Reality Of Others Research Articles

Judging the reality of others' memories

Interpersonal reality monitoring (IRM) refers to our ability to evaluate whether other people's memories reflect real or imagined events. The current work examined IRM and whether or not it can be affected by training and feedback. We found that people are better than chance and that the ability to accurately make this judgement can be improved or reduced with appropriate and inappropriate training, respectively. Understanding IRM has implications for applied psychologists interested in how people evaluate others' descriptions of past events (e.g., eyewitness testimony).

Illness as Narrative by Ann Jurecic (review)

Reviewed by: Illness as Narrative by Ann Jurecic Kimberly K. Emmons (bio) Ann Jurecic. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. xii + 178 pp. Paperback, $24.95. Drawing on a range of literary, journalistic, and popular texts, Ann Jurecic’s Illness as Narrative serves as a touchstone for a range of responses to stories of illness. It begins, however, with the assertion that both literary critics and medical humanities scholars have failed to attend fully to such stories because they have not recognized the biases of their own disciplinary reading and writing habits. On one hand, Jurecic argues, literary critics have remained committed to what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has led them to discount most contemporary writing about illness as unreliable and stylistically unimportant. Medical humanities scholars, [End Page 227] on the other hand, have tended to read writing about illness as a documentary record of individual experience and this has led to an oversimplification and underappreciation of the textuality of the stories themselves. Both readings—and the writing they engender—miss the important work these stories do outside of the academy and beyond the professional school curriculum. For Jurecic, attending to the “split in critical attitudes” toward illness narratives is a necessary first step toward valuing and addressing the “ordinary motives for reading and writing” that produce them (3). When we ignore the differences among critical approaches to these texts, her book demonstrates, we miss opportunities to understand how health and illness shape our intellectual commitments and to connect meaningfully with the realities of others. Illness as Narrative directly challenges the contemporary “disinterested critic” by pointing toward an “empathy gap” between “creators of art about suffering and illness” and the expert readers of the academy (13). This gap has opened as the expansion of literary engagement has moved beyond traditional English and Comparative Literature departments and into medical humanities and public health programs. It has widened as the range of narrative responses to illness has proliferated over the twentieth century. Jurecic sees the growth of illness memoirs in this time period not as the collapse of literary standards, but rather as a logical consequence of changes in culture, medicine, and society. Thus, she argues, such texts require new reading practices in order to understand how they “test the possibility that a narrative will do meaningful work in the world” (11). Each of the chapters in Illness as Narrative engages with two foundational questions: what meaningful work is accomplished by illness memoirs? And, how might critics respond “to the complex ways writing and reading sustain individuals, communities, and cultures” (112)? In chapter 2, “Life Narratives in the Risk Society,” Jurecic notes the rise of illness narratives alongside the growing consciousness of statistical risk in countries such as the United States. Making “personal meaning out of the impersonal statistics that represent one’s life ‘at risk’” appears to be one of the primary functions of contemporary illness narratives (18). As society places greater emphasis on norms and probabilities, individual lives must be lived without the familiar structures of religious and cultural narratives that have traditionally provided meaning. In this context, illness narratives work to construct, however partially, coherent responses to changeable physical and mental realities. This chapter points out the value of a literary response to the indeterminacy of risk. Such a response exploits narrative’s ability to [End Page 228] manipulate its own conventions and to resist (and also to fulfill) its normal demand for closure. Jurecic identifies several textual resolutions to the tension between narrative closure and indeterminacy in literary works: Ian McEwan’s Saturday offers an “overly manufactured” but ultimately reassuring conclusion (38); Suzanne Antoinetta’s Body Toxic concludes by proliferating new narratives; and David Reiff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death closes “in equivocation” (39). In her analyses of these texts, Jurecic demonstrates the value of narrative theory for attending to stories of illness. At the same time, however, she identifies the possibilities for multiple readings of risk narratives, some of them informed by purely personal engagement. Readers of these texts intervene by superimposing their own experiences, drawing conclusions that may not be objectively justifiable, and recalling master tropes...

