Dualistic Perspective Research Articles

Representation, Distribution, and Formation of Sexuality in the Photography of Araki Nobuyoshi

The aim of this essay is to suggest a way to see and discuss a body of Araki Nobuyoshi's later photographic work that centers on images of bound and naked women. Araki has prolifically exhibited and published provocative photographs for over thirty years in Japan and for some years in the West. While it seems difficult to differentiate his images from crude exploitation and general degradation of women, his photographs attract many female fans. I argue that we are invited and directed to see his photographs in ways that “engender” the viewer. I focus on the “Araki industry,” which has made orchestrated efforts to produce hundreds of publications and a self-promoting discourse. I also examine how a personal cult is promoted through the sale of these images, and the indispensable role this self-promoting discourse plays in sustaining this industry, while more challenging and serious critiques are downplayed and sometimes do not make their way into print. Araki's recent exhibitions were enthusiastically received in the West. A series of photographs of bound naked women in kimonos dazzles Western eyes. I proceed to analyze orientalist contradictions based on the Western reviewers' double standard. To discuss sexual images such as Araki's work in a dualist perspective, Japan versus the West, only leads to exoticization of the cultural other. But their orientalist bias does not interrupt the photographer's project. Instead, any kind of Western attention is welcomed as proof of the photographer's success in the West. Araki's work has been reviewed not only as sexually excessive but also as desolately asexual. Araki's photographs are open to both readings, while other readings are not encouraged. In fact sexual excess and sexual desolation, as defined from a male point of view and supported by big sale, are not very different from each other for women. There is a magnetic field around Araki's work, where smooth and profitable distribution on the art market is powerfully promoted. Any interference with this process is driven back, and any supportive element, including orientalist fantasy, is appropriated. The photographs for exhibition and publication are carefully selected. If our sexuality is formulated through exposure to sexual images, analyzing photographic work such as Araki's requires that we focus on the whole process from production to distribution and consumption.

