Ongoing Encounter Research Articles

Ambiguity and uncertainty: The ongoing concerns of male partners of women treated for breast cancer

As the prevalence of breast cancer increases, survival improves and short stay or outpatient care become the norm, greater numbers of men will be involved in providing care and support for their partners at home. This qualitative study explored the experiences of 26 male partners of women who had completed treatment for breast cancer. A questionnaire was developed in order to collect background information and to provide a pool for further qualitative sampling. One hundred and five questionnaires were distributed, 79 returned and 26 one-to-one interviews were conducted. While negotiating a role in their wives' breast cancer experience the men attempted to find a balance between the ambiguity and uncertainty they experienced and their need to maintain normality. They described feeling 'in limbo' when expectations of being able to move on following their wives treatment were not fulfilled. An understanding of the 'liminal' experience of being a male partner of a woman with breast cancer may help health care professionals to address the ongoing difficulties men encounter. This is important as it is often the male partners who are called upon to provide continued care and support beyond the recognised treatment period.

HARAMBEC! Quebec Black Women Pulling Together

North of the Canada—U.S. border, conditions, attitudes, and behaviors toward Blacks practiced during the time of slavery have continued sometimes in crude displays of racism, sometimes in more subtle forms. No Black is exempt—male or female, adult or child. Advocacy is unavoidable; proactive interventions are necessary. This exposé deals with the little-known story of Black women challenging the Canadian system in an ongoing bid for quality life for themselves and their families. This valiant, ongoing encounter can only result in some modifications favorable to an improved quality of life for Canadian Blacks. In essence, Harambec opens a window on Black women organizing in Quebec under the aegis of the Congress of Black Women of Canada—a vibrant national organization intent on changing behaviors, perceptions, policies, and practice across the Canadian social, political, and economic landscape.

Response: The Mottled Discourse of Chinese Studies

The writer responds to Jonathan Hay's article, in this issue, on the role of mediation in an artwork, specifically in the painting A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi). He characterizes the choices of theories, theorists, and concepts used by Hay in his article. He asserts that the study of Chinese art provides an exemplary occasion to analyze how theories are selected and used because it articulates the intersection of two historiographically reflective traditions—art history and Chinese studies—each with its critical and historical texts. He notes that Hay's essay presents a particular moment in the ongoing encounter of those traditions.

Religious Experience and the Transformation of Narcissism: Kohutian Theory and the Life of St. Francis of Assisi

Kohut proposed that the narcissistic personality could be transformed in the therapeutic environment by an empathic approach on the part of the analyst. Within the analytic setting, specific transference phenomena arise spontaneously, allowing the analysand to confront infantile grandiose fantasies and unresolved narcissistic wounds. Using the story of the life of St. Francis of Assisi, this paper illustrates how religious experience––specifically the ongoing encounter with a transcendent other––can provide the “therapeutic” milieu in which the mirroring, idealizing, and twinship transferences described by Kohut can arise, and within which pathological narcissism can be transformed into the “cosmic narcissism” of the healthy personality.

Rethinking Religion as Part of Japan's Ongoing Encounter with the West and Itself, Iwanami Koza: Religion (10 vols.), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003-2004, @\3,400.

Rethinking Religion as Part of Japan's Ongoing Encounter with the West and Itself, Iwanami Koza: Religion (10 vols.), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003-2004, @\3,400.

Falun Dafa and the New Age Movement in Malaysia: Signs of Health, Symbols of Salvation

Falun Dafa entered Malaysia in the mid-1990s as a spiritual movement for the mind-and-body development market that attracts middle-class consumption-oriented Malaysians. Its self-presentation as a New Age product tends to obscure its connections with Chinese popular religion. The movement’s similar profile to other Chinese sectarian groups is accompanied by claims to absolute difference from these groups. Development of Falun Dafa during the phase of persecution and exile since 1999 has involved an ongoing encounter with new symbols and signs. The symbols of human rights, democracy and salvation are transacted with the Western media and the signs of New Age lifestyle products. These address identity needs within the diverse Malaysian Chinese community.

