History Of Body, Time And Space

In interpreting Aristotle, the only tenable way of thinking the relationship between time and motion is that time is not motion, but is inseparable from and belongs to motion. This paper works out what this means: what makes time both different from and dependent on motion is that it is the number of motion. But in counting time we are not counting whatever we use to count with, namely, the ‘now,’ we are counting time. For Aristotle, all motion is basically articulated, and when we mark off these articulations as limits or ‘nows,’ the number that arises from them is time. Put otherwise, movement is related to number because it generates a
before and after, a ‘now’. Movement itself, however, is not  numerable: by marking off movement, the before and after have delimited that which we number, namely, time. That is, we mark off movement with before and after, but in doing so we do not count movement, nor do we count the ‘nows’ with which we number; instead, we count time. Thus Aristotle’s account of time does not presuppose the existence of time, nor does it reduce time to motion. It does not assume that time is linear or composed of discrete moments. It grapples with and gives an account of the original generation of time.

Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affective experience of ITenabled (physical and virtual) hybrid workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) literature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organizational space to suggest implications for HRM practice and pathways for future research on how virtual and physical spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid workplaces and practices.

“Maps, Calendars and Diagrams: Space and Time in Seventeenth-Century Maritime East Asia.” In Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang, eds. Sea Rovers, Silk, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in World History, 1500-1750.  (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016) 86-113.

As museums are increasingly attracted to Virtual Reality (VR) technology as a display resource, this research argues for a pressing need to examine the role of VR objects in the museum and how visitors picture the past via such intangible forms.  Acknowledging the cultural literacies of 21st century ‘digital natives’ and Lemke’s new attentional cultures, the thesis maps an evolving taxonomy around the ‘real’/’virtual’ to conceptualise the VR artefact as a new genre of museological object. Taking the display of a VR mummy in Mummy: the inside story (British Museum 2004-06), as its focus, this thesis dissects the acts of spectatorship and interpretation, via in-depth interviews with a sample of artists. Interview data present participants’ critique of VR as a display resource, and their interpretative practices around the VR mummy. Perceptions of ‘authenticity’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘spectacle’ occupy a central place in the analysis. Extending Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of the chronotope (literally ‘timespace’), provides a method to make visible the processes and mechanisms of interpretation in the museum which facilitate visitors to imagine the time and space of other societies. Analysis of the interview data identifies two new forms of the chronotope which organise interpretation around the VR artefact – the chronotopes of differentiation and regeneration. Modelling the arrangements of timespace in each demonstrates the VR mummy as a stimulus for different pictures of the past. In conclusion, the implications for accessing the past via a VR artefact are critically questioned to arrive at a dual role for the VR object – as an interpretative tool to augment the physical collections and as an artefact to be interpreted in its own right. Both roles are analysed for their pedagogic potential, offering recommendations for practice, informed by the research findings.

This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate agency. Secondly, fat has implications for agency by virtue of the power relationships implied in the act of fattening, which has been repeatedly framed in the West with reference to animal consumption. Discourses of fat and fattening are thus saturated with allegations of failed agency, whether by citing the confining materiality of fat itself or by associating the fattened person with abject animality. After exploring these claims with reference to select examples from classical antiquity, the essay presents surveys how similar ideas mobilized weight-loss discourses from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, by which time most of our current anti-fat thinking had been firmly entrenched.

A brief explanation of the development of the continuous concept of matter, as represented by the general theory of relativity and the unified field theory, is offered, as opposed to the discrete theory of matter represented by quantum mechanics which has been normally interpreted by the Copenhagen School. Throughout the modern development of these two concepts - the discrete and continuous aspects of nature - the thread of wave/particle duality is intimately woven. Yet they do not seem to be compatible. Wave/particle duality is a unifying concept while the debate over the discrete and continuous natures of matter is anything but unifying. In spite of the overwhelming presence of the discrete-continuity debate in physics, wave/particle duality remains important because the concept is an honest attempt to bring these two opposing views together as one universal concept. It seems strange that the physics community can allow this vast discrepancy in basic notions of nature to exist and persist, but it does so in spite of all attempts to describe nature within the context of either one or the other of these seemingly incompatible concepts. This paper was written well before the Standard Particle Model became the dominant theory of the quantum. Yet, paradoxically, parts of this argument have become ever more relevant because of the dominance of the Standard Model, which is supposedly a unifying theory, but seems to stress the differences between discrete and continuous rather than attempt to either unify them or demonstrate their physical compatibility in any manner.

