Construction Of Consciousness Research Articles

Diptych in Verse: Gender Hybridity, Language Consciousness, and National Identity in Nirālā's "Jāgo Phir Ek Bār"

Nirālā (literally the strange one) was the pen name of Sūryakānt Tripathi (1899?-1961), one of the four major twentieth-century Hindi poets associated with Chayavad, the first prominent movement in contemporary Hindi poetry. Many critics, both Western and Indian, have stressed Chayavad's parallels with Western Romanticism, mainly because of its preoccupation with individual consciousness and subjectivity. One of the most recurrent criticisms of the movement has been that it lacked a concern with the central political and social issues of its era, the twenties and thirties. While that may be true in general, it does not do full justice to at least some Chayavad poetry. Here it will be argued that, in particular, Nirala's poetry is surprisingly polemical, this-worldly, and is engaged with such issues as language consciousness, national identity, and gender constructs. This paper presents a close analysis of two of Nirālā's representative early Chayavad poems that form a kind of diptych in verse: they are both entitled Jago Phir Ek Bar (Wake up, once more), numbered 1 and 2 respectively. Both poems date from his early, most Chāyāvādī phase (1920-38) and are included in the first anthology, Parimal, which he published in 1929. 1 The analysis of these poems reveals how Chayavad techniques were adapted to convey a complex nationalist, Hindu- and Hindi-chauvinist message, and how this was overlaid with gender images. This conflation can be understood against the background of Nirālā's life: his search for his own linguistic identity in the light of his experience of growing up in Bengal, his obsession with Tagore, and his marriage and early loss of his wife.

A Qualitative Exploration of Relational Consciousness in Christian Children

Nye's (1998) core construct of relational consciousness in child spirituality embraces a wider dialogue with social and personality psychology. Relatedness in spirituality implies the importance of language, mind, and the self as guideposts for development. In this research we seek to qualitatively expand our understanding of relational consciousness around recent work in these three domains. Twelve school-age children are given detailed interviews dealing with spirituality framed by the relational consciousness core construct. Transcribed responses are analysed using grounded theory methodology. Theoretical categories are assembled into a preliminary framework for relational consciousness as a social and contextual phenomenon. The relationships between categories in the framework are outlined in terms of mental representation and self/other orientation in the child. We conclude that relational consciousness and its social framework commends a pedocentric, community-based approach to religious education.

"Open Containers": Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of content: The American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001) 46-72 Ironic and satiric impulses consistently suffuse tone, structure, realization of characters, and vision of contemporary reservation reality in small press collections of poems and stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) through The Summer of Black Widows (1996), as well as his mainstream works of fiction, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) to The Toughest Indian in World (2000). Much of praise bestowed on Alexie's early efforts and The Lone Ranger and Tonto has focused on author's unflinchingly bold depiction of dysfunctional nature of contemporary reservation life and fragmented, often alienated bicultural lives of characters who daily confront white civilization that encaptives their world - physically, historically, spiritually, and psychically. Clearly, part of attractiveness of Alexie's early volumes of verse and works of prose, at least for many mainstream readers, can be attributed to author's conscious construction of a hyperrealistic hip persona, one that at times might be indistinguishable from his biography. Kenneth Lincoln's recent assessment of Alexie's poetry, for example, voices both puzzlement and concern over Alexie's authorial stance: With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out smokehole. . . . Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky. To Lincoln, Alexie is stand-up comedian, Indian improvisator [who himself] is performing text (267). While Lincoln acknowledges that some readers may find meaning in Alexie's performance-art poetry - His firecat imagination plays tricks on reader, for our supposed good, for its own native delight and survival (268) - he also questions Alexie's motives: His is more performance than poem, more attitude than art, more schtick than aesthetic. Definitely talented, deeply impassioned, hyphenated American-Indian, but to what end? Although Alexie's poetry shows an obvious delight in surfaces, Lincoln finds little more beyond facade: Indi'n vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on edge of despair. A late- twentieth-century, quasi-visionary clown tells truth that hurts and heals in one-liners cheesy as Marx Brothers, trenchant as Lenny Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hill's BIA Halloween 'Trick or Treaty'. (271) Following publication of The Lone Ranger and Tonto and Reservation Blues (1995), however, Alexie also came under fire from certain quarters for his purportedly negative use of irony and satire - namely, literary connections to (white) popular culture and representations of Indian stereotypes that some consider inappropriate and dangerously misleading for mainstream consumption. Despite his early praise of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, for example, Louis Owens finds that Alexie's fiction too often simply reinforces all of stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing; there is no family or community center toward which his characters . . . might turn for coherence; and in process of self-destruction Indians provide Euramerican readers with pleasurable moments of dark humor or titillation of bloodthirsty savagery. Above all, non-Indian reader of Alexie's work is allowed to come away with a sense . . . that no one is really to blame but Indians, no matter how loudly author shouts his anger. (79-80) In his chapter on American Indian fiction, Owens contends that the most popularly and commercially successful Native American works thus far are marked by a dominant shared characteristic: They are direct heirs of modernist tradition of naturalistic despair, of which Indian is quintessential illustration (81). For Owens, these new American Indian novels articulate in sometimes extraordinarily well-disguised form familiar stereotype...

