Essentialist View Research Articles

The stage-within-the-screen: Peter Brook’s film adaptation of King Lear

Abstract In his film of King Lear (1971), Peter Brook reimagined his landmark production of the play on screen through an intricate interplay of theatrical and cinematic codes. This article revisits Brook’s adaptation, focusing on how its much-discussed debt to theatrical traditions relates to broader issues regarding the production and reception of Shakespearean films in the UK. I argue that the film’s overt affiliation to theatre sets it apart from other Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare grounded in Hollywoodian conventions that broaden considerably their potential to reach a global audience across time and location. In establishing strong links between his film and the RSC production, Brook’s counter-cinematic approach to filmic storytelling, alongside his casting of acclaimed stage actors, asserted the authority of theatre as a privileged medium where Shakespeare is made to signify. We shall see that the various marks of site-specific theatrical traditions in the film underscore its appeal to a local – rather than global – audience, thus dismantling essentialist and universalist views of Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare on screen.

Introducció

In their reconsiderations of hospitality through the thought and artistic practice of women of color, the contributions in this special issue rely heavily on historical memory, testimony, storytelling, affective politics, and decolonial phenomenology and epistemology. Given the mismatch between a humanistic, almost old-fashioned discourse of hospitality and the secular use of the word in the service business, the essays demonstrate a renewed interest in hospitality as a figuration of ethics and a critique of its practical and discursive contradictions: between a legally confirmed identity and the encounter with the unknown, between the unlimited responsibility toward a guest and gendered and racialized economic relations, between justice and fairness and essentialist views of the other (McNulty, 2007: viii).

Zoomorphism and Human Biology in Barbara Kingsolver’s "Prodigal Summer"

This article explores the conceptual difficulties that arise when fiction explores humankind’s primordial ties to nature, specifically regarding gender representation. I examine how an emphasis on biology demonstrates humankind’s innate connection to nature, while simultaneously perpetuating a problematic, essentialist view of gender. Using Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000) as a case study, I present two perspectives from which to interpret her ecofeminist approach. Firstly, I argue that Kingsolver employs zoomorphism as an effective strategy to override essentialist representations of sexuality. Secondly, I use Hans Gumbrecht’s theory of presence to contextualise the representation of biology and claim that Prodigal Summer attempts to dilute a much broader conceptual binary between humankind and nature.

Norms and necessity: replies to critics

ABSTRACT The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach.

Non-ideal theory, cultural studies, and the transgender inclusion debate

ABSTRACT This paper centers two complementary theoretical approaches to advance the debate about transgender women’s inclusion in elite women’s sports – namely, non-ideal theory and cultural studies. In doing so, the paper highlights divisions between ideal theory and non-ideal theory, normative internalism in sports and normative externalism in sports, and essentialist views of sports compared to non-essentialist views of sports. The paper’s main agenda is to show the value of applying non-ideal theory, externalism, and non-essentialism to the discourse over transgender inclusion.

How the Lewisian can Account for Kit Fine’s Essentialist Beliefs

AbstractThe Lewisean counterpart theorist– despite not defending a genuinely essentialist view of what is possible, de re, of individuals – generally has a way to make essentialist claims come out as true, in those contexts in which they are endorsed by a committed essentialist.In this paper, I am going to show that the normal system that the Lewisean adopts when she wants to make the essentialist a truth-teller does not work with Kit Fine: his essentialist beliefs, which support his counterexamples to the modal account of essentialism, cannot come out as true, in any contexts whatsoever, under the Lewisean view.After arguing that this represents a genuine problem for Lewis’s theory, I will propose a solution. I will indeed show that the Lewisean has a principled way to account for Fine’s essentialist beliefs, consistently with her own counterpart-theorist reading of them.

Children’s Essentialist Beliefs About Weight

ABSTRACT Striking weight biases emerge early in development, yet cognitive-developmental research has largely ignored weight as a social characteristic of interest. How do children conceive of weight? In particular, do children hold essentialist views of weight (i.e. do they view weight as natural, stable, inductively meaningful, and reflective of people’s insides) as they do of so many other social characteristics? We conducted an exploratory investigation of children’s weight essentialism across two studies. In total, 356 participants (280 4- to 11-year-old children and 76 adults from the United States, mostly White and from middle- to high-income families) participated in three tasks, respectively assessing three dimensions of essentialism of social categories: Beliefs about weight stability, heritability, and inductive potential despite transformation. Results revealed that children viewed weight as stable (similarly so to race) and informative of someone’s food choices, but they did not view it as biologically- or genetically-determined. Thus, children may not view weight as reflecting people’s biological nature (biological essentialism), but they may view weight as reflecting people’s stable personal character (moral essentialism) – a view which is also highly compatible with weight bias, unlike biological essentialism. Children also demonstrated stronger essentialist views of lightness than heaviness across tasks, though essentialism of heaviness increased over development. Findings are discussed as they relate to early conceptions of weight and weight bias. Implications for conceptualizations and measurement of essentialism are also discussed.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Definitions in economics: farewell to essentialism