Awareness of impermanence is an attitude that permeates much of traditional Japanese culture. It is often seen to be grounded in Buddhist doctrine, which emphasizes the transiency of everything that exists. However, there are statements by the medieval Zen Master Dôgen (1200-1253) – a professedly orthodox Buddhist and arguably one of the most important religious minds from this country – that contradict this feeling. Arguing against over-emphasis on time's passage, Dôgen asserted the stationary aspects of time. Some of his modern readers took such statements as expressions of mystical insight into a world of timeless truth. A close reading of the sources suggests instead that Dôgen wanted to argue against eternalist as well as nihilist views. He developed a complex view of time, which accounts for its stable sequential order. This theory served to substantiate his claim that the Buddhist ideal could only be realized by continued religious practice.

"* Preface *:

What makes laws endure or change? When a law changes, how does a tradition of legal interpretation justify the innovation in light of its legal precedents and foundational texts? What is the function of the reasons given for laws? What relationship does law bear to social values? These interrelated questions fall under the heading of philosophy of law, yet it is mainly through the study of history that they can be probed. Answering these questions in different cultural and historical settings is a prerequisite for developing a general theory of law, for it makes distinguishing universal elements from culturally-specific parameters possible. In particular, a culturally specific feature of Islamic law is its religious character. One may ask, therefore, whether the fact that Muslim legal traditions invoke sacred authority makes an essential difference to the way the questions posed above are answered. In other words, does sacred law operate in a fundamentally different way from secular law? This book explores these questions through a study of the largest legal tradition in Islam, namely the Hanafi school of law.

The book begins by creating a general model of juristic decision making that describes any legal tradition, Islamic or not, in terms of a number of parameters. It does not presuppose that all legal traditions are identical, for the parameters in the model may vary from one tradition to another.  [continued]"""""""

Abstract: This article proposes that, at various historical moments, stereotypes about fat people as being corrupt, weak, and stupid have been complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. In an effort to understand the formation and longevity of these three long-standing stereotypes this article submits that the material properties of fat – particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness – have played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of ‘fat’ in its various forms (whether ‘frozen’ as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses examples from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has resonated across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which ‘fat’ has been understood culturally.

