Transcultural Studies Research Articles

Transcultural Literary Interpretation: Theoretical Reflections with Examples from the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The present contribution explores the topic of literary interpretation from a transcultural perspective. We employ two dramas by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Die Juden and Nathan der Weise) and one by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Iphigenie auf Tauris) as models for the investigation of intercultural and transcultural readings of literary texts. We first consider the epistemologies of Johann Martin Chladenius and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to distinguish between intercultural and transcultural studies. As a field of inquiry, transcultural literary studies does not employ one particular approach or advocate one specific method since it seeks to create new knowledge by opening up literary texts. For the first time, the article differentiates clearly between intercultural and transcultural studies and offers a clearer definition of transcultural spheres or spaces than has been advanced before. The critique of Karl-Josef Kuschel’s reading of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise opens up the literary-dramatic text to new possibilities. The field does not focus on what cultures do with human beings but with what different human beings do with culture. In sum, the transcultural dimensions of literary texts foster transcultural mentalities. They also have the potential to identify shared experiences and to develop common understandings while respecting the authenticity of difference.

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Series. By Ann McGrath.

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Series. By Ann McGrath. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xxxiv + 504 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, CAN$58.50, £31.99.) In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, settler states in America and Australia attempted to police the boundaries of love. Illicit affairs, however, exposed their inability to impose fully a colonial social order. And as Ann McGrath demonstrates in her book Illicit Love , they also shaped the very concept of nation and self in these places. McGrath’s transnational study exposes the limits of intermarriage law among diverse populations: Americans, citizens of the Cherokee Nation, and the many inhabitants of Yarrabah, Queensland, Australia. … jjbuss{at}salisbury.edu

The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. By Todd W. Wahlstrom.

The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War . Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Series. By Todd W. Wahlstrom . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xxix + 190 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, CAN$68.95, £36.00.) Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico is a novel effort to rethink the historical role played by Southern migrants who exited the United States for Mexico following the Civil War. Until now, the historiography has held that when Southern exiles went to Mexico and curried the favor of Maximillian—the French emperor in Mexico—they simply sought to recast parts of Veracruz as a new South, but Wahlstrom pushes back against this view. While that first wave of migrants did indeed include many Confederates-cum-royalists who courted the transplanted Hapsburgs … jnichols{at}qcc.cuny.edu

Factors associated with caregiver burden: comparative study between Brazilian and Spanish caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Transcultural studies regarding the comparison of levels of burden in caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) from Europe and Latin America are rare. We designed this study to investigate the differentiating factors associated with burden in Brazilian and Spanish caregivers of patients with AD. This is a cross-sectional study composed by samples of outpatients with AD and their caregivers from Brazil (n = 128) and Spain (n = 146). Caregivers answered the Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI) and a Sociodemographic Questionnaire. Patients were assessed with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ), Disability Assessment for Dementia (DAD), Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), and Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) Scale. In the multivariate regression analysis, high burden levels were reported in Brazil, when caregivers were female (p = 0.025) and when patients did not attend Day Care Center (p = 0.025). In Spain, high burden levels were associated with living with the patient (p = 0.014), younger caregivers (p = 0.003), and participation of patients at Day Care Center (p = 0.046). Also, different neuropsychiatric symptoms explained high burden levels: in Brazil, depression (p < 0.001) and anxiety (p = 0.024) and, in Spain, apathy/indifference (p < 0.001), agitation/aggression (p = 0.019) and irritability/lability (p = 0.027). Caregivers' gender, patients who attended Day Care Center and neuropsychiatric symptoms were differentiating factors in the burden of Brazilian and Spanish caregivers.

Preocupación y conducta ecológica responsable en estudiantes universitarios: estudio comparativo entre estudiantes chilenos y españoles

As part of a pilot study aimed at the transcultural analysis of environmental concern and its relationship with ecological behavior, a questionnaire assessing these was developed in Spain, and tested in Spain and in Chile. Chilean (n=88) and Spanish (n=149) students filled out the questionnaire. The results were analysed according to the model of multidimensional conceptualisation of concern for the environment manifested in 4 types of attitude: apathetic, anthropocentric, connected and emotional affinity (Amérigo et al., 2012). Results differed between the two groups, and cultural and psychosocial variables appear to play a significant role in this. This suggest that it is important to have instruments that facilitate environmental studies in the Chilean context, and to take contextual factors (such as the exacerbation of the country's environmental crisis and citizens’ concern about the situation) into account in such studies. Transcultural studies are key to deepening our understanding of the subject at the worldwide level.

