From classic aesthetic theories to fresh aesthetic methods, this volume is an accessible introduction to the main topics in contemporary aesthetics: the media-technological challenges, transcultural aesthetics and aesthetic methodology.

In this paper I propose a method to solve controversies in scenarios of legal pluralism. Shortly, in scenarios of legal pluralism some of the controversies involve members of culturally differentiated groups who justify their allegations with arguments that only make sense in the culture to which they belong. If the adjudicator does not share the same cultural worldview as the parts under litigation, how can he/she come to make a decision determining the parties’ rights and obligations? My answer (...) for this question includes (1) an account of knowledge to culturally differentiated groups, and (2) a method for the evaluation of the culturally-dependent arguments. (shrink)

Community technology design has been deeply affected by paradigm shifts and dominant discourses of its seminal disciplines, such as Human Computer Interaction, Cultural and Design theories, and Community Development as reflected in Community Narratives. A particular distinction of community technology design endeavours has been their cultural stance, which directs the agendas, interactions, and outcomes of the collaboration. Applying different cultural lenses to community technology design, shifts not only practices but also directs the levels of awareness, thereby unfolding fundamentally distinct cultural (...) engagement approaches. Previous community technology design research indulged in cross-, inter-, and multicultural approaches to community engagement; it was occupied with meticulously deconstructing and reconstructing perspectives, interactions, roles, and agendas. We argue that when deeply immersed in joint design activities in long-term collaborations, we look beyond individual cultures and enter a transcultural mode of engagement. A transcultural community technology design endeavour supports a continuous creation and re-creation of new meanings, originating from individual entities yet being diffused and continuously reflected within the existing design space. We suggest that within community technology design, a context with abundant cultural diversity, a heightened awareness becomes a necessity. We exemplify different instantiations of the cultural engagement approaches within our long-term collaborations and technology design projects with indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo and Namibia. A transcultural approach to indigenous knowledge preservation and digitisation efforts with indigenous communities opens up a controversial debate about protecting versus integrating local epistemologies. (shrink)

As in other societies, medical professionalism in the Peoples’ Republic of China has been rapidly evolving. One of the major events in this process was the endorsement in 2005 of the document, “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter,” by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association (hereafter, the Charter). More recently, a national survey, the first on such a large scale, was conducted on Chinese physicians’ attitudes toward the fundamental principles and core commitments put forward in the Charter. Based (...) on empirical findings from that study and comparing them to the published results of a similar American survey, the authors offer an in-depth interpretation of significant cross-cultural differences and important transcultural commonalities. The broader historical, socio-economic, and ethical issues relating to salient Chinese cultural practices such as family consent, familism (the custom of deferring decisions to family members), and the withholding of medical information, as well as controversial topics such as not respecting patients’ autonomy, are examined. The Chinese Survey found that Chinese physicians supported the principles of the Charter in general. Here we argue that Chinese culture and traditional medical ethics are broadly compatible with the moral commitments demanded by modern medical professionalism. Methodologically and theoretically—recognizing the problems inherent in the hoary but still popular habit of dichotomizing cultures and in relativism—a transcultural approach is adopted that gives greater (due) weight to the internal moral diversity present within every culture, the common ground shared by different cultures, and the primacy of morality. Genuine crosscultural dialogue, including a constructive Chinese-American dialogue in the area of medical professionalism, is not only possible, but necessary. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We have several objectives in this article. Firstly, we return to the category of semiosphere due to its dialectical and polysemic character, but we also introduce some reflections in order to analyze more complex cultural productions. In this same sense, the category of internal and external semiotic border allows us to present the cultural, intercultural, and transcultural translation problems that are articulated with the dynamic changes of every culture. Secondly, we examine the category of culture and articulate it (...) with the no-culture, with the anti-culture, which would lead to propose three types of semiosphere: cultural semiosphere, noncultural semiosphere, and anti-cultural semiosphere, which introduce controversial aspects that must be considered. Thirdly, we study Iuri Lotman’s latest approaches on the unpredictable in cultural processes, assuming assumptions of complexity and transdisciplinarity that are present in all his work. (shrink)

Controversy has centered on the frightening potential possessed by the state to deprive of his rights the individual officially classified as mad.In this book, ...

