Material Things Research Articles

With Latour in our hands: discovering the politics of organizing and the aesthetic matter of things

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to pay tribute to the work of Bruno Latour and its relevance for organization scholars particularly, by relentlessly going beyond the reified category of “organization.” We rely in particular on our own experiences of conducting fieldwork with Latour in our hands and expose our journeys, sometimes feeling naked, embarrassed and naive. By following traces of actions, paying attention to things and appreciating plurality, with Latour we have discovered the politics of organizing and the aesthetic matter of things.Design/methodology/approachWe use our own methodological experience to describe how Latour’s work has helped us concretely. We structure our methodological reasoning around three excursions in the field, corresponding to our different fieldwork journeys. For each excursion, we rely on descriptions and reflect on how we have traced actions, paid attention to things and appreciated plurality, as set out in the introduction.FindingsWe render through excursions our Latour moments, that is, critical moments in fieldwork, where we get stuck and embarrassed and where Latour’s texts with simple questions help us move. Against the critique of ANT as being apolitical and unable to account for the body, we explain how we have precisely, through our ANT investigations, intersected between politics, aesthetics and organizing through three main ways of displacing us in the field: leaving a priori categories and questioning what we see; placing our view somewhere and moving it in an oligopticon-like way; and “thick thinging.”Originality/valueThe paper is a tribute to Latour’s work and wants to contribute to emphasizing his relevance for understanding not only organization in general but also the politics and aesthetics of organizing. We reassemble our fieldwork journeys and, despite their being personal to us, we believe that our learnings are recognizable and recognized by other scholars. We conclude with a research suggestion relevant to organization scholars.

MENINGKATKAN RASA MENGUCAP SYUKUR MELALUI PEMBINAAN PEMAHAMAN BERKAT

Gratitude is acceptance of one's condition in any condition. This attitude is crucial for Christians to have as a form of respect for God's sovereignty. However, the importance of this attitude is often not found in Christians, especially when experiencing difficult times. One of the reasons is the belief that the blessings given by God are only material things in the form of wealth. This view then influences the gratitude of people who receive God's blessings. To anticipate the formation of this thought pattern, guidance is needed in understanding God's blessings as a whole. This coaching activity is intended to answer this problem. Using research results that have been published regarding God's blessing in Deuteronomy 28:1-14, the implementers carry out coaching using the lecture method. The coaching targets two mutual aid communities in Batam City, OMEFA and Family Batam. The participants were given coaching in four stages to provide a complete understanding of God's various blessings, which are very broad. This coaching is expected to make participants aware of God's blessings apart from material wealth.

Vouching- A Splendid Jewel of Auditing

Vouching is evaluating all the fact based cues i.e invoices, bills, minute records, wage sheet, counterfoils to see whether all the recording in books of accounts are bona-fide or not. Vouching is such a panoramic concept of auditing which meddle with every material thing, as it is done for Cash book, purchase book, sales book, sales return book, debtors ledger, Creditor ledger etc. This paper is regarding what is vouching? , why to resort to vouching is material? , how routine checking and vouching is not same. This paper also tell about what to do & what not to do by the auditor while vouching? The information contained in this paper is collected from different websites and from already published research papers. A special thanks to researchers who already contributed to this study. In today’s era where malfunctions are booming day by day there is need to chop such activities, so that we can get fructiferous consequence of auditing. And solution to this is ‘VOUCHING’ which is splendid Jewel of auditing.

There are More, or Fewer, Things than Most of us Think

Abstract In Chapter 12 of his book Material Beings (Van Inwagen, Peter. 1990. Material Beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press) van Inwagen argues that there are no artefacts, or very few, certainly fewer than most people believe. Artisans very rarely create, at least in the sense of causing things to come into existence. The argument in Chapter 12 is a very powerful one. I do not think that it establishes van Inwagen’s conclusion, but it does, I think, given its (plausible) premise, establish that if there are not far fewer material things in the world than we ordinarily believe, then there are far more. In this sense it establishes, as Russell once said, ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’. Furthermore, I argue at the end, we cannot avoid this conclusion even if we reject van Inwagen’s premise. Thus the defender of our common sense ontology is caught on the horns of a dilemma. So our commonsense ontology is indefensible.