Religious Studies and Transcultural Studies: : Revealing a Cosmos Not Known Before?

Drawing on our research on Pentecostal Christianity in Singapore, the article introduces the transcultural approach and discusses its possible contributions to the academic study of religions. After a short overview of the history of the discipline, the article introduces our understanding of the transcultural approach and a discussion of similar or related approaches in Religious Studies, which emphasize relationality and polyvocality in the study of religious practices and discourses. The final section of the article is devoted to two case studies that demonstrate the fruitfulness of adopting a transcultural approach to our research material. The first example contests the prevalent narrative of the Azusa Street Revival (1906–1909) as the birth of Pentecostalism and an inherently American religious phenomenon, which was subsequently exported from the US to the rest of the world. The second example discusses Singaporean Pentecostal missionary narratives and genealogies of small group practice, which decentre North America, Europe, and the North Atlantic as focal points of the religious world map.

The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War by Todd W. Wahlstrom

Reviewed by: The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warby Todd W. Wahlstrom John McKiernan-González The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. By Todd W. Wahlstrom. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xxx, 189. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4634-8.) How does southern history shift when Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans share pages and a central narrative with Confederates after the Civil War? Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warprovides a clue. The book seeks to anchor Confederate ambitions after the Civil War in a more global and multiethnic cultural frame. To me, this is the abiding tension in the project: Wahlstrom brings southern history to the northern Mexican borderlands, treating individual Confederate merchants and soldiers alongside [End Page 946]Comanche and Kickapoo migrants within a sharp-edged Mexican political context. The tension lies in keeping the southern dimensions of this North American migration prominent but not overwhelming. By bringing the tenuous dimension of the commercial allegiances between erstwhile Confederate elites and conservative landowners and politicians in Tamaulipas and Coahuila into view, Wahlstrom has done Mexicanists a great service. The book mines a variety of personal papers in special collections across the United States that give both day-to-day reports and textured portraits of the way Confederate southerners learned to work with politically conservative Mexican elites. These documented interactions provide a window into the direct military challenges Confederate soldiers faced from local Mexican, Apache, and Kickapoo militias when they sought to take possession of land south of the Nueces River. Many U.S.-based historians portray an easy projection of American power southward; Wahlstrom makes the weak jury-rigging of these projects very clear. In this fashion, he challenges the seamless way classes and popular books proclaim “America in the World.” Wahlstrom has done historians of the West and Native America a large favor. The same papers and documents that illuminate the transnational alliances between conservative elites also make a political project of various Comanche, Kickapoo, and Apache bands clear. They worked to remove white southern and conservative political influence from the Coahuila and Nuevo León borderlands. Wahlstrom’s analysis of the attacks makes it clear that these bands fought French and southern influence and often allied themselves with Mexican popular militias for this purpose. His discussion of African American movement south hints at individuals’ ability to seize the moment when Confederate authority and anti-black conservative political power receded in the regions, using the violence and chaos to escape owners and employers and to make new and perhaps more peaceful lives away from their earlier bonds. Wahlstrom’s account points to the territories opened to peasants and workers by the collapse of the French empire in Mexico, an opening rendered tragic by the rural enclosures that came with mines, railroads, and resurgent haciendas under the Porfiriato. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoadds to the growing argument that Mexico is a key part of the American West. This brings us back to the earlier question: how southern is The Southern Exodus to Mexico?If southern history predates nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, includes Mexican Americans and Comanche leaders by name, and treats the movement of families as a key theme, the chastening of Confederate exiles in northern Mexico by multiple ethnic communities—as Wahlstrom amply demonstrates—should be central to the South. I am not convinced that northern investors eluded similar obstacles in imposing their vision on Mexico, in particular if the time frame for their investments included the Mexican Revolution. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoshould be included in any conversation about the global dimensions of southern history. [End Page 947] John McKiernan-González Texas State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Editor’s Introduction

MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting. MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues. Table of Contents Walter POHL, Editor’s Introduction Stefanie SAMIDA - Jörg FEUCHTER, Why Archaeologists, Historians and Geneticists Should Work Together – and How Sebastian BRATHER, New Questions Instead of Old Answers: Archaeological Expectations of a DNA Analysis Stefan BURMEISTER, Archaeological Research on Migration as a Multidisciplinary Challenge Patrick GEARY - Krishna VEERAMAH, Mapping European Population Movement through Genomic Research Manfred K. H. EGGERT, Genetizing Bantu: Historical Insight or Historical Trilemma? Kerstin P. HOFMANN, With víkingr into the Identity Trap: When Historiographical Actors Get a Life of Their Own Celine WAWRUSCHKA, Genetic History and Identity: The Case of Turkey The journal is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Editor’s Preface

MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting. MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues. Table of Contents Walter POHL, Editor’s Preface Daniel G. KÖNIG, Charlemagne’s ›Jihād‹ Revisited: Debating the Islamic Contribution to an Epochal Change in the History of Christianization Tsvetelin STEPANOV, Venerating St. Michael the Archangel in the Holy Roman Empire and in Bulgaria, Tenth–Eleventh Centuries: Similarities, Differences, Transformations Jesse W. TORGERSON, Could Isidore’s Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? Using the Concept of Genre to Compare Ancient and Medieval Chronicles Thomas ERTL - Markus MAYER, Acculturation and Elimination: Europe’s Interaction with the Other (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Century) Miriam Adan JONES, A Chosen Missionary People? Willibrord, Boniface, and the Election of the Angli Marieke BRANDT, Heroic History, Disruptive Genealogy: al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī and the Historical Formation of the Shākir Tribe (Wāʿilah and Dahm) in al-Jawf, Yemen Daniel MAHONEY, The Political Agency of Kurds as an Ethnic Group in Late Medieval South Arabia Anna FRAUSCHER - Jelle WASSENAAR - Veronika WIESER, Making Ends Meet. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism The journal is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Series. Edited by Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xii + 514 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $45.00, CAN$51.95, £32.00, paper.)

<b><i>Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas</i></b>. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Series. Edited by Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xii + 514 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $45.00, CAN$51.95, £32.00, paper.)

Visions of Community (VISCOM): Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE)

MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting. MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues. TABLE OF CONTENTS Walter POHL and Andre GINGRICH Medieval Worlds: Introduction to the First Issue Patrick GEARY, The Discourse of Herrschaft as the Practice of Herrschaft in the Fifth Century Robert MOORE, The First Great Divergence? Lars Boje MORTENSEN, Comparing and Connecting: the Rise of Fast Historiography in Latin and Vernacular (Twelfth to Thirteenth Century) Helen SIU, Historical Anthropology: A View from »South China« COMPARATIVE PAPERS: UNIVERSAL HISTORIES Ian WOOD, Universal Chronicles in the Early Medieval West Ann CHRISTYS, Universal Chronicles in Arabic before c. 900 COMPARATIVE HISTORY IN THE MAKING: ONGOING MAJOR RESEARCH PROJECTS Gwen BENNETT, »I Spy with my Little Eye«: GIS and Archaeological Perspectives on Eleventh Century Song Envoy Routes in the Liao Empire (Kitan-Liao Archaeological Survey and History KLASH) Michael BORGOLTE, Foundations »For the Salvation of the Soul« – an Exception in World History? (Foundations of Medieval Societies FOUNDMED) Catherine HOLMES and Naomi STANDEN, Defining the Global Middle Ages (AHRC Research Network) Eduardo MANZANO, Why Did Islamic Medieval Institutions Become So Different from Western Medieval Institutions? (Power and Institutions in Medieval Islam and Christendom PIMIC) Walter POHL and Andre GINGRICH, Visions of Community (VISCOM): Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE) John TOLAN, The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (RELMIN)

“we…head back to English”: Anglophone Lyric in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines

English has become such a widespread international language that it has spawned Anglophone literatures in many countries. The spread of English has been one of the largely unintended benefits of empire, including in Hong Kong. For most countries the era of empire sufficiently belongs to history that literary ―postcolonial studies now seem to have largely run their course, to be replaced by the more open ―transcultural studies. This signifies the English language‘s loss of the stigma of empire as it gains a local habitation and a name. However, English often remains a minority language and a minority literature in a specific national context. These literatures are certainly minority ones in global terms, routinely ignored in the Norton, Oxford and other major anthologies of modern English literature. This makes all the more important a possible fraternity, or sorority, of such immigrant Anglophone literatures and the reading of them in relation to each other. Such writing will be, in the words of the editors of the first anthology of writing in English from South-east Asia, ―separated by distance, cultural diversity and differing historical trajectories (Patke et al, xv). What the writing will have in common are the characteristics of English, thereby encouraging an attention to the aesthetic qualities of the writing as well as the socio-political issues which have dominated literary criticism over the last fifty years in reaction against New Criticism.  This paper attempts such a glocal study through a comparison of the work of established contemporary poets from Hong Kong, Singapore and The Philippines, each an Asian place with a recent but now strong enough Anglophone poetry to mark the foundations of a tradition. For practical purposes, this is a sample of countries and of poets, the three being Agnes Lam (Hong Kong), Kirpal Singh (Singapore) and Isabela Banzon (The Philippines).