The subject of my dissertation is "rationality". In this book I undertake a comprehensive, systematic and independent treatment of the problem of rationality. This furthers progress toward a general theory of rationality, one that represents and defends a uniform conception of reason. The structure and general outline are as follows: Part I: General Definition of the Concept; Part II: Rationality in the Theoretical Realm; Part III: Rationality in the Practical Realm (parts II and III are divided respectively into A. Relative (...) Reasons and B. Absolute Reasons); Part IV: Grounds for the Principle of Reason. My aim in this work is to prove that a conception of rationality as justification of our usage of language is more significant than has been classically recognized, without, however, reducing the concept of rationality. After a definition of the term is provided in the first chapter by means of language analysis, the following three questions are dealt with in the subsequent chapters: a) Exhaustion of rationality in relative reasons—i.e., is reasoning exhausted by reference to existing views and goals, or does rationality also exist in a strong sense? The latter would be the case if the views and goals referred to the relative conception must themselves be justified de novo. I argue that such an absolute justification of views and goals cannot be provided. To this end, in the theoretical domain, I discuss a question prominent in the debate over the rationality of worldviews, namely the question of whether the standards of theoretical rationality are merely culturally relative (chapter V.). Here I arrive at the position that standards of theoretical rationality are only transcultural insofar as there are goals which are not themselves culturally-dependent. With regard to practically fundamental goals, the core standards of modern science can be justified. This justification strategy therefore requires that such goals be established. In practical terms, first I address (in Chapter VII) the so-called "final justification" of norms problem. Here I discuss above all the transcendental-pragmatic proposal and the contractualist conception. According to my view, neither succeed in providing a final rational grounding for norms. That grounding pertains instead to the rationale for objectives, and Chapter VIII demonstrates that even a final justification of objectives is impossible. This does not mean, however, that a person's goals cannot be criticized as irrational. But the warrant in this case depends on the rules that govern the genesis of desires being accepted by the subject. b) If substantive rationality does not exist because no absolute grounding for opinions and goals can obtain, then the question of how strong or weak the concept of rationality is acquires further weight. On that basis, relative theoretical and practical rationality is examined in detail. I aim with this analysis of (relative) rationality to apprehend the structural parallelism between rationality in both the practical and the theoretical domain, and therefore to defend a uniform conception of reason or rationality. This is accomplished by identifying a concept that exhibits the same structure in both theoretical and practical domains: the term "rational" is applied to actions and opinions in order to claim, first of all, that they are "well-founded." For example, one must inquire into the precise rational justification for opinions or actions. To determine the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions required for an opinion or action to be rational, one must first provide a formal characterization of the rationality of those opinions or actions. What is to count as a rational ground can only be explained by formal procedures and results achievable via those procedures. To be more specific, I claim that the process of opinion formation and practical reflection is subject to rational justification based on internalist rules. The rules governing theoretical rationality can have their content transformed in a further move, if one takes the result of the process of rational opinion-formation as the product of an epistemological determination, that is, as a decision about which opinion to hold that is made on the basis of epistemological or prudential goals. Implicit in this position is the controversial idea that one can actually decide to believe something. The rules of practical reason are the rules that guide the rational selection of objectives and actions. The structural parallelism of theoretical and practical rationality consists, therefore, in the fact that both refer to mental processes that are controlled by rules which one freely accepts and follows. In both cases, these rules are to be understood as governing the rational choice of a mental or physical action. c) Therefore, the question of whether rationality—being rational—can in turn be grounded by reasons can be answered in the following way: The rules of rationality can only be justified with reference to a person’s goals, as the best strategy for achieving those goals. If someone does not desire the optimal realization of his goals, there is no other way of arguing directly for rationality. One can only attempt to demonstrate—if the person is open to argument—that it is typically in the person's own best interest to adhere to the rules of rationality. (shrink)

