The artist discusses the work presented in The Secret Life of Things, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 18th through 22nd, 2013. The exhibition consists of sixteen illustrations (four of these are digitally enhanced photographs) and one animation that show the artist’s interest in bringing household objects to life. Pieces in the exhibition can be characterized as humorous with a strong narrative and attention to details. Savić’s ideas are based on traditional education with contemporary influences. All printed work is twenty inches wide, sixteen inches tall, framed, and hung in one side of the gallery. The other side was reserved for an animated artist statement projected onto the gallery walls. This thesis discusses the most important influences and doctrines about art that support and further explain the presented work.

This thesis is about the heritage in Vientiane. In an attempt to go beyond a more traditional descriptive approach, the study aims at bringing forward a discussion about the definition, or rather the multiplicity of definitions, of the concept of heritage as such. The unavoidabe tension emanating from a modern western frame of thought being applied to the geographical and cultural setting of the study provides an opportunity to develop a criticism of some of the assumptions underlying our current definitions of heritage. For this particular study, heritage is defined as to include stories, places and things. It is a heritage that is complex and ambiguous, because the stories are parallel, the definitions and perceptions of place are manifold and contested, and the things and their meaning appear altered, depending on what approach to materiality is used. The objective is not to propose how to identify and manage such a complex heritage. Rather, it is about what causes this complexity and ambiguity and what is in between the stories, places and things. In addition, the study aims to critically deconstruct the contemporary heritage discourse, which privileges material authenticity, form and fabric and the idea that heritage values are universal and should be preserved for the future and preferably forever. In Laos, Buddhism dominates as religious practice. In this context, the notion of material impermanence also governs the perception of reality. Approaches to materiality in Buddhism are related to the general ideas that things are important from a contemporary perspective and primarily as containers for spiritual values, that the spiritual values carry the connection to the past, and that heritage is primarily spiritual in nature and has little to do with physical structure and form. By exploring the concepts of restoration, destruction and consumption in such a perspective, we understand that preservation and restoration are active processes of materialisation. We also understand that destruction and consumption are necessary for the appreciation of certain heritage expressions, and that heritage is being constantly created. With this understanding, this book is an argument for challenging contemporary western heritage discourse and question its fundamental ideology of preservationism.

Kepler is mainly known among historians of science due to his astronomical theories and his approaches to problems having to do with philosophy of science and ontology. This thesis attempts to contribute to Kepler studies by providing a comprehensive discussion of a topic hitherto not really considered, namely Kepler’s theory of the soul, a general theory of knowledge or epistemology whose central problem is what makes knowledge possible—rather than what makes knowledge true, as happens in the case of Descartes’s and Bacon’s epistemologies. Kepler’s theory consists of four issues: the theory of the different sorts of soul—i.e. the human soul, the animal soul, the vegetable soul, and the Earth soul—concerning their faculties, the differences and the resemblances that emerge among them, the relation they maintain with their own bodies and the world, and the distinction soul-world. The thesis discusses these issues from a historical perspective, that is, it reconstructs the way they appear in three periods of Kepler’s career: the period prior to the publication of the Mysterium Cosmographicum, the period going from 1596 to 1611, and the harmonic period. Finally, Kepler’s epistemology is briefly contrasted with Descartes’s and Bacon’s in order to suggest why Kepler’s is philosophically interesting and valuable. / October 2006

This thesis explores animic and perspectivist notions in the context of Nordic Seamanship with a biocultural framework. It examines the history, cosmologies, terminology, practices, physiology and phenomenology of Nordic crafts and arts of boat building, rope-making, seafaring and fishing. Rope-making, its molecular basis and the social organization in a boat reveal the way in which physical and social bodies coalesce in the harmonies of the differing intentionalities of their constituents, forming symmetric hierarchical structures, which are at the basis of Nordic egalitarian and individualistic society. Through the enskillment in seafaring and fishing, we explore the perspectival transformations involved in nausea; the development of sea-legs (the attunement to the rhythms of the sea), fishiness (empathy with the fish) and the meiths (a system navigation, perception and theorization of the coastal environment), showing the role of normal microbial biota in the perception and interactions with the environment. Based on the experience at sea, it is suggested that the ontologies developed through the interactions of seamanship constituted a cosmology that influenced the development of the Medieval Perspectivist theories in Natural Philosophy, Norse poetry and hermeneutics, which were means of secularization of pagan knowledge in the Nordic conversion to Christianity. Elaborating on some aspects of medieval perspectivist theory through their comparison with Amerindian animic theories and the biology of the eye it is suggested that its morphology entails an entoptic (inner-vision) microscopy, affording a means of visual perception and interaction with microbial entities. Finally, with the aid of a Treponema pallidum, a transatlantic traveller with a copious Amerindian mythology, it is shown that animic notions about spirits, dwarves and gods are coherent with an ecological physiology that takes into account microbial sociality and their role, both in health and in disease, in our metabolism, perception and relations with the environment in particular ecological communities. In so doing, it demonstrates that animic perspectivist ontologies are compatible with a naturalism that takes into account intentionality as a generalized physical property constituent of beings and things, and therefore sociality as generalized characteristic of the interactions between beings/things in the environment.

