Journal articles on the topic 'Sociologia carnale'

Este artículo elabora la ontología social y la metodología de la sociología carnal como un modo distintivo de indagación social, evitando la postura espectadora para captar la acción-en-proceso, a raíz de los debates desencadenados por mi estudio basado en el aprendizaje del boxeo como un arte corporal plebeyo. Primero critico las nociones de agente (dualista), estructura (externalista) y conocimiento (mentalista) que prevalecen en las ciencias sociales contemporáneas y esbozo una concepción alternativa del animal social, no solo como portadora de símbolos, sino como una criatura de carne y sangre, sensible, sufirente, hábil, sedimentada y situada criatura de carne y hueso. Destaco la primacía de los conocimientos prácticos incorporados que surgen y se enredan continuamente en redes de acción y considero qué modos de investigación son adecuados para desplegar y extraer esta concepción encarnada del agente. Sostengo que la etnografía performativa, la marca del trabajo de campo inmersivo basado en “realizar el fenómeno”, es un camino fructífero hacia la captura de los esquemas (habitus) cognitivos, conativos y catécticos que generan las prácticas y subyacen en el cosmos que se está investigando. Pero se necesita talento social y persistencia para obtener los beneficios de la “participación observante” y lograr la competencia social (a diferencia de la saturación empírica). Para concluir, vuelvo al diálogo de Bourdieu con Pascal para considerar la dificultad y la urgencia especiales de capturar el “espíritu de agudeza” que anima dicha competencia pero desaparece de los relatos sociológicas normales.

The article is an attempt to describe the first years of Stefan Żółkiewski’s scientific activity. The author begins by analysing the student duties of a future researcher, looking for his first masters. He also considers the theses contained in Żółkiewski’s thesis and concludes with a description of his activity in the students’ scientific circle known as “Warszawskie Koło Polonistów”. The author of the article tries to point out the genesis of Żółkiewski’s qualities, which characterize his later attitude: a leftist worldview, organizational skills, sociological thinking about literature and concern for the general condition of the humanities.

Existen muy pocos estudios empíricos sobre el proceso de formación y/o transformación de disposiciones desde el marco analítico de Bourdieu o el cercano de Lahire. El artículo contribuye a paliar este problema con un estudio sobre el proceso de corporeización de la organización del trabajo de las nuevas cajeras de un hipermercado. La cuestión se aborda desde la doble dimensión de análisis de Bourdieu del cuidado corporal y la incorporación de disposiciones. Los datos provienen de una etnografía con observación participante que siguió de cerca la propuesta de “sociología carnal” de Wacquant. El artículo muestra que en el proceso de aprendizaje de las cajeras, que exige su esfuerzo, tienen lugar dos procesos. Primero, una adaptación de disposiciones genéricas que se tenían a las nuevas situaciones del hipermercado. Segundo, una incorporación de nuevas disposiciones específicas gestuales y motrices y la memorización de procedimientos, protocolos y códigos de barras.

AbstractDespite a corpus of sources, historians of the Moluccas (Indonesia) have given little attention to military history. While land warfare consisted mainly of headhunting raids, maritime warfare was essentially amphibious, with a fleet (hongi) sailing to an enemy beach where a village would be stormed. The European intrusion brought changes to this general pattern. The Dutch East India Company developed its own hongi, consisting of local vessels and a few European ones. However, these were ineffective by the final stages of the wars of conquest and ultimately it was European expeditionary forces that eliminated the last opposition to Dutch rule. Once the 'Pax Neerlandica' was established, the Company could rely on the hongi once again.Malgré le nombre de sources historiques à leur disposition, les historiens des Moluques (Indonésie) n'ont guère prêté attention à l'histoire militaire. La guerre sur terre, c'était surtout faire la chasse aux têtes. La guerre par mer, en revanche, consistait surtout en opérations amphibies, à l'aide d'une flotte (hongi) qui faisait voile vers une côte ennemie pour monter à l'assaut d'un village. La pénétration européenne a changé cette situation. La Compagnie Unie des Indes Orientales a développé sa propre hongi, composée d'embarcations locales et de quelques navires européens. Pourtant, ces hongi ne furent pas efficaces dans les dernières étapes des guerres de conquête et, finalement, ce fut la marine européenne qui élimina la résistance à la domination hollandaise. Lorsque la 'Pax Neerlandica' fut établie, la Compagnie put de nouveau compter sur les hongi.

Abstract Islamic State videos have often been associated with savage violence and beheadings. An in-depth scrutiny however reveals another striking feature: that female bodies are absent, blurred or mute. Examining a few Islamic State videos in depth, the article suggests that the invisibility of women in tandem with the ostentatious visibility of male bodies enable gendered and embodied spectators to indulge in homoerotic as well as heterosexual imaginaries. In contrast to studies on visual security and online radicalization which assert that images affect an audience, this article focuses on the interaction between video and audience and argues that spectators are not only rational and emotional but embodied and gendered as well. Islamic State videos do not only attract western foreign fighters through religious–ideological rhetoric or emotional impact but also through gendered forms of pleasure and desire that enable carnal imagination and identification. The article probes the analytical purchase of carnal aesthetics and spectatorship.

Abstract Bolstered by international support, Sri Lanka's government and separatist Tamil rebels continued evaluating ways to end two decades of ethnic carnage. The absence of conflict saw the economy improve and the rebels strengthen their capabilities. But peace talks over the contentious northeast were suspended, and the president initiated a constitutional crisis when she sought to undermine the government. This and other factors ensured that Sri Lanka in 2003 was far from consolidating peace.

AbstractThe Great War ushered in a new era of long-distance combat. For the first time, weapons with a very long range were massively deployed, in previously unheard-of places: under the sea and in the air. Stealth fighting also included espionage and propaganda, now orchestrated on a global scale. In reaction to the carnage in the trenches, a degree of moral rehabilitation came to be conferred on the weapons initially associated with a “cowards’ war”. This in turn encouraged experimentation with the new, unmanned technology that would lead to the first prototypes of guided munitions and drones.

The massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat in February 2002 demonstrated the challenge of Hindu nationalism to India's democracy and secularism. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organisations. The Gujarat government's intervention did little to stop the carnage. The communalism that was witnessed in 2002 had its roots in the mid-1980s. Since then, militant Hindu nationalism and recurring communal violence arose in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat. This study aims to shed light on the rise and nature of communalism since the mid-1980s.

"'LOOK UP ON ME, SIR': Relationships in King Lear" explores some of the connections between current performance theory and early modern sacramental theology. Protestant reformers objected to "carnal fancies of a local presence," but, rather than regarding the sacraments as mere signs of things absent, they defined them as a "means effectual" for sustaining communion among the faithful. McCoy argues that Shakespeare's drama functions in similar ways, supporting relationships with fictive characters from long ago and placing us "in their present" if not their presence, in the words of Stanley Cavell.

This article traces a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as “Jewish” by the Pauline tradition. This tradition produced a tendency to discuss political error in terms of Judaism, with the difference between mortal and eternal, private and public, tyrant and legitimate monarch, mapped onto the difference between Jew and Christian. As a result of this history, transcendence as a political ideal has often figured (and perhaps still figures?) its enemies as Jewish.

The carnage of World War I gave rise to liberal visions for a new world order with democratized foreign policy and informed international public opinion. Conservatives emphasized continuity in national sovereignty, while socialists focused on the interests of the working class. While British diplomacy in the construction of the League of Nations has been widely discussed, we focus on contemporary uses of nationalism and internationalism in parliamentary and press debates that are more ideological. We also examine how failed internationalist visions influenced uses of these concepts during World War II, supporting alternative organizational solutions, caution with the rhetoric of democracy and public opinion, and ways to reconcile national sovereignty with a new world organization. The United Nations was to guarantee the interests of the leading powers (including the United States), while associations with breakthroughs of democracy were avoided. Nationalism (patriotism) and internationalism were reconciled with less idealism and more pragmatism.

