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"Blood - Symbolic aspects"
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Blood and kinship
The word \"blood\" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.
eBook
Thicker Than Water
Blood is more than a fluid solution of cells, platelets and plasma. It is a symbol for the most basic of human concerns--life, death and family find expression in rituals surrounding everything from menstruation to human sacrifice. Comprehensive in its scope and provocative in its argument, this book examines beliefs and rituals concerning blood in a range of regional and religious contexts throughout human history. Meyer reveals the origins of a wide range of blood rituals, from the earliest surviving human symbolism of fertility and the hunt, to the Jewish bris, and the clitoridectomies given to young girls in parts of Africa. The book also explores how cultural practices influence gene selection and makes a connection with the natural sciences by exploring how color perception influences the human proclivity to create blood symbols and rituals.
eBook
Blood will out : essays on liquid transfers and flows
Unique in focus and international in scope, this book brings together 10 essays about the material, metaphorical, and symbolic importance of blood.
* An interdisciplinary study that unites the work of noted historians and anthropologists
* Incorporates insights from recent work in symbolism, kinship studies, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, the sociological study of finance, and textual analysis
* Covers topics such as Medieval European conceptions of blood; blood and the brain; blood and the cultural study of finance; and blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America
eBook
Sangre y filiación en los relatos del dolor
En este libro se analiza, desde distintos ángulos, la presencia sostenida que la sangre, como mero fluido corporal y como evocación metafórica del parentesco biológico, tiene en los relatos sociales, literarios y sociológicos producidos en contextos de fuerte afectación de los derechos humanos.[Texto de la editorial]
eBook
Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe
This interdisciplinary collection of essays, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, medical history, and literature, examines how the intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Its individual contributors demonstrate the myriad ways in which rethinking the human body was one way to approach rethinking the social, political, and religious realities of the world from the Middle Ages until the early modern period.
eBook
Uncertain tastes
This richly drawn ethnography of Samburu cattle herders in northern Kenya examines the effects of an epochal shift in their basic diet-from a regimen of milk, meat, and blood to one of purchased agricultural products. In his innovative analysis, Jon Holtzman uses food as a way to contextualize and measure the profound changes occurring in Samburu social and material life. He shows that if Samburu reaction to the new foods is primarily negative—they are referred to disparagingly as “gray food” and “government food”—it is also deeply ambivalent. For example, the Samburu attribute a host of social maladies to these dietary changes, including selfishness and moral decay. Yet because the new foods save lives during famines, the same individuals also talk of the triumph of reason over an antiquated culture and speak enthusiastically of a better life where there is less struggle to find food. Through detailed analysis of a range of food-centered arenas, Uncertain Tastes argues that the experience of food itself—symbolic, sensuous, social, and material-is intrinsically characterized by multiple and frequently conflicting layers.
eBook
Matters of the Heart
The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. We feel emotions in the heart, from the heart-stopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair. And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood. Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain. It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West. So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger? Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as ‘heartfelt’? We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol. Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences. With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity, and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centres of emotion in the West.
eBook
Can HRV Predict Prolonged Hospitalization and Favorable or Unfavorable Short-Term Outcome in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke?
The aim of this study was to assess whether the heart rate variability (HRV) could predict a favorable or unfavorable stroke outcome. The endpoint was based on the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS). The patient’s health condition was assessed upon discharge from the hospital. An unfavorable stroke outcome was defined as death or NIHSS ≥ 9, while NIHSS < 9 meant a favorable stroke outcome. The studied group consisted of 59 patients with acute ischemic stroke AIS (mean age of 65.6 ± 13.2; 58% were females). An original and innovative non-linear measure was used to analyze HRV. It was based on symbolic dynamics consisting of comparing the “length of the longest words” in the night recording of HRV. “The length of the longest word” meant the longest sequence of identical adjacent symbols possible for a patient. An unfavorable stroke outcome occurred in 22 patients, whereas the majority of patients (37) had a favorable stroke outcome. The average hospitalization time of patients with clinical progression was 29 ± 14 days, and with favorable outcomes was 10 ± 3 days. Patients with long words (more than 150 adjacent RR intervals having the same symbol) were hospitalized no longer than 14 days and they had no clinical progression. The patients with a favorable stroke outcome were characterized by longer words. Our pilot study may be the beginning of work on the development of a non-linear, symbolic method as a predictor of prolonged hospitalization and increased risk of clinical progression in patients with AIS.
Journal Article