Intellectual Appreciation Research Articles

Zero Zone Praxis as Conscious Creative Cultivation

ABSTRACT Zero Zone praxis (ZZ) can increase a performer’s craft and personal life quality, thereby satisfying the need for personal enhancement—a need that recent writings about performing arts and executive coaching have identified. ZZ is designed to improve the ability to avoid the detrimental effects of stage fright that often rest on the actor-director dyad, via expanding consciousness and focus guiding. ZZ includes external and internal psychosomatic actor training and intellectual appreciation of consciousness as derived from yoga philosophy and practice and from coaching. This essay is a discussion of the need to develop an elevated internal state of the performer, to unlock the blockages in the performer and in a spectator’s reception. I introduce here a critical review of scholars’ findings and my personal, practical experiences of forty years in Stanislavskian and physical theatre-making, self-cultivation coaching, and yoga.

The Configuration of Incentives in Small and Medium-Sized Content Platform Enterprises Under the Normalization of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the advantages of online knowledge communities with cross-space, time, interpersonal, and other characteristics fully demonstrated. Exploring the configurations of platform incentives to improve knowledge collaboration performance can provide a reference for the efficient and sustainable development of the platforms under the normalization of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method, taking the social Q&A platform enterprises as an example, this study analyzed the configurations of platform incentives for the high knowledge collaborative performance from the dimensions of market incentives and social incentives, and the heterogeneity of knowledge capital appreciation and social capital appreciation is also discussed. The results show that each of the platform incentives (virtual currency, cash benefit, community reputation, social identity, skill training, and communication) does not constitute a necessary condition for high performance. There are four and three types of configurations for intellectual capital appreciation and social capital appreciation, respectively. The important findings are that nearly 30% of users may participate in knowledge production based on pure economic benefits, and there may be so-called “get the best deal” behavior. Social identity, community reputation, and skill training have an important incentive effect on knowledge collaboration. Communication supplemented by a little economic incentives can significantly promote the appreciation of social capital.

Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture by Emily Kesling

Reviewed by: Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture by Emily Kesling Stephanie Hollis Kesling, Emily, Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (Anglo-Saxon Studies, 38), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2020; cloth; pp. xii, 223; R.R.P. £19.99; ISBN 9781843845492. The novelty of Emily Kesling's examination of the four Old English medical compilations lies in regarding them as literary translations made by skilled Latinists for readers interested in medicine as a liberal art. In other words, she is suggesting that the vernacular medical compilations were read by an educated elite engaged in the eclectic pursuit of knowledge of the nature of God and his [End Page 230] creation that is exemplified by the study of computus. Specifically, she argues that all four compilations were produced in major ecclesiastical centres, and that each of them consistently displays connections with an elite intellectual culture. Kesling's view flies in the face of a substantial body of scholarship that argues that Bald's Leechbook was compiled for the use of a specialist practitioner (or practitioners). She does not address this anomaly, nor does she mention Angus Cameron's study of its 'professionalism', particularly its repeated references to the specialist expertise and equipment employed by leeches. Her analysis of a few passages to illustrate the differing styles of translation is admirably clear, but scarcely necessary, given that the translators' handling of their Latin sources has already been demonstrated in painstaking and comprehensive detail by Cameron and others. Kesling is by no means the first to see a connection between the educational revival associated with King Alfred and Bald's Leechbook, copied at Winchester c. 950 from an exemplar dated c. 900. The connection is inescapable, in view of the Leechbook's account of medical advice and pharmacological ingredients sent to Alfred by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, also mentioned in Asser's biography of the king. Cumulatively, there is evidence of an interest in the practical application of medical knowledge at Alfred's court, which includes an echo of the Leechbook's entry on synovia in the compensation for injury clauses of Alfred's law-code. What needs to be addressed is whether the Leechbook reflects the encouragement given to the study of medical practice by the king's chronic illness, or whether it was actually part of the same educational project as the translation of Boethius's Consolation, Augustine's Soliloquies, Gregory's Pastoral Care, and the Tollemache Orosius. Kesling's discussion of the Old English Herbarium as a product of the Benedictine Reform draws chiefly on Maria D'Aronco, who argued that the translation may have originated at Winchester under the auspices of Bishop Athelwold. The three extant manuscript copies, however, appear to have been undertaken independently of one another, not disseminated from Winchester. It is worth recalling, moreover, that the number of reformed monasteries in the late Anglo-Saxon period, though small, exceeded the three that Kesling names, and Linda Voigts made a strong case for an East Anglian provenance for London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius C III. But book owners and readers in the late Anglo-Saxon period included high status lay men and women, and also, presumably, the male and female members of un-reformed communities. In her chapter on Lacnunga, Kesling pursues her overall thesis by arguing that it shows a learned interest in foreign languages, letters, and alphabets. This seems to me to confuse the eighth- and ninth-century translators of Lacnunga's sources with its eleventh-century readers, whose intellectual appreciation of these matters must have been severely limited by the copyists' garbled rendering of Irish and the three sacred languages. [End Page 231] The chapter on Leechbook III argues that learned persons must have created the remedies for illnesses attributed to elves because the cures employ medical expertise and ecclesiastical practices. Kesling, then, like Karen Jolly, and a number of others, regards the pagan elements in Leechbook III and Lacnunga as having been Christianized. She shows no sign of having considered the argument advanced by Valerie Flint in her landmark study of early medieval magic. Whereas Jolly described a process of Christian cultural imperialism, Flint envisaged a process of cultural negotiation...