This article deals with the relation of Micha Yosef Ben Gurion (Berdichevski)—one of the central formulators of the Zionist idea and of modern Hebrew literature—to the Zionist political sphere. As a wordly Jewish intellectual, Berdichevski attempted to establish a kind of Zionism that would allow Jewish individuals to engage in it as an act of their desires. In exploring how his carnal inclinations affected his vision of the political, I argue that Berdichevski's perception fails qualitatively by transposing its guiding sensual approach to the formulation of the new Jewish political sphere. As this article will show, Berdichevski's relation to the Jewish political revolution reveals a sometimes limited perception regarding the possibilities of freedom inherent in political activity and often contradicts his own aspiration to nurture the liberty of Jewish individuals.

In this article for the magazine "Historia constitutionale" it was intended to draw up a general picture of the most relevant legal aspects in the Carnaro Charter. One hundred years after its enactment, there are many current aspects that are worth exploring. Starting from a brief reference to the historical events in which this constitution came to light, the article will focus in particular on the rights of freedom and articles concerning social rights, therefore aimed at guaranteeing social justice and solidarity. Fecha de envío / Submission date: 11/1/2021 Fecha de aceptación / Acceptance date: 13/03/2021

AbstractKey moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner’s Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa’s gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid.

En las últimas décadas la teoría del afecto se ha vuelto relevante en los estudios del trabajo y la subjetividad. Gracias al énfasis en aspectos preconscientes y sensoriales, con el estudio del afecto se ha comprendido la producción subjetiva superando modelos racionales que (re)producen un ideal de sujeto soberano neoliberal. En este artículo se analiza afectivamente la subjetividad laboral de quienes ejecutan la política de protección a la infancia chilena a través de una etnografía digital con seis trabajadoras del Servicio Nacional de Menores. Mediante la técnica del análisis textual-afectivo y palabras carnales, se profundizó en la experiencia singular de una de las entrevistadas, quien describe las relaciones coconstitutivas con otros sujetos de la política. A partir de los hallazgos, se argumenta que la subjetividad de estas trabajadoras se constituye por y en el ensamblaje de sus cuerpos con otros cuerpos humanos y no humanos que son parte de la política de infancia. En los ensamblajes con cuerpos humanos, las trabajadoras adquieren la agencia que les permite habitar de nuevas formas sus espacios laborales cotidianos. En conclusión, al estudiar la producción subjetiva desde una perspectiva afectiva se reivindican y rescatan las voces de las trabajadoras de la política de protección a la infancia, un elemento fundamental en el engranaje del cual emerge esta política social.

It is obvious that today the facts of international relations do notfitinto any general framework of which people are aware (perhaps they never have). As descriptions, concepts such as state, sovereignty, federation seem more than ever stabs in the dark. In prescriptive political theory, we are even more at sea. Old prescriptive certainties such as nationhood must be conceded to be at best the most provisional of guides to action. The interface between domestic sovereignty and international organisations (and what a wilderness of phenomena that term is supposed to describe) needs to be comprehended anew. This is urgent if we are to make sense of, and have a sense of direction through, the problems of the European Community, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, not to mention a host of problematic multi-ethnic polities as diverse as India and Iraq. Wherever we look in the world today, the relationship between ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘community’ seems to be in crisis: from the Balkans to Canada, from Scotland to Kurdistan. This no more has the appearance of an aberration from some historical norm than does the tie between state and nation in previous European history. It makes more sense to regard both as shifting patterns of collective human consciousnesses. The idea that there is something ‘out there’, ‘given’, that preordains human beings to live in nations, and nations t o form states, was certainly a myth; and as a myth had a certain real force. The problem today is, first, that the myth is reviving in some places at just the time when it is being swept aside in others (in parts of the European Community, for example); and, secondly, that the idea of imprescriptible national rights seems to be a postulate of democracy whenever the majority in a territory embrace it, and at the same time a recipe for carnage and the vilest known abrogation of all other human rights. The revival of this nationalist idea around 1990 has also to be set beside the real feelings of belonging that arise amongst groups other than nations; which, whenever they do have such a feeling of corporate identity, we may describe by the general term ‘communities’.

