Essentialist Ideas Research Articles

Disorderly development: Globalization and the idea of “culture” in the Kalahari

ABSTRACTThe San (Bushmen) of southern Africa are currently engaged in global activism and local struggles for rights as indigenous people. As their identity becomes globalized, the San are encouraged to promote a stereotypical image of themselves as isolated, pristine primitives. In this article, I argue that primordial expressions of San identity reflect the globalization of an essentialist idea of culture. I examine how this idea of culture is instrumentalized in local contexts of disorder and corruption. Finally, I outline how disorder and primordialism combine to sustain systems of inequality for an underclass of farm San in the Omaheke Region of Namibia.

Old History of Culture and New Cultural History

The article compares two epochs in the history of the Western cultural history writing, with main attention paid to their theoretical assumptions: that of the late 19th - early 20th century (called in the article "old history of culture") and that of the late 20th - early 21st century (known as "new cultural history"). Both of them emerged as challengers: the old history of culture was conceived as the alternative to the once dominant political history, and the new cultural history challenged the social history that dominated in the Western history writing since the 1960s. However, the theoretical sources of their respective concepts of culture are very different. The old history of culture shares its psychologistic, holistic, organicist, and essentialist ideas of culture with the philosophy of culture of the late 19th - early 20th century. New cultural history uses an analytical concept of culture peculiar to contemporary social science as its theoretical point of reference and considers the methods of field research in cultural anthropology as its methodological paradigm. From the analytical point of view (T. Parsons, C. Geertz), culture is an aspect of social reality, represented by the authoritative patterns for action and symbols. This idea of culture invites a historian to consider culture not as a specific set of social phenomena that are concentrated in the particular "cultural institutions" or segment of society, but as an aspect which can be detected in any social phenomena. This idea of culture opens the prospect of the cultural history of politics, cultural history of economy, and so on.

Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Essentialism1

This article focuses on key themes in the liberal philosophical debate over multiculturalism, as well as the responses of Canadian social and political actors to the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Since September 11, there has been a renewed popularity of arguments positing a 'clash of civilizations' between Muslim and Christian societies, and a new legitimacy advanced for 'ethnic profiling' in the name of security. The rapidity with which this has happened in Canada is particularly striking because of the country's liberal-democratic and multicultural tradition. The introduction of a national policy of multiculturalism in 1971 provided a new understanding of Canadian citizenship that was more inclusionary of immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities. Multiculturalism has also become a hotly debated ideal among Canadian, American and European political philosophers concerned with addressing the possibilities and limits of liberalism given ethnic diversity, and the limits of ethnic diversity given liberalism. Multiculturalism is typically presented as a 'problem' for liberal politics and ethics. Building on how multiculturalism policy in Canada has provided a more inclusionary discourse around citizenship, a defence of multiculturalism is advanced which rejects the essentialist treatment of 'culture' and 'cultural' groups. It is suggested that the unfolding discussions in Canada since September 11 demonstrate the ongoing tension between cultural essentialism and liberal individual rights. The Canadian experience points to the value of an anti-essentialist multiculturalism in challenging discrimination given that neither liberalism, nor liberal democratic states, are neutral in their allocation of resources and legitimacy among more and less powerful ethnic groups. It is argued that rather than multiculturalism, it is essentialist thinking, imagery and ideas which present the greatest 'problem' to the ethics of liberalism and the politics of liberal democracies like Canada.

'Labyrinths of the future': Nietzsche's genealogy of European nationalism

In light of the continued primacy of national identities in European politics, this article considers the earlier and largely unexplored genealogy of modern European nationalism advanced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that by analysing the rise of modern nationalism in Europe within the broader context of European nihilism, Nietzsche was able to gain original insights both about the appeal of national ideas in Europe and about why such ideas were perpetuated. On the basis of this unique understanding Nietzsche subsequently developed an innovative critique of modern nationalism that remains pertinent not only for the contemporary debate on Europe, but also for current attempts to theorize the rise of modern nationalism in Europe. Nietzsche's own idea of the 'good Europeans', in turn, is one that transcends nationalist perspectives without, however, replacing the former with an essentialist idea of Europe.

