The paper is an example of interdisciplinary research. It combines aspects of mythology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and feminism to support the analysis of images of water associated with woman and seduction, mainly in visual art. The author’s question is as follows: What are the basic characteristics of woman, water and seduction that have enabled them, throughout the world’s history, to fuse into a complex that can be found in myths, fairy tales, philosophical treatises, psychoanalysis and especially in works (...) of art? Is it a kind of Jungian archetypal image? To answer this question the author searches for a philosophical explanation of seduction in Jean Baudrillard’s On Seduction, and for an explanation of women’s identity in the works of Helene Cixous and Julie Kristeva. Further, an explanation of the development of the image of the mermaid is offered. The main emphasis is put on the interpretation of several works of art: What a Water Gave Me by Frida Kahlo, The Seduction and The Collective Invention by Rene Magritte, Queen of the Fish by Mimi Parent, and Bathing Nymphs by Paul Delvaux. (shrink)

A critical study of the growing use of evolutionary theory and neuroscience to interpret art. Explores the question of what is gained from using ideas and methods from the biological sciences in the analysis of art"--Provided by publisher.

Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the US Presidential election that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, (...) responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. (shrink)

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

I discuss the aesthetic power of painful art. I focus on artworks that occasion pain by “hitting too close to home,” i.e., by presenting narratives meant to be “about us.” I consider various reasons why such works may have aesthetic value for us, but I argue that the main reason has to do with the power of such works to transgress conversational boundaries. The discussion is meant as a contribution to the debate on the paradox of tragedy.

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent formal (...) conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

Helps individual readers to overcome procrastination and build self-esteem Reveals how to create a culture of accountability, and how to hold someone accountable Gives leaders a step-by-step process for helping team members become more self-responsible Explains commitment reluctance and how to encourage self-responsibility among team members Uncovers why we blame others and shows how to defeat a blame culture Provides an easy read with no consultant-speak In recent years, HORN Training and Consulting was awarded the distinguished Gold Medal by the (...) Canadian Society for Training and Development for its leadership development program designed for one of the world’s largest international banks; and HORN is currently executing leadership development projects on a global scale for companies in the consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical industries. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Sexual Selection, Women's Preferences, and Mating Intelligence The Seduction Community: Human Excellence and Empowering Social Art in a Post‐Scarcity Era Is It Wrong to Try to Raise Your Mating Intelligence? Is Raising Your Mate Value a Good Thing? A Deflationist Solution to the Problem Conclusion: What About Women?

The increasing availability of passively observed data has yielded a growing interest in “data fusion” methods, which involve merging data from observational and experimental sources to draw causal conclusions. Such methods often require a precarious tradeoff between the unknown bias in the observational dataset and the often-large variance in the experimental dataset. We propose an alternative approach, which avoids this tradeoff: rather than using observational data for inference, we use it to design a more efficient experiment. We consider the case (...) of a stratified experiment with a binary outcome and suppose pilot estimates for the stratum potential outcome variances can be obtained from the observational study. We extend existing results to generate confidence sets for these variances, while accounting for the possibility of unmeasured confounding. Then, we pose the experimental design problem as a regret minimization problem subject to the constraints imposed by our confidence sets. We show that this problem can be converted into a concave maximization and solved using conventional methods. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of our methods using data from the Women’s Health Initiative. (shrink)

Adults spend most of their conscious life speaking, comprehending, writing, and reading discourse. It is entirely appropriate for cognitive science to investigate discourse especially as transmitted texts or printed media, such as books, newspapers, magazines, and computers. However, there is another reason why text understanding has been one of the prototypical areas of study in cognitive science: Interdisciplinary work is absolutely essential. As cognitive scientists have unraveled the puzzles of text comprehension, they have embraced the insights and methodologies from several (...) disciplines. (shrink)

