Art Of Presence Research Articles

Al-ʿUcha

<i>Al-ʿUcha</i>

Converting ordinary resistance into collective action: Visibility struggles, discreet antiracist mobilisations and intermediation work in the French banlieues

ABSTRACT Working-class neighbourhoods are often seen as political deserts, but can one identify discreet mobilisations that might prefigure broader movements? During fieldwork in poor urban areas in France, we observed different ways of opposing the everyday injustices of discrimination. These practices differ from the infrapolitics analysed by James Scott: the actors manifest forms of publicisation closer to what Asef Bayat calls ‘the art of presence’. The article starts out from an analysis of these non-organised practices and then examines the processes that enable feelings of injustice to be converted into more structured collective actions. Based on ethnographic studies in three working-class neighbourhoods in France over three years, the investigation highlights the conditions of emergence and publicisation of collective action by focusing on the role of intermediaries and re-placing discreet mobilisations in their institutional context of emergence.

The bargaining of a sacred place: relocation of a Hindu temple in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Drawing on Asef Bayat’s ‘art of presence,’ this paper analyses how Malaysian Indian Hindus reinvent the Tirtha – a sacred location identified for building a Hindu temple – and make it liminal. I contend that the reinvention is a quiet encroachment strategy for Indian Hindus to safeguard community temples against urban development. I base my argument on empirical data gathered from in-depth interviews and ethnographic approaches. I anchor my argument on a case study concerning a demolished and relocated Hindu temple in Penang. I additionally demonstrate how the liminality of a Hindu temple is rationalised and made plausible with rituals for relocation, namely the Balathanam ceremony.

Refusing a “City without Slums”: Moroccan slum dwellers' nonmovements and the art of presence

In June 2018, as a result of a program known as “Villes Sans Bidonvilles” (VSB) or “Cities without Slums,” the Kingdom of Morocco declared 58 of 85 cities across the country as slum-free. This paper analyzes the “pockets of resistance” that the Kingdom of Morocco has faced in the implementation of the VSB program. I assert that the contestations and acts of resistance pursued by slum-dwellers are an art of presence – “the ability of the subaltern subjects to assert their collective will in spite of all odds, to circumvent the constraints, utilizing what is possible, and discover new spaces within which to make themselves heard, seen, felt and realized” (Bayat, 2017:111). The art of presence is “the fundamental movement in the life of nonmovements,” therefore I combine the two concepts to argue that slum-dwellers responded to the VSB in incremental/spontaneous and organized/strategic ways, and in doing so they forced the authorities to change their approach against all odds. Using two case studies, I demonstrate how slum dwellers' responses to the rehousing scheme delayed the VSB process by a number of years, and in fact made the authorities offer a resettlement option (recasement) that was preferable to the residents. As slum dwellers resisted the intervention of the state and used tactics of refusal, protest, and grassroots organizing, they turned urban space into a site of contention, and made claims to that space despite being “dispersed, unorganized and atomized” (Bayat, 2017:106). The social ‘nonmovement’ of the slum-dwellers led to tangible benefits for them, and led to the “socialization of the state” through the replacement of the government rehousing program with a resettlement scheme that they preferred. They therein resisted the state's attempt to make them invisible, eradicate their built environment and inculcate them into proper neoliberal development subjects. Their resistance was not a form of radical, insurgent citizenship, but rather a form of “deradicalized dissent” that amended the existing order instead of producing a new one. Against all odds, the art of presence of the slum-dwellers induced a dramatic change in housing policy in their favor.

The phenomenon of presence in spiritual care: a tapestry of themes

Abstract This paper is an invitation to contemplate the phenomenon of presence. This is inherently important, in the bigger picture and broader conversation concerning presence and more especially the art of presence as spiritual care. Experience centred narratives are ‘texts’ which bring stories of personal experience into being. The self-narrative (autoethnography) and three additional narratives – co-participants who expressed a willingness to tell their story – is the chosen approach to enable the expression of first-person experience in all its richness, complexity and multiplicity. The essence of presence is portrayed with particular focus on the manifestation, mystery, meaning, movement and ministry dimensions and dynamics of the concept. The patterns and meanings of the lived experience of presence, in the four narratives, emerge beyond the narrative realms of writing, extending into the symbolic realms of art, poetry and music as engaged by the co-informants. This essay is the story of presence in the presence of story – a co-creation of the nature and experience of presence, a tapestry woven on and of the fabric of life.

Mindful Eating: The Art of Presence While You Eat.

IN BRIEF Mindfulness, a practice based on Zen Buddhism, has become popular as a way of self-calming and as a method of changing eating behaviors. Mindful eating is being incorporated into behavior change programs along with recommended dietary behavior changes. This article describes mindful eating and offers ideas for how to teach the basics of this practice.

Polygraph: somatic truth and an art of presence

Robert Lepage’s Vinci began, he says, with the impression made on him by Leonardo’s Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, which appears in the work in the form of a projected image.1 He had discovered in this drawing something of the paradoxical genius of an engineer profoundly moved by the human body. In Plaques Tectoniques / Tectonic Plates one of the uses of a pair of grand pianos is to illustrate the geological theory of continental drift, which becomes the immense context of individual self-transformation (very evident through the various versions of the work as well as in them) and of complex personal relations. In Echo a bed frame is the main piece of stage furniture, constantly manipulated by the actors and becoming the very antithesis of itself – a burial plot – in the course of its metamorphoses. Such emphases on things are in keeping with the professed program of Théâtre Repère: to begin with the available resources and to work through successive cycles of development based on them. In this way Repère opens itself to intuition, avoiding the domination of its work by argument or theme.2

The Art of Presence: The Poet and “Paradise Lost.”

The Art of Presence: The Poet and “Paradise Lost.”

Reviews

Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of Milton, by Joseph Anthony WittreichArnold Stein, The Art of Presence: The Poet and Paradise LostKitty Cohen, The Throne and the Chariot: Studies in Milton's Hebraism