ABSTRACT There is an essentialist view that requires one to specify the set of necessary and sufficient properties of the things that exist when establishing definitions. The endorsement of essentialism for definitions in economics has been largely motivated by the Taxonomic Tower of Babel (TTB), which encompasses two intellectual fears. The fear of scientific aphasia is the fear that scientific progress is hampered because economists do not agree on the definitions they use. The fear of nihilism refers to the fear of the advent of an unmanageable proliferation of definitions of the same term. We advocate the abandonment of essentialism by offering three arguments. First, essentialism seems impracticable in economics because essences are either mostly unavailable or useless. Second, the TTB, rather than a bug, is a feature of economics. Third, the TTB does not necessarily display the negative implications presumably associated with its existence.

A skeptic’s guide to “intercultural communication”—debunking the “intercultural” and rethinking “culture”

Abstract Starting with a critique of so-called intercultural communication, the present paper contests and challenges the prevalent and dominant essentialist views of “culture”. It is exposed that these views have a detrimental underlying logic that is both destructive and self-destructive. Instead, the paper proposes a radically new idea of culture, a minimalist approach supported by insights gleaned from contemporary semiotic inquiry. In this approach, culture is defined as a biological instinct to acquire information through modeling, that is, learning by models. This instinct is at work, or is realized, in specific acts of such modeling, resulting in cultural practices and cultural artifacts. In the case of humanity, a cultural practice is anything a human does that can be modeled by another human and a cultural artifact is any object that humans make and can model. The paper argues it is imperative to keep in mind that when we deal with the “intercultural”, we are only dealing with concrete yet different cultural practices or cultural artifacts. This is an effective way to completely refute essentialism. In a sense, the paper is meant to be a wake-up call, instead of a fighting talk. Its main objective is not to negate or obliterate the field of “intercultural communication”, among others, but rather to save them from themselves—a true and worthy field of “intercultural communication” is a field against essentialism, instead of an accessory to essentialism, whether the commission is “before the fact” or “after the fact”.

Islam, Justice, and Democracy by Sabri Ciftci

This book by Sabri Ciftci is a timely arrival that fills an important gap in comparative democratization literature. Grounded in the concept of justice, this volume advances the debate on Islam and democracy by shedding light on individual-level microfoundations of attitudes that support democratic ideals to begin with. Two goals motivate this study: (1) tracing the evolution of political and social justice, and (2) explaining their implications for Muslims’ support for democracy. While the key historical junctures of social and political justice are accounted for, the volume chiefly examines the “contemporary manifestations of political and social justice trajectories and their formative effects on Muslim attitudes” (p. 11), particularly in relation to Islamist ideology, mass protest movements, and public opinion in the Muslim world. The author explores the debate about Islam and democracy between two competing theories: an essentialist view that holds Islam as inherently incompatible with modern liberal democracy and a counteressentialist view that see no contradiction between Islam and democratic values and institutions (Chapter 2). After summarizing the leading voices in both theoretical camps and effectively highlighting the unaccounted gaps of this debate, Ciftci cogently exposes the limitations of essentialist views that are largely based on narrow historical determinism, simplistic reductionism, and broad-brush absolutism.

A New Perspective on the Perception of Thai Culture Reflected by Thai University Students’ Accounts through the Lens of Small Cultures

Thai culture has been discussed in several studies, yet such discussion is fixed and fails to consider the complexity and dynamism of Thai culture in response to the changing circumstances within society. This qualitative study employed an innovative photo-elicitation technique, utilizing online semi-structured interviews, to explore eighteen Thai university students’ perceptions of Thai culture and to establish whether or not their perceptions differ from prescribed ethnic, national, and international qualities. Data from the Thematic Analysis demonstrate that Thai university students’ perceptions differ from traditional Thai cultural values in terms of the openness of their sexual attitudes and behavior, the equal relationships between younger and older people, and the promotion of gender equality. Using the notion of small cultures as a conceptual framework, the findings add variety to Thai cultural values and beliefs and raise questions about an imagined conception of national cultures, leading to cultural generalizations by setting up stereotypes of others. Taken together, this study suggests moving beyond generalizations or stereotypes about national groups, or the essentialist view of culture, supporting the notion that culture is dynamic and complex and unrestricted by national boundaries. This study contributes to wider scholarship on intercultural communication by demonstrating that there are a variety of behaviors and perceptions of Thai culture within a single group of Thai people, highlighting that Thai culture is constantly evolving and never fixed.

