Intermediation: Arts' Contribution to General Integrative Theory

Intermediation approaches integration via medium, as does interdisciplinarity via field/content, while both involve concerns of methodology. "Media" are distinguished by the perceptual acts required for their constitution (cf McLuhan, 1964) - by the relationship to the body which they institute. Intermediation integrates, without eliminating, multiple perceptual acts and bodily relationships. Thus hypertext tends not to be an inter-medium, because its output is usually in one medium (video or print). while classrooms are almost always inter-media of print, spatio/temporal design, performance, and imagery (Carp, 1991). Artists, designers, and anthropologists of material culture have most thoroughly and consistently investigated intermediation. Artists and designers adopt intermediation as a communicative strategy; anthropologists posit intermediation as a site for cultural resistance, post-colonial creativity and non-Eurocentric wisdoms

Lost in the Desert: A Review of Mark C. Taylor's Disfiguring Art, Architecture, Religion

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Semiotrix Deux

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Rereading Coomaraswamy

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Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, Feeling, Seeing: The Role of the Arts in Making Sense Out of the Academy

Our bodies provide keen metaphors for the predicament of the disciplines and the pharmakon (both remedy and poison) provided by interdisciplinarity. Each human body is single, complex but unified, whole. Yet we have come to experience our bodies as composed of parts (like machines) and to fetishize some of these parts (particularly primary and secondary female parts) as separable, distinguishable from the whole not only abstractly and analytically, but practically and in terms of value. Our "environments," the ecosystems in which we participate and on which we rely for our existence are, as we call them, systems, complexly interrelated in every place and at every moment. There are no "parts" in them, only participants. Yet we have come to experience them not as webs of mutual belonging but as domains of paradoxical dominion and subservience. [From the first paragraphs]]]> 1995 English http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Carp_Richard_1995_Hearing.X.pdf oai:libres.uncg.edu/4614 2016-03-21T08:24:15Z ASU Creating an Image Bank for Teaching World Religion: Challenging and Reifying Structures of Knowledge Carp, Richard M. NC DOCKS at Appalachian State University <![CDATA[Creating an indexed set of slides for teaching the academic study of religion reveals how existing structures of power/knowlcdge shape the frameworks from which new knowledge emerges, and how that knowledge may affect those structures. Although cultural, political and personal history impinge upon every aspect of the project, the data and the challenge of organizing them reveal meaningful world-experiences that lie outside the capacity of our knowledge structures, tending to transform or destabilize them

Relying on the Kindness of Strangers: CEDD’s Report on Hiring, Tenure, Promotion in IDS

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Integrative Praxes: Learning from Multiple Knowledge Formations

After adopting and extending the “test of truth as effective action” that Newell proposes in “A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies,” this article proposes “living well” as the goal of knowledge processes. With this in mind, it explores disciplinarity—the unspoken assumption underlying Newell’s argument. Disciplinarity is discovered to be an historical and cultural phenomenon, demonstrating the partial and situated character of all knowledge formations, rather than a privileged site of especially valid knowing. Alternatives are offered to the notions of interdisciplinarity and discipline. Integrative praxes (the alternative to interdisciplinarity) are practices, informed by theory and differentiated by existential situation, aimed at living well. Knowledge formations (the alternative to disciplines) are both bodies of knowledge and processes of coming to know that contain within themselves dynamic patterns from which they have been generated and by which they will be transformed. They are ecological, developing in relation with other developing entities and composed in part of material and structures taken from them. The proposal is that living well is best served by seeking integrative praxes that learn from multiple knowledge formations and fostering ongoing conversation among these praxes

[A review of] "Masked Metaphors: Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica, by John H. Markman and Roberta T. Markman"

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Teaching Religion and Material Culture

Because religions discipline and interpret bodies; create and define sacred spaces; generate, adore and study images in all media; regulate the intake of food; structure temporal experience; and in general interpenetrate and are permeated by the cultural landscapes in which they exist, religious studies must engage material religion and religious materiality. We encounter bodily realities of other religions and cultures through our own disciplined bodies, which are both necessary and problematic for those encounters. This article connects theoretical and practical resources needed to help students discover the stuff of religion – flesh and blood, bread and wine, songs and sound, knives and body parts, movement and music, human bodies, time, space, cosmograms composed of and composing the bodies of the religious – uncovering the materiality of religion, existing underneath, alongside, without, and amidst religious textuality and verbal ideation