R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Faubion, James D."

Browsing by Author "Faubion, James D."

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A Leaky House: Haiti in the Religious Aftershocks of the 2010 Earthquake
(2012-09-05) Payne, Nichole; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Cox, Edward; Woodson, Drexel
My research explores nation building, religious conflict and Christian democratization in Post-earthquake Haiti. Christians I spoke with blamed Vodou for the destructive quake. In Haiti, Vodouisants now require UN protection to practice their faith. The thick religious tension in Haiti post-earthquake could portend deep political riffs and dangerous religious persecution. What is more, the quake has effectively shut down government, leaving in its wake essentially an NGO Republic. Moreover, some sectors of the population, particularly the very poor in the black majority, have been converting to evangelical Christianity at very high rates. About the conversions Vodouisants say, "Kay koule twompe soley soley men li pa twompe lapil." A leaky house can fool the sun, but it can't fool the rain. I took this notion of a leaky house from the discussion with a Vodouisant research participant who often compared the massive conversions to an incomplete and quick cover for the inner turmoils of the Haitian subject. I expanded this phrase to work as analogy for the significant evangelical/NGO infrastructure in Haiti. Can this leaky house last as the pseudo-governmental body of Haiti? Problem: A devastating 7.0 Earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th, 2010. By January 24th, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded (CBS News 2010). Cite’ De Soleil has turned into a devastating battleground-- Vodouisants against Christians. Christian evangelicals have a carte blanche to intervene into the lives of devastated Haitians, also into the Haitian government. Struggling with insufficient capacity in the face of overwhelming poverty and environmental disasters, the Haitian government has capsized in what many are calling a religious coup d’état. At least 10,000 religious non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are operating in Haiti. Against this background, the actual hypothesis to be tested in this research is that the conversion from Vodou to most sectors of evangelical Christianity and the subsequent violence against Vodou practitioners is, in the case of some of my research participants, actually a modality for expatriation from, or incorporation into, the New Haitian body politic.
“Another Economy [Is Possible] Already Exists”: Making Democratic Worlds One Day at a Time in Barcelona
(2022-08-11) Gimenez Aliaga, Victor; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation is an ethnography of the Social and Solidarity Economy movement (ESS) in Catalonia. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Barcelona between 2014 and 2019, I show how ESS activists practice a political commitment based on constructing cooperative economic structures and performing, here and now, economic relations in accordance with the values of cooperation, horizontalism, and direct democracy. While the ESS movement centers on the everyday practice of democratic ways of being and relating otherwise, I focus particularly on the oft-overlooked theoretical and knowledge-making practices and modes of expertise that emerge enmeshed with them. Working from this focus, I found in Barcelona a democratic epistemic ecology that uses the tools of social theory, paired with an anthropological sensibility, to problematize and rethink what the good life is and to critically reflect on ways of being otherwise while practicing them. I argue that within the ESS movement, democratic ways of being and doing on the one hand, and democratic ways of thinking and looking at the social world on the other, are inextricably linked. ESS activists produce a democratic social theory of their own and practice parallel modes of non-hierarchical expertise. They bring to light that the epistemic is a crucial dimension of social transformation and that the processes of changing ourselves/changing our thinking/changing the world are co-implicated and co-constitutive. In this intersection between thought, action, and social reality, ESS offers a generative mirror for academia; I use this mirror to reflect on the potentialities and limitations of social theory and academic intellectual authority in processes of democratic, post-capitalist social transformation. Ultimately I argue that ESS activists build worlds otherwise fully shaped by the value of direct democracy. Through their cooperative projects and practices they shape their subjectivities, their knowledges, and their everyday social worlds. They make, one day at a time, the democratic worlds in which they live. Between ethnography, anthropological thought, and activist debates, this dissertation aims to disentangle and convey how they do so. What do politics, life, and knowledge look like when the value of direct democracy guides all collective and individual structures, practices, and relations?
Anthropologies of ethics: Where we've been, where we are, where we might go
(University of Edinburgh, 2014) Faubion, James D.
Comment on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Between prescription and proscription: Adoption, kafala, and abandoned children in Morocco
(1998) Bargach, Jamila; Faubion, James D.
