scholarly journals A critical evaluation of the use of skin as a form of identity in Zulu culture

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Langa P. Magwa

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate and critically evaluate the use of skin as a form of identity in Zulu culture. This investigation wil /foc'uu on the historical and contemporary practices of scarification and ear - piercing in Zulu culture. 1 In Chapter One, Section One the candidate will discuss the scarification and tattooing i techniques, and refer to the decline in the practice of scarification in contemporary Africa. 'l The scarification and tattooing techniques have the following elements in common, incisions `made on the body or skin to create scar patterns or shapes. Chapter \xAEne, Section Two the candidate will discuss the different purposes of carification practiced by people in Africa Scarification has traditionally been used for any different purposes, such as rite of passage, tribal/clan identity, civilizing, beauty, sexual atttraction, healing and medicinal. In Chapter Two, Section One the candidate will discuss the concepts of culture and identity and propose a definition of identity and culture for the purposes of this dissertation. In Chapter Two, Section Two the candidate will write a personal history and describe the origins of his identity. Chapter 'two, Section Three will discuss the historical formulation 0. of Zulu identity and culture. Chapter Two, Section ]Foam will investigate how internal and external influences have changed Zulu identity and culture over time.

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lianuska Gutierrez

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] "Sphinx Eyes Antiphon," one of the poems in my collection, And the Wood Doll Arose and Told, I'm a Real, refers to a blank or unreciprocal social gaze. Humans need some level of affirmation from the surrounding community. The eyes of ancient statues, due to weathering over time, appear as solid, blank convexitieswith no pupils or irises. The speaker of my poems understands that this is the "gaze" (in fact unseeing) that often meets her back. The poems deal with subjects who have a harder time rebuffing this blankness, due to their marginalized status and an unwillingness to conform. Many of my poems treat gendered experience as well as yoke personal history and subjectivity to political, or ethical, exhortation. My work is largely about the 'victim'; it's an effort at a vertical descent into the radically alienated experience of one caught to violence, from verbal violence or indifference to extreme physical cruelty. Animals figure into my poems often because of this focus. I attend to invisibility, to a subject overwritten. One of my strategies is physicalizing the psychic. This has to do with how the body's senses register social impingement or dominance (i.e. through the gaze or in language). The poems carry a 'feminine' sensibility (but they are for anyone), and they also attend to and dignify the body and the immanent, the inner life.


Kant Yearbook ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey W. Dyck

Abstract In this paper, I challenge the assumption that Kant’s Third Paralogism has to do, first and foremost, with the question of personal identity. Beginning with a consideration of the treatments of the soul’s personality in Christian Wolff’s rational psychology, I show that, despite being influenced by Locke’s novel account of personhood and confessing a dissatisfaction with the Scholastic definition of the term, Wolff maintained the agreement between his account of personality and the traditional conception. Moreover, Wolff did not put this concept to a forensic use but considered its primary application to be in the context of the demonstration of the soul’s immortality which, according to him, required that after the death of the body the human soul retained its status personalitatis, understood as its distinct capacity to be conscious of its identity over time. Wolff’s account of the soul’s personality, and the use to which he put it, proved rather influential for metaphysicians like G. F. Meier and Moses Mendelssohn, and Kant’s lectures in the 1770’s also betray this influence. Considering the Third Paralogism in light of this context I claim that, rather than taking up the question of whether the numerical identity of the soul can be inferred from the meagre resources of the I think, what is at issue is the rational psychologist’s account of how we are conscious of our numerical identity in different times. Despite disagreeing with the rational psychologist on this score, Kant nonetheless contends that the way in which we are, in fact, conscious of our numerical identity in all times qualifies us as persons and suffices for that concept’s use in the proof of the soul’s immortality. This reading thus makes sense of Kant’s claim that the soul’s personality, even with its transcendental grounding, is “necessary and sufficient for practical use,” and provides a charitable alternative to the recent allegation of a paralogism of pure practical reason on Kant’s part.


Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.


Author(s):  
Galen Strawson

This chapter examines the difference between John Locke's definition of a person [P], considered as a kind of thing, and his definition of a subject of experience of a certain sophisticated sort [S]. It first discusses the equation [P] = [S], where [S] is assumed to be a continuing thing that is able to survive radical change of substantial realization, as well as Locke's position about consciousness in relation to [P]'s identity or existence over time as [S]. It argues that Locke is not guilty of circularity because he is not proposing consciousness as the determinant of [S]'s identity over time, but only of [S]'s moral and legal responsibility over time. Finally, it suggests that the terms “Person” and “Personal identity” pull apart, in Locke's scheme of things, but in a perfectly coherent way.


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
LuAnn Bean ◽  
Deborah W. Thomas

Determining what should be considered a material item has been a problem for both the accounting profession and the courts. By reviewing the court cases involving the issue of materiality, the authors have determined where differences in the materiality standard as applied by the courts exist. The judicial definition of materiality has developed over time, and current trends with important variations are observed. Based upon the authors' analysis, the following judicial definition of materiality, with its possible variations, is suggested: Would the reasonable (or speculative) investor (or layman) consider important (or be influenced by) this information in determining his course of action?