Is freedom a Western concept? As a multifaceted human experience it seems fairly transcultural. Freedom is hardly a focus of philosophical discourses in China as it is in the West, and I suppose this partly accounts for the difficulty in tracking freedom and closely related notions of agency, choice, and autonomy in Chinese philosophy.Over four decades ago Herbert Fingarette raised the controversial idea about the absence of freedom in Confucian ethics. Although not intending to denigrate, Fingarette raised a polemic (...) that has lingered to the present.1 A. C. Graham noted the sour upshot of the issue when writing that "the claim that the concept of moral choice is foreign to Confucius has offended... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: The Negotiable and the Non-NegotiableRobert Baker (bio)AbstractThe preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal presents the argument that “moral fundamentalism,” the position that international bioethics rests on “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all eras and cultures, collapses under a variety of multicultural and postmodern critiques. The present article looks to the contractarian tradition of (...) Hobbes and Locke—as reinterpreted by David Gauthier, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls—for an alternative justification for international bioethics. Drawing on the central themes of this tradition, it is argued that international bioethics can be rationally reconstructed as a negotiated moral order that respects culturally and individually defined areas of nonnegotiability. Further, the theory of a negotiated moral order is consistent with traditional ideals about human rights, is flexible enough to absorb the genuine insights of multiculturalism and postmodernism, and yet is strong enough to justify transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments, including the condemnation of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg. This theory also is consistent with the history of the ethics of human subjects experimentation and offers insights into current controversies such as the controversy over changing the consent rule for experiments in emergency medicine and the controversy over exempting certain clinical trials of inexpensive treatments for preventing the perinatal transmission of AIDS from the ethical standards of the sponsoring country.The Preamble to the Council of Europe’s (1997) Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the most recently ratified code of international bioethics, is noteworthy because it never mentions “principles,” the concept most frequently cited by the fundamentalists as basic to international bioethics. Instead it stresses rights, a concept that has been utterly ignored by the fundamentalist theorists of international bioethics. The Preamble exemplifies a conception of international [End Page 233] bioethics as an ethics of covenants and conventions grounded in human rights. In the full text of the Preamble, the term “rights” appears eight times and the expressions “convention” and “covenant” are used six times; the term “principle” does not appear at all. In this essay, I develop a theoretical framework for international bioethics based on conventions, covenants, and areas of “nonnegotiability”—a concept that serves as a functional analogue to the traditional notion of “human rights.” I also shall argue that, unlike the theory of basic principles central to moral fundamentalism, the theory of negotiated morality appears immune to the multicultural and postmodern critiques of international bioethics that were analyzed in the preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (Baker 1998).Negotiated Moral Order: A Model for International BioethicsReconsidering ContractarianismThe linkage of “conventions” and “covenants” with human rights that is evident in the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine traces back directly to the moral and political theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Such philosophers as David Gauthier (1986), Robert Nozick (1974), and John Rawls (1971, 1993) recently have reinvigorated this classic contractarian line of analysis. In this section, I shall reconsider classical contractarian theory from a perspective informed by these more recent analyses.The most riveting feature of all forms of contractarian theory is the metaphor of the contract itself, particularly the legitimating role it accords to assent. Because contractarians look to the assent of those who would be bound by a moral norm as ultimately the sole source of a norm’s legitimacy, the most important corollary of contractarian moral theory is that moral norms are illegitimate insofar as agents either in principle could not, hypothetically would not, or actually will not rationally assent to be bound by them. Contractarians also argue that because legal norms are legitimated by acceptance of the authority of those who promulgate them, the authority of such norms is bounded by the actual or hypothetical assent of the governed. These features of contractarian analysis generate the correlative concepts of human rights and civil rights.Less often remarked, but nonetheless integral to the metaphor of the social contract, is the contractarian recognition that the interests of the [End Page 234] parties who contract to form civil society are naturally in conflict (or, as Hobbes put... (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of mass migration and the conditions of hybridization for early 21st century Western societies in texts dealing with migrantexperiences. The novel Goodbye Lucille (2007) by the Afro-cosmopolitan writer Segun Afolabi will be explored with respect to the crucial problem of an ethics and politics of belonging, related to the recent controversies surrounding multiculturalism and issues of migration. This text deals with the “in-between world” of migrants and negotiates questions of identity, alienation and belonging in (...) a so-called transcultural/transnational context. The issues raised in Segun Afolabi's fiction are addressed by employing the ways of thinking developed in political philosophy, including recent phenomenological attempts to theorize the notion of “home” and “belonging” (e.g., by Karen Joisten, but also Martin Heidegger) in order to deal with the complexities of the issue. The question, “What constitutes the good life for the individual and the political community?”, needs to be considered by taking into account the current plurality of approaches to forging identitiesin the political sphere as well. The subtlety of literary accounts of this phenomenon – literature may indeed be one of the best diagnostic instrument for studying a society – sheds light, I suggest, on the conditions of politically relevant identity formations. A close reading of literary texts such as those by Afolabi offers an important contribution to a realistic, and therefore complex and complicating, account of our overall situation in the Western world with respect to the politics of belonging. (shrink)

The body of research on civic education points to the importance of teachers creating open democratic environments, leading to what has been termed the political classroom. This yearlong study of an Israeli multicultural and bilingual high school civics course, in which students from different citizenship status participated, presents a case in which teachers were unsuccessful in achieving this goal, raising the question of what limited this class's potential to create an educational environment where democratic discourses could have taken place? The (...) main argument points to Israel's current disputative political environment that led to the enactment of four educational mechanisms that resulted in such a futile reality. These included: conflicting objectives, avoiding discussion of controversial issues, implementing traditional teaching practices, and overlooking language issues. The neo-liberal educational environment and a culture of fear and self-censorship were both identified as a common explanation to these, leading to an educational reality in which there was a detach between the lessons and the students’ transcultural lived political experiences. From a methodological perspective, the study illuminates the importance of focusing on such unsuccessful cases, examining their elements, and understanding what influences them. (shrink)

Transculturality. When Anthropology meets Psychology.

