Russell P. Shuttleworth
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520246140
- eISBN:
- 9780520939141
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520246140.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Global
Disabled individuals suffer stigmatization and discrimination in various fields but nowhere more than within the contexts of dating and romance and in their attempts to negotiate sexual intimacy. ...
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Disabled individuals suffer stigmatization and discrimination in various fields but nowhere more than within the contexts of dating and romance and in their attempts to negotiate sexual intimacy. However, a critical constructionist approach to studying the intersection of disability and sexuality is yet to materialize. This chapter seeks to delineate the ideal research focus in this field and appraise the difficulties faced by differently abled individuals vis-à-vis sexuality and their causes. Although all societies reckon on some physical, cognitive, and/or behavioral differences, disability as a cultural category with its particular constellation of tragic, medical, and economic meanings is considered unique to societies influenced by certain Western European value-orientations concerning the individual. Prevalent studies in this field still tends to be dominated by medical-model thinking which always vies the body in relation to functional norms and fixes disability in a particular bodily impairment and its functional limitations.Less
Disabled individuals suffer stigmatization and discrimination in various fields but nowhere more than within the contexts of dating and romance and in their attempts to negotiate sexual intimacy. However, a critical constructionist approach to studying the intersection of disability and sexuality is yet to materialize. This chapter seeks to delineate the ideal research focus in this field and appraise the difficulties faced by differently abled individuals vis-à-vis sexuality and their causes. Although all societies reckon on some physical, cognitive, and/or behavioral differences, disability as a cultural category with its particular constellation of tragic, medical, and economic meanings is considered unique to societies influenced by certain Western European value-orientations concerning the individual. Prevalent studies in this field still tends to be dominated by medical-model thinking which always vies the body in relation to functional norms and fixes disability in a particular bodily impairment and its functional limitations.
Kathryn Linn Geurts
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520234550
- eISBN:
- 9780520936546
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520234550.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This chapter presents an inventory of sensory fields. It first searches for a possible category for “the senses,” and then considers some cultural categories and studies the domain of feeling in the ...
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This chapter presents an inventory of sensory fields. It first searches for a possible category for “the senses,” and then considers some cultural categories and studies the domain of feeling in the body. Next, it addresses the issue of “category as container” and some detailed examples of specific perceptory domains. A category of immediate bodily experiences is outlined and explained within Anlo cultural worlds. The chapter also discusses several Ewe terms that pertain to various sensations, such as “tasting to see.”Less
This chapter presents an inventory of sensory fields. It first searches for a possible category for “the senses,” and then considers some cultural categories and studies the domain of feeling in the body. Next, it addresses the issue of “category as container” and some detailed examples of specific perceptory domains. A category of immediate bodily experiences is outlined and explained within Anlo cultural worlds. The chapter also discusses several Ewe terms that pertain to various sensations, such as “tasting to see.”
Karla Hoff and James Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781501759383
- eISBN:
- 9781501759284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501759383.003.0003
- Subject:
- Law, Public International Law
This chapter examines how “law and economics” is affected by the broadening of the scope of economics. The “command function” of law was partly dismantled and enriched by the new work on the ...
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This chapter examines how “law and economics” is affected by the broadening of the scope of economics. The “command function” of law was partly dismantled and enriched by the new work on the “expressive function,” which recognized that the law works not just by command, reward, and punishment but also by triggering social norms and affecting some of our preferences. The chapter then introduces a third novelty, what can be referred to as the “schematizing function” of the law. Lodged in their brains, human beings have cultural categories and concepts that influence what they focus on and what they ignore. At one level, all this happens instinctively and so may seem like innate qualities, but they are influenced and shaped by many social factors by the laws of the nation and also the deliberations surrounding the adoption of laws. The chapter shows how entrenched cultural categories can be used to both reinforce and to block a law.Less
This chapter examines how “law and economics” is affected by the broadening of the scope of economics. The “command function” of law was partly dismantled and enriched by the new work on the “expressive function,” which recognized that the law works not just by command, reward, and punishment but also by triggering social norms and affecting some of our preferences. The chapter then introduces a third novelty, what can be referred to as the “schematizing function” of the law. Lodged in their brains, human beings have cultural categories and concepts that influence what they focus on and what they ignore. At one level, all this happens instinctively and so may seem like innate qualities, but they are influenced and shaped by many social factors by the laws of the nation and also the deliberations surrounding the adoption of laws. The chapter shows how entrenched cultural categories can be used to both reinforce and to block a law.
