Worldwide, the literature reports that many residents in long‐term care (LTC) homes are sedentary. In Canada, personal support workers (PSWs) provide most of the direct care in LTC homes and could play a key role in promoting activity for residents. The purpose of this institutional ethnographic study was to uncover the social organization of LTC work and to discover how this organization influenced the physical activity of residents. Data were collected in two LTC homes in Ontario, Canada through participant observations (...) with PSWs and interviews with people within and external to the homes. Findings explicate the links between meals, lifts and transfers, and the LTC standards to reveal that physical activity is considered an add‐on program in the purview of physiotherapists. Some of the LTC standards which are intended to product good outcomes for residents actually disrupt the work of PSWs making it difficult for them to respond to the physical activity needs of residents. This descriptive ethnographic account is an important first step in trying to find a solution to optimize real activities of daily living into life in LTC. (shrink)

Nursing practice occurs in the context of conversations with healthcare users, other healthcare professionals, and healthcare institutions. This discussion paper draws on symbolic interactionism and Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis to examine language that nurses use to describe the people in their care and their practice. We discuss how nurses’ use of language constructs meaning about healthcare users and their own work. Through language, nurses are articulating what they believe about healthcare users and nursing practice. We argue that the (...) language nurses use can contribute to viewing their practice as tasks on bodies that must be accomplished efficiently and objectively within the biomedical model, rather than relational and person‐centered. Moreover, the language nurses use can perpetuate a sense of powerlessness within healthcare systems yet paradoxically they are in a position of power over healthcare users. Nurses’ compliance with the efficiency and biomedical model results in a lack of emphasis on the full breadth of nursing work, which could be enacted in relational rather than power‐laden practices. We conclude by positing that careful use of language among nurses in all settings is essential, if we are to begin to articulate what nursing is to ourselves and to others. (shrink)

Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities —Germaine de Staël, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier—Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionalist view of ambition prevailed—that is, ambition as morally wrong unless subsumed into a corporate whole—the new regime was marked by a rising tide of competitive individualism. Greater opportunities for personal advancement, however, were shadowed by lingering doubts about the moral value of ambition. Kete identifies three (...) strategies used to overcome the ethical “burden” of ambition: romantic genius, secular vocation, and post-mythic destiny. In each case, success would seem to be driven by forces outside one’s control. She concludes by examining the still relevant conundrum of the relationship of individual desires to community needs, which she identifies as a defining characteristic of the modern world. (shrink)

The French and German political economies have been significantly reconfigured over the past two decades. Although the changes have often been more piecemeal than revolutionary, their cumulative effects are profound. The authors characterize the changes that have taken place as involving the institutionalization of new forms of dualism and argue that what gives contemporary developments a different character from the past is that dualism is now explicitly underwritten by state policy. They see this outcome as the culmination of a sequence (...) of developments, beginning in the field of industrial relations, moving into labor market dynamics, and finally finding institutional expression in welfare state reforms. Contrary to theoretical accounts that suggest that institutional complementarities support stability and institutional reproduction, the authors argue that the linkages across these realms have helped to translate employer strategies that originated in the realm of industrial relations into a stable, new, and less egalitarian model with state support. (shrink)

The increase in ethnically and linguistically diverse older adults in Canada necessitates attention to their experiences and needs for healthy ageing. Arab immigrant women often report challenges in maintaining health, but little is known about their ageing experiences. This interpretive descriptive study uses a transnational life course framework to understand Arab Muslim immigrant women's experiences of engaging in health‐promoting practices as they age in Canada. Women's stories highlight social dimensions of health such social connectedness, social roles and social support that (...) are constructed and maintained within different migration contexts across the life course. Barriers and facilitators to healthy ageing in this population centred around five themes: (i) the necessity of staying strong, (ii) caring for self while caring for others, (iii) double jeopardy of chronic illnesses and loneliness, (iv) inadequate support within large social networks and (v) navigating access to health‐supporting resources. The findings point to transnational connections and post‐migration social support as major influencers in creating facilitators and barriers to healthy ageing for Arab Muslim immigrant women. (shrink)

