Warm, sweet, delicious, an inviting smell. Intrigued, enticed, compelled, sniffing and tracing like a gazelle. Croissant, chiffon cake or sourdough? Inside the open wooden door, shelves present neatly: Fruity, buttery, savoury, firm, soft, crispy. Rich are the treats, row after row. [...]
Given how all thought systems, aesthetic judgments, or moral frameworks are deeply embedded in the flow of the lived world, human experience becomes the ultimate source of value and meaning and a broker of what is perceived as reality. Such significance then calls into question the limits and dynamics of...
The mentioning of Foucault often reminds one of the ways of understanding and analyzing the disciplinary technologies and discourses at play in various institutions—be it prisons, hospitals, or asylums—that the modern citizen is subject to. And so, throughout his works, one is also presented with the relationships between...
The precarity of the human condition makes care a vital fabric of social life and acts of care a driving force of our moral engines. Despite how there is so much care work to be done and how often such acts are received with awe and gratefulness, no care work, arguably, is straightforward or without an issue. Every act of care bears with it...
Death is surely a defining feature of the human condition—tying every being together with its universality and constituting the ethical substance of many lives. Beneath such universality, however, lies particular understandings of how a ‘good death’ should be. One could, perhaps, argue that...
Stories are profound as they provide a room for us to exist through reconfiguring memories. In this sense, memory is not simply the mechanism of storing and recalling certain knowledge and experiences but it is a social and political process that comes to being within interpersonal relationships and takes shape through stories. The anthropologist Michael... Continue Reading →
Chapter 1: What is hermeneutics? According to Zimmermann, a simple answer to the question is that "it means interpretation" (p.1). "Interpretation occurs in many fields of study and also day-to-day life. We interpret plays, novels, abstract art, music and movies, employment contracts, the law, the Bible, the Quran, and other sacred texts; but we also... Continue Reading →
Hammer, Juliane. Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland. University of Texas Press, 2005. In this ethnographic book Juliane Hammer, a scholar of Religious Studies with a focus on Islam, writes about the different ways Palestinians born in exile subjectivize their Palestinian identity and how they experience 'return' to homeland. She has... Continue Reading →
In his famous essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss touches upon the concept of reciprocity in gift-giving and contends that no gift is disinterested. By drawing on ethnographic observations, such as those on potlatch, a ceremonial gift-giving feast practiced in some places in North West America, he argues that potlatch is a competition for prestige that... Continue Reading →
In her book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar looks into the settler-colony of Israel in Palestine to bring forth a crucial understanding of sovereignty and its relation to the body. She specifically analyses the deliberate maiming techniques used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) which attempts to keep Palestinian casualties low... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 