During fieldwork on dementia care in a nursing home, I was struck by the complex and layered orderings of space, time and subjectivity in daily life on the wards, and the struggle this implied for people with dementia.
On her ‘daily rounds’ strolling through the nursing home ward, Mrs Hansen repeatedly expressed great relief and pleasure on meeting a familiar …
One: Whither The Subject?
It has been exactly 8 years since I wrote the introductory installment of a mini-series on political subjectivity for Somatosphere. When I wrote on political subjectivity at the time, aside from exploring and communicating ideas, a good part of my agenda was to help propagate the concept of political subjectivity in cultural and medical anthropology …
This month’s web roundup comes through a bit late – paradoxically- due to technical difficulties (my computer died!). Although I will be able to recover most of my files, the past days were a reminder of just how much we depend on technology to go about our lives, including saving our work, our thoughts and ideas… which leads me directly …
For our latest installment in the book forum series, we bring you a series of commentaries on Lisa Stevenson’s Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014). As it takes us across the conceptual grounds of governance, (post)colonialism, biopolitics, violence, and suicide, this book illuminates care as an object of study in a way …
Introduction
This article presents a summary and discussion of key findings from ten months of experimental cyberethnography among tulpamancers.[i] Tulpas, a term reportedly borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, are imaginary companions who are said to have achieved full sentience after being conjured through ‘thought-form’ meditative practice. Human ‘hosts’, or tulpamancers, mediate their practice through open-ended how-to guides and discussion …
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter
W. W. Norton, 2013, paperback, 627 pages.
Incomplete Nature is a big book, literally and conceptually. The subtitle “How Mind Emerged From Matter” hints of a grand synthesis and Terrence Deacon, chair of University of California–Berkeley’s anthropology department, presents a dense argument which defies usual labels. The result is part …