“Guy Bennett-Hunter dans «Tillich and Divine lneffabililty» affirme l‘étroite correlation entre l’affirmation tillichienne de l’ineffabilité divine et le rejet de l’ontothéologie. L’affirmation de leur incompatibilité lui semble une contribution majeure de Tillich à la pensée religieuse. Guy Bennett-Hunter part des déclarations bien connues où Tillich affirme que l’on ne saurait, à proprement parler, attribuer l’existence a Dieu puisque Dieu est «être même au-delà de l’essence et de l’existence». En d’autres termes, Dieu «mystére de l’être», «fondement et abîme de (...) la raison», résiste à la connaissance coneeptuelle et à l’articulation linguistique.” — Anne Marie Reijnen & France Farago. (shrink)

This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today.Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this (...) world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production (...) of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

Sixty years after the famous ‘Conférence des écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne’, and sixty years after Black-Label, the third collection of poetry by French Guianese Leon-Gontran Damas, the word “nègre” and “nigger” remain offensive words all too much used in postcolonial Europe today. Even after the short lived Obamamania, Damas’s poetry remains actual as it expresses the censorship all too many times endured by the lyrical voice who cannot speak out loud against those violent verbal, physical, and thus (...) psychological assaults. Consequently, his “mors dans la bouche”, or “bit in the mouth” is incoporated in his less wellknown work which testifies to the “mort dans l’âme”, it is the constant feeling of depression and blues lurking on the Black or coloured citizen of France and the West Indies. Standing in the shadow of the cofounders, and quite neglected by the leading Martinicans of the post-Négritude era, Damas nevertheless understood the urgency of transcontinental and transcultural solidarities in this battle and wrote against the dichotomies of race, class, and gender. Damas and James knew each other for over forty years. Damas read James’s novel, Minty Alley before they met in Paris when James was doing the research for The Black Jacobins, his landmark history of Tousssaint L’Ouverture and the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Damas helped James with translations and discovering documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. On one occasion, Damas brought James to the home of Robert Desnos. Both lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s when Damas was at Howard University and James taught at Federal City College/University of the District of Columbia. (shrink)

Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature (Series Editors: Kathleen Coleman and Richard Rutherford) introduces individual works of Greek and Latin literature to readers who are approaching them for the first time. Each volume sets the work in its literary and historical context, and aims to offer a balanced and engaging assessment of its content, artistry, and purpose. A brief survey of the influence of the work upon subsequent generations is included to demonstrate its enduring relevance and power. All quotations from (...) the original are translated into English. Plato's Symposium tells of a dinner party at a crucial point in Athenian history at which the guests decide that they will each in turn deliver a speech in praise of love. The humorous and brilliant work that follows points the way towards all Western thinking about love. The Symposium is also one of Plato's most sophisticated meditations on the practice of philosophy. This book introduces the literary and historical context of Plato's work, surveys and explains the arguments, and considers why Plato has cast this work in a highly unusual narrative form. A final chapter traces the influence of the Symposium from antiquity to the modern day. (shrink)

Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin, & Frances Willmoth, volume 2, 1682–1703, volume 3, 1703–1719; Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol & Philadephia, 1997, 2002, pp. xlvii+1095, lxvi+1038, Price £199 each hardback, ISBN 0-7503-0391-3, 0-7503-0763-3The correspondence of John Wallis, volume 1 Philip Beeley, & Christoph J. Scriba, with the assistance of Uwe Mayer and Siegmund Probst; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. xlvii+651, Price £120 hardback, ISBN 0-19-851066-7 The Hartlib Papers. Second edition. A complete text and image database of the papers (...) of Samuel Hartlib HROnline, Sheffield, 2 CDs, Price £1,500, ISBN 0-9542608-0-5The Letters of Jan Jonston to Samuel HartlibW. J. Hitchens, Adam Matruszewski, & John Young ; Retro-Art, Warsaw, 2000, pp. 269, Price £25 paperback, ISBN 83-87992-12-7. (shrink)

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it. When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone (...) studies it and applies it”When Alexis De Tocqueville visited the United States from France in the 1830s, he noted that many voluntary associations existed among citizens throughout the American landscape, something that did not exist in the... (shrink)

