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What a Body Can Do: Martial Arts Ethics

Barry Allen

in Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts

Violence is a complex subject with many controversies. The chapter describes several of these complexities, including violence and power, war, law, gender, and its representation in cinema. Through ... More

Violence is a complex subject with many controversies. The chapter describes several of these complexities, including violence and power, war, law, gender, and its representation in cinema. Through these comparisons we see where martial arts practice fits in the economy of violence.Less

Frequent Sipping: Assembling the Subject of Hydration

Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter, and Kane Race

in Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water

This chapter argues that making up the thirsty consumer has been an important element in the formation of markets in bottled water. It traces the emergence of the concept of ‘hydration’ from its ... More

This chapter argues that making up the thirsty consumer has been an important element in the formation of markets in bottled water. It traces the emergence of the concept of ‘hydration’ from its origins in exercise science, considering its contemporary use, function, and deployment by the beverage industry. Hydration is centrally involved in the process of creating attachments between people and bottled water. This process has involved tapping into some of the dispositional tendencies and practices through which late 20th century consumers were making themselves into subjects: discourses of health and personal performance in particular. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical technologies of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’, offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. The chapter gives a sociomaterial answer to the question: how have we become so thirsty?Less

Biomedical Citizenship

Claire Laurier Decoteau

in Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This chapter focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign, and its struggle for the public provision of antiretrovirals. The international struggle against patent protection on essential medicines is the ... More

This chapter focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign, and its struggle for the public provision of antiretrovirals. The international struggle against patent protection on essential medicines is the backdrop of this movement’s success. The chapter argues that the TAC instigated the introduction of biomedical citizenship by linking welfare rights to certain disciplinary biomedical behaviors. The chapter asks: what happens when structural inequality makes the assumption of biomedical technologies of the self impossible? It argues that bio-politics blurs into necropolitics at the threshold of citizenship, constituting a new form of exclusionary inclusion.Less

Encultured Identities, Cultivated Selves

Carol Upadhya

in Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy

Chapter 5 continues the exploration of the connections between work, culture, power, and subjectivity in IT workspaces through an examination of the fashioning of new worker-subjects through soft ... More

Chapter 5 continues the exploration of the connections between work, culture, power, and subjectivity in IT workspaces through an examination of the fashioning of new worker-subjects through soft skills training. Communication skills, cross-cultural sensitivity, and other such training programmes impart and valorize personal orientations and techniques of self-development that draw on a neoliberal model of the self as well as stereotyped notions of Indian culture. Though such training, software engineers are urged to reconstitute themselves according to a standardized model of global corporate culture and professionalism and to reflect upon their identities and selves through an authorized discourse of cultural difference. The chapter also delineates the multifarious ways that ‘culture’ is put to work in IT workspaces to manage labour and business relations, and highlights the ways in which IT workers appropriate these technologies of the self and narratives of culture to reengineer themselves within a complex and shifting social field.Less

Technologies of Transcendence

Christopher Partridge

in High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World

This chapter introduces the book’s core ideas and some of the principal issues raised. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s understanding of “technologies of the self,” it explores how ... More

This chapter introduces the book’s core ideas and some of the principal issues raised. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s understanding of “technologies of the self,” it explores how drugs might be understood as “technologies of transcendence”—technologies that have the power to subvert dominant readings of reality. As such, they are always countercultural. By inducing the transcendence of ordinary consciousness, they are often understood to provide access to gnosis, or a special form of knowledge. They also typically induce mystical experiences of oneness that lead to a form of perennialism. In order to understand these mystical experiences, the chapter makes use of William James’s analysis of mysticism. Also, drawing on Mircea Eliade’s understanding of shamanism as “techniques of ecstasy,” it shows that drugs are often understood as technologies that induce ekstasis, meaning “to be located outside,” to “transcend,” or to be “displaced from” the embodied self.Less

Legalism and the Care of the Self: Sharīʿah Discourse in Contemporary Lebanon

Morgan Clarke

in Legalism: Rules and Categories

This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving ‘anthropology of ethics’. That literature seeks to move ... More

This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving ‘anthropology of ethics’. That literature seeks to move beyond notions of ethics and morality as ‘codes of conduct’ and explore instead what Foucault calls ‘the care of the self’, that is, projects of virtuous self-fashioning. The neglect, even dismissal, of rules in these discussions comes despite the obvious ubiquity and importance of the use of rules as technologies of the self, as in dietary regimes. The chapter explores the use of rules in one ethical tradition, the Islamic sharīʿah, through ethnography from Lebanon. Thinking more carefully about the nature of rules—their ‘necessary suboptimality’ for instance—opens up promising avenues of ethnographic inquiry rather than the theoretical dead-end that recent anthropology has assumed.Less

The Genealogy of Repentance

David A. Lambert

in How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture

This chapter considers the time and place of the rise of repentance. Moving from Greek sources to late Second Temple, early Christian, and rabbinic literatures, it argues that there is, in fact, a ... More

This chapter considers the time and place of the rise of repentance. Moving from Greek sources to late Second Temple, early Christian, and rabbinic literatures, it argues that there is, in fact, a genetic relationship between the representations of repentance found therein, locating its origins in Hellenistic moral philosophy. The argument focuses on how, in these various formulations, repentance functions as a technology of the self. It brings into being a shared notion of the human based on concerns for interiority, autonomy, moral transformation, and pedagogy. The formative place of repentance in early Judaism and Christianity corresponds to a period of governmentality in which these emerging religions must enable conversion and, at the same time, ensure compliance, a solidity of identity. The discourse around repentance develops the notion that a transformation in identity can be effectively enacted—that “repentance” exists—and puts it forward as a tool for self-monitoring.Less

Religion after Naturalism

Eric Steinhart

in Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays

This chapter argues that there are nontheistic religions in the West whose claims are compatible with naturalism. Many are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and ... More

This chapter argues that there are nontheistic religions in the West whose claims are compatible with naturalism. Many are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, it can be aroused, directed, and shaped. The energy religions thus involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. In this chapter, attention is focused on four new types of energy religion. These include the religions of consciousness (e.g., the New Stoicism, Westernized Buddhism); the religions of vision (involving the ethical use of entheogens); the religions of dance (e.g., religious raves); and the religions of beauty (e.g., Burning Man).Less

Christina Rossetti’s Chronometrical Eternal

Krista Lysack

in Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a ... More

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a miscellany of daily reading that combines lyric poetry and prose meditations. In Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Rossetti embraces the apparent synchronizations of liturgical and clock time that Keble’s volume implies. Among the time signatures that Rossetti tries on, in addition to the more familiar ones of liturgical time, are ones shaped through the possibilities of the quotidian. Time Flies playfully reveals how heterotopic or “eternal” time is produced through a material relation with the book as diurnal reading/writing object.Less

The Red Road

Michael Jackson

in The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing

Rimbaud's writing as oeuvre vie, in which poetry will be written only for as long as it takes for apersonal metamorphosis to be effected, whereupon the work of language will come to an end.