¿Era Aristóteles indiferente al deporte? Análisis de Ética a Nicómaco, Retórica, Política, Metafísica y Acerca del alma

Después del análisis sistemático de cinco obras principales de Aristóteles -Ética a Nicómaco, Retórica, Política, Metafísica y Acerca del alma-, se puede advertir un muy considerable aprecio intelectual de Aristóteles por la actividad deportiva, que se manifiesta en: a) un número abundante de referencias en Retórica, Política y Ética de Nicómaco, b) la inclusión de las cualidades deportivas y competitivas en las listas de bienes que convienen al hombre, en Retórica, c) la importancia educativa y social que Aristóteles da a la actividad deportiva, en Política y d) la creación de una rica epistemología sobre la ciencia del ejercicio físico y el deporte, en Ética a Nicómaco, Retórica, Política y Metafísica.

“A Fall of Snow Maintains the Warmth of the Earth”

Abstract This essay attempts to shed light upon the European Jewish partnership in the second half of the twentieth century, through an analysis of the persona of the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg, one of the major teachers of Emmanuel Levinas. Beyond the inherent interest in his intellectual stature and prominence as a philosopher, our study will reveal an additional aspect of the French-Jewish partnership at the turn of the century, and will reconsider the import of assimilation—as an enabler of Jewish involvement in Western civilization. The moral and intellectual appreciation that Emmanuel Levinas had for his teacher, Léon Brunschvicg, motivated him to call for a return to Jewish cultural discourse, and to honor the role models whose Judaism found expression not through their national or religious commitments, but rather through their universal concerns.

The Remains from Ancient Times: Newly Formed Connections with Buddhist Culture Designated as “Art” or “Cultural Assets”

Imperial Japanese scholars investigated Buddhist art in Korea prior to their country’s annexation of Korea, and shortly after that annexation they commenced their restoration work on those investigated cultural artifacts. This paper aims to review the changes in the context of restored Korean Buddhist art through an examination of period photographs. Japanese publishers made frequent use of photographs of Korean cultural properties taken before and after their restoration. Through these modern Japanese publishing and education efforts, Koreans came to perceive their Buddhist cultural properties as objects belonging to the past to be preserved and protected. Korea’s Buddhist cultural properties, which had once been pivots of ardent prayers, changed into objects of aesthetic and intellectual appreciation. As a result, Koreans of the period came to consider the objects of Korea’s Buddhist material heritage as the subjects of “sightseeing” or questions of “educational refinement” rather than of religious faith.