This paper offers a critical commentary on the essentialist concept of ethnicity, which, it is argued, underpins the discourse of transcultural health‐care. Following a consideration of the difficulties that ensue from the way in which ethnicity has been theorised within transcultural nursing in particular, the paper turns to a consideration of alternative ways of thinking about ethnicity, which have emerged from more recent social anthropology and postmodernism. It addresses the question of how to therorise ethnicity in a way (...) that does not entail its reification as a set of fixed cultural properties, and makes some tentative suggestions for the possibility of a critical culturalist approach to difference and healthcare practice, which must include a consideration of racisms. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown the operational potential in political discourse analysis from the proximization perspective. This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze political communication across transcultural contexts, especially in the cyber discourse space. Based on the spatial–temporal–axiological model, we compare the journalistic discourses on two social media platforms by China Xinhua News Agency, an official speaker for China worldwide. The corpuses are constructed with microblogs on Weibo in Chinese and Twitter in English containing key words of Sino–US trade (...) war. It is found that the speaker has shaped different realities of discourse in accordance with the cultural contexts and proximized from corresponding dimensions to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

I begin by introducing the standoff between the transculturalist aim of moving beyond cultural inheritances, and the worry that this project is itself a product of cultural inheritances. I argue that this is rooted in concerns about the meaning of life, and in particular, the prospect of nihilism. I then distinguish two diametrically opposed humanistic responses to nihilism, post-Nietzschean rejections of objective truth, and the moral objectivism favoured by some analytic philosophers, claiming that both attempt, in different ways, to break (...) down the distinction between description and evaluation. I argue that the evaluative sense of a “meaningful life” favoured by moral objectivists cannot track objective meaningfulness in human lives, and that there are manifest dangers to treating social meaning judgements as a secular substitute for the meaning of life. I then conclude that the problems of the post-Nietzscheans and moral objectivists can be avoided, and the transculturalist standoff alleviated, if we recognise that nihilism is descriptive, and maintain a principled distinction between description and evaluation. (shrink)

Many Turkish people migrated to Germany between 1955 and 1975. This study was carried out in Göttingen, Germany. Fifty Turkish people (described as patients) were asked about the care they had received from German health care personnel, and 50 German nurses and 50 German physiotherapists were questioned about care they had given to Turkish patients. Significant findings were the needs of the Turkish patients for good communication, physical contact and understanding of their culture-based expressions of illness. The German nurses and (...) physiotherapists expressed the need for language barriers to be minimized and for education in the specific culture of Turkish patients. Our findings are discussed from an ethical viewpoint. The International Council of Nurses’ code of ethics is used to guide the ethical debate about the findings within the context of transcultural and multicultural care. Suggestions for better transcultural health care paradigms are made for relating to patients from different cultures when patients and care providers have little understanding of each other’s needs and expectations. (shrink)

Global television has enabled cultures across the world to meet within the virtual space and interact in terms of decoding, meaning making and appropriating messages. It is also the case of the Romanian audience, a local community of viewers who have long been exposed to highly censored and restrictive programming (under the communist regime) and who are now enabled to identify with the (western) communities they have aspired to. We intend to illustrate our case with TV advertisements, which, generally, provide (...) abundant material for television viewers, with socio-culturally determined profiles, to re-construct meanings into either coincidental or disjunctive semantic outputs. Since the act of consumption is productive, we aim to show that in spite of the possibly conflicting readings of the poly- and multi-semantics of the ads, viewers can coalesce into interpretative communities irrespective of their cultural make and cooperate towards the production of a joint meaning. We consider that this is an illustration of transculturalism at the level of a local audience interacting with the symbolic representations of cultures elsewhere on television. (shrink)

(1996). Transcultural theater: The viewer response to Draussen vor der Tuer. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 1219-1224.