§7 Fazit
Die metonymische und metaphorische Verwendung von Körperteil-Bezeichnungen für assoziierte Handlungen darf meines Erachtens zum Grundvokabular theologischer Rede in Ägypten gezählt werden (§§5–6). Ihre Verwendung setzt nicht notwendigerweise eine körperliche Vorstellung der betreffenden Aktanten voraus (vgl. §4). Grundlage ist eine Weltwahrnehmung, in der Körperteile und mit ihnen assoziierte Handlungen kognitiv eng verknüpft sind (§3). Diese Wahrnehmung scheint aber nicht auf die antiken Kulturen beschränkt, wie eine reflektierte Betrachtung moderner Sprachen nahelegt. Als kulturspezifisch-ägyptische Besonderheiten metonymisch-funktionaler Verwendungen von Körperteil-Lexemen möchte ich folgende hervorheben (vgl. §3):
a) Emotion und Kognition ist in Ägypten ausschließlich im Leib bzw. genauer im Herzen verortet – nicht im Kopf. Im Unterschied z.B. zum Deutschen leiten sich daher vom Kopf ausschließlich Verwendungen ab, die sich auf seine hervorgehobene Position ‚ganz oben‘  Anthropomorphismus) oder ‚ganz vorne‘ (Zoomorphismus) zurückführen lassen.
b) Das Ägyptische nutzt häufiger metonymisch das ‚Gesicht‘ (ḥr) zur Ansprache des ‚Blicks‘ o.ä. (anstelle des semantisch näher liegenden ‚Auges‘ jr.t). Analog nutzt es gelegentlich den ‚Schläfenbereich‘ (mꜢꜤ) (anstelle der ‚Ohren‘) zur Ansprache des Zuhörens.
c) Das Motiv der ‚Feinde unter den Füßen/Sohlen‘ steht für politische Unterwerfung und Dominanz über den politischen Gegner.
d) Das Motiv der ‚Luft für die Nase/an die Nase‘ und des ‚Lebens an der Nase‘ steht wohl für Lebensheil. Dasselbe Motiv liegt auch einer Schöpfungstheologie zu Grunde, die den göttlichen (lichtdurchfluteten) Äther (Šw; Schu) mit dem ‚Leben‘ (Ꜥnḫ) identifiziert.
Neben weiteren finden wir die beiden Motive ‚Feinde unter den Füßen/Sohlen‘ und ‚Luft für die Nase/an die Nase‘ auch mehrfach als ‚erweckte Metaphern‘ in bildliche Medien umgesetzt (§3).

In this chapter, I propose that a trans-textual hermeneutics across the Han interpretations of chapter 42 and the elaboration of the concept cluster in the chapter would unveil a coherent philosophy of body. According to this philosophy, the human body is composed of the Quintessential Spirit and the Physical Body. The Quintessential Spirit
and the Physical Body are not two distinct entities but two forms of qi-pure qi and turbid qi, as originated from Heaven (tian) and Earth (di), respectively. In other words, the human body is not regarded as an entity simpliciter but the arena for the interplay between Heaven and Earth. It is only through retaining the harmonious state between the Quintessential Spirit (the cognitive mind) and the Physical Body (the whole living body) that there is a harmonious bodily space for the harmonization of things in the world.

As medical technology continues to progress, we are able to correct deficiencies in the body through means such as cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. This has led some scholars to argue that we are creating technologized, cyborg bodies. However, these technologies have also enabled us to correct perceived cultural flaws in the body. This article explores the nature of the body through the lens of posthumanism, examining ways that individuals attempt to reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification. Specifically, this article examines the practice of hymen restoration, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artistic endeavours in cosmetic surgery and Stelarc’s cybernetic experimentations. These cases yield three potential visions of the body: the body must be restored; bodies must be unified; and the body must evolve. Such visions have consequences; the ways in which the body is rhetorically constructed influence how people choose to alter their own bodies. By considering the body itself as medium and as an interface with other technologies, we can better theorize what it truly means to be human.

In this article, aspects of narrative critique, genre, editorial critique, the body and space are uniquely combined into a body-space framework. This spatial framework is used to examine the second episode of ‘Bel and the Dragon’, called ‘Daniel Dragonslayer’. It is postulated that the second episode of ‘Bel and the Dragon’ should be read in a reciprocal relationship with not only ‘Bel and the Dragon’, but also the larger Book of Daniel. Firstly, such an analysis indicates that the smaller episode is part of a larger clash of deities. Secondly, it shows that the editor / author utilises the episode to create a new cosmology. In this new cosmology, the Jewish deity is an almighty one, whilst other deities are seen as false and not real living gods. In his own way, the editor or author contributes to the way in which Jews regarded their God within the reality of the diaspora.