The Existence of Other People: Byatt, Manning, and Murdoch

Alfer, Alexa and Amy J. Edwards de Campos. A.S. Byatt: Critical Story-Telling. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010. 194 pp. $90.00. Patten, Eve. Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning's Fictions of War. Cork: Cork University Press, 2011. 234 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]. Rowe, Anne and Avril Horner, eds. Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.246 pp. $85.00. [Virtue] is concerned with really apprehending that other people exist, writes Iris Murdoch. The knowledge and which is virtue is precisely kind which novelist needs to let his characters be, to respect their freedom and to study them themselves in that most significant area of activity, where they are trying to apprehend reality of (284). Murdoch's concern with literary a means of apprehending reality of others is shared by A. S. Byatt and Olivia Manning, other subjects of three excellent critical works discussed here. Murdoch's engagement with this concept, in philosophical and critical writings in her fiction, is surely basis for much of her long-term influence on both literary studies and ethics, well on younger writers such Byatt. Proponents of ethical turn in literary criticism certainly acknowledge this powerful influence. S. L. Goldberg, for instance, praises The Sovereignty of Good deepen[ing] my understanding of moral aspects of literature that my debts to it are now too basic and too pervasive to be spelt (253). Despite some negative voices, many philosophers accept Murdoch's work ground breaking: Charles Taylor sees her a trail-blazer (qtd. in Rowe and Homer 23), while Martha Nussbaum claims that Murdoch more than any of her contemporaries inspired growing concern with the moral significance of imagination (137). Given her undoubted influence, current directions in Murdoch studies become a matter of some importance, and Iris Murdoch: Texts and a stimulating essay collection, provides a useful indication of current trends and future possibilities. Many of essays use materials from Murdoch Special Collections in Kingston University Library, London, which includes among its various holdings Peter Conradi's extensive archive well Murdoch's Oxford library. Murdoch's annotations on her books provide a rich source for scholars. Elaine Morley, for instance, argues, from examination of Murdoch's extensive comments on her copies of Elias Canetti's works and from a careful reading of both writers, for need to reassess their relationship as writers rather than lovers (158). Frances White, discussing T. S. Eliot's Murder in Cathedral in relation to one of Murdoch's least-known works, her 1987 radio play The One Alone, notes markings on Murdoch's acting copy of Eliot's play, dating from undergraduate days when she performed in a student production of it. Comparing Eliot's celebrated Christian martyr with Murdoch's nameless political prisoner, White argues convincingly for importance of The One Alone illuminating Murdoch's concern with role of suffering in moral life. The various essays in this collection are organized into sections on various contexts: White's essay appears among Literary Contexts, and other sections focus on Theological Political and so on. The editors point out that, well examining intertextual relations, their collection develops an emerging strand of current Murdoch criticism that ... align[s] her work with thinkers and modes of writing she would herself have resisted (2), and this approach is certainly vindicated by three strong essays addressing Murdoch's reading of Derrida, to whom she was consistently hostile. Both Tony Milligan and Paul S. Fiddes, acknowledging flaws in her treatment of Derrida, explore this misreading a basis for understanding her larger concerns. …

A collaboratıve media production project on human rights: bridging everyday and media education

Given the importance of media institutions and universities as spaces of knowledge productions, development of ‘critical media pedagogy’ becomes crucial for the establishment of a responsible and ethical media environment. Drawing from the collaborative project of The First Step into Human Rights: I do not do it! – A Short Film Project on Human Rights, this study discusses the significance of media students’ involvement in an interdisciplinary and collaborative project dealing with the realities of ‘everyday’ in the development of critical media pedagogy in Turkey. The study is based on the authors’ personal observations as the supervising media instructors who have participated in the development and application of the project as well as the accounts of the media students who were actively involved in the process. The authors have argued for the integration of various partners into media education, perceiving this as a necessary extension of the learning process beyond the walls of the classroom in order to build connections with the realities of others – an important dimension in the development of a media environment promoting social justice and cultural dialogue.

Point/Counterpoint

Point/Counterpoint

Unofficial truths and everyday insights: understanding voice in visual research with the children of Accra's urban poor1

This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a ‘vector’, as something capable of connecting our knowledge and understanding of the everyday with the everyday experiences and reality of others. Drawing upon the photographs and spoken testimonies of children who live and work on the street, and of children who live in a large informal settlement, the article advances an intimate connection between photography and knowledge of the everyday reality of children's lives, most evident in the capacity of children's photographs to surprise and highlight the fallibility of our understandings.