HERING TORRES, Max; ROJAS, Nelson A. (Eds.). Microhistorias de la transgresión. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Universidad del Rosario, 2015. 483 p. Soraya Maite Yie Garzón Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) Pontifícia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ/Colombia) El libro Microhistorias de la trasgresión, publicado el año pasado por las universidades Nacional de Colombia, del Rosario y Cooperativa de Colombia, y editado por los historiadores colombianos Max Hering e Nelson Rojas responde a una invitación de sus editores a historizar la trasgresión desde un enfoque microhistórico. Tres presupuestos en torno a la trasgresión le dan forma a esta propuesta editorial. Primero, como la norma, la transgresión está sujeta al cambio, esto en la medida que su contenido es definido dentro de procesos históricos moldeados a través de pugnas y negociaciones sociales por fijar lo permitido, lo legitimo y lo pensable. Segundo, los actos transgresores son polisémicos: dependiendo del marco moral desde el cual sean interpretados, pueden ser comprendidos como una irrupción violenta de los principios de la sociedad, o como una forma de resistencia contra un orden social ilegítimo. Y, tercero, tales actos toman sentido dentro de una red de relaciones más amplias, por lo cual su comprensión pasa por el estudio de las redes de significado, las relaciones sociales, así como de las alianzas y disputas en que están imbuidos los sujetos trasgresores. Un aporte central del libro está aproximarse a la trasgresión desde la microhistoria. Varios de sus autores abordan explícitamente las implicaciones y alcances de este enfoque y sus ventajas para el estudio de la trasgresión. En la presentación, los editores advierten que esa “forma de hacer historia” se acerca a las personas y sus acciones, a la documentación particular, y a los individuos al margen de la sociedad, entablándose así una intersección tanto temática como metodológica entre la trasgresión y la microhistoria[1]. Ya en los diferentes capítulos, la adopción de la microhistoria como enfoque puede expresarse de varias formas. Primero, en un análisis exhaustivo de las fuentes para hacerse a una imagen, aunque incompleta, lo más detallada y compleja posible del entramado de relaciones del cual hacen parte quienes ejecutan, juzgan y sancionan las distintas prácticas trasgresoras estudiadas, esto con miras a una comprensión de sus múltiples sentidos y efectos. Segundo, en una descripción cuidadosa de las prácticas trasgresoras, de sus actores y contextos específicos, que parte de la comprensión de las primeras como formas de expresión y gestación de los discursos que ordenan o tensionan el orden social. Tercero, en una apuesta narrativa que, sin negar sus interconexiones, rescata singularidad de los acontecimientos narrados y trae a escena las trayectorias de individuos concretos, recuperando la vitalidad de la historia. Y, finalmente, en la adopción de la escala micro como una vía de experimentación y creación teórica, en este caso particular, en relación con la trasgresión. En un plano temático, el libro incluye un abanico amplio de escenarios que van del periodo colonial temprano al presente, así como distintas prácticas consideradas trasgresoras de las que fueron acusados individuos localizados en posiciones sociales muy diversas. Entre estas se incluyen, el acceso carnal a una ternera por el que fue condenado un indio durante el siglo XVII en la Nueva Granada, usado por Torres para desentramar las redes de significado construidas en torno a la “bestialidad”[2]; los hurtos y homicidios de que fueron acusados sujetos esclavizados entre 1750 y 1800, analizados por Guevara como formas de resistencia cotidiana a un orden colonial y esclavista[3]; el suicidio de un sacerdote jesuita a finales del periodo colonial, cuyo múltiple tratamiento en los códigos jurídicos, teológicos, médicos y morales de la época es analizados por Álzate[4]; los gritos de un reo en contra del nuevo orden republicano, tratados por Hensel como síntomas de la precaria legitimidad de las formas de autoridad y regulación social establecidas al inicio de la República y como una entrada a la cultura política del periodo[5]; el parricidio cometido por una mujer finales del XIX, retomado por Del Valle para estudiar los procedimientos probatorios y la interacción entre ley y moral en ese periodo[6]; la desobediencia popular ante la prohibición de las corridas de gallo en Bogotá a finales del XIX, abordada por Hering para iluminar los límites de los proyectos modernizadores y cuestionar la biopolítica a fines del siglo XIX en Colombia[7]; el violento homicidio ejecutado por un hombre diagnosticado como epiléptico a inicios del siglo XX, estudiado por Rojas para acceder a las concepciones sobre la epilepsia de la época[8]; el engaño perpetuado por dos exseminaristas quienes, fingiendo ser sacerdotes, oficiaron en una Semana Santa en Puente Nacional (Santander), retomado por Mario Aguilera para estudiar la expresión regional de las tensiones políticas entre liberales y conservadores durante la primera mitad del siglo XX[9]; las agresiones físicas cometidas por mujeres contra sus compañeros sentimentales vistos desde la prensa de las décadas cincuenta y sesenta del siglo pasado, abordados por Jimeno para mostrar las concepciones cambiantes sobre los roles de género[10]; y, finalmente, los casos de deserción y filtración juzgados dentro de la guerrilla de las Farc-EP, utilizados por Aguilera para mostrar las interacciones entre el sistema jurídico de esa guerrilla y las estrategias del estado colombiano para debilitarla[11]. Pero el libro no sólo ofrece aportes para pensar sobre la trasgresión, sino también para hacerlo desde ella, usándola como una llave analítica. En grado variable, sus diferentes autores muestran que el estudio cuidadoso de las prácticas de trasgresión puede ampliar nuestro conocimiento sobre diferentes cuestiones. Entre estas, una primera por mencionar es las formas de ordenamiento y regulación social, su variación de un tiempo y lugar a otro, sus procesos de gestación y trasformación, sus ambigüedades y contradicciones, y los modos en que varios sistemas normativos interactúan, ya sea oponiéndose o reforzándose, en un mismo contexto. Una segunda cuestión es la de las taxonomías sociales vigentes en un periodo y lugar determinado, los discursos e imaginarios que le dan contenido a las categorías sociales que las componen, y la manera en que taxonomías y categorías son reafirmadas o tensionadas a través de las prácticas de individuos específicos. Sobre este punto, varios trabajos muestran que aquellos individuos que ocupan las categorías más bajas de jerarquías ordenadas a partir de ciertas nociones de raza, la clase social, el estatus y el género suelen ser juzgados y sancionados de manera más dura. También muestran que, por esta vía, la inclinación a la trasgresión es asumida como parte de sus atributos de los sujetos subordinados, ayudando a naturalizar las mismas jerarquías que los subordinan. Una tercera cuestión, por su parte, es la de los discursos que participan de los procesos de reproducción o contestación de un determinado orden social. Así, el libro incluye diversos ejemplos de prácticas trasgresoras cuyo definición en cuanto tal, así como las formas particulares de su juzgamiento y sanción, están permeadas por los discursos emitidos desde las instituciones eclesiales, políticas, jurídicas y científicas de cada época, ayudando así a marcar límites entre lo normal y anormal, lo prohibido y lo permitido, lo legitimo y lo ilegitimo, y que participan, incluso, en la configuración moral y emocional de los sujetos. Finalmente, varios capítulos muestran que el análisis de la trasgresión ofrece una entrada a las múltiples formas de agencia a que apelan individuos y agrupaciones en posiciones subalternas, ligadas ya sea a la ruptura o a la reafirmación de las normas vigentes, y los modos en que, a través de su ruptura o su sometimiento, ponen en juego la distancia entre lo permitido y lo legítimo, o entre ley y moral. Por sus contribuciones temáticas, metodológicas y teóricas, Microhistorias de la Transgresión constituye un aporte clave para la historiografía no solo de Colombia, Brasil y demás países de América latina y el Caribe. Igualmente lo es para investigadores de otras disciplinas cuyos campos de investigación se entrecruzan con los de la historia cultural, como es el caso de la antropología histórica, la sociología jurídica, la antropología política y jurídica, los estudios culturales y los estudios de género. Sobre a autora Soraya Maite Yie Garzón é doutoranda em Ciências Sociais na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). Professora no Departamento de Antropologia da Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá (Colombia). Possui graduação em Antropologia (2002) e mestrado em Historia pela Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá, 2009). Resenha recebida em 18 de maio de 2016. Aprovada em 1º de julho de 2016. [1] HERING TORRES, Max; ROJAS, Nelson A.. Transgresión y microhistoria. In: HERING TORRES, Max; ROJAS, Nelson A. (Eds.). Microhistorias de la transgresión. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Universidad del Rosario, 2015, p. 18. [2] TORRES, Leydi. Polvo y cenizas. Bestialidad y orden social en Antioquia colonial. In: HERING TORRES; ROJAS (Eds.). Ibid., p. 39-82. [3] Guevara, Natalia. Lobos carniceros y parricidas. Esclavos en la Nueva Granada, 1750-1800. Op. cit., p. 83-116. [4] ÁLZATE E., Adriana María. Francisco Felipe de Campo y Rivas (1802). Homicidio de sí mismo en Santafé de Bogotá. Op. cit., p. 117-158. [5] HENSEL R., Franz D. De obediencias y procesos antirrepublicanos. Transgresiones de lo político en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Op. cit., p. 161-198. [6] DEL VALLE M., Piedad. Un caso de parricidio en Colombia. Op. cit., p. 197-230. [7] HERING T., Max S. Policías y prohibición de gallos. Op. cit., p., 231-272. [8] ROJAS, Nelson A. El delincuente epiléptico. Op. cit., p. 275-318. [9] AGUILERA P. Mario. Del sacrilegio al heroísmo. Un engaño colectivo en Puente Nacional. Op. cit., p. 319-365. [10] JIMENO, Myriam. Crímenes de pasión en la prensa colombiana. Op. cit., p. 369-414. [11] AGUILERA P. Mario. Deserción e infiltración en la evolución reciente de las FARC. Op. cit., p. 415-448.

In comparison to the natural sciences, there is a lack of empirically grounded social scientific research which addresses how people arrive at forming pleasurable interpretations of physical activity participation. Both social and natural conceptualisations of the bodily sensations evoked via physical activity involvement have also been restricted to pain and pleasure and pleasure-displeasure dualisms. Nevertheless, there is general agreement across these disciplines that pleasurable interpretations of physical activity participation encourage regular and sustained future involvement. We draw on carnal sociology to explain life history interview data from 30 varied physical activity careers to argue that corporeal experiences of being physically active are more ambiguous than existing pleasure-pain dualisms suggest. Furthermore, interpreting these ambiguous corporeal senses as pleasurable was of central importance to sustaining a prolonged physical activity career, which we argue is a carnal skill that can be learned. This skill, possessed by those interviewees with the most prolonged physical activity careers, had been acquired through becoming accustomed to the unique situated sensual ambiguities of particular physical activities, as a type of existential connoisseurship. Future research might pay more attention to the ambiguity of physical activity involvement, the carnal interpretation of which carries important consequences for the likelihood of long-term participation.

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin.

Abstract In the early decades of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) ranked among the world’s most eminent philosophers. His distinction between clock-time and time as subjectively experienced, as well as his invocation of the élan vital as driving humanity to higher planes of creativity and freedom, enabled him to enjoy unparalleled influence among French students as well as international writers. Bergson personified philosophy. He also seemed to justify the gamble of emancipation that France had taken barely a century earlier, in granting talented Jews the opportunity to flourish. In 1927 Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet very soon thereafter, the prominence that he had enjoyed quite precipitously declined, and he drifted into obscurity from which his writings have yet to recover. How can such an eclipse be explained? Part of the reason was an inevitable shift in philosophic fashion. By the 1920s, belles-lettres aimed at an educated public yielded to linguistic analysis in the Anglo-American world and to phenomenology on the continent. Part of the reason was the shock of the First World War. Its carnage led to disillusionment and to pessimism, which made Bergson’s paeans to the intuitive powers of humanity seem tone-deaf. Another part of the reason was an illness that left him virtually speechless—and thus unresponsive—for the last fifteen years of his life, which was cut short by the German invasion and occupation. Registering as a Jew in the dead of winter, Bergson died—a victim of Nazism—of pneumonia.