What role does race play in the moral judgment of character? None, ideally, philosophers insist, contending that the proper assessment of an action requires that we disregard any social values associated with the body performing it. What rightly comes under evaluation, they assert, is the neutral, abstract deed irrespective of the race of the agent. Only under these conditions, presumably, can we gauge true moral worth. Reading together Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon on ethics and race, I propose instead that (...) embodied values such as those accorded by race do not distort the portrait of the ethical subject but rather bring that subjectivity into being. Key Words: blackness • embodiment • ethics • Frantz Fanon • Immanuel • Kant • morality • race • value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François VernayDiana MistreanuVernay, Jean-François. La séduction de la fiction. Hermann, 2019. 214pp.Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies pioneered in Anglo-Saxon research in the late 1970s, but which French academia, with a (...) few notable exceptions such as Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Alexandre Gefen, Catherine Grall, or Françoise Lavocat, is still largely reluctant to embrace. The author is a lecturer in Australian studies at the Global Institute in Sydney, and he is a bilingual literary scholar whose recent research explores the complex interface between fiction and human cognition.Vernay’s book starts by restating a narratological cliché: in the words of Paul Valéry, stories accompany humans from the cradle to the tomb, as monsters, pirates, fairies, and other fantastic creatures fascinate children’s minds from the first years of their lives (7). A truism follows this cliché: the origin of any story is the human brain (16), as the author reminds us by underlining the bio-anthropological origins of fiction in pages that cite the works of Umberto Eco and Nancy Huston (the writer who coined the notion of “espèce fabulatrice,” “the tale-teller species” [2008]), and that echo the research of scholars such as Mark Turner (1996) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999). Indeed, oral and written stories are not only created, but also interpreted by human minds, triggering states and emotions that range from extreme boredom to excitement and inviting identification with fictional characters. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the interaction between the human mind and brain and one of its most sophisticated products, namely fiction, are largely still understudied in the field of literature. Placing fiction under the sign of seduction (8) – which allows us to read between the lines an homage to Roland Barthes, the theorist of the “plaisir du texte” referenced later in the book (85-86) – Vernay defines works of fiction as catalysts of a sensori-affective experience [End Page 151] that engages almost all our senses and arouses emotions (“le vecteur d’une expérience sensori-affective qui sollicite la quasi-totalité de nos sens et suscite des émois” [19]). Characterized by the interdisciplinarity that forms the core of cognitive approaches to fiction, Vernay’s study investigates the literary phenomenon in its complexity, asking not only how fiction seduces us, but also why it sometimes fails to do so. Drawing on state-of-the-art research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the book manages to eschew over-simplified or reductionist analyses. Our engagement with and consumption of literary fiction is thus analyzed by discussing marketing strategies and editorial choices, the activity of reading as a solitary pleasure versus a professional obligation, as well as the interplay between society, politics, and educational curricula. The author answers his multi-layered research question in nine different chapters, each of them exploring one facet of the relationship between literature and the human mind.The first chapter, “Émois livresques,” highlights the marketing value of books, as well as their status as objects of consumption, in the capitalistic sense of the word. Books are presented here as the targets of our desire, since in financial terms, the notion of reader, the author reminds us, is a mere euphemism for that of consumer (20-22). As we are entering the era of what Yves Citton, often quoted in this essay, calls “cognitive capitalism,” a system in which society is conceptualized as a set of machines that process information (21), fictional literature, along with the arts, is devalued. To counterbalance this trend, Vernay explains, the book industry has to adopt effective strategies that create a desire for consumption. Thus, this chapter addresses the editorial and marketing techniques designed to attract our attention and trigger our impulse to buy and read. From the smell and color of books to the blurb and the careful mention of literary prizes, no detail is overlooked or considered redundant.After addressing the... (shrink)