The Importance of Direct Experience: A Philosophical Defence of Fieldwork in Human Geography

Human geography fieldwork is important. Research has shown that when students ‘see it for themselves’ their enjoyment and understanding is enhanced. In addition it helps develop subject-specific and transferable skills, promotes ‘active learning’ and links theory to ‘real world’ examples in a ‘spiral of learning’. Stressing the socially constructed nature of knowledge and identity, however, Nairn (2005) has made a valuable critique of the assumption that human geography fieldwork gives students direct and unmediated access to ‘the truth’. Drawing on qualitative research with students in New Zealand she shows that their fieldwork experience, rather than enhancing their understanding, reinforced misconceptions they held prior to the trip. Using evidence from an action research project on the student experience of human geography fieldwork in the Western Isles of Scotland, this paper argues that while fieldwork can reinforce preconceptions in the way Nairn describes, this is not inevitably so. Fieldwork can give us direct experiences that challenge our preconceptions. The reality of others can ‘call us to attention’ in ways that make them matter to us. This ‘enhanced affective response’ helps deepen our understanding of the wider world and our place within it. It is for this reason that fieldwork remains a valuable mode of learning for human geography students.

Do Psychologically Autonomous Individuals Behave as if they Have Free Will?

One-hundred research subjects completed a standardized test measuring moral autonomy, a game-theory exercise measuring belief in the predictability of decisions, a previously published scale measuring belief in free will, and a previously unpublished survey measuring the conceptual structure of evil. Greater moral autonomy was positively correlated with game-theory postulations of predictable decision-making, rather than freely willed decision-making, and was negatively correlated with a factor-analysis theme suggesting that “the nature of evil is revealed by God.” Belief in free will was positively correlated with the theme suggesting that “the nature of evil is revealed by God” and was negatively correlated with themes suggesting that “the potential for evil is within everyone,” that “the reality of others prevents harm to others,” and that “good will prevail over evil.” These results support the conclusion that morally autonomous individuals do not behave as if they have free will. Instead, they behave as if their decision-making is predictable and determined.

The Collaborative Power Struggle

The Collaborative Power Struggle Samuel R. Cook (bio) In the discipline of anthropology the term collaborative is a loaded one to say the least. As Field and Fox (2007) argue, ethnographic research has always required a degree of collaboration between primary researcher (the anthropologist or ethnographer) and research communities or individuals (even those once identified by the archaic distinction as "informants"). Yet while collaborative has been a technical moniker for methodological applications for some time (see, e.g., Stull and Schensul 1987), this journal purports in part to operationalize the term as a designator for a malleable field of theory, methodology, and praxis aimed at leveling the epistemological and ideological space between ethnographer and research community or consultants. Indeed, the dialogue coming of age over the past decade that has seemingly formalized collaborative ethnography as a distinct, if not notorious, new direction in anthropology has generated more questions than answers. Consider Lassiter's succinct definition of collaborative ethnography, in which he argues for "an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration [with community co-intellectuals] at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it-from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and especially, through the writing process" (Lassiter 2005, 16, emphasis in original). By adding the phrase "Can there be" to the beginning of this sentence one creates a challenging question that simultaneously asserts an ideal ethnographers may strive to attain but may never reach. In this light it is clear that all of collaborative ethnography is experimental inasmuch as such endeavors seek the best means to an end while realizing that the means are always determined by the context and, paradoxically, that there is no true end. [End Page 109] When Marcus and Fischer (1986) elucidated "an experimental moment in the human sciences" (specifically anthropology) they were addressing the problem of social representation in the postmodern world and particularly the sobering reality of the privileged position an ethnographer holds in interpreting the realities of others. The essays in this section are thematically bound by their head-on efforts to breech this power dynamic by placing community agendas first. While such endeavors may seem just another rendering of applied anthropology-and specifically advocacy anthropology (e.g., Gray and Heinen 1990; Paine 1985), insofar as "in particular cases [of anthropological fieldwork] advocacy is no option but an implicit requirement of the social relationship established between the anthropologist and the local people" (Hastrup and Elsass 1990, 301)-the following essays reflect deliberate efforts to be moved by community agendas, reactions, and even resistance. These efforts necessarily required experimentation, not only in an effort to reach certain ends (not always entirely successfully) but, more important, to learn actively from successes and failures in communication between anthropologist and community co-intellectuals. This refunctioning of ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 2006) is perhaps at the crux of truly integrated collaborative ethnography. "Key to this refunctioning," state Holmes and Marcus (2008, 82), "is drawing on the analytical acumen and existential insights of our subjects to recast the intellectual imperatives of our own methodological practices, in short, the para-ethnographic practices of our subjects." Accordingly, the three essays that follow articulate divergent efforts to navigate community imperatives, to realize the profound differences between ethnographer and community collaborator-whether in the form of age, race, class, gender, sexual preference, education, or other differences-and to assess successes and shortcomings in reconciling these differences and advancing disparate agendas. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, Rachel Breunlin and Helen A. Regis ask: "Can there be a critical collaborative ethnography?" They attempt to forge an answer by reflecting on their involvement both as community residents and as anthropologists living and working in the city's Seventh Ward, a historically Creole neighborhood that has become increasingly diverse, yet seemingly enjoying a sense of solidarity built on a post-hurricane state of communitas. After Katrina numerous high-profile city and state officials seemed to take advantage [End Page 110] of the forced evacuation of the majority of New Orleanians and proposed a new plan for radical demographic and political restructuring (in essence replacing the pre-Katrina underprivileged, predominantly nonwhite population with a new class of cosmopolitan migrants, so it seemed...

