Everyday Fears Research Articles

Risky Hitchhiking, and Other Stories about the Theatre of the Eighth Day

Teatr Ósmego Dnia (the Theatre of the Eighth Day), established in Poznań in 1964, was a part of Polish student theatre. Between 1976 and 1981, it became one of the most important companies in the history of the Polish theatre, producing several masterpieces. It also became a legendary grouping of democratic, anti-communist opposition. The persecution it was subjected to was caused by censorship, the secret police, and the administration at all levels. However, the members of the group managed to overcome everyday fear, face the totalitarian authorities openly, and create unforgettable artistic works. Four of them, who belonged to the group from the early 1970s, still maintain the ethical principles and artistic strategies adopted at that time, and thus now clash with the ideology of the current ruling administration, which is the right-wing Law and Justice Party.

What People Feared in Soviet Times: Expression of Everyday Fears in Urban Legends and Rumors

Александра Архипова, Анна Кирзюк. Опасные советские вещи. Городские легенды и страхи в СССР, (сер. Культура повседневности), Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2020, 536 p.

Locked in Liminality. Angst und Methode in der Krisenerfahrung der Gegenwart

Against the backdrop of proclamations of a society of fear, risk and panic from the late 1970s to the present, the article takes a lead from fears as productive agents within the ethnographic process. Through the focal lens of pandemic everyday experience, and deploying essayistic ways of thinking and writing, it draws attention to the intersubjective and intercorporeal practice of meaning-making as conceptualised in phenomenology, psychoanalysis and pragmatist semiotics, and outlines its relevance for emergent interpretation and reflexivity. On an interactive micro-level, the essay explores the moment of ‘in-between’ that is sparked by surprise or crisis, and opens a transient ‘third milieu’ where experience can be shared, whilst cultural meaning is in ongoing renegotiation. The idea of this ambivalent space, as marked by indeterminate creative possibilities merging with fear and uncertainty, is followed further through Corona communication and narration, and investigated in its ambiguous effects of consolidating agency, and perpetuating anxiety and ideological exclusion by way of paranoid ‘infection’. The article inquires into the dynamic conceptual potentials of liminality theory, which it transgresses towards a late-capitalist state of permanent exception: What happens when everyday actors find themselves overpowered by paradoxical emotional requirements that cannot be resolved into new sociality? How can ethnographers, with view to their own involvement into the meshes of everyday fears, retain an empathic, yet empirically grounded understanding of pandemic experience and beyond?

The Everyday Fears of the Country of the Soviets

This review analyses Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR, a book by A. Arkhipova and A. Kirzyuk that was published by the Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie publishing house in 2020. The research studies Soviet urban legends from the point of view of their typologisation and the description of the nature of existence and interpretation of the plots presented. The sources of urban folklore are reports of the KGB from the Soviet republics, case investigations, letters from Soviet citizens, and information from the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. These documents reflect those events that caused the most acute social reaction: this manifested itself in the emergence and spread of folklore plots that caused changes in everyday behaviour. The authors refer to the experience of Western anthropological research and conclude that it is advisable to use a set of scholarly approaches (interpretive, memetic, and operational) that offer their own tools for working with folklore texts: this determines the methodological novelty of the work. Focusing on the definition of the genre of the “urban legend”, Arkhipova and Kirzyuk divide the collected material not only according to wider plots, but also according to the type of actualisation (the authorities’ initiative or “horizontally” spread in society) and functions (prevention, protection, agitation, propaganda). According to the reviewer, the book offers unique folklore material and universal ways to interpret such material.

