Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Sensuous (Re)Collections: The Sight and Taste of Socialism at Grūtas Statue Park,Lithuania

ABSTRACT

The present paper is about Grūtas, a Lithuanian park—museum featuring recuperated Soviet-era artifacts. This museum is examined as a locus of public memory where the nation's socialist history is invoked through visual representations (recovered statuary) and by implicating the sense of taste (“Soviet” drinks and dishes served at the museum's café). The paper suggests that seeing the Socialist past at Grūtas activates memories of trauma and loss, while tasting that past summons up more nostalgic reminiscences. It is further argued that this museum constitutes a visual and gustatory critique of Lithuania's increasingly commodified and “modernized” present. It is also proposed that collective memory in today's Eastern Europe affords a productive ethnographic site in which to investigate the ongoing systemic transformations in the aftermath of communist rule.     

Realism and Contingency

This paper constitutes an extended response to Athanasia Chalari's paper The Causal Impact of Resistance, which suggests that one may derive from internal conversations a causal explanation of resistance. In the context of our engagements with critical realism and digital research into social movements, we review Chalari's main argument, before applying it to a concrete case: the student protests in London, 2010. Whilst our account is sympathetic to Chalari's focus on interiority, we critique the individualism that is implicit in her argument, arguing that it emerges because of an underlying neglect of the relational aspects of resistance. Instead, we offer a relational realist analysis that treats resistance as process within an ontologically stratified account of reality that is mindful of the contingency of political acts. Taking this route, we establish resistance as an emergent relation, generative of distinctive “relational goods” in the context of collective action, which we locate at different levels of reality, as we move from an analysis of individual to collective reflexivity. In doing so we offer a sympathetic critique of Chalari, building on the thought provoking arguments contained within it, whilst also making a contribution to the theorisation of social movements and the “relational turn” within realist social theory (Archer, 2010, 2012).     

Let's not get tied into knots: a response to Newman, (2018)—Vygotsky,Wittgenstein and sociocultural theory

The September 2018 issue of this journal included an article by Newman, (2018) that challenges research carried out on second language acquisition (henceforth, SCT‐L2) informed by the psychological theory proposed by L. S. Vygotsky. We would like to respond to Newman's critique, which he problematizes as three “knots” that he then undertakes to untie through analysis of Vygotsky's writings contained in Vygotsky's two most popular works, Thought and Language and Mind in Society. We first summarize Newman's knots and his approach to untying them. We then present our response to each of these in turn.     

Xun Zi’s Image across the Qin-Han Period: Three Types of Discourse on a “Great Confucian” and Their Significance in Intellectual History

Abstract

This article scrutinizes three texts about Xun Zi written during the Qin-Han period: the final part of “The Questions of Yao” in the Xunzi, a rebuttal by one of Xun Zi’s disciples of the idea that Xun Zi was inferior to Confucius; “Mencius and Xun Zi” by Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian; and the Annotated Book of the Xunzi by Liu Xiang. We explore the images of Xun Zi as a great Confucian (大儒) that emerge from these texts, as well as their authors’ motives for writing. These texts are understood within three contexts: first, the self-identification of a Confucian; second, the dispute between Confucianism and Daoism; and lastly, the distinction between the classics and the annals and biographies. Due to their different discourse environments, Xun Zi’s great Confucian image project a different significance in each: in one, he is a model of action who can act in accordance with perfected morality; in another, he is a model of “private words,” who can counter the philosophers of his day and become the teacher of kings; and finally, he is a model of “official learning,” able to use his knowledge of the classics in practical statecraft and elucidate the kingly Way. Overall, these three texts represent three types of discourse on a great Confucian. At the same time, they also exhibit their writers’ consciousness of their times and their views of the genealogy of daotong, or transmission of the Way; hence their significance for intellectual history.     

