Recovering the Self seeks to place issues of morality and justice at the heart of social theory. Because of the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, respect for authorities can no longer be taken for granted. Increasingly people believe that respect has to be earned and people have to discover sources of authority within themselves. Victor Seidler seeks to establish a framework to rethink the relation between self and society, identities and power. Through exploring the works of Marx, Weber, and (...) Durkheim he shows the hidden complexities of a modernity too often identified with a unified vision of the rational self. Reinstating the body and emotional life into the discussion, Seidler sets new terms for respect and equality by showing ways the self is undermined in its sense of self-worth and adequacy through the working of relationships of power and subordination. (shrink)

This article explores the way sound, music, rhythm and movement reflect experiences of suffering, trauma and aliveness by reflecting on colonializing and decolonializing modes of understanding the role played by sounds and music in living through suffering, displacement, cultural devastation and illness. Music and sound practices offer people ways of connecting life narratives and coping mechanisms to deal with loss and suffering. A peculiar aliveness of the body is mediated by sound and rhythm. The experiences with personal and cultural suffering (...) of Richard Wilhelm, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein and people in the author’s life are read against the background of the ethical and communicative dimensions of sound and music, in an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic as much a philosophical study. (shrink)

Social researchers have long known that playing music to people can evoke memories of their pasts and bring people into a different relationship with themselves as the sounds move them to make connections with an earlier period in their lives. It has been discovered in patients with dementia that it could revive people to hear songs they have loved, which can help to bring them back from a state of inner withdrawal. Some researchers have given people portable music listening devices (...) so that they can listen to music that evokes memories from particular moments that they might be willing to share as part of an oral history or ethnographic project. This is to invoke processes that we can acknowledge ourselves as we realize the very special relationship we seem to have with music from our teenage years ‐ processes that have helped to shape a generational experience and sensibility. Hearing old tracks from the past can move us to make connections and can invoke emotions and feelings in us that we might not have felt for years. It can restore memories of times past as we feel the presence of the past through the mediation of the sounds. This article explores the significance of sound and voice memory for traumatic suffering in the form of an autoethnographic study of Amy Berg’s documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015), transgenerational trauma, sexual trauma, feminism, therapy and the truths of memory. (shrink)