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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

Language Learning as Technology of the Self: The Moral Grounding of English

Joseph Sung-Yul Park

in In Pursuit of English: Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberal South Korea

This chapter explores how the act of English language learning came to be framed as a moral project during the Korean English fever, focusing on the role that such aspects of morality played in ... More

This chapter explores how the act of English language learning came to be framed as a moral project during the Korean English fever, focusing on the role that such aspects of morality played in rationalizing the social inequalities reproduced and exacerbated through the neoliberal promotion of English. Its analysis focuses on representation of successful learners of English in the conservative press, which frequently published stories of elite English language learners throughout the English fever. The chapter shows how these stories consistently downplayed the privileged provenance of the successful learners, and instead highlighted the extraordinary effort they put into learning English, presenting them as moral figures—ideal neoliberal subjects who immerse themselves in careful and ethical management of oneself. It is through such representations that English language learning came to reframed as a Foucauldian technology of the self, and a moral responsibility for neoliberal self-development.Less

Tactics of transformation: Self-formation and the multiplicity of authority in Polish conversions to Judaism

Jan Lorenz

in Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History

This chapter presents a case study rooted in the Jewish tradition of legalistic ethics, halakhah, discussing in particular its role in processes of conversion to Judaism. Jews-by-choice have become a ... More

This chapter presents a case study rooted in the Jewish tradition of legalistic ethics, halakhah, discussing in particular its role in processes of conversion to Judaism. Jews-by-choice have become a prominent feature of the synagogues and Jewish organisations of contemporary Poland, the focus of the chapter. In the understanding of halakhah, conversion (giyur) means becoming an observant Jew. Converts willingly submit themselves to rules and constraints in order to effect a desired self-transformation. The institution of giyur creates the legal matrix that enables these individual, rule-oriented projects of the self and their recognition by the communities that the converts wish to join. However, the halakhah is characterised by pluralism. This form of self-making must thus be mediated through a multiplicity of rabbinical legal expectations – ‘progressive’, ‘orthodox’, ‘ultra-orthodox’ – and the varying degree of their recognition by a handful of especially important institutions, including, crucially for some, the Israeli state. In hierarchical terms, the strictest version of religious practice often becomes the most readily acknowledged. In practice, then, these transformative projects are realised not just through the rules of religious observance, but by navigating the meta-rules of conversion – which themselves vary – and the relationships, formal and informal, between these different legal matrices. Successful conversion thus often requires elaborate tactics of shifting between authorities, institutions and spheres of influence. An appreciation of its legalism thus becomes an indispensable technology of the self.Less

Counting good and bad deeds under military rule: Islam and divine bookkeeping in Nablus (Palestine)

Emanuel Schaeublin

in Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History

This chapter describes the challenges of a distinct aspect of ethical formalism, that of quantification, and the tension in many ethical traditions between calculation and the incalculable. Certain ... More

This chapter describes the challenges of a distinct aspect of ethical formalism, that of quantification, and the tension in many ethical traditions between calculation and the incalculable. Certain facets of ethical conduct can be weighed or counted, while others – such as matters of faith, mercy and trust – disrupt or evade calculation. The chapter explores this tension in the context of Sunni Islam, where adhering to religious rules in one’s personal conduct is often assumed to gain one points in a divine system of bookkeeping. Through ethnographic research in the Palestinian city of Nablus, it is argued that such divine bookkeeping can be understood as a technology of the Muslim self. Other aspects of being a good Muslim, however, break calculation apart. Ethical qualities that bear on one’s relation to God or other human beings are particularly difficult to think of in such formalistic terms. Regarding contemporary Islam, some scholars have argued that an interest in calculation stems from the rise of neo-liberal forms of capitalism. Yet attention to comparable ideas in the Christian tradition shows otherwise. St Anselm, for instance, phrased similar notions in the terms of the feudalism of his time. The chapter points instead to the repressive politics of the occupied Palestinian territories, which combine capitalist political economies with extensive security surveillance. There is an elective affinity between the microscopic scrutiny of such state surveillance and the calculated tallying of good and bad deeds.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.