Luci is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at UWTSD and co-editor with Professor Louise Steel on the Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology series with University of Wales, Press. Luci is Deputy Executive Director of UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Global Coalition and is also the Director of the UNESCO-MOST's BRIDGES Hub in the UK. UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES is a global coalition that advocates transdisciplinary humanities-informed sustainability science (THiSS) to address the SDGs.
This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (C... more This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (Cr. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, have been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters has altered since the successfully construction of a sweet-water well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (Cf. Bennett 2010), and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of water scarcity to engage and demonstrate how fluidity and movement supports their mutuality. Therefore, rather than considering water simply as a resource for human use, I am choosing to establish water as a subject that, through its physical abilities and material behaviours, not only shapes cultural ontologies but also through ingestion viscerally upholds, mobilises and sustains bodies.
Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a pr... more Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a provocative, mysterious and powerful mixture of wisdom and danger. This chapter explores the ubiquitous persistence of snakes in human stories and pays specific attention to how existential knowledge is obtained through digestive relationships with specific cryptozoological serpents. Using the ethnographic example of the consumption of Ayahuasca – a hallucinogenic decoction drunk commonly because of the hallucinations of wisdom-imparting snakes it generates - this paper reviews the ‘liminality’ that snakes tend to exemplify by illustrating the correspondences between the inner mythopoetics concerning snakes, the corporeality of snake-ness (in the form of snakes encountered during hallucinogen-induced visions) and the messages snakes present for assimilation. In association with the phenomenological emotionality snakes inspire, I suggest that the feeling-sense of snakes pervades human cultures because it works to facilitate the incorporation of internal non-verbal areas of conflict that might otherwise remain repressed or unexpressed and that this is commonly represented by associating snakes with food, eating, knowledge and the human body.
This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow toge... more This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow together and shape each other. While the focus of the book is on the relationships held between water and people, it also has a broader message about human relationships with the environment generally – a message that illustrates not only that people are existentially entangled with the material world, but that the materials of the world shape, determine and enable humans to be ‘humans’ in the ways that they are. Offering a selection of anthropological examples from Kenya, Wales and Spain to illustrate how water’s materiality coproductively generates the way people are able to engage with water, this book uses cross-disciplinary perspectives to provide and promote a new analytic – one that encourages ethical, holistic and sustainable relationships with the world around us. This approach challenges representations that ignore, sidestep or are blind to the fleshy materiality of being human, an...
"Recent botanical studies present plants as responsive subjectivities that use a wide range of ch... more "Recent botanical studies present plants as responsive subjectivities that use a wide range of chemicals to communicate metaorganismically. Ethnographic information makes similar claims. However, despite these cross-disciplinary resonances, scientific papers tend to overlook human animals as recipients of plants’ chemical messages while ethnographic accounts do the contrary. Using an ethno-bio-chemical, morethanhuman and morethanspecies approach, this paper considers these perspectival disparities alongside the becoming-consequences of ingesting plants.
Focusing on hallucinations and addiction in particular, this paper positions edibility and ingestion as pivotal in mobilising some plant-human relationships, and illustrates how the co-mingling or molecular entanglements of the digestive encounter initiate enduring corporeal affiliations between the digester and the digested. This model enables edibility to be a historically significant plant-initiated strategy and another method in plants’ diverse chemical communication repertoire that both botanical and ethnographic accounts describe."
Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2021
Zhigoneshi describes the symbiotic dependencies that weave together to produce the world. The Kog... more Zhigoneshi describes the symbiotic dependencies that weave together to produce the world. The Kogi concept of mutuality, as expressed in their word zhigoneshi, conveys a picture of life as a series of collaborative, cooperative relationships, which the Kogi understand as axiomatic to all living processes, including human societies. This is evident in relation to their vertical mountain economy and in their view of exchange. Consequently, for the Kogi, materials, knowledge and thought are not simply connected but are also fundamentally entwined. This approach does not simply describe ecological dependencies; it also holds that economic and biological life existentially inform each other and therefore cannot be separated, even in thought. Chiming with the reality of cellular symbiotic practices at the very origins of life (as articulated by Margulis), zhigoneshi rejects the notion of the self-interested in pursuit of accumulation and profit, as employed by capitalist economic methods, in favor of actions that understand connectivity and ensure balance and harmony are maintained. Using numerous cultural examples, we illustrate how many alternative ideas of economy continue to inform current exchange practices out from the market and suggest that these examples provide a useful understanding of post-capitalist possibilities in the Anthropocene.
Workplaces are designed with work in mind. According
to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces o... more Workplaces are designed with work in mind. According to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces of command, obedience, and obligation that make relations of power and authority tangible. This article considers the expe- rience of moving from tethered to open-plan hot-desk offices by exploring the difference between what hot- desks signal and what they do. Using the example of hot-desks in a non-clinical National Healthe Service nhs setting in Britain, it demonstrates how employees resist the homogeneity and equality implied by hot- desks and hold tightly to how they imagine their work identities should perform within a hierarchical habitus of work (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, it shows that workers need work to reproduce the naturalised notions of what work is thought to be, and when challenged to adopt alternative methods use moralising arguments and subtle acts of resistance (Foucault 1991; Scott 1992) to perpetuate and redeploy hierarchies. Consequently, the fundamental and dominant values and methods associated with how and where to work are exposed as comfortable through familiarity, and, therefore, despite irritations people not only want to know their place but also want that place to sit within a landscape that uses the conventional rules of the ‘game’ of work (Frayne 2015).
Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the ... more Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from anthropology, archaeology and medieval studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body; the chapters come together to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding readers of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate that bodies not only seep into (and are part of) the landscape, but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.
Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks... more Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ‘why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ‘eating’ and ‘caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.
This chapter considers the influence water (as a hyperobject) has on climate change. Drawing part... more This chapter considers the influence water (as a hyperobject) has on climate change. Drawing particularly on my experience with the Giriama in Kenya, I demonstrate the inherent complications of finding balance or harmony when perspectives on the material world dramatically diverge.
Discussions concerning the socio-environmental harms and the inadequacies of effectively recyclin... more Discussions concerning the socio-environmental harms and the inadequacies of effectively recycling plastics are now well rehearsed. These issues are counterbalanced by plastic’s enormous versatility and low production costs. To enable plastic to remain a useful material its inability to degrade needs to be addressed. Current practice almost forces consumers to purchase non-recyclable containers if they want to benefit from the contents. Governments should support moves away from recycling towards biodegradable with regards plastic containers. The following is a summary of the perspectives of approximately 80 young people studying Anthropology at undergraduate level with regards plastic consumption and consumer choice. The information results from 3 years of informal qualitative data collection. This document first describes the courses and then culminates with the students’ suggestions for the future that arose from their research. It also demonstrates the apprehensions young people...
Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a pr... more Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a provocative, mysterious and powerful mixture of wisdom and danger. This chapter explores the ubiquitous persistence of snakes in human stories and pays specific attention to how existential knowledge is obtained through digestive relationships with specific cryptozoological serpents. Using the ethnographic example of the consumption of Ayahuasca – a hallucinogenic decoction drunk commonly because of the hallucinations of wisdom-imparting snakes it generates - this paper reviews the ‘liminality’ that snakes tend to exemplify by illustrating the correspondences between the inner mythopoetics concerning snakes, the corporeality of snake-ness (in the form of snakes encountered during hallucinogen-induced visions) and the messages snakes present for assimilation. In association with the phenomenological emotionality snakes inspire, I suggest that the feeling-sense of snakes pervades human cultu...
This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (C... more This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (Cr. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, have been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters has altered since the successfully construction of a sweet-water well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (Cf. Bennett 2010), and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of ...
