Viewing animal bodies: truths,practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in UK livestock breeding

This paper focuses on the production of aesthetic ‘truths’ in UK livestock breeding, drawing on detailed qualitative research with breeders and breed societies. It extends emerging interest in the aesthetic in human geographical research, examining how aesthetic judgements about non-human animals depend, in part, on the agency of the animal and their inter-subjective relations with humans in specific places. Aesthetic evaluation further produces implicit judgements about animals' ethical considerability, at the same time obscuring the effects of such judgements on their framing and treatment. Aesthetic evaluation is thus related to sets of material and ethical interests. The paper develops a more-than-human reading of Foucault's biopower, which explores how truths about visual evaluations of animals become established. Two empirical perspectives explore, first, a ‘relational practical aesthetic’ for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, exploring the implications of the aesthetic framing of specific animals and, second, the tensions involved in looking at animals when different aesthetic truths conflict and when traditions of aesthetic evaluation encounter genetic modes of evaluation. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of ongoing transformations of evaluative modes in livestock breeding, suggesting that shifts away from inter-subjective modes of aesthetic evaluation further diminish the ethical status of animals.     

Climbing heritage: The lines and aesthetics of rock climbing

Climbing is an experience born of the interplay of aesthetics and heritage. Nowadays, climbing attracts people in droves, all eager to join the contest between body and rock. In this article, the author addresses the refined social background of climbing. He asks how the intangible heritage left behind in rocks by generations of climbers manifests itself in the aesthetics of movement and the experiences embedded in the lines that form the climbing routes. How might anthropologists study the mind-body experiences and traces left by generations of rock users? How are we to understand the multisensory craft of climbing?     

The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa

In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with which African nation‐building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation‐building, aiming to enhance citizens' emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re‐enact and re‐redefine national history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make‐up national identity and, in the interstices of official ceremonies, provided space for the articulation of new demands for public recognition. A study of the independence celebrations thus allows us to explore contested processes of nation‐building and images of nationhood and to study the role of ritual and performance in the (re)production of nations.     

The metaphysics of disinterestedness: the Chinese gardening style and Shaftesbury's new aesthetics1

Scholars of Shaftesbury generally consider his notion of disinterestedness as the beginning of modern aesthetics while connecting it questionably with a view of modernity as defined in terms of the segregation of truth, beauty, and goodness. To read Shaftesbury differently, it is necessary to look into the textual circumstances of his key aesthetic ideas. In particular, it is important to recognize his implicit use of Sir William Temple's discussion of the Chinese garden immediately before the few justly famous passages about the beauty of the ocean, the vale, and the fruit trees and about the free and spontaneous response of the human character which constitutes the aesthetic experience. As well as a useful illumination for his new understanding of disinterestedness, this unusual involvement of a radically different artistic and philosophical tradition may also be his momentary revelation and acknowledgement of an otherwise hidden metaphysical inspiration for his revolutionary aesthetics.     

Theatre,mathematics, and the aesthetics of infinity: Complicite’s A Disappearing Number

ABSTRACT

Complicite's A Disappearing Number is one of the best examples of contemporary plays that use theatrical strategies to convey complex scientific ideas. Complicite uses performance to stage the complex mathematical concepts of partition and infinite convergent series, taking inspiration from the statement by renowned British mathematician G. H. Hardy that “a mathematician... is a maker of patterns”. As well as performativity, other elements in the play contribute to performing mathematics on the stage, elements such as time and space, narrative structure, thematic content, and characterization. Complicite introduces a complex pattern that runs throughout the play to connect these elements to form a complete whole. These elements effectively work with each other to release a set of clues that guide the audience towards decoding the play's pattern. This study provides an in-depth analysis of these connections and the complex process of decoding the pattern in the play.     

Be Part of the Story: A popular geopolitics of war comics aesthetics and Royal Air Force recruitment

This paper provides an analysis of images associated with the British Royal Air Force's recent ‘Be Part of the Story’ war comic-styled military recruiting campaign. Set around literatures in popular geopolitics, the paper builds on the concept of comic book visualities to suggest that the ‘Be Part of the Story’ images reproduce longstanding war comics conventions, and coherently represent the complex, relational and spatially disparate battlespaces of the present. The paper, firstly, provides a detailed history of war comics as they have mediated war to publics, and argues that war comics should figure more strongly in future studies of popular geopolitics. Secondly, it argues that more than simply part of a pervasive ‘cultural condition’ of militarization, military recruitment is a vital medium through which states and militaries view, and choose to represent their role in the world. Lastly, it demonstrates that ‘Be Part of the Story’ reproduces the violent visions, metaphors and cultural designations integral to state-centric narratives of global politics, and specifically, spatial principles inherent to network-centric warfare.