The Meaning of Meaning in Sociology. The Achievements and Shortcomings of Alfred Schutz's Phenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology was founded at the beginning of 1930s by Alfred Schutz. His mundane phenomenology sought to combine impulses drawn from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Weber's action theory. It was made famous at the turn of 1960s and 1970s by Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Berger & Luckmann's social constructionism. This paper deals with the notable accomplishments of Schutz and his followers and then proceeds to a shared shortcoming, which is that the phenomenological approach is unable to understand meaning in any other way but as actors's knowledge. Therefore, phenomenological sociologists are forced to describe the actor's interpretations of meaning as transparent to the actor him/herself, even if they sometimes make heroic attempts to escape the limitations of the phenomenological conception. The limitation is apparent in Husserl's and Schutz's definition of meaning as a “reflective intentional act”, Garfinkel's use of the term “accounting” to refer to a signifying effect, and the way Berger and Luckmann describe their social theory as “sociology of knowledge”. Today, similar confusions are present in Michael Polanyi's “tacit knowledge”and in Giddens' structuration theory.     

Measuring Support Provisions for People Living With Disabilities in South Asia: An Accessibility Index

ABSTRACT

The terms “empowerment,” “rights,” and “inclusiveness” are now commonly used in public policy, but little emphasis is placed on “accessibility” issues in the integration of disabled people. This article proposes a composite index to measure economic support provisions, such as employment, vocational training, microfinance, and safety nets. The index was tested in a case study (N= 245) of two districts in Pakistan. Results support a “cost/benefit”-based philosophy, rather than the “means–ends” goal, where the disabled poor are viewed as unproductive and risky payers, instead of giving them an opportunity to exercise their potential. Change for the disadvantaged poor can be brought about with the mandatory use of this index in local annual audits. Future research might examine the impact of the index and standardize it for global use.     

Rethinking the Soundscape

ABSTRACT

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term's use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer's work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term “soundscape” emerges as at once indispensable and elusive, provocative and limited. By calling attention to background sound, Schafer shaped the field in ways that exceeded his own contribution.     

E-Nose for News?

ABSTRACT

Many journalists claim to have a “nose for news.” This metaphor, where a body part is used in a transferred sense for metaphorical change has occupied a central place in journalists' discourses. It appears to express something essential about their identity, profession, practice, and how they “see” and experience the world. This article uses the figure/ground approach of Marshall McLuhan to inform an exploration of the “nose for news” metaphor. By studying the “nose for news” we can understand how and why electronic noses and the Internet have made this once vital and living metaphor obsolete. We can also discover ways to reanimate this metaphor in order to: (a) help recover something of the essence of journalism expressed by journalists' claims to possess a “nose for news,” and (b) re-conceptualize the current “crisis” in journalism.     

The Social as Heaven and Hell: Pierre Bourdieu's Philosophical Anthropology

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical‐sociological investigations presupposed and, at the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory (latu sensu), and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition (“symbolic capital”) appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”.     

The Flesh and the World: Intercorporeal Body-selves,Ageing and Dancing

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address the role that embodiment, embodied consciousness and what can be termed “extradiscursive” experiences such as body memory and ekstasis as a form of ecstatic experience assume in understanding the body-self of mature dancers. I argue that the body-self of the dancer becomes increasingly intersubjective in maturity through her/his bodily practice, and that this can be understood in terms of the notions of intercorporeity, and of the “flesh” derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. I argue that ways of manifestation of intercorporeity in bodily experience are discursively elusive, drawing on two forms of bodily experience—body memory and ekstasis—and examining experiences narrated by mature dancers who were interviewed in my Ph. D. study on ageing, gender and dancers' bodies. I contend that the experience of ekstasis is the “glue” of a corporeal subjectivity that transforms itself through momentary identification with the world, that calls on the invisible as well as the visible. Body memory also challenges Western dualist conceptions of consciousness and bodily experience, and is more easily aligned with Eastern understandings of consciousness as embodied. Finally, I suggest that the concept of body memory is useful for imbuing the body-subject with a cohesion and authenticity through the body's capacity for nonconscious remembrance of movement through a proprioceptively stored “body history,” which enables the constitution of a coherent body-self in older age.     