An Environmental History of Latin America

Over the past several decades, the environmental history of Latin America has emerged as a vibrant field. Historians have produced innovative studies exploring nature’s central role in Latin American history. Most of these studies, however, are local or regional in scope. Miller’s Environmental History of Latin America is an excellent synthesis of the literature, inflected by his own original and thoughtful analytical voice.Miller traces the environmental history of Latin America from the eve of the European conquest to the present. The book’s unifying analytical theme is sustainability, in short, “whether the project of tropical civilization has been sustainable” (p. 3). Miller analyzes “four recurring themes: population, technology, attitudes towards nature, and attitudes towards consumption” (p. 4). The book’s treatment of precontact Amerindian societies carefully debunks the “Pristine Myth,” which argues that these societies lived in a purported equilibrium with their natural world. Miller replaces this myth with a more complex story that shows the diverse ways in which Amerindian societies transformed their nature(s). Sometimes, these societies consumed far beyond their biological needs. He lists nine pre-Columbian societies that collapsed before the European conquest, although he does not suggest that these societies collapsed because of environmental mismanagement alone.Miller then turns to the conquest and colonial Latin America, retracing the (now) familiar story of how epidemic diseases contributed to the demographic collapse of the New World populations. Miller argues that this population collapse was the defining feature in shaping Latin American environments from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Low population densities allowed for the recovery and regeneration of Latin America’s landscapes, giving them the appearance (if not the substance) of being “pristine.” The biological conquest, in Miller’s analysis, was not a total catastrophe. Old World plants and animals increased the New World’s biological diversity. They also increased the food supply, making famine a rarity in the colonial New World, at a period when famines were commonplace in Europe. The colonial commodity booms, especially in sugar and silver, did create localized environmental catastrophes, especially on the smaller islands of the Caribbean. But the extent of the depredations was limited by colonial mercantilist policies and imperial monopolies, both of which limited the scope and intensity of export commodity production.The independence movements of the nineteenth century bought an end to the colonial ecological order. Freed from imperial restrictions, commodity production expanded almost unchecked across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This created environmental problems on a new scale: massive soil erosion, increased vulnerability to natural disasters, and epidemic crop diseases. Latin America’s populations also began to expand in this period, a demographic revolution driven by improved “death control” (p. 172), innovations in medical and public health that sharply reduced mortality across the region. At the same time, the turn to fossil fuels and other technologies allowed Latin American societies an unprecedented control over the natural world. Here, as in the earlier section, Miller does not tell a story of unremitting environmental decline. He points to the impressive public transportation infrastructure of Curitiba, Brazil, as an alternative to Latin America’s growing dependence on the car. He also explores the emergence of conservationism and environmentalism in Latin America. Here, he relates some unfamiliar stories, such as the history of Joaquín Balaguer’s persistent and sometimes violent efforts to preserve the forests of the Dominican Republic. The book ends with an epilogue presenting Cuba’s (involuntary) shift to organic, local, and sustainable agriculture as a model of modern environmental and ecological sustainability.The book’s greatest strength is its ability to capture complex and nuanced positions on the environment, an area in which simplistic and polemical stories are all too commonplace. The book’s greatest shortcoming is that it frequently reifies “nature” and “culture,” especially at the beginning and ending of each chapter. Sentences such as “in the war against nature, culture will frequently sacrifice its own members” (p. 132) present, at best, a caricature of a more complicated reality. It reinforces a commonly held but overly simple dualist perspective that most environmental historians take great pains to dispute in their research and teaching. Neither nature nor culture is monolithic, nor are they independent of one another. Miller himself recognizes this, noting in the introduction that “as much as we may protest, humans are nature too” (p. 5).Nonetheless, this lucid and concise synthesis will be a welcome addition to undergraduate survey courses on Latin American or global environmental history. For advanced scholars, too, it is a useful overview of the scholarship to date, informed by Miller’s original and provocative historical voice. Miller has captured the intellectual vitality of a field where there are still many live questions and few definitive answers.

The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia Circa 2009

Keywords Neuropsychology.Cognitiveneuroscience.Genetics.Informatics.Neuroimaging.Phenomics.SchizophreniaThe last 30 years have been marked by the emergence oftransformative technologies for the study of brain structure-function relations, and these have been deployed vigorouslyto help unravel the mysterious causes for, and treatmentsfor the schizophrenia syndrome. Despite the progress, theultimate goal—to identify a “smoking gun,” in the form ofa cognitive, a functional anatomical or a genetic signatureresponsible for the brain pathology underlying schizophre-nia—remains elusive. This collection of articles from globalleaders in neuropsychological research on schizophreniamakes poignant how much our thinking has changed overthe last three decades, but also that we still have morequestions than answers about the fundamental neurobio-logical underpinnings of schizophrenia.To put the progress in perspective, we may recall theconclusions of Heaton et al. (1978), following theirincisive review of neuropsychological studies of psychiatricdisorders:“The finding that chronic or process schizophrenicslook like organics on neuropsychological tests mightbe considered surprising … One fairly popularexplanation … is that … motivational deficienciesand thought disorders are responsible … the implica-tion is that these deficits are functional in nature. Thisexplanation cannot be ruled out on the basis ofcurrently available evidence, but it can be questioned”(page 156); and “[it is likely that] chronic schizo-phrenics will appear organic on neuropsychologicaltesting because a significant proportion of them areorganic” (page 157).These prescient (and diplomatic) statements signal whatwas then a prevalent dualistic perspective, the echoes ofwhich are now only faint. For example, one may note thatthe term “organic” was effectively scrubbed from theDSM-IV, contrasting to its conspicuous presence in theDSM-III. If the 21st century is one day seen as markingthe death of dualism in psychiatric taxonomies, this maybe considered a victory for neuropsychology, neuroimag-ing (which provided compelling evidence of structuralbrain anomalies (Johnstone et al. 1976)), and genetics(confirming heritability of ~80% for the schizophreniasyndrome). Whatever the driving forces, it is now com-monplace to seek biological explanations for both thecauses and treatments of schizophrenia, and this reflects asea change in thinking for which neuropsychology canclaim significant credit.The reviews in this issue offer snapshots from multipleperspectives embraced in 21st century research on theneuropsychology of schizophrenia. These papers show thatneuropsychology has become central to the study of boththe causes and treatments of schizophrenia.& Palmer, Dawes, and Heaton offer a broad historicalview, highlighting the role neuropsychological research