In light of correspondence between interdisciplinary representations of plant abilities, this pap... more In light of correspondence between interdisciplinary representations of plant abilities, this paper raises questions about plant/human-animal relationships and in so doing problematizes the category/species boundaries that both establish and characterize the differences between plant and animal. Using a more than human (Cf. Whatmore 2002; Head et al., 2012) multi-species (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) framework that rejects reductionist methods in favour of a relational, materialities approach; an alternative method to consider plant/human-animal relationships that focuses on edibility and the consequences of ingestion is proposed. Termed the Edibility Approach, this method foregrounds the ways that plants influence human bodies as a result of their edibility and considers the corollary processes that occur during in-gestion and after digestion. Interrogation of the social effects of eating plants and the part plants play in inciting behaviours as if from " the inside " of bodies adds a nuanced direction to the study of plant/human-animal relationships. This phyto-centric framing offers a new botanical ontology and conceptual tool. By focusing on the dependencies between species, it proposes that there is a multi-vocal embodied dialogue occurring between species through digestion .
This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (C... more This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (Cr. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, have been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters has altered since the successfully construction of a sweet-water well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (Cf. Bennett 2010), and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of water scarcity to engage and demonstrate how fluidity and movement supports their mutuality. Therefore, rather than considering water simply as a resource for human use, I am choosing to establish water as a subject that, through its physical abilities and material behaviours, not only shapes cultural ontologies but also through ingestion viscerally upholds, mobilises and sustains bodies.
Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a pr... more Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a provocative, mysterious and powerful mixture of wisdom and danger. This chapter explores the ubiquitous persistence of snakes in human stories and pays specific attention to how existential knowledge is obtained through digestive relationships with specific cryptozoological serpents. Using the ethnographic example of the consumption of Ayahuasca – a hallucinogenic decoction drunk commonly because of the hallucinations of wisdom-imparting snakes it generates - this paper reviews the ‘liminality’ that snakes tend to exemplify by illustrating the correspondences between the inner mythopoetics concerning snakes, the corporeality of snake-ness (in the form of snakes encountered during hallucinogen-induced visions) and the messages snakes present for assimilation. In association with the phenomenological emotionality snakes inspire, I suggest that the feeling-sense of snakes pervades human cultures because it works to facilitate the incorporation of internal non-verbal areas of conflict that might otherwise remain repressed or unexpressed and that this is commonly represented by associating snakes with food, eating, knowledge and the human body.
This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow toge... more This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow together and shape each other. While the focus of the book is on the relationships held between water and people, it also has a broader message about human relationships with the environment generally – a message that illustrates not only that people are existentially entangled with the material world, but that the materials of the world shape, determine and enable humans to be ‘humans’ in the ways that they are. Offering a selection of anthropological examples from Kenya, Wales and Spain to illustrate how water’s materiality coproductively generates the way people are able to engage with water, this book uses cross-disciplinary perspectives to provide and promote a new analytic – one that encourages ethical, holistic and sustainable relationships with the world around us. This approach challenges representations that ignore, sidestep or are blind to the fleshy materiality of being human, an...
"Recent botanical studies present plants as responsive subjectivities that use a wide range of ch... more "Recent botanical studies present plants as responsive subjectivities that use a wide range of chemicals to communicate metaorganismically. Ethnographic information makes similar claims. However, despite these cross-disciplinary resonances, scientific papers tend to overlook human animals as recipients of plants’ chemical messages while ethnographic accounts do the contrary. Using an ethno-bio-chemical, morethanhuman and morethanspecies approach, this paper considers these perspectival disparities alongside the becoming-consequences of ingesting plants.
Focusing on hallucinations and addiction in particular, this paper positions edibility and ingestion as pivotal in mobilising some plant-human relationships, and illustrates how the co-mingling or molecular entanglements of the digestive encounter initiate enduring corporeal affiliations between the digester and the digested. This model enables edibility to be a historically significant plant-initiated strategy and another method in plants’ diverse chemical communication repertoire that both botanical and ethnographic accounts describe."
Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2021
Zhigoneshi describes the symbiotic dependencies that weave together to produce the world. The Kog... more Zhigoneshi describes the symbiotic dependencies that weave together to produce the world. The Kogi concept of mutuality, as expressed in their word zhigoneshi, conveys a picture of life as a series of collaborative, cooperative relationships, which the Kogi understand as axiomatic to all living processes, including human societies. This is evident in relation to their vertical mountain economy and in their view of exchange. Consequently, for the Kogi, materials, knowledge and thought are not simply connected but are also fundamentally entwined. This approach does not simply describe ecological dependencies; it also holds that economic and biological life existentially inform each other and therefore cannot be separated, even in thought. Chiming with the reality of cellular symbiotic practices at the very origins of life (as articulated by Margulis), zhigoneshi rejects the notion of the self-interested in pursuit of accumulation and profit, as employed by capitalist economic methods, in favor of actions that understand connectivity and ensure balance and harmony are maintained. Using numerous cultural examples, we illustrate how many alternative ideas of economy continue to inform current exchange practices out from the market and suggest that these examples provide a useful understanding of post-capitalist possibilities in the Anthropocene.
Workplaces are designed with work in mind. According
to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces o... more Workplaces are designed with work in mind. According to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces of command, obedience, and obligation that make relations of power and authority tangible. This article considers the expe- rience of moving from tethered to open-plan hot-desk offices by exploring the difference between what hot- desks signal and what they do. Using the example of hot-desks in a non-clinical National Healthe Service nhs setting in Britain, it demonstrates how employees resist the homogeneity and equality implied by hot- desks and hold tightly to how they imagine their work identities should perform within a hierarchical habitus of work (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, it shows that workers need work to reproduce the naturalised notions of what work is thought to be, and when challenged to adopt alternative methods use moralising arguments and subtle acts of resistance (Foucault 1991; Scott 1992) to perpetuate and redeploy hierarchies. Consequently, the fundamental and dominant values and methods associated with how and where to work are exposed as comfortable through familiarity, and, therefore, despite irritations people not only want to know their place but also want that place to sit within a landscape that uses the conventional rules of the ‘game’ of work (Frayne 2015).
Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the ... more Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from anthropology, archaeology and medieval studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body; the chapters come together to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding readers of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate that bodies not only seep into (and are part of) the landscape, but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.
Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks... more Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ‘why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ‘eating’ and ‘caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.
This chapter considers the influence water (as a hyperobject) has on climate change. Drawing part... more This chapter considers the influence water (as a hyperobject) has on climate change. Drawing particularly on my experience with the Giriama in Kenya, I demonstrate the inherent complications of finding balance or harmony when perspectives on the material world dramatically diverge.
Discussions concerning the socio-environmental harms and the inadequacies of effectively recyclin... more Discussions concerning the socio-environmental harms and the inadequacies of effectively recycling plastics are now well rehearsed. These issues are counterbalanced by plastic’s enormous versatility and low production costs. To enable plastic to remain a useful material its inability to degrade needs to be addressed. Current practice almost forces consumers to purchase non-recyclable containers if they want to benefit from the contents. Governments should support moves away from recycling towards biodegradable with regards plastic containers. The following is a summary of the perspectives of approximately 80 young people studying Anthropology at undergraduate level with regards plastic consumption and consumer choice. The information results from 3 years of informal qualitative data collection. This document first describes the courses and then culminates with the students’ suggestions for the future that arose from their research. It also demonstrates the apprehensions young people...
Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a pr... more Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a provocative, mysterious and powerful mixture of wisdom and danger. This chapter explores the ubiquitous persistence of snakes in human stories and pays specific attention to how existential knowledge is obtained through digestive relationships with specific cryptozoological serpents. Using the ethnographic example of the consumption of Ayahuasca – a hallucinogenic decoction drunk commonly because of the hallucinations of wisdom-imparting snakes it generates - this paper reviews the ‘liminality’ that snakes tend to exemplify by illustrating the correspondences between the inner mythopoetics concerning snakes, the corporeality of snake-ness (in the form of snakes encountered during hallucinogen-induced visions) and the messages snakes present for assimilation. In association with the phenomenological emotionality snakes inspire, I suggest that the feeling-sense of snakes pervades human cultu...