Book Reviews

Practicing Community: Class, Culture, and Power in an Urban Neighborhood. Rhoda H. Halperin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky. Shuanna L. Scott. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience, Christena L. Turner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Culture and Dissociation in Toraja

This article examines the extent to which some psychoanalytic ideas about dissociation and its correlates are useful in helping us to understand possession behavior and related phenomena in places such as Toraja, Indonesia. Although some of these ideas can be useful to us, data from Toraja challenge us to modify some key psychoanalytic assumptions about dissociation. The article demonstrates how cross-cultural data can be used to broaden our perspectives on the construction and breakdown of human consciousness.

Is visual thinking "imageless thought"?

Two measures of visual problem solving ability and two measures of visual-imaging ability were administered to 99 subjects. Scores on the Emergent Patterns Test, a problem-solving test which requires subjects to think about specific combinations of visual icons and to identify the emergent patterns, did not correlate significantly with scores on either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. Scores on the Block Visualization Test, which requires subjects to think about blocks being painted and diced and to answer questions about the resulting pieces of block, did not correlate significantly with the scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and correlated negatively with the scores on the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. The three nonsignificant correlations support nineteenth century arguments that vivid imagers tend to construct sensory representations of unconscious visual thoughts, whereas "imageless thinkers" tend not to. The one negative correlation further may suggest that the conscious construction of visual imagery can sometimes interfere with the underlying processes of unconscious visual thinking.

Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory

Researchers in a number of fields, including contemporary psychoanalysis, are contributing to the development of a dynamic model of mind that acknowledges the contributions of biology and social experience to the construction of human consciousness and subjectivity. In this paper, I examine this emerging model of mind and I discuss its implications for the development of Culture theory. I argue that theories of culture must reflect the fluidity and complexity of the psychological states that underlie the culture process, and I suggest that even highly conventional models of action, thought, and feeling are rarely, if ever, internalized, appropriated, or reproduced without some degree of modification, refashioning, and personalization. I propose person‐centered ethnography as one of the methods by which we can explore the complex relations among culture, mind, and behavior, [constructivist models of mind, contemporary psychoanalysis, culture theory, self and subjectivity, person‐centered ethnography]

Awareness may be existence as well as (higher-order) thought

Rolls attributes to consciousness the functions of reflection, planning, and error-correction. Neuropsychologically grounded cybernetic theory provides an analogous, broader conceptualization: consciousness constructs goals (and plans), alters the valence of goal-related phenomena, registers error-signals, and explores unexpected circumstances (reconfiguring goals and plans as necessary). Consciousness plays a fundamental unrecognized ontological role, as well, conferring the status of “discriminable object” on select aspects of otherwise indeterminate “being.”

Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism

Shannon Sullivan's critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is based on the argument that, due to his concept of the “anonymous body,” his theory of intersubjectivity omits the particularities of bodies, such as gender. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's “anonymous body” (le corps phénoménal) is not in fact “neutral” as Sullivan suggests, and moreover that he does not ignore differences but rather provides us with the idea of difference as a process of differentiation. Additionally, I argue that Sullivan's concept of “hypothetical construction,” which is introduced as an alternative to Merleau-Ponty, turns out to be a conscious construction, not reflecting upon its very conditions. Thus, Sullivan's account fails by presupposing what in fact needs to be explained: the particularities.

Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism

Shannon Sullivan's critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is based on the argument that, due to his concept of the “anonymous body,” his theory of intersubjectivity omits the particularities of bodies, such as gender. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's “anonymous body” (le corps phénoménal) is not in fact “neutral” as Sullivan suggests, and moreover that he does not ignore differences but rather provides us with the idea of difference as a process of differentiation. Additionally, I argue that Sullivan's concept of “hypothetical construction,” which is introduced as an alternative to Merleau-Ponty, turns out to be a conscious construction, not reflecting upon its very conditions. Thus, Sullivan's account fails by presupposing what in fact needs to be explained: the particularities.

IS VISUAL THINKING 'IMAGELESS THOUGHT'?

Two measures of visual problem-solving ability and two measures of visual-imaging ability were administered to 99 subjects. Scores on the Emergent Patterns Test, a problem-solving test which requires subjects to think about specific combinations of visual icons and to identify the emergent patterns, did not correlate significantly with scores on either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. Scores on the Block Visualization Test, which requires subjects to think about blocks being painted and diced and to answer questions about the resulting pieces of block, did not correlate significantly with the scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and correlated negatively with the scores on the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. The three nonsignificant correlations support nineteenth-century arguments that vivid imagers tend to construct sensory representations of unconscious visual thoughts, whereas “imageless thinkers” tend not to. The one negative correlation further may suggest that the conscious construction of visual imagery can sometimes interfere with the underlying processes of unconscious visual thinking.

Art, consciousness and artificial life

This paper addresses the relationship of consciousness to artificial life set in the context of art. Artificial life is as much a part of our quest for self-definition as an instrument in the construction of reality. In exploring the technology of life we are exploring the possibilities of what we might become. In our hypermediated, telematic culture, the self acquires an essentially non-linear identity. Telepresence and virtual reality, the avatars of Net life, present us with a distributed, multiple identity which in turn is producing a radically new art. This embodies an ‘interstitial practice’ set within the domain of artificial life, and located at the intersections of cognitive science, bio-engineering, telematics and metaphysics. Can artists find in artificial life, nanotechnology, robotics and molecular engineering the means towards a re-materialization of art, after its postmodern, screen-based dematerialization? Just as ideas of the ‘immaterial’ have dominated art discourse for the last 15 years, so questions of emergent form, intelligent structures and artificial life are shaping a new discourse, from which art is moving off the screen and back into the material world. Will the real significance of art's re-materialization be at the level of mind? Will artificial life only gain cultural significance when it gives rise to artificial mind and the construction of consciousness?

Ideology, False Consciousness and Psychology

Marxist social theory and, in particular, Marxist notions of ideology have never been popular within psychology. Recently, however, the Marxist notion of false consciousness has begun to make appearances in mainstream psychological journals. In this paper I argue that this notion has been misappropriated by those who construct it simply as a psychological-cognitive phenomenon located in individuals' heads, rather than as a socially emergent product of a capitalist society. A cognitive construction of false consciousness by social psychologists is no surprise given the dominance of social cognition as a research tradition within psychology: a tradition which has always emphasized the limited and faulty cognitive capacities of the individual and one which sits comfortably with a highly individualized and psychological account of false consciousness. The inherent epistemological difficulties in maintaining the notion of false consciousness within contemporary social theory are discussed. Despite these difficulties, it is argued that the notion of false consciousness remains a useful theoretical construct, not as a psychological and cognitive affliction suffered by the `less enlightened', but as a phenomenon grounded in social reality itself: in particular, the material reality of late capitalism and postmodern culture.