The walking dead: Identity, variability, and cultural interactions of funerary behaviors between Crete and mainland Greece during the Early Iron Age (11th to 8th BC)

This paper aims to examine funerary contexts of sites in mainland Greece and compare them with sites on the island of Crete in Ancient Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age, in the period of circa the 11th until the 8th centuries BC. From an integrative approach to the analysis and interpretation of material culture from funerary contexts allow us to understand aspects of the space of the dead, aspects of mortuary practices and their role in the configuration of the historical context of the rise and formation of the polis, especially during the 8th century BC. The comparative analyses also provide a better understanding about contact and interactions in the Mediterranean. This requires us to analyze and consider on the different nature of material culture from funerary contexts, such as types of treatment and deposition/disposal/placement of the body of the dead, the construction of funerary architecture, grave goods, and the agency of the space of the dead in the construction of the funerary topography (funerary landscape). Cultural interactions are material expressions resulting from the exchange of ideas, know-how, technique and technology, beliefs, customs, and behaviors, both from objects and from the movement of people. They constitute a prospective field to address mortuary archaeological data as an active part of death and of the social process of dying. Funerary behaviors assign meanings, build memories and identities to biological death. They bring life to the transition of an active person in the “world of the living” into a passive “material thing” in the “world of the dead”. Thus, the dead, become the “walking dead” and “come to life”. Cultural interactions during the Early Iron Age constitute a fundamental element in the configuration of a new historical structure, the polis, which characterizes the Greek world as a unit – not homogeneous but consisting of heterogeneous and idiosyncratic aspects. Mortuary practices integrate this world of simultaneously standardized and peculiar actions and have crucial roles in the hellenic identity and in the identity particularities of its polis in Greek mainland and Crete.

Anthropology of the private world in N. V. Gogol’s Little Russian novels about modernity

The relevance of the article is connected with the application of the method of literary anthropology, the study of anthropological forms, for the first time undertaken to a set of N. V. Gogol's Little Russian novels about modernity: "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Auntie", "The Old World Landlords", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich". The problematic question is how a special narrator and a special world are related. The aims and objectives are connected to the analysis of the narrator's image and images of the characters primarily from the verbal portrait’s point of view, which makes it possible to cover important aspects of the writer's humanistic vision. The emphasis is on how the particular narrator creates a private world with all its subjects and details. The peculiarities of the narrator's image are considered as immersed in everyday life and material things, close to an ordinary common man of Mirgorod. The question is raised about the complication of this image, which, however, did not lead to the wholeness and completeness of the image. The private world created by the special narrator is dominated by special laws that determine the portrayal of the characters. The destruction of the boundaries between human and non-human, external and internal, philistine and divine, leads to the destruction of the world’s hierarchical structure. Another consequence of this is the likening of everything to everything else, the tendency to depict the mass, the similar, the echoing, including the accentuation of imaginary pairing. The singular tends to pairing, the paired tends to the mass-shaped. The destruction of the boundaries between the external and the internal leads to the dominance of corporeality, regardless of whether man is shown as flesh or as form. One can speak of Gogol's dominance of the face over the countenance (Florensky), the dismemberment of the body into parts, the autonomisation and independent life of these parts. An excessive importance is given to the character's costume, which can replace the hero. The traditional description is replaced by an expressive representation of the hero in two variants: representation-in-general and representation-in-the-moment.