Abstract The article discusses the social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the meat processing industry in southern Brazil. Based on the notion of disaster capitalism, we examine how political and corporate agents have taken advantage of the health catastrophe to create a privileged space for simplifications and deregulation in this sector. According to our reasoning, they accelerate precarious work in the meat industry and amplify the harmful effects of agribusiness on local ecologies and global ecosystems. In light of this, we also emphasize the analytical potential that results from the intersection between the categories of syndemics and structural violence to displace the traditional analyses of risk groups and behaviors in highlighting environments and their agents.

‘Now if you take the ugly,’ he continued, ‘or the deformed, or the old, and transcend your natural revulsion by uniting with it aesthetically – sometimes even physically – a rare ecstasy results which generates great magical potential.’ – John Scott, ‘Preface’ In our editorial call for submissions we set the parameters for a discourse of ‘filth’ based in the creative work of Australian poet and novelist John Scott and the psychoanalytic theoretical frame of Julia Kristeva’s work on the aesthetics of abjection, as set out in Powers of Horror. Following Scott’s alchemical imperative, we cast ‘filth’ as the creative product of aesthetic union with the abject, often repudiated by the cultural mainstream. Thus we embarked on a journey down crooked alleyways to places of alterity, where we found our editorial electronic mailbox clogged with more detritus than an urban sewage viaduct, bursting and bubbling up through the foramina magna at the bases of our skulls to pickle our brains in abject ‘filth’. By panning alluvially amongst the faecal dross of pornographic spam that sprayed at us each time we logged in, we managed to a sift a little gold from it all—the papers and artwork we selected from the scree—as well as lumps of crystalline feldspar, two sets of false teeth, a whalebone corset, and a small battery-operated device with a studded rubber collar. Filth, it seems, continues to be confronting and contentious as is evidenced by our articles; as well the sheer volume of filth we received and the ensuing debates around what should make the final cut. In our feature article Donna Lee Brien bravely and eruditely reassesses An American Psycho fifteen years after its original publication. Bret Eastern Ellis endured years of vilification and threats due to this novel. Dr Brien reminds us that it is precisely that which we most stridently attempt to repudiate is that which most clearly mirrors the parts of ourselves and our society that we wish to ignore. As Julia Kristeva famously declared, ‘the abject, and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.’ (Kristeva 4) By declaring American Psycho depraved filth borne out of a depraved mind, mainstream society was able to ignore the urgent warnings for western culture implicit in the text. Fifteen years after its publication it remains relevant, and a terrible prophecy of the situation we find ourselves. A society that laments murder and violence but consistently fails to recognise its complicity. A society which continues to champion individualism but refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of such a manifesto. Filth—in all its incarnations—reminds us of our humanity, in all its messy, frightening, stinking glory. Our work is further anchored and framed in a carnal discourse of ‘filth’ by this issue’s cover image—Julie Firth’s ‘Always Already (Not) There’, from the corpus of her recent video installation exhibition Stain. Julie’s accompanying paper ‘Ineradicable Stain’ elucidates the theoretical background to this artwork, and the nature of its process of creation—one of carnal union with the abject, involving transcendence of revulsion in a process sacred to the artist, but likely to be considered blasphemous in the context of her religious and cultural frame. Firth tells us that ‘Stain is about forgiveness’. She cites the work as ‘a protest against any beliefs that position individual, cultures, religions into polarised extremes of hatred’ and as ‘an appeal for reintegration, self-acceptance, and a plea to bear the unbearable’. Well known cult writer and academic Jack Sargeant explores the increasing prevalence of anal sex in heterosexual pornography, and its various scatological implications in his article ‘Filth and Sexual Excess: Some Brief Reflections on Popular Scatology’. Sargeant reminds us that ‘shit is the part of us that both defies and defines humanity’, and the combining of shit and sex symbolises one of the final taboos in human relationships. This is an especially confronting article, but it lucidly and poignantly unpacks our revulsion and our fascination with bodily waste; and the carnal union represented in scatology. Vivienne Muller’s paper discusses the aesthetic displays of plastinated human cadavers, in The Amazing Human Body exhibition currently touring Australia and in the art of showman anatomist Gunther von Hagens, in the context of Kristeva’s illustration of the abject, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (4), in corporeal terms. The display of the sculpted human corpse—in both it’s external and internal organicity—as objet d’art constitutes a abject breach of boundaries and conventions that shows us something of what Kristeva has described as ‘what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’. Although she does not address John Scott’s work directly, Muller’s discourse of the mortician’s art raises to mind Scott’s narrative ‘Elegy’ in which his loathsome Pogliani sneers, referring to the dead poet’s sister: “You’ll find her in the galleries. She has requested les embaumers.” He breathed forcefully through the nose. “It is ridiculous, when there’s so little left to be preserved! At least the stench will make her easier to find.” (Translation 60) Patrick West offers us a careful and concise critical piece, based in his knowledge of the literary discourse generated by Kristeva’s work, and applied to Janet Frame’s The Carpathians. West argues the case that ‘Abjection is the … discovery by the subject that what lies without also lies within, that to be one is also to be an other. Not that one necessarily lives on the edge, but that the edge is what makes us live.’ In the context of Frame’s work, he politicises corporeal abjection and declares to us that the ‘body is abjectly ripe with language.’ By comparing urinary and faecal incontinence with the concept of a nation’s ‘leaky borders’, Farida Tilbury also invokes a discourse of corporeal abjection, of the loss of control of the boundary between what is inside and what is outside, the me and the not-me. Within our discourse of ‘filth’, her work advances from the ground that Patrick West has taken with respect to the political implications of bodily metaphors and that of Vivienne Muller’s paper on breaches of physical boundaries and conventions. The infamous Bondi ‘rubbish house’ has been presented by tabloid television time and again as an assault on the aspirations of home-owners in John Howard’s Australia. In her article ‘Location, Location: Situating Bondi’s “Rubbish House”’, Kirsten Seale uses the media coverage of the Bondi home, and it’s owner, as a metaphor for Australian mainstream society’s distaste for ‘matter out of place’ and it’s transgressive qualities in the capitalist social space. The impact on young people of violent video games has, and continues to be, an important aspect in the argument for censorship. Scott Beattie in ‘Extremity, Video Games and the Censors’ takes up the argument that ‘the trend toward censorship of games in Australia would seem to bear the hallmarks of a moral panic’. Beattie proposes that more critical academic engagement in the booming video game industry is necessary to change the prevalent disparaging attitude toward gaming and gamers. As does Kirsten Seale’s article, Beattie’s explores the sociological and political dimensions of labelling ‘filth’. Imogen Tyler guides us through the filthy territory of class politics in her article ‘Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain.’ The trope of the chav has become a highly emotive symbol and reviled figure in contemporary Britain. Imogen Tyler unpacks the role of the chav in British society using theories of the despised Other. In ‘Matter Out of Place: Reading Dirty Women’ Carol Wical reads the role of dirt and women in the film Alien to illuminate the disruptive role of mess – particularly when the mess is attached to women. When women are represented as literally dirty in film it is often to signal their status as unfeminine; in direct contrast to the role of dirt as a signifier of courage and effort on male characters. To conclude the issue, Jason Bainbridge sticks a fork into the turf of suburbia and turns it over to reveal its underbelly, teeming with ‘filth’. He applies the critical writings of John Hartley and Mary Douglas to the cinematic work of David Lynch and Todd Solondz on the soiling of suburban life. He describes the way in which Lynch’s character in Blue Velvet, college student Jeffrey Beaumont, is traumatised by his voyeuristic adventures. John Scott’s Carl, from ‘Preface’, who follows the magician’s advice given in our introductory epigraph, also is corrupted and comes to a bad end. We editors, now baptised in the cesspool of our filthy investigations, turn to our suburban lives, fearful lest you buttonhole us sternly in the street, like Sandy in Blue Velvet saying: ‘I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert!” References Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Scott, John. St Clair. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1990. ———. Translation. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Leggett, Andrew, and Donna Hancox. "filth." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Leggett, A., and D. Hancox. (Nov. 2006) "filth," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/00-editorial.php>.

