Dante's Gluttons

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Callegari
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how in his work medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to articulate, reinforce, criticize, and correct the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante’s Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life in the most profound sense of the term, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to the individual body and soul as well as to the collective. This book establishes how one of the world’s preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone, communicating through a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance.

scholarly journals Crowd surveillance: The (in)securitization of the urban body

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hidefumi Nishiyama
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Behaviour Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Crowd Behaviour ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Crowd Surveillance ◽  
Individual Body

The recent proliferation of the securitization of crowded places has led to a growth in the development of technologies of crowd behaviour analysis. However, despite the emerging prominence of crowd surveillance in emergency planning, its impacts on our understanding of security and surveillance have received little discussion. Using the case of crowd surveillance in Tokyo, this article examines the ways in which crowds are simulated, monitored and secured through the technology of crowd behaviour analysis, and discusses the implications on the politics of security. It argues that crowd surveillance constitutes a unique form of the biopolitics of security that targets not the individual body or the social body of population, but the urban body of crowd. The power of normalization in crowd surveillance operates in a preemptive manner through the codification of crowd behaviour that is spatially and temporarily specific. The article also interrogates the introduction of crowd surveillance in relation to racialized logics of suspicion and argues that, despite its appearance as non-discriminatory and ‘a-racial’, crowd surveillance entails the racial coding of crowd behaviour and urban space. The article concludes with the introduction of crowd surveillance as a border control technology, which reorients existing modalities of (in)securitization at airports.

scholarly journals Symbolic Action and Communication: Metaphor and Money in Kenneth Burke

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-194
Author(s):  
Andrei A. Gornykh
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Internal Quality ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Character ◽  
Poetic Imagery ◽  
Social Critical ◽  
The Individual

The article examines how the social-critical vision of modern society stems from the key notions of Kenneth Burke's conception of “symbolic action”. The bridge between literary criticism and Burke's socio-anthropological constructions is the concept of motive. An authentic source of motives for human action is a metaphor that gives an image that is simultaneously poetic, imaginary and dynamic, moving (in the form of “third term” of the metaphor). The metaphor reveals unexpected, but essential unity of dissimilar things. And in this sense it serves as a model of inter-subjective relations. Group cohesion can be understood as an “extended metaphor” in which all group members have a common “third term”. Thus, Burke brings the fields of anthropology and poetics closer together. A metaphor is a relationship in which the elements do not absorb each other, but reveal the essence of each other, sublate their partiality, contingency, that is make up a collective form. This is the “paradox of substance”. The commonality of a tribe is not an abstraction that arises “after” individuals, but exists in the form of a generic substance in the individuals themselves. This defines the dialectic of identification: the individual coincides with himself by mediation of not-himself (some external “character”). The paradox of substance places symbolic actions in the general field of “symbolic communication,” in which the word is not only an external instrument, but an internal quality of individuals. Poetic imagery is the substance of the social. Metaphor in this capacity is contrasted with money, which, displacing metaphor as a principle of social coherence, undermines truly human motives (utilitarianism instead of communal poetics).

Emotions and politics

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Rosa Ricci
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Individual

The theory of affections has seen a renewed conceptual interest both in the role played in the formulation of power structures in modernity, which remains important in understanding the present form of Nation State, and in the possibility to formulate a new interpretation of the social relationship useful to surpass the classical psychological lectures. We aim here to reconsider an affect which in contemporary language is tinged with theological nuances: the affect of fides. We can translate the word using the modern terms of trust and belief, but also loyalty. The choice of this particular affect is due to the centrality that, in our view, it occupies in modern contract theories, and to its ability to reflect, with its multiple conceptual stratification, different perspectives and political proposals. In order to clarify the terms of this discussion, we will henceforth use the term fides, alongside with different meanings which overlap within it, to illustrate two different and divergent proposals that have emerged during the seventeenth century. We consider, in particular, the thought of Spinoza opposed to the social contract theories by Hobbes in order to understand the modern theoretical break with previous political concepts; in particular, we will briefly analyze the different conceptions of Societas civilis that emerge from this division. The background of these considerations is the analysis of modern philosophy‘s use of the theory of affections. The XVII century witnessed the rise of social contract theory. It draws on the concept of the individual, conceived as isolated from others, located in the original state of nature (pre-social), unable to develop its rational part. It is therefore a victim of its own passions, but even more so those of others. The dominant sentiments emerging in Hobbes‘ Leviathan are therefore those of awe and fear. They derive from the constant uncertainty of one‘s power and strength; the uncertainty of being able to maintain everyone‘s domination over others and thus to suffer in turn the others‘ power. From the necessity to control these emotions in a rational way emerges the contractual proposal to transfer the power to an authority (singular or plural) whom all subjects must obey. Philosophical movements such as neostoicism and philosophical works such as Les passions de l‘ame by Descartes, testify in their „rationalist“ proposal the need to keep a constant control over the passions. They open the way for the famous dialectics of reason and passion, a central theme throughout the Enlightenment. This need to dominate the passions arouses from the complex Cartesian metaphysical theory and from its conception of the individual always split between body and soul, reason and instinct. These two models are the ones which have prevailed; this conception of individual and society and this approach to the passions still dominate common sense when we talk about human affections. The paper follows an itinerary across three authors of the modern age. At first we try to delineate the theory of affection by Descartes, and the birth of the dichotomy of body and soul through the focus of two of the most important works by Descartes: Méditations métaphysiques and Traité sur les passions de l‘âme. Then, by analyzing the works of Hobbes (Leviathan), and Spinoza (Ethic and Political treatise) we will describe in which terms the subject carrying his affective baggage interacts in a political space.