Genre Crossing in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’: From Short Fiction to Poetry

The paper intends to reread Jamaica Kincaid’s short story, ‘Girl’ (1978) and provide new insights into its understanding. It aims to analyse the poetic qualities, word choice, and structure of the text that are left not fully discussed by recent scholarship. The structure as well as the poetic language of ‘Girl’ make it an unconventional piece of writing falling between two literary categories and so hard to classify. ‘Girl’ apparently violates rules and transgresses conventions by being both poetic and going beyond the traditional fictional structure of a short story. The paper argues that ‘Girl’ is an unconventional piece of literature that crosses the borders of a short story to poetry. First, it obviously lacks the traditional structure to be classified as a short story. Second, the text embraces several poetic techniques which reveal it as poetry written in prose. Therefore, the paper purports to carefully consider the poetic techniques and rhetorical devices found in ‘Girl’ and make it much closer to a prose poem than a short story. The story depicts a pre-adolescent female being dictated by the instructions of a sharp-tongued mother who teaches her how to become a lady- both in the private setting of the house as well as in public- in contrast to what it is like for a woman growing up in Antigua. The paper’s considerations of Kincaid’s depictions of mother, daughter, and their relationship illuminate the poetic traits found including repetition, sound devices and word choice. The paper’s interpretation of ‘Girl’ reveals its poetic nature for being thoroughly repetitive and alliterative piece. The text’s repetitive quality does not only stimulate the reader’s intellectual appreciation of the text’s thematic notions and meanings but also promotes an overall unifying effect.

Introduction to Research: A New Course for First-Year Undergraduate Students

Introduction to Research is a 4-credit elective course designed for first-year undergraduate students who have a strong interest in the chemical sciences and scientific research. The rich yet accessible field of gold nanoparticles was the theme connecting a multifaceted teaching/learning experience. In the first unit, students were introduced to the various research topics through searching, reading, discussing, presenting, and writing about primary literature. In the second unit, students carried out synthesis and characterization of spherical gold nanoparticles using prescribed protocols to gain some general knowledge and hands-on skills. Writing a full laboratory report on the laboratory module helped students develop intellectual appreciation of the discipline and greatly enhanced their scientific writing skills. In the last unit, each student pair carried out one research-style project in order to gain a more comprehensive experience with the complex nature of scientific inquiry. Students gained comp...

Octavio Paz's Bread and Mole

Octavio Paz's Bread and Mole Debra A. Castillo Pero, Señora ¿qué podemos saber las mujeres sino filosofías de cocina? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz la cocina mexicana es, con la china y la francesa, una de las tres grandes cocinas existentes en el mundo. … La cocina mexicana responde a una filosofía , a un sistema, a un discurso del método. (30) Alejo Carpentier Octavio Paz comes to this topic as a native speaker, of sorts, in two cultural and culinary discourses, with all the benefits signaled in the epigraphs from Sor Juana and Carpentier. Already of a philosophical turn of mind, he brings to his work the metaphorical depth and imagination of the poet, including a richly contextualized body of food metaphors. Likewise, in a number of his essays on the United States, he highlights the inherent comparative advantage of a deep immersion in the Mexican culinary philosophy, which enhances his intellectual appreciation of culture from both sides of the U.S.A./Mexican border. At the same time, the essays in Paz's oeuvre that support this line of reading also make clear that the U.S.A., with its laughably weak food culture, has very little basis to support its end of a potential debate. Thus, alongside his explicit comparative discussions of Mexican and U.S. political and cultural systems, we find sprinkled in brief discussions of Mexican cuisine and U.S. food, as well as other essays that focus even more specifically on the topic, often with titles like: "La mesa y el lecho" (this key essay was written in Cambridge, Mass in 1971, and included in Ogro), "El banquete y el ermitaño", "Hartazgo y náusea," "Conocimiento, drogas, inspiración" (Corriente alterna), "Lo lleno y lo vacío" (Vislumbres), "La pluma y el metate" (In/mediaciones).1 To follow one line of metaphor prominent in these essays, we might be tempted to conclude that it is not the Protestant Reform and the Catholic Counter-reformation that defined the much-referenced [End Page 153] civilizational differences between the two nations, but the presence or absence of a developed "filosofía de cocina." And he started young. As he tells his reader in one of his autobiographical asides, his childhood was marked and shaped by his kindergarten experience in the United States, where his father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, was exiled during the Mexican Revolution to drum up support for the Zapatista cause, and where six-year-old Octavio junior joined him for several months at the end of 1920. The new, Anglo-dominated, school was terrifying. There were only two Mexican-Americans in the class and young Octavio spoke no English. He describes his first day as an exhausting blur of incomprehension, followed by a break for lunch and recess. Both were traumatic: Al cabo de una eternidad llegó la hora del recreo y del lunch. Al sentarme en la mesa descubrí con pánico que me faltaba una cuchara; preferí no decir nada y quedarme sin comer. Una de las profesoras, al ver intacto mi plato, me preguntó con señas la razón. Musité: "cuchara", señalando la de mi compañero más cercano. (Itinerario 16) With the unthinking cruelty of six-year-olds everywhere, the other children began to taunt him with versions of the word "cuchara," and as soon as they exited the cafeteria for the playground, Octavio found himself fighting several of his classmates, returning home that day with a black eye, scratches, and a torn shirt. "[P]oco a poco, todo se normalizó," he concludes, "ellos olvidaron la palabra cuchara y yo aprendí a decir spoon" (Itinerario 16). Paz does not tell us in this essay what the cafeteria served for lunch that day – a triviality, really, since he could not eat whatever needed to be spooned up. Nor does he tell us who won the unequal fight. He does, however, signal a distinct difference in manners, including table manners: his silence, and his classmates' yelling, his refusal to adopt any of the alternatives that might occur to a gleeful child, such as eating with his hands or slurping soup from a...

