The Anthropology of Poiesis

Author: Mihai Popa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527578747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
The volume addresses a distinct field in the anthropology of culture, namely that of creativity. It defines the cultural field of poiesis, which includes not only the poetic creation, but also the scientific and philosophical one, and, above all, insists on the connection of creativity with the metaphysical spirituality, the mythological imaginary, and the sacred realm. Creation is primarily personal—this phenomenon is obvious both in the field of art and of theory. This book considers that it is necessary to emphasize, from the perspective of cultural anthropology, the importance and significance of the creative act that binds all fields of culture. To this end, it gives new meanings to the relationship between the symbolic and abstract in the field of cultural creation, a relationship considered from the perspective of three concepts—beauty, harmony and dynamic asymmetry—as well as the relationship between creative intuition and constructive reason. The book adopts a historical-comparative approach, from the perspective of the dialectic of the creative act, the becoming and synthesis of some opposite elements, coordinated by the abstract-creative principle: dynamis and symetros, rational and symbolic, immanent and transcendent. It shows that the meaning of experience as a creative synthesis is primordial and fundamental to human existence. The book is addressed both to specialists in the field of philosophy of art or cultural anthropology, and to the general reader who wants to approach the original meaning of spiritual creation, poiesis, which is the unification of all possible experiences, both feelings and knowledge.

Poiesis

Author: Stephen K. Levine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This work argues that poiesis, the creative act, as also the act by which we affirm our identity and humanity, and shows the essential affinity of the creative and therapeutic processes. The context in which modern therapy emerged is considered, as are various aspects of arts therapies.

Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter

Author: Xin Wei Sha
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019515
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A groundbreaking conception of interactive media, inspired by continuity, field, and process, with fresh implications for art, computer science, and philosophy of technology. In this challenging but exhilarating work, Sha Xin Wei argues for an approach to materiality inspired by continuous mathematics and process philosophy. Investigating the implications of such an approach to media and matter in the concrete setting of installation- or event-based art and technology, Sha maps a genealogy of topological media—that is, of an articulation of continuous matter that relinquishes a priori objects, subjects, and egos and yet constitutes value and novelty. Doing so, he explores the ethico-aesthetic consequences of topologically creating performative events and computational media. Sha's interdisciplinary investigation is informed by thinkers ranging from Heraclitus to Alfred North Whitehead to Gilbert Simondon to Alain Badiou to Donna Haraway to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Sha traces the critical turn from representation to performance, citing a series of installation-events envisioned and built over the past decade. His analysis offers a fresh way to conceive and articulate interactive materials of new media, one inspired by continuity, field, and philosophy of process. Sha explores the implications of this for philosophy and social studies of technology and science relevant to the creation of research and art. Weaving together philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, mathematics, and media studies, he shows how thinking about the world in terms of continuity and process can be informed by computational technologies, and what such thinking implies for emerging art and technology.

Poiesis

Author: Peter Hampden Acton
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199335931
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
Despite the fact that Athenians consumed great quantities of manufactured goods, and around half of the residents of classical Athens can be shown to have been more or less dependent for survival on manufacturing in some form, this subject has been almost completely neglected by historians. Poiesis brings together ancient texts and inscriptions, recent scholarly analysis, archaeological finds, and the expertise of modern craftsmen to investigate every known facet of Athens' manufacturing activities. Authored by a management consultant and a recent PhD in Ancient History, the book presents the information in terms of contemporary business principles, drawing on supply and demand and risk-return analysis to explain events and choices. Manufacturing operations are classified in a novel framework based on competitive advantage and barriers to entry, concepts previously absent from ancient history. The framework explains why certain segments were suited to the sole craftsman and others to teams of slaves, and deduces earnings potential based upon competitive differentiation. The result is a new angle on how Athenian society operated; in particular it shows how fragmented industry structures, often the result of primitive technology, were fundamental to the workings of the Athenian democracy by enabling citizens to supplement their income through casual manufacturing activity. The book explains how manufacturing for sale emerged from autarchic peasant households, explores whether any of the industries examined changed to any great extent in Hellenistic and Roman times, and shows how some were transformed by the Industrial Revolution. It includes a methodology for quantifying the demographics of participation in manufacturing. By presenting a new paradigm of historical analysis, one complementing political, military, and literary perspectives, the book will be valuable to classicists and ancient and economic historians.

Sentient Flesh

Author: R. A. Judy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious, Sentient Flesh offers a major intervention in the black study of life.

Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds

Author: Anthony J. Cascardi
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826518346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Poetic making from Cervantes and Gongora to Descartes and Locke

Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy

Author: Paolo J. Knill
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 9781843100393
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
This book lays the foundation for a fresh interpretation of art-making and the therapeutic process by re-examining the concept of poiesis. The authors clarify the methodology and theory of practice with a focus on intermodal therapy, crystallization theory and polyaesthetics, and give guidance on the didactics of acquiring practical skills.

The Man Without Content

Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804735549
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.

In Praise of Poiesis

Author: Ellen G. Levine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780968533062
Category : Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
This volume is offered as a gift to the life and work of Stephen K. Levine and to the thinkers and the practitioners in the field. In the spirit of Levine's thinking, it offers a lively array of ideas about the current state of work in the expressive arts: therapy, coaching, education, consulting, and social change. This collection of writings, poems and visual images honours the thinking and the work of Stephen K. Levine, philosopher of the field of expressive arts therapy. Levine's work in this field over the past 25 years has focused on the central role of art and art-making in human experience, calling attention to the uniquely human act of shaping and its embodiment in artistic activity. Levine places the concept of poiesis at the center of his thinking and, by doing so, provides an important guidepost for practitioners of therapy, education and social change work through the arts. His ideas have influenced a whole generation of teachers and practitioners of expressive arts therapy and this volume is a testament to that influence. Levine has issued a series of challenges to the authors contained in this volume. Each writer, student or colleague, has responded from his or her own standpoint. In the longer articles, the writers were asked to address ideas at the forefront of their thinking in these times. For the medium-length pieces, they were summoned to respond to a concern: can the expressive arts move from its original focus on psychological disorder and its treatment to a broader social and political perspective? Finally, in the short responses, the writers were asked to consider what new directions are needed for the field of expressive arts.

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form

Author: Aaron M. Moe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429592272
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage energy of the Atom made a leap toward the gaze of the first cell, to echo Merwin. Moe distills his methodology as follows: "My work?—I point," asserted the aphorism. "That’s what I do." To point, the project integrates a wide range of interdisciplinary ideas—including biosemiotics, fractals, phi, trauma theory, the Mandelbrot Set, hyperobjects, meditative chants, Goethe’s morphology, Ramanujan’s summation, a spiderweb’s sonic properties, and Thoreau’s sense of the plant-like burgeoning force of an Atom—in order to open up multiple trajectories. In this context, the volume foregrounds the insights of poets/storytellers including Hillman, Snyder, Anzaldúa, EEC, okpik, Whitman, Dickinson, Gladding, Melville, Morrison, and Toomer, for they are most attentive to that liminal moment when the vibratory hum in language, and in the cosmos, turns kinetic. As this volume draws on a wide range of writers from many backgrounds, it allows the myriad voices to engage with one another across differences in race, gender, and ethnicity. These writers show us how, to echo Dickinson, the "Freight / Of a delivered Syllable - " can split and how the energy unleashed came from, and points us back toward, the energy (un)making the forms of Gaia. The starting point for discussing the energy of a poem can no longer begin with the human; rather, Holding on explores how the poem’s energy is but a sliver of a hyperobject "massively distributed" throughout the cosmos—a sage energy that brings forth form.