Mathematization, Movement, and Extension of the World-Soul in Plato's Timaeus (Tim. 35b4-37a2)

The main aim of this study is to explain passage 35b4-37a2 of Plato’s Timaeus which deals with three main topics: the mathematization of the world’s soul, its movement, and its binding to the world’s body. First, it is argued that the mathematical structure of the world-soul allows it to participate in and be sensitive to harmony, which is essential for the correct workings of its cognitive capacities. Second, the division of the world-soul to the circle of the same and the circles of the different and its self-motion comes in. This allows it to ‘touch’ and cognize the forms and the material things, as well as rule the movement of the corporeal world and care for it. In this aspect, the world-soul continues the process that started with the original creative act of the demiurge. Third, it is argued that the description of the world-soul’s binding to the world-body entails its conception as a spatially extended entity, which, in turn, explains of the possibility of an interaction between the corporeal world and its soul.

In the Trading Zone

In this article, we describe and discuss the negotiations and processes of carrying out a science curriculum-based research project with multiple stakeholders, including an 8th grade science teacher/soccer coach, and 24 student-participants from a middle school in the South-eastern United States. Drawing on the theoretical notion of trading zones, we focus on the negotiations, commitments, and collaborations that took place in order to: (a) teach science to Latino students in the context of an after-school soccer program, (b) develop curriculum and (c) carry out a research program in which both material things and physical spaces are recognized as central to this process. Our study presents these experiences and processes in relation to the characteristics of the human and non-human elements involved in this work. We conclude with a set of recommendations for pre-service and in-service science teachers developing science activities as part of a broader curriculum and teaching science to middle school students in multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multicultural settings.

Harmonizing Loss Accounting with Local Cultural and Religious Principles

This research aims to construct loss accounting practices by "binthe biluhuta" sellers based on local wisdom and religious values. This study uses a spiritual paradigm with an Islamic ethnomethodological approach. This approach develops modern ethnomethodology under a secular (interpretive) paradigm. The author conducted observations and interviews with residents to obtain local cultural data. The data obtained was validated using the source triangulation method. The study found that sharing, among others, is a seller's way of avoiding losses. In Gorontalo's Islamic culture, elders often convey these values through advice dilla bo ilaato binthe wawu pale—the meaning of the family statement. The results of this study indicate that the loss accounting implemented by binthe biluhuta sellers is not limited to material things (money) but conditions with local cultural values and faith in the Creator. The theoretical implication of the results of this study is that local wisdom contained in loss accounting implemented by binthe biluhuta sellers can be combined with loss accounting theory to make it more holistic. The concept of loss accounting by binthe biluhuta can be used by sellers with a materialist, humanist, and religious spirit when building a business.

عبا دات کا میقاتی تصور :سامی ادیان کے تناظر میں ایک مطالعہ

Worship is an integral part of every religion. Now a days there is not any region in world where worship is not practiced in one way or another. Islam is a natural religion. Everything comes under the cover of Islam including Human Rights, Commands of Allah, human relations and interactions with each other etc. All commands, rights and actions are as per path of nature. However, other religions are lacking such kind of delicate balance of nature in every aspect of life. On one side excess and other side deviation is observed. Some religions consider material things core of life while others completely deny it. Islam kept balance between spirit and body. It commands as per requirement of each part. It has not refused one part and encouraged other part of it. Such kind of access and deviations are possible in secular systems but not under the Divine Religion of Islam where everything is written on “Tablet of Heaven”. Therefore there are no chances of such kind of error in this divine religion of Islam. He has been given as much importance and priority as he has the right and demand. It is possible for the human mind and free thinking to be completely inclined towards the other side by denying one aspect, but it is absolutely not possible in the divine system of Islam. Because here are the commands of the Creator of the slaves instead of the slaves and like His essence, His commands are also free from all defects.

Making Vessels for the Dead: Pottery-Making Practices, Chaîne Opératoire and the Use of Grog (Crushed Sherds) as a Technological and Cultural Choice during Late and Inca Periods in the Northwestern Argentine Region (Southern Andes)

Abstract Pottery-making practices have been approached by the use and application of the concept of chaîne opératoire in different parts of the world. This concept has allowed researchers to re-evaluate the social dimensions of technological studies as well as to explore aspects related to technical and social identity of ancient and modern artisans. In this article, we examine the use of grog (crushed sherds) to temper specific ceramic vessels (infant funerary urns) as material practice often used by ancient potters during Late (c. 950–1450 AD) and Inca (c. 1450–1532 AD) Periods in the Northwestern Argentine (NWA) region. The research shows that this practice can be understood as a ritual material practice with a long-standing tradition in the NWA region. Additionally, several alternative interpretations of this practice are explored in the light of different – animistic – understandings of how the Andean world works, and how people interact each other, with material things, and with landscape.

