Touching Sound: Vulnerability and Synchronicity

2017

At its full breadth a capacity for empathy is a capacity to notice, to understand, to internalise, to experience and to adequately respond to another’s feelings. Whether empathy is unique to humans is not clear (for example, Bartal, Decety, & Mason, 2011; Langford et al., 2006), but it is definitely a prominent human proficiency. Empathy plays an important part in human life from infancy. For example, in its most essential form empathy constitutes an integral part of parent–infant relations (Elicker, Englund, & Sroufe, 1992; Winnicott, 1960). Parents are constantly striving to unravel their child’s needs, wishes and moods and to provide support and consolation as well as direction. At the same time, infants are highly aware of their parents’ state of mind and feelings and continuously attempt to adjust to them. As the child develops and grows, he or she exhibits a progressively comprehensive capacity for empathy towards other children and adults (Borke, 1971; Knafo et al., 2008; Rie...

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2012

Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems, 2018

Human Studies, 1996

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

Centuries after the exclusion of lived experience and the life-world by a science inherited from Platonism, the repressed returns in its purest form: that of a living present recognizing itself as the origin and the blind spot of science, under the pressure of the advances of quantum physics. From there, a radical response is made to the speculative materialist argument of ancestrality. The epistemic correlation does not bind, in time, real objects to empirical human subjects contemporary with them; it binds, upstream of time, the present act of constitution to an always-now constituted natural domain.

Priestman, S. 2016: 'The Silk Road or the sea? Sasanian and Islamic Exports to Japan', Journal of Islamic Archaeology, 3(1): 1-35.

This article considers the movement of commodities manufactured in southern Iraq during the Sasanian and Early Islamic periods to the furthest eastern extremity of the Old World: to the archipelago of Japan. In particular the focus is on two categories of non-perishable finds that survive within the archaeological record: glass vessels and turquoise blue alkaline glazed ceramic jars. We begin by providing an outline of the definition and dating of what is a commonplace and widely distributed ceramic product within the Middle East and western Indian Ocean area. It is then possible to place these finds within a broader context by reviewing the evidence for the earliest West Asian exports to Japan and what these might tell us about the mechanisms of their transmission and circulation and the role of such imports within an East Asian context. Specifically these include glass vessels dated to the Sasanian period followed some time later by ceramic vessels manufactured at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate. The continued arrival of Islamic glass into this later period is not a subject that will be covered specifically as it does not contribute directly to the main arguments that are developed below. Finally the finds are used to shed light on the broader debate surrounding the development of the Indian Ocean economy and to what extent Japan itself may have been commercially integrated within a wider commodity exchange network.

2024