A pluralist view of generalization in qualitative research

A common way of discussing generalisation is to search for one conception – a monist view. Another approach is to create a dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative research, each having a single definition – a dualist perspective. A pluralist view is argued for here, i.e. the existence of several lines of reasoning, each of which can be evaluated in specific cases in terms of usefulness, strengths and weaknesses. Five different lines of reasoning about generalization, which could possibly be useful in qualitative research, are presented. They are: ‘studies that undermine established universal “truths”’, ‘the ideographic study’, ‘enhancing the generalisation potential by maximizing variation’, ‘generalisation through context similarity’ and ‘generalisation through recognition of patterns.’ Each is critically commented on.

Križišča niso nikoli sama. Mejni prostori na Krasu in v Istri<br>Crossroads are Never Alone. Border Areas of the Karst and Istria</br>

The authors endeavour to understand the symbolic power of crossroads through the ethnographical records from Istria and the Karst in Slovenia. From the Antiquity to this day the crossroads are marked with different monuments, ranging from ancient landmarks and Christian symbols to memorials to fallen heroes and national monuments. In peoples' imagination crossroads are perceived as dangerous places, where different demonic forces gather and meet. On the other hand, they also represent the meeting places of benevolent creatures and sites of apotropaic and magic acts, so their character is ambivalent. Besides crossroads there are several other examples of liminal places, sites of crossings and borders, which attract supernatural forces. Liminal spaces will be discussed within the dualistic perspective, where reality is perceived on the grounds of binary oppositions, and on the idea of an empty centre, a »gap«, which was constantly being attempted to diminish and domesticate.

Maternal Epistemological Perspectives and Variations in Mental State Talk

This study examined how complexity of maternal epistemological beliefs predicted mothers' and children's talk about the mind. Twenty-eight mothers of 5- to 10-year-olds completed a measure of receptive vocabulary, and mothers and children participated in a storytelling task specifically designed to elicit talk about the mind. Their use of mental state terms to encode pragmatic functions and mothers' epistemologies were assessed and compared. Maternal mental state talk and amount of talk increased with epistemological complexity. With the number of utterances held constant, mothers with simple, dualistic perspectives of knowledge used mental states more often to direct interaction; mothers with more complex epistemologies used mental states more often to encourage child reflection. Mothers with the less complex perspective underperformed on the receptive vocabulary measure in comparison to others. Children's amount of talk and use of a variety of mental state terms also increased with maternal epistemological complexity. The amount of talk and mental state terms produced by mothers and children frequently persisted after the effects of maternal receptive vocabulary were removed. Maternal epistemologies predict several qualities of mothers' and children's mental state talk that may contribute to children's developing theory of mind.

Excluding exclusion: the natural(istic) dualist approach

The exclusion problem for mental causation is one of the most discussed puzzles in the mind–body literature. There has been a general agreement among philosophers, especially because most of them are committed to some form of physicalism, that the dualist cannot escape the exclusion problem. I argue that a proper understanding of dualism – its form, commitments, and intuitions – makes the exclusion problem irrelevant from a dualist perspective. The paper proposes a dualist approach, based on a theory of event causation, according to which events are medium-grained, namely parsed into mental and physical property components. A theory of contrastive mental causation is built upon this theory of events, for which the problem of exclusion does not arise.