Contested Codes: The Social Construction of Napster

In the 5 years since its inception, some interpretations of the software program known as Napster have been inscribed into laws, business plans, and purchasing decisions while others have been pushed to the fringes. This article examines how and why certain assumptions about Napster have gained greater currency while others have not. Our analytical approach involves an examination of discourse about Napster in several arenas—legal, economic, social, and cultural—and is informed by a conceptualization of Napster as an ongoing encounter between, rather than the accomplishment of, inventor(s), institution(s), and interest(s). While we recognize the value of empirical examinations of Napster's impact on firms and markets, as well as the proscriptive advice which it supports, we opt here for providing a contextualized understanding of the technology that complements rather than substitutes for empirical analyses of it.

MINDING GOD/MINDING PAIN: CHRISTIAN THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON RECENT ADVANCES IN PAIN RESEARCH

Abstract. As Gregory Peterson's book Minding God illustrates, an ongoing encounter between theology and the cognitive sciences can provide rich insights to both disciplines. Similarly, reflection on recent advances in pain research can prove to be fertile ground in which further theological insights might take root. Pain researchers remind us that pain is both a sensory and an emotional experience. The emotional component of pain is critically important for the clinical management of people in pain, as it serves a communicative function—human connection occurs more readily through the expression of and response to emotion than through the sterile exchange of “objective” descriptions of sensory phenomena. But emotion, pain and communication also figure prominently in Christian theology. For example, doctrines of incarnation and eschatology raise questions about suffering, healing, and hope as well as about the nature of the divine–human relationship. In addition, there seems to be scientific evidence for (admittedly subtle) gender differences in the perception of and response to pain. Several feminist theologians have noted that a habitual theological emphasis on God's rationality tends to reinforce masculine images of God and demeans the validity of emotion in the divine‐human relationship. Potential theological implications of the emotional and communicative aspects of pain and how this might affect women's religious experience‐with a particular focus on Teresa of Avila‐are explored.

The Cultural Foundations of Philosophy

The Struggle for Meaning:Reflections on Philosophy,Democracy, and Culture in Africaby Paulin HountondjiOhio University Press, 2002, 308 pp.+ xxiv, $28 (paper) The work under review is a quasibiographical text by one of Africa’s most important post-colonial philosophers and intellectuals. Hountondji is known in Africana philosophical circles for having produced two important paradigmatic works representative of the attempted autonomy of Africa’s thinkers as they sought to come to terms with Africa’s experiences at the end of the colonial era. That era represented the culminating point of the clash of European and African civilizations dating from the fifteenth century. The expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the three hundred year Atlantic slave trade constitute key moments in this ongoing encounter.

The Social Construction of Napster

This paper attempts to unpack a few of vast array of assumptions implicit in how the technology known as Napster was understood by several of its key constituencies. Our approach examines discourse about Napster in several areas - legal, economic, social, and cultural. This approach enables us to understand the technology as an ongoing encounter, rather than accomplishment of any one inventor, team of inventors, dominant institution, or rule of law. We do not offer proscriptive advice. While there is value in other research that has tried to determine impact of Napster a particular market or industry, we argue that a multidimensional understanding is necessary both as a foundation for such research as well as in its own right. In only past four years, dominant interpretations of Napster have not only emerged, but also have been inscribed into laws, business plans, and purchasing decisions, in effect, determining what tools - precedents, myths, data sets, prior objects, capabilities - will be available in future. Our paper tries to show how and why certain (subjective) significations increasingly have taken on status of truth, while other (equally subjective) discourses have been pushed farther and farther out to fringes.

Massive Star Clusters in Ongoing Galaxy Interactions: Clues to Cluster Formation

We present HST WFPC2 observations, supplemented by ground-based Hα data, of the star-cluster populations in two pairs of interacting galaxies selected for being in very different kinds of encounters seen at different stages. Dynamical information and n-body simulations provide the details of encounter geometry, mass ratio, and timing. In NGC 5752/4 we are seeing a weak encounter, well past closest approach, after about 2.5 × 108 yr. The large spiral NGC 5754 has a normal population of disk clusters, while the fainter companion NGC 5752 exhibits a rich population of luminous clusters with a flatter luminosity function. The strong, ongoing encounter in NGC 6621/2, seen about 1.0 × 108 yr past closest approach between roughly equal-mass galaxies, has produced an extensive population of luminous clusters, particularly young and luminous in a small region between the two nuclei. This region is dynamically interesting, with such a strong perturbation in the velocity field that the rotation curve reverses sign. From these results, in comparison with other strongly interacting systems discussed in the literature, cluster formation requires a threshold level of perturbation, with stage of the interaction a less important factor. The location of the most active star formation in NGC 6621/2 draws attention to a possible role for the Toomre stability threshold in shaping star formation in interacting galaxies. The rich cluster populations in NGC 5752 and NGC 6621 show that direct contact between gas-rich galaxy disks is not a requirement to form luminous clusters and that they can be triggered by processes happening within a single galaxy disk (albeit triggered by external perturbations).

Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century

From colonial times to the present, the United States has been home to a steady stream of utopian experimental communities. In Experimental Americans, George L. Hicks takes us inside one of the longer-lived of such communities, Celo Community in western North Carolina, to explore the dynamics of intentional communities in America. Founded in 1937 by Arthur Morgan, first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Celo (pronounced see-lo) established its own rules of land tenure and taxation, conducted its internal business by consensus, and did not require its members to accept any particular ideology or religious creed. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Celo and among its local neighbors, consultation of Celo's documentary records, and interviews with ex-members, Hicks traces the Community's ups and downs. Attacked for its opposition to World War II, Celo was revived by pacifists released from prisons and Civilian Public Service camps after the war; debilitated in the 1950s by bitter feuds with ex-members, it was buoyed up in the 1960s by the radical enthusiasm of new currents in the nation. Hicks assesses the Community's success in creating alternatives to mainstream social relations and examines the interactions between Celo and its neighboring community. He considers variations in paths taken by utopian communities, with a look at a close cousin of Celo, the Macedonia Community in Georgia. He also discusses the Community's post-utopian phase, marked by a shift in the late 1970s from social goals to straightforward land management. While utopian communities might hope to secede from American society in varying degrees and to institute new and improved cultural models, nonetheless they express in many ways the attempt--characteristic of the nation itself--to balance individualism and egalitarianism. By providing the context, utopian and conventional, within which Celo and other experimental communities emerge and change, Experimental Americans illuminates an ongoing encounter with persistent tensions and contradictions in America's cultural postulates.

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.

SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM IN SAUDI ARABIA: IN SEARCH OF A CULTURALLY COMPATIBLE MODEL FOR REFORM

Economic development programs in Saudi Arabia have rapidly enlarged organizational size, and complexity. New organizations have also been created to implement the objectives of the developing nation. Yet in its quest for economic progress, Saudi Arabia continues to face challenges resulting from ways in which cultural values influence administrative structures and behavior in organizations. Current problems in organization can be understood in the context of an ongoing encounter between forces of change and forces of stability. This study examines Saudi management problems, explores alternative models for reform, cites areas of compatability between Saudi Islamic tradition and Western management practices, and makes recommendations to integrate the various systems.

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.

Interacting with latter-day musical automata

The idea of music that somehow plays itself, or emerges from a nonhuman intelligence, is a common, transculturally present theme in folklore, science, and art. Over the centuries, this notion has been expressed through the development of various technological means. This paper explores aspects of my ongoing encounter with computers in improvised music, as exemplified by my most recent interactive computer music compositions. These works involve extensive interaction between improvising musicians and computer music-creating programs at the performance (“real-time”) level. In both theory and practice, this means that both human musicians and computer programs play central organizing and structuring roles in any performance of these works. This paper seeks to explore aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and social implications of this work. In addition, the nature and practice of improvisation itself will be explored, since an understanding of this ubiquitous musical activity is essential to establishing the cultural and historical context of the work.

Challenges and prospects for Indian education in Mexico

An independent national project involving all the constituent groups of society and every one of the nation's peoples should release all the creative cultural forces in the community and set them on the right road to the desired future. This entails rehabilitating the various maps for civilization of the country's ethnic groups freeing them from the repression introduced by the forces of standardization and clearing the way for the expression of their full creative potential. It is within this framework that we see education as having a part to play: a system for the general mobilization of all the cultures of the nation, both the oppressed and those which today are dominant, in an ongoing and egalitarian encounter and debate guided by the target image of the future that we seek. The education of the Indians, of each indigenous ethnic group in the country, is the driving force and the context for the liberation of those forces of civilization, hitherto frustrated, which are now leading the way to the design and implementation of a pluralist plan for the nation.