This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (C... more This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (Cr. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, have been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters has altered since the successfully construction of a sweet-water well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (Cf. Bennett 2010), and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of ...
In light of correspondence between interdisciplinary representations of plant abilities, this pap... more In light of correspondence between interdisciplinary representations of plant abilities, this paper raises questions about plant/human-animal relationships and in so doing problematizes the category/species boundaries that both establish and characterize the differences between plant and animal. Using a more than human (Cf. Whatmore 2002; Head et al., 2012) multi-species (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) framework that rejects reductionist methods in favour of a relational, materialities approach; an alternative method to consider plant/human-animal relationships that focuses on edibility and the consequences of ingestion is proposed. Termed the Edibility Approach, this method foregrounds the ways that plants influence human bodies as a result of their edibility and considers the corollary processes that occur during in-gestion and after digestion. Interrogation of the social effects of eating plants and the part plants play in inciting behaviours as if from " the inside " of bodies adds a nuanced direction to the study of plant/human-animal relationships. This phyto-centric framing offers a new botanical ontology and conceptual tool. By focusing on the dependencies between species, it proposes that there is a multi-vocal embodied dialogue occurring between species through digestion .
Earthy Matters is a lively collection of theoretically informed chapters that introduce the reade... more Earthy Matters is a lively collection of theoretically informed chapters that introduce the reader to the notion that matter is a creative agent, and that it plays a key role in the formation of our material and social worlds. The focus of the book is sediments, soils, clay and earth ‒ materials that surround us and have shaped people’s interactions with the environment since even before the first farmers settled in the Near East tilling the earth, building houses from mud and plaster, and making vessels and figurines from clay. This collection questions orthodox understandings that these substances are inert and an infinite resource for humanity, rather to foreground earthy substances in their relationships with humans, and to show how these materials have co-created our social and material worlds. It is a novel and timely reminder for the reader that our lives have always been embedded within the matter of the E(e)arth.
Earthy Matters explores how people's lives have been shaped through their interactions with earth... more Earthy Matters explores how people's lives have been shaped through their interactions with earth, soils and clay. It questions an understanding that these substances are inert, drawing attention instead to the co-creative agency of matter in the production of social and material worlds. As such, this book reminds us that we are simply part of the matter of the Earth.
The aim of Careful Eating is to critically reflect on the many and varied relationships between ... more The aim of Careful Eating is to critically reflect on the many and varied relationships between food and care. Specifically, it investigates how these relationships are mobilized to shape and intervene in individual bodies, as well as how they may be both enacted and resisted in and through those bodies. It thereby develops current critical debates regarding how care, in the context of food and eating, may so often be a political mechanism through which the self and the Other are (re)produced and social hierarchies constructed.
Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the imp... more Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.
TALE OF A RIVER CITY - READING URBAN HISTORIES THROUGH ASI RIVER, 2022
The book TALE OF A RIVER CITY is as a collective work that aims to narrate the complex history be... more The book TALE OF A RIVER CITY is as a collective work that aims to narrate the complex history between Antakya’s inhabitants and the Asi River running through the city that has shaped Antakya’s urban life and its reception for millennia. The book outlines the collaborative, interdisciplinary work of five researchers coming from different academic backgrounds ranging from anthropology, archaeology, art history, architecture, and city planning, and articulates stories merging into the flow of the Asi River from Antakya's foundation until today. The book adopts a historical narrative method, which will be expanded upon five chronologically ordered chapters employing a kaleidoscope of perspectives from diverse sources, including books, articles, travelers’ notes, myths, drawings, maps, photographs to mediate understanding the changing urban-water relations in the historical context.