Bhavani Raman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226703275
- eISBN:
- 9780226703299
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but this book uncovers a lesser-known ...
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Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but this book uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on archival research in the files of the East India Company's administrative offices in Madras, this book tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. The book shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company's reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, the book maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.Less
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but this book uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on archival research in the files of the East India Company's administrative offices in Madras, this book tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. The book shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company's reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, the book maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226568126
- eISBN:
- 9780226568140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226568140.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter focuses on how metaphors function as conveyors of cultural categories of thought, and how immunology becomes a dominant medium through which those categories are variably embodied. The ...
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This chapter focuses on how metaphors function as conveyors of cultural categories of thought, and how immunology becomes a dominant medium through which those categories are variably embodied. The chapter also focuses on how the tyranny of being subjected to the powerful negative transformers of immunology can be handled more creatively. The cultural meaning that is carried by metaphor finds its way into both archetype and stereotype. Though immunology has increasingly become an eclectic domain of esoteric knowledge, it is important to remember that its disciplinary legitimacy has always stood, and for now still stands, on a fundamental distinction between “self” and “not-self.” Self-recognition is central to the understanding of antibody formation. Despite the recent trend to include immunologists in the widespread scientific habit of mystifying everything, immunology's focus on identity has given centrality to the fundamental autotoxic metaphor of the body at war with itself.Less
This chapter focuses on how metaphors function as conveyors of cultural categories of thought, and how immunology becomes a dominant medium through which those categories are variably embodied. The chapter also focuses on how the tyranny of being subjected to the powerful negative transformers of immunology can be handled more creatively. The cultural meaning that is carried by metaphor finds its way into both archetype and stereotype. Though immunology has increasingly become an eclectic domain of esoteric knowledge, it is important to remember that its disciplinary legitimacy has always stood, and for now still stands, on a fundamental distinction between “self” and “not-self.” Self-recognition is central to the understanding of antibody formation. Despite the recent trend to include immunologists in the widespread scientific habit of mystifying everything, immunology's focus on identity has given centrality to the fundamental autotoxic metaphor of the body at war with itself.
Naomi C. F. Yamada
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824847593
- eISBN:
- 9780824868215
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824847593.003.0015
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter is a story about cultural categories of birds and science in China that addresses issues of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—which suggests that the cultural content of one's language can ...
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This chapter is a story about cultural categories of birds and science in China that addresses issues of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—which suggests that the cultural content of one's language can influence one's habitual thought and practice. It emphasizes that to learn Chinese categories one had to “unlearn” similar, yet different, concepts of Western culture—resulting in a culture shock that has less to do with an encounter with difference and more a forced reevaluation of familiar categories. These cultural categories can be summed up neatly in the concept of “linguistic relativity”—the idea that language influences the way people see the world and even think.Less
This chapter is a story about cultural categories of birds and science in China that addresses issues of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—which suggests that the cultural content of one's language can influence one's habitual thought and practice. It emphasizes that to learn Chinese categories one had to “unlearn” similar, yet different, concepts of Western culture—resulting in a culture shock that has less to do with an encounter with difference and more a forced reevaluation of familiar categories. These cultural categories can be summed up neatly in the concept of “linguistic relativity”—the idea that language influences the way people see the world and even think.
G. E. R. Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198854593
- eISBN:
- 9780191888847
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198854593.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations ...
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This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. How can we reconcile our sense of what links us all as humans with our recognition of these deep differences? All humans use language and live in social groups, where we have to probe what is distinctive in the experience of humans as opposed to that of other animals and how the former may have evolved from the latter. Moreover, the languages we speak and the societies we form differ profoundly, though the conclusion that we are the prisoners of our own particular experience should and can be resisted. The study calls into question the cross-cultural viability both of many of the analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture) and of our usual categories for organizing human experience and classifying intellectual disciplines, mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics. The result is a robust defence of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility while recognizing both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.Less
This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. How can we reconcile our sense of what links us all as humans with our recognition of these deep differences? All humans use language and live in social groups, where we have to probe what is distinctive in the experience of humans as opposed to that of other animals and how the former may have evolved from the latter. Moreover, the languages we speak and the societies we form differ profoundly, though the conclusion that we are the prisoners of our own particular experience should and can be resisted. The study calls into question the cross-cultural viability both of many of the analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture) and of our usual categories for organizing human experience and classifying intellectual disciplines, mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics. The result is a robust defence of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility while recognizing both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.