Governing Sexual Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Health ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Work ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

This chapter describes how sexual health has become a touchstone in discussions about political belonging in the United States. By linking the management of the individual body to the governance of the social body, proponents of sexual health projects define healthy societies, responsible conduct, and “good” and “bad” sexual citizens. While the uptake of sexual health by federal health agencies suggests movement toward the centralized administration of the concept, other uses of the term escape the control of any central biomedical or state authority. This essay considers how projects of sexual health, some organized by the state and some the efforts of a politically diverse range of activists, circulate within worlds of politics and governance. It concludes that as proponents of sexual health work to establish the proper relations between bodily conduct and social order, they offer a range of templates for modern biocitizenship.

Lo Normal Como Categoría Sociológica

1998 ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
Sandra Caponi
Keyword(s):  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Ian Hacking ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Georges Canguilhem ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Individual Body

Building on criticism directed against August Comte by Georges Canguilhem, I analyze Émile Durkheim's usage of the "normality-pathology" typology and show that these concepts do not support the organicist metaphor or the analogy between the social and the individual body. Rather, as suggested by Ian Hacking, these concepts are linked to the use of statistics and the Quetelian media, tools which allow us to understand social phenomena on populational terms. Thus, from the application of biological and statistical categories to sociological analysis, a kind of speech is born which enjoys solidarity with strategies of administration and management of the masses. This Foucault called the "biopolitics of the population."

scholarly journals Cultural values, but not nationality, predict social inclusion of robots

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Marchesi ◽  
Cecilia Roselli ◽  
Agnieszka Wykowska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Humanoid Robot ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Ostracism ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Individual

Research highlighted that Western and Eastern cultures differ in socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as social inclusion. Interestingly, social inclusion is a phe-nomenon that might transfer from human-human to human-robot relationships. Although the literature has shown that individual attitudes towards robots are shaped by cultural background, little research has investigated the role of cul-tural differences in the social inclusion of robots. In the present experiment, we investigated how cultural differences, in terms of nationality and individual cul-tural stance, influence social inclusion of the humanoid robot iCub, in a modi-fied version of the Cyberball game, a classical experimental paradigm measur-ing social ostracism and exclusion mechanisms. Moreover, we investigated whether the individual tendency to attribute intentionality towards robots mod-ulates the degree of inclusion of the iCub robot during the Cyberball game. Re-sults suggested that the individuals’ stance towards collectivism and tendency to attribute a mind to robots both predicted the level of social inclusion of the iCub robot in our version of the Cyberball game.

The Literary Social Symbol for an Interrelated Study of Mexico

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-399
Author(s):  
Mario J. Valdés
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Latin American Society

The idea of a seminar that would contribute as much to the understanding of the country or area studied as to the individual disciplines participating is still one of those interesting projects that very rarely materialize. I can only provide knowledgeable discussion on the contribution that literary criticism can make to the larger objective of the study of Latin American society and culture. I am of the opinion that the insights of literary analysis can be very useful to my colleagues in the social sciences, but the adaptation of material from a discipline that is dealing with the imagination in its most elaborate expression, in the last analysis, must depend on each specialist's willingness to confront the subjective vision in man as a part of the human experience.

