Based on an ethnographic study in a Danish residential care center, this article shows how the interplay of a sensor-floor technology and currently influential values of person-centeredness, privacy, and security in care transforms care work and care interactions between residents and care workers. Based on an understanding of care as realized in a heterogeneous collective of human and nonhuman actors, this article illustrates how new modes of monitoring and interpreting residents’ care needs at a distance arise, and how a new (...) organization of work focusing on quick and responsive care is established. These new care practices lead to conflicts between the values of privacy and security, to ambivalent experiences among care workers of simultaneously increased security and insecurity in work, and, paradoxically, also often to a decentering rather than person-centering of care. Instead of accommodating simultaneous compliance to the values of privacy, security, and person-centeredness, the use of the sensor-floors makes the tensions between these values continuously and loudly present in daily care practices. (shrink)

The concluding five books (33-37) of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia enumerate various types of metals and minerals together with how these materials can be used. This utilization especially in fine arts gives Pliny a chance to survey the history of art. The peculiar feature of this historical narrative can be spotted in the author’s strongly anecdotic presentation. The first part of “Natura, Ars, Historia” is devoted to a specification, an analysis and an interpretation of the anecdotic narratives found in (...) the Naturalis Historia’s art history. The essay highlights how the anecdotes become parables illustrating certain virtues Pliny highly esteemed. (shrink)

The second part of “Ars, Natura, Historia” focuses on the narrative techniques used by Pliny’s art history found in the Naturalis Historia. The narratological analysis of the artist anecdotes draws our attention to how Pliny’s diction is essentially rooted within rhetoric. The artist anecdotes of Naturalis Historia fulfill the role of exemplum, and as such, they become the vehicle for conveying the sets of values expounded in the encyclopedia.

Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection. Edited by Agnete W. Lassen, Eckart Frahm, and Klaus Wagensonner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 306. $35 (paper).