Conventional interpretations agree that Islamic jurisprudence officially prohibits adoption. Anthropologists have thus tended to presume that adoption does not exist in the Muslim world. This dissertation explores a conflicted and complex array of practices--extra-legal, illegal, customary, and religiously valorized--that fill the lacuna which official proscription leaves open. It focuses particularly upon two such practices: secret adoptions, which are considered a criminal activity and therefore create a fragile legal fiction of family continuity; and kafala (tutelage-fostering) which is religiously encouraged but creates an equally fragile family unit in which there is no continuity. The dissertation further addresses the failure of the one legal practice (kafala) to absorb the rapidly increasing number of "illegitimate" and unwanted children, and the consequent emergence of what has recently been identified as a national crisis: that of abandoned children. The dissertation explores legal, historic, literary, sociological, and administrative literature, and is based on field research combining interviews and participant volunteering. I examine adoption as a practice and juxtapose legal apparatus, state and bureaucratic edifice, the world of development and philanthropy, individual and family stories, and elements of the cultural repertoire to depict the highly fluid world of secret adoptions and kafala within Moroccan society. Through adoptions, kafala, and abandoned children, this dissertation analyzes core symbols and institutions in Moroccan society--family, state, social politics, affect--and performs a cultural critique of their internal mechanisms.
Closets and Walls: Practices of Heterodoxy among Gay Mormons and Stencilistas in Santigao, Chile
(2010) Adair-Kriz, Michael; Faubion, James D.; Tyler, Stephen A.; Kripal, Jeffrey J.
This dissertation compares the heterodoxic practices of gay Mormons and stencil street artists (Stencilistas) in Santiago, Chile, recorded during twenty-two months of fieldwork. The dissertation is divided in two distinct sections: one text-based and the
Comparative Analysis of Gift Exchange among a Pentecostal Christian Denomination and an Indigenous Religious Tradition in Ile-Ife, Nigeria
(2014-01-27) Gbadegesin, Enoch; Bongmba, Elias K.; Pinn, Anthony B.; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the gift and how it impacts on interpersonal relationship among the Yoruba of Nigeria. The dissertation examines gift exchange as it is practiced among the worshippers of Ògún deity usually commemorated as an annual Olójó festival in comparison with Christ Way Church International a member of Pentecostal Charismatic group in Ilé-Ifè. In particular, the dissertation analyses a) the gift, its definition and the theoretical propositions by the anthropologists and sociologists and the principles that govern its practice; b) ethnographically, the Yoruba experience and expression of the gift, at the social, political, economic and ritual levels of interaction among immediate group and with other group of people; c) the patterns of interpersonal relationship that exists between the Òrìsà worshippers and Pentecostal Charismatic Christians using the two focused religious groups in Ilé-Ifè as test case; d) how gift exchange practices can be means of creating and maintaining boundaries, and how that can lead to identity formation between different religious groups; in short how gift and reciprocity can be means of exclusion by bringing Annette Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions in conversation with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift; e) the different senses and contexts in which the religious groups can use gift exchange practices to bring about solidarity and harmony in the Yorùbá society.
Containing the Future: Modern Identities as Material Negotiation in the Urban Turkish Ceyiz
(2011) Samli, Sherife Ayla; Faubion, James D.
The Turkish trousseau, çeyiz in Turkish, connects contemporary brides to the traditions and responsibilities of women from previous generations while demonstrating how greater access to education shapes young women's choices as consumers, spouses, and daughters. An emotionally laden collection, the çeyiz entails intergenerational negotiations between mothers and daughters who collaborate to organize the bride's future furnishings, crystallizing their respective desires and differences. A variable collection of bedding, tablecloths, curtains, and embellishments, the çeyiz serves as the bride's contribution of domestic furnishings for the new couple's house An analysis of the trousseau engages with the past and the present revealing how young women's lives are being transformed over time. By comparing mothers with daughters, I demonstrate that, within one generation, young women have greater agency over their futures At the same time, however, they are expected to comply with the traditional roles of marriage, suggesting that their gains are not permanent. The trousseau's material and affective contents reveal the shifts--and continuities--in family relationships, marriage, and consumption engendered by Turkish modernity. Drawing on the analytical works of Annette Weiner, who researched Samoans, Trobrianders, and the Maoris, I approach the çeyiz as an "inalienable possession," connecting generations of women, mothers and daughters, who reproduce through it their expectations for marriage (Weiner 1992). This dissertation also considers the subjective implications of the çeyiz; it serves as a technology of self, honing women's skills and tastes in preparation for their future. The urban Turkish çeyiz reveals that young Turkish women desire new subjectivities, which they display through consumption and acquire through education. This research demonstrates that increased education influences how Istanbul brides select the contents of their çeyiz and envision their futures as wives. More than a symbol for marriage, the rapidly changing bridal çeyiz envelops Turkey's participation within the global economy, national identity, and investment in equalizing gender relations.