TEACHER’S EFFORTS IN OVERCOMING PAI LEARNING DIFFICULTIES JUDGING FROM THE LEARNING STYLES OF STUDENTS AT SMA PATRA MANDIRI 01 PALEMBANG

Learning difficulties can occur if the teacher is not qualified in taking learning methods. Therefore, teachers need to facilitate learning in the classroom according to the learning styles of students. This study aims to determine the learning difficulties experienced by students as well as complement previous studies on the efforts that teachers can make in overcoming these difficulties. This type of research is a case study. Data collection techniques use observation, interviews and documentation. Data validity techniques use triangulation techniques. The results showed the form of PAI (Pendidikan Agama Islam) learning difficulties of visual students in the form of difficulty reading the Qur'an and slow to understand learning material, auditory students namely difficulty reading the Qur'an, difficulty writing Arabic letters, and slow in memorization, and kinesthetic students namely difficulty reading the Qur'an and slow in memorization. The efforts of PAI teachers in overcoming visual learners' learning difficulties are using audio-visual learning media when explaining material and marking important things with color variations. To overcome the learning difficulties of auditory students, namely using audio-visual learning media when explaining learning material, inviting students to read aloud, and using discussion methods and group assignments. Meanwhile, to overcome learning difficulties, kinesthetic learners are doing practice.

Beyond Idi Amin: urban militarization, Africanization and materiality in Kampalans’ experiences of expulsion

ABSTRACT This article explores the role that material things, such as space, buildings, and all kinds of commodities, played in how Kampalans experienced the expulsion of the Asians under Idi Amin in early 1970s and its aftermaths. It argues that the materiality of things – in everyday urban items, goods, buildings and urban spaces – was at the centre of how Kampalans experienced expulsion; with expulsion, particular items, commodities, spaces, and buildings gained new meanings, and the government as well as Kampalans transformed the prevailing notions of value attached to them. It draws on material artefacts, such as personal possessions and news clippings, and the oral histories of the men and women who lived in post-expulsion Kampala. The article shows how material goods and spaces transformed significantly and fluctuated as sources of both power and vulnerability for Kampalans during the 1970s and 1980s.

PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF DEFINING LIFE TASKS IN WARTIME

The study is devoted to the specifics of defining life tasks in conditions of war and personal resources that help in solving them. It was established that the most common life tasks, which were determined by the respondents turned out to be: self-education, education, development, self-development, and self-improvement. Material things and maintaining work were no less important, as well as helping others in various ways and in various spheres of life. In the conditions of the war tasks that ensure the preservation of the psychological state, mental health, and survival in the physical sense, as well as the preservation of family relationships and mutual support in the family, turned out to be significant. It was established that the factors that help in solving the specified tasks that respondents singled out are the following: personal traits and qualities, the main of which are perseverance, stress resistance, responsibility, indomitability, and self-confidence; support of surrounding; a sense of security and finding a resource in various ways of activity. It was also revealed that the respondents are aware of existing problems and obstacles preventing the solution of certain life tasks. A significant part of the respondents identified the war that lasts on the territory of our state and the associated with the war situation of uncertainty, feeling of physical danger and threat to life, presence of constant stress, syndrome of delayed life, evacuation abroad, uncertainty in future and instability as the main factor. As a result of empirical research, it was also determined bright, in respondents’ opinion, life events affected the personality of the researched. The fourth part of the respondents described the beginning of the war and events related to its continuation as a traumatic situation that affected their personalities. A significant part of the respondents identified events in which the evacuation process is shown, as well as their own return and return of relatives and friends to the country or to their places. The sixth part of the respondents avoided answering this question. We assume that this is a manifestation of protective mechanisms in a prolonged crisis situation. However, this assumption requires further research.