NEHİRLİ KENTİN ÖYKÜSÜ kitabı, Antakya şehrinin içinden geçen ve kentin yaşamını şekillendiren Asi Nehri ile Antakya sakinleri arasında süregelen binlerce yıllık karmaşık ilişkinin tarihini anlatmayı amaçlayan kolektif bir çalışmadır. Kitap, antropoloji, arkeoloji, sanat tarihi, mimarlık ve şehir planlama gibi çok farklı akademik geçmişlerden gelen beş araştırmacının işbirlikçi ve disiplinler arası çalışmalarını bir araya getirmekte ve Antakya’nın kuruluşundan günümüze kadar Asi Nehri’nin suyuna karışan hikayelerini özetlemektedir. Kitaplar, makaleler, gezgin notları, mitler, çizimler, haritalar, fotoğraflardan oluşan çeşitli kaynakların farklı perspektiflerini bir araya getiren kronolojik olarak sıralı beş bölümden oluşan bu kitap, tarihsel anlatı yöntemini benimsemekte, zaman içerisinde değişen şehir-su ilişkilerini tarihsel bir bağlamdan anlamaya aracı olmaktadır.
In association with /İşbirlikleri.
This project is funded by Spaces of Culture. Bu proje, kültür ... more In association with /İşbirlikleri. This project is funded by Spaces of Culture. Bu proje, kültür için alan tarafından fonlanmaktadır.
Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the ... more Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from Anthropology, Archaeology and Medieval Studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body. Govier, Feyers-Kerr and Steel examine how minerals such as carbon (smoke), cinnabar, mud and plaster co-mingle with human bodies in Çatalhöyük, Kenya and the Near East respectively whiles Walsh highlights the ways in which bodies are shaped through handling pottery, drawing upon Bronze Age Kerma. Attala explores the bodily consequences of ingesting hallucinogens (Ayahusca) and Rahmen considers how substances such as water and tobacco combine with bodily flesh to produce the intangible and invisible aspects of a person for the Amazonian Warakena. Burton and Webster draw our attention back to the very flesh, blood and bones constituting the matter of the body in Medieval Europe, while Coard examines its disintegration into dust. All these papers come together then to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding the reader of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate not just that bodies seep into (and are part of) the landscape but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.
Eating – the material incorporation of one into another.
This chapter uses a New Materialities a... more Eating – the material incorporation of one into another.
This chapter uses a New Materialities approach to think about the corporeal consequences of eating plants. The aim is to encourage the reader to recognise the many active and formative material entanglements that articulate our lives. Typically positioned as an activity that is primarily self-interested and instinctual, eating is redefined here as a mutually influential co-productive relationship that is, in part, driven and shaped by the capacities of the engaging materials as they meld together through digestion.
Our aim in Body Matters is to remind you of your inherent materiality and the inextricable ties y... more Our aim in Body Matters is to remind you of your inherent materiality and the inextricable ties you have with the rest of the material world around you. It seeks to illustrate that it is inaccurate to imagine your existence is distinct and at a distance from the physical world; once this truism is realized the intellectual rupture that persuades you to imagine that you stand at a distance from the world will be repaired. In short, this book demonstrates how you are a body and that you come into being because of a set of shifting materials acting in relationship with other materials.
Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks... more Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ‘why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ‘eating’ and ‘caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.