The rise of the Aristotelean worms

Most developmental research focuses on a few model organisms, among which the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is particularly prominent. Until recently, C. elegans was viewed as the ultimate deterministic organism, because there is a virtual absence of variation in cell number (eutely). However, Azevedo et al. [1xThe demise of the platonic worm. Azevedo, R.B.R. et al. Nematology. 2000; 2: 71–79CrossrefSee all References[1] in their ‘Demise of the Platonic worm’, previously showed that the ‘platonic ideal’ of a worm, where each individual faithfully represents the essentialist idea of the species, does not hold true for all nematodes. The authors reported that, in the epidermis, the variance in cell number between individuals of a species increased with the mean cell number in that species.In a new article [2xA power law for cells. Azevedo, R.B.R. and Leroi, A. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2001; 98: 5699–5704Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (22)See all References[2], Azevedo and Leroi report that the variability in some supposedly eutelic taxa is not unusually low, and that the relationship between cell number variation and mean cell number generally follows a power law with an exponent of 2 across a wide range of multicellular taxa. They use stochastic branching processes to model the way in which variation builds up in a lineage and convincingly argue that the relationship between cell variability and cell number must be maintained by selection. In another new article, Delattre and Felix [3xPolymorphism and evolution of vulval precursor cell lineages within two nematode genera, Caenorhabditis and Oscheius. Delattre, M. and Felix, M.-A. Curr. Biol. 2001; 11: 631–643Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (51)See all References[3] report variability in vulval cell lineages in several strains of C. elegans and of its close relative Oscheius sp. CEW1, and demonstrate that this variability is affected by several loci. Thus, lineage variability can even evolve over short evolutionary timescales.These studies are important for several reasons. First, they provide a solution to the paradox that the C. elegans nematode model displays no developmental variation, whereas there is variation in development among nematode species. The current results no longer exclude a standard neo-darwinian scenario where the gradual divergence of a developmentally polymorphic population can lead to species differences. Second, these studies dispel the notion that C. elegans can serve as the platonic model for all nematodes. Finally, these studies provide a framework for unraveling the genetic mechanisms underlying developmental stochasticity. It is perhaps ironic that animals known for their invariance should provide materials for a better understanding of the developmental basis of phenotypic variability. This would really please Aristotle. In his view, knowledge comes from understanding and classifying variation in the empirical world.

Assessment in Educational Practice: Forming Pedagogised Identities in the Art Curriculum

This paper draws on the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida in order to present a discussion of how students and teachers in the field of art and design education achieve their pedagogised identities. My purpose is to offer some thoughts on assessment by advocating a project of difference which attempts to embrace children's and student's ontological orientations of practice. Assessment discourses which assume universal and essentialist ideas of ability are criticised and shown to presuppose objective or naturalist fantasies. A valuing of difference and the singularity of practice is proposed by describing five drawings produced by Year 7 students in a London secondary school, and then by referring to the Lacanian Real in order to extricate the art object from normative assessment discourses.

'It's only as stupid as you are': Children's and adults' negotiation of ICT competence at home and at school

Contemporary discourses about children's use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—which both celebrate children's command of a technology which is seen to be our future, and raise fears that this technology is putting children's emotional well-being at risk—are problematic, resting as they do on essentialist ideas about children, and overt technological determinism. Drawing instead on work within the new social studies of childhood, and the sociology of science and technology, we identify a need for research which examines how children and technology come together in diverse communities of practice. The communities of practice we study are the home- and school-based ICT usage of British school children in the late 1990s. Our research identifies the different ways in which children and adults negotiate children's technical and emotional competence in relation to ICT, and uncovers the varied meanings of childhood and technology which emerge for adults and children in these two socio-spatial environments. These findings not only highlight the spatiality of children's and adults' performances and understandings of ICT competence, but also how these are constituted through the socio-spatial relations which shape the off-line spaces of home and school.