The study subjected to scrutiny the context of Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere and Hugo’s novel, Notre Dame de Paris in the search for confluence through the two novels’ use of rhetorical devices and imagery. It utilized Kolb’s Experiential Method, Phenomenology, and Interdisciplinary Approach. Primarily, a connection between Hugo and Rizal is established since no studies relating the two writers existed. Gathered evidences proved the historical and biographical connections: the phenomenology of both writers’ existence in the same Romantic milieu, and (...) of Rizal’s diary and bibliographic entries on Hugo. Thereafter, a focus on the two novels’ literary elements by character, setting, point of view, and conflict, as well as theme, confirmed textual confluence. Moreover, Hugolian symbols and rhetorical devices in Noli Me Tangere are conclusive in the establishment of confluence. Furthermore, evaluation of the Notre Dame de Paris as a historical novel, a poetic novel, a novel of ideas, and a dramatic novel are evident in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. Finally, a sharp phenomenology of confluence between Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere is concluded. Further studies on the novel Noli Me Tangere are recommended to take into account the influence of Victor Hugo. Keywords - Hugo, Rizal, France, Philippines, novel, phenomenology, imagery, criticism. (shrink)

Dyadic play fighting occurs in many species, but only humans are known to engage in coalitional play fighting. Dyadic play fighting is hypothesized to build motor skills involved in actual dyadic fighting; thus, coalitional play fighting may build skills involved in actual coalitional fighting, operationalized as forager lethal raiding. If human psychology includes a motivational component that encourages engagement in this type of play, evidence of this play in forager societies is necessary to determine that it is not an artifact (...) of agricultural or industrial conditions. We examine whether coalitional play fighting appears in the hunter-gatherer record and includes motor skills used in lethal raiding. Using the ethnographic record, we generated a list of motor patterns regularly used in forager warfare. Then, using Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, we identified 100 culture clusters containing forager societies and searched the ethnographic records of these societies for descriptions of coalitional play fighting, operationalized as contact games played in teams. Resulting games were coded for the presence of eight motor patterns regularly used in forager lethal raiding. Although play does not tend to be systematically documented in the hunter-gatherer literature, sufficiently detailed descriptions of coalitional play were found for 46 of the 100 culture clusters: all 46 exhibited coalitional play using at least one of the predicted motor patterns; 39 exhibited coalitional play using four or more of the eight predicted motor patterns. These results provide evidence that coalitional play fighting occurs across a diverse range of hunter-gatherer cultures and habitats, regularly recruits motor patterns used in lethal raiding, and is not an artifact of agricultural or industrial life. This is a first step in a new line of research on whether human male psychology includes motivations to engage in play that develops the deployment of coordinated coalitional action involving key motor patterns used in lethal raiding. (shrink)

Katherine Wilson-Chevalier propose avec Patronnes et mécènes en France à la Renaissance une somme qui marquera l’histoire du mécénat féminin. Les Anglo-Saxons ont un joli nom pour définir ce patronage au féminin, ils parlent de matronage, et c’est précisément à cette pratique qu’est consacré cet ouvrage fondamental. Il nous propose une galerie de fortes femmes destinées à jouer un rôle politique dans la France du XVIe siècle, mais aussi protectrices des arts. Certaines sont fort connues et se...

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

Louise Dupin (1706–1799) was known during her lifetime as the philosophically inclined hostess of one of the most brilliant salons of Enlightenment France, where Montesquieu, Condillac, Buffon, Vol...

Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017, 222 pp. Julie Cheminaud, Les évadés de la médecine. Physiologie de l’art dans la France de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, Vrin, Paris 2018, 294 pp. Carla Carmona, Jerrold Levinson, Aesthetics, Literature, and Life: Essays in Honor of Jean-Pierre Cometti, Mimesis International, Milan 2019, 220 pp. Report on “Jean Baudrillard, l’intelligence du temps qui vient”, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Cerisy, France, 9-16 August 2019.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s All Personal”Frances Rieth MaynardI was (am?) the mother of a full-term infant born in 1998 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. This was my 3rd pregnancy; I had two prior pregnancies resulting in healthy children. Until that final week before birth, my pregnancy had been uneventful; my blood pressure, weight gain, and lab work charted normally. At my prenatal check (with a new physician as mine was away), (...) my measurements were off. That OB-GYN referred me to a perinatologist who was able to perform an ultrasound (checking for infant size) and advised that I should deliver soon because the infant was markedly growth retarded. I was induced two days later. My small daughter was born with skeletal leg deformities and brought to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I was familiar with that NICU since I had worked there as an RN prior to this pregnancy. I was comfortable with the environment, the people, and the overall culture of the place. Indeed, I had been a pediatric nurse for the previous 10 years working primarily in intensive care.After my daughter’s birth, I was able to intuit meaning by the placement of her bassinet in the unit (e.g., it was not too close to the nurse’s station; she had no oxygen or tubing, and she was not in a private room). I believed that her journey home would be longer than I had planned but that it would occur. On that first day, a pediatric cardiolo-gist arrived to perform an ultrasound. I was familiar with this scene too; I did not view this process as anything more than routine. I was relieved to have [End Page 24] a physician who I knew and trusted to watch over my daughter. This allowed me to go back to my room to rest as I do not believe I had slept well (if at all) after being informed there was a potential problem a few days earlier.Less than two hours after returning to my room, my daughter had been intubated and begun on prostaglandins as the echocardiogram had revealed a hypoplastic left heart defect. The neonatologist started to discuss options for transport so my daughter could be treated at a larger hospital. I tried to catch my breath and process what I was being told. We spoke by phone with my husband who quickly deferred all decision-making responsibility to me because I was “the person with the medical expertise.” My thoughts raced with all these unforeseen circumstances, yet time seemed to slow down. I requested that an evaluation be made of other potential conditions before transfer since my daughter was also small for gestational age, something we had learned less than a week earlier, and she had some skeletal defects, an issue of which we were unaware until after she was born.A head ultrasound revealed an absent corpus callosum, the region of the brain that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and allows them to communicate by sending and receiving signals from each other.Given all the enormous medical issues my daughter was facing, I asked for her ventilator to be withdrawn and my husband concurred. We wanted our daughter to be baptized and to die a “natural death.” Our neonatologist indicated that our choices were reasonable. But, before the ETT could be withdrawn, I was advised that an ethics consult had been called by one of the nurses. I became angry, scared, and saddened at the thought of strangers (to me) deciding the fate of my daughter. The neonatologist told me not to be concerned, and I later learned that the ethics committee had “signed off” on the wishes of my husband and myself. My daughter was extubated and died 3 days later.This happened 25 years ago. In retrospect, it is interesting to me that I began to distrust the nurses, wondering which one had called the consult. I could not understand how anyone could doubt that I, as a mother, was not making the best possible decision, among bad alternative choices, for my daughter. I began to view the anonymous persons of the powerful ethics committee as a “them... (shrink)

Adaptation to the impacts of climate change is a rapidly emerging, new area of knowledge and policy that is coevolving with political negotiations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As such, it offers the opportunity to study the coproduction of knowledge and social order within the climate change regime. A subset of adaptation knowledge relates to cost estimates of adaptation policy. Here the methodology of the adaptation cost studies are reviewed and compared to economic theory. Although presented as (...) technical and apolitical applications of economic theory, this analysis shows that these studies in fact differ significantly and consistently from theory in that they largely ignore autonomous adaptation and almost universally cost complete adaptation rather than an efficient level of adaptation. It is suggested that these differences are related to the political nature of adaptation cost estimates, which are closely connected with normative claims for both adaptation funding for developing countries and compensation for the unavoidable climate change impacts. As such, adaptation cost estimates are an example of boundary objects, used to manage normative and highly politicized claims for restitution using scientific and therefore apolitical language and framings. (shrink)

When is industry self-regulation (ISR) a legitimate form of governance? In principle, ISR can serve the interests of participating companies, regulators and other stakeholders. However, in practice, empirical evidence shows that ISR schemes often under-perform, leading to criticism that such schemes are tantamount to firms marking their own homework. In response, this paper explains how current management theory on ISR has failed to separate the pragmatic legitimacy of ISR based on self-interested calculations, from moral legitimacy based on normative approval. The (...) paper traces three families of management theory on ISR and uses these to map the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes. It identifies tensions between the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes, which the current ISR literature does not address, and draws implications for the future theory and practice of ISR. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: Visualizing (...) Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

On 14 and 15 December 2005, on the eve of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the adoption of UNESCO's Constitution, a group of scholars from a wide range of cultural and scholarly backgrounds assembled at UNESCO Headquarters.