Migration, gender, and emotions. A reflection on global care chains and circuits of care in the context of migration from Bolivia to Argentina

The intersection between the history of emotions and migration studies highlights how motherhood and care practices are transformed during migration. In this article, through the example of Bolivian migration to Argentina, we shed light on diverse emotional experiences around care work that cannot be understood if we analyze them through the classic approaches of global care chains and the circulation of care. In this study, we set out to analyze care practices and the emotional dynamics that are connected to them from a situated perspective that focuses on different geographic locations to those studied in these two classic approaches. We call into question essentialist views of motherhood, care, and emotions by conducting a historical analysis of human mobility between two countries in the Global South: the waves of migration from Bolivia to Argentina that took place between the 1970s and 1990s.

Disabled Bodies and Ableist Ideology in The Hunger Games Film Trilogy

Yet, there has been no research thoroughly examining how The Hunger Games film trilogy, in both obvious and subtle ways, expresses widely accepted ableist concepts of and perspectives on disability and people with disabilities. Given as much, I apply critical disability studies as the primary theoretical frame, will carefully explore and discuss how The Hunger Games films can be regarded as harmful and regressive for the human rights of those with disabilities in that they covertly and overtly support deterministic and essentialist views of disability as a marker of Otherness and fortify ableist ideology, which flourishes everywhere in society. Namely, I aim to unmask and thereby problematize the ideological power of ableism and able-bodied normativity lurking in The Hunger Games films.

Toward a Class-Conscious Approach to Cultural Responsiveness

The last several decades have seen a growth in scholarship and application of culturally responsive and sustaining educational (CRSE) approaches in schools serving youth of color. A growing body of research has shown how CRSE serves as an effective strategy to engage students of color, combat pernicious stereotypes, and improve academic outcomes. Notwithstanding these important contributions, CRSE scholarship and practice have not fully explored the significance of social class, despite its long-standing correlation with academic performance, deep connections to identity, and relationship to race and racialization. Drawing on lessons gleaned from ethnographic research, which has demonstrated the importance of social-class analyses, this essay calls for a greater emphasis on and recognition of class in CRSE methods and application. As one of the most prominent and useful sets of pedagogical strategies used in education today, CRSE stands to benefit from a wider inclusion of social class, an addition that would have important ramifications for practitioners and scholars seeking to effectively educate historically marginalized populations. A deeper understanding of the significance of class could also help educators and scholars avoid perpetuating pernicious cultural stereotypes, such as the model minority myth and the culture of poverty. However, a class-conscious addition to CRSE must also maintain its anti-deficit perspective to avoid essentialist views about working-class youth.

Getting it right: Teaching undergraduate biology to undermine racial essentialism.

How we teach human genetics matters for social equity. The biology curriculum appears to be a crucial locus of intervention for either reinforcing or undermining students' racial essentialist views. The Mendelian genetic models dominating textbooks, particularly in combination with racially inflected language sometimes used when teaching about monogenic disorders, can increase middle and high school students' racial essentialism and opposition to policies to increase equity. These findings are of particular concern given the increasing spread of racist misinformation online and the misappropriation of human genomics research by white supremacists, who take advantage of low levels of genetics literacy in the general public. Encouragingly, however, teaching updated information about the geographical distribution of human genetic variation and the complex, multifactorial basis of most human traits, reduces students' endorsement of racial essentialism. The genetics curriculum is therefore a key tool in combating misinformation and scientific racism. Here, we describe a framework and example teaching materials for teaching students key concepts in genetics, human evolutionary history, and human phenotypic variation at the undergraduate level. This framework can be flexibly applied in biology and anthropology classes and adjusted based on time availability. Our goal is to provide undergraduate-level instructors with varying levels of expertise with a set of evidence-informed tools for teaching human genetics to combat scientific racism, including an evolving set of instructional resources, as well as learning goals and pedagogical approaches. Resources can be found at https://noto.li/YIlhZ5. Additionally, we hope to generate conversation about integrating modern genetics into the undergraduate curriculum, in light of recent findings about the risks and opportunities associated with teaching genetics.