Die sozialtheoretischen Diskussionen der letzten Jahrzehnte haben zu neuartigen Anforderungen an eine allgemeine Sozialtheorie geführt.
Wie muss eine allgemeine Theorie des Sozialen aussehen,
• die den Kreis legitimer Akteure als historisch variabel, d.h. als kontingent, begreift, statt ihn selbstverständlicherweise auf den Kreis lebendiger Menschen zu beschränken?
• die die Natur-Kultur-Unterscheidung nicht als gegeben voraussetzt, sondern als eine mögliche Ordnung des Zugangs zur Welt begreift?
• die Ordnung nicht nur als eine Ordnung des Sozialen analysiert, sondern auch Materialität und die Dimensionen von Raum und Zeit einbezieht?
• die Gewalt als ordnungsbildende Kraft begreifen kann?
• die eine Perspektive für die Formulierung einer Gesellschaftstheorie erschließt?
Mit Blick auf die allgemeine Theoriedebatte werden in diesem Buch drei Diskus-sionstränge zusammengeführt: Zum einen das Konglomerat an Debatten um die Notwendigkeit theoretischer Neuorientierungen (»turns« oder »Wenden« wie z.B. linguistic turn, material turn, body turn, pictorial turn oder spatial turn); zum anderen die Problematisierung der Grenzen der Sozialwelt bzw. des Akteursstatus nichtmenschlicher Entitäten; drittens die immer wieder aufflackernden Auseinandersetzungen um die Bedeutung von Gewalt für die Gestaltung sozialer Prozesse.
Die Theorie der Weltzugänge führt diese Aspekte zu einer Theorie mehrdimensionaler Ordnungsbildung zusammen und entwickelt dabei zugleich eine Perspektive für die Ausarbeitung einer Gesellschaftstheorie. Dieser Schritt ist theoriearchitektonisch notwendig, denn dadurch lassen sich die Sozialtheorie und damit auch die durch sie angeleiteten Forschungen reflexiv historisch situieren – dies ist die Voraussetzung für eine rationale Theoriekonstruktion.

Injurier autrui n’est pas une simple affaire de mots. C’est avant tout, voire surtout, une affaire de corps, de corps socialisés, émotionnels et de corps situés dans l’espace. S’appuyant sur la sociolinguistique et l’anthropologie linguistique contemporaine qui plaident pour une étude multimodale du langage (verbal, non-verbal, matériel), cette communication s’intéressera aux « façons d’être injurieuse » traçables dans la documentation judiciaire bolonaise du XIVe siècle. À partir des procès pour « paroles injurieuses » (verba iniuriosa) recueillis en archives, nous explorerons la dimension corporelle des relations interpersonnelles au Moyen Âge, dont l’injure est une des facettes.

ABSTRACT This article contends that, as a complex experience with definite implications for the body, modern civilization exercises a double logic that promotes and supports the interests of elite males while at the same time threatening to undermine those
interests by eroding the corporeal foundations of male privilege. This argument is developed by examining: 1) those places in the West where localized concerns about the declining power and fitness of male bodies have reflected transnational engagements
with modern civilization; 2) the ways in which tensions between masculinity and civilization are played out in time and space; and 3) how these anxieties about bodies in the modern world have contributed to fantasies of “new men” since the eighteenth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, social attitudes toward disability turned sharply negative. An international eugenics movement brought about restrictive immigration laws in the United States and other immigrant nations. One cause was the changing understanding of time, both historical and quotidian, that accompanied the advent of evolutionary theory and a competitive industrial economy. As analogies of competition became culturally ubiquitous, new words to talk about disability such as 'handicapped', 'retarded', 'abnormal', 'degenerate', and 'defective', came into everyday use, all of them explicitly or implicitly rooted in new ways of thinking about time. The intense fear of disability that characterised the eugenics movement grew, in good part, from this new and unsettling vision of time.

This paper takes as its starting point a definition of islands that goes beyond geographical isolation to consider islands as social constructs insofar as they reflect feelings of isolation, separateness, distinctiveness and otherness. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ‘dry’ island, an island that although once surrounded by water has long since lost its physical isolation due to changes in sea level and drainage patterns. Taking the Isle of Ely in the fens of East Anglia in the United Kingdom between AD 1200-1600 as a case study, and utilising archaeological evidence for diet and for the local Ely ware pottery, it is possible to reconstruct a cognitive mappa, which describes the perception of islandness amongst the island’s medieval inhabitants.