Spread of Vector-borne Diseases and Neglect of Leishmaniasis, Europe

The risk for reintroduction of some exotic vector-borne diseases in Europe has become a hot topic, while the reality of others is neglected at the public health policy level. Leishmaniasis is endemic in all southern countries of Europe, with approximately 700 autochthonous human cases reported each year (3,950 if Turkey is included). Asymptomatic cases have been estimated at 30-100/1 symptomatic case, and leishmaniasis has up to 25% seroprevalence in domestic dogs. Even though leishmaniasis is essentially associated with Leishmania infantum and visceral leishmaniasis, new species, such as L. donovani and L. tropica, might colonize European sand fly vectors. Drug-resistant L. infantum strains might be exported outside Europe through dogs. Despite this possibility, no coordinated surveillance of the disease exists at the European level. In this review of leishmaniasis importance in Europe, we would like to bridge the gap between research and surveillance and control.

Thinking from within the Calyx of Nature

Is philosophy an appropriate means for inducing the ‘moral point of view’ with respect to nature? The moral point of view involves a feeling for the inner reality of others, a feeling which, it is argued, is induced more by processes of synergistic interaction than by the kind of rational deliberation that classically constituted philosophy. But how are we to engage synergistically with other-than-human life forms and systems? While synergy with animals presents no in-principle difficulty, synergy with larger life systems takes us into epistemological realms explored only in the margins of the Western tradition, such as in Goethe's Romantic alternative to science. These ‘alternative’ epistemological realms are however the very province of the Daoist arts of China, and these arts accordingly furnish us with practices conducive to a moral consciousness of nature.

A Historical Case Study of Alternative News Media and Labor Activism: The Dubuque Leader 1935–1939

Identifying Alternative Media in Media History This study contributes the historical dimension of the literature addressing alternative media in the United States through a close consideration of the Dubuque Leader's reorganization in the mid 1930s as a collectively owned and independently operated newspaper, the challenges the newspaper faced as an alternative medium, and its role in cultivating progressive social change in the city and region. A weekly newspaper controlled by a cooperative of several hundred working-class shareholders involved in or supportive of the labor union movement, the Leader became an important forum for Dubuque, Iowa's working-class community, while its editorial abandon made it a frequently controversial outlet. As the Leader established itself as a social conscience of the community, so did its journalistic voice foster action toward the increased civic and economic enfranchisement of Dubuque's craft and industrial workers. In comparison the circulation of other labor and progressive journals of the period published in larger metropolitan locales, the Leader's peak weekly circulation of 3,350 during the late 1930s1 was modest, yet close historical exploration of the paper's formative years reveals not only an unusual discursive element within the social microcosm of Dubuque proper, but also many of the facets which constituted Midwestern working-class culture and community in the 1930s. At the same time the Leader is illustrative of the constraints facing journalists that are still encountered by independent news media this day. In fact, the Dubuque Leader's formation as non-profit organ correspondingly informs a central problem encountered by news media and addressed by journalists and scholars throughout the twentieth century: a commercial modus operandi versus genuine editorial freedom.2 This fundamental problem driven much of the media criticism in the United States3 and is of marked concern at the present historical moment where a networked world spawned a multiplicity of alternative news outlets and what become a genuine movement toward media reform.4 As John Downing noted many years ago, the problem of media access not been endemic the United States, and his studies have thus been driven by one crucial question which informs the present work: What are the possibilities people have for constructing their own media, independently of capital, the state, the church, and other agencies of oppressive power?5 One means of significantly responding this question is through historical examples of alternative media that illustrate under what specific social and historical conditions such possibilities were realized in a pre-information based era.6 While historical instances of alternative, independent, or community-based news media are essential a greater understanding of media and the potential for democratic social movements, media scholars have largely overlooked the histories of working-class newspapers with small circulations and similar alternative media. Detailed documentation of the difficulties encountered by them, however, is rich in its implications for a greater comprehension of not just alternative media forms, but also of the media terrain in general.7 As Nick Couldry and James Curran observe, The process we call 'media' is the historic result of countless local battles over who the power represent the reality of others. Once such battles are won, they generally cease being remembered as battles.8 Chris Atton also notes how recent scholarship has had little say about the historical conditions under which [alternative] media enact their journalism.9 Media historians' neglect of these struggles over representation, according Jon Bekken, signifies a missed opportunity to grapple with such vital questions as press freedom (both political and economic) and the nature of the relationship between the media and the publics they serve. …