Kepler is mainly known among historians of science due to his astronomical theories and his approaches to problems having to do with philosophy of science and ontology. This thesis attempts to contribute to Kepler studies by providing a comprehensive discussion of a topic hitherto not really considered, namely Kepler’s theory of the soul, a general theory of knowledge or epistemology whose central problem is what makes knowledge possible—rather than what makes knowledge true, as happens in the case of Descartes’s and Bacon’s epistemologies. Kepler’s theory consists of four issues: the theory of the different sorts of soul—i.e. the human soul, the animal soul, the vegetable soul, and the Earth soul—concerning their faculties, the differences and the resemblances that emerge among them, the relation they maintain with their own bodies and the world, and the distinction soul-world. The thesis discusses these issues from a historical perspective, that is, it reconstructs the way they appear in three periods of Kepler’s career: the period prior to the publication of the Mysterium Cosmographicum, the period going from 1596 to 1611, and the harmonic period. Finally, Kepler’s epistemology is briefly contrasted with Descartes’s and Bacon’s in order to suggest why Kepler’s is philosophically interesting and valuable.

This thesis explores how Katuic-speaking indigenous groups in the Central Annamitic Cordillera of Vietnam and Laos understand their environment – hills, streams and forest. Katuic eco-cosmology assumes that the natural landscape is imbued with spirit agents, with whom people must continuously communicate lest misfortune will strike and their livelihoods fail. The thesis posits the hypothesis that these spirit beliefs, and a variety of taboo notions accompanying them, can be interpreted as expressions of a complex socio-environmental adaptation. Today, the indigenous groups in the study region are confronted with a massive development- and modernisation push on two fronts – that of the global development industry on the one hand, and the implementation of national development policies and programs as part of the high-modernist state project in communist Vietnam and Laos, on the other. A second objective of the thesis, then, is to examine the effects of this multi-layered and multi-scaled confrontation on indigenous cosmology, livelihood and landscape. It is argued, this confrontation at the development frontier can be conceived of as an interface between different ontologies or reality posits – one animist, articulated in a relational stance towards the landscape; the other, a naturalist or rationalist ontology, expressed as an objectivist stance towards nature and embodied in the high-modernist development schemes and programs unfolding in the region with the aim of re-engineering its indigenous societies and exploiting its natural resources.      Large parts of the Central Annamites were severely impacted by the Vietnam War; uncounted numbers of minority people were killed, or had their villages destroyed or relocated while defoliants, bombs, and forest fires ravaged the landscape. In the decades that followed the war, the entire social and natural landscape has been reshaped by national development policies and the modernist visions that underpin them. The thesis attempts to understand this physical and cultural transformation of the landscape, focusing particularly on the gradual breakdown of the complex indigenous socio-religious institutions that appear to have played an important functional role in maintaining the pre-war structure of the landscape. The thesis is based primarily on fieldwork carried out between 2004 and 2009 in the provinces of Quảng Nam and Thừa Thiên–Huế in Vietnam and Sekong in Laos.

