Download or read book Afterlives of Affect written by Matthew C. Watson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afterlives of Affect Matthew C. Watson considers the life and work of artist and Mayanist scholar Linda Schele (1942–98) as a point of departure for what he calls an excitable anthropology. As part of a small collective of scholars who devised the first compelling arguments that Maya hieroglyphs were a fully grammatical writing system, Schele popularized the decipherment of hieroglyphs by developing narratives of Maya politics and religion in popular books and public workshops. In this experimental, person-centered ethnography, Watson shows how Schele’s sense of joyous discovery and affective engagement with research led her to traverse and disrupt borders between religion, science, art, life, death, and history. While acknowledging critiques of Schele’s work and the idea of discovery more generally, Watson contends that affect and wonder should lie at the heart of any reflexive anthropology. With this singular examination of Schele and the community she built around herself and her work, Watson furthers debates on more-than-human worlds, spiritualism, modernity, science studies, affect theory, and the social conditions of knowledge production.

Download or read book The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives written by Debra J. Bassett and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of ‘the fear of second loss’. Bassett argues that digital afterlives challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors. But Bassett’s book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the ‘intentional’ Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett’s conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who wants to live forever?

Download or read book The Afterlives written by Thomas Pierce and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ridiculously good” (The New York Times) author Thomas Pierce's debut novel is a funny, poignant love story that answers the question: What happens after we die? (Lots of stuff, it turns out). Jim Byrd died. Technically. For a few minutes. The diagnosis: heart attack at age thirty. Revived with no memory of any tunnels, lights, or angels, Jim wonders what--if anything--awaits us on the other side. Then a ghost shows up. Maybe. Jim and his new wife, Annie, find themselves tangling with holograms, psychics, messages from the beyond, and a machine that connects the living and the dead. As Jim and Annie journey through history and fumble through faith, they confront the specter of loss that looms for anyone who dares to fall in love. Funny, fiercely original, and gracefully moving, The Afterlives will haunt you. In a good way.

Download or read book Online Afterlives written by Davide Sisto and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How digital technology—from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones—is changing our relationship to death. Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death. Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

Download or read book Afterlives of Data written by Mary F.E. Ebeling and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What our health data tell American capitalism about our value—and how that controls our lives. Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape our control. Mary F. E. Ebeling's ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and the debt that we carry becomes biopolitical assets owned by healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals how data about our lives come to affect our bodies and our life chances and to wholly define us. Investigations into secretive data collection and breaches of privacy by the likes of Cambridge Analytica have piqued concerns among many Americans about exactly what is being done with their data. From credit bureaus and consumer data brokers like Equifax and Experian to the secretive military contractor Palantir, this massive industry has little regulatory oversight for health data and works to actively obscure how it profits from our data. In this book, Ebeling traces the health data—medical information extracted from patients' bodies—that are digitized and repackaged into new data commodities that have afterlives in database lakes and oceans, algorithms, and statistical models used to score patients on their creditworthiness and riskiness. Critical and disturbing, Afterlives of Data examines how Americans' data about their health and their debt are used in the service of marketing and capitalist surveillance.

Download or read book Modernism and Affect written by Julie Taylor and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses an under-researched area of modernist studies, reconsidering modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of the humanities' turn to affect.

Download or read book Religious Affects written by Donovan O. Schaefer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.

Download or read book Life Emergent written by Yasmeen Arif and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Who Are You written by Alex Custodio and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance in this video game history that traces the handheld’s network of hardware and software afterlives! In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan “Who Are You?”—asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players’ nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly 2 decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform. In Who Are You?, Alex Custidio considers each component of this network—hardware, software, peripheral, or practice—to illuminates the platform’s unique features as a computational system and a cultural artifact. You’ll learn about: • The evolution of Nintendo’s handhelds and consoles, and how they embed nostalgia into the hardware • Nintendo’s expansion of the Game Boy Advance platform through interoperability • Physical and affective engagement with the Game Boy Advance • Portability, private space, and social interaction • The platformization of nostalgia • Fan-generated content including homebrew, hacking, and hardware modding • And much more! Although the Game Boy Advance is neither the most powerful nor the most popular of Nintendo's handhelds, Custodio argues, it is the platform that most fundamentally embodies Nintendo's reliance on the aesthetics and materiality of nostalgia.

Download or read book Solitary Confinement written by Lisa Guenther and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. A searing and unforgettable indictment, Solitary Confinement reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary confinement tells us about what it means to be human—and why humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all other people.

Download or read book Affect and Literature written by Alex Houen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores a wide range of affects, affect theory, and literature to consolidate a fresh understanding of literary affect.

Download or read book The Affect of Difference written by Christopher P. Hanscom and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Affect of Difference is a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia. Contributors approach this subject through the exploration of everyday culture from a range of academic disciplines, each working to show how race was made visible and present as a potential means of identification. By analyzing artifacts from diverse media including travelogues, records of speech, photographs, radio broadcasts, surgical techniques, tattoos, anthropometric postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks—an archive that chronicles the quotidian experiences of the colonized—their essays shed light on the politics of inclusion and exclusion that underpinned Japanese empire. One way this volume sets itself apart is in its use of affect as a key analytical category. Colonial politics depended heavily on the sentiments and moods aroused by media representations of race, and authorities promoted strategies that included the colonized as imperial subjects while simultaneously excluding them on the basis of "natural" differences. Chapters demonstrate how this dynamic operated by showing the close attention of empire to intimate matters including language, dress, sexuality, family, and hygiene. The focus on affect elucidates the representational logic of both imperialist and racist discourses by providing a way to talk about inequalities that are not clear cut, to show gradations of power or shifts in definitions of normality that are otherwise difficult to discern, and to present a finely grained perspective on everyday life under racist empire. It also alerts us to the subtle, often unseen ways in which imperial or racist affects may operate beyond the reach of our methodologies. Taken together, the essays in this volume bring the case of Japanese empire into comparative proximity with other imperial situations and contribute to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the role that race has played in East Asian empire.

Download or read book The Life of Plants written by Emanuele Coccia and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world. In this highly original book, Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Since our atmosphere is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought that discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia’s account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life.

Download or read book Afterlives written by Abdulrazak Gurnah and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BY THE WINNER OF THE 2021 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 'Riveting and heartbreaking ... A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure' Maaza Mengiste, Guardian 'A brilliant and important book for our times, by a wondrous writer' Philippe Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year _______________ While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security – and the love of the beautiful Afiya. As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away... _______________ 'One of the world's most prominent postcolonial writers ... He has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals' Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee 'In book after book, he guides us through seismic historic moments and devastating societal ruptures while gently outlining what it is that keeps those families, friendships and loving spaces intact, if not fully whole' Maaza Mengiste 'Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair ... One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment' The Times

Download or read book Culture in Networks written by Paul McLean and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction? It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.

Download or read book Afterlives written by Nancy Mandeville Caciola and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Download or read book May 68 and Its Afterlives written by Kristin Ross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.