"Moribondo Cristo le rispose:/non mi toccare!" Touch, Isolation, and the Agonizing Flesh in Amelia Rosselli’s <i>Variazioni belliche</i>

The theoretical responses that constellate the recent debates around the pandemic often neglect the contradictory, painful tensions that arise in the aftermath of historical lacerations. What would it mean to approach the lyric, instead, when thinking about the diseased body, the dangers and potentialities of isolation, and the everyday fear of contagion? How could we turn to an understanding of poetry that might proudly elude a practical answer, escape the assumed (but not always achieved) lucidity of a comforting solution, and help us grasp the ineffability of the current crisis? Some of Amelia Rosselli’s Variazioni belliche (1964) could lead us into thinking beyond the mediatic hygiene that bombards us with graphs and projected figures, thus disclosing an eidetic and experiential horizon able to illuminate the present (in a way, to infect it). One of Rosselli’s lyrics, in particular, comments upon (and dislodges) the prohibition of touching contained in the Noli me tangere story, echoing the long-lived fascination that Western critical theory has felt towards Judeo-Christian tales as sites of “critical inquiry”. Delving into Rosselli’s lyrics will offer a glimpse of a new language of loss and seclusion able to question the well-worn constructs through which we are accustomed to reading the pandemic: beyond the abstraction of the biopolitical subject, and the numeric reports circulated by the media, the poet conflates civic participation and solitude, invoking the materiality of death and of the sacred within the vertigo of a personal and epochal shift.

Lost footprints of our ancestors

Fossilised tracks can provide a window on the everyday fears and joys of ancient people – if you know how to read them. Colin Barras reports

Abstract 11357: Sleep Modulates Heartbeat Waveform in Humans During a Predatory Virtual Competition

Introduction: Psychological stress modulates cardiac activity as a self-defense mechanism established across animal evolution and known as fight or flight response. However, the fact that our everyday fears differ from the ones that motivated this evolution represent a difficulty to the study of this response in humans. In this work, we are particularly interested in finding morphological cardiac markers that demonstrate the modulation of sleep to the human response of feeling like prey or predator. Methodology: Twelve individuals (10 men and 2 women) were recruited in pairs to attend to the laboratory, where they were randomly assigned in two groups: preys and predators. They played for 45 minutes a first person shooter electronic game against each other with close-combat weapons, but the predator had the advantage of being able to use a medium-range shotgun. After the match, they slept for 2 hours, followed by another 45 minutes match. We evaluated the ECG of the first 20 minutes of each of these 3 blocks in windows of 1 minute. We measured each cardiac cycle using variance, then estimated each resulting signal with Shannon entropy. Result: We verified that the Shannon entropy applied to the variance of cardiac cycles (H(V)) is larger in preys than in predators during the second game (Figure), with a p-value of 0.028 by the paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test. No statistical differences were found for the first game or sleep blocks. Conclusion: We hypothesized that prey and predator cardiac signals have their own characteristics and, therefore, have unique parameters for each of the different blocks. Thus, we believe that this tendency towards a standardization of roles (predator x prey) over time is due to the fact that in the first game, predators and prey are arbitrarily instituted and not biologically established, and that during sleep the memory of game events is consolidated towards their role goals, which modulates heartbeat waveform in the second game.

What's the Risk? Fearful Individuals Generally Overestimate Negative Outcomes and They Dread Outcomes of Specific Events.

Although it is an adaptive mechanism that danger usually elicits fear, it seems that fearful individuals overestimate the danger associated with their feared objects or situations. Previous research has not systematically distinguished between the estimated risk of an encounter with fear-relevant stimuli and the expected unpleasant outcomes of such encounters. Furthermore, it is not clear if biased risk perception is specific to an individual’s fear or generalized to all negative events. In an online-survey (N = 630) we assessed the estimated risk to encounter fear-relevant stimuli and the expectations of negative outcomes of such encounters. Items contained three domains (spiders, snakes, and everyday fear triggers). In regression analyses we examined the specific associations between fear and risk estimations. In addition, we compared subgroups with specific fears and low fearful individuals. While an individual’s fear score was not related to the estimated risk of an encounter with fear-specific stimuli, it was related to an overestimation of negative outcomes in all domains. The perceived risk of aversive outcomes was most pronounced for an individual’s specific fear. Furthermore, an individual’s specific fear was most predictive of the estimated risk of a negative fear-relevant outcome. Highly fearful individuals overestimate the risk of negative outcomes of fear-relevant encounters. Specifically, they dread outcomes of encounters with their feared object. Differentiating fear-relevant components of risk perception provides insights into the cognitions which may motivate maladaptive avoidance behavior.