Cultural Heritage in States of Transition: Authorities, Entrepreneurs and Sound Archives in Ukraine
(2012) Potoczniak, Anthony G.; Faubion, James D.
Since Ukraine's independence, a burgeoning private sector has been increasingly encroaching in cultural spaces that previously were conceived of as "property of the state." This dissertation is an ethnographic account of how objects of cultural heritage are being re-configured within the new post-Soviet economy. Specifically, it focuses on sound archive field recordings of traditional music and how they are being transformed into cultural commodities. Regarding the jurisdiction of culture - who controls cultural heritage and how it is used to represent ethnic and national identity - my research shows how these boundaries are increasingly being negotiated within structures of social, cultural and political power. Thus, culture becomes a contested object between competing ideological systems: cultural heritage as a means to salvage and reconstruct repressed histories and to revive former national traditions, on the one hand, and cultural heritage as a creative, future-oriented force to construct new identities in growing consumer marketplaces.
Depression and the Catholic church: A genealogy of accommodation and subject-formation
(2007) Randall, Amanda Ziemba; Faubion, James D.
A genealogy of institutional Catholic discourse on depression reveals a strategic process of epistemic accommodation that supports the construction of the condition as a spiritual and moral problem. The hierarchy defends its stake in Catholic subject-formation through competition and complicity with psychiatric models of depression. Positing secular society as a risk to mental health, the Church proposes a cure for depression that is also a solution to the twin crises of ecclesial authority and postmodern culture. That is the evangelization of EuroAmerican culture through the resurrection of Catholic moral pedagogy and technologies of the self. Thus, depression serves as a discursive field for the operation of Catholic governmentality.
Development and its discontents: NGOs, women and the politics of social mobilization in Bangladesh
(2002) Karim, Lamia N.; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation is an analysis of the policies, practices, and effects of a number of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Bangladesh. My work focuses on micro-credit NGOs, the Grameen Bank model in particular, and on the strategy pursued by them to "empower poor women." I look at how the extension of credit to "poor women" intersects with existing gender and community relations to produce results that are often in conflict with the stated goals of "empowerment" and "development." While credit can be a source of capital, and often is such a source for established market agents in Western societies, the extension of credit in more traditional societies, such as Bangladesh, can often become an additional site of stress and exploitation. My research highlights how these new forms of violence in which poor men and women find themselves implicated, sometimes as victims and sometimes as aggressors, are linked with the social stresses and dislocations produced by modern development agencies, the NGOs in particular. My dissertation documents how NGOs have become channels through which globalization enters the most private space of rural society---the home---and how it begins to dissolve the private/public distinctions that regulate rural life. This modernizing agenda of NGOs often disrespects the norms that local people live by. By alienating the very people they seek to empower, NGOs surrender critical ground to Islamic militants who move into occupy moments of social disruptions. Finally, I argue that the development NGO sector in Bangladesh have inducted various groups into its self-perpetuation, thereby, making it difficult for alternatives to the NGO's way of doing things to emerge. Similarly, the Grameen Bank operates as a form of symbolic capital for Bangladeshi national elites and diasporans, and as a financially viable tool for Western aid agencies, thus making it difficult for critiques of the micro-credit model to emerge as a constructive dialogue. My dissertation places these instances in a theoretically developed anthropology of "women in development."
