Life Beside Itself
eBook - PDF

Life Beside Itself

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Life Beside Itself

About this book

In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else, " and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.

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Yes, you can access Life Beside Itself by Lisa Stevenson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Sciences sociales & Anthropologie. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
University of California Press
Year
2014
Print ISBN
9780520282605
eBook ISBN
9780520958555
Edition
1
Topic
Sciences sociales
Subtopic
Anthropologie
46 
| 
Chapter 
1
an 
Inuit 
wards 
of 
the 
state 
and 
their 
mode 
of 
“being” 
or 
“being-attuned” 
was 
destroyed—the 
images 
that 
their 
sons 
and 
daughters 
describe 
above 
stubbornly 
register 
the 
uniqueness 
and 
irreducibility 
of 
that 
being. 
Still, 
the 
images 
in 
this 
chapter 
are 
not 
images 
that 
carry 
some 
kind 
of 
redemptive 
force. 
Peutogak 
“gets 
criminal,” 
Kaujak 
dies, 
and 
the 
state 
disappears 
her 
body. 
Sakiassie 
suffers. 
I 
haven’t 
been 
able 
to 
find 
any 
trace 
of 
Kaujak 
in 
the 
archive, 
although 
I’ll 
continue 
to 
look. 
Allowing 
our 
thought 
to 
remain 
embedded 
in 
the 
images 
that 
produce 
it 
rather 
than 
letting 
ourselves 
get 
deflected 
onto 
a 
series 
of 
facts 
(or 
statistics) 
that 
help 
us 
“voyage 
a 
little 
past 
the 
emotions,” 
means 
to 
stay 
with 
Kau-
jak’s 
death 
as 
Sakiassie 
does, 
to 
feel 
the 
ways 
we 
too 
remain 
connected 
to 
her, 
through 
the 
images 
her 
grandson 
gives 
us. 
Thus 
it 
is 
that 
Kaujak’s 
image 
takes 
hold 
of 
me, 
registering 
the 
knowledge 
that 
we 
are 
the 
kinds 
of 
beings 
that 
die, 
and 
that 
sometimes 
even 
at 
the 
moment 
of 
death 
we 
can 
be 
misrecognized, 
dismissed 
as 
an 
animal, 
or—perhaps 
even 
worse—dismissed 
as 
a 
fact.
31

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Life Beside Itself
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Prologue: Between Two Women
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. 1. Facts and Images
  10. 2. Cooperating
  11. 3. Anonymous Care
  12. 4. Life-of-the-Name
  13. 5. Why Two Clocks?
  14. 6. Song
  15. Epilogue: Writing on Styrofoam
  16. Notes
  17. References
  18. List of Illustrations
  19. Index