Since DNA has replaced blood as the medium through which we establish kinship, how do we determine with whom we are kin? Who counts among those we care for? The distinction between these categories is constantly in flux. How do we come to decide those we may kiss and those we may kill? Focusing on narratives of kinship as they are defined in contemporary film, literature, and news media, Frances Bartkowski discusses the impact of "stories of origin" on our (...) regard for nonhuman species. She locates the role of "totems and taboos" in forming and re-forming kinship categories-groupings that enable us to tie the personal to the social-and explores the bestiary, among the oldest of literary forms. The bestiary is the realm in which we allegorize the place of humans and other species, a menagerie encompassing animals we know as well as human-animal chimeras and other beings that challenge the "natural" order of the world. Yet advances in reproductive technologies, the mapping of genomes, and the study of primates continually destabilize these categories and recast the dynamic between the natural and the cultural. Bartkowski highlights the arbitrariness of traditional kinship arrangements and asks us to rethink our notions of empathy and ethics. She shows how current dialogues concerning ethics and desire determine contemporary attitudes toward issues of care, and suggests a new framework for negotiating connection and conflict. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with changing social representations of the ``wild,'' in particular wild animals. We argue that within a contemporary Western context the old agricultural perception of wild animals as adversarial and as a threat to domestication, is being replaced by an essentially urban fascination with certain emblematic wild animals, who are seen to embody symbols of naturalness and freedom. On closer examination that carefully mediatized ``naturalness'' may be but another form of domestication. After an historical overview of the (...) human-animal, domestic-wild construction, an anthropological approach is used to interpret the social representation of wild animals held by different social actors – farmers, hunters, and tourists – within the context of an inhabited National Park, that of the Cévennes in south east France. Within the Park, the domestic and the wild, along with agriculture, hunting, conservation, re-introduced wild animals, and tourists co-habit. It is argued that changes in the representation of ``wildness'' may well be an important indicator ofchanges in the social representation of nature. (shrink)

Some 41 million Americans, many of them children, currently live below the official poverty level. As a proportion of the population, the number has been stable for several decades. But what it mea...

The rise, in the 1980s, of what is now labelled appropriation-photography can be understood as the full absorption of the logic of the ready-made into photographic art. Like its Duchampian predecessor, the deployment of the ready-made was used to question the nature of institutionalized art-photography: was art inherent to the photo's medium; was it an auratic attribute of the author; conferred by the institution; or ratified by its consumption? It also enabled a critique of the politics of representation at stake (...) in photographic practice outside of the immediate institutions of art. However, the correlation of appropriation-photography and a politics of representation relies upon the reduced logic of the subversive effect of a re-presented image. David Levinthal's photographs of mass-produced toys extends the reduced logic of the ready-made cultural artefact through their playful configuration, as well as through the more complex forms of photographic technique this allows. This enables a distinctive critical re-presentation of cultural myth. However, Levinthal also introduces a number of photographic techniques, which would seem to renege on the avant-garde claims of appropriation-photography, such as the reintroduction of pictorial composition and the use of large-scale Polaroids that emphatically reassert the unique and the expertly crafted image. This article examines this ambiguity in Levinthal's work, particularly with respect to its presentation of myth, and diagnoses it as symptomatic of the conditions of recent art-photography. (shrink)

In the first part of this article, I argue that even those entities that in their own right and for their own sake give us reason not to destroy them and to help them are sometimes substitutable for the good of other entities. In so arguing, I consider the idea of being valuable as an end in virtue of intrinsic and extrinsic properties. I also conclude that entities that have claims to things and against others are especially nonsubstitutable. In the (...) second part, I argue that cloning poses no threat to the nonsubstitutability of these entities (and in this sense, to the dignity of persons). I also consider the relation between cloning and (what I called) holistic identity, and between the latter and genetic identity. In the concluding part of the article, I try to distinguish cases where identity over time and so-called person-affecting acts have and do not have greater moral significance than nonidentity over time and nonperson-affecting acts. I try to apply my results to cases involving embryos, future generations, and to the so-called Non-Identity Problem. (shrink)