Earth Matters: Religion, Nature, and Science in the Ecologies of Contemporary America
(2013-09-16) Levine, Daniel; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Faubion, James D.; Stroup, John M.
Earth Matters examines the relationships between alternative religion in North America and the natural world through the twin lenses of the history of religions and cultural anthropology. Throughout, nature remains a contested ground, defined simultaneously the limits of cultural activity and by an increasing expansion of claims to knowledge by scientific discourses. Less a historical review than a series of fugues of thought, Earth Matters engages with figures like the French vitalist, Georges Canguilhem, the American environmentalist, John Muir; the founder of Deep Ecology, Arne Næss; the collaborators on Gaia Theory, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis; the physicist and New Age scientist, Fritjof Capra; and the Wiccan writer and activist, Starhawk. These subjects move in spirals throughout the thesis: Canguilhem opens the question of vitalism, the search for a source of being beyond the explanations of the emerging sciences. As rationalism expands its dominance across the scientific landscape, this animating force moves into the natural world, to that protean space between the city and the wild and in the environmental thinkers who initially moved along those boundaries. As the twentieth century moves towards a close, mechanistic thinking simultaneously reaches heights of success previously unimagined and collapses under the demand for complexity posed by quantum physics, by research in genetic interactions, by the continued elusive relationship of mind to health. This allows the wild to return inside through the internalization of consciousness sparked by the American New Age, but also provides a new model to understand the natural world as complex zone open to a wide variety of strategies, including the multiplicities of understanding offered through contemporary neopaganisms. Earth Matters argues for the necessity of the notion of ecology, both as an environmental concern but also as an organizing principle for human thought and behavior. Ecologies are by their nature complex and multi-variegated things dependent upon the surprising and unpredictable interaction of radically different organisms, and it is through this model that we are best able to understand not only ourselves but also our communities and our efforts to make sense of the external world.
Eat, drink, man, woman: Modernity and urban lifestyles in China
(2001) Zhang, Qin; Faubion, James D.
Based on my fieldwork and research in Beijing and other Chinese urban cities in the 1990s, this dissertation focuses on urban Chinese lifestyles caught up in historical and momentous dynamics of continuity and transition. It is to study how lifestyles are embodied by urban men and women in the 1990s and played out in the bars, coffee shops, teahouses and Karoke halls in Beijing, as well as Shanghai and Zhengzhou. In general, this dissertation tries to explore how lifestyles become both reflexive and performative bodies in a complex of historical, political, social, cultural phenomena in a flow of fluxes and trends, a flow of information, a flow of history, a flow of modernity and a flow of globalization.
Elsewheres: Greek LGBT activists and the imagination of a movement
(2005) Riedel, Brian Scott; Faubion, James D.
From twenty-six months of fieldwork conducted in Athens, Greece from May 2001 through July 2004, this dissertation documents the social and cultural contexts that shape the practices of activists working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Greece. Those practices connect to conceptions of friendship, relations of patronage, informal democratic processes, the routinized suspicion of economic profit, and beliefs about the relationships between sexual identities and social identities. The practices in which the activists engage both restrict the kinds of successes they are able to enjoy, and enable those successes they do achieve. These practices are brought to bear by the activists both consciously and not. Furthermore, these practices draw on and are drawn from a diversity of places, times and realms of meaning beyond particular moments of activist practice---a diversity of locations termed elsewheres. Accounting for these elsewheres, which need not be non-Greek, not only provides insights into how Greek LGBT activists imagine the movement, but serves as an allegory of democratic values and processes at a micro-scalar level, an index of reactions to processes of Europeanization, and a study of the localized responses to globally circulating activist forms, sexual and gender identities, and modes of collectivity.
Ethics and Ecologies: Negotiating Responsible and Sustainable Business in Ireland
(2012-09-05) Mc Carthy, Elise; Faubion, James D.; Ninetto, Amy; Schuler, Douglas A.
