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This chapter, written by John Heritage, provides an overview of the author's main findings on questioning in doctor‐patient interactions. Heritage pays particular attention to the way that questions in medical contexts are designed to communicate information about doctors' expectations and beliefs and thereby limit the way that patients can appropriately respond. Heritage identifies two principles of medical questioning that illustrate this phenomenon of recipient design: optimization and problem attentiveness. He argues that the principle of optimization, that is, designing questions so that they grammatically “prefer” a “no‐problem” response, is the default principle of medical questioning; such optimized questions encourage patients to produce responses that confirm optimistic beliefs about their health. By contrast, in certain situations (e.g., when a patient presents with a particular problem) the principle of problem attentiveness informs the design of questions; that is, the questions presuppose that a particular health problem exists rather than encouraging a no‐problem response.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how sacrifice is the most primary and basic form of ritual. The elimination of animal sacrifice from contemporary Western religious life came about as a result of a cataclysmic moment. The chapter also explores how love is a noninstrumental relationship outside of what appears to be the sphere of exchange. The mark of love as noninstrumental is attentiveness. Attentiveness as a form of affirmation is what makes love so precious. The remainder of the chapter talks about how the sacrificial system itself was replaced in Jewish life after the temple's destruction. The rabbis devised alternatives to the sacrificial functions in ways that struggle and deal with the fears and stress inherent in sacrifice.

Riegl made changing sitter/observer relations the conceptual center of his master narrative, which was shaped by the conviction that the genre's defining characteristic was the subjective factor of attention or attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), the third in the triad of attitudes that constitute his “psychological typology.” Aufmerksamkeit is the attentiveness of the sitters to each other and to the viewer, and the attentiveness of the viewer to the sitters as a group and as individuals. Posing as if not posing may well produce the anecdotal Genre effect even to the extent of suggesting action that involves participant observers. Riegl's account of group portraiture elides a prior and more basic pretense. Riegl imagines observer space peopled by virtual viewers invisible to us but not to the sitters.

Part of the system's very openness is its resistance to the mutating static and noise that are the critic's walking papers, less than reputable edition of the social contract. According to Benjamin, in this interpellation into Convolute D of The Arcades Project, by the time the conversation arrives at the weather, it has sunk to the emptiest chatter. Critique, in keeping with Benjamin's long-term struggle to make it compatible with attitudes and practices of material history, is no longer the paraphrase, expiation, and distillation of telling concepts from diverse rubrics and housings in which they have been archived, with no anticipated or foregone outcome. There can be no sublimation, purification, or occultation of the material from critique. Furthermore human's tendency, to manage moods and transitions, along with similar conditions of attentiveness, via a range of approaches including pharmacology is redolent when physical turbulence remained the property of the engineering school.

The conclusion highlights the double movement of the book as it reveals the figure of the American dream and refracts this figure into all its complexity. Ethnic literature’s shared engagement with and inevitable difference from this figure brings out both ubiquity and unevenness. Constellating distinct literary traditions in this way develops new comparative methods and orientations to ethnic archives, along with a better understanding of how race and ethnicity are being realigned at present. The conclusion emphasizes what characterization as contestation accomplishes—how the interplay of the many facets of character across literary and social worlds breaks down persistent archetypes and foregrounds structural constraints. In closing, the book points to attentiveness, underscoring the agency of literature and of literary critique.

The conversation and the dialogue are key to the practice of Self-inquiry. This chapter records and analyzes this discipline. A special emphasis is placed on the spiritual skills associated with listening as a contemplative skill.

This chapter foregrounds my approach to ethics as a ‘new’ ethnographic object. I show how an attentive ethnographic sensibility can uncover forms of interpersonal relationality, which diverge from a politics of interminable opposition. Learning from Veena Das’ work, I turn away from the most visible campus ‘events’ and toward a seemingly mundane student meeting in order to address the following question: how, in a politically polarised context, do friendships and alternative sociabilities become possible? I offer an ethnographic account of a small scale gathering of students involved in an ‘Israel-Palestine Forum’ at Redbrick University. Tracing the interpersonal and institutional conditions of this meeting, I show how its participants cultivated practices of speaking and listening, which enabled us to engage with each other as uncertain, ambivalent and fragmented subjects. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ethics of ‘parrhesia’ and Stanley Cavell’s insights into the pedagogic dimensions of democratic relationships, I explore how risk-taking, trust and singular friendships enabled the tragic histories of Palestine-Israel to be spoken and reflected upon. The chapter concludes with some comparative insights in relation to my three fieldsites, highlighting how the differential impacts of socio-economic changes to higher education can limit these democratic possibilities within campuses.

This chapter examines Hans-Georg Gadamer’s implied approach to aesthetic attentiveness and how it can address the defining paradox of his notion of aesthetics: reconciling the alleged disinterestedness of aesthetics with the cognitive interests of a phenomenological analysis of experience. It shows how the nature of attentiveness draws out the hermeneutic dynamics of aesthetic experience and that it is important to Gadamer’s reflections about art. It argues that Gadamer opposes Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, yet commits to a form of disinterestedness by agreeing with the evidentiary nature of aesthetic experience. The chapter also considers Gadamer’s argument that ‘the experience of art is an experience of meaning’ and hence must be absorbed within hermeneutics. Finally, it analyses the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, two German words with very different connotations of the term ‘experience’.