In the 1980s, an extremely successful Nescafé Gold Blend coffee advertising campaign dared to posit, albeit subliminally, that a love relationship was inextricably linked to coffee. Over several years, an on-again off-again love affair appeared to unfold onscreen; its ups and downs narrated over shared cups of coffee. Although the association between the relationship and Gold Blend was loose at best, no direct link was required (O’Donohoe 62). The campaign’s success was its reprisal of the cultural myth prevalent in the West that coffee and love, coffee and relationships, indeed coffee and intimacy, are companionate items. And, the more stable lover, it would seem, is available on the supermarket shelf. Meeting for coffee, inviting a potential lover in for a late-night cup of coffee, or scheduling a business meeting in an espresso bar are clichés that refer to coffee consumption but have little to do with the actual product. After all, many a tea-drinker will invite friends or acquaintances “for coffee.” This is neatly acknowledged in a short romantic scene in the lauded feature film Good Will Hunting (1997) in which a potential lover’s suggestion of meeting for coffee is responded to smartly by the “genius” protagonist Will, “Maybe we could just get together and eat a bunch of caramels. [...] When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.” It was a date, regardless. Many in the coffee industry will argue that coffee—rather than tea, or caramel—is legendary for its intrinsic capacity to foster and ignite new relationships and ideas. Coffee houses are repeatedly cited as the heady location for the beginnings of institutions from major insurance business Lloyd’s of London to the Boston Tea Party, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels, and even Western Australian indie band Eskimo Joe. This narrative images the coffee house and café as a setting that supports ingenuity, success, and passion. It is tempting to suggest that something intrinsic in coffee renders it a Western social lubricant, economic powerhouse, and, perhaps, spiritual prosthesis. This paper will, however, argue that the social and cultural production of “coffee” cannot be dissociated from feeling. Feelings of care, love, inspiration, and desire constellate around “coffee” in a discourse of warm, fuzzy affect. I suggest that this blooming of affect is not superfluous but, instead, central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers as represented on the Websites of select Western roasting companies, the repetition of this discourse is abundantly clear. Here, the good feelings associated with cross-cultural friendship are figured as the condition and reward for the production of high quality coffee beans. Money, it seems, does not buy happiness—but good quality coffee can. Good (Colonial) Feelings Before exploring the discursive representation of friendship and good feeling among the global coffee community with regard to direct trade, it is important to account for the importance of feeling as a narrative strategy with political affects and effects. In her discussion of “happy objects,” cultural theorist of emotion Sara Ahmed argues that specific objects are associated with feelings of happiness. She gives the telling example of coffee as an object intimately tied with happy feeling within the family. So you make coffee for the family, and you know “just“ how much sugar to put in this cup and that. Failure to know this “just“ is often felt as a failure of care. Even if we do not experience the same objects as being pleasurable, sharing the family means sharing happy objects, both in the sense of sharing knowledge (of what makes others happy) and also in the sense of distributing the objects in the right way (Ahmed, Promise 47). This idea is derived from Ahmed’s careful consideration of affective economies. She suggests emotions neither belong to, or are manufactured by, discrete individuals. Rather, emotions are formed through social exchange. Relieved of imagining the individual as the author of affect, we can consider the ways in which affect circulates as a product in a broad, vitalising economy of feeling (Ahmed, Affective 121). In the example above, feelings of care and intimacy attached to coffee-making produce the happy family, or more precisely, the fleeting instant of the family-as-happy. The condition of this good feeling is not attributable to the coffee as product nor the family as fundamentally happy but rather the rippling of happy feeling through sharing of the object deemed happy. A little too much sugar and happiness is thwarted, affect wanes; the coffee is now bad(-feeling). If we return briefly to the Nescafé Gold Blend campaign and, indeed, Good Will Hunting, we can postulate following Ahmed that the coffee functions as a love object. Proximity to coffee is identified by its apparent causation of love-effects. In this sense, “doing coffee” means making a fleeting cultural space for feeling love, or feeling good. But what happens when we turn from the good feeling of consumption to the complex question of coffee production and trade? How might good feeling attach to the process of procuring coffee beans? In this case, the way in which good feeling seems to “stick to” coffee in mass culture needs to be augmented with consideration of its status as a global commodity traded across sociopolitical, economic, cultural and national borders. Links between coffee and colonialism are long established. From the Dutch East India Company to the feverish enthusiasm to purchase mass plantations by multinational corporations, coffee, colonialism and practices of slavery and indentured labour are intertwined (Lyons 18-19). As a globally traded commodity across a range of political regimes and national borders, tracing the postcolonial and neocolonial relations between multinational companies, small upscale boutique roasters, plantation owners, coffee bean co-ops, regulatory bodies, and workers is complex at best. In what may appear a tangential approach, it is nonetheless instructive to consider that colonial relations are constituted through affective components that support and fuel economic and political exchange (Stoler, Haunted). Again, Ahmed offers a useful context for the relationship between the imperative toward happiness and colonial representation. The civilizing mission can be redescribed as a happiness mission. For happiness to become a mission, the colonized other must be first deemed unhappy. The imperial archive can be described as an archive of unhappiness. Colonial knowledges constitute the other as not only an object of knowledge, a truth to be discovered, but as being unhappy, as lacking the qualities or attributes required for a happier state of existence (Ahmed, Promise 125). The colonising aspect of the relations Ahmed describes includes the “mission” to construct Others as unhappy. Understood as happiness detractors, colonial Others become objects that threaten the radiant appeal of happiness as part of an imperial moral economy. Hence, it is the happiness of the colonisers that is secured through the disavowal of the feelings of Others. Moreover, by documenting colonial unhappiness, colonising forces justify the sanctity of happiness-making through violence. As Ann Stoler affirms, “Colonial states had a strong interest in affective knowledge and a sophisticated understanding of affective politics” (Carnal 142). Colonising discourses, then, are inextricably linked to regimes of sense and feeling. Stoler also writes that European-ness was established through cultivation of an inner sense of self-worth associated with ethics, individuality and autonomy (Haunted 157). The development of a sense of belonging to Europe was hence executed through feeling good in both moral and affective senses of the word. Although Stoler argues her case in terms of the affective politics of colonial sexualities and desire, her work is highly instructive for its argument that emotion is crucial to structures of power in colonial regimes. Bringing Stoler’s work into closer proximity with Ahmed’s postulation of State happiness and its objects, I am now going to suggest that coffee is a palimpsestic cultural site at which to explore the ways in which the politics of good feeling obscure discomforting and complex questions of power, exploitation, and disadvantage in global economies of coffee production and consumption. Direct Trade In the so-called “third wave” specialty coffee market that is enjoying robust growth in Australia, America, and Europe, “direct trade” across the globe between roasters and plantation owners is consistently represented as friendly and intimate despite vast distances and cultural difference. The “third wave” is a descriptor that, as John Manzo describes in his sociological exploration of coffee connoisseurship in privileged Western online and urban fora, refers to coffee enthusiasts interested in brewing devices beyond high-end espresso machines such as the cold drip, siphon, or pour-over. Jillian Adams writes further that third wavers: Appreciate the flavour nuances of single estate coffee; that is coffee that is sourced from single estates, farms, or villages in coffee growing regions. When processed carefully, it will have a distinctive flavour and taste profile that reflects the region and the culture of the coffee production (2). This focus on single estate or “single origin” coffee refers to beans procured from sections of estates and plantations called micro-lots, which are harvested and processed in a controlled manner.The third wave trend toward single origin coffees coincides with the advent of direct trade. Direct trade refers to the growing practice of bypassing “middlemen” to source coffee beans from plantations without appeal to or restriction by regulatory bodies. Rather, as I will show below, relationships and partnerships between growers and importers are imagined as sites of goodwill and good feeling. This focus on interpersonal relationships and friendships cannot be disarticulated from the broader cross-cultural context at stake. The relationships associated with direct trade invariably take place across borders that are also marked by economic, cultural and political differences in which privileged Western buyers engage with non-Western growers on low incomes. Drawing from Ahmed’s concern that the politics of good feeling is tied to colonial nostalgia, it is compelling to suggest that direct trade is haunted by discourses of colonisation. At this point of intersection, I suggest that Western mass cultural associations of coffee with ease, intimacy and pure intentions invite consumers to join a neocolonial saga through partaking in imagined communities of global coffee friends. Particularly popular in Australia and America, direct trade is espoused by key third wave coffee roasters