Suchergebnisse

Nowadays, life itself is one of the most active zones of capitalist production. Not only has biology been upgraded to Big Science, biological material and information are increasingly the subject of engineering, banking, reproduction, and exchange. The description and broad implications of the refiguring of life itself and its intrusion into economics and politics represent some of the most important issues on the academic agenda at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Pálsson 2007). Foucault's works on biopolitics (see, for instance, Foucault 1994) have obviously contributed critical insights with respect to the current refashioning of the human body, illuminating the political and governmental dimensions of these developments (Inda 2005; Rose 2006; Gottweis and Peterson 2008; Nowotny and Testa 2009; Lock and Nguyen 2009). Recently, a series of scholars have revisited the early writings of Marx, sometimes in combination with Foucauldian perspectives, in their attempt to make sense of the political economy of modern biotechnology, including the fragmenting of body parts and the labor process involved. One of the emerging themes in current discussions relates to the conception and role of labor in the reproduction of bodies and body parts. While Marx may not be an obvious source of innovative perspectives on the modern production of human biovalue, a somewhat unique industry that had not arrived in his time, his early works offer useful insights into contemporary developments.

"Can one have something in common with a lava field? Can one identify with a mountain, or connect with a contemporary event in the history of the earth, in the way that some people feel connected together by birthday, genetic fingerprint, or zodiac sign? In the terms of the Christian burial ceremony, what is this earth from which we come and to which we return?In Down to Earth, Gísli Pálsson explores such questions through both personal reflection on the microcosm of his childhood home, an Icelandic island disrupted by volcanic eruption, and a critical discussion of the current age of the Anthropocene, characterized by the growing environmental impact of humans. While environmental hazards caused by humans often inform public discussion of the Anthropocene, human impact on the planet is not always detrimental. This book discusses in detail the pioneering effort on Heimaey island to cool molten lava and to divert its flow, in order to save a fishing harbor and the community it has allowed to thrive. Mingling the personal and the geological, the local and the global, Down to Earth should appeal to many readers in diverse contexts throughout the English-speaking world. The author appears to the reader when it suits him, naturally enough, and on occasion near the center of the narrative, in the vicinity of earthquakes, eruptions, and other natural hazards."

Les vingt dernières années ont vu émerger des « machines généalogiques » qui promettent de révolutionner les recherches sur l'histoire familiale. Cet article examine les pratiques de traçage qui s'articulent autour de ces technologies, et leur impact sur le façonnement des concepts actuels de parenté, en s'appuyant sur deux études de cas. L'une se réfère aux efforts déployés par les descendants d'Islandais en Amérique du Nord en vue de s'insérer à nouveau dans l'arbre généalogique national, et l'autre suit les tentatives d'un Islandais afin de rétablir le lien avec le père qu'il n'a jamais connu.

This article maps the confluence of biosocial relations through the agential networks of water. In the language of the environmental humanities and social sciences, such relations and networks are biosocial and sacralised (Meloni, Williams, and Martin 2016; Mangiameli 2013). The self-organisation of aquatic environments in these relations towards humans is engaged in an ongoing process of entanglement and adaptation in parallel with human understandings and approaches to water. This article imagines new and conscientious behaviour that might treat the ubiquitous river more gently, against the tensions and provocations of the Anthropocene Epoch. It argues for the development of fresh sustainability logic; a hydro-logic that cultivates connectivity, adaptive capacity, and broader water values that exist beyond the containment of the commodification paradigm, (that are particularly evident among First Nations peoples). This logic necessarily includes a reconsideration of economic, ecological, customary and recreational values in more balanced measure. By configuring water as a complex adaptive stream of intra, inter and extra-relationships, this research champions waters' multi-dimensional capacity and agency for the purpose of advancing more sustainable biosocial water futures within a geosocial matrix.

Focusing on data relating to Iceland, we examine differences in the performance of fishing skippers both in and out of school and explore the development of dexterity and the connections among fishing practice, schooling, and fishing success.Our ethnographic and statistical analyses indicate that, contrary to the prevailing assumption of many educators, skippers' performance in marine school has little direct relation to success in fishing. We conclude that while schooling serves important other purposes, critical abilities required for locating and catching fish are largely developed in the course of everyday practice. Our findings substantiate much recent theorizing on embodied knowledge and schooling, emphasizing the embeddedness of learning and cognition. There are good grounds, we argue, for placing practical knowledge, situated activities, and communities of practice at the center of the theoretical and environmental agenda, [dexterity, fishing, practice, schooling, Iceland]

We have argued that differences in success in Icelandic fishing are statistically explained more by technical and ecological factors than by personal qualities of skippers, the "skipper effect." Research by other scholars has reopened the discussion of the skipper effect. We assess some of the statistical arguments, pointing out that while there may be a strong skipper effect in some societies, in other societies it is weak or negligible. We suggest that it is important to distinguish between the statistical reality of the skipper effect and its sociology and that the concept of skipper effect is of limited utility in comparative studies, since different researchers using it have not always been talking about the same phenomena and fishing success is conceived differently in different societies. The discussion of the skipper effect echoes debates on resource management and the authenticity of folk models, as well as larger debates in social theory on the relationship between the symbolic and the real and the role of history and agency. Folk theories of production, we argue, are best regarded as cultural accounts constructed in social discourse, in the context of production systems.