The Dance

Abstract

“The Dance” is a story of a young social worker's journey in a HIV+ women's support group. It discusses issues of death, HIV, use of self, and theory application. Most specifically, this essay honors the role of individual strength and love within a group setting.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

From fun to fraught: marketing to kids and regulating “risky foods” in Canada

ABSTRACT

In an era of industrialized food production, ultra-processed foods, “Big Food” marketing, and growing obesity rates, food has come to be framed as an object of risk – and as an object of regulation. Such reframing has fascinating implications related to issues of responsibility and decision making, especially when it comes to children’s food. This article probes the relationship between representation, regulation and “risky” consumption with respect to children’s food. I examine how child-targeted foods become framed as “risky” and what counts as “risky” food messaging under Health Canada’s commitment to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. Detailing the tension between food as a risk object and food as a child object, I suggest how issues of semantic provisioning and the politics of the unseen work to complicate and destabilize the (seemingly) straightforward process of prohibiting unhealthy food marketing to children.     

Acoustic Cocooning

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, car manufacturers increasingly underline their cars' interior tranquility. Both this acoustic condition and the availability of car audio sets enable drivers to transform their car into a highly personal, controlled and relaxing sonic bubble.

Yet how could the car, once a noisy contraction, evolve into such a space for acoustic cocooning? This article studies the introduction of car radio and interior car sound design in Europe between the 1920s and the 1990s. The car radio's meaning shifted from an artifact that brought companionship to lonely drivers, to an instrument that helped drivers to mentally block out their fellows on the road. At the same time, listening to engine sounds changed from a drivers' skill to a practice drivers had to de-learn. Moreover, car sound construction shifted from reducing noise to creating target sounds for specific consumer groups.

This article employs three forms of cultural analysis to understand these shifts: an “archeology of corporate culturology,” the symbolism of sound, and Gerhard schulze's theory on the experience society. Finally, by analyzing the rise of acoustic cocooning in the car, it aims to contribute to the study of “techno-cocooning”: the use of technology for creating sensory privacy.     

Kinesthesia,Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modernism

ABSTRACT

“Kinesthesia, Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modernism” discusses the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky's controversial choreography to Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) in the light of kinesthesia, or movement sense, and synesthesia or the merging of the senses. Dr. Järvinen argues that the invention of kinesthetic sense and particularly the theory of expression linked with this notion, kinesthetic sympathy, were historically and culturally specific responses to increasing abstraction as a goal in the arts, also seen in Le Sacre du Printemps, a work aiming to produce synesthetic experiences in the spectators.     

Children forever: The search for origins among Chilean adults who were adopted

There has been a global increase in the number of adults who were adopted 1 1 To make the text more readable, we use the term “adult adoptee” rather than our preferred term “people who were adopted.” We prefer the latter term because it does captures our understanding that adoption is a practice and a life experience and not necessarily a permanent fixture of the identities of people who were adopted.
searching for their origins. This trend has promoted the interest of social sciences researchers, as well as carry out the obligations of states to provide specialized services. In this article, we present some results from the first qualitative study that explores the experiences of some Chilean adults who were adopted and searched for their origins in Chile through the National Service of Minor's Search for Origins Program. The narratives of the participants show that, in spite of legislative changes, a series of barriers and contradictions continue to exist, which make it difficult to guarantee the right to know one's origins. The legal and technical frameworks and practices analysed show how difficult it is to dismantle the “clean break” principle. They also highlight the persistence of the image of adoptees as “minors” who need the “protection” of their parents or professionals. We discuss the different challenges to be considered by researchers, practitioners, and policy‐makers involved in adoption policies and practices.     

Embracing Sculptural Ceramics: A Lived Experience of Touch in Art

ABSTRACT

Sculptural ceramic objects created by and for the body were made within the context of art-based research, in which theoretical explorations and studio practice were integrally interwoven. Studio explorations developed from theoretical knowledge gained from human physiology, and from the development of an understanding of the “lived experience” as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the experiences of the artist in making, and comments from visitors at exhibitions. The artworks challenge the visual hegemony of the art gallery by more fully engaging the body's sense of touch through the embrace. The sculptures, which were made by “casting hugs,” instinctively invite interaction, with soft curves that echo the human body, textures to visually entice individuals to touch, and a pleasurable weight that slows down responses. In public exhibition the artworks are enthusiastically embraced and held, broadening and articulating a tactile aesthetic for sculpture, and shifting focus from the sculptural objects themselves to one's physical and emotional experience of those objects.