This dissertation is about the development of corporate responsibility and sustainability advocacy in Ireland. It shows how the biopolitics of corporate responsibility (or CR) and sustainability was rendered—by CR advocates and interested companies—as an ethical ecology, not dissociated from the biopolitical but rooted in it. By ‘ecology’ I mean to refer to the growing consciousness and deliberate cultivation of the interconnections, dependencies and feedback as well as responsibilities between heretofore discreet parts of the social landscape—between business and employees for example. These nascent interconnections—between what we might think of as systems and their environment—were also being presented as compelling ethical striving and to an extent, facilitating it. Importantly this effort was to be directed towards what was coming to be understood by the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsible business.’ Hence, I also used the word ‘ecology’ in the sense of how this argument for ethics had roots in concern for the planet itself and for the very survival of the human race. In a deeper sense then, the matrix or the features of biopower—“[1] one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; [2] an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; [3] strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; [4] and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health” (Rabinow and Rose 2006, 195)—permeated this concern with sustainability (the ecology or the engagement of systems and environments in the name of ‘life’ as such) and certainly as it was rendered in this arena of business and all that surrounds it, sustainability weighed heavily on ethical quest or government of the self for its potential for success. Furthermore, these logics could be extended into the less biological concern with the sustainability of our ways of life—including communities, businesses and markets; as proxies for vital human bodies, they too were at risk and dependent on changed dispositions to action for their durability.
Gimp Anthropology: Non-Apparent Disabilities and Navigating the Social
(2012-09-05) Orlando, Rebekah; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Ninetto, Amy
Individuals with non-apparent, physical disabilities face unique social challenges from those that are encountered by the more visibly disabled. The absence of visible cues indicating physical impairment causes ambiguity in social situations, leaving the sufferer vulnerable to moral judgments and social sanctions when they are unable to embody and perform to cultural norms. This dynamic generates a closeted status that the individual must learn to navigate. Using Eve Sedgwick's "The Epistemology of the Closet," this paper deploys auto-ethnography, traditional ethnographic techniques, and literature reviews to illuminate a third space of functioning between the outwardly 'healthy' and the visibly disabled.
HIV/AIDS and democracy in Nigeria: Policies, rights, and therapeutic economies
(2004) Peterson, Kristin; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation is an analysis of the political economy of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. This dissertation traces Nigerian democratic imaginaries and shows their intertwined connections to national and international AIDS policies, constructions of rights, and the production of therapeutic economies for which features of local, national and international forces merge to produce the materiality of AIDS. In particular, the dissertation analyzes (a) the relationship between Nigerian AIDS NGOs and the development industry and how definitions and discourses of AIDS translate into problematic policies; (b) ethnographically Nigerian coming into compliance with the TRIPs Agreement, and subsequent vying of power among international and local actors; (c) global drug pricing practices and their relationship to drug distribution infrastructures as well as new biosocial relations that form around lack of treatment access; and (d) a case study of HIV/AIDS cure claims over which the veracity of such claims were publicly debated and how ideas of democracy and forms of nationalism informed these debates.
Indigeneity in the courtroom: Law, culture, and the production of difference in North American courts
(2004) Hamilton, Jennifer Anne; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation considers how culturalist arguments are being deployed and interpreted in legal cases involving indigenous peoples in both Canada and the United States. Focusing specifically on three court cases, it asks how a certain kind of difference, indigeneity, is produced in both legal and extra-legal spheres. Rather than having a specific referent that is indigenous cultural practice and epistemology, indigeneity references the idea that indigenous difference is produced in particular contexts, in response to a variety of sociopolitical forces. The dissertation closely examines these three recent cases involving indigenous peoples, one from the U.S. and two from Canada. In each of these cases, the courts deploy the idiom of indigenous difference, indigeneity , in purportedly novel and unexpected ways. The dissertation argues that despite their superficial novelty, these cases are not especially anomalous; they are, in fact, part of continuing processes which rely on reductive multiculturalist discourses of indigeneity to continue to manage and even deny the existence of a colonial past and a postcolonial present.
