“We are our bodies”, “we have our bodies”, “we make our bodies”. This “three-headed” axiom has made the body the “parasite” of modern culture. The individual that is fit for modernity was, and certainly still is, expected and encouraged to embrace its corporeal existence in order to find an answer to one of the most frequently asked questions in the modern Western world: “Who am I?” For those who live in Western societies, with a history of individualism, the temptation is to look inside oneself, to examine one’s thoughts and feelings, as if self-identity is a treasure locked inside. The desire to change the skin one inhabits, to cite Almodòvar, has become “territorialized” in on-screen media, digital sites and social networks, shuffling the cards as if in an attempt to dance on the ruins of passing time. Everything is at play, everything is art. Madonna is like Michelangelo. Comic strips are like eight hundred page novels by Tolstoy. What is up for discussion is the advanced transformation of persons into spectators. The multiplication of screens creates a “visual party”. The definition of the boundaries between the social sensorium and today’s advanced technologies is the fundamental, and as yet unsolved, methodological problem arising from the contemporary “spatial turn” that is coming to maturity thanks to the re-orientation of the classical digital paradigm. “Reclaiming the social throughout embodied practices” (Greenwood, 1994) is basically the ultimate objective of this book. The thinking, feeling and acting body will figure as prominently as the mind, cognition, and rationality in combining the framework of the research and the methodology underpinning its development. The body is, indeed, the origin of humans’ most individual experiences and actions, since it is the point of application of the tuning and calibration of the senses and the general training of social skills. The notion of “body in action in context” is, consequently, the methodological proposal that Beyond the Skin: The Boundaries between Bodies and Technologies in an Unequal World offers to sociology, in order to surpass the “new alliance” between human senses and the new media, an alliance staged by bodies moving faster than thought across the maps of contemporary mobile spaces.
“We are our bodies”, “we have our bodies”, “we make our bodies”. This “three-headed” axiom has made the body the “parasite” of modern culture. The individual that is fit for modernity was, and certainly still is, expected and encouraged to embrace its corporeal existence in order to find an answer to one of the most frequently asked questions in the modern Western world: “Who am I?” For those who live in Western societies, with a history of individualism, the temptation is to look inside oneself, to examine one’s thoughts and feelings, as if self-identity is a treasure locked inside. The desire to change the skin one inhabits, to cite Almodòvar, has become “territorialized” in on-screen media, digital sites and social networks, shuffling the cards as if in an attempt to dance on the ruins of passing time. Everything is at play, everything is art. Madonna is like Michelangelo. Comic strips are like eight hundred page novels by Tolstoy. What is up for discussion is the advanced transformation of persons into spectators. The multiplication of screens creates a “visual party”. The definition of the boundaries between the social sensorium and today’s advanced technologies is the fundamental, and as yet unsolved, methodological problem arising from the contemporary “spatial turn” that is coming to maturity thanks to the re-orientation of the classical digital paradigm. “Reclaiming the social throughout embodied practices” (Greenwood, 1994) is basically the ultimate objective of this book. The thinking, feeling and acting body will figure as prominently as the mind, cognition, and rationality in combining the framework of the research and the methodology underpinning its development. The body is, indeed, the origin of humans’ most individual experiences and actions, since it is the point of application of the tuning and calibration of the senses and the general training of social skills. The notion of “body in action in context” is, consequently, the methodological proposal that Beyond the Skin: The Boundaries between Bodies and Technologies in an Unequal World offers to sociology, in order to surpass the “new alliance” between human senses and the new media, an alliance staged by bodies moving faster than thought across the maps of contemporary mobile spaces.
Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.
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