As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagio... more As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagion and risk in dialogue with theological positions about materials, their own long history which includes surviving previous pandemics and plagues, governmental and civil expectations and edicts, and pious – but often unofficial – understandings about protection and the sacrality of religious artefacts and the space of the temple. This article draws upon primary ethnographic research amongst Orthodox Christians in the UK, Serbia, Greece and Russia, as well as news articles about and primary ecclesiastical documents from Orthodox Churches more widely, to highlight commonalities and divergences in Orthodox Christian responses to the pandemic. Examining both the theological basis, and socio-political differences, this article considers how the Orthodox theology of apophaticism and relationality impacts wider discourses of contagion (both positive and negative), and consequently compliance with public health initiatives. Comparison across diverse Orthodox settings suggests that Orthodox Christians are concerned with the neighbour – both in terms of who may be watching (and reporting) them, and who may fall sick because of them.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagio... more As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagion and risk in dialogue with theological positions about materials, their own long history which includes surviving previous pandemics and plagues, governmental and civil expectations and edicts, and pious – but often unofficial – understandings about protection and the sacrality of religious artefacts and the space of the temple. This article draws upon primary ethnographic research amongst Orthodox Christians in the UK, Serbia, Greece and Russia, as well as news articles about and primary ecclesiastical documents from Orthodox Churches more widely, to highlight commonalities and divergences in Orthodox Christian responses to the pandemic. Examining both the theological basis, and socio-political differences, this article considers how the Orthodox theology of apophaticism and relationality impacts wider discourses of contagion (both positive and negative), and consequently compliance with public health initiatives. Comparison across diverse Orthodox settings suggests that Orthodox Christians are concerned with the neighbour – both in terms of who may be watching (and reporting) them, and who may fall sick because of them.
Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to soci... more Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to social life, this innovative new book examines the unexpected and surprising ways in which failure can lead to positive and creative results.
The London-based New Scientist Magazine has been publishing popular science and technology news s... more The London-based New Scientist Magazine has been publishing popular science and technology news since 1956. Each year it holds a large 4-day conference in London, called ‘New Scientist Live’, hosting talks and exhibitions from many of Europe’s leading innovators and scientists, and attracting tens of thousands of visitors. The exhibition and speaker’s space is divided into 5 main stage areas: Cosmos, Earth, Humans, Technology and Engineering. While these categories have always overlapped to varying degrees, their distinctions are increasingly becoming blurred. In 2018, a talk on ‘Boosting your brain with electricity and magnets’ on the Humans Stage was delivered simultaneously with a talk on ‘Building bionic people’ on the Engineering Stage, as well as two talks titled ‘The posthuman future’ and ‘Our cyborg future’ on the Technology Stage. One of the implications of this overlap, and an intellectual challenge for scholars in these disciplines, is that the material form of the human ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagio... more As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagion and risk in dialogue with theological positions about materials, their own long history which includes surviving previous pandemics and plagues, governmental and civil expectations and edicts, and pious – but often unofficial – understandings about protection and the sacrality of religious artefacts and the space of the temple. This article draws upon primary ethnographic research amongst Orthodox Christians in the UK, Serbia, Greece and Russia, as well as news articles about and primary ecclesiastical documents from Orthodox Churches more widely, to highlight commonalities and divergences in Orthodox Christian responses to the pandemic. Examining both the theological basis, and socio-political differences, this article considers how the Orthodox theology of apophaticism and relationality impacts wider discourses of contagion (both positive and negative), and consequently compliance with public health initiatives. Comparison across diverse Orthodox settings suggests that Orthodox Christians are concerned with the neighbour – both in terms of who may be watching (and reporting) them, and who may fall sick because of them.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagio... more As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Orthodox Christians globally reacted to the possibility of contagion and risk in dialogue with theological positions about materials, their own long history which includes surviving previous pandemics and plagues, governmental and civil expectations and edicts, and pious – but often unofficial – understandings about protection and the sacrality of religious artefacts and the space of the temple. This article draws upon primary ethnographic research amongst Orthodox Christians in the UK, Serbia, Greece and Russia, as well as news articles about and primary ecclesiastical documents from Orthodox Churches more widely, to highlight commonalities and divergences in Orthodox Christian responses to the pandemic. Examining both the theological basis, and socio-political differences, this article considers how the Orthodox theology of apophaticism and relationality impacts wider discourses of contagion (both positive and negative), and consequently compliance with public health initiatives. Comparison across diverse Orthodox settings suggests that Orthodox Christians are concerned with the neighbour – both in terms of who may be watching (and reporting) them, and who may fall sick because of them.
Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to soci... more Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to social life, this innovative new book examines the unexpected and surprising ways in which failure can lead to positive and creative results.
The London-based New Scientist Magazine has been publishing popular science and technology news s... more The London-based New Scientist Magazine has been publishing popular science and technology news since 1956. Each year it holds a large 4-day conference in London, called ‘New Scientist Live’, hosting talks and exhibitions from many of Europe’s leading innovators and scientists, and attracting tens of thousands of visitors. The exhibition and speaker’s space is divided into 5 main stage areas: Cosmos, Earth, Humans, Technology and Engineering. While these categories have always overlapped to varying degrees, their distinctions are increasingly becoming blurred. In 2018, a talk on ‘Boosting your brain with electricity and magnets’ on the Humans Stage was delivered simultaneously with a talk on ‘Building bionic people’ on the Engineering Stage, as well as two talks titled ‘The posthuman future’ and ‘Our cyborg future’ on the Technology Stage. One of the implications of this overlap, and an intellectual challenge for scholars in these disciplines, is that the material form of the human ...
Medical Materialities: Toward a Material Culture of Medical Anthropology, 2019
This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of Medical Materiality. It o... more This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of Medical Materiality. It outlines discussions of medical anthropology and material culture studies as they have engaged with objects and materials in the past, in order to situate the concept of medical materialities within the two sub-disciplinary traditions. It highlights key ways in which medical anthropology has attempted to understand places, practices, methods, and material cultures of healing and how material culture studies has understood the active role of things and objects in society. The chapter presents and expands upon a definition of ‘medical materiality’, namely the social impact of the capacity of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapter opens up the discussion of the genre, and outlines how the investigation into medical materialities is a biosocial approach that integrates the biological, physical, ecological insights of medicine into the social analysis of health. Finally, the introduction outlines the diverse ethnographic case studies presented in this volume, and highlights the various ways each contributing author adds to the way cultures of medicine are understood and practiced.
Routledge Handbook of Failure: Critical Perspectives from Sociology and other Social Sciences, 2021
This chapter contends with the meeting of bodies and policies, and the material effects these wie... more This chapter contends with the meeting of bodies and policies, and the material effects these wield. We investigate the material failure of public policies by examining key literature concerning the ways in which policy and its related materials makes failure manifest in and through people’s individual bodies. This comes across particularly within: the spaces of adjudication of public support; in surgical interventions in human physical forms; and in end-of-life care. After outlining key ethnographic cases in materially-grounded, medical anthropology approaches to failure, we then move on to the relationship between the human body and various infrastructures of care and governmentality. We unpack the evolving role of institutions and the state in the life of the resident and their chosen health behaviours, paying special attention to the advancement of the avuncular “nudge” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) within policy-making and communication, as well as how austerity measures have impacted upon a generation of those residing in the UK. Finally, we turn our attention to the question of dignity in the formation and enactment of policy development. We frame this within a discussion of affordances (Gibson 1979) and focus on the interface between bodies and the implementation of governmental policy. This positions the focus of our investigation of policy failure across scales, from the macro of the state to the micro scale of the individual person.
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