Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Wonder of Minor Experiences -- Queasiness -- A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment -- Reuse and Recycle -- Enchantment without Design -- Joyful Attachment -- How the Story Goes -- 2. Cross-Species Encounters -- Crossings and Enchantment -- Andoar's Transcendence -- Rotpeter's Way Out -- Alex Changes the Subject -- Body without Organs -- My Wager -- Marvels and Monsters -- 3. The Marvelous Worlds of Paracelsus, Kant, and Deleuze -- The Satyrion Root -- Enchantment and Repetition -- Kantian Wonders

In 2004, the African Gender Institute ran a continental research project, Mapping Sexualities, among the objectives of which was the development of a research methodology suited to carrying out in-depth case studies of the dynamics of gender and contemporary sexual cultures in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda. This book is the result of that research. The chapters cover broad-ranging issues and include questions about what it means to research topics that are unpopular or fraught with the sense of the taboo that underpins much work in sexualities and gender studies. Overall, the diverse pieces within the collection offer the opportunity to see qualitative research not as the 'poor cousin' of quantitative studies but as a zone which raises intellectual and political challenges.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Force of Things -- 2. The Agency of Assemblages -- 3. Edible Matter -- 4. A Life of Metal -- 5. Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism -- 6. Stem Cells and the Culture of Life -- 7. Political Ecologies -- 8. Vitality and Self-interest -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This essay explores five figures of "sympathy" at work in Walt Whitman's writings, with a focus on Leaves of Grass. Of particular note is the way Whitman presents sympathy as not only a moral sentiment but also a more-than-human natural force that draws bodies together. Sympathy was a key term in the lexicon of nineteenth-century American political debates, and we find in Whitman and others elements of a non-modern sense of sympathy as a vital or physical force operating below, through, and beyond human bodies.

Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. By Thomas Princen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224p. $22.95.When you are trying to get someone to embrace new habits of mind and body, like, say, those of ecological sustainability, it sometimes works to appeal to common sense. Thomas Princen employs this stragegy of persuasion—he also invokes enlightened self-interest, but I think he prefers to appeal to common sense—in his bold, tolerant, honest, and powerful short book. To be more specific, he invokes a set of minor or currently rather quiet "segments" (p. 171) inside the mixed bag that is American common sense. Common sense is not, after all, a stable block but a conglomeration of diverse parts, some of which do not fit at all well with the others. And it is the heterogeneity of the common store of wisdom that makes possible Princen's reorganization of it. He highlights some underutilized segments of the "old normal" and harnesses their power to the project of building a society that "takes infinite material growth as impossible," "embraces limits" (p. 187), and is devoted to "living well by living well within our means" (p. 124).