Apresiasi Intelektual Islam terhadap Naskah Klasik Keagamaan

Manuscripts of the archipelago is one of the important Indonesian cultural treasures which are mostly neglected and only being paid attention by limited intellectual communities who are expert in their field so that its existence is threatened with the passage of time. The existence of this manuscript is similar with that of other cultural legacies such as temples,palaces, places of worships, museums, etc. The number of manuscript is even more than these cultural heritages. Islamic manuscript of the archipelago is one of the invaluable Islamic heritages of this country. These large number of manuscripts have attracted the interest of researchers and those who areconcerned with the manuscript and even the manuscript collectors to continually do inventorization and data recording of these manuscripts. The urgency of manuscript as a cultural heritage that needs to be protected for the sake of cultural evaluation and development in the future . This articlewill secutiuize some lights on Indonesian Muslim intellectual appreciation to the religious manuscript.

A sense of place: place, culture and tourism

The perspective of ‘place’ has emerged as important one in many realms of scholarship and professional practice. Ironically, though, tourism – in which place is a central concept – has paid little attention to the concept. This paper explores the importance of place in the context of tourism product development and marketing, particularly the linkage between place and culture as a tourism experience. The linkage can be understood through an analogy to the concept of terroir from viniculture. Terroir is the set of qualities that shape the sensory and intellectual appreciation of a wine, including soil, climate, grape variety and wine-making techniques. In the case of placed-based cultural tourism development and promotion, the terroir of a place includes history, local traditions and cultures, religion, industry, the natural environment, cuisine and arts, as well as attractions and events. A key feature of place-based product development and promotion is the identification and telling the story of a place through a variety of narrative techniques. These techniques include the tradition of oral storytelling, but also print, video, graphic and digital media. The paper examines the themes of stories often told in connection with place-based cultural tourism and illustrates these with examples drawn from a Canadian cultural destination.