Resisting Convention: The Films of Joe Comerford

RESISTING CONVENTION: THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD JERRY WHITE Throughout his career, filmmaker Joe Comerford has fiercely challenged mainstream ideas about Irish selfhood. Juxtaposed with the images of Ireland that have filled film screens until the 1960s, Comerford’s work is assertively anti-romantic and offers a rigorously anti-colonial critique of the “New Ireland.” In his treatment of landscape, for example, Comerford eschews traditional preoccupation with the picturesque—with the conventional iconographic project of making Ireland look beautiful, or, alternately, harsh and rugged. His unstable landscapes connote danger and anxiety rather than beauty or grandeur. Further, his work explicitly concerns itself with those on the margins: drug addicts, the desperately poor of Dublin, traveling people, gay men, and criminals on the run. This concern with the periphery breaks down essentialist ideas such as fíor ghael or the “Celtic Tiger,” and interrogates Ireland’s confrontation of its postcolonial future. Drawing on a wide variety of visual and narrative strategies , Comerford intentionally offers “imperfect” solutions to the problem of representation raised by modern Irish culture. In fact, the notion of imperfection itself figures prominently in the debates into which Comerford hurls himself. CONTEXT Although Comerford participates in a blossoming indigenous motion picture community that seeks to correct conventional visualizations of Ireland , his work stands apart from much of the recent Irish cinema receiving international attention. Comerford’s densely constructed films, which should be viewed in both a national and international context, offer contradictory mixtures of narrative, political, and avant-garde strategies. Echoing both the French New Wave and the Third Cinema movement, they combine traditional narrative with techniques that undermine illusionistic realism. THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD 134 Comerford aggressively avoids Hollywood’s1 choice to subsume both formal innovation and explicit ideology to the demands of realism. His work is unusual not only because it is confrontational or anti-authoritarian , both formally and politically, but because it clearly chooses to be so. These films distinguish themselves from popular cinema by asserting themselves as ideological representations. Whereas most of Comerford’s films have a narrative drive,2 complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end, he never bypasses formal and political concerns in favor of an obsessive focus on narrative linearity and closure. Neither entirely avant-garde nor entirely conventional, his work has an ambiguous relationship with dominant models of cinema. To some extent, Comerford’s films evoke French New Wave productions of the 1950s and 1960s; his 1988 Reefer and the Model, especially, recalls the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Innovative French filmmakers were deeply, albeit self-consciously, influenced by Hollywood, and Comerford ’s derivative relationship with Hollywood is similarly complex. His first feature, Traveler, draws on elements of the Hollywood road movie; Reefer and the Model on the heist film; and High Boot Benny, on the boarding school melodrama. In each case, though, like his French colleagues of the fifties and sixties, Comerford radically transforms the conventions he exploits in ways quite specific to his own national and historic condition. The concept of “Third Cinema” is equally important in understanding Comerford’s films. First appearing in a fiery and idealistic manifesto (“Hacia un Tercer Cine,” or “Towards a Third Cinema”) by Argentine Fernando Solanas and Spaniard Octavio Gettino,3 the term stresses skepticism toward illusionistic/realist narrative. Solanas and Gettino assert THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD 135 1 The term “Hollywood” should not be taken to mean films made only in Hollywood, California, but films made in a realist style, produced in an explicitly commercial framework, and generally fulfilling a schema outlined in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s seminal text, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2 Exceptions to this would be his short experimental films Withdrawal (1974), a nonnarrative portrayal of the tormented psyche of a drug addict, or Waterbag (1984), which deals with a woman who has just had an abortion. These films are not discussed in this article, which is restricted to Comerford’s features, or in the case of the fifty-one-minute Down the Corner, his featurette. 3 Published in the Cuban journal Tricontinental in 1969, the essay first appeared in English in Cineaste 4:3...

Fetishising Flesh

Fetishising Flesh