The paper attends to the increasingly heated debate on the local, the global versus the glocal approaches in transcultural brand communication with an examination of how Disneyland performs emotional branding on social media across US to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Integrating insights from brand communication with linguistics, the present study develops a framework to examine how Disneyland builds emotional attachment of the public to the brand via brand personality appeals and use of interactional features. It is found that on (...) a global-local continuum, brand personality traits exhibit strong globalization propensity whereas interactional features demonstrate strong localization tendency in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Variations also exist in the means of emotional branding between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Finally, the paper provides an account for the differences between Hong Kong and Shanghai and concludes that neither the local approach nor the global approach but the glocal approach can tackle the challenge of transcultural brand communication and that future studies in this area should be oriented further to uncovering the global-local nexus in the process. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore some key methodological issues in comparative and cross-cultural bioethics, through a discussion of a particular example: childhood and adolescent Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.1 At its heart, this paper makes an argument for a transcultural approach to bioethics. The argument starts with the examination of a conceptually mistaken and empirically unsustainable belief that culture is inevitably a force for difference. This “difference presumption” appears in various guises, for example in the belief that West and East (...) have altogether different “mentalities” and ethical ideas, reflective of a number of dichotomies such as individualization vs communitarianism. This... (shrink)

Yuanfang Dai argues that, despite the many forms of gender oppression in different societies and cultures, it is still possible to speak generally of women’s oppression. This notion of shared oppression can inform a transcultural feminist solidarity that challenges structural gender oppression across social and cultural differences.

This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is 'softened' and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. At the book’s centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili (...) Pietilä’s Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical 'western' exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain 'architectural rationality' can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort or even tradition. (shrink)

This article provides a transcultural, “transversal” investigation. It starts from the philosophical problem of knowing non-knowing. In chapters 1 and 2, the first expressions of this problem by Confucius and Socrates are considered. Against this background, new transcultural working concepts are developed. A new key term to be established here is that of an “implicate logic”. It refers to the reflection of unity of unity and difference and therefore to the very condition of the possibility of (differentiating) thinking (...) as such. In chapters 3 and 4, this train of thought is further developed under the influence of Nico- laus Cusanus, by reflecting on the first chapter of the Daodejing, and in view of important remarks by Niklas Luhmann. In chapter 5, the outcome is related to the idea of transversal reason in the philosophy of Wolfgang Welsch. As the most basic principle of (self-referential) thinking, implicate logic is to be discerned from Aristotelian (or similar traditions of ) logic and Hegelian dialectics—albeit both are being tied to the former’s principle in one way or the other. In the end, an introductory outlook of a comprehensive work by the present author provides the starting point to validate the logical foundations of knowing non-knowing as a methodological foundation to further develop the fields of transcultural-comparative, trans-comparative, and global philosophy. (shrink)

Existe evidencia de que el ajuste transcultural influye en el desempeño académico en población migrante. A partir de un análisis categorial del discurso, este trabajo evidencia experiencias de ajuste transcultural en cinco migrantes retornados de nivel de licenciatura que emigraron a EE.UU. Los resultados ofrecen guías para diseñar intervenciones psicoeducativas en inclusión social para esta población en contextos universitarios.

During the last few years, burnout has gained more and more attention for its strong connection with job performance, absenteeism, and presenteeism. It is a psychological phenomenon that depends on occupation, also presenting differences between sexes. However, to properly compare the burnout levels of different groups, a psychometric instrument with adequate validity evidence should be selected (i.e., with measurement invariance). This paper aims to describe the psychometric properties of the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) version adapted for workers from Brazil and (...) Portugal, and to compare burnout across countries and sexes. OLBI's validity evidence based on the internal structure (dimensionality, reliability, and measurement invariance), and validity evidence based on relationships with other variables (work engagement) are described. Additionally, it aims presents a revision of different OLBI's versions—since this is the first version of the instrument developed simultaneously for both countries—it is an important instrument for understanding burnout between sexes in organizations. Data were used from 1,172 employees across two independent samples, one from Portugal and the other from Brazil, 65 percent being female. Regarding the OLBI internal structure, a reduced version (15 items) was obtained. The high correlation between disengagement and exhaustion, suggested the existence of a second-order latent factor, burnout, which presented measurement invariance for country and sex. Confirmatory factor analysis of the Portuguese OLBI version presented good goodness-of-fit indices and good internal consistency values. No statistically significant differences were found in burnout between sexes or countries. OLBI also showed psychometric properties that make it a promising and freely available instrument to measure and compare burnout levels of Portuguese and Brazilian employees. (shrink)