Translating Cuba: Diasporic writing between moving cultures and moving media

This article discusses the interrelation between transculturality and transmediality with an emphasis on processes of translation. It focuses on two examples of transcultural and transmedial writing taken from contemporary Cuban literature in Paris: Miguel Sales's recontextualization of Cuban popular music in Paris and William Navarrete's ekphrastic reinscription of his island into the realm of French romantic painting. The case studies are significant in this context because they show how cultural borders are simultaneously set and transgressed at medial crossings—between music and poetry, text, and image. Thus, cultural translations go hand in hand with medial transpositions that include forms of rewriting, recomposition, and revisualization. The connection between moving cultures and moving media also points to the question of “travelling memory” in diaspora.Andrea Gremels studied Romance languages, sociology, and American studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she has been working as a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures since 2008. In the area of Latin American and francophone literature and culture, her main research interests are transcultural studies, inter- and transmedial approaches, and the Carribean. In 2013 she finished her dissertation on exile and transculturality in contemporary Cuban literature in Paris (“Kubanische Gegenwartsliteratur in Paris zwischen Exil und Transkulturalität.” Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2014). She also published the volume Cuba: La revolución revis(it)ada (ed. with Roland Spiller, Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2010).

Psychometric Properties of the Korean Versions of Three Sleep Evaluation Questionnaires.

Psychometric properties of the Korean versions of three sleep evaluation questionnaires were described to provide tools for practitioners and researchers interested in transcultural studies in Korea. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), the General Sleep Disturbance Scale (GSDS), and the Leeds Sleep Evaluation Questionnaire (LSEQ) were analyzed using data from 959 community-dwelling adults in Korea. Furthermore, cut-off points and prevalence of sleep disturbance were identified. Reliability and concurrent validity for all measures were acceptable. Optimal cut-off points of PSQI, GSDS, and LSEQ with highest Youden's index were 5, 33, and 66, and prevalence of sleep disturbance was 22.1%, 26.3%, and 25.8%, respectively. The Korean PSQI, GSDS, and LSEQ are all valid and reliable tools for detecting sleep disturbance. We provide suggestions for selecting the right tools according to the purpose, setting, and participants of transcultural studies.

Beginning with the Mediterranean

The emergence of the “Mediterranean” as a coherent category of thought or, more pertinently, as a “geohistorical universal,” dates back to the early nineteenth century. The relation of the Mediterranean to formations of knowledge would thus be linked to the framework of imperial history and the discursive bounds of area and (post)colonial studies. More recently—and ostensibly as part of a larger turn away from area studies toward comparative, transcultural, transregional, and global studies—the burgeoning field of Mediterranean studies has put this resurgent category into massive deployment and circulation through a rhetoric of renewal, invention, and innovation. Responding to CSSAAME’s renewed mission statement of 2013, this introductory essay as well as the articles that follow aim to dramatize an encounter between area studies and Mediterranean studies. Through a redeployment of the Mediterranean as a methodological trope, this essay draws attention to its liquidity in configuring geopolitical and discursive relations between Africa, Asia, and Europe and to its fungibility as conceptual currency and considers the Mediterranean as a source of both data and theory.

Janne Lahti. Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico.

In the United States, the history of the military in the nineteenth-century American West is not much remarked by scholars. The conference programs of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians rarely feature the subject, and at the recent annual meeting of the Western History Association, only two panels out of eighty dealt with the topic. Most academic historians there turned instead to issues of race, class, gender, borderlands, and transcultural studies...

