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Most women in the West use contraception in order to avoid having children. But in rural sub-saharan Africa many women use it to have more children. This study of aging & reproduction makes use of ethnographic & demographic data.
Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason—to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, Contingent Lives explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, Caroline Bledsoe produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives. Her insights will be welcomed by scholars of anthropology and demography as well as by those working in public health, development studies, gerontology, and the history of medicine.
Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.
"This manual presents solutions to all exercises from Actuarial Mathematics for Life Contingent Risks (AMLCR) by David C.M. Dickson, Mary R. Hardy, Howard Waters; Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780521118255"--Pref.
Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.
Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives examines the repercussions of economic globalization on several manufacturing-dependent rural communities in Canada. Foregrounding a distinct interest in the 'grassroots' effects of such contemporary corporate strategies as plant closures and downsizing, authors Anthony Winson and Belinda Leach consider the impact of this restructuring on the residents of various communities. The authors argue that the new rural economy involves a fundamental shift in the stability and security of people's lives and, ultimately, it causes wrenching change and an arduous struggle as rural dwellers struggle to rebuild their lives in the new economic terrain. Beginning with broader theoretical and empirical literature on global changes in the economy and the effects of these changes on labour, the text then focuses exploration on manufacturing in Ontario with an analysis of five community case studies. Winson and Leach give considerable attention to the testimony of numerous residents; they report on in-depth interviews with key respondents and blue-collar workers in five separate communities, ranging from diverse manufacturing towns to single-industry settlements. The result is an intimate contextual knowledge of the workers' lives and their attempts to adapt to the tumultuous economic terrain of 1990s rural Canada. Winner of the John Porter Prize for 2003, awarded by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.
The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.
This volume explores the different dimensions of how the contingency of life, and especially human life, is relevant for ethical discussions and the normative frameworks in bioethics. It explores the relevance of the notion contingency, needs and desires for moral argumentation and bioethics. The volume discusses those notions in a philosophical perspective. Additionally, the volume is a contribution to a deeper reflection on basic philosophical assumptions of bioethics.