Interculturalism and multiculturalism seem to be finished. ‘Transculturalism’ is now the order of the day, an idea which, apart from referring to a break with the classical conception of culture, also indicates in which direction a solution should be sought: in the mutual intersection, penetration, interweaving and overlapping between the cultural forms and lifestyles cutting through the various national or ethnic cultures which are now seen to be less monolithic and less hermetic than they had appeared through multicultural spectacles. In (...) short, métissage is in, and we all find ourselves in a big melting pot where the political problem no longer consists in combining the different ingredients but in giving shape to the combination which has already come about de facto — and by ‘shape’, transculturalism is not simply referring to the syncretism of bringing old, already existing elements together, but rather means to establish something new.Multiculturalism, according to the champions of transculturalism, has never succeeded in doing this. Instead of leading to cultural contact, it produced a flourishing of cultural separatism, a kind of totalitarian particularism which carried ‘retribalization’ even into education: instead of grouping plants according to Linnaeus’ classification scheme, Mexican- American children now follow their ‘own’ rediscovered ethnobotanical principles.Multiculturalism, then, seems on the one hand to be outdated by facts which it cannot very well place within its own concept of culture . And, on the other hand, multiculturalism seems to have led to a fiasco when it has been able to impose itself politically: “Instead of plurality we find particularism; instead of citizenship, a dictatorship of minorities.” Authors such as Welsch in Germany, Finkielkraut in France, or Procee in the Netherlands are thus in search of a new concept of culture which would be able to curb multicultural violence.Since the plausibility of their ‘transcultural’ alternative seems to depend on the extent to which one is convinced by their critique of multiculturalism, I will begin by examining this critique , then go on to formulate another critique which concerns multiculturalism as well as transculturalism , and which is mainly centred on what I take to be a mistaken concept of alterity and difference which one finds in both conceptions and which links them together. (shrink)

Human culture is built upon nature to help humans adapt to their environment – first natural, but later natural-cultural. Cultural practices are aimed at aiding survival in changing environments, and in different settings they meet different environmental pressures, causing later changes in trajectories. According to cultural evolutionism, behaviours, ideas and artefacts are subject to inheritance, competition, accumulation of modifications, adaptation, geographical distribution, convergence and changes of function – these are mechanisms present also in biological evolution. In the following paper, we (...) examine women’s dance and physical exercise practices, which contain similar postures performed in comparable circumstances, as found in initiation ritual dances in chosen East African communities and in Slavic gymnastics for women in the Belarusian tradition. In times of globalization and the mixing of cultures, the position on knees and elbows is recontextualized in a visually attractive form of contemporary dances like Kangamoko and Baikoko, or more widely different variants of ‘twerking’ and reconstructed physical exercises. Approaching ‘twerking’ positions, especially on knees and elbows as a cross-genre performance, we find common roots in the communal support for women’s good wife and mother status teachings in various cultures, showing the importance of women’s circles, women’s health and well-being for the community. (shrink)

Publication date: 30 November 2016 Source: Author: Wen Lee Ng, Manimangai Mani, Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya While the growing body of research on Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain focuses on the protagonist, Philip Hutton’s traumatic condition, his Chinese identity, and his ambiguous identity, this study devotes particular attention to the complexity of interactions between various cultures practised by Philip. This study aims to address this gap by applying the concept of transculturalism to analyse the processes of acquiring a (...) foreign culture and incorporating the foreign culture into traditional cultures experienced by Philip. In other words, this study employs the concept of transculturalism to examine multicultural depictions in the novel. Scholars, such as Khan, Tiwari, Sheoran and Tan C. S. who have examined multicultural depictions in various literary texts, have found that multicultural circumstances cause certain ethnic groups to lose their cultures and identities. Hence, the multicultural circumstances depicted are perceived as negative phenomena. However, this study has found that by examining the interactions between various cultures, rather than focusing on the end products such as portrayals of hybridity, the positive sides of multicultural depictions could be revealed. The transculturation process experienced by Philip shows that the new cultural practices he has created are made up of both his traditional cultures and the foreign culture he has acquired. This means that Philip does not totally lose his traditional cultures and identities. Therefore, this study concludes that multicultural depictions in The Gift of Rain could be read positively, provided that the interactions between various cultures, which resulted in the incorporation of a foreign culture into traditional cultures, are examined. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate a new approach to transcultural postcomparative philosophy, which may be tentatively called “the method of sublation,” using the example of Adorno and Gong Sunlong’s respective views on the relationship between concepts and objects. The term sublation is a neologism commonly used to translate Hegel’s idea of Aufhebung. It is derived from the Latin term sublatio, for its original meaning covered all three crucial connotations of Hegel’s Aufhebung – to lift up, to (...) preserve and to eliminate. The method thus encompasses all three of these three notions that are crucial to any process of creating something new from the interactions between two or more distinct discourses. In this philosophical sense, it has the three meanings of producing, eliminating, and preserving arguments, propositions, or ideas. Moreover, unlike “synthesis” the term “sublation” refers to a process rather than a stage. The sublation method aims to develop new forms of transcultural philosophizing and to overcome the impasses of traditional comparative approaches through procedures of “conceptual comparison” rather than relying only on the “comparison of concepts”. It starts from similarities and differences identified in the basic paradigms of different culturally and semantically defined frames of reference, and uses the method of discursive translation to transfer meanings across different languages and ideational traditions. Through a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences between Adorno’s and Gongsun Longs conceptions of concepts and objects (or names and realities, respectively), the paper demonstrates the importance of considering different culturally conditioned paradigms and frames of reference in order to gain new, more complex, and more pluralistic philosophical insights. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of the future, continuously engaged with and drawing from the past, in relation to my own creative practice as theatre and film director, curator, and singer-performer, a practice that continuously engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia. Through three case studies from the author’s creative engagement with Tagore’s utopia, the article explores the building of transcultural utopias in which Tagore and Leonard Elmhirst participated and how Dartington Hall rapidly became a magnet for (...) artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians; Tagore’s opera Tasher Desh, a powerful political satire on fascism/free will; and the author’s feature film Life Goes On and the Tagorean construct of the absent-present mother figure. (shrink)