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 6 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G Stories come to us in many shapes. Nearly every art form, utilitarian or not, is at some point bound to a critical reading that asserts that it is narrative: dance, music, painting, even architecture have been saddled with that ennobling but burdensome label. As much as we as viewers or listeners can learn to appreciate abstraction, our minds tend to seek a storyline. The most common systems for telling stories, of course, are language and art. If we agree that these two principal expressions of human creative intellectual e√ort, picture making and language, evolved simultaneously – in the form of pictograms, cuneiform, hieroglyphics – then it is interesting (or at least intriguing) to ponder how one form gained supremacy over the other as our primary system for expressing narratives. What I am really talking about is one speci fic and vexing issue that persists in our modern world: why so few people give comic books and graphic novels the respect they are due. Yes, Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Prize and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was one of the best-reviewed books of H e r e , by Richard McGuire (Pantheon, 304 pp., $35) 1 6 4 Y O U N G Y its decade, but by and large stories told with pictures have not made significant ingress onto best-seller lists. Ever since comic books were excoriated as instruments intended to seduce the innocent by the psychologist Fredric Wertham in the 1950s, there have been rallying movements by artists and cartoonists to reclaim the value of the serial graphic narrative form. One of the most important outlets for experimental comic art over the past forty years was RAW, the brainchild of Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, which aimed to express and elicit an intellectual appreciation of alternative graphic art. This selfproclaimed ‘‘graphix magazine of postponed suicides’’ eventually came to focus on long-form comic stories, launching or supporting the careers of artists such as Sue Coe, Gary Panter, Julie Doucet, and Charles Burns. The most influential work to appear in RAW may have been ‘‘Here’’ by Richard McGuire, published in volume 2, issue 1, in 1989. This six-page, thirty-six-panel story, in black and white, looked at first glance as if it were just another avant-garde comic tale. Instead, it was a startling experiment with time and space. It had a single setting – the corner of a suburban house. It had characters, but in the fifth panel another scene popped up in front of the narrative, then another pair of ‘‘windows’’ appeared – all of these distinguished by years noted at their top left corners. The story being told seemed to be multiplied across time but not space. It was all happening in the same room – or, more accurately, at the extremes of the scale of time in the same open vista. A first-time viewing of McGuire’s original ‘‘Here’’ in 2015 might call to mind the work of one of our other great national comic artists, Chris Ware, creator of an ever-expanding universe of brilliant illustrative expression. That connection would not be incorrect, but the chronology of influence must be kept in order. Ware credits McGuire with opening his eyes to the temporal and spatial possibilities of graphic storytelling when he was a young artist, something Ware himself has explored with great success. Ware, in an essay expressing his admiration for McGuire, calls him a genius for breaking the traditional hold that linearity had on comic stories – and making a work that functions ‘‘closer to real memory and experience than anything that had come before in comics.’’ That appreciation, shared by a great number of readers F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 6 5 R and other artists, had to be leavened by a large measure of patience , as McGuire worked on an expanded, color version of his story over the years. The fully realized version of Here...

Introducing Ross Chambers

This article introduces the following one by Ross Chambers, with a personal and intellectual appreciation of Chambers' work and contribution to the field of cultural studies.

Creating Consistent Hitters: A Growth Hitting System to Promote a Mastery Climate in Collegiate Baseball

Hitting is, in part, the art of handling failure. Statistically, a 30% success rate is exceptional, meaning 70% of the time hitters fail. Therefore, managing and maintaining personal motivations, particularly mastery beliefs and orientation is imperative in baseball. Accomplishing this goal requires hitters to embrace a new definition of success by developing a deeper intellectual appreciation for hitting. The purpose of this paper is to outline the Growth Hitting System (GHS) which systematically promotes growth mindsets and mastery orientation development by focusing on process goals and redefining outcome goals in baseball by focusing on “quality contact” rather than base hits.

Transdisciplinary Science and Practice in Action: The Maternal and Child Health Journal as Shared Space

