806

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The human body is not a given fact; it is not, as Descartes believed, a “machine made up of flesh and bones.” The body is acquired, achieved, and learned. It is thus full of mimetic and mnemonic implications. The body remembers, and it does so in collectively relevant ways. Gestures, corporeal and phonetic rhythms, affective idioms, and emotional styles — perceptual, sensorial, motoric, and affective schemata — are all largely learned in shared social contexts. These aspects of the embodied experience are often consigned to habit, to bodily automatisms, and to corporeal memories that reflect aspects of culture. But if the body reflects certain aspects of culture that press to become naturalized and organically attached to social actors, it also resists these kinds of cultural pressures. These adaptive and resistive dynamics, as this book shows, are not without consequences for individuals and groups. These processes can result in both advantages and disadvantages for social actors. They can take us toward certain futures while foreclosing others. It is therefore necessary to understand how, why, and to what extent corporeal memories are constructed but also resisted, modified, or created anew.

Strange Tools
Strange Tools

Author: Alva Noë

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1429945257

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A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Nature's Body
Nature's Body

Author: Londa L. Schiebinger

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780813535319

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Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.

Bodies of Nature
Bodies of Nature

Author: Phil Macnaghten

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2001-08-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0857022741

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This book examines the embodied nature of people′s experience in, and of, the modern world. It is therefore part of the deep-seated ′turn towards the body′. However, it is partly critical of this development in as much as it affirms that the sociology of the body has downplayed the extent to which the body is located in, and involved with, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape and wilderness. The book argues that bodies in nature are subject to novel, complex and contradictory opportunities of freedom and escape, surveillance and monitoring. The book guides readers through the various ways in which these bodily opportunities and constraints are temporally and spatially organized and managed.

The Virtual Embodied
The Virtual Embodied

Author: John Wood

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780415140058

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Intended to inform, provoke and delight, this book explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge, space, virtue and virtuality to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence.

Learning from the Left
Learning from the Left

Author: Julia L. Mickenberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-11-10

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 019988238X

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At the height of the Cold War, dozens of radical and progressive writers, illustrators, editors, librarians, booksellers, and teachers cooperated to create and disseminate children's books that challenged the status quo. Learning from the Left provides the first historic overview of their work. Spanning from the 1920s, when both children's book publishing and American Communism were becoming significant on the American scene, to the late 1960s, when youth who had been raised on many of the books in this study unequivocally rejected the values of the Cold War, Learning from the Left shows how "radical" values and ideas that have now become mainstream (including cooperation, interracial friendship, critical thinking, the dignity of labor, feminism, and the history of marginalized people), were communicated to children in repressive times. A range of popular and critically acclaimed children's books, many by former teachers and others who had been blacklisted because of their political beliefs, made commonplace the ideas that McCarthyism tended to call "subversive." These books, about history, science, and contemporary social conditions-as well as imaginative works, science fiction, and popular girls' mystery series-were readily available to children: most could be found in public and school libraries, and some could even be purchased in classrooms through book clubs that catered to educational audiences. Drawing upon extensive interviews, archival research, and hundreds of children's books published from the 1920s through the 1970s, Learning from the Left offers a history of the children's book in light of the history of the history of the Left, and a new perspective on the links between the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s. Winner of the Grace Abbott Book Prize of the Society for the History of Children and Youth