Aun cuando Trágame tierra2 (1969), de Lizandro Chávez Alfaro (1929-2006), es reconocida como la primera novela contemporánea nicaragüense, sigue ocupando un lugar marginal en el panorama de la crítica latinoamericana. Las lecturas que se le han hecho tienden a enfatizar cómo retrata los esfuerzos revolucionarios contra la dictadura somocista, dando poca importancia al elemento regional que Chávez Alfaro desarrolla, en particular el mundo cultural de la llamada Costa Atlántica. Este artículo analiza la novela a partir de una perspectiva transcultural, (...) guiada por las elaboraciones teóricas de Ángel Rama, con el objetivo de problematizar cómo introduce la otredad cultural del Caribe nicaragüense en el discurso letrado nacional. Se centra en las diversas formas de representar el choque entre la modernización estatal y la diferencia cultural caribeña, en particular las representaciones de sujetos subalternos, la pluralidad de nombres y las tensiones presentadas entre la oralidad y la escritura. Se argumenta que estos elementos forman las piezas de una narrativa transculturadora que destaca la inherente conflictividad de toda simbiosis cultural. (shrink)

If we do not shrink from making rough generalizations and adopt a broad, conventional approach, then what we call modernity refers to the process whereby a state of heterogeneity progresses toward homogeneity in time, space, human collectives, social order, and other areas. In his book The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg discusses a late-16th century incident of heterodoxy that cannot be classified into previously existing standard categories. As new knowledge was disseminated thanks to the invention of the Gutenberg printing (...) press, old and new knowledge came into conflict in the mind of a heterodox figure by the name of Menocchio. He attacked the church, saying that it was more important to love one’s neighbor than to love God. Through these small, humble manifestations of change, Ginzburg was able to reveal the juncture when European modern knowledge first emerged from a muddled, undifferentiated state into one of clarity, whereby over the course of about a century of fermentation, its contours eventually became clearly evident around the year 1800. This process has been termed by the pioneer of conceptual history Otto Brunner as the “threshold era”, and by Reinhart Koselleck as the beginning of the “saddle era”. (shrink)

This article comments on the treatment of critical-care ethics in four preceding articles about critical-care medicine and its ethical challenges in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines. These articles show how cultural values can be in both synchrony and conflict in generating these ethical challenges and in the constraints that they place on the response of critical-care ethics to them. To prevent ethical conflict in critical care the author proposes a two-step approach to the ethical jus tification of (...) critical-care management: (1) the decision to resuscitate and initiate critical-care management, which is based on the obligation to prevent imminent mortality without permanent loss of consciousness; and (2) the decision to continue critical-care management, which is based on the obligation both to prevent imminent death without permanent loss of consciousness and to avoid unnecessary, significant iatrogenic costs to the patient and psychosocial costs to the family when the reduction of morta lity risk is marginal. Physicians and hospitals should restore the critical-care physician's authority and power - against prevailing cultural values, if necessary - to control when critical-care intervention is offered, when it is recommended to continue, and when it is recommended to be discontinued and the patient allowed to die. (shrink)

