Transforming Otherness

Transforming Otherness
Author: Peter Nynas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1351297422

Today, people in different situations and contexts face intercultural challenges. These are a result of increasing mobility. Sometimes such challenges are brought about by crisis situations and an international labor market. However, people also come in contact with each other through forms of new technology such as the Internet, and through literature and film. In these multicultural encounters, misunderstandings and sometimes clashes are experienced. This volume presents studies in culture, communication, and language, all of which strive, through a variety of theoretical perspectives, to develop understanding of such challenges and perhaps offer practical solutions. Encountering otherness may evoke fears, negative attitudes, and a corresponding will to dismiss the otherness in front of us—either consciously or unconsciously. This denial of otherness may also be subtle. Thinking about otherness, as described in this volume, also raises questions about how otherness is represented and mediated and about the possible role of third parties in facilitating communication in such situations. Sometimes a third party can play a crucial role in facilitating the communication process and serve as a channel of communication. Trust in humanity as a bridge to community requires a subtle balance between representations of self and other. Various problems arise in intercultural mediation, which may be caused by cultural and political differences, and these are sometimes used to validate stereotypical beliefs and images. The editors argue that in both academic and art circles, European perspectives have widely been understood as universal.

Transforming Otherness

Transforming Otherness
Author: Jason Finch
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1412844150

Today, people in different situations and contexts face intercultural challenges. These are a result of increasing mobility. Sometimes such challenges are brought about by crisis situations and an international labor market. However, people also come in contact with each other through forms of new technology such as the Internet, and through literature and film. In these multicultural encounters, misunderstandings and sometimes clashes are experienced. This volume presents studies in culture, communication, and language, all of which strive, through a variety of theoretical perspectives, to develop understanding of such challenges and perhaps offer practical solutions. Encountering otherness may evoke fears, negative attitudes, and a corresponding will to dismiss the otherness in front of us—either consciously or unconsciously. This denial of otherness may also be subtle. Thinking about otherness, as described in this volume, also raises questions about how otherness is represented and mediated and about the possible role of third parties in facilitating communication in such situations. Sometimes a third party can play a crucial role in facilitating the communication process and serve as a channel of communication. Trust in humanity as a bridge to community requires a subtle balance between representations of self and other. Various problems arise in intercultural mediation, which may be caused by cultural and political differences, and these are sometimes used to validate stereotypical beliefs and images. The editors argue that in both academic and art circles, European perspectives have widely been understood as universal.

Facing Otherness in Early Modern Sweden

Facing Otherness in Early Modern Sweden
Author: Magdalena Naum
Publisher: Society for Post Medieval Arch
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2018-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781783272945

A new view of Sweden's relations with the world beyond its borders, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Horror Film and Otherness

Horror Film and Otherness
Author: Adam Lowenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231556152

What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.

Otherness

Otherness
Author: David Brin
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781502540423

From Hugo and Nebula winning author David Brin comes this extraordinary collection of tales and essays about the near and distant future, as humans and other intelligences encounter the secrets of the cosmos - and of their own existence. In The Giving Plague, a virus, transmitted by blood donation, begins to change humanity. In Dr. Pak's Preschool, a woman discovers that her baby has been called to work while still in the womb. In Natulife, a married couple finds their relationship threatened by the wonders of virtual reality. In Sshhh... the arrival of benevolent aliens on Earth leads to frenzied madness as humans rush to conceal their secret 'talent.' In Bubbles, a sentient starcraft reaches the limits of the universe - and dares to go beyond. What happens when an urban archaeologist discovers a terrible secret under the landfills of Los Angeles? Will there still be a purpose for "biologicals" when cybernetic humans become mighty and smart? Come explore these and another dozen startling and provocative tomorrows with a modern master of science fiction. Table of Contents The Giving Plague Myth Number 21 Dr. Pak's Preschool Detritus Affected The Dogma of Otherness Piecework Natulife Science vs. Magic Sshhh... Those Eyes What to Say to a UFO Bonding to Genji The Warm Space Whose Millennium? Bubbles Ambiguity What Continues...And What Fails... The New Meme

Global Transformations

Global Transformations
Author: M. Trouillot
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137041447

Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.

Radical Otherness

Radical Otherness
Author: Lisa Isherwood
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317546180

The problem of otherness is central to debates in both the social sciences and theology. To define the other – by colour, gender, politics, nationality, or religion – is to define the self. Othering has been used through history as a justification for boundary-setting, for conflict and for oppression. Radical Otherness presents a broad overview of otherness in both sociology and theology. The book reveals how social theory can illuminate many contemporary issues in theology, whilst the examination of theological methods can shed light on problematic issues in sociology. The discussion of issues in Radical Otherness moves from the personal to the political, to the hermeneutic, to the ultimate otherness of metaphysics. At each stage, discussion of theory is grounded in concrete examples. The book offers students of ethics, theology, and sociology of religion a clear and engaged assessment of otherness, and opens up new ways for investigating a concept central to the study of both religion and society.

Melancholy and the Otherness of God

Melancholy and the Otherness of God
Author: Alina N. Feld
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739166034

An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.

Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World

Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World
Author: Michael Washburn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791486265

Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of human spirituality will find something of value in Michael Washburn's new book. Drawing on a rich variety of psychoanalytic, Jungian, and existential-phenomenological sources and on both Western and Asian spiritual texts, Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World provides a theoretical foundation for the idea that human development follows a spiral path. Washburn shows that ego development early in life requires us to turn our backs on original sources of our existence and, therefore, that spiritual development later in life requires us to spiral back to these sources on the way to whole-psyche integration. He elucidates the underlying causes and pivotal events that set development on its spiral course and traces six major dimensions of experience as they unfold along the spiral path: the unconscious, the energy system, the ego system, the perceived other, the experiential body, and the life-world. In providing a theoretical foundation for the idea of the spiral path, Washburn defends the idea against its critics and helps explain why the idea has been compelling to so many people in diverse traditions.

Tourism and the Power of Otherness

Tourism and the Power of Otherness
Author: David Picard
Publisher: Channel View Publications
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-01-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1845414187

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.