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.     

Sneezing as a Form of Transaction between Active Body and Space

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the idea of sneezing as a manifestation of how an active body responds to its surrounding space. Sneezing is a natural body reflex against particular external stimuli. As a reflex action, sneezing is an instinctive transaction between an active body and space that occurs in a very natural way. Sneezing has the potential to become one way in which the human body serves as an instrument of spatial experience. The occurrence of sneezing in certain spaces serves as a natural indicator of the quality of the spatial environment. In particular the sneezing process demonstrates the latent capabilities of the human body to become a natural instrument for comprehending the spatial environment in which it exists. It can be regarded as a unique instrument for mapping spatial experience, and for differentiating between qualities of the spatial environment that are not merely visual. Through sneezing, the body's experiencing process in space is manifested as a transaction between the active body and its space.     

走向一种后现代心理学

现代思想最基本也是最严重的问题是由笛卡儿发轫的、康德肯定的心物、主客、事实及价值二元论，现代科学和现代大学基本接受了这种二元论。这种二元论是建立在视自然为无价值的死物质基础上的，当进化论显示人是自然的一部分时，唯一被大学容许的反应是我们人类也将像物质一样被客观地看待。这种认识反映在心理学上就是将一切主体性经验都看作是大脑内事件的副产品。然而当代脑科学和心理学的最新发现则从根本上颠覆了现代二元论，它们的发现表明，自然不是死物质，而是有主体性和价值的。这为后现代心理学的发展提供了科学支撑，后现代心理学将发展人们的共情情怀为自己的重要使命，而怀特海哲学则为这种后现代心理学提供了本体论的支持。     

Queering Data Collection: Using the Life History Calendar Method With Sexual-Minority Youth

ABSTRACT

A challenge for research with sexual-minority youth is to capture their unique stories in a way that heightens understanding of lived experience and promotes the development of culturally relevant programs and policies tailored for this population. One data collection approach that may be particularly useful for research with sexual-minority youth is the life history calendar (LHC) method. The LHC provides a visual, calendar-based assessment of life events and behaviors anchored by contextual cues to enhance retrospective recall. The purpose of this article is to examine the utility of the LHC method with sexual-minority youth and its potential to address three methodological and conceptual challenges: developmental complexity, shifting and evolving identities, and timing. The LHC method is illustrated using three studies conducted by the author as case examples. Findings suggest that the LHC offers several potential benefits for research with sexual-minority youth including its adaptable and flexible structure, capacity to assess event timing and sequence, mixed-methods capability, and its ability to engage and empower youth to co-create the interview process. Strengths and limitations of the LHC method and implications for research and practice with sexual-minority youth in a range of social service settings are discussed.     

Maybe We Should Just Shut Up: The Body as an Important Consideration for Group Work Practice

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of the human body as an important consideration for group work. It discusses six concepts related to how the body can be paid attention to and utilized within the realm of practice. These concepts include the idea of the body as related to the sense of self; physical experience as metaphor; the body as a barometer of group experience; shared physical experience and group cohesion; physical experiences and behavior; and the notion of somatic intelligence and communication. Examples of each are discussed from the lens of the author's practice.     

Freedom in the making: the slaves of hacienda La Esperanza,Manatí, Puerto Rico,on the eve of abolition, 1868–76*

Abstract

The article studies the experience of slavery and its abolition on the sugar plantation La Esperanza, on the northern coastal plain of Puerto Rico. It offers a snapshot of La Esperanza's slave crew and presents insights into the affective relationships slaves established among themselves. Based on census material and court records, the article focuses on slave agency and on the opportunities rendered by the political and administrative context created in the colony after the triumph of liberalism in Spain. As the abolition of slavery approached, the local court restricted planters' traditional rights to administer punishment to their bondsmen, who they now began to see as potential free citizens. Slaves responded accordingly and played a decisive part in the process of change, thus showing understanding of the law and its possibilities. The events described here will help depict how ‘freedom’ took shape and how the administration of justice was becoming an exclusive prerogative of the state and its already dense network of intervention. The slaves were quick to observe and partake in the rigorous truth-establishing processes of meticulous investigation and witness interrogation characteristic of the practice of ordinary justice as it began to break into the plantation.     