The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21st Century

This paper examines the treatment of homosexuality in 21st-century Nigerian literature and discusses how the Nigerian literary community critiques discourses of homophobia and explores the everyday fears, desires, pleasures, and anxieties of those who experience same-sex attraction. It argues that 21st-century Nigerian writing can be seen as what Raymond Williams calls “emergent” because it resists the dominant discourses in ways not previously done before and tells diverse stories about same-sex desire that are neither monothematic nor moralistic. This article demonstrates how the work of authors such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Jude Dibia as well as writing published on the Internet in the wake of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act tells queer stories about everyday life and love and the intersecting struggles queer African subjects must face.

Video Art: Everyday Fear within the Three Southern Thai Provinces

The objective of this project was to create a form of video art and utilize it to instill a social awareness of living everyday in fear as experienced by women who lost their husbands through the insurgency in Thailand’s three southern provinces. The overall objective of this video was to portray the personal and social atmosphere in terms of way of life, culture, and identity. The video is ten minutes long and consists of three stories: First, the ambience of the rubber plantation illustrating the unique culture in this region; Second, the tea drinking tradition of Thai Muslim men; Third, women suffering the loss during the insurgencies. Together the three accounts depicts how the lives of these women became a life of enduring suffering and loss. It is online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-5pqeQKpiI.

Video Art: Everyday Fear within the Three Southern Thai Provinces

Video Art: Everyday Fear within the Three Southern Thai Provinces

Fear, Loathing and the Everyday Geopolitics of Encounter in the Arizona Borderlands

This paper argues for the importance of attending to both affective and emotional experience in analysing the origins and effects of border and immigration efforts in the US/Mexico border region. We do so by engaging with theoretical understands of the politics of affect and emotion among cultural and feminist geographers and social scientists. We then examine Arizona's SB 1070 and its connection to a larger history of border and immigration enforcement in Arizona. Drawing from ethnographic work, interviews, and media and policy analysis, we engage with narratives provided by border area ranchers to unpack how these ranchers' encounters with unauthorised migrants have changed over time. We then examine how the everyday fear and anxiety associated with these encounters drive political activism and state intervention in the region. We conclude by discussing how this intervention, in turn, reproduces racial and gender hierarchies, hierarchies that are themselves affectively mediated.

From Military Threats to Everyday Fear

The history of combat is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception. In other words, war consists not so much of scoring territorial, economic or other material victories but of appropriating the immateriality of perceptual field. The function of the eye has become the function of the weapons (Virilio, 1989; 2009). To understand information age warfare we have to understand the concept of representation as a part of our process of violence. The idea of information warfare or an information operation is based on the process where the physical target is no longer destroyed with the kinetic systems, but the process where the non-kinetic systems, like information, scan the symbols-semiotics networks. We like to consume safety different kind of fears. The feeling of the safety fear based on the virtual boundaries, which are set in the movement from “principle” to “practice, in other words in the actualization of the cyber-form. The power of fear is not a form. It is not abstract. It is the movement of form into the content outside of which it is a void of potential function, of the abstract into the particular it cannot be or do without. (see Massumi 1993, 20-21) Today, particularly the advanced mobile technology, the Internet and the entertainment industry immensely exploit the experiences from different wars and conflicts for example as ideas of computer games. In return the military industrial complex represents its own language for example in the concept of information operations with the help of applications particularly rising from the entertainment industry. The roles of Hector and Achilles, the teachings of Jomini and Clausewitz have an effect in the background of games and gaming. Opposite to Clauseiwitz’s thinking, Jomini took the view that the amount of force deployed should be kept to the minimum in order to lower casualties and that war was a science, not an art. The most central genres in gaming are ”strategy”, ”adventure”, ”shooter”, ”sports”, ”simulation”, ”music”, ”role playing” and ”puzzle”. All of these are related to warfare one way or another. Another interesting fact is that in the 1950’s the first computer games were mathematic strategy based games that that had been developed in universities (Czosseck, 2009; Peltoniemi, 2009).

