Download or read book Deconstructing Prehumanity written by Jorge Serrano and published by UPA. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deconstructing Prehumanity is an investigation into the role of archaeological perception in the construction of race. It explores how social knowledge and disciplinary subjectivity have shaped our organization of the human past and how this organization and its lexicon have fueled racialism. The idea of an African prehuman hierarchy powers American race relations in a damaging way. Scientific physical distinctions used in ethnological studies quantified and qualified physical and “racial” differences among so-called African prehumans, all of which plague human social relations as they extend harmful ideas about peoples of African descent. This book delves into the evolution of terms and utilizes Africana studies to present the systematic reconstruction of a black past. By reviewing ethnological studies, nomenclature, and how such processes play a role in conceiving African origins, the multidisciplinary work supplies explanations about notions of African nature, culture, and race as prehuman. It explicates paleoanthropological categories and connects them to racialized inferences. Deconstructing Prehumanity is intended for readers looking to understand how perceptions about human origins add to racialization as it proffered a utilitarian past.
Download or read book Deconstructing Behavior Choice and Well being written by Edward R. Morey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoclassical economists assume that people act to maximize their well-being: they choose based on their desires and only desire what they will like. Neuroscientists and psychologists disagree. Their research demonstrates that cues and evolutionary quirks cause people to act against their best interests, even choosing alternatives they will not like. In this book, Edward R. Morey contrasts neoclassical choice theory with behavioral models and findings in psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. The book addresses the fundamental idea within economics that behaviors are chosen, and it explains why other disciplines disagree. The chapters touch on modeling behavior, judging behavior, and policies. Morey breaks down judgment using the ethics of welfare economics, and it compares and contrasts this recognized approach with others, including Mill’s liberalism, virtue ethics, duty-based ethics, Buddhist ethics, and utilitarianism.
Download or read book Deconstructing India Pakistan Relations written by Sanjeev Kumar H. M. and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complex dynamics of India-Pakistan relations, by situating the same in the postcolonial setting of the subcontinent. In pursuit of this, the book analyses the impact of the linkages between the postcolonial processes of state-making and the structuring of political communities, upon the evolution of the problématique of state security in South Asia. For the purpose of undertaking this task, the author deconstructs the countries’ colonial history, with an aim to mapp its impact on the making of the foreign policy of Pakistan. Drawing primarily from colonial discourse theory and historical sociology, the book links the trajectory of Pakistan’s international politics, to its domestic politics and “weak state” inheritances. By doing this, it offers a stimulating treatment of the history of the country’s troubled postcolonial relations with India. This has been done in the book, by presenting the modes by which the religio-military and politico-bureaucratic classes that constitute the power elite in Pakistan, tended to have moulded an India-centred State security problématique. This book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian security, India-Pakistan relations and the defence and foreign policy of Pakistan.
Download or read book Deconstruction A Reader written by Martin McQuillan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers 'do' 'it', literary critics 'do' 'it', even architects, poets, painters 'do' 'it'. It can involve the concepts of capital, politics, and justice. So what, after all, is deconstruction? Deconstruction: A Reader makes an answer to this question available in the only way possible - by offering a selection of breathtaking range and depth of essential texts. With more than sixty selections by fifty contributors, including nine pieces by Jacques Derrida, this is the ultimate anthology of deconstructive reading, demonstrating that deconstruction is vivid, surprising, varied, and true to the text.
Download or read book How We Became Human written by Pierpaolo Antonello and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, René Girard’s mimetic theory is presented as elucidating “the origins of culture.” He posits that archaic religion (or “the sacred”), particularly in its dynamics of sacrifice and ritual, is a neglected and major key to unlocking the enigma of “how we became human.” French philosopher of science Michel Serres states that Girard’s theory provides a Darwinian theory of culture because it “proposes a dynamic, shows an evolution and gives a universal explanation.” This major claim has, however, remained underscrutinized by scholars working on Girard’s theory, and it is mostly overlooked within the natural and social sciences. Joining disciplinary worlds, this book aims to explore this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy. The contributors provide major evidence in favor of Girard’s hypothesis. Equally, Girard’s theory is presented as having the potential to become for the human and social sciences something akin to the integrating framework that present-day biological science owes to Darwin—something compatible with it and complementary to it in accounting for the still remarkably little understood phenomenon of human emergence.
Download or read book Throughout written by Ulrik Ekman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading media scholars consider the social and cultural changes that come with the contemporary development of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing and our cultural life promise to become completely interwoven: technical currents feed into our screen culture of digital television, video, home computers, movies, and high-resolution advertising displays. Technology has become at once larger and smaller, mobile and ambient. In Throughout, leading writers on new media--including Jay David Bolter, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich--take on the crucial challenges that ubiquitous and pervasive computing pose for cultural theory and criticism. The thirty-four contributing researchers consider the visual sense and sensations of living with a ubicomp culture; electronic sounds from the uncanny to the unremarkable; the effects of ubicomp on communication, including mobility, transmateriality, and infinite availability; general trends and concrete specificities of interaction designs; the affectivity in ubicomp experiences, including performances; context awareness; and claims on the "real" in the use of such terms as "augmented reality" and "mixed reality."
Download or read book Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.