El que en el presente libro se confronten "lenguaje" e "historia" pretende indicar que una parte especial de los que hemos sido se hace presente como "lenguaje"; pero, además, según se analiza en sus páginas, la función del historiador tuvo, en principio, algo elemental y simple. La misma etimología de la palabra significa alguien a quien se le pide consejo sobre un hecho porque "él vio lo que pasó". Al decir lo que ve, lo que interpreta, el historiador compromete la (...) veracidad de su propio ser. Colección Clásicos - Dykinson (títulos publicados)?Serie estudios?? - Sobre la democracia ateniense. Luis Gil Fernández. - Derecho natural y dignidad humana. Ernst Bloch. - Alejo Carpentier. Poética del Mediterráneo Caribe. Inmaculada López Calahorro. - P. Szondi. Teoría del drama moderno. Ensayo sobre lo trágico. - El concepto poíesis en la filosofía griega. Emilio Lledó. - Lenguaje e historia. Emilio Lledó.?Serie textos? - Heródoto. Historia. Libro I. Ed. bilingüe de J. M. Floristán. - Sófocles. Electra. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Platón. Fedro. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Aristóteles. Poética. Ed. bilingüe de Paloma Ortiz García. - Horacio. Arte poética. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Boileau. El arte poética y otras sátiras. Ed. bilingüe de Alberto Torrego Salcedo. - Lezama Lima. Escritos de Estética. Ed. de Pedro Aullón de Haro. - República poética. Textos programáticos de la literatura española (siglos XVIII y XIX). Ed. de Germán Garrido Miñambres. (shrink)

This article looks at Lev P. Karsavin’s experience with the heritage of early Christian Gnosticism, from his attempts at stylization based on his study of genuine Gnostic texts and his systematic presentation of Gnostic systems in art almanacs published in the Soviet Union, to his perception of Gnosticism as a kind of “other principle” in his original religious–philosophical texts. We show that, following Silver-Age traditions, Karsavin uses myth as a form of philosophical thinking. He teeters on the edge of Gnosticism, (...) applying certain Gnostic concepts, but he generally turns to Gnostic thought only to distinguish it from his own, which he presents as authentic to the Christian tradition. He criticizes both ontological and anthropological postulates of Gnosticism: the hierarchization of intradivine life, the introduction of the cosmic feminine into the bosom of the Divine, the interpretation of the Fall as the kenosis of God in time, and the explanation of the perfect God from the imperfect world, as well as the type of religious personhood that leads to a rupture in theory and personal faith. We examine Karsavin’s reception of Gnosticism against the background of interest in Gnosticism in post-revolutionary Russia, as expressed by Kropotkinite anarchists, A. Karelin, V. Murav’ev, Yu. Danzas, and M. Kuzmin. (shrink)

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

One of the finest private collections of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art in America is owned by James and Marilynn Alsdorf. This catalogue provides an opportunity for individuals other than scholars and specialists to view the works of art.

Baars (1988, 1997) has proposed a psychological theory of consciousness, called global workspace theory. The present study describes a software agent implementation of that theory, called ''Conscious'' Mattie (CMattie). CMattie operates in a clerical domain from within a UNIX operating system, sending messages and interpreting messages in natural language that organize seminars at a university. CMattie fleshes out global workspace theory with a detailed computational model that integrates contemporary architectures in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Baars (1997) lists the psychological (...) ''facts that any complete theory of consciousness must explain'' in his appendix to In the Theater of Consciousness; global workspace theory was designed to explain these ''facts.'' The present article discusses how the design of CMattie accounts for these facts and thereby the extent to which it implements global workspace theory. (shrink)

BackgroundCORE (Clarity and Openness in Reporting: E3-based) Reference (released May 2016 by the European Medical Writers Association [EMWA] and the American Medical Writers Association [AMWA]) is a complete and authoritative open-access user’s guide to support the authoring of clinical study reports (CSRs) for current industry-standard-design interventional studies. CORE Reference is a content guidance resource and is not a CSR Template.TransCelerate Biopharma Inc., an alliance of biopharmaceutical companies, released a CSR Template in November 2018 and recognised CORE Reference as one of (...) two principal sources used in its development.MethodsThe regulatory medical writing and statistical professionals who developed CORE Reference conducted a critical review of the TransCelerate CSR Template. We summarise our major findings and recommendations in this communication. We also re-examined and edited the Version 1 CORE Reference Terminology Table that we first published in 2016, and we present this as Version 2 in this communication.ResultsOur major critical review findings indicate that opportunities remain to refine the CSR Template structure and instructional text, enhance content clarity, add web links to referenced guidance documents, improve transparency to support the broad readership of CSRs, and develop supporting resources.The CORE Reference ‘Terminology Table’ Version 2 includes estimand as a defined term and an adaptation of the original ‘worked study example’ to incorporate the recently evolved concept of ‘estimands’.ConclusionsAs TransCelerate’s CSR Template represents an important milestone in authoring CSRs, we offer CSR authors advice and recommendations on its use, similarities, and differences with CORE Reference and advise them to consider shared interpretations between the two.RegistrationCORE Reference is registered with the EQUATOR Network. The TransCelerate CSR Template is not registered with any external organisation to the knowledge of the authors of this paper. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger broadened the meaning of art to a truth-disclosing event akin to seemingly disparate events such as the founding of a political state, Jesus’s sacrifice for all humankind, and the questioning of a philosopher. Art makes us pay attention to it by presenting the familiar in a new and unfamiliar context and unsettles our presuppositions and reconceptualizes our way of thinking. I begin by explicating the Heideggerian interpretation of the nature of art by looking at the key concepts that (...) make a work of art work. Then I argue that by themselves, the concept of veiling and the concept of fashion are very familiar concepts to Indonesians, but that the practice of combining these two ideas brings something unfamiliar to that society. This new practice reveals a way of Being that combines religious piety with our current, late-modern, consumer society. The combination of fashion and veiling for piety discloses, in the Heideggerian sense, a new “world” that undermines secular and fundamentalist narratives about the religious agent while still remaining an authentic Indonesian art piece. (shrink)