More than 20 years ago, I was in my first ‘‘real’’ public health job—as a maternal and child health epidemiologist (from New York) with the Bureau of Public Health (in West Virginia). Fresh from my epidemiology training and still working on my PhD (and with my wife pregnant with our second child), I was motivated by the clear importance of the maternal-fetal period in the short-term on immediate health outcomes, and in the long-term on lasting health and well-being. Deeply inspired by the writings of ecologist Rene Dubos (e.g. ‘‘think globally, act locally’’) during my training, I felt—and feel—that the future of civilization depended, at its core, upon healthy pregnancy, safe birth, and nurturing childhoods. But, despite my intellectual appreciation for human reproduction and the future of the world, the task before me at the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health was to deconstruct some confusing adolescent pregnancy vital statistics in the context of age-specific fertility rates. I ended up calling (in an era before universal email!) the HHS Region III Perinatal Information Consortium at Johns Hopkins University and spoke with a director there about how to approach the problem. The director was Dr. Donna Petersen, who subsequently connected me to other resources and people and my envelopment into the network of maternal and child health officially began. To me, this anecdote is substantial and emblematic of the broad, far-reaching field of maternal and child health. That professional network of MCH workers and scientists impressed me with both its substance and efficiency—and I quickly and routinely encountered highly accomplished academics, practitioners, and officials—many of whom serve on our Editorial Board—and so, so many others who helped me think through practical problems and who tolerated my own ideas and thoughts on grants to fund, papers to accept, and themes for conferences. I remember well the first meeting of a few MCH epidemiologists and MCH directors that Roger Rochat held at his home in the early 1990s—that small gathering of a dozen or so people mushroomed into the annual Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference that now attracts many from all over the world. Maternal and child health professionals were driven, hard-working, smart, insightful, compassionate people—technically sophisticated but networked through human relationships and old-fashioned collaboration. And they were everywhere—in states, localities, universities, government agencies—all struggling with resistant ethnic disparities in outcomes, insufficiently measured phenomena, quality challenges inherent to data sets, statistics that sometimes poorly met the needs of our populations, programs with great ideas but with inconclusive and uncertain benefits, facing strong political pressures, stigma, and fundamental questions about rights. Maternal and child health was then, and is now, profoundly inclusive of many disciplines, cultures, methods, and constituents from affected populations to government officials to finely specialized scientists and practitioners. What other field can claim such a diverse scope of interconnected issues involving so many disciplines, paradigms, and people? Choosing to work in maternal and child health is daunting, and humbling. Dr. Milt Kotelchuck and his colleagues’ founding vision for the Maternal and Child Health Journal was bold and risky. Disciplinary purists—which comprise much of science—would find crossing boundaries unpleasant, T. De Ver Dye (&) Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health, University of Hawai’i, John A. Burns School of Medicine, 1319 Punahou St., Suite 824, Honolulu, HI 96826, USA e-mail: dyet@hawaii.edu

Change of Art Appreciation Attitude after Getting Guidance on Intellectual Appreciation Elements

Change of Art Appreciation Attitude after Getting Guidance on Intellectual Appreciation Elements

In Focus: Teaching "Difficult" Films: Introduction

Introduction Paul McEwan (bio) Teaching is central to what almost all SCMS members do every day, yet we spend surprisingly little time talking about how we teach film. It is, of course, often secondary to research in the institutions where we work. But even those of us who work in teaching-focused liberal arts do not have much opportunity to exchange ideas about film pedagogy. In addition, many film scholars are the only "film person" in their institution or department, which limits the possibility to exchange ideas with colleagues. The only stories we share tend to be recollections of what the students "didn't get" and the frustrations of what did not work. This section is an opportunity to exchange some ideas about what works. Film is a particular challenge in the classroom precisely because our students arrive with a lifetime of experience with cinema and strong notions of what movies should look like (invariably betraying a preference for contemporary Hollywood narrative film). It can be difficult to get them to understand and appreciate films that are beyond this experience, and equally difficult to have them look anew at something they have known all of their lives. For that reason, the definition of "difficult" we use here includes not just the exotic and the foreign, but also the familiar and quotidian. Effective teaching might be best understood as an act of intellectual empathy, depending as it does on our ability to understand what our students do and do not know, to correctly recognize the framework of their assumptions and preconceptions so that we can begin building at a suitable point. With film, there are often old ideas to be dismantled as well as new ones to be built, and those ideas are wrapped up in notions of pleasure and entertainment that can be difficult for students to face, let alone unravel. In my classes, I always want it to be clear that I am not trying to replace their emotional and visceral enjoyment of film with a purely intellectual appreciation of "better" film. I point out that my intellectual and academic study of film has never ruined for me the emotional pleasures of cinema. Rather, it has allowed me to greatly expand the sources of that pleasure, and that is what I try to do for them. [End Page 93] Of course, for anyone who has become a professor, intellectual ideas are in themselves a source of pleasure, so there is no need to sacrifice one for the other. Indeed, convincing students of this interplay is one of the goals of a liberal arts education. Thus, as a bridge between the visceral and the reflective, between the emotional and the intellectual, film studies is uniquely situated to convince students of the joys of intellectual inquiry. Paul McEwan Paul McEwan's current research project is a book on the history of the reception of The Birth of a Nation. Previous essays have appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and the collection Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture. He is assistant professor of media and communication and associate director of film studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Copyright © 2007 University of Texas Press

