Company Of Strangers Research Articles

Company of Strangers, and: Meeting with the Red Lobster Birthday Club after Covid

Company of Strangers, and: Meeting with the Red Lobster Birthday Club after Covid

A Marxist Analysis of In the Company of Strangers by Awais Khan

A Marxist Analysis of In the Company of Strangers by Awais Khan

The “Medicalized Death”: Dying in the Hospital

This article is part of a larger study dedicated to the place of death and dying. The focus of this article is on the “medicalized death” of older people who died in hospitals in Israel and the United States and is based on the experiences of four family members who cared for them at the end of their lives. In-depth interviews were conducted with each participant, and narrative analysis methods were utilized to identify themes in the data. In the findings section, participant accounts are presented as individual monologues, each followed by the authors’ theoretical commentary. Despite the fact that the process of dying in a hospital is often depicted in the media as being fraught with excessive and aggressive procedures, the cases described in this article suggest there is marked ambiguity and contradiction experienced by caregivers and patients regarding the hospital setting for the process of dying. In some cases, the hospital was perceived as a preferred place for dying because it often reduced caregiver strain. However, participants also remarked on many undesirable aspects about hospital deaths, including dying in the company of strangers; the lack of empathy from physicians; existential dilemmas about the withdrawal of treatment; and several more.

Stranger Tongues

Stranger Tongues

Fashionable Dunedin and “Rooted Cosmopolitanism” in the Twenty-First Century: NOM*d and Company of Strangers

Abstract Typically, fashion has been associated with the large urban centers that are considered the hubs of contemporary culture, or “fashion’s world cities,” to borrow from the title of an oft-quoted edited volume; however, in the twenty-first century, fashion may play a role at a local or regional level, even in relatively isolated contexts such as that provided by Dunedin, located in New Zealand, at the bottom of the South Island. The work of Dunedin designers such as Margarita Robertson and Sara Munro, creative directors for their respective clothing lines, NOM*d and Company of Strangers, illustrates Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of fashion as expressing utopian desires, in this case a form of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” to borrow from Kwame Anthony Appiah, while furthering an economic system dependent on commodity fetishism.

Hobbes, Seabright, and our ancestors: institutionalist theory and the writing of evolutionary history

Recently, a debate has ensued as to whether neoclassical economics has jettisoned its inward looking, reductionism of the past in favour of a more open evolutionary style, making it more compatible with institutional economics. Paul Seabright’s, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life claims to do precisely this and thus it is worthwhile to critically assess its efforts. Does it really represent a fundamental change or it is merely window dressing, serving up the same neoclassical analysis in slightly different form? This paper evaluates Seabright’s claim from largely an (old) institutionalist perspective and finds that fundamentally The Company of Strangers fits quite comfortably within the confines of traditional neoclassicism; thus, no ‘bridge’ has been established which would allow a more fruitful interchange with ‘old’ institutionalism.

In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust by Barry McCrea (review)

In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust by Barry McCrea (review)

<em>In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust</em>, by Barry McCrea

<em>In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust</em>, by Barry McCrea

How to Personalize Pharmacoproteomics?

Copyright: © 2014 Andreev VP. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Stepping into the elevator this morning, I noticed a familiar yet strange scene: five people staring into their smart phones. To be completely honest, it required some effort not to do the same. Why are we doing this? How many of us really need to check e-mails every two minutes? Is it the modern substitute of cigarettes, a way to feel comfortable in the company of strangers? More interestingly, can we use the same psychosocial phenomenon to achieve something useful and valuable? More specifically, can we make proteomics and pharmacoproteomics “sexy” for millions of people, popularize and personalize it? The question is worth examining, since the price that 150 million [1] smart phone owners in the US pay for data plans solely (which most of us do not really need) is $30 a month, which adds up to $54 billion annually, or nearly twice the total NIH budget (30 billion USD in 2014 [2]).

BARRY MCCREA In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust.

BARRY MCCREA In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust.

Civilizing Cooperation: Paul Seabright and the Company of Strangers

Paul Seabright is the first to clearly identify a major puzzle about human social evolution: the expansion of cooperation in the more complex societies of the Holocene. Identifying that problem is a major achievement, but in this paper I give a somewhat different account of the nature of the problem and a somewhat different account of the social world of Pleistocene foragers. So, we agree that there is a problem, but not on its nature or solution.

The Three Musketeers: What do We Still Need to Know About Our Passage Through Prehistory?