O império dos hormônios e a construção da diferença entre os sexos

Within the context of the theoretical debate on gender and science, the article discusses the process of redefining gender and sex differences using so-called biological or natural markers. It identifies how gender differences undergo naturalization using a logic of 'substantialization or 'materialization'. This process is exemplified in how medicine views women, promoting explanatory models of economics of the female body that are at times centered around organs like the uterus and ovaries, at other times centered on the mechanics of hormones, and, most recently, focused on genetic and neurological differences. More specifically, it follows the discovery of so-called sex hormones and its relation to a dualist perspective of gender. These powerful chemical messengers helped shaped the passage from the logic of excess surrounding sex through the late nineteenth century, to the imperative of insufficiency, prevalent since the mid-twentieth century.

Recognizing and Avoiding Intercultural Miscommunication in Distance Education

Language differences and diverse cultural norms influence the transmission and receipt of information. The online environment provides yet another potential source of miscommunication. Although distance learning has the potential to reach students in cultural groups that have been disenfranchised from traditional higher education settings in the past, intercultural miscommunication is also much more likely to occur through it. There is limited research examining intercultural miscommunication within distance education environments. This article presents the results of a qualitative study that explored the communication experiences of Canadian faculty and Aboriginal students while participating in an online baccalaureate nursing degree program that used various delivery modalities. The microlevel data analysis revealed participants' beliefs and interactions that fostered intercultural miscommunication as well as their recommendations for ensuring respectful and ethically supportive discourses in online courses. The unique and collective influences of intercultural miscommunication on the experiences of faculty and students within the courses are also identified. Instances of ethnocentrism and othering are illustrated, noting the effects that occurred from holding dualistic perspectives of us and them. Lastly, strategies for preventing intercultural miscommunication in online courses are described.

The complexity of governance change: reforming the governance of medical performance in Germany

The governance of medical performance is changing and new governing instruments are emerging. Existing analyses highlight the complexity of new governance arrangements, but the more or less dualistic perspective limits the possibility for exploring more fully this complexity. The present article therefore uses recent contributions to the literature on governance to explore the co-existence of different forms of governance with the aim of assessing the relative extent and the substantive nature of governance change. Using recent reforms of the governance of medical performance in Germany as a case study, the analysis suggests that the complexity of governance change takes three forms: first, the balance among (hybrid) forms of governance is shifting; second, the nature of individual (hybrid) forms of governance is changing; and, third, both types of change are reflected in tensions not only between but also within (hybrid) forms of governance. As such, the article also contributes to the recent literature on governance by highlighting the centrality of tensions in contemporary governance, which can also occur within both hybrid forms of governance and ;pure' forms of governance.

Working with Parents and Infants: A Psycho-Soma Integrative Approach

Drawing on a single case of a mother-infant difficult relationship, I shall consider the inseparability of psyche and soma and the embodiment of psychosomatic health and illness. A dualistic perspective prevents acknowledging that the mother's concerns, conflicts and mental state can obstruct the milk flow and affect the infant's feeding pattern, the mother-infant relationship and the infant's health. The aim of psychotherapists and all those with a professional concern for parents and infants should be that of understanding the positive value of a symptom and facilitating the mind integration with the soma.

Dualist and Animalist Perspectives on Death

Dualist and Animalist Perspectives on Death

US accounting standards and their environment: A dualistic study of their 75-years of transition

This article examines the 75-year transition of the US accounting standards and their environment. It consists of three parts, each having two themes: Part (I) Past changes: 1. The first market crash and the second market crash; 2. Facts-based accounting and forecasts-based accounting, Part (II) Present issues: 3. The reform legislation (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) and the reform administration; 4. Procedural fairness and pure fairness, and Part (III) Future trends: 5. Forecast protection and forecast separation; 6. Principles-based systems and rules-based systems. These themes are each examined from dualistic perspectives by contrasting two fundamental concepts or principles. The article concludes with the strong need to focus on “procedural fairness” in establishing accounting standards as well as in implementing the reform legislation and administration, in contrast to “pure fairness” that is almost impossible to achieve by anyone.