in Melbourne, Portland and Seattle. Melbourne Coffee Merchants are perhaps the most well-known importers of directly traded green bean in Australia. On their Web page they describe the importance of sharing good feelings about high quality coffee: “We aim to share, educate, and inspire, and get people as excited about quality coffee as we are.” A further page describing the Merchants’s mission explains, “Growers are treated as partners in the mission to get the worlds [sic] finest beans into the hands of discerning customers.” The quality of excitement that circulates through the procuring of green beans is related to the deemed partnership between Merchants and the growers. That is, it is not the fact of the apparent partnership or its banality that is important, but the treating of growers as partners that signifies Merchants’s mission to generate good feeling. This is a slight but crucial distinction. Treating the growers as partners participates in an affective economy of excitement and inspiration—how the growers feel is, presumably, in want of such partnership.Not dissimilarly, Five Senses Coffee, boutique roasters in Melbourne and Perth, offer an emotional bonus with the purchase of directly traded coffees. “So go on, select one of our Direct Trade products and bask in the warm glow you get knowing that the farmer who grew the beans that you’re enjoying is reaping the rewards too!” The rewards that the growers are deemed to be receiving are briefly explained in blog posts on the Five Senses news Web page. I am not suggesting that these friendships and projects are not legitimate. Rather, the willingness of Five Senses to negotiate rates with growers and provide the community with an English teacher, for example, fuels an economy of Westerners’s good feelings and implies conventional trading produces unhappiness. This obscures grounds for concern that the provision of an English teacher might indeed serve the interests of colonising discourses. Perhaps a useful entry point into this narrative form is founded in the recently self-published book Coffee Trails by Toby Smith, founder of boutique Australian roaster Toby’s Estate. The book is described on the Toby’s Estate Web page as follows:Filled with personal anecdotes and illustrating his relationships developed over years of visiting the farmers to source his coffee beans, Smith’s commentary of his travels, including a brush with Jamaican customs officials and a trip to a notoriously dangerous Ethiopian market, paints an authentic picture of the colourful countries that produce the second most traded product in the world. [...] Coffee Trails has been Smith’s labour of love over the past two years and the end product is a wonderfully personal account of a man fulfilling his lifelong dream and following his passion across the world. Again, the language of “passion” and “love” registers direct trade coffee as a happy object. Furthermore, despite the fact that coffee is also grown in Australia, the countries that are most vivid in the epic imagination are those associated with “exotic” locations such as Ethiopia and Jamaica. This is arguably registered through the sense that these locations were where Smith encountered danger. Having embarked on a version of the quintessential hero’s journey, Smith can be seen as devoted to, and inspired by, his love-object. His brushes with uncivilised authorities and locations carry the undertones of a colonial imaginary, in which it can be argued Smith’s Western-ness is established and secured as goodwill-invoking. After all, he locates and develops relationships with farmers and buys their coffee which, following the logic of happy objects, disperses and shares good feelings.Gloria Jean’s Coffees, which occupies a similar market position in Australia to the multinational “specialty” coffee company Starbucks (Lyons), also participates in the dispersal of coffee as a happy object despite its mass scale of production and lack of direct trade capability (not unexpectedly, Starbucks hosts a Relationships campaign aimed at supporting humanitarian initiatives and communities). Gloria Jean’s campaign With Heart allocates resources to humanitarian activities in local Australian communities and worldwide in coffee-growing regions. Their Web page states: “With Heart is woven throughout Gloria Jeans Coffee houses and operations by the active participation of Franchise Partners, support office and team members and championed across Australia, by our With Heart Ambassadors.“ The associative message is clear: Gloria Jean’s Coffees is a company indissociable from “heart,” or perhaps loving care, for community.By purchasing coffee, Gloria Jean’s customers can be seen to be supporting heartening community projects, and are perhaps unwittingly working as ambassadors for the affective economy in which proximity to the happy object—the heart-centred coffee company—indicates the procurement of happiness for someone, somewhere. The sale of good feeling enables specialty coffee companies such as Gloria Jean’s to bypass market opportunities associated with Fair Trade regulatory provisions, which, as Carl Obermiller et al. find in their study of Fair Trade buying patterns, also profit from consumers’ purchase of good feeling associated with ethically-produced objects. Instead, assuring consumers of its heart-centredness, Gloria Jean’s Coffees is represented as an embodiment not of fairness but kindness, and perhaps love, for others. The iconography and history of direct trade coffee is most closely linked to Intelligentsia Coffee of Chicago in the USA. Intelligentsia describes its third wave roasting and training business as the first to engage in direct trade in 2003. Its Web page includes an image of an airplane to which the following pop-up is linked: “Our focus is not just identifying quality coffee, but developing and rewarding it. To do this means preserving and developing strong relationships despite the considerable distance. At any given time, there is at least one Intelligentsia buyer at origin.” This text raises the question of what constitutes quality coffee. It would appear that “quality coffee” is knowledge that Intelligentsia owns, and which is rewarded financially when replicated to the satisfaction of Intelligentsia. The strength of the relationships in this interaction is closely linked to the meeting of clear conditions and expectations. Indeed, we are reassured that “at any time” an Intelligentsia buyer is applying these conditions to the product. Quality, then, is at least in part achieved by Intelligentsia through its commitment to travelling long distances to oversee the activities and practices of growers. This paternalistic structure is figured in terms of “strong relationships” rather than, perhaps, a rigorous and shrewd business model (which is assumedly the province of mass-market Others).Amid numerous examples found in even a cursory search on the Web, the overwhelming message of direct trade is of good feeling through care. Long term relationships, imagined as virtuous despite the opacity of the negotiation procedure in most cases, narrates the conviction that relationship in and of itself is a good in what might be called the colonial redramatisation staked by an affective coffee economy. Conclusion: Mourning CoffeeIn a paper on happiness, it might appear out of place to reference grief. Yet Jacques Derrida’s explication of friendship in his rousing collection The Work of Mourning is instructive. He writes that death is accommodated and acknowledged “in the undeniable anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship” (159). Derrida maintains close attention to the productivity and intensity of Otherness in mourning. Thus, friendship is structurally dependent on impending loss, and it follows that there can be no loss without recognising the Otherness of the other, as it were. Given indifference to difference and, hence, loss, it is possible to interpret the friendships affirmed within direct trade practices as supported by a kind of mania. The exuberant dispersal of good feeling through directly traded coffee is narrated by emotional journeys to the primordial beginnings of the happy-making object. That is, fixation upon the object’s brief survival in “primitive” circumstances before its perfect demise in the cup of discerning Western clientele suggests a process of purification through colonising Western knowledges and care. If I may risk a misappropriation of Sara Ahmed’s words; so you make the trip to origin, and you know “just” what to pay for this bean and that. Failure to know this “just” is often felt as a failure of care. But, for whom?References Adams, Jillian. “Thoroughly Modern Coffee.” TEXT Rewriting the Menu: The Cultural Dynamics of Contemporary Food Choices. Eds. Adele Wessell and Donna Lee Brien. TEXT Special Issue 9 (2010). 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue9/content.htm›. Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79 22.2 (2004): 117-39 . -----. “The Politics of Good Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association E-Journal 5.1 (2008): 1-18. -----. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago; London: U Chicago P, 2003. Five Senses Coffee. “Coffee Affiliations.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.fivesenses.com.au/coffee/affiliations/direct-trade›. Gloria Jean’s Coffees. “With Heart.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.gloriajeanscoffees.com/au/Humanitarian/AboutUs.aspx›. Good Will Hunting. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Miramax, 1997. Intelligentsia Coffee. “Direct Trade.” 28 Feb. 2012 ‹http://directtradecoffee.com/›. Lyons, James. “Think Seattle, Act Globally: Specialty Coffee, Commodity Biographies and the Promotion of Place.” Cultural Studies 19.1 (2005): 14-34. Manzo, John. “Coffee, Connoisseurship, and an Ethnomethodologically-Informed Sociology of Taste.” Human Studies 33 (2010): 141-55. Melbourne Coffee Merchants. “About Us.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://melbournecoffeemerchants.com.au/about.asp›. Obermiller, Carl, Chauncy Burke, Erin Tablott and Gareth P. Green. “’Taste Great or More Fulfilling’: The Effect of Brand Reputation on Consumer Social Responsibility Advertising for Fair Trade Coffee.” Corporate Reputation Review 12.2 (2009): 159-76. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Advertising Uses and Gratifications.” European Journal of Marketing 28.8/9 (1993): 52-75. Smith, Toby. Coffee Trails: A Social and Environment Journey with Toby’s Estate. Sydney: Toby Smith, 2011. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. California: U California P, 2002. -----. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Toby’s Estate. “Toby Smith’s Coffee Trails.” 27 Feb 2012 ‹http://www.tobysestate.com.au/index.php/toby-smith-book-coffee-trails.html›.