Locating Nonviolence: the people, the past, and resistance in Palestinian political activism
(2014-04-24) Alazzeh, Ala; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Makdisi, Ussama
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of political culture and contemporary activism in Palestine. I illustrate the entangled processes that enabled the discourse of nonviolence to flourish in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) in the last ten years. I particularly explore the refashioning of the Palestinian Authority under the banner of a ‘state’ through intensive structural reforms that emphasize ‘security’ as a marker of political modernity and the dominant liberal hegemonic understanding of morality through a shifting global political context that impacts perceptions on political violence. In addition, the phenomenon of NGO-ization in the OPTs has functioned as a force of re-politicization through the construction of a new paradigm of ‘nonviolence’ to narrate the Palestinian history of struggle. I argue that in contrast to the hegemonic discourse of nonviolence, it is the question of mass-based participation that fuels the great nostalgia among Palestinian activists in the post-Oslo era for the experience of the first intifada. This study also addresses perceptions and practices of resistance that arise in response to the colonial modalities of control, analyzing the fusion of discursive processes that produced a new taxonomy of society under colonial control and the structural transformations of the material conditions of society. I ethnographically demonstrate how contemporary confrontation politics in the OPTs function in opposition to the logic of settler colonialism, where the primary focus of colonial subjugation is located in the land, on the body, and in political consciousness. Confrontational politics mobilizes around these same sites through the notion of dignity and the primacy of the land. I contextualize these discussions by examining representations of armed struggle that still prevail within local activism in the OPTs, particular through resistance song and literature, in connection to the history of the Palestinian national imaginary and the contemporary neoliberal economy and process of state-formation.
Mediating the EU: Deciphering the transformation of Turkish elites
(2009) Saka, Erkan; Faubion, James D.
Reporting the European Union (EU) is the mother of all political coverage in Turkey even if the actors deny it. In mediating the EU, senior journalists, editors and columnists act not as spokespersons of other elites but become a group of elites that organize, produce, mediate the existing Republican rule whose foundations are directly linked to the founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Their role appears through the formation of a political assemblage, which I call the EU Process Assemblage. Even if a journalist has a pro-EU stance personally, overall journalistic production tends to be anti-EU because of their embeddedness in this assemblage. This particular assemblage formed during a political party, AKP, which did not have traditional Republican credibilities, came to rule. Senior journalists acted against the political authority fiercely, even this meant not good for business. In republican history, journalists are known to oppose government policies but there was never such an ideological stance against the civil authority before. By senior journalists, I particularly think of those who are based in the giant media conglomeration, Dogˇan Media Group (DMG). There are exceptional, mostly 'liberal' columnists in DMG or some others in the growing media power of pro-AKP press corps. However, most of the journalists I think come to have a homogenous ideological formation despite their personal differences. Along with and sometimes independently from military, judiciary and some other bureaucratic sectors, they acted as the guardians of the Kemalist order.
Memory as Concept and Design in Digital Recording Devices
(2013-09-16) Dib, Lina; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Wolfe, Cary
This thesis focuses on scientists and technologies brought together around the desire to improve fallible human memory. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork, it considers interdisciplinary collaborations among experts who design recording and archiving technologies that seek to maintain, extend, and commemorate life. How are everyday experiences translated as information, and for what purpose? How are our habits of drinking tea, talking on the phone, driving to work, and reminiscing with old photographs, turned into something that can be stored, analyzed and acted upon? How might information be used in real time to supplement the living in a recursive feedback loop? By addressing these questions, I reveal how these memory banks are inherently tied to logics of capital, of stock and storage, and to logics of the technological where, when it comes to memory, more is more. The first sections that make up this dissertation shift in scale from the micro to the macro: from historical national endeavors that turned ordinary citizens into a sensors and collectors of the mundane, to contemporary computational projects designed to store, organize and retrieve vast amounts of information. The second half of this dissertation focuses on two extreme cases of lifelogging that make use of prototypical recording technologies: Gordon Bell, who is on a quest to record his life for the sake of increased objectivity, productivity, and digital posterity, and Mrs. B, a woman who suffers from amnesia and records her life in the hopes of leading a normal life in which she can share the past with loved ones. Through these case studies, I show how new recording technologies are both a symptom of, and a cure for, anxieties about time. By focusing on the design of new objects and by addressing contemporary debates on the intentions that govern the making of recording machines, I examine how technologies take shape, and how they inform understandings of memory and the self as well as notions of human disability and enhancement. In short, I show that the past, as well as the present and the future, are always discursively, practically, and technologically informed.

Browsing by Author "Faubion, James D."

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