This chapter examines how Hans-Georg Gadamer’s deconstruction of traditional aesthetics brings about a threefold redemptive revaluation of the discipline. First, the endeavour to redeem aesthetics by absorbing it within hermeneutics is linked to the question of meaning within the experience of art. As a result, aesthetic experience shifts into a participatory mode, which in turn revitalises the importance of the part-whole relationship in aesthetic reasoning. Second, aesthetic attentiveness offers a way of seeing that facilitates origination within and amongst the aesthetic ideas and subject-matters which shape any experience of art. Third, the aesthetic image has both summative and projective aspects in relation to the complexities of human experience. A hermeneutically orientated aesthetics implies that we are vulnerable to art’s address owing to our unfinished experience not only of ourselves but also of our world.

Understanding incubation patterns provides insight into the proximate and ultimate factors influencing this behavior. We used video recordings to quantify diurnal nest attentiveness during the incubation period in Sprague’s pipit.Incubation bouts ranged from 8 seconds to at least 2.5 hoursand recess bouts ranged from 6 seconds to at least 3.2 hours,with the majority of bouts lasting 5–20 and 5–15 minutes, respectively. Incubation boutswere longest in the early morning and evening and shortest in the late morning and afternoon. Our results indicate that pipit nest searches done in the early morning and evening have an increased chance of encountering an incubating female.

It is an uncommon gift to have a mountain to yourself. Pulling up to the trailhead for the Bell Mountain Wilderness Area, I saw no other vehicles parked there and began to hope for as much. I noticed that the dirt road into the area hadn’t been graded recently. Another good sign was my having to wipe spider webs from my face every hundred yards or so as I hit the trail. Obviously no one had been there for a while. But the real treat was reaching the top of the mountain and finding nothing. A favorite campsite lay empty, nestled in the rocks just above the treetops. From there you can look out onto thousands of acres of oak- and hickory-covered hills to the east. Not a road or a building in sight, nothing but trees. Bell Mountain is one of eight protected wilderness areas in Missouri. It is named after a family that once lived and farmed along its 1,700-foot ridge. I’d gotten a late start that day and the sun was going down by the time I set up camp. But sunlight on a late April afternoon, filtered through the yellow-green growth of new leaves, can be stunning. I sat on a rock ledge, cutting up potatoes, onions, and carrots for mulligan stew, watching shadows creep up the hills across the hollow. Putting the vegetables in a pot, I added fresh basil and rosemary, topped it off with ground beef, and washed it down with a shot of Grand Marnier as night came on. I delight in the solitude of these trips, but I’m not always sworn to a monastic austerity. Bell Mountain is a good place for the study and practice of solitude. I’ve sat there for hours with only the dog beside me, watching red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures soar on thermals rising from the forest below. Now and then you’ll see a lone eagle high overhead, though generally they nest closer to the river. Bald eagles are common in Missouri, especially in winter.

The locals call it Moonshine Hollow, or Mooner’s Hollow, partly because of the haunting character of the moonlight in this small, isolated valley. It forces you to pay attention to the thousand shades of shadow and light you’d never thought to distinguish before. The phenomenon has something to do with the curvature of the ravine here, as light reflects off stone cliffs above and the lithe, white limbs of sycamore trees below. Whatever accounts for it, Moonshine Hollow is well named. Up from Coonville Creek in St. Francois State Park in southeast Missouri, it lies along the eleven-mile Pike Run backpacking trail. A small trickle of water flows year-round from the base of the cliff where I usually camp. During Prohibition it’s said that bootleggers operated a still in this remote hollow, making hooch, white lightning, or panther’s breath (as it was variously called). Hidden deep in the Ozarks, with cornfields nearby, a steady supply of cold water, and sufficient wood to keep a fire going, it was an ideal site for producing “mountain dew.” In fact, Missouri law still allows its citizens to distill up to two hundred gallons of whiskey a year for personal and family use. All of this lends Moonshine Hollow its unique appeal. What creates the ambience or “sense of place” that we associate with a singular locale? For Moonshine Hollow, it’s a combination of sheltered seclusion, the distinctive play of shadows on a moonlit night, even an edge of lawlessness. It’s a place where time has stopped. It invites you to linger. The moonshiner’s art is a slow and demanding one. The corn has to soak in a wet burlap sack for ten days. The mash has to be fermented with water, yeast, and malt for another ten days or more. Then, in being gently heated over a low fire, the alcohol has to evaporate, passing through a copper coil inside a barrel of cold branch water, dripping leisurely into a stoneware jug. The process can’t be hurried. Nothing should be rushed in Moonshine Hollow.

This chapter casts conscientiousness as a virtue that is concerned with monitoring one’s impacts upon the world, from attending to and seeking to minimize the embedded carbon or virtual water in consumption activities to the awareness of and concern for one’s relationships with others that share our physical environment. In this respect, to be conscientious is to seek to minimize negative impacts on the environment but also to work positively to ensure that environmental quality is maintained and accessible, and to practice a form of citizenship in working with others to do the same. It is a virtue that, as Aldo Leopold noticed, is threatened by technologies and physical distance that separate modern humans from the land and its productive capacities, but may be enhanced by disclosure and transparency efforts that are assisted by information technology, which can increase cognitive awareness of our dependence and impacts upon our environment.

This chapter focuses on two important practices that are essential to the work of shaping the stories of a human life: the cultivation of attentiveness and of humor. College students who are committed to a particular religious tradition face not only the usual distractions and demands that all undergraduates face, but also cultural, social, and institutional pressures to “perform” their beliefs in a certain way. If students are to narrate their own lives in ways that make space for these complexities, they will need to engage in certain kinds of spiritual practices that will help them re-center themselves and tell their stories in their own voices. Drawing on the Sufi tradition, the author suggests that by cultivating the practice of attentiveness, and by maintaining a lightness of perspective and a dose of humor, students may be able to navigate their undergraduate years more successfully.