Author: Michael W. Thomas File Type: pdf Over the past decade, Ethiopian films have come to dominate the screening schedules of the many cinemas in Ethiopias capital city of Addis Ababa, as well as other urban centers. Despite undergoing an unprecedented surge in production and popularity in Ethiopia and in the diaspora, this phenomenon has been broadly overlooked by African film and media scholars and Ethiopianists alike. This collection of essays and interviews on cinema in Ethiopia represents the first work of its kind and establishes a broad foundation for furthering research on this topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and bringing together contributions from both Ethiopian and international scholars, the collection offers new and alternative narratives for the development of screen media in Africa. The books relevance reaches far beyond its specific locale of Ethiopia as contributions focus on a broad range of topicssuch as commercial and genre films, diaspora filmmaking, and the role of women in the film industrywhile simultaneously discussing multiple forms of screen media, from satellite TV to video films. Bringing both historical and contemporary moments of cinema in Ethiopia into the critical frame offers alternative considerations for the already radically changing critical paradigm surrounding the understandings of African cinema. **

Author: Sherry Turkle File Type: pdf In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a tool, but as part of our social and psychological lives she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. Technology, she writes, catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture -- to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners -- people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think -- about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.) Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms -- how this happens, and what it means for all of us -- is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.

Author: Richard Baxstrom File Type: pdf Benjamin Christensens *Haxan *(The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Haxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female hysterics and the mentally ill. In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how Haxan opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. Haxan is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of documentary and fiction. Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensens attempt to tame the irrationality of the witch risked validating the very nonsense that such an effort sought to master and dispel. Haxan is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless know to be there. **Review Realizing the Witch is a highly original, exciting, and important book. With this work, Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers establish themselves as pioneering scholars in the emerging field between media studies and the history of science.--Henning Schmidgen, Professor of Media Studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany This is a significant and groundbreaking work that is likely to make important and lasting contributions to the various fields of scholarship that it engages and to stimulate debate about the past, present and future of anthropology.--Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota Baxstrom and Meyers book is more than a meticulous analysis of Benjamin Christensens masterpiece Haxan, more than a model monograph. It finds and charts undiscovered tracks in the field of film studies, tracks that the authors invest with methods of analysis inspired by Warburgian iconology. In the light of their work, the film becomes a privileged way of accessing the history of discourses and representations.--Philippe-Alain Michaud, Director and Film Curator, Musee national dart moderne---Centre Georges Pompidou Benjamin Christensens 1922 film Haxan is well known for some of the wrong reasons. Realizing the Witch rescues Haxan from the sensationalist prurience of the entertainment market, and subjects it to careful historical scrutiny and a lively close reading that exploits the resources of film history and theory. The authors explore Christensens use of his contemporaries research into witchcraft, psychology, and anthropology and refract their analysis through up-to-date scholarship on these topics. They conclude that Christensen hoped to materialize the figure of the Witch, setting a trap that would possess the audience. The implications of this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to researchers and teachers in all these fields, not least the history of witchcraft studies.--Walter Stephens, Johns Hopkins University Baxstrom and Meyers have a keen eye for the wondrous otherness of Christensens work, never missing an opportunity to theorize the films struggles with the ontological slipperiness of the witch, cinema as absent presence, and questions of recording, witnessing, and irrationality in twenty-first century science and culture.--Alison Griffiths, City University of New York About the Author Richard Baxstrom is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Houses in Motion The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia. Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy and the coeditor of Fordhams Forms of Living series.

Author: Antonino Falduto File Type: pdf In the past few decades a remarkable change occurred in Kant scholarship the other Kant has been discovered, i.e. the one of the doctrine of virtue and the anthropology. Through the rediscovery of Kants investigations into the empirical and sensuous aspects of knowledge, our understanding of Kants philosophy has been enriched by an important element that has allowed researchers to correct supposed deficiencies in Kants work. In addition, further questions concerning the nature of Kants philosophy itself have been formulated the more the other Kant comes to the fore, the stronger the question concerning the connection between pure philosophy and empirical investigation becomes. The aim of this study is to show that the psychological and anthropological interpretations of Kants pure philosophy are not convincing and at the same time to illustrate some connections between his critical and anthropological investigations by means of an analysis of the theory of the faculties. Against both a transcendental psychological and an anthropological reading, the book presents Kants theory of the facultiesas a constitutive part of his critical philosophy andshows that there is a close connection between Kants pure philosophy and his moral aesthetic. **About the Author Antonino Falduto, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.