Latin American female business executives: an interesting surprise

Purpose– Because women ' s status in Latin American countries appears comparable to their status in organizations of more economically advanced nations, this paper probes the mystery of how and why these women fare relatively well in their careers, given that socioeconomic and cultural factors could limit their possibilities of achieving higher management positions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– Exploratory study of 162 Latin American women who demonstrated exceptional success by attaining first and second level positions in private organizations. They responded to a semi-structured interview of 49 closed-ended questions about career challenges and barriers, leadership style, ambition, personal goals and work-life balance, plus two open-ended questions about men and women ' s leadership differences and how they understand their success.Findings– Interviewees disagreed on issues of discrimination, recognized few serious professional career barriers and regarded work-life balance as their main challenge. They understood their success in terms of individual factors such as personality characteristics, performance and results, and their own leadership traits. Most admitted that machismo limits women ' s access to upper level positions. They recognized their ambition to attain power positions mainly for personal satisfaction, and their main goal was personal development and fulfilment.Research limitations/implications– Given the sample size per country, future research could include a more representative and large sample or concentrate on one country per region to establish relationships between women ' s personal characteristics and organizations ' sector, or challenges faced and leadership style. Also family-owned companies as well as women entrepreneurs could contribute knowledge about women ' s leadership in these countries. Studying only national companies, a more neatly description of local culture and gender awareness in its organizational practices that hinder or promote women ' s leadership and participation in decision-making positions may be obtained. Transcultural studies that compare women ' s rise and upper management performance in countries where support from domestic help and extended family as well as cultural values are very different, could permit to understand more fully what it takes to reach top management positions and the weight that these particular cultural conditions have.Originality/value– This study is unique in shedding light on a multinational sample of Latin American female executives and their perceptions of their success, leadership style and barriers and challenges faced.

Hysteria around the world.

In the 20th century the term hysteria declined and the interest in the hysteria-related diseases decreased in comparison to the florid period of studies that was inspired by Charcot's legacy in the second half of the 19th century. Scientific interest has once again increased in the 21st century, and dissociative and somatoform disorders (previously indicated as hysteria or hysterical neurosis) have come to be regarded as conditions that are known to be much more prevalent than formerly estimated. Available current epidemiological data from several countries on different continents (adopting DSM criteria for diagnosis) suggest not only that the prevalence is probably similar, but also that there is a consistency in their clinical manifestation around the world and across different cultures, social classes, and institutional settings. In line with this uniformity, and also with Charcot's concept of hysteria as a functional disorder, neuroimaging studies suggest that for some of these disorders, there might be some changes of neural connectivity in specific pathways at the origin of the behavioral aspects. Only large-scale multidisciplinary transcultural studies can improve the research and the development of therapeutic interventions for these disorders.

Philosophical Thought and its Existential Basis: The Sociologies of Philosophy of Randall Collins and Pierre Bourdieu

The sociology of philosophy is a relatively new discipline aiming to link philosophical thought to the social conditions from which it has emerged. This article examines how two of the discipline’s main representatives, Randall Collins and Pierre Bourdieu, understand the relationship between social conditions and philosophical thought in their main relevant works, to so provide a more precise definition of the term ‘social conditions’/‘social factors.’ Basic differences between Bourdieu’s and Collins’s approaches are considered, as are the consequences of these differences for how much autonomy each author is prepared to ascribe to what they call, respectively, the ‘philosophical field’ and ‘attention space.’ The argument is made that the conceptual innovations built into both of these terms represent a clear step forward from Karl Mannheim’s overly vague notion of ‘existentially connected knowledge.’ Ultimately, it is nevertheless Bourdieu’s explanatory model that is shown to be the more powerful one of the two. 1. This paper is largely based on my doctoral dissertation Filosofisociologi – ett sociologiskt perspektiv pa filosofiskt tankande [The Sociology of Philosophy – A Sociological Perspective on Philosophical Thought] (Lund: Lund Univ. Press, 2007).The first draft of this article was written for a symposium on philosophical cultures held in Helsinki, Finland, in April 2008. Had it been conceived today, a discussion of Neil Gross’ important study, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), would certainly have had to be included in it. In this study, Gross introduces his theory of “intellectual self-concepts,” which he juxtaposes with both Collins’s and Bourdieu’s sociologies of philosophy. Even if it has not yet managed to influence research in the field to a comparable extent, Gross’ theory can rightly be characterized as a “challenger paradigm” within the discipline that deserves to be discussed side by side with both Collins’s and Bourdieu’s work in the area (Carl-Goran Heidegren, Henrik Lundberg, “Towards a Sociology of Philosophy,” Acta Sociologica 53 (2010): 1-18. 2 Review of Max Scheler’s Versuche zu einer Sociologie des Wissens, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1925), pp. 262-264. 120 Transcultural Studies

Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies

Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies