Two years of living abroad, two years of stories, encounters, and self-discovery. These are tales from everywhere but home. After graduating college, Phil Rosen dropped everything, packed up, and moved to Hong Kong. He launched a travel blog and ventured all over Southeast Asia, meeting people, seeing places, and writing about it all the while. Travelogues of different countries alternate with chapters that raise questions of self-discovery, purpose and finding meaning as a recent college graduate. There are stories from Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Bali, and more. With each chapter, Phil seems to get closer and closer to answering the question "What are college graduates really supposed to do in life?"
The title of this book is a phrase often used to describe the fate of the Jewish people in the world and invokes one of the central arguments for the creation of the state of Israel. In this thoughtful collection of essays, Kim Chernin suggests that the Zionist struggle has left the Palestinian people in a similar predicament; now they, too, are merely guests in their former homeland. Confronting her own uncritical support of Israel, Chernin tries to reconcile her desire for a Jewish homeland with the reality of the violence carried out in order to secure it. Following an in-depth examination of the perspectives of both Jews and Palestinians, Chernin writes eloquently of the process by which she gradually learned to hear once-ignored Palestinian voices. By combining her knowledge of Jewish history with her insights as a psychotherapist, Chernin discovers the psychological mechanisms that have kept her and other Jews from fully comprehending the suffering of both parties in this seemingly endless conflict. She argues persuasively that by overcoming the mental blocks that prevent so many from seeing the Palestinian point of view, Jews can learn to feel empathy for them without diminishing their love and support for Israel.
As a young man living in rural Kansas in the 1940s, Charles Novak took a job with the federal government--not because he liked the work but because he heard it paid well. That job shaped his life in ways he could never have imagined. As a surveyor for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Charles was tasked with measuring the unmapped American landscape. Over the years this would take him from being eaten up by mosquitoes in Alaska, to eating steak and lobster on oil rigs in Louisiana. His career became even more adventurous when his family later hit the road with him, making their home in a caravan of trailers as the survey team traversed the nation. The measurements taken by Charles and the team eventually helped build today's GPS technology. But such a contribution was the furthest thing from the minds of Charles and his family as they experienced life on the road during a time of astounding change in American life. From segregated trains, to Cold War military bases, and back to Kansas, Charles's family found that home is more than a place on a map.
German biologist Jakob von Uexküll focused on how an animal, through its behavioral relations, both impacts and is impacted by its own unique environment. Onto-Ethologies traces the influence of Uexküll's ideas on the thought of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze, as they explore how animal behavior might be said to approximate, but also differ from, human behavior. It is the relation between animal and environment that interests Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, and yet it is the differences in their approach to Uexküll (and to concepts such as world, body, and affect) that prove so fascinating. This book explores the ramifications of these encounters, including how animal life both broadens and deepens the ontological significance of their respective philosophies.
This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.
A collection of spontaneous "satsangs," or truths, spoken from Sri H. W. L. Poonja's experience of the highest and yet simplest truth: that we are pure love and consciousness, the totality of existence. Reveals thousands of ways to help us inquire into who we really are, to bring our awareness into the infinity of the moment, and surrender to the wisdom of our Truth.
Reading Autoethnography situates autoethnographic insights within the context of two fundamental concerns of critical qualitative inquiry: justice and love. Through philosophical engagement, it gives close readings of written passages taken from leading autoethnographers and frames the philosophical project of autoethnography as one that is both political and interpersonal. It does this to highlight how autoethnographic lessons can allow us to think through how we may achieve a flourishing for all — something that is both related to justice as it pertains to the political, and when situations are in excess of justice, related to love as it pertains to feeling at home in the world with others. As such, this book will be of interest to those who have a burgeoning interest in autoethnography and seasoned autoethnographers alike; anyone interested in critical qualitative inquiry as a discourse promoting justice and love; and any scholar who has encountered the ethical question of: "What ought we do?"
While our world is characterized by mobility, global interactions, and increasing knowledge, we are facing serious challenges regarding the knowledge of the places around us. We understand and navigate our surroundings by relying on advanced technologies. Yet, a truly knowledgeable relationship to the places where we live and visit is lacking. This book proposes that we are utterly lost and that the loss of a sense of place has contributed to different crises, such as the environmental crisis, the immigration crisis, and poverty. With a rising number of environmental, political, and economic displacements the topic of place becomes more and more relevant and philosophy has to take up this topic in more serious ways than it has done so far. To counteract this problem, the book provides suggestions for how to think differently, both about ourselves, our relationship to other people, and to the places around us. It ends with a suggestion of how to understand ourselves in an eco-political community, one of humans and other living beings as well as inanimate objects. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of environmental ethics and philosophy as well as those interested in the environmental humanities more generally.
Home and exile have become key discussions in discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, identity, and multiculturalism. These discourses can be expected to flourish in the future as an increasing number of multicultural scholars struggle with various kinds of displacements and the meaning of home that is thereby instantiated anew as we experience living in between cultures. This book sits in the intersection between cultural studies and performance studies. It seeks to break theoretical and empirical ground by reframing understandings of home and exile. Popular notions of exile forwarded by transnational and postcolonial scholars position home as a place of return and longing. While we believe that there are many truths in this position, we performatively seek emergent forms of displacement that are demanding new frameworks with which to enact meanings of home and exile. As Third World immigrant scholars in Western academe, we believe our move is vital in order to explore the experiences of persons, such as ourselves, who fall outside the models of displacement that have long constituted émigré writings. We define this move as a performative one because we experiment with different genres and voices to question and reproblematize existing understandings of knowledge frames. The genres we embody include performative writing, dialogue, autoethnography, essay form, personal narrative, and so on. Our goal is to address theories, stories, and pedagogies that speak to our tribulations in negotiating such intellectual displacements. This book can be an ideal supplementary text for courses in cultural studies as every chapter speaks in performative, reflexive, and storied ways to our own struggles to find real and theoretical homes. It will therefore have relevance to many departments in the humanities, including Communication Studies, English, Cultural Studies, Education, Anthropology, Sociology, and Women's Studies. In fact, this book serves the heuristic function of inspiring new research questions and demonstrating how a wide range of theories and research methods can be employed to enact discourses of home and exile.
Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways. But they have often not been attentive enough to locals’ horizons of concern and to the enormous disparity in population size between these groups and other societies. Us, Relatives explores how scalar blindness skews our understanding of these cultures and the debates they inspire. Drawing on her long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers, Nurit Bird-David provides a scale-sensitive ethnography of these people as she encountered them in the late 1970s and reflects on the intellectual journey that led her to new understandings of their lifeways and horizons. She elaborates on indigenous modes of “being many” that have been eclipsed by scale-blind anthropology, which generally uses its large-scale conceptual language of persons, relations, and ethnic groups for even tiny communities. Through the idea of pluripresence, Bird-David reveals a mode of plural life that encompasses a diversity of humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared life. She argues that this mode of belonging subverts the modern ontological touchstone of “imagined communities,” rooted not in sameness among dispersed strangers but in intimacy among relatives of infinite diversity.
