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Annotation "Good fish get dull but sex is always fun." So say the Mehinaku people of Brazil. But Thomas Gregor shows that sex brings a supreme ambiguity to the villagers' lives. In their elaborate rituals--especially those practiced by the men in their secret societies--the Mehinaku give expression to a system of symbols reminiscent of psychosexual neuroses identified by Freud: castration anxiety, Oedipal conflict, fantasies of loss of strength through sex, and a host of others. "If we look carefully," writes Gregor, "we will see reflections of our own sexual nature in the life ways of an Amazonian people." The book is illustrated with Mehinaku drawings of ritual texts and myths, as well as with photographs of the villagers taking part in both everyday and ceremonial activities.
Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would–be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time. Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.
Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would–be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time. Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.
The following sections deal with such themes as the relationship of wit to political and sexual anxiety, the connection of the mobility of signs to an elusive interiority of the subject, and the paradoxically threatening and redemptive mobility of women in relationship to patriarchal control.
Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. In this provocative ethnography, Debra Curtis examines their sexuality in gripping detail: why do Nevisian girls engage in sexual activity at such young ages? Where is the line between coercion and consent? How does a desire for wealth affect a girl's sexual practices? Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerless¡ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.
First published in 2006. Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.
In the spring of 2020, panic surrounding COVID-19 erupted and mandatory shelter in place orders went into effect, forcing the artist to abandon long-planned portrait shoots, travel, and work in progress in their art studio. They found themselves in a 340 sq ft apartment in a Bay-area neighborhood that was emptying by the day. The buzzing silence was profound. Two weeks into isolation, their drive to connect with others and make portraits only amplified. With no safe way to do so, they spontaneously turned the camera on themself to create a portrait. They printed it as a cyanotype, a simple nineteenth century photographic process that was only feasible due to the basic materials they happened to have on hand-a budget printer, transparency film and a package of fraying sheets of cotton pretreated with cyanotype chemicals. At first, they exposed the prints in the unpredictable spring sunlight coming through their third floor apartment window. As the seasons changed, they went on to make them in a garden, on the top of a car, or a patch of wobbly concrete tiles. They rinsed them in water and varying shades of blue emerged. They created a daily self-portrait using this technique for more than a year.