Download or read book A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy in Literature and the Arts written by Hong Zeng and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revising her Ph.D. dissertation in comparative literature for the University of North Carolina, where she now teaches, Zeng deconstructs Chinese natural philosophy into time, self, and language, with time as the primary rupture that triggers the other two. She considers a variety of art forms, including Taoism and Zen Buddhism, classical Chinese painting, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, the contemporary film Farewell, My Concubine, linguistic characteristics of classical Chinese poetry, and modern American poetry. Then she analyzes in detail the work of several classical Chinese poets. The text is double spaced. Annotation :2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Download or read book Replications written by Whitney Davis and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve interdisciplinary essays collected here explore what Whitney Davis calls "replication" in archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis--the sequential production of similar artifacts or images substitutable for one another in specific contexts of use. Davis suggests that while archaeology deals with the "physics" of replication (its material conditions and constraints), psychoanalysis deals with the "psychics" of replication (its mental conditions and constraints). Because art history is equally interested in the material properties and in the personal and cultural meaning of artifacts and images, it can mediate the interests of archaeology and psychoanalysis. Thus Replications explores not only the differences between but also the common ground shared by archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis--focusing, for example, on their mutual interest in the "style" of artifacts or image making, their need to treat the "nonintentional" or "nonmeaningful" element in production, and their models of the subjective and social transmission of replications in the life history of persons and communities. Replications is an original contribution to an emerging field of study in domains as diverse as philosophy, cognitive science, connoisseurship, and cultural studies--the intersection of the material and the meaningful in the human production of artifacts. Davis develops formal models for and theories about this relationship, exploring the ideas of a number of philosophers, historians, and critics and presenting his own distinctive conceptual analysis.
Download or read book Early Human Kinship written by Nicholas J. Allen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Human Kinship brings together original studies fromleading figures in the biological sciences, social anthropology,archaeology, and linguistics to provide a major breakthrough in thedebate over human evolution and the nature of society. A major new collaboration between specialists across the rangeof the human sciences including evolutionary biology andpsychology; social/cultural anthropology; archaeology andlinguistics Provides a ground-breaking set of original studies offering anew perspective on early human history Debates fundamental questions about early human society: Wasthere a connection between the beginnings of language and thebeginnings of organized 'kinship and marriage'? How far didevolutionary selection favor gender and generation as principlesfor regulating social relations? Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of GreatBritain and Ireland in conjunction with the British Academy
Download or read book Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction written by Gerald Alva Miller Jr. and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.
Download or read book Branches of Asanteism written by Abdul Karim Bangura and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branches of Asanteism explores the epistemologies and research methodologies that have sprung from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante’s treatises on Afrocentricity. The book identifies and analyzes thirteen such epistemologies and methodologies while defining and explicating the various “branches” of Asante’s idea of Afrocentricity.
Download or read book Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process written by Harry F. Dahms and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emphasis is placed in Continental European social theory, and on the importance of political analyses to theorizing modern societies. This title focuses on dynamic processes that gave way to illuminate structural features of modern social life.
Download or read book The Trouble with Nature written by Roger N. Lancaster and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger N. Lancaster provides the definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire in this spirited exposé of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene. Lancaster links the recent resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general with the current pitched battles over sexual politics. Ideas about a "hardwired" and immutable human nature are circulating at a pivotal moment in human history, he argues, one in which dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented normalization of lesbian and gay relationships are challenging received notions and commonly held convictions on every front. The Trouble with Nature takes on major media sources—the New York Times, Newsweek—and widely ballyhooed scientific studies and ideas to show how journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence. Lancaster also provides a novel and dramatic analysis of the social, historical, and political backdrop for changing discourses on "nature," including an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment. By showing how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender, Lancaster invites us to think more deeply and creatively about human acts and social relations.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Sartre written by Christina Howells and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-08-28 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a balanced view of Sartre's philosophy in relation to contemporary trends in Continental philosophy, this volume shows that many of the topics associated with Lacan, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida are to be found in the work of Sartre, in some cases as early as 1936.
Download or read book Helene Cixous written by Abigail Bray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2003-12-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abigail Bray offers a lucid and accessible introduction to Hélène Cixous and her theorisation of writing and sexual difference. This book explores the context of feminist debates surrounding Cixous's work and provides a concise explanation of her major philosophical and literary concepts, including the 'other bisexuality', the 'third body', and l'écriture feminine. Bray demonstrates, through original and provocative readings of texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Angela Carter, the creative potential of Cixous's thought on literature and philosophy. Reading Cixous alongside Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, Bray argues for a recognition of Cixous as one of the important thinkers of our times.
Download or read book Rousseau and Nietzsche written by Katrin Froese and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality offers a vivid depiction of the problems and potential of modernity through the words of two of its most poignant voices. The book focuses upon the modern self's desire to individuate while facing the ethical responsibility to integrate into the world. Katrin Froese elegantly juxtaposes Nietzsche's drive for extraordinary individualism with Rousseau's call for the dependable citizen, demonstrating that where Nietzsche's aestheticism embraces the limitless and irreconcilable longings of a divided being, Rousseau's approach emphasizes the imposition of limits to ensure that harmony and contentment prevail. Going beyond conventional scholarship, the work emphasizes the similarities at the heart of Rousseau's notion of morality and Nietzsche's aestheticism: the moral vision that underlies Nietzsche's notion of art and the aesthetic understanding prevalent in Rousseau's moral system. This stunning new work of political philosophy will be of great use to scholars of political thought and readers seeking to understand what made Rousseau and Nietzsche's thought so decidedly modern.