American and European masculinity: a transatlantic dialogue

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF THE FEMINIST PROJECT INVOLVES the more nuanced exploration of female subjectivity--that is, the recognition that the construction of female consciousness involves an ongoing series of critical edeavours, rather than an assumed set of conclusions. This critical approach is also imperative when one considers the construction of masculinity in both American and European culture. In the scholarship of Harry Brod, Maurice Berger, and Michael Kimmel, for example, masculinity as a subject of inquiry in American culture is being revisited; in this sense, the contemporary interest in masculinity shares some basic tenets with feminism. The cultural assumptions which attend its construction in the West are now part of the men's studies movement of which John Bly is most readily associated; his memoir, Iron John (1990), has become part of the men's studies canon. In XY On Masculine Identity, Elisabeth Badinter invites us to explore masculinity, what she refers to as the quality of a man (9), in its distinctive forms but also to imagine it as a way of being that does not have

Discussion

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.

Discussion

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.

The Near and Middle East - Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness. xvi, 309 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. $34, £22.95.

The Near and Middle East - Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness. xvi, 309 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. $34, £22.95. - Volume 62 Issue 1

THE APOCALYPSE OF PARADISE AND THE SALVATION OF THE WEST: NIGHTMARE VISIONS OF THE FUTURE IN THE PACIFIC EDEN

This article examines representations of the Pacific in the film Rapa Nui, in articles from National Geographic, and in the academic debate on cannibalism as epitomized by Marshall Sahlins' and Gananath Obeyesekere's discussion of Cook's fate in Hawaii. While the area is typically the location of an Edenic paradise, in these texts it becomes the locus of apocalypse ending in cannibalism. Furthermore, rather than being radically ‘other’, the Pacific becomes a paradise whose virtues are those of the West as well, but whose very virtues lead to its destruction. The article argues that these texts use the ‘apocalypse of paradise’ as an allegory for the economic history and destiny of the West, such that cannibalism becomes a quintessentially Western practice. But the texts also contain mechanisms for the construction of a critical consciousness centred on Nature which is denied to the islanders themselves, and which serves in classic colonial style to institute a future alterity which will redeem the West from apocalypse. The texts' use and subsequent undermining of the more typical paradise images, many of which can be localized in the post-Second World War era, can finally be read in the light of a late twentieth-century, leftist socioenvironmental critique of the economic, political and environmental legacy of postwar America. However, the texts betray a more postmodernist sense of doubt about the reality of a rational critical consciousness. They raise important issues regarding the liminal space between self and other, threatening as they do to dissolve this distinction. But they all attempt to use cannibalism as a last bulwark for the construction of a privileged, natural discourse which combines environmentalism, colonialism and classical humanism while resisting the full implications and limitations of postmodernism.

Book Review: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

Book Review: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

The making of memory: the politics of archives, libraries and museums in the construction of national consciousness

An archive is a repository - that is, a place or space in which materials of historic interest or social significance are stored and ordered. A national archive is the storing and ordering place of the collective memory of that nation or people(s). This article provides a brief his torical/theoretical introduction to the politics of the archive in late capi talist societies and discusses this politics of memory via the performance of ordinary daily activities of librarians and archivists. Some relevant political/discursive questions include: who controls, establishes and maintains the archive, and how do they do so? Which materials are preserved in the archive and which are excluded? As the documents and artifacts selected for the archive are ordered and classi fied, how do the schemas and structures applied include, exclude, fore ground or marginalize those materials? Finally, to what extent do the logical hierarchies for classification and arrangement reflect social or political hierarchies? Librarians and archivists face these concerns in HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;17-32; 006604]their professional practice as they make decisions influenced by budgets, finite amounts of both physical and computer storage space and limited staff resources. The authors give real-life examples of choices made as archivists struggle to balance ideological goals made contradictory by practical constraints. For example, is it more appro priate to acquire as many materials as possible but be unable to describe, preserve and present them adequately, or is it preferable to describe, preserve and make fully available a more limited range of records and documents? Because of such practical concerns in modern technicist cultures, the explicitly political who often is reduced to the technically instrumental how - that is, political-moral questions are displaced to nonmoral and nonpolitical technical discourse, thereby establishing a 'meta-politics' that is understood only by the initiated. Conversely, archival activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are 'technical' activi ties that may become explicitly 'political'. The article concludes that technical activities always are political, at least latently or potentially, even when they are not contested and made explicitly political.