Materiality and Marginalia across the World: The Role of Things in Christopher Columbus’s Annotations on Marco Polo

The recension of Marco Polo’s Devisament dou monde—an incunable of Francesco Pipino’s Latin translation titled De consuetudinibus et conditionibus orientalium regionum—used by Christopher Columbus is one of five annotated books known to have survived from the explorer’s library. The exemplar contains in its margins copious notes and drawings attributable to Columbus himself and other members of his immediate circle. These marginalia reveal that Columbus was a highly distinctive reader of content transmitted in the Poline textual tradition. He rarely dwelt on topographic, ethnographic or historical information. Rather, he was almost exclusively concerned with material things. His notes consist of brief references either to single objects or to lists of multiple objects associated with specific places. Cross-referencing allowed him to highlight similarities and differences between the regions of the known world, as well as to organise these regions hierarchically depending on the potential value of their manufactured and natural resources to himself and his fellow Europeans. He placed particular emphasis on mineral deposits and other substances such as gold, pearls and spices that he apparently considered to have an especially elevated intrinsic value. This article examines the revision, dissemination and especially interpretation of Polo’s late thirteenth-century work at a particular historical moment in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In so doing, it draws attention to Columbus’s contribution to a shift in the relationship between materiality and cosmography that would prove to be of key importance to modern colonialism.

Doing isolation – Caring Citizens. A cross-country comparative analysis of patient experiences with isolation practices during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this article is to investigate isolation experiences of individuals affected by Covid-19 and explore how care practices were enacted or upheld under the particular policies of the pandemic. Conceptually we draw upon Foucault's notion of biopolitics and scholarship on ‘care practices’ and ‘carescapes’. We are interested in how theoretical ideas such as ‘containing the virus’ or ‘flattening the curve,’ as part of policies of ‘pandemic management,’ shaped lived realities and influenced practices and understandings of care. We reviewed qualitative interviews with individuals who were ill with Covid-19 in 2020/2021 from seven countries that we analyzed comparatively across emerging themes with a Foucauldian lens on biopolitics.The idea of ‘carescapes,’ suggests that ‘care’ and ‘policy’ intermingle, which allow us to bring to the fore what is silenced through the biopolitics of Covid-19. Carescapes are the embodied places of care where policies and regulations traverse from public into private spaces, effectively re-configuring the latter. To ‘do’ isolation in the context of Covid-19, carescapes were assembled with the help of material things such as, masks, disinfectants, doors and schedules; these served as boundaries that had to be sustained and navigated. ‘Doing isolation’ therefore presents a form of biopolitics that relies on individual citizenship and complex care practices required to chart the terrain created by the polices of the pandemic. Doing isolation was especially challenging because policies about safe spaces and safe practices were regularly changed as governments struggled to devise policies to contain the pandemic.

Virtual property from the position of the digital intellectual economy: theoretical foundations of digital law

The article examines the formation of a humandigitalenvironment as a society using digital technologies. It is studied from the standpoint of a real and virtual or material and relatively abstract environment where therights to intellectual property objects dominate as a digital right of a person when using digital tools that enable the use of various digital technologies, as well as fundamental digital rights that require a new understanding. It is noted that the right of virtual property should be distinguished from the right of intellectual property and defined as a specific type of property right. The virtualization of intellectual property is considered as a process of transition from digital intellectual property to digital virtual intellectual property with the corresponding signs of the development or creation of new objects that have an economic value equivalent to material things. In the conditions of digital individualization, the main feature of property rights is the domination of a person over a virtual thing. Virtual space allows the owner of virtual objects to own, use and dispose of them. On the basis of the virtualization of property in the system of using technological platforms, a human-digital system is formed using the latest digital technologies and digital communication with the observance of digital law. Amore complex phenomenon is considered in which virtual owner(s) or implicit owner(s) appear, relying on artificial intelligence. In this regard, the rights are dissolved in a system of transformed computer programs and digital technologies which is gainingpace of development of the digital human rights to digital objects or instruments of virtual property. They are replaced by a virtual or conditional author, a digital administrator as a digital person or a subject of digital legal relations where the value of the real right is lost as the domination of a person over a virtual thing, and only commercial economic dominates an interest that may take the form of a monopoly in the market of digital services. Virtual property is becoming the main legal construct in the system of the digital economy of intellectual property, where there are distinctive features of virtual intellectual property rights in relation to real intellectual property rights.