Author(s):  
James G. March

Humans use reasons to shape and justify choices. In the process, trade-offs seem essential and often inevitable. But trade-offs involve comparisons, which are problematic both across values and especially over time. Reducing disparate values to a common metric (especially if that metric is money) is often problematic and unsatisfactory. Critically, it is not that values just shape choices, but that choices themselves shape values. This endogeneity of values makes an unconditional normative endorsement of modern decision-theoretic rationality unwise. This is a hard problem and there is no escaping the definition of good values, that is, those that make humans better. This removes the wall between economics and philosophy. If we are to adopt and enact this perspective, then greater discourse and debate on what matters and not just what counts will be useful and even indispensable.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 953-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne M Boddy ◽  
Allan F Hackett ◽  
Gareth Stratton

AbstractObjectiveTo estimate the prevalence of underweight between 1998 and 2006 in Liverpool schoolchildren aged 9–10 years using recently published underweight cut-off points.Design and settingStature and body mass data collected at the LiverpoolSportsLinx project’s fitness testing sessions were used to calculate BMI.SubjectsData were available on 26 782 (n13 637 boys, 13 145 girls) participants.ResultsOverall underweight declined in boys from 10·3 % in 1998–1999 to 6·9 % in 2005–2006, and all sub-classifications of underweight declined, in particular grade 3 underweight, with the most recent prevalence being 0·1 %. In girls, the prevalence of underweight declined from 10·8 % in 1998–1999 to 7·5 % in 2005–2006. The prevalence of all grades of underweight was higher in girls than in boys. Underweight showed a fluctuating pattern across all grades over time for boys and girls, and overall prevalence in 2005–2006 represents over 200 children across the city.ConclusionsUnderweight may have reduced slightly from baseline, but remains a substantial problem in Liverpool, with the prevalence of overall underweight being relatively similar to the prevalence of obesity. The present study highlights the requirement for policy makers and funders to consider both ends of the body mass spectrum when fixing priorities in child health.


Analytica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-75
Author(s):  
Toshiki Horikoshi ◽  
Chihiro Kitaoka ◽  
Yosuke Fujii ◽  
Takashi Asano ◽  
Jiawei Xu ◽  
...  

The ingredients of an antipyretic (acetaminophen, AAP) and their metabolites excreted into fingerprint were detected by surface-assisted laser desorption ionization (SALDI) mass spectrometry using zeolite. In the fingerprint taken 4 h after AAP ingestion, not only AAP but also the glucuronic acid conjugate of AAP (GAAP), caffeine (Caf), ethenzamide (Eth), salicylamide (Sala; a metabolite of Eth), and urea were detected. Fingerprints were collected over time to determine how the amounts of AAP and its metabolite changed with time, and the time dependence of the peak intensities of protonated AAP and GAAP was measured. It was found that the increase of [GAAP+H]+ peak started later than that of [AAP+H]+ peak, reflecting the metabolism of AAP. Both AAP and GAAP reached maximum concentrations approximately 3 h after ingestion, and were excreted from the body with a half-life of approximately 3.3 h. In addition, fingerprint preservation was confirmed by optical microscopy, and fingerprint shape was retained even after laser irradiation of the fingerprint. Our method may be used in fingerprint analysis.


1973 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-215
Author(s):  
Hanns Ruder

Basic in the treatment of collective rotations is the definition of a body-fixed coordinate system. A kinematical method is derived to obtain the Hamiltonian of a n-body problem for a given definition of the body-fixed system. From this exact Hamiltonian, a consequent perturbation expansion in terms of the total angular momentum leads to two exact expressions: one for the collective rotational energy which has to be added to the groundstate energy in this order of perturbation and a second one for the effective inertia tensor in the groundstate. The discussion of these results leads to two criteria how to define the best body-fixed coordinate system, namely a differential equation and a variational principle. The equivalence of both is shown.


Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Courtney Thompson ◽  
Jean Adams ◽  
Helen Anna Vidgen

(1) Background: The term ‘food literacy’ has gained momentum globally; however, a lack of clarity around its definition has resulted in inconsistencies in use of the term. Therefore, the objective was to conduct a systematic scoping review to describe the use, reach, application and definitions of the term ‘food literacy’ over time. (2) Methods: A search was conducted using the PRISMA-ScR guidelines in seven research databases without any date limitations up to 31 December 2019, searching simply for use of the term ‘food literacy’. (3) Results: Five hundred and forty-nine studies were included. The term ‘food literacy’ was used once in 243 articles (44%) and mentioned by researchers working in 41 countries. Original research was the most common article type (n = 429, 78%). Food literacy was published across 72 In Cites disciplines, with 456 (83%) articles from the last 5 years. In articles about food literacy (n = 82, 15%), review articles were twice as prevalent compared to the total number of articles (n = 10, 12% vs. n = 32, 6%). Fifty-one different definitions of food literacy were cited. (4) Conclusions: ‘Food literacy’ has been used frequently and broadly across differing article types and disciplines in academic literature internationally. However, agreement on a standardised definition of food literacy endorsed by a peak international agency is needed in order to progress the field.


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