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Papers by Luci Attala
Focusing on hallucinations and addiction in particular, this paper positions edibility and ingestion as pivotal in mobilising some plant-human relationships, and illustrates how the co-mingling or molecular entanglements of the digestive encounter initiate enduring corporeal affiliations between the digester and the digested. This model enables edibility to be a historically significant plant-initiated strategy and another method in plants’ diverse chemical communication repertoire that both botanical and ethnographic accounts describe."
to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces of command,
obedience, and obligation that make relations of power
and authority tangible. This article considers the expe-
rience of moving from tethered to open-plan hot-desk
offices by exploring the difference between what hot-
desks signal and what they do. Using the example of
hot-desks in a non-clinical National Healthe Service
nhs setting in Britain, it demonstrates how employees
resist the homogeneity and equality implied by hot-
desks and hold tightly to how they imagine their work
identities should perform within a hierarchical habitus
of work (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, it shows that workers
need work to reproduce the naturalised notions of what
work is thought to be, and when challenged to adopt
alternative methods use moralising arguments and
subtle acts of resistance (Foucault 1991; Scott 1992)
to perpetuate and redeploy hierarchies. Consequently,
the fundamental and dominant values and methods
associated with how and where to work are exposed as
comfortable through familiarity, and, therefore, despite
irritations people not only want to know their place but
also want that place to sit within a landscape that uses
the conventional rules of the ‘game’ of work (Frayne
2015).
Focusing on hallucinations and addiction in particular, this paper positions edibility and ingestion as pivotal in mobilising some plant-human relationships, and illustrates how the co-mingling or molecular entanglements of the digestive encounter initiate enduring corporeal affiliations between the digester and the digested. This model enables edibility to be a historically significant plant-initiated strategy and another method in plants’ diverse chemical communication repertoire that both botanical and ethnographic accounts describe."
to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces of command,
obedience, and obligation that make relations of power
and authority tangible. This article considers the expe-
rience of moving from tethered to open-plan hot-desk
offices by exploring the difference between what hot-
desks signal and what they do. Using the example of
hot-desks in a non-clinical National Healthe Service
nhs setting in Britain, it demonstrates how employees
resist the homogeneity and equality implied by hot-
desks and hold tightly to how they imagine their work
identities should perform within a hierarchical habitus
of work (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, it shows that workers
need work to reproduce the naturalised notions of what
work is thought to be, and when challenged to adopt
alternative methods use moralising arguments and
subtle acts of resistance (Foucault 1991; Scott 1992)
to perpetuate and redeploy hierarchies. Consequently,
the fundamental and dominant values and methods
associated with how and where to work are exposed as
comfortable through familiarity, and, therefore, despite
irritations people not only want to know their place but
also want that place to sit within a landscape that uses
the conventional rules of the ‘game’ of work (Frayne
2015).
NEHİRLİ KENTİN ÖYKÜSÜ kitabı, Antakya şehrinin içinden geçen ve kentin yaşamını şekillendiren Asi Nehri ile Antakya sakinleri arasında süregelen binlerce yıllık karmaşık ilişkinin tarihini anlatmayı amaçlayan kolektif bir çalışmadır. Kitap, antropoloji, arkeoloji, sanat tarihi, mimarlık ve şehir planlama gibi çok farklı akademik geçmişlerden gelen beş araştırmacının işbirlikçi ve disiplinler arası çalışmalarını bir araya getirmekte ve Antakya’nın kuruluşundan günümüze kadar Asi Nehri’nin suyuna karışan hikayelerini özetlemektedir. Kitaplar, makaleler, gezgin notları, mitler, çizimler, haritalar, fotoğraflardan oluşan çeşitli kaynakların farklı perspektiflerini bir araya getiren kronolojik olarak sıralı beş bölümden oluşan bu kitap, tarihsel anlatı yöntemini benimsemekte, zaman içerisinde değişen şehir-su ilişkilerini tarihsel bir bağlamdan anlamaya aracı olmaktadır.
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This project is funded by Spaces of Culture. Bu proje, kültür için alan tarafından fonlanmaktadır.
This chapter uses a New Materialities approach to think about the corporeal consequences of eating plants. The aim is to encourage the reader to recognise the many active and formative material entanglements that articulate our lives. Typically positioned as an activity that is primarily self-interested and instinctual, eating is redefined here as a mutually influential co-productive relationship that is, in part, driven and shaped by the capacities of the engaging materials as they meld together through digestion.