Makna Bersukacitalah Berdasarkan Filipi 4:4-7 Dan Refleksi Teologisnya Terhadap Orang Kristen Masa Kini

This research aims to describe the meaning of rejoice contained in Philippians 4:4-7 and reflect it on the lives of Christians today. In this writing, a qualitative method is used with an exegetical approach to draw meaning through the images that Paul has given through his writing, then the results of the interpretation and conclusions are expected to provide the right understanding for believers. The initial understanding of Christians assumes that if everything goes according to what is desired, it is desirable that they will rejoice and Christians imagine that joy is living without problems or just having fun and measuring this joy only by the amount of material things. The results of the analysis show that rejoicing cannot be separated from all His advice and rules and rejoicing is not just having fun or living without problems, but rejoicing in every situation of abundance, lack, then all things can be borne in Him who gives strength ( Phil. 4:13). Where the meaning of rejoice is expressed by being grateful in all circumstances, meaning both in hardship and happiness, disappointment, trials, suffering, which is implemented through friendly, kind-hearted actions towards everyone regardless of whether they are rich or poor and there is no place to worry and give up. everything to God by praying. So in this way, Christians who can do this will receive grace from God, namely God's peace which preserves and protects human hearts and minds, where disappointments, trials and suffering will be transformed by God into salvation. This research concludes that the meaning of rejoice is a command written by Paul for every Christian which can be seen from his gratitude and is implemented through actions that are friendly, kind to others and that there is no room for excessive worry and prayer. So that in the end you will obtain God's peace and God, the source of peace, will guard the hearts and minds of believers.

Political rallies as assemblages for transportation and communication: the case of the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign

Although rallies are essential to political communication campaigns, they have been little studied. Thus, this article presents an ethnographic observation of the Democratic campaign rallies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Two research questions structure the paper: How do material things—including human bodies—and their transportation structure the production and reproduction of rallies as political communication systems? What kind of political communication assemblages constructs the materiality of rallies? The text presents three conclusions. 1) A substantial part of the materiality of these rallies was composed of human bodies and many other things that were transported to a specific space to have copresent interactions with other bodies. 2) The production of these rallies required creating an infrastructural space built upon transporting a myriad of material objects to a specific place. These objects constituted the material bases for developing these rallies as a set of political communication practices. 3) These rallies can be conceptualised as mobile and itinerant assemblages for transportation and communication. These rallies were a means of transportation that moved the candidate’s body across a vast territory and a (political) media of communication designed to transcend the time and space in which these events were produced.

The Nous Seeing its Own Light According to Evagrius Ponticus

Abstract Evagrius of Pontus (345–399 AD) presents in his spiritual doctrine the concept of “pure prayer,” that is, prayer not only devoid of any contact with material things but also divorced from any concrete image in the νοῦς (i. e., the mind/intellect). Upon reaching this state of deep purification, the νοῦς sees during such a prayer the light of God and also perceives himself as radiant. Evagrius specifies that the νοῦς sees itself in the colour of the sapphire or in sky-blue, or even as a star. Scholars have been asking for a long time whether, for Evagrius, this light originated within the mind itself, or came from God. It seems that monk of Pontus joins these two lights together, although considering them always as separate. The light of νοῦς itself is but a reflection of the divine light, in the same way like the moon reflects the light of the sun. Even if the νοῦς is not the source of its own light, nevertheless its light is real. In a time of deep spiritual union with God, His light illuminates the human νοῦς and turns it into radiance.