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 ethnographic work, Malkki researches the Hutu refugees in exile in Tanzania who had to flee their homes in Burundi due to a bloodbath of ethnic conflicts with the Tutsis, a minority group that controlled the military in the country. Malkki categorizes refugees as camp and town refugees and thus conducts multi-sited fieldwork in... Continue Reading →
In his book, Michael Jackson looks deeply into the lives of three individuals, Emmanuel Mulamila, Roberto M. Franco, and Ibrahim Ouedraogo while shedding some light on their journeys that concern the endurance of life via different ethical modes of being, how these individuals approach and derive meanings from their extraordinary encounters in life, and what... Continue Reading →
In The Sunflower Simon Wiesenthal narrates his story that occurred during his time as a concentration camp inmate during the reign of the Nazis; a time in which many, such as his friends, had lost hope and started questioning God: "It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man... Continue Reading →
Section I: Of the Different Species of Philosophy According to Hume, “moral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners” (p.1). The first type of philosophical thinking he refers to is one that considers man born for action, considers his taste and sentiment, borrows help from poetry and eloquence,... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 