These photographs, essays, drawings, and original texts document the rich agit-art legacy of the Situationist International, a group of European artists and writers who emerged from such avant-garde movements as COBRA, Lettrisme, and the Imaginary Bauhaus and from the breakup of surrealism to launch a strategy of art as cultural critique.

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Os sentidos da paixão foram originalmente um curso livre que o Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas da Fundação Nacional de Arte (Funarte) promoveu no Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília e Curitiba e que atraiu cerca de setecentas a mil pessoas em cada cidade. Prova da fertilidade do curso é este livro apaixonado. Nele, alguns dos mais brilhantes intelectuais brasileiros discutem desde o amor em Platão até a paixão em Pasolini, passando por Freud, Walter Benjamin e Clarice Lispector, o que (...) só comprova a riqueza de um tema que até então não havia sido objeto de um debate como este.ÍndiceApresentaçãoPor que tanta paixão? Adauto NovaesOS SENTIDOS DA PAIXÃOO conceito de paixão - Gérard LebrunSobre o medo - Marilena ChauiPlatão: as várias faces do amor - José Américo Motta PessanhaO CANTO DAS PAIXÕESA glória - Renato Janine RibeiroA inveja - Renato MezanA melancolia de Ulisses - Olgária MatosPaixão da igualdade, paixão da liberdade: a amizade em Montaigne - Sérgio CardosoA paixão dionisíaca em Tristão e Isolda - José Miguel WisnikO lenço e o caos - Jorge ColiPasolini: paixão e ideologia - Michel LahudA paixão de Clarice Lispector - Benedito NunesPoesia: a paixão da linguagem - Paulo LeminskiÉdipo e a paixão - Hélio PellegrinoO Dom de Édipo - Luiz Renato MartinsLou Andreas-Salomé: a paixão viva - Luzilá Gonçalves FerreiraA PAIXÃO REVOLUCIONÁRIAA alegoria da liberdade - Jorge ColiA paixão revolucionária e a paixão amorosa em Stendhal - Renato Janine RibeiroA PAIXÃO SILENCIOSARazão e paixão - Sérgio Paulo RouanetA psicanálise e o domínio das paixões - Maria Rita KehlBenjamin: política e paixão - Katia Muricy. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Collecting ethnographic items for the Estonian National Museum has been linked to the practice of buying objects during fieldwork. Often we can find metaphors or expressions connected with trading in the Komi fieldwork diaries. Comparing ethnographers with merchants is a stereotypical way of describing the activities of Estonian researchers in the field. If ethnographers use, in their diaries, metaphors and expressions connected to trading, it may be just a spontaneous phrasing or inter-textual play of words. Inside the community of Estonian (...) ethnologists there exists some kind of discourse style, which is followed in the fieldwork diaries, more or less consciously. This style of narration is also connected to the specific social and historical context in which ethnographers act. At the same time, even satiric inter-textual quotations do not exclude the possibility that some of this discourse is related to a deeper level of human consciousness. (shrink)