Perception in Plato’s Heaven?

American critical realism was defended in two versions, an “essentialist” and an “empirical.” The main proponent of the essentialist version was George Santayana, who in his Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) outlined a critical realist account of epistemology based substantially on an articulate doctrine of essences. In the present paper, an attempt is made to critically examine the resulting approach, particularly in relation to perception. It will be argued that Santayana failed to develop a sufficiently convincing essentialist view of perception, and that his actual significance in terms of the impact of the critical realist movement was, contrary to what is often claimed, quite limited.

Actualization of the warrior maiden archetype in Ukrainian cinema of the beginning of the 21st century

The article focuses on the screen incarnations of female characters, whose images, being contemporary with the challenges of today, associated with the archetype of the Warrior, destroy the stereotypical notions of the feminine as weak and passive characteristic of traditional (that is, phallocentric/patriarchal) culture. Nowadays, such an essentialist view seems not just debatable, but finds an alternative interpretation, both in material realities and in artistic practices. In particular, the cinematography of Ukraine at the beginning of the 21st century convincingly testifies to the expansion of the body of representations of the feminine. The film material of the early 2020s convincingly testifies to the actualization of the screen incarnations of the image-concept of the warrior woman, which is symptomatic of the military and political contexts of today. New Ukrainian cinema seeks to understand the little-studied experience of women’s participation in hostilities and the peculiarities of their stay in military captivity, implementing modern feminist approaches to the study of the topic “woman and war”. In an effort to go beyond the stereotypical vision of women within the dipole “heroine-victim”, the screen demonstrates the transformation of gender patterns and at the same time is a continuation of a tradition with deep historical roots.

Autism as emergent and transactional.

The current epistemology of autism as a phenotype derives from the consistency of historical accounts and decades of work within the tradition of descriptive epidemiology, culminating in current categorical descriptions within DSM and ICD nosologies and the concept of “prototypical autism.” The demonstrated high heritability of this phenotype has led to an essentialist theory of autism as a biological entity and the concerted search within the developmental brain and genetic science for discrete biological markers. This search has not revealed simple markers explaining autistic outcomes and has led to moves towards a more dimensional account. This article proposes an alternative transactional approach. It proposes to understand autistic states as an emergent property within a complex developmental system; as the neurodivergent brain, and mind and body, encounter their social and physical environment within early development. Key evidence in support of this approach comes from random allocation intervention trials based on such transactional development theory, both in the infancy pre-diagnostic prodrome and the early post-diagnostic period. In replicated evidence, these intervention trials show that a targeted alteration in the quality of social transactional environment available for the child leads to significant, predictable, and sustained alterations in the outcome dimensional autistic phenotype over time; and further, in one prodromal trial, to a significant reduction in later categorical classification status. The inference from this evidence is that the prototypical autistic phenotype is to a degree malleable with a changed experienced social environment and that it is emergent from its constituent traits. Such a transactional approach enlarges our notion of the phenotype and brings the study of autism within mainstream individual difference developmental science. It challenges essentialist views, for instance as to intrinsic autistic “social avoidance” or theory of mind empathy deficits, integrates dimensional and categorical perspectives, and is consistent with the lived experience of autistic people and their advocacy for improved understanding within a social model.

‘Purification’ and ‘Hybridization’: (Re)construction and Reception of Theatrical Nationality in Western Tours of the Mei Lanfang and Tsutsui Troupes in 1930

The Western tours of the Mei Lanfang and Tsutsui troupes in 1930 illustrated how to (re)construct the theatrical nationality of China and Japan through the manifestation and manipulation of the performance of Peking opera and kabuki. Through the ‘purification’ of Peking opera's stage presentation system, the Mei Lanfang troupe forged a ‘pure’ theatrical Chineseness that boosted the Americans’ fascination with the ‘(a)historicality’ of Chinese theatrical tradition. By presenting Westerners with a ‘hybridized’ kabuki, which embodied a ‘historically authentic’ theatrical Japaneseness, the Tsutsui troupe deconstructed Westerners’ psychological expectations of a culturally imagined ‘pure’ and ‘classical’ Japanese theatre. As two sides of the same coin, the two troupes’ (re)construction of theatrical Chineseness and Japaneseness together challenged the West's essentialist views of cultural ‘Others’, which forcibly endowed Eastern theatre with a pure and unchanged ‘otherness’.