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From Death to Resurrection: Modern Islam

Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad

in The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection

Contemporary (twentieth century) Muslim exegetes and interpreters have taken the classical materials of scripture and tradition and recast them in the light of modern understanding. In this chapter, ... More

Contemporary (twentieth century) Muslim exegetes and interpreters have taken the classical materials of scripture and tradition and recast them in the light of modern understanding. In this chapter, the events proposed by classical writers to pertain to the period between death and resurrection are reexamined and either rejected or accepted, sometimes with new twists. Modern science and new theories of psychology are drawn on as they consider the state of the soul after death. Particular attention is given to contemporary Muslim spiritualist interpretations.Less

Great Expectations: The Materiality of Commensurability in Social Media

Susan V. Scott and Wanda J. Orlikowski

in Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World

This chapter considers the question of commensuration — the process of comparison according to a common metric — and how it is accomplished on online social media websites. When commensurability is ... More

This chapter considers the question of commensuration — the process of comparison according to a common metric — and how it is accomplished on online social media websites. When commensurability is produced through the distributed reviews and ratings of thousands of user-generated postings, and transformed through filtering and weighting algorithms into ratings and rankings, it may be expected that different things will be paid attention to, connected, and compared. The chapter is interested in understanding these differences and the implications of online user-based evaluation mechanisms for how commensurability is organized and achieved.Less

Inverse Instrumentality: How Technologies Objectify Patients and Players

Hamid Ekbia Bonnie A. Nardi

in Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World

A growing trend in the development of large-scale technological systems seeks to strategically insert human beings into these systems in order to allow them to function in intended ways. These ... More

A growing trend in the development of large-scale technological systems seeks to strategically insert human beings into these systems in order to allow them to function in intended ways. These “technologies of objectification” enable situations where individuals are turned into either fragmented or totalized subjects. The chapter identifies certain types of health technologies and multiplayer online games as systems that objectify patients and players, turning them into docile or actively engaged subjects, respectively. Through the analysis of specific examples of each technology, the chapter demonstrates how software systems regulate human behavior in an expectant manner, drawing them in or pushing them away from certain kinds of activities. The chapter discusses the implications of this analysis for the question of materiality, and argue for a view that understands (de)materialization as a process rather than a settled dichotomy.Less

Technologies of Failure, Bodies of Resistance: Science, Technology, and the Mechanics of Materializing Marked Bodies

Josef Barla

in Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism

Asking for technology and the body at the same time almost inevitably evokes the question of what kinds of connections extend between the two. But what if it is not so much a question of connections ... More

Asking for technology and the body at the same time almost inevitably evokes the question of what kinds of connections extend between the two. But what if it is not so much a question of connections but of entanglements? What would it mean to understand the entanglement of technology and the body not so much as a matter of epistemological but of ontological indeterminacy? That is, what would it mean to argue that the boundaries and properties of bodies and technologies are performatively enacted through particular material-discursive practices, or “apparatuses”, through which ontological indeterminacy is resolved locally and temporarily? Building on Karen Barad’s work, in this chapter, I argue for an understanding of the concept of the apparatus of bodily production as both a figure and an analytical tool for technophilosophical inquiries of narratives centering on questions of power and becomings. Analyzing the Human Provenance Pilot Project— a project initiated by the UK Border Agency to determine the ethnicity and nationality of asylum seekers using DNA and isotope testing—I demonstrate how this concept allows us to get to an understanding of how bodily materialities along with far-reaching ethical and political consequences are enacted through generative material-discursive practices.Less

Representation: Images in Social Interactions

Tonio Hölscher

in Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome: Between Art and Social Reality

Regarding the role of images in social life, three fundamental categories are to be distinguished: representation, decor, and objects of discourses. Representation was a major aim, because ancient ... More

Regarding the role of images in social life, three fundamental categories are to be distinguished: representation, decor, and objects of discourses. Representation was a major aim, because ancient societies consisted not only of their living members but also of two other social groups, their dead ancestors and their gods and heroes. Community life developed in interactions, through rituals and other cultural practices, between these social partners, of which those that were, in fact, absent could be made present by images within the society’s living spaces. Specific groups of images, such as cult statues, votive images, athletes’ statues, and honorary portraits, had their specific places, in sanctuaries, public spaces, and necropolises, where they were dealt with according to specific rules of “living with images.”Less

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters: Orthodox Holiness and the Natural World

Donald Sheehan

in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation

Central to Orthodox asceticism is the work of opening space in ourselves between our desires and our actions. If every desire we have triggers an action we take then two disastrous effects follow. ... More

Central to Orthodox asceticism is the work of opening space in ourselves between our desires and our actions. If every desire we have triggers an action we take then two disastrous effects follow. First, our desires soon come to steer all our relations with the natural world, in that the world becomes the materialization. The second effect that follows when we fail to open space between our desires and our actions is that our selfhood becomes, in time, something like an entirely closed system of autonomous desire and autonomous satisfaction, a system wherein the natural world is dematerialized and unmade.Less

Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization

Diana Espírito Santo

in Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo

This chapter contains some of the book’s most central arguments, namely, those pertaining to the nature of knowledge, materiality, performance and mimesis in relation to the constitution, experience, ... More

This chapter contains some of the book’s most central arguments, namely, those pertaining to the nature of knowledge, materiality, performance and mimesis in relation to the constitution, experience, and expansion of particular selves (both of mediums and spirits). It is argued that “developing” is a paradoxical cosmogonic process in that it brings into existence that which already exists, a world of spirits, one that nevertheless wills its instantiation in matter and body in order to achieve presence and effect. The chapter further explores the mechanics and functions of espiritismo’s bread-and-butter ritual, the misa espiritual, and discusses notions of “education” and “materialization” relative to the dead and to the experience of spiritual differentiation and communion.Less

Body Work

Erik Mueggler

in Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

The third part of a speech to the dead focuses on fashioning material bodies for the dead, their extensive bodies. The songs describe two such bodies: an ancestral effigy given a home in a ... More

The third part of a speech to the dead focuses on fashioning material bodies for the dead, their extensive bodies. The songs describe two such bodies: an ancestral effigy given a home in a descendant’s house and a great effigy constructed as these songs were being performed. These songs trace a journey from intensive body to extensive body. The journey takes the form of a series: loss ⇒ search ⇒ encounter ⇒ assembly ⇒ destruction. This chapter also briefly describes the two rituals at which the speech was performed. It then considers the two pressing question raised by this speech for the dead. How is a person—body and soul—to be aligned with the earth; how is a person to find a home there? Second, how is a soul to be aligned with a particular body; how that soul to find a home in that body? The first question identifies a longstanding historical issue for Lòlop’ò, who have repeatedly had to search for new homes. The second grapples with a question that was particularly relevant during the socialist period, as Lòlop’ò used the frequent misalignment of soul with body to reflect upon socialist state campaigns.Less

Sensual Knowledge

Pablo F. Gómez

in Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms ... More

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.Less

Crossing Cameras in China: Christian Aesthetics and Realized Fictions

Angela Zito

in DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film

Chinese Director Gan Xiao’er makes the first fiction features to take up Christians in their everyday concerns. His film Raised from Dust (Juzi chentu 举自尘土‎2007) uses mostly members of the community ... More

Chinese Director Gan Xiao’er makes the first fiction features to take up Christians in their everyday concerns. His film Raised from Dust (Juzi chentu 举自尘土‎2007) uses mostly members of the community as actors. Gan’s documentary Church Cinema (Jiaotang dianying yuan教堂电影院‎ 2008) intercuts a chronicle of community screenings of Raised from Dust in churches with extensive post-production debriefing with local participants who assisted in making the feature. Gan, himself Christian, and his community approach the aesthetic materialization of this project differently. The community argues that more mobilization of feeling would enhance the fiction feature which they saw primarily as media for evangelizing. Gan was intent on pursuing his own agenda as writer and director with a modernist art-house sensibility. Their differing aesthetic regards point to differences of urban/rural sensibilities and of class distinctions of education, but also to a division within Protestant sensibilities about “sensibilities” themselves. Gan’s restraint about what can be “shown” contrasts with his fellow congregants’ affective enthusiasm for melodrama and “liveness.” Their differences provide examples of how the dialectical mediation of social life requires just such distinct moments of liveness/performance and objectification/artifact. Their malleable, digital objects, videos, are its perfect instantiation.Less

Katie, the Gold Leaf Lady

in The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations

This chapter, which presents the case of the “gold leaf lady,” a Florida woman whose body would break out spontaneously and at close range in a golden foil that turned out to be brass, investigates ... More

This chapter, which presents the case of the “gold leaf lady,” a Florida woman whose body would break out spontaneously and at close range in a golden foil that turned out to be brass, investigates why the phenomenon took the peculiar form of brass leaf and evaluates whether this should be regarded as a materialization or an apport. It also highlights the failure of the noted magician to replicate this phenomenon, and the botched attempt by the television show Unsolved Mysteries to study and document its occurrence.Less

Valuation Devices’ Orientation to Each Other: Imitation and Differentiation among Devices Valuing Companies’ Social and Environmental Performance

Sabina Du Rietz

in Making Things Valuable

This chapter investigates how valuation devices are oriented towards each other. It underlines the social influences that affect how we assess value. Studying valuation devices in this way emphasizes ... More

This chapter investigates how valuation devices are oriented towards each other. It underlines the social influences that affect how we assess value. Studying valuation devices in this way emphasizes that they are not simply composed in terms of what they assess. The ideas of how something should be valued come from somewhere. The chapter analyses orientation between devices in terms of the classic dichotomy of imitation and differentiation, informed by the work of Czarniawska and Joerges on travel and materialization of ideas. The analysis shows that while in one locality a device is considered as ‘new’, another locality views it as ‘the same’. Concurrently, the device may be viewed as an imitation from a translocal perspective. Connecting the translocal view of valuation devices with such local views, the analysis also shows when similarity in devices is not a consequence of imitation.Less