Fear of crime as a political weapon: explaining the rise of extreme right politics in the Flemish countryside

In this article, we discuss the recent success of extreme right politicians in the Flemish countryside. Because the Vlaams Belang, the dominant extreme right-wing party in Flanders, plays to racist attitudes and everyday fears, we study the interrelations between the rise of the extreme right, racism and a spatialized and racialized culture of fear. Based on a multi-level analysis of spatial variations of racism and a qualitative analysis of focus group interviews on fear of crime, we suggest that a rural or suburban vote for the extreme right Vlaams Belang has to be understood as a protest vote against the racialization and the insecurity of the central cities and as an anticipatory vote that has to stop the imagined infection of the ‘white’ and ‘safe’ countryside with urban ‘diseases’ like crime and foreigners.

Fear of Falling: An Emerging Issue After Stroke

Purpose: Qualitative data regarding stroke survivors’ recovery experiences were used to describe factors important in the development of fear of falling (FoF) during the first 6 months after stroke. Method: Stroke survivors were interviewed 1 and 6 months after stroke to obtain data on their experiences related to stroke recovery trajectory. Analyses identified FoF as a naturally occurring part of stroke survivors’ descriptions of their everyday lives. Interviews were reexamined to identify and describe personal experiences related to FoF in this population. Results: Forty-two (32%) veterans who participated in the larger study discussed FoF during the first 6 months after stroke. Analyses indicate three important factors may be associated with the development of poststroke FoF: (a) the initial fall coinciding with stroke onset, (b) perception of poststroke body changes, and (c) a pervasive everyday fear of future falls. Conclusion: These factors related to FoF need to be further studied in the poststroke population. It is possible that individualized interventions may be necessary to assist stroke survivors to manage FoF, decrease fear, and reduce falls after discharge home poststroke.

Everyday fears: a survey of violent hate crimes in Europe and North America

Everyday fears: a survey of violent hate crimes in Europe and North America

Globalization, spectral aesthetics and the global soul Tracking some 'uncanny' paths to trans-Pacific globalization

The intensification of neo-liberal globalization under US hegemony has all the more activated uncanny forces and spectral forms in various trans-Pacific sites. This article contrasts Korean and US films and travelogues to elaborate uncanny paths to globalization and articulate modes of spectral critique. The seamlessness of globalization across the Pacific is thus threatened by uncanny anxieties, disrupted space–time coordinates, and everyday fears that challenge the end-of-history triumph in marketization.

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier

A Remarkable Disappearing Act

A Remarkable Disappearing Act

A Fading Aztec Sun

■ This article examines the changing nature of contemporary political discourse in Mexico. The traditional nationalist political discourse centered on issues of sovereignty and social justice, carefully cultivated and controlled by the Insititutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to legitimize its dominant position in a one-party corporate state. Using the 1994 presidential elections as my entry point, I argue that the PRI has undergone a semiotic metamorphosis, shedding nationalist rhetoric and image in favor of global ones. Its discourse has evolved as the domestic socio-economic situation has devolved. Central to this project is the redefinition of national identity. As Chatterjee (1993: 21) observes, 'nation- ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness'. The PRI is establishing new sets of institutional myths about the relationship between prosperity, the free market and globalization. Complementing its symbolic rebirth is a redefin ition of danger in a stark survivalist narrative - the politics of everyday fear. Presi dent Carlos Salinas's (1988-94) message emphasized that traditional nationalist economic policies were dangerous, and that Mexico could only survive through economic globalism. Over the course of his term, he was able to disarm the nationalist symbolism of the leftist opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, with an equally powerful integrationist utopian discourse that promised pros perity, especially to the middle class. I conclude by noting that there is a pro nounced disjuncture between material conditions and the historically imagined identity of Mexicans that signifies a break between the nation and the state. Out of the detritus of economic reform, a critical project facing Mexicans is to reimagine what it means to be Mexican and carry forward a sense of social justice in the new global economic order.