Kepler is mainly known among historians of science due to his astronomical theories and his approaches to problems having to do with philosophy of science and ontology. This thesis attempts to contribute to Kepler studies by providing a comprehensive discussion of a topic hitherto not really considered, namely Kepler’s theory of the soul, a general theory of knowledge or epistemology whose central problem is what makes knowledge possible—rather than what makes knowledge true, as happens in the case of Descartes’s and Bacon’s epistemologies. Kepler’s theory consists of four issues: the theory of the different sorts of soul—i.e. the human soul, the animal soul, the vegetable soul, and the Earth soul—concerning their faculties, the differences and the resemblances that emerge among them, the relation they maintain with their own bodies and the world, and the distinction soul-world. The thesis discusses these issues from a historical perspective, that is, it reconstructs the way they appear in three periods of Kepler’s career: the period prior to the publication of the Mysterium Cosmographicum, the period going from 1596 to 1611, and the harmonic period. Finally, Kepler’s epistemology is briefly contrasted with Descartes’s and Bacon’s in order to suggest why Kepler’s is philosophically interesting and valuable.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 1994. / Abstract. Annotated bibliography (leaves 330-338). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-361).

A obra romanesca de Mia Couto é o objeto da investigação desta tese, ponto de partida para tentar compreender a contribuição do autor na afirmação do romance africano e na reconstrução da identidade de seu país, Moçambique. Para tanto, o estudo discute a importância da revelação de uma paisagem oculta ao leitor, de matriz cultural e complexo entendimento. O capítulo que traz esta análise mostra como a obra retrata as condições históricas e políticas de dominação, desigualdade, identificando aqui e lá um tom levemente engajado na escrita miacoutiana, tanto quanto suas posições ideológicas, suas denúncias. Entre os temas mais destacados na obra está o animismo africano que dá origem a uma série de circunstâncias sobrenaturais nos enredos, como uma lembrança constante: em África, os espíritos estão por toda a parte, mantendo intensa relação com os vivos. Em torno da questão, a tese discute o fato de parte da crítica classificar a obra por gêneros como o Realismo Mágico, o Maravilhoso e o Fantástico. Também são investigadas as estratégias narrativas deste autor, suas opções regulares na composição de enredos, personagens, nomes de personagens e epígrafes. Com base nessas marcas e em outros traços comuns a todos os seus romances talvez presentes igualmente em seus contos descobre-se a adequação entre a criação de um sistema de pensamento dicotômico, que atravessa a obra, e estruturas frasais que revelam algo significativo: os romances de Mia Couto são propositivos, especialmente quando convidam o leitor ao movimento constante de questionamento de suas próprias certezas / Mia Coutos romanesque work is the inquiry object of this thesis, trying to comprehend the authors contribution in the assertion of the African novel and in the reconstruction of the identity of his country, Mozambique. In order to do this, the study discusses the importance of revealing an occult landscape to the reader, its cultural origin and complex understanding. The chapter that brings this analysis shows how the work reflects the historical and political conditions of domination, social differences, identifying occasionally a slightly engaged accent in Mia Coutos writing, as much as his ideological position and denouncement. Among the detached subjects in the work is African animism, which originates several supernatural circumstances in the plot, as a constant remembrance: in Africa, spirits are everywhere, keeping intense relationship with the people. Around this issue, the thesis discusses the fact that part of the critics classify the work in genres such as the Magical Realism, the Marvellous and the Fantastic. Also the narrative strategies of this author are investigated, as his regular options in the creation of the plots, characters, names of characters and epigraphs. Based on these marks and in other common traces to all his novels perhaps equally present in his short stories we find adequacy between the dichotomic thought system, through the work, and the phrasings that reveal something significant: Mia Coutos novels are propositive, especially when they invite the reader to the constant movement of questioning their proper certainties

As technology becomes increasingly intelligent and pervasive in the physical context of daily life, it is crucial to consider the design of technological artifacts to develop new interaction paradigms that can expand technological capabilities, shape behaviors, establish new practices, and broaden our worldview. This thesis proposes using principles of animism to inform the design of interactive objects as a way to encourage people to reflect on their relationships with the world around them, and to perceive objects beyond their roles as mere tools or ephemeral fashion products. Animism, as a design metaphor, can be powerful in creating expressive, affective, and empathetic interactions with interactive objects. Through the use of behavioral, physical, and social metaphors, an animistic object can communicate in a more nuanced way with its changing form and behavior within a given context. An animistic object can connect in multi-sensorial ways to provide an individual and idiosyncratic experience, which can afford one to construct new meanings with their surrounding objects and re-form their relationship with them. Animistic objects aim to create a poetic dialogue between themselves and their humans, fostering a deeper relationship that surpasses their utilitarian and aesthetic value. The goal of this thesis is to define animism in the context of industrial and interaction design, examine dimensions of animistic qualities, and evaluate implications of animistic objects in building rapport between human and artifacts.