Wrestling Whiteness: Three Stages of Shifting Multicultural Perspectives among White Pre-service Teachers

Pedagogical progress in the field of multicultural education moves at a snail's pace due to pre-service teachers' level of acceptance of multiculturalism and its tenets. Teacher candidates and seasoned teachers are simply unconscious and apathetic about matters of diversity. Pre-service teachers, primarily White and middle class, are mandated to take multicultural courses and grapple with recognizing their own cultural beings and the cultural realities of others. While student populations grow more diverse, the pre-service teacher population is becoming more homogenous. A major obstacle in teacher preparation programs arising from this mismatch of teacher and student cultures is the ability to facilitate a critical consciousness. This includes the ability to analyze the world and employ equity pedagogy in pre-service teachers who are resistant to diversity issues. Pre- and post-course surveys, in open-ended and anonymous narrative form, were administered to White pre-service teachers (= 94), and this article is divided into two sections based on the results. First, I outline the three shifting perspectives that were identified during a semester-long course with White and middle class pre-service students, and then connect these perspectives to existing research on racial identity ego, theorizing whiteness, and curriculum integration. This new theoretical model addresses equity pedagogy and is framed within whiteness and consciousness studies and may serve as a reflective tool for educators to self-evaluate their pedagogical proclivities. Second, the implications of this informal action research project for White pre-service educators and research in theorizing whiteness are developed.

Agency, Identity and Technology

America has become a spiritual wasteland. Three aspects of the human condition are crucial for human beings to recognize if they are to develop a proper identity and agency within the world: these aspects are finitude, contingency, and the spiritual (which follows from the other two). The notion of the spiritual can be filled out with an understanding of faith. American culture is antithetical to faith, as is demonstrated through a discussion of the basic human practice of conversation. In America, conversation works against faith because conversation has become brutal. Contemporary debate literally works against faith because conversation has become brutal Contemporary debate literally works to annihilate the reality of others. These reflections support the conclusion that brutality is the antithesis of faithfulness.

“Canada's Most Notorious Bad Mother”: The Newspaper Coverage of the Jordan Heikamp Inquest*

This article is an examination of the media coverage of the inquest into the 1997 starvation death of an infant in a homeless women's shelter in Toronto. It explores the usefulness of using the discourse of mothering, intersected with the individualization of responsibility, to understand why one interpretation of this case seized the imagination of the public and informed media accounts. Examining how the mother of this infant was constructed as a "bad" mother helps to understand how hegemonic notions of "good" mothering are reinforced and perpetuated. The invocation of the ideals of motherhood, however, prevents us from seeing the reality of others' experiences of motherhood and the fact that, for many, there are barriers and restrictions to the ideal of good mothering.

Václav Havel. A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John s> Keane (review)