This paper takes a fresh look at Dōgen's ideas on time by reviewing the way time is expressed in his writings. It explores the aspects of time addressed, and discusses the modes and function of chronometrical information present. This lays the foundation for a new assessment of the importance of time and, specifically, duration in his thought.

The monastery of San Benito el Real of Valladolid in XVth century directed a reformation of other benedictine monasteries in the Kingdom of Castile in order to obligate to the compliance of the San Benito´s rule. As a result of this, the relationships among the monasteries increased and the friars travelled along the kingdom of Castile. This research is about one of this travels and it analizes the time-conscious and the time-measuring in the course of the travel. The main source is a document stored in  the Archivo Histórico Nacional. This essay considers the possibility of using astronomical knowledge and devices to measure the time during the travels without mechanical clocks. The friars had a great interest in time, because they measured it with hours of equal length, as we do today. Finally the survey concludes explaining that the friars had an abstract and modern conception of time connected with the diffussion of the mechanical clock and its use.

This article uses Franciscan history to explore an alternative approach to global history. Following Benjamin Lazier’s observations about ‘Earthrise’, which showed that images of the world have been entangled with intellectual and political discourses, this article explores the Franciscans’ own Earthrise perspective which can be traced in the spiritual and mystical writings produced in the late Middle Ages. The aim of this article is not only to contest the kind of periodisation which has seen the global turn and ‘global era’ as peculiarly ‘modern’, but to suggest that any study of the ‘global’ must incorporate an analysis of the multilayered nature of that concept. It suggests that the global is not so much a scale as an idea, and considers how the hyper-local place of the body can be a site for realising a global vision.

Abstract: This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather this analysis tracks a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals, between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard could be sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Providing new practical and conceptual tools for responding to human and environmental crises in Appalachia and beyond, Recovering the Commons radically revises the framework of critical social thought regarding our stewardship of the civic and ecological commons. Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor ally social theory, field sciences, and local knowledge in search of healthy connections among body, place, and commons that form a basis for solidarity as well as a vital infrastructure for a reliable, durable world. Drawing particularly on the work of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt, the authors reconfigure social theory by ridding it of the aspects that reduce place and communi-
ty to sets of interchangeable components. Instead, they reconcile complementary pairs such as mind/body and society/nature in the reclamation of public space.

With its analysis embedded in philosophical and material contexts, this penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.

Being a child is feeling afraid; children experience daily things that can be frightening and difficult to understand, but we tend to think or hope that children are not affected by the sad sides of life. It does not work like that: of course, it does affect them; violence is part of the daily life of most children: violence at home, at school, in their communities and in the world. However, very few countries and channels assume the responsibility of taking complex current issues to children's audiences, even though conflict is present at all levels of social life. Cultural creations for children have of course to reflect this; no matter how hard or difficult a topic is, there is always a child perspective, a point of view to address it. This article contributes to the reflection on the strategies that we can implement to give adequate treatment to the issues ignored in the media for childhood. Resumen: Ser un niño es sentir mucho miedo; los niños experimentan diariamente cosas que pueden ser atemorizantes y difíciles de entender, pero tendemos a pensar o a esperar que a los niños no les afectan los lados tristes de la vida. No funciona así: claro que sí les afectan; la violencia es parte de la vida cotidiana de la mayoría de los niños: violencia en la casa, en la escuela, en sus comunidades y en el mundo. Sin embargo, muy pocos países y canales asumen la responsabilidad de llevar los temas complejos de actualidad a las audiencias infantiles, a pesar de que el conflicto está presente en todos los niveles de la vida social. Las creaciones culturales para los niños tienen por supuesto que reflejar esto; sin importar lo duro o difícil que resulte un tema, siempre existe una perspectiva, un punto de vista infantil para abordarlo; este artículo aporta a la reflexión sobre las estrategias que podemos implementar para dar un adecuado tratamiento a las temática ignoradas en los medios dirigidos a la infancia.