The Meaning of Engagement

1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald L. Spence
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Phase Model ◽  
Analysis Approach ◽  
Age Related ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interactional Analysis ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Disengagement Theory ◽  
Age Related Changes

A distinction should be made between disengagement as a means of conceptualizing and as a means of explaining changes that take place with aging. The author is critical of those aspects of Disengagement Theory that emphasize inevitability, determinism, the separation of the individual from society, and the “crucial phase” model of development. An alternative viewpoint is sketched from the interactional analysis approach. Attention is given to the constant reinterpretation of self and situation, with consequent modification of actions. The facts of Disengagement Theory as seen from this perspective take on new meaning. Age-related changes are the outcome of the social circumstances within which they take place, along with the cultural values operating in that context.

scholarly journals They Order�this Matter Better in France�. Yorick the Philosopher and Sentimental Traveller

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena V. Maksiutenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Small World ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
The Individual

The article highlights the existing tradition of understanding Laurence Sterne�s literary texts as philosophical. Author uses such research approaches as historical and literary, sociocultural and biographical. The reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey produced by the �English Rabelais� through the philosophical dominant in the poetics is a controversial theme that has its supporters and opponents. Occasionally some researchers totally negate philosophical direction of Sterne�s works, others � though do not deny his interest in the studies of contemporary philosophers, with many of whom Sterne had friendly relations (Hume, d�Holbach, D�Alembert, Diderot), nevertheless accuse the writer for inability to create a consistent system of philosophical ideas and become an original thinker (James Work). In course of time a number of literary critics convinced in inherency of philosophical themes for Sterne�s novels is widening (A. Hadfield, J. Hawley, Sh. Regan, P. Davies, Ch. Lupton). Experts declare that the attempts to distance Sterne�s texts from the intellectual climate of the century lead to the marginalization of his achievement and Sterne has become celebrated by �a coterie of enthusiasts� as �our most influential unread author� (Andrew Hadfield). On the contrary, Martin Battestin in his famous essays written in 1994 � �A Sentimental Journey�: Sterne�s �Work of Redemption� and �Sterne �mong the Philosophes: Body and Soul in �A Sentimental Journey� � insists on the inseparability of Sterne�s novels from the leading philosophical tendencies of the epoch. The first of his papers, �A Sentimental Journey�: Sterne�s �Work of Redemption�, is the subject of the analytical commentary in the present article. Battestin argues that Sterne can be considered the first philosophical novelist in English who discerns Locke�s radically subjectivist implications and demonstrates in the form of his narrative the principles of association of ideas and �durational time�. In A Sentimental Journey Sterne debates the mechanistic doctrines of La Mettrie and his followers, d�Holbach, Diderot and discovers in the passion and sympathy a way of rejecting Hume�s skepticism. Yorick�s figure in A Sentimental Journey, his ability to enjoy the moments of happiness, the restraint to the manifestation of the extremeness of passion transform the canon of travel writing and unnoticeably give it the form of personal journal and self-observation where the plunge into the description of everyday trifles predominates. Sterne�s A Sentimental Journey turns into the model of �the literature of sensibility� ensuring the author with the popularity within the wide range of reading public. The researchers view A Sentimental Journey as a variation of familiar features of Sterne�s style that correlates with the turn to the lyrical psychological form, the attention to the individual consciousness, the world of inner feelings and emotions. The text of the novel becomes refined, the author�s tone is frivolous and full of erotic hints. The narrator intrigues the reader with the insinuating intonation where the ironical, ambiguous and melancholic colors are mixed. In A Sentimental Journey Yorick�s travel notes look like an �imaginary journey� where the factual topography becomes the cause for extensive emotional reflection of the hero who is not constraint with the social conventions and the outer world turns to be the �mirror of the soul� and is reflected in the endless stream of changeable opinions. According to Battestin, Sterne�s emphasis on the liberating function of human sexuality is important. Claiming a spiritual value for eroticism Sterne turns to be the precursor of D. H. Lawrence and the famous final chapters in A Sentimental Journey, �The Grace� and �The Case of Delicacy�, can be viewed as the paradigm of the novel�s leading theme � the human yearning for relationship, the quest for union and sociability. Battestin comes to a conclusion that in A Sentimental Journey Sterne found a way to diminish the disturbing solipsistic implications of the new philosophy that had defined �the small world of Shandy Hall in terms of hobby-horsical self-enclosure�. He proposed to find in human senses, imagination and physiology the means of transcending materialist doctrines and of affirming the possibility of communion.

Mobile Crowdsourcing Technology Acceptance and Engagement in Crisis Management

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Saad G. Yaseen ◽  
Khaled Saleh Al Omoush
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Crisis Management ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Mobile Crowdsourcing ◽  
Performance Expectancy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of the intention for the continuous acceptance and use of mobile crowdsourcing to participate in refugee crisis management. A questionnaire was developed to collect data from 389 Syrian refugees in Jordan's Za'atari camp. Smart PLS was used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the individual and crowd performance expectancy, the social influence, and perceived risks on the individual and crowd levels have a significant influence on the intention for the continuous acceptance and engagement in mobile crowdsourcing to participate in refugee crisis management. In addition, the results revealed that cultural values of masculinity, power distance, and long-term orientation have no effect on the intention. At the same time, cultural values of collectivism and uncertainty avoidance have a significant effect.

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