178 SEER, 79, I, 200 I Over theyearstheprocessofEuropeanintegrationhasbeen anunprecedented greatsuccess;politiciansshould now avoid snatchingfailurefromthejaws of victory.The author'salternativeis to embarkon buildinga liberalorderby overcoming the past which has oscillated between violent disorder and hegemonic order (a dig at the Franco-German alliance). Europe should be based on non-hegemonic order, a common law which secures human, civil and minority rightsand become a single actor on the world stage (pp. 328f). If GartonAsh's book is neither historyin any of its academic sensesnor wellresearchedsocialscience thatneed not deterthereader;itswealthof evocative particulars,resplendentliteracy,probing questions,prudentjudgements, not theleast itsenlightenedvisionsmakeit a compelling read. London LASZLO PETER Keane, John. Vaclav Havel.A PoliticalTragedy inSixActs.Bloomsbury,London, I999.vii + 532 pp. Notes. Plates.Index. [25.00. PROFESSOR KEANE describes his ruminative biography of Vaclav Havel from his birth to early I999 as 'a serious work of scholarship' (p. 508) and as 'factional'(p. 8). By 'faction'he means a workthatis 'selective',thoughpaying 'meticulous attention to all of the important details' and a work subject to 'value-laden "interpretations"'(p. 8). In its normal, now obsolescent, usage 'faction'means the record of a seriesof factualevents narratedin the manner of fiction, and normally containing extensive fictional elements. Keane certainly uses imagery that belongs more to fiction than to scholarship (the most ingenious example, 'likea bull at a gate baying forblood' (p. 44), but the readerassumesthat this is part of his political scientistgame likethe whole notion of scholarshipas faction. The readerwill have troubleascertainingthe rulesof the game. One clue no doubt lies in the keywordof Keane's subtitle, 'Tragedy'. Havel does have some of the conventional features of the tragic hero: he is admirable in his courage (an element down-played by Keane except in his account of Havel's behaviour in hospital), in the noblemindedness of his essays, especially those of the 1970S and I980s, in the consistence of his thinking from the late 1950S onwards. His life, however, does not inspireterror,is not cathartic,and it would seem hypocriticalto label his ambitious nature or his arrogance hubris. Havel certainlyvied with the gods embodied in the Communist regime but these gods did not crush him. Keane's imaginary picture of Havel's state funeral, introduced to persuade the reader that the subtitlehas meaning, manifestslittle more than bad taste, and certainlyalackof knowledgeaboutT. G. Masarayk'sstatefuneral;Keane claims that Havel's funeralwill be 'a global media event on a scale much bigger than the state funeral of Masaryk' (p. 504). It is difficultto imagine hundreds of Czech poets and poetasters marking Havel's death, as they did Masaryk's. Towardsthe end of his study,he playswith the notion of Havel as king (not an uncommon notion in the Czech press and a notion recentlyexploited to comic effect by the Slovak novelist, Peter Pist'anek).It is a pity that Keane does not know that Czechoslovakpresidentshave from the startbeen treated REVIEWS 179 more orlessasroyalty.He does note thatCzechs spokeof Havel's 'abdication', not resignation (p. 496), but appears unaware that this regal term was used also of Masarykand Edvard Benes. I have never seen the term used for the oustingof Antonin Novotny or GustavHusak. Though I learned many little details about Havel's life from Keane, I learnednothing aboutHavel, the man orthewriter.This bookwasnot written for historians or for students of Czech culture. Keane does call his work 'political' (p.12) and no doubt he thus informs us he is writing for political scientists. Throughout Keane conceives of all relationships, between individual human beings, between individuals and institutions, and between institutions as relationships of power. Disquisitions on the nature of power interlardthis biography. Unfortunately, for a student of culture ratherthan politics, these disquisitionsofferlittle new. Statementslike 'in the era of mass communications, one of the prizes and privilegesof power is the freedom to define reality for others' (p. 369) sound hackneyed; furthermore, 'mass communication'isvague and potentiallymisleading:thinkof the power of the nineteenth-century novelist to define reality. Though power is the theme of Keane's book, he also gives us disquisitionson democracy (forexample p.14), death (p. 494), friendship (p.I83), hubris (pp. 283-84), and nationalism (p. 450). On the last, Keane speaks only of ultra-nationalism, excludes national mythologies and...

Science in the Memory Debate

Experimental psychology has much to offer the current debate about memories of childhood abuse. However, laboratory scientists, with their enormous cognitive authority to define reality for the rest of the population, must be especially conservative when arguing that laboratory results on memory generalize to contested memories of abuse. Researchers must make an effort to untangle the appropriate from inappropriate application of research results to this debate. A crucial untangling strategy for future research on general phenomena involves taking care to pose questions separately. When the research is disseminated, its relevance and its limitations must be carefully communicated. Finally, scientists must attend to their power to define reality for others.