Any author is lucky to have readers, but to have three readers as subtle, attentive, and generous as Geoff Brennan (GB), Ben Fraser (BF), and Kim Sterelny (KS) is a privilege indeed. I have learned much from all three of them, both from these pieces and more generally from their other writings and the discussions we have had. I am grateful to them for the many generous things they say about The Company of Strangers (hereafter TCOS), and in particular for agreeing that the ease with which we citizens of prosperous modern societies interact with strangers is a puzzle given our prehistoric origins. But all three chide me, diplomatically though firmly, for imprecision about some crucial aspects of the transition of humankind from hunting and gathering to modern society, for appealing to metaphors (such as ‘‘tunnel vision’’ and ‘‘honorary friends’’) instead of mechanisms. I think there is much truth in this criticism, and I would like to take this opportunity to say more about what we know—and, crucially, about what we still don’t know—about how this transition happened. To do this I propose not to answer the questions and criticisms of the three commentators point by point. Instead I shall set out six broad questions about the transition, each of which is posed explicitly or implicitly by one or more of these commentators and about which they are right to point out that TCOS does not have enough to say. In some cases this is because the state of our collective knowledge is inadequate, in others because TCOS does not clearly enough reflect that collective knowledge. These are the questions: (1) Was Pleistocene life transparent enough for prudent calculation based on self-regarding preferences to support cooperation via mutual monitoring, punishment of defectors, and incentives for reputation building? (2) How violent was the Pleistocene? And how much of this violence was intra-group rather than inter-group? (3) Was interaction with strangers frequent or rare? (4) What exactly would have been necessary for a psychology adapted to the Pleistocene to make sense of a much more frequent exposure to strangers in the Holocene? Was it just a matter of adjusting to a higher frequency of stranger contact or was it a qualitative shift? (5) What ensured that when agriculture arrived the social contract did not either (a) collapse, or (b) remain sufficiently robust to resist substantial increases in inequality? (6) In what sense, precisely, does the psychology we inherited from the Pleistocene continue to shape (either in the sense of enabling, or in the sense of constraining) the way we interact with strangers in modern societies?

What can economics contribute to the study of human evolution?

The revised edition of Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers is critically reviewed. Seabright aims to help non-economists participating in the cross-disciplinary study of the evolution of human sociality appreciate the potential value that can be added by economists. Though the book includes nicely constructed and vivid essays on a range of economic topics, in its main ambition it largely falls short. The most serious problem is endorsement of the so-called strong reciprocity hypothesis that has been promoted by several prominent economists, but does not pass muster with biologists.

Introduction: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture

The papers in this special section are revised contributions to one of the Conversations in the Disciplines funded by the State University of New York and the SUNY College at Plattsburgh, held in Plattsburgh on October 7–9, 2007. This discussion, titled “The Origins of Agriculture,” brought together scholars with diverse perspectives and methodological approaches on the origins of agriculture. My perception is that the many perspectives and methodologies are not in sufficient contact with one another, and my goal in organizing this collection for the SUNY Conversation and for this special section in Current Anthropology was to generate cross-fertilization of ideas. The areas in question include ancient health, paleopathology, paleonutrition, paleodemography, evolutionary theory, genetics, political prehistory, social organization, climatology, human behavioral ecology, archaeobotany, and Neolithic demographic transition theory. As these papers demonstrate, the conversation was successful to a degree in that regard, even though, as is inevitable, we reached no consensus. My perspective was then and is now that such widespread common events require relatively simple common core events and causes. To argue otherwise defies the odds of coincidence given the enormously widespread complex sequences of events occurring in parallel but independently in so many regions of the world. I suggested that we resembled the proverbial blind men, each describing an elephant from the perspective of his or her own incomplete experience. (Hence the reference to elephants in some accompanying papers.) I still insist that there is an “elephant,” or common core of events, despite our various incomplete perspectives; however, many participants do not agree that the elephant or core understanding exists. What follows is my own perspective on the problem, modified and updated by more recent research and, most recently, by participation in the conversation. I take pride of place as organizer and also as the person providing the most primitive, albeit drastically updated, hypothesis. In The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Cohen 1977), I proposed

The Company of Strangers: Defending the Power of Business in Britain, 1975–2005

The power of business is among the most contested issues in democratic capitalism. At its heart lies the question of whether democratic control of economic life is compatible with the existence of ...

Making Men of Monsters: Shakespeare in the Company of Strangers

Voltaire's racist attack on Shakespeare was motivated by what he, Voltaire, correctly identified as Shakespeare's essentially non-racist (and hence to Voltaire offensive) philosophy articulated in his plays. The ritual of carnival, an act of exclusion, has been well explored in relation to Shakespeare, to the neglect of the equally important ritual of mumming: the identification with and admittance of the disguised stranger. Repeatedly Shakespeare dramatizes acts of hospitality towards strangers that go far beyond the liberal notions of tolerance that Voltaire championed and form an emotion and philosophical rejection of the human divisive mentality.