The Harm of Dualism

A dualism is an extreme opposite. Historically, from Plato’s division between the intellect and matter, and between the soul and the body, one side of the dualism or polarity has been valued more highly than the other. In fact, one side is needed to transcend the perceived shortcomings of its opposite, or the perceived dangers of being pulled to the other side of the dualism. Traditional political and philosophic dualisms include abstract/concrete, reason/passion, intellect/emotions, objectivity/ subjectivity, logic/intuition, political/personal, public/private, and maleness/femaleness. A dualistic framework allows for no half measures. You are either with us or against us. You either identify with the civilized world of freedom (as defined by Bush, the U.S. administration, the West, or by the leaders of the “coalition of the willing”), or you must be part of a terrorist regime. What is meant by the “civilized world of freedom” is rarely spelled out. Those using such language assume that the valued side of the dualism is superior and therefore does not need a defense. With simple, absolutist worldviews, everything is black or white; there is no space for grey contradictions or ambiguities. Yet many writers from various disciplinary areas increasingly point to ways in which dualistic perspectives on culture, moral virtue, work practices, and politics minimize the rich tapestry of social diversity. For example, an abstract idea of “just war” can be explained through concrete examples of when there has been just cause, right intention, legitimate authority, or last resort. That is, the abstract and the concrete illuminate one another, rather than stand in necessary opposition. As a further example, the objective logic of “collateral damage” is presented by governments and throughout the media as the defense of the unavoidability of civilian casualties in war. But the very idea of “collateral damage” as merely an objective fact of Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 17:231–237 Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis LLC ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online DOI: 10.1080/14631370500332965

Friends and Citizens: Essays in Honor of Wilson Carey McWilliams. Edited by Peter Dennis Bathory and Nancy L. Schwartz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 311p. $50.00.

Wilson Carey McWilliams is certainly one of the great teachers of American political thought in his generation. The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), as well as his series on presidential elections and many essays, has captivated both his students and his colleagues. There are, of course, many prominent figures who have addressed the complexity of political thought in America in recent years but few whose influence is acknowledged so centrally on these terms. Of course, it is sometimes difficult for those influenced by a master teacher to convey thoughts once they are removed from the electricity of the seminar or conference. McWilliams is a good example of this phenomenon. At one level his understanding of American political culture is Whitmanesque. McWilliams is not primarily a jeremiadic thinker and much of his writing has the same breezy celebration of America as Whitman's. Added to this perspective is an intense appreciation of Mark Twain's comedic iconoclasm. Both foci are juxtaposed with what is his central preoccupation, a deep attachment to the Puritan vision of the human experience. McWilliams generalized the latter in The Idea of Fraternity in America as a tradition of fraternal politics that was enriched by other European immigrants. Although “Puritanism…was here first,” (113) it was superceded, though not replaced, by the powerful symbols of “Enlightenment liberalism.” McWilliams' model of cultural dualism offered the first systematic critique of Hartz's liberal society thesis and has since been replicated and expanded by many others including Robert Bellah and Rogers M. Smith. In fact, there is some irony in his alternative to Hartz's single-factor explanation of American culture, since it returned the study of American political thought to the traditional dualist perspectives developed by Progressive scholars, who are villains in McWilliams' own reading of American political thought. Moreover, McWilliams' focus on Puritan conceptions of community has led him to an attachment to premodern conceptions of politics as well as to a decided antipathy toward the political world of the American founders.