Faces for a Philosophy of the Morning

And when morning appeared, (he) found himself in thick forest and the road disappeared. Then he laid the dead man in a hollow tree at his head-for he wanted to protect him from the wolves-and laid himself down on the mossy ground.l How many of us, in our philosophical writings, include burying a corpse with our own hands? Which of us dare publish an article containing conversations with animals, friendships with beggars or circus performers, or dialogues with our own shadows? In the theoretical reflections on otherness, do any of us risk including sundry face-to-face encounters with strangers? Readers of Nietzsche likely believe they have the answer to the above questions. Only the writer of Zarathustra seems willing to interweave his philosophical thoughts with meeting a dwarf, a high-wire walker, or a serpent. In his solitary wanderings Nietzsche stuns and delights the reader by treating unfamiliar encounters as integral to his thinking about familiar ideas and values. Yet readers of Alphonso Lingis's recent works might understandably suggest a new response to the above questions. Wandering from the Americas to Asia, Lingis retells encounters with transvestites, body-builders, dope dealers, and prisoners that are central to discussions of more conventional appeal, such as truth and beauty. Like Nietzsche, and partly because of Nietzsche, Lingis interweaves acts of philosophy with the ventures of a wanderer. These philosophical sojourns contribute to and challenge much of the recent discussion on otherness. However well intentioned, many disputes on the other are guided by cultural, political, or personal convictions and commitments. Such guides have the inadvertent effect of situating an encounter with the other on familiar grounds, thus precluding the possibility of knowing the other in his or her distinctness, on his or her own terms. Are not many of the disputes about otherness simply new ways of ignoring the realities of others? Perhaps many of the current discussions on otherness are too confident in their moral or political values, values that might not stand up to scrutiny if the inquiry into otherness were guided by a wanderer's will to truth. In the following pages I want to elucidate several key aspects of the wanderer's will to truth. Part one addresses what a philosopher can gain from encounters with others in strange circumstances, those outside more familiar routes of scholarship or introspection. Part two focuses on specific issues in facing the other, including anonymity and identity, silence and trust, law and chance. Part three briefly concludes with what the reader might gain from a who returns to town. Each part will open with a selection from Nietzsche as a point of departure. If Lingis is a disciple of Nietzsche, it is only in the sense Nietzsche demanded: Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves.... One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.2 In leaving Nietzsche Lingis takes his readers to different ways of encountering others. Whereas Nietzsche lets Zarathustra partly play the role of the prophet, Lingis is rooted in phenomenology. Nietzsche speaks with voices of the past and anticipates figures of the future. In teaching the Ubermensch (Overman, or Superman), he enlists the images of height and depth, overcoming and descending. Lingis prefers turning to the faces of humans who still populate this earth. However divergent their paths, the wanderers return to the reader and encourage the rethinking of human possibilities and familiar truths. I. Leaving Town The wanderer speaks.-If you would like to see our European morality for once as it looks from a distance, and if one would like to measure it again other moralities, past and future, then one has to proceed like a who wants to know how high the towers in town are: he leaves the town.... That one wants to go precisely out there, up there, may be a minor madness, a peculiar `you must'-for we seekers for knowledge also have our idiosyncrasies of `unfree will---The question is whether one really can get up there. …

"I Saw What Really Happened"

In this article, the authors demonstrate how discursive psychology may be applied to the analysis of eyewitness accounts ofparamilitary-related violence in North Belfast, Ireland. Eyewitnesses are in apowerful position to construct reality for others in their community, but such accounts can easily be dismissed as partisan characterisations of events. The authors therefore demonstrate some ofthe ways in which these accounts are made difficult to undermine, how they are rhetorically designed to undermine alternative versions of events, and how blamings and mitigations may be achieved through the construction of the social identities of the individuals in the events as blameless victims or as ruthless perpetrators. They further consider how it is made discursively possible for "blameless" victims to exist alongside "professional" hitmen through the construction of assailants as professional but also personally flawed, and this therefore compromises their claim to rational, political motivations for violence.

Exploring Simultaneous Oppressions

In this article, the authors argue that to develop public policies that will work in the interests of diverse female consumers, it is imperative to recognize how sexism intersects with racism, classism, and heterosexism. The multiple simultaneous oppressions faced by diverse women make for vast differences in their consumption problems and the remedies they require. The authors illustrate how even consumer research that may seem to promote the interest of women actually serves privileged interests and ignores the reality of others. To move toward consumer research that will help shape public policy in the interests of diverse women, one needs to identify how research to date has enhanced the privilege of some women while neglecting or reinforcing the oppression of others. New research issues will need to be added to the agenda if the current situation is to improve.