Taste and Lively Matter in the Anthropocene This paper is concerned with the role of taste in relation to food produced in backyard or community gardens. Taste, as outlined by Bourdieu, is constructed by many factors driven primarily by one’s economic position as well as certain cultural influences. Such arguments tend to work against a naïve reading of the “natural” attributes of food and the biological impulses and responses humans have to taste. Instead, within these frameworks, taste is positioned as a product of the machinations of human society. Along these lines, it is generally accepted that the economic and, consequently, the social shaping of tastes today have been significantly impacted on by the rise of international agribusiness throughout the twentieth century. These processes have greatly reduced the varieties of food commercially available due to an emphasis on economies of scale that require the production of food that can be grown in monocultures and which can withstand long transport times (Norberg-Hodge, Thrupp, Shiva). Of course, there are also other factors at play in relation to taste that give rise to distinction between classes. This includes the ways in which we perform our bodies and shape them in the face of our social and economic conditions. Many studies in this area focus on eating disorders and how control of food intake cannot be read simply as examples of disciplined or deviant bodies (Bordo, Probyn, Ferreday). Instead, the links between food and subjectivity are much more complex. However, despite the contradictions and nuance acknowledged in relation to understandings of food, it is primarily conceptualised as an economic and symbolic good that is controlled by humans and human informed processes. In line with the above observations, literature on food provisioning choices in the areas of food sociology and human geography tends to focus on efforts to understand food purchasing decisions and eating habits. There is a strong political-economic dimension to this research even when its cultural-symbolic value is acknowledged. This is highlighted by the work of Julie Guthman which, among other things, explores “the conversion of tastes into commodities (as well as the reverse)” (“Commodified” 296). Guthman’s analysis of alternative food networks, particularly the organic sector and farmers markets, has tended to reaffirm a Bourdieuan understanding of class and distinction whereby certain foods become appropriated by elites, driving up price and removing it from the reach of ordinary consumers (“Commodified”, “Fast Food”). There has also been, however, some recognition of the limits of such approaches and acknowledgement of the fragility and porous nature of boundaries in the food arena. For example, Jordan points out in her study of the heirloom tomato that, even when a food is appropriated by elites, thereby significantly increasing its cost, consumption of the food and its cultural-symbolic meaning can continue unchanged by those who have traditionally produced and consumed the food privately in their gardens. Guthman is quite right to highlight the presence of huge inequities in both mainstream and alternative food systems throughout the world. Food may, however, be able to disrupt the dominance of these economic and social representations through its very own agentic qualities. To explore this idea, this paper draws on the work of political theorist, Jane Bennett, and eco-feminist, Val Plumwood, and applies some of their key insights to data gathered through in-depth interviews with 20 community gardeners and 7 Canberra Show exhibitors carried out from 2009 to 2012. These interviews were approximately 1 to 2 hours long in duration and were carried out in, or following, an extensive tour of the gardens of the participants, during which tastings of the produce were regularly offered to the interviewers. Jane Bennett sets out to develop a theoretical approach which she names “thing-power materialism” which is grounded in the idea that objects, including food, have agency (354). Bennett conceptualises this idea through her notion of “lively matter” and the “thing power” of objects which she defines as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (“The force” 351, “Vibrant”). The basic idea here is that if we are willing to read agency into the nonhuman things around us, then we become forced to recognise that humans are simply one more element of a world of things which can act on, with or against others through various assemblages (Deleuze and Guatarri). These assemblages can be made, undone and rebuilt in multiple ways. The power of the elements to act within these may not be equal, but nor are they stable and static. For Bennett, this is not simply a return to previous materialist theories premised on naïve notions of object agency. It is, instead, a theory motivated by attempts to develop understandings and strategies that encourage engaged ecological living practices which seek to avoid ongoing human-inflicted environmental damage caused by the “master rationality” (Plumwood) that has fuelled the era of the anthropocene, the first geological era shaped by human action. Anthropocentric thinking and its assumptions of human superiority and separateness to other elements of our ecological mesh (Morton “Thinking”) has been identified as fuelling wasteful, exploitative, environmentally damaging practices. It acts as a key impediment to the embrace of attitudinal and behavioural changes that could promote more ecologically responsible and sustainable living practices. These ideas are particularly prominent in the fields of ecological humanities, ecological feminism and political theory (Bennett “The force”, “Vibrant”; Morton “Ecological”, “Thinking”, “Ecology”; Plumwood). To redress these issues and reduce further human-inflicted environmental damage, work in these spaces tends to highlight the importance of identifying the interconnections and mutual reliance between humans and nonhumans in order to sustain life. Thus, this work challenges the “master rationality” of the anthropocene by highlighting the agentic (Bennett “The force,” “Vibrant”) or actant (Latour) qualities of nonhumans. In this spirit, Plumwood writes that we need to develop “an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the nonhuman sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the nonhuman world” (3). Food, as a basic human need, and its very gustatory taste, is animated by nonhuman elements. The role of these nonhumans is particularly visible to those who engage in their own gardening practices. As such, the ways in which gardeners understand and speak of these processes may provide insights into how an environmental culture as envisaged by Plumwood could be supported, harnessed and shared. The brevity of this paper means only a quick skim of the murky ontological waters into which its wades can be provided. The overarching aim is to identify how the recent resurgence of cultural materiality can be linked to the ways in which everyday people conceptualise and articulate their food provisioning practices. In so doing, it demonstrates that gardeners can conceptualise their food, and the biological processes as well as the nonhuman labour which bring it to fruition, as having actant qualities. This is most overtly recognised through the gardeners’ discussions of how their daily habits and routines alter in response to the qualities and “needs” of their food producing gardens. The gardeners do not express this in a strict nature/culture binary. Instead, they indicate an awareness of the interconnectedness and mutual reliance of the human and nonhuman worlds. In this way, understandings of “taste,” as produced by human centred relations predicated on exchange of capital, are being rethought. This rethinking may offer ways of promoting a more sustainable engagement with ecological beliefs and behaviours which work against the very notion of human dominance that produced the era of the anthropocene. Local Food, Taste and Nonhuman Agency Recent years have seen an increase in the purchasing, sale and growing of local food. This has materialised in multiple forms from backyard, verge and community gardens to the significant growth of farmers markets. Such shifts are attributed to increasing resistance to the privileging of globalised and industrial-scale agri-business, practices which highlight the “master rationality” underpinning the anthropocene. This backlash has been linked to environmental motivations (Seyfang “Shopping,” “Ecological,” “Growing”); desires to support local economies (particularly the financial well-being of farmers) (Norberg-Hodge); and health concerns in relation to the use of chemicals in food production (Goodman and Goodman). Despite evidence that people grow or buy food based on gustatory taste, this has received less overt attention as a motivator for food provisioning practices in the literature (Hugner). Where it is examined, taste is generally seen as a social/cultural phenomenon shaped by the ideas related to the environmental, economic and health concerns mentioned above. However, when consumers discuss taste they also refer to notions of freshness, the varieties of food that are available, and nostalgia for the “way food used to be”. Taste in its gustatory sense and pleasure from