On Creating a Space: An Interview with Parker Palmer

Increasingly, social work educators introduce the thoughts of Parker Palmer into their discussions of teaching methodology, course content, and the occupation of teaching. While not himself a social worker, Palmer's thoughts about teaching, on creating a “space” or conditions within which people can learn and change, and on the spiritual and relational aspects of human learning resonate with many social work educators. Parker Palmer is a writer, consultant, and lecturer who addresses issues in education, spirituality, community, and social change. He is a senior associate of the American Association for Higher Education, senior advisor to the Fetzer Institute, and the author of such books as To Know as We Are Known, Let Your life Speak, The Courage to Teach, The Active Life, and The Company of Strangers. Palmer has received five honorary doctorates for his writing and numerous other awards. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin where he is also a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). This interview was conducted to elicit Palmer's thoughts on teaching, learning, relating, and the academic preparation of social workers and took place on a cold and dreary late winter afternoon at his home in Madison. A range of subjects was discussed and he was quite gracious and generous with his time.

The Company of Strangers: Sociology in Trans-Disciplinary Research

En 1993, le Secretariat Tri-Conseil, qui vit le jour apres la mise en place du Projet vert du gouvernement federal, subventionna plusieurs projets multidisciplinaires dans le domaine de la recherche ecologique. Un de ces projets ayant pour centre l'Universite de Guelph avait pour but explicite le developpement d'indicateurs de la sante des agro-ecosystemes. Etant donne que la dimension humaine-sociale se trouve a la base des systemes agro-ecologiques, la sociologie a entrepris de cooperer avec les disciplines qui ont contribue au Projet d'etude de la Sante des Agro-ecosystemes. Cet article etudie le role de la sociologie dans le cadre de cette recherche en approfondissant la question : ou va la sociologie ? ou encore, comment va la sociologie ? ce genre de question peut s'exprimer et trouver une solution grâce a l'un examen des deux conditions suivantes : les ressources de base de la discipline (qui refletent sa capacite a repondre a la pression) et l'efficacite de la sociologie (qu'on mesure par sa capacite a atteindre des buts). Au travers d'une critique de l'adaptation de la perspective sociologique au regard des methodes et de l'analyse dans le cadre du Projet d'etude de la Sante des Agro-ecosystemes, cet article suggere que la sociologie fait face a un avenir prometteur pour deux raisons : elle sait, d'une part, s'adapter et, d'autre part, elle s'est engagee a poursuivre des projets qui peuvent trouver des applications dans le domaine de l'elaboration des politiques ainsi que dans le domaine des nouvelles approches en matiere scientifique

The Company of Strangers in the Company of Books

ABSTRACTIn 1936, Edgar du Perron and his family escaped the threat of war in Europe, when they boarded the Danish vessel Alsia, bound for the Dutch East Indies. He described the voyage in Scheepsjournaal van Arthur Ducroo (1943; ‘Arthur Ducroo's Logbook’). Du Perron was returning to his ‘country of origin’, already evoked in his semi-autobiographical novel Land van herkomst (1935). This new journey was to offer him a revised picture of the region, a correction of the idealized memory of his youth. Now he would come into contact with Indonesian nationalists like Suwarsih Djojopuspito (1912–1977).Terag naar Kongo (1987; ‘Back to the Congo’), on the other hand, describes Lieve Joris ‘s voyage to the Zaire of 1985, introducing her to an ex-colony that had long since achieved independence, if not freedom from neo-colonialism. The narrator Joris describes her trip on board the Fabiolaville to Matadi, and embarks on a sentimental journey, discovering the region where her uncle was a missionary. Soon, however, she delves into the modem, chaotic, energetic life of Mobutu's Zaire, and undertakes a second journey by boat up the Zaire river.These very different texts by Du perron and Joris share certain characteristics, primarily their representation of the journey as a quest, and the important role played by other literary texts in shaping the narrators' experience.

Hags, Nags, Witches and Crones: Reframing Age in The Company of Strangers

Le film de Cynthia Scott The Company of Strangers (Canada, 1990) est un réquisitoire sur le vieillissement des femmes, leurs histoires personnelles, la mémoire, la vie et la mort, et la coexistence du passé et du présent. Le texte examine les représentations dominantes des vieilles et des corps vieillissants et décode les sens moraux et politiques qui s'y rattachent. Le texte démontre comment The Company of Strangers fusionne le documentaire et la fiction pour y établir un espace dans notre culture où les vieilles femmes refusent de devenir invisibles. Le film examine les qualités distinctes de chacunes de ces femmes et entre elles, ainsi que ce qu'elles ont partagent, sans vouloir proposer ni critique de la vieille femme en temps que catégorie, ni l'attestation d'un point final de la subjectivité. Plutôt, il s'agit de changer le visage de l'âge afin de libérer le potentiel radical de la subjectivité féminine des ces vieilles irréductibles.