Discriminating From Within

A classic experiment by Henri Tajfel provides evidence for the conclusion that the division of a group into subgroups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior, even if there is no reason for such behavior in terms of the individual's own interest. I don't challenge that conclusion; but I question an implicit assumption which is suggested by the experimental setup and by the language used by Tajfel in describing the experiment. The assumption is that an initially coherent group will typically experience division as a result of outside influence. A totally different picture of the situation and totally different social policy recommendations will follow if we believe instead that groups are evolving structures, and specifically structures that constantly and autonomously come into conflict with themselves.     

Aboriginal Violence: Responding to the Tatz view

In the previous issue of AJSI (November, 1990), Colin Tatz proclaims his chagrin with Aboriginal affairs and the state of play in Aboriginal communities. I in turn am dismayed by the thrust of his ‘essay’. Although I broadly share Tatz's concerns regarding the way events have unraveled, and concur with his suggestion that current policy lacks a sense of history and that a number of realities need to be faced, I part company with him when it comes to the depiction and analysis of the ins and outs of the scene.     

二元论到二重性：布迪厄社会观理论研究

布迪厄反对将社会看作实体性的物质结构,以为这一结构能够被感知和触摸;也反对将社会看作是种种表象和意志,呈现于主体性的感悟中。进而言之,他反对在社会与个人、物质与精神、结构与行动等二元论范式中寻求社会所在。就此而言,布迪厄的社会观,是将社会看作是实践者及其文化所型构而成的有机生命体。这一特定的社会观,建基于他对“doxa”概念的阐释。场域与习性则构成了一种具体的二重性存在。由此,布迪厄展开了其唯物主义人类学的分析。     

Splitting Difference: Psychoanalysis, Hatred and Exclusion

In this paper I will argue that the inclusion of certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory into sociological analysis can be particularly enlightening in specific areas of social research where traditional theory and practice have failed to explain phenomena satisfactorily. This is arguably the case in the explanation of hatred and exclusion, where powerful affective forces fuel racist discourse and support structures of discimination. This is not presented as an antithesis or critique of contemporary sociological methodologies, rather as an addition, a tool through which another dimension of exploration is added to give a greater understanding of conflict arising in social life. This paper seeks to reveal the affective forces that shape motivation in everyday life, influencing social structure and leading to the maltreatment of people because of their 'otherness'.     

行政发包制

本文试图论证行政发包制在中国作为一种分析政府间关系、官员激励和政府治理的理论框架所具有的独特内涵、价值和意义。行政发包制是指政府内部上下级之间的发包关系。作为一种理想类型,它既有别于韦伯意义上的科层制,也有别于纯粹的外包制,而是居于两者之间的一种混合形态。行政发包制在行政权分配、经济激励和内部控制三个维度上呈现相互配合和内在一致的特征,适合概括中国政府间关系和治理模式的长期稳定而鲜明的特征。提出行政发包制,有助于重新解释许多有关中国政府运行的特征和现象,同时也可以揭示一系列未被现有文献系统关注的政府现象和问题。本文还将行政发包制与“政治锦标赛”理论结合起来,从纵向行政发包和横向晋升竞争两个维度进一步拓展关于官员激励和政府治理的分析深度和广度。     

U.S. foreign policies of presidents Bush and Clinton: The influence of China's most favored nation status upon human rights issues

The United States must find a new direction in its efforts to curb China's human rights abuses. The change will be a slow and difficult one, with each step measured by countless sacrifices. Without such steps, however, tens of thousands will suffer. During the last two presidential administrations, focus on human rights issues has increased as a result of the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the recent signing of China's most favored nation (MFN) status, Clinton has succesfully separated the issues of human rights abuses and international economics. Although he may have hoped to curb such abuses early in his presidency, he fell victim to the growing complexity of Congress and the ability of special interest groups to influence legislators. A possible explanation for the support of the MFN status by both presidents may be evident in their previous experiences. Bush, a former ambassador to China and representative at the United Nations, had a strong foreign policy background. Clinton, however, with a weak foreign policy background and no military experience, relies heavily on Vice President Gore's military history—during the Vietnam War—as well as his strengths in foreign service.     

