Temporal Realm Research Articles

Appropriating bodies: Organ(izing) ideology and cultural practice in medical school

Abstract The current study examines “appropriating bodies”; as a narratively performed cultural practice. A critical‐interpretive reading of medical students’ narratives concerning their training in how to perform gynecologic exams is used to understand how the professional medical ideology of excellence produces and is produced through material and symbolic activity. Medical students’ narratives reproduce, legitimate, and critique the traditional ideology of excellence through symbolic appropriation instantiated in a variety of narratives about the body, conflicts with teaching associates, and the performance of anesthetized exams during clinical situations. In particular, symbolic forms of appropriation are evidenced in temporal and spatial realms.

Literary Invention and the Impulse to Theoretical Change: "Or Whether Revolution Be the Same"

T HE DESIRE TO universalize our experience, to affirm the unity of being over the ever-changing variety of becoming, is as old as the philosophic urge, an urge we have known since the dawn of humanity as thinking creatures. Trapped within what our own experience permits us to see, we retain the need-as old as Plato's in his war against the Sophists-to try to account for what we must believe is outside those limits, ready to be experienced by everyone. But the philosophic urge in us seems opposed by what Bergson saw as the temporal flow of our experience, which is constantly differentiating itself, except that the universalizing impulse wants to prevent us from seeing that differentness. So we tend to reify the common elements we presume to find, treating them as universals that enable us to freeze the ever-changing flow of experience, and then we congratulate ourselves for our philosophic perspicacity. But this universalizing is exclusively spatial because the very notion of time and its changes is enemy to the desire of our intellect to contain and give structure to the varieties of historical experience. Indeed, the intrusion of a precise and discriminating historical consciousness has long been a deconstructive act, because in introducing change it gives the lie to our universalizing ambition by relativizing it, that is, by subjecting it to its place within our necessarily partial and contingent perspective. Change thus makes of our universal claims no more than creatures of our historically determined needs; it reduces theoretical grandeur, built on a single, time-defying, all-inclusive structure, to the culture-bound relativism of permanent revolution. In the realm of pure temporality it is as hard to clutch at a constant as it was way back in the realm of paradox ruled by Zeno. For when it comes to our grasping at solid things, the realm of temporality is the realm of paradox.

The Conscience's Voice and Its Temporal Realm in LA COSCIENZA DI ZENO

The Conscience's Voice and Its Temporal Realm in <i>LA COSCIENZA DI ZENO</i>

Toward a Framework for Memory : Straus and Some Others

AbstractAfter defining various aspects of memory, this paper has sought to outline the phenomenology of memory developed by Erwin Straus and his effort to refute the trace or engram theory of memory storage. We found Straus proposing some major insights : that human experience has its own structure of lived time, that this experience transcends the realm of physical events, and that the suchness of past experiences is preserved, and can be reactivated, in lived time. Straus's approach repudiates the conventional reductionistic wisdom about memory. That wisdom has some powerful support, both ideological and experimental. However, other evidence taken from physiological, neurological, clinical and psychological observations lends weight to Straus's views. The final answer is not in, but it seems plausible that Straus was on the right track toward a framework for human memory. We concluded with a brief broadening out of the Straus framework into the whole realm of lived time or temporality.

Church and State in Peru and Chile since 1840: A Study in Contrasts

BY the late I830's the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Peru and Chile were beginning to repudiate the regalistic doctrines that many had accepted at the inception of the independence period.' No longer resigned to the dominance of the state over the Church that had prevailed throughout colonial times and that had been particularly marked in the late eighteenth century during the era of Bourbon reforms, churchmen began to want a bipolar power structure in which their ecclesiastical institution would be at least as powerful in the temporal realm as the state. In Peru clerical leaders gradually became convinced that the declining importance of religious values in the conduct of state affairs was the primary cause of the country's abiding political chaos.2 Stability could only be achieved, they asserted, if the Church became a major factor in the political realm. And in Chile churchmen were able to attribute the stability that had been attained beginning in I830 tO the fact that the dominant political leaders had recognized religion's indispensable contribution to the establishment of authority and institutional stability and had therefore encouraged the Church to become an imposing temporal force. Both in Peru and Chile the ire of secular liberal spokesmen was aroused by the clergy's mounting objections to state control and accompanying insistence upon the right to wield political influence. Liberals, moreover, were