Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

This is a chronological comparative study of five visual artefacts spanning about a millennium in Chinese history and retrieved from various sources included in the mid-fifteenth century collection called in English the Taoist Canon. All five specimens are basically titled “Taiping fu” 太平符 in Chinese, literally “Great Peace Symbol”. By briefly in…[Read more]

The Centre for Post Digital Cultures invites you to its second annual conference, which will explore the phenomenon of ‘Pirate Care’. The term Pirate Care (Graziano, 2018) condenses two processes that are particularly visible at present. On the one hand, basic care provisions that were previously considered cornerstones of social life are now…[Read more]

Introduction to special issue of IJHS: The Gift in India in Theory and Practice

During nonemergency appointments at traditional sites of āyurvedic healthcare in Kerala, South India, classically trained Brāhmaṇa physicians and their patients seldom exchange anything of substance (whether medicinal or monetary). The physician-patient interface instead routinely involves an exchange of knowledge. Interactions between phy…[Read more]

As the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical…[Read more]

For at least the last twenty years, scholarly attention has been drawn to the numerous depictions of cancer in comic books as well as oncology’s use of the comics medium (Rhode and Connor, 2012). However, little in the way of comprehensive analysis has been attempted, especially in terms of the various genres addressed. In this presentation, a ca…[Read more]

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian lit…[Read more]

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills,…[Read more]

A brief piece on what I call “diagnosis deafness.” In short, to depict the sudden disorientation and shock of being diagnosed with cancer, comics artists frequently employ a visual rhetoric usually reserved for instances of deafness. At least momentarily – during an immensely significant moment in the life of the character – words fail, dev…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: ‘Samuel Beckett y la Narración Reflexiva’ es un estudio en profundidad de la escritura experimental de Beckett, en especial de la trilogía novelística ‘Molloy,’ ‘Malone Dies,’ and ‘The Unnamable,’ desde la perspectiva de la narratología estructuralista y las teorías estructuralistas sobre la enunciación. El segundo capít…[Read more]

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

An interpretation of the Red Mammoth Panel in Chauvet linking Chauvet to Lascaux in a single ritual landscape

Bibliography for One Godz – A Peoples History of the Upper Paleolithic

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

This paper draws on chinese folklore, chinese medical theory, chinese materia medica and western ethnobotany and comparative religion to construct a theory of how the common infestation of ganoderma lucidum on peach trees in China would have led to an association of peach trees with immortality, daoist alchemy and the ability to vanquish ghosts…[Read more]

The Index of Deities and Demons is the heart of One Godz. This Index presents almost all Deities and Demons represented on the cave walls of Chauvet and Lascaux along with their defining Basis Points drawn from Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. This chapter demonstrates the actual process of attaching meaning to symbolism while mediating subjectivity.

This Primer provides a methodology for mitigating subjectivity when attaching meaning to preholocene rock art. It provides an introduction to basic syntax, grammar, and some vocabulary. It identifies four non-verbal languages of the Upper Paleo.

German version of Parables of Care (2017). Translated into German by Dr Andrea Hacker. Parables of Care presents true stories of creative responses to dementia care, told by carers, taken from a group of over 100 case studies available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk/.

Creativity, emotional intelligence and common sense are amply shown in these…[Read more]

Why are academic and policy discourses on child soldiers relatively silent on sexual violence against boys in armed groups? Drawing from the experiences of boys forcibly conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), this Chapter seeks to transcend the gendered language of sexual slavery, concubines, forced pregnancy and rape. Most sexual a…[Read more]