The Assessment of Discomfort in Dementia Protocol

Many people with dementia are unable to clearly or consistently verbalize pain symptoms. The Assessment of Discomfort in Dementia (ADD) Protocol is a systematic tool that can be used by nurses to make a differential assessment and treatment plan for both physical pain and affective discomfort experienced by people with dementia. This ADD Protocol is based on the assumption that behaviors associated with dementia are symptoms of unmet physiologic and/or nonphysiologic needs. Steps of the process include a physical assessment, a review of the patient's history, an assessment of affective needs including environmental stress and sensoristasis, and the administration of analgesics. The ADD Protocol is unique in that it uses “as needed” analgesics as a part of the assessment process. The dualistic perspective, in which physical and affective needs are considered in tandem, is an essential and innovative feature of the ADD Protocol. © 2002 by the American Society of Pain Management Nurses

The widsom of children-in-context

Children-in-families-in-communities are embedded in social realities that provide the matrix in which they grow, learn and develop and against which they test their identity. To view children-in-context it is necessary to shift from a dualist perspective that sees children and context as two separate entities to a view that sees the two as one at the interface of an ongoing transformational relationship. Childhood viewed in specific contexts, cultural, historical and social, expose the extent to which this is true. A contextual view acknowledges the structures, the forces and the processes in societies that impact on the interactions and regularities in children's daily lives. In a number of societies a deficit model of children is inherent in these interactions and regularities. This deficit model includes discrimination on the basis of age that places them lowest in the pecking order and denies them rights. Children, more than any other group, endure the added burdens of poverty and violence that further marginalize and alienate them from society. Childhood is not something to grow out of, childhood is life itself. Social interactions that acknowledge and respect children's experiences as valid can potentially reconstruct societal views towards children. To begin this process and to counter the present discriminatory discourse, research that gave children a voice to speak about their own experiences of violence is reported. This research recognizes that in the land of the small, it is the small who are wise.

Beyond Nancy Fraser's 'perspectival dualism'

The bifurcation between economically and culturally orientated perspectives has become a central trope in critical thinking on the problems of social justice and injustice. This paper attempts a critical explication and assessment of Nancy Fraser's recent work on this problem. She attempts to transcend the culture-economy divide by proposing a 'perspectival dualism' in which distinctive 'economic-redistributive' and 'cultural-recognitive' logics of justice are analytically distinguished and practically combined so as to furnish a balanced strategy for left-critical praxis. The paper seeks to demonstrate how and why Fraser's dualistic perspective fails, insofar as it is untenable to confine recognitive claims to the realm of culture, since they can be seen to underpin both redistributively and culturally oriented manifestations of social struggle. An alternative, multi-axial and 'metatheoretical' conception of recognition is offered, one which, it is claimed, can encompass both economic and cultural struggles within its theoretical ambit.

Approaching the society-nature dialectic : a plea for a geographical study of the environment

At a time when the environmental problem is becoming one of the major political and socio-economic issues, geography seems to face difficulties in approaching the subject. Although the study of society-nature interactions was the very foundation on which geography built itself as an academic discipline at the end of the previous century, today’s geographical work reveals a deep gap in the representations of physical and human processes. We shall discuss the historical production of this gap through an explanation of the rise of modern sciences and a brief history of geographical approaches of nature. In doing so, the paper tries to draw attention to the major concepts that could help combining physical and human geographies in a new and more promising manner. Using ‘political ecology’ and ‘historical materialism’, we shall demonstrate how society and nature can be seen as dialectically linked to each other, and how geography is able to analyse the socio-ecological processes that shape the ‘world’. This analysis merges together space, society and nature in a single framework without falling into the earlier dualist perspectives (i.e. determinism and possibilism).

Hispanismo e indigenismo: o dualismo cultural no pensamento social peruano (1900-1930). Uma revisão necessária

This article is about the two peruvian interpretations that, in the earlier XXth century, discussed about the cultural components of that country and their rol in the conformation of the peruvian further nation. This presentation attemps to outline the dualism that hispanismo and indigenismo had in common and how this dualistic perspective remains important until now. I will suggest that opposition and conflict are not the only forms of cultural communication - as dualistic perspective think - and that is necessary to think iguality as well and at the same time that difference.