Cultures of Transnational Adoption (review)

Toby Alice Volkman (ed.), Cultures of Adoption. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 248 pp. Cultures of Adoption is a very welcome addition the growing literature on adoption, weaving narratives of identity, kinship and globalization into what are often highly personal and reflective accounts of the lives of the authors and their informants. It is never easy get the balance between the autobiographical and academic register, but the rhetorical skill and theoretical sophistication displayed in many of these essays is often virtuosic, leading both an emotional and intellectual appreciation of the complex issues involved in transnational adoption. As Elizabeth Alice Honig remarks in her short end piece, Phantom Lives, Transnational adoption has been on the margins of cultural consciousness for many generations (214). Honig uses the example of a discussion in the novel Anne of Green Gables, in which the possibility of adopting a Home Boy, i.e. one of the many surplus children sent from England its overseas colonies, is mentioned. The voices of these children and of the hardships they often endured are only now coming light, but their experience of a disrupted biography and of the phantom life they started but never completed in their country of origin, is similar that of the current generation of transnational adoptees. The book is divided into three parts, with an introduction by the editor in which she charts the changing culture of adoption in late twentieth century North America from the if born to ideal of closed adoptions, the notion of multiple, socially constructed identities in which countries of origin and perhaps relatives continue play a place in the imagination and experience of the adopted person and his or her parents. The cultures of transnational adoption cannot be separated from wider political and economic forces that shape supply and demand in relation adoptable children, or from the impact of globalization. International travel and the rise of the Internet has shortened the circuit between the adoptable child and approved parents, between sending and receiving countries, between parents, their children and new families. In Part One, Displacements, Roots, Identities, three essays by Barbara Yngvesson, Eleana Kim and Toby Alice Volkman look at the experience of children adopted from Chile and their parents on a roots tour their country of origin, at organised cultural tours for Korean adoptees, and at the efforts made by North American families with children adopted from China enact aspects of their children's birth All three chapters tackle the thorny issues of the nature of kinship, the relationship between biological and social parenting, and the shadowy presence of the third party in the adoption triangle, the mother or family-often transposed onto a whole country or culture. Adoptive families find themselves simultaneously asserting the possibility and indeed the daily reality of forming deep and meaningful parent-child relationships with a child who comes not just from another woman's body, but from another country, and at the same time recognising the prior and continuing umbilical pull that links their child physically and psychologically with another person and place. The need understand and come terms with this, often unknown, woman, seems be as great for many adoptive mothers as it is for their children (contrary the social work script that usually assumes adoptive parents will seek deny this rival presence). And it is largely women we are talking about. It may be a coincidence but the contributors this volume are all women, it is the mother above all who is the focus of real and imagined searches, and it is disproportionately female adoptees who feature in these narratives. While the majority of children adopted from China are female, and more generally girls are often favoured over boys by adoptive parents, it is also clear that the cultures we are talking about are also predominantly female cultures. …

Guess who's coming to therapy? Getting comfortable with conversations about race and ethnicity in psychotherapy.

The ability to conduct psychotherapy effectively with racially and ethnically diverse populations is becoming increasingly important given the changing demographics of this country. Recent estimates of population trends suggest that by the year 2050, non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans will constitute approximately 50% of the United States population, as compared with the current 72% of the population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). The American Psychological Association (APA) has recognized the critical nature of integrating issues of race and ethnicity into the field of psychology by encouraging attention to these issues in clinical training programs (APA, Committee on Accreditation, 2002), creating therapist competency guidelines for working with racial and ethnic minority populations (APA, 1993), and sponsoring professional meetings to identify strategies to promote sensitivity to diversity in psychology (McGuire, 1999). It is likely that most clinical psychologists have acquired an intellectual appreciation of the salience of race and ethnicity in the

Heritage Sailing in Australia: a preliminary schema

Distinguishing between replica and restored sailing vessels in terms of their emphasis on heritage and sailing and between the intellectual and kinaesthetic appreciation of heritage produces a simple classificatory schema. Using this schema enables one to distinguish stationary exhibits, ?museum? vessels, sail training vessels and commercial vessels. The schema suggests several research areas for further enquiry.