If, as asserted by the French collective Tiqqun, we are essentially living in a global colony, where the 1% control the 99%, then it follows that the revolutionary struggle should strategically reorient itself as guerrilla warfare. The agents of this war, Tiqqun characterize, in part, by drawing on ethnologists Pierre de Clastres and Ernesto de Martino, specifically their figures of the Indigenous American warrior and the Southern Italian sorcerer, respectively. Hybridizing these two figures into that of the “warrior-mage,” the (...) present article posits an actionable exemplar thereof in players of the massively popular trading and online card game, Magic: The Gathering (MTG). More specifically, I propose a strategic mapping of MTG’s five colors of magic onto the five divisions of a coalition against late capitalist Empire, which I call the “Warrior-Mage Guild,” including liberation clerics, animal rights activists, propagandists, anti-psychiatrists, hackers, saboteurs, and those who threaten decolonizing force contra Empire. (shrink)

Self-recognition is an intimate act performed by people. Inspired by Paul Ricoeur, we reflect upon the action of self-recognition, especially when data visualization represents the observer itself. Along the article, the reader is invited to think about this specific relationship through concepts like the personal identity stored in information systems, the truthfulness at the core of self-recognition, and the mutual-recognition among community members. In the context of highly interdisciplinary research, we unveil two protagonists in data visualization: the designer and the (...) observer - the designer as the creator and the observer as the viewer of a visualization. This article deals with some theoretical aspects behind data visualization, a discipline more complex than normally expected. We believe that data visualization deserves a conceptual framework, and this investigation pursues this intention. For this reason, we look at the designer as not just a technician in the visualization production, but as a contemporary ethnologist - the designer as a professional working in a social environment to comprehend the context and formulate a specific inquiry with the help of appropriate visual languages. (shrink)

Haci Bektash Veli (d. 1271[?]), considered to be the founder of the Bektashism, is one of the leading representatives of Turkish-Islamic thought and belief traditions. He is a person whose influence continues today, as in the past, not only in Anatolia, but also in many countries such as Azerbaijan, Iraq, Egypt, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and even Hungary, both as historical personality and with his mythical aspects, and his teachings. Haci Bektash Veli and his influence in the entire Turkish-Islamic world, especially (...) in Anatolia, have caught the attention of the researchers from the fields of History, Language, Literature, Sociology, etc. Since the first studies on Haci Bektash Veli and Bektashism have been revealed, many works have been written in this field in various societies. Moreover, these studies become an independent research area over time. In particular, orientalists, including many turkologists, historians, philologists and experts in Islamic studies, were involved in this field, wondering about Turkish-Islamic world. In other words, many researches about Haci Bektash Veli and Bektashism have been carried out both in our country and abroad; original works and translations, such as articles, encyclopaedia articles, monographs, journal special issues, tribute books, surveys and publications, annuals, bibliographic studies, etc. were published in this field. These studies also found their own expression in the scientific events, such as special national and international congresses, symposiums and conferences. Russian-Soviet researchers, who mostly include turkologists, historians, philologists, ethnologists and experts in Islamic historical researches and have a large expert staff, have focused on the great role and effects of Haci Bektash Veli in the preservation of Turkish-Islamic thought and culture. Correspondingly, the essence and philosophical foundations of Bektashism have also attracted their attention. As a result of this process, that began with curiosity and turned into academic interest, a significant literature in Russian on Haci Bektash Veli and Bektashism has emerged. The aim of this paper is to identify- within the available possibilities- Russian written sources on Haci Bektash Veli and Bektashism, to reveal the prominent studies among them and to present comments and evaluations of Russian researchers and other authors who have written their academic publications in Russian in this field, by using the method of description and evaluation. We should specify that in the paper we followed a chronological order taking into account the dates on which these studies were conducted. Finally, this paper aims to contribute to the literature in Turkish on Haci Bektash Veli and Bektashism. Thus, the author of the paper hopes that the paper will be useful in terms of the directory of sources and materials for the ongoing and future researches in our country. (shrink)

Unlike Heidegger who reflects on the relationship between being and time, we are interested in studying the relationship between doing and time. We begin by discovering that the basis of people's doing is the starting point for any reflection on society and culture, and therefore we believe that our conclusions can be important especially for sociologists, ethnologists, political scientists, economists and psychologists. A fundamental difference between "doing" and "acting" could be that only people, not things, "do". We say "Antonio (...) made his house out of bricks to prevent the wind from blowing it down". We never refer to the "action of the wind" as a "doing". Acting, especially in "action," is erroneously associated with causation; we think, "the action of the wind on the house, is the cause of the collapse of the house." But in reality, causation is only a variant of doing. For example, in "Susanna writes a letter to Paul", Susanna is the cause of the text of the letter, but not of the reading of the letter. This is a paradigmatic example, the one that gave rise to our study. We say that the text "attracts its reader", as the poles of a magnet attract each other. From which we concluded that it is impossible to keep secrets. The importance of the study of doing in general becomes very relevant when we understand that "producing" and "consuming" are variants of doing. In Marx's work, the doing that generates social value is productive doing. But our research shows that all variants of doing generate order and all "order" generates organizational value. Note that the order of an act can be measured in "bits", which frees us from subjective measurements of the value of what we do in "money". We anticipate here that, in the following pages, we arrive at the conclusion that doing can be divided into 6 types of acts and their subgroups: the vectorial independent and hodern acts and the pendular complementary, parallel, curative and causa-dor acts. In addition, we discovered the existence of inter-acts, i.e. the "organizational resonance of the poles of a pendular act" and which includes the self-referent, bipolar, tripolar and multipole variants. This book could not have been written, without the background of the works already published and elaborated jointly, with Professor Luis de Marcos Ortega between 2018 and 2021. We refer to The Informational Foundation of the Human Act and Whispers and Shouts. The Informational Measurement of the Human Act both published by the University of Alcalá (Madrid). The texts of this book were published in weekly installments between May 2020 and December 2021, in the GaZeta portal of Guatemala. We have respected the chronological order of publication, as well as the contents of the articles. (shrink)

Review Essay on Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis, edited by Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (Routledge, 2023).