lets update this blog

i am going to add my comps list here. (i actually did it but as distinct pages on the right upper side)

written exam

in two days i'll have my written exam...
i hope all the light of the universe will guide my hands...

update

como veran no estoy actualizando nada este blog...
en unas semanas tengo que dar el examen...
tal vez despues meta todo lo que lei para el examen en este blog.
abrazos
rafa

as you may guess i am not updating this blog...
in a couple of weeks i will be sitting for my comps...
may be after i will add everything that i have been reading for this exam in this blog.
cheers
rafa

Bauman 1992 Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies

Bauman, Zygmunt
1992 Mortality, immortality, and other life strategies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
For Bauman, common knowledge about death, which he considers is provoked by a universal awareness of mortality, offers the inspiration and the catalytic for cultural creativity, and the drive behind transcendence. Bauman suggests that “culture is about expanding temporal and spatial boundaries of being, with a view to dismantling them altogether… the first activity of culture relates to survival-pushing back the moment of death, extending the life-span” (5). Bauman considers that the same awareness of mortality pushes the cultural production of the notion of immortality; he says, “Mortality is ours without asking-but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death” (7). Therefore, the social and cultural production of immortality is the central foundation of life’s meaning, producing the conversion of biological death into a cultural object, which in turn “offers the primary building material for social institutions and behavioral patterns crucial to the reproduction of societies in their distinctive forms” (9). Bauman finds two key strategies to deal with death and dying, “the modern strategy”, which dismantles mortality by overcoming the unsolvable issue of death into many particular problems of health and illness, which are “soluble in theory”; and “the postmodern strategy”, which dismantles immortality through transformation of life into a regular preparation for “reversible death”, a change of “temporary disappearance” for the irreversible end of life.

Lock, Margaret. 1997 Displacing Suffering

Lock, M. M. 1997. Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North American and Japan. In Social Suffering. A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. M. Lock, eds. Pp. 207-244. Berkeley: University of California Press.
In this comparative study of social and medical attitudes towards medicalized death and organ transplant medicine Lock situates the brain death debate at the heart of her analysis. Lock compares two sites, US and Japan, in which technological development of transplant medicine and different professional and social contexts allow or preclude the social production of organ transplantation. In both contexts notions of personhood, mortality and immortality are central to the public debate and the general approval or rejection of brain death as a defined marker of the end of one’s life, and the justification for organ removal and, then, transplantation. Informed consent is also a key part of this displacement of suffering (quote: “a fist step is to recognize how easily suffering can be used in the service of ideological and political ends” (238)). For Lock, in Japan, the individual suffering and the dying person, and the repulsion to receive an organ from a person beyond the “natural” kin group may produce the lack of public support to organ transplantation. Whereas in US, the notion of “gift of life,” with its inherent altruism, allegedly give meaning to the individual death, and, thus, support the ethics of transplant. Another important issue is the role of technology within society, Lock says that in Japan “A tension between technology as both creator and destroyer of culture is evident” (231). Whereas in US, bio-technology is a central force that propels a highly corporative and non-inclusive biomedicine. For Lock, there is a need for a middle ground that avoid “the silencing of individual suffering in the name of nationalism, or professional or governmental interest” (237).