This collection of essays examines the ways in which disputes and controversies about the application of scientific knowledge are resolved. Four concrete examples of public controversy are considered in detail: the efficacy of Laetrile, the classification of homosexuality as a disease, the setting of safety standards in the workplace, and the utility of nuclear energy as a source of power. The essays in this volume show that debates about these cases are not confined to matters of empirical fact. Rather, (...) as is seen with most scientific and technical controversies, they focus on and are structured by complex ethical, economic, and political interests. Drs. Engelhardt and Caplan have brought together a distinguished group of scholars from the sciences and humanities, who sketch a theory of scientific controversy and attempt to provide recommendations about the ways in which both scientists and the public ought to seek more informed resolutions of highly contentious issues in science and technology. Scientific Controversies is offered as a contribution to the better understanding of the roles of both science and nonscientific interests in disputes and controversies pertaining to science and technology. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 571-588.

This chapter reviews fundamental ethical controversy surrounding the ongoing effort to revise the Uniform Determination of Death Act in the United States. Instead of focusing on the process of the revision itself, the chapter explores the underlying ethical debate over brain death that has been ongoing for many decades and finally culminated in this revision. Three issues are focused: the requirement for consent and personal exemptions before applying brain death for the diagnosis of death; redefining the areas of the brain (...) that have ceased to function in the definition of brain death; and codifying the American Academy of Neurology as the authority to issue the standards of the diagnosis of brain death. The chapter concludes that allowing the personal choice of death determination gives a pragmatic compromise to the disputed definition and practice of diagnosing brain death. So long as all risks and imperfections of the diagnosis are accepted through the consenting process, there is nothing ethically objectionable to continuing the current practice of diagnosing brain death as a successful tool to facilitate heart-beating organ donation without violating the dead-donor rule. By contrast, precluding personal choice and imposing legal restrictions to consent and exemptions would further erode public trust. (shrink)

Epistemology is one of the oldest, yet still one of the most active, areas of philosophical research today. There currently exists many annotated tomes of primary sources, and a handful of single-authored introductions to the field, but there is no book that captures epistemology’s dynamic growth and lively debates for a student audience. In this volume, eight leading philosophers debate four topics central to recent research in epistemology: The A Priori: C. S. I. Jenkins and Michael Devitt The A Posteriori: (...) Richard Fumerton and Nicholas Silins The Regress of Justification: Declan Smithies and Peter Klein Skepticism: Anthony Brueckner and Ernest Sosa Ram Neta’s introduction to the volume, descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for each controversy, and supplemental guide to further controversies in epistemology help provide clearer and richer views of active controversies for all readers. (shrink)

This work aims to rescue, transcribe and create new artistic and cultural expressions through the use of native peoples’ historical visual recordings, integrating intelligent technologies. For this purpose, a Chilean native peoples’ digital repository is collected, in order to apply a Digital Humanities-based methodology. From the chosen material, portraits are selected, recoloured through a AI-based model; the facial mesh is constructed using a facial landmark detector; the points of the mesh are reconstructed by a Delaunay triangulation; to finally apply an (...) additive manufacturing process. Thus, these physical pieces allow to compare the native people’s own physiognomies, creating new cultural expressions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anticolonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore and Gandhi, especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article shows how British Christian and Quaker utopians and Indian utopians cooperated with each other. (...) The article excavates the utopian experiments of Corder Catchpool, also a Quaker, in Darwen, Lancashire, where Gandhi stayed. Religion should be accorded an important place in our understanding of utopia, the article argues. A human propensity to create a paradoxical sense of futurity that does not negate the past, one that Tagore highlights in The Religion of Man, is found in all the utopians discussed. (shrink)

Nowadays, the forms assumed by knowledge indicate an unhinging of traditional structures conceived on the model of discipline. Consequently, what was once strictly disciplinary becomes interdisciplinary, what was homogeneous becomes heterogeneous and what was hierarchical becomes heterarchical. When we look for a matrix of interdisciplinarity, that is to say, a primary basis or an essential dimension of all the complex phenomena we are surrounded by, we see the need to break with the disciplinary self-restraint in which, often completely inadvertently, many (...) of us lock ourselves up, remaining anchored to our own competences, ignoring what goes beyond our own sphere of reference. However, interdisciplinarity is still a vague concept and a much demanding practice. It presupposes the continuous search for convergent theoretical perspectives and methodologies, and the definition of common spaces and languages, as well as a true dialogical and open mind of several scholars. From ethics to science, from communication to medicine, from climate change to human evolution the volume Controversies and Interdisciplinarity offers a series of original insights beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model. (shrink)