Bridges

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body, and a city's industrial architecture. It takes as its fieldwork site the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges that dominate downtown New York, and uses this to present an ethnographic understanding of lived experience as a continuous sensory exchange between mind, body, and world. New York's bridges, towering 300 feet into the air and 7,000 feet across, established a new sense of scale against which citizens could compare their finite, organic bodies. The article draws upon a practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be complex sites of perception, sensation, and experience, which generate ongoing streams of interior dialogue ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or part of the city but are instead partially in the sky above the water, “making strange” the sense of being on the ground, and subjecting people to various delirious effects including vertigo, flying, and falling, before reaching the other side. It is a story told through words and images in the form of a photo-essay with accompanying text that derives from the practice-based ethnography that is also available in video and audible form online.     

Innocence and Suffering in the Middle Ages: An Essay about Popular Taste and Popular Literature

Michael Stugrin's essay is both theoretical and practical: he suggests that texts, when viewed as “structures ofperception,” give us the “voices of the reality which they were part of and helped shape.” He then proceeds to apply this theory to a number of spiritual texts popular during the Middle Ages to give us an idea of popular taste at that time. Such texts were structured in a highly affective way to affirm testimonies o f faith and to commemorate God's promises to men. But perhaps most importantly, these spiritual texts, along with such texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and countless prose treatises and sermons, provided medieval audiences with a way of “knowing” within the context of human experience in a time of great cultural stress.     

齐美尔论个性

本文着重考察齐美尔个性观在其生命哲学中的展开。以个性观在德国思想史中的演变为线索,追溯了自文艺复兴经十八世纪启蒙时代,再到十九世纪浪漫主义兴起之后的一系列重要变化,集中讨论了尼采--作为生命哲学的最初阐发者--的贵族理论是如何影响齐美尔的。尼采笔下备受推崇的个体,在与世界整体相剥离之后,失去作为类存在的归宿感,这也是齐美尔探讨现代个性如何持存的起点。齐美尔在现代资本主义劳动分工、艺术创作之形式的转变以及个体生命时间的展开（尤其是死亡的意义）等不同的层次上,对以生命为立足点寻求个体自我的统一作了深入论述。文章最后回应了韦伯和卢卡奇对齐美尔的批评,笔者认为两者分别从理性主义和马克思的历史唯物主义传统反思了齐美尔的生命哲学。     

The topic of subjectivity in psychology: Contradictions,paths and new alternatives

This paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.     

Delicious molecules: big food science,the chemosenses,and umami

Abstract

Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, molecular techniques of mapping chemosensation (the chemical senses of taste and smell) have been woven into a universalizing, evolutionary explanation for human eating behavior. In a prominent example, umami (translated from Japanese as “savory deliciousness”) has come to be understood as the “fifth basic taste sensation,” elicited by the common flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) along with other amino acids and ribonucleotides. Meanwhile, socialized associations of food desirability, undesirability, pleasure, and disgust have likewise come to be interrogated on the molecular level – in the oral cavity, in the brain, and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. In this paper, I abridge this molecularization of sensuous eating with the provocation that the sensory is affective is molecular is political. This phrase signals the stakes with which taste and smell are ontologized as fundamentally embedded in memory (and thus in affect and in culture); as conducted in train with corporate food and beverage research and development; and effected at molecular sites of transduction (chemical reception). It is to say that, in recent decades, the sensory and affective domains have been made molecular. And in the context of food science, that molecular knowledge is interested. This paper conducts a brief, critical accounting of how chemosensation is made knowable and actionable, and for what purposes. It suggests that the most authoritative knowledge of how taste and smell mediate human health (the sensory) is shaped by the corporate imperative to determine what chemical compounds humans register as pleasurable (the affective), and thus what food products humans can be relied upon to buy (the political). As a result, a lack of scientific consensus on wider questions of metabolism – of glutamate, for instance – is built into chemosensory science, which has privileged the work of product design.     

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.