food consumption is alluded to in all of the interviews carried out for this research. While the reasons for gardening are multiple and varied, there is a common desire to produce food that tastes better and, thus, induces greater pleasure than purchased food. As one backyard gardener and successful Royal Canberra Show exhibitor notes: “[e]verything that you put [grow] in the garden [has a] better taste than from the market or from the shop.” The extent of this difference was often a surprise for the gardeners: “I never knew a home grown potato could taste so different from a shop bought potato until I grew [my own] […] and I couldn’t believe the taste.” The gardeners in this research all agreed that the taste of commercially available fruit and vegetables was inferior to self-produced food. This was attributed to the multiple characteristics of industrialised food systems. Participants referred specifically to issues ranging from reduction in the varieties available to the chemical intensive practices designed to lead to high yields in short periods of time. The resulting poor taste of such foods was exemplified by comments such as shop bought tomatoes “don’t taste like tomatoes” and the belief that “[p]otatoes and strawberries from the shop taste the same as each other”. Even when gardeners raised health concerns about mainstream food, emphasising their delight in growing their own because they “knew what had gone into their food” (Turner, “Embodied”), the issue of taste continued to play an important role in influencing their gardening practices. One gardener stated: “I prefer more [food that] is tasty than one that is healthy for me”. The tastiest food for her came from her own community garden plot and this motivated her to travel across town most days to tend the garden. While tasty food was often seen as being more nutritious, this was not the key driver in food production. The superior taste of the fruit and vegetables grown by these gardeners in Canberra calls their bodies and minds into action to avoid poor tasting food. This desire for tasty food was viewed as common to the general population but was strongly identified as only being accessible to people who grow their own. A backyard gardener, speaking of the residents of an aged care facility where he volunteers observes: “[w]hen you…meet these people they've lost that ability to do any gardening and they really express it. They miss the taste, the flavours.” Another backyard gardener and Show exhibitor recounted a story from two years prior when he and his wife invited guests for a New Year’s Day lunch. While eating their meal, a guest asked “did you grow these carrots?” When he confirmed that he had, she declared: “I can taste it.” Others noted that many young people don’t know what they are missing out on because they have never tasted home-grown produce. Through the sense of taste, the tomatoes, potatoes and carrots and myriad of other foodstuffs grown at homes or in community gardens actively encourage resistance to, or questioning of, the industrial agricultural system and its outputs. The gardeners link poor tasting food to a loss of human responsiveness to plants resulting from the spatial characteristics of industrial agriculture. Modern agribusiness requires large-scale, global production and streamlined agricultural processes that aim to limit the need for producers to respond to unique climatic and soil conditions (through genetically modification technology, see Turner, “Reflections”) and removes the need, and capacity, for individual care of plants. This has led to heavy reliance on agricultural chemicals. The gardeners tend to link high-level usage of pesticides and herbicides with poor taste. One highly successful Show exhibitor, states that in his food, “There’s better taste …because they haven’t got the chemicals in them, not much spray, not much fertiliser, for that is better”. However, when chemical use is limited or removed, the gardeners acknowledge that food plants require more intensive and responsive human care. This involves almost daily inspection of individual plants to pick off and squash (or feed to chickens and birds) the harmful bugs. The gardeners need to be vigilant and capable of developing innovative techniques to ensure the survival of their plants and the production of tasty food. They are, of course, not always successful. One organic community gardener lamented the rising populations of slaters and earwigs which could decimate whole beds of newly sprouted seedlings overnight. This was a common issue and, in response, the gardeners research and trial new methods of control (including encouraging the introduction of “good” bugs into the ecosystem through particular plantings). Ultimately, however, the gardeners were resigned to “learn[ing] to live with them [the ‘bad’ bugs]” while exerting regular bodily and mental efforts to reduce their populations and maximise their own food production. The lack of ultimate control over their growing patch, and the food it could produce, was acknowledged by the gardeners. There was an awareness and understanding of the role nonhuman elements play in food production, ranging from weather conditions to soil microbes to bugs. The gardeners talk of how their care-giving is responsive to these elements. As one community gardener asserts: “…we prefer to … garden in a way that naturally strengthens the plant immune system.” This involves regular attention to soil microbes and the practice of what was referred to as “homeopathic” gardening. Through a responsive approach to the “needs” of plants, the soil, and other nonhuman elements, the plants then delivered “vitamins and minerals” to the gardeners, packaged in tasty food. The tastiest foods ensured their survival through seed-saving practices: “[i]f something tastes good, we’ll save the seed from it”. In this way, the plant’s taste encourages gardeners to invest their human labour to secure its future. The production of tasty food was understood to be reliant on collaborative, iterative and ongoing efforts between human and nonhuman elements. While gardening has often been represented as an attempt to bend nature to the will of humans (Power), the gardeners in this study spoke about working with nature in their quest to produce good tasting food. This was particularly evident in the interviews with gardeners who exhibit produce in the Canberra Show (see NMA for further details). However, despite the fact that taste is the key motivator for growing their own food, it is not a factor in Show judging. Instead, fruit and vegetable entries (those not turned into value added goods such as jams or relishes) are judged on appearance. While this focus on appearance tends to perpetuate the myth that the fruits and vegetables we consume should conform to an ideal type that are blemish free and uniform in size (just as is prized in industrialised agriculture), the act of gardening for the Show and the process of selecting produce to enter, contradicted this assumption. Instead, entering the Show seemed to reinforce awareness of the limits of human control over nature and emphasise the very agency of nonhuman elements. This is highlighted by one exhibitor and community gardener who states: I suppose you grow vegetables for the enjoyment of eating them, but there’s also that side of getting enough and perfecting the vegetables and getting… sometimes it’s all down to the day of whether you’ve got three of something, if it’s the right size and colour and so I’ll enter it [in the Show] on the day instead of putting an entry form in before …you just don’t know what you’re going to have, the bugs decide to eat this or the mice get it or something. There’s always something. In this way, where “there’s always something” waiting to disrupt a gardener’s best laid plans, the exhibitors involved in this project seem to be acutely aware of the agency of nonhumans. In these interviews there is evidence that nonhuman elements act on the gardeners, forcing them to alter their behaviours and engage with plants to meet both of their needs. While perfect specimens can sometimes be grown for the Show, the gardeners acknowledge that this can only be done with an element of luck and careful cultivation of the partnership between human and nonhuman elements in the garden. And, even then, you never know what might happen. This lack of ultimate control is part of the challenge and, thus, the appeal, of competing in the Show. Conclusion The era of the anthropocene demonstrates the consequences of human blindness to ecological matters. Myths of human supremacy and a failure to respect nonhuman elements have fuelled a destructive and wasteful mentality that is having serious consequences for our environment. This has prompted efforts to identify new environmental cultures to promote the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles. 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Acknowledgements Thank you to the gardeners who volunteered to be part of this study. The interviews related to the Royal Canberra Show were carried out as part of a collaborative project between the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra (Joanna Henryks and Bethaney Turner) and the People and the Environment team (George Main and Kirsten Wehner) at the National Museum of Australia.