scholarly journals The Quest for Today's Totemic Psychology: A New Look at Wundt, Freud and Other Scientists

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yueh-Ting Lee ◽  
Xiangyang Chen ◽  
Yongping Zhao ◽  
Wenting Chen

Totems are symbols or representations of human's affiliations with, and/or categorizations of, animals, plants and inanimate objects. Totemism is related to fundamental human belief systems based on totems. Investigating totems and totemism psychologically is a unique way to explore human minds. We have critically examined Wundt, Freud and many other scholars and scientists who made distinguished contributions to scientific research on totems and totemism almost in the past two centuries –i.e., totemic psychology, which is the study of our mind's categorization and affiliation in the human and natural world today. Understanding and appreciating their totemic psychology can help psychologists today enhance their understanding in other fields—e.g., ecological and environmental psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, personality, social and ethnic psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, cultural psychology, and religious or spiritual psychology. Unfortunately, recent data from a content analysis via PsycInfo and a cross-cultural survey study (N=273) showed that well-trained psychologists around the world and psychology students in the United States and in China are unfamiliar with Wundt and Freud's totemic contributions to psychology today. The implications, benefits, and lessons of totems and today's totemic psychology are discussed here.

Author(s):  
Karen A. Krasny ◽  
Patrick Slattery

Postmodernism is a mid-20th-century response to 18th-century Enlightenment rationality. As a movement that developed across a diverse range of disciplines, it is not so much defined by a distinct chronology but rather is predicated on a recognition of the past and has come to represent a way of operating. The late Italian semiotician and writer Umberto Eco argued from an ideological point of view that every period in history has had its postmodernism. Architect and critical theorist Charles Jencks further polemicized postmodernism as a specific form of cultural resistance. In his view, postmodernism operates as a communicative set of values to address the needs of a society, and he cites architecture’s response to the pressing need for mass housing and large-scale urban redevelopment as an example of postmodern innovation. Inspired by postmodernism as a critical movement in the arts, architecture, and philosophy, postmodern curriculum similarly works to reject the universalizing ideals of modernity. It shares Jencks’s polemic stance and would have us reimagine the literal and metaphorical bricks and mortar of schools, colleges, and universities to advance a broader understanding of curriculum with the aim of addressing the need to provide fair and equitable access to education. The postmodern notion that the past has everything to do with the present is central to decolonizing efforts aimed at acknowledgment and reconciliation of the devastating and oppressive ends of curriculum as institutions. For example, government-sponsored residential schools in Canada and the United States stand as a glaring example of the abject failure of modern education to embrace the communicative ideals of postmodernism in its response to First Nations people. Postmodern curriculum is committed to a decentering and challenging agenda aimed at exposing and undermining master narratives of truth, language, knowledge, and power. Dynamic and responsive, postmodern curriculum’s holistic and ecological approach to education works to dissolve the artificial boundary between the outside community and the classroom to celebrate and honor the interconnectedness of knowledge, experience, international and local communities, the natural world, and life itself.


This chapter traces the co-production of knowledge on the global migrations of biota—humans, plants, and animals—by exploring a brief biography of life in the United States over the past decade. It also emphasizes the human influence on the natural world by calling this contemporary epoch the Anthropocene, an era driven primarily by the impact of human actions. Thus, with refusing the unproductive choices of a nostalgic past or an anarchic future, this chapter turns to a naturecultural vision of responsible and ethical living with our cohabitants, a vision that is always politically astute and reflexive of the complex histories of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation that have shaped our ideas of nature and the natural.


Author(s):  
Ella Inglebret ◽  
Amy Skinder-Meredith ◽  
Shana Bailey ◽  
Carla Jones ◽  
Ashley France

The authors in this article first identify the extent to which research articles published in three American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) journals included participants, age birth to 18 years, from international backgrounds (i.e., residence outside of the United States), and go on to describe associated publication patterns over the past 12 years. These patterns then provide a context for examining variation in the conceptualization of ethnicity on an international scale. Further, the authors examine terminology and categories used by 11 countries where research participants resided. Each country uses a unique classification system. Thus, it can be expected that descriptions of the ethnic characteristics of international participants involved in research published in ASHA journal articles will widely vary.


Crisis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shannon Lange ◽  
Courtney Bagge ◽  
Charlotte Probst ◽  
Jürgen Rehm

Abstract. Background: In recent years, the rate of death by suicide has been increasing disproportionately among females and young adults in the United States. Presumably this trend has been mirrored by the proportion of individuals with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether the proportion of individuals in the United States with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide differed by age and/or sex, and whether this proportion has increased over time. Method: Individual-level data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 2008–2017, were used to estimate the year-, age category-, and sex-specific proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. We then determined whether this proportion differed by age category, sex, and across years using random-effects meta-regression. Overall, age category- and sex-specific proportions across survey years were estimated using random-effects meta-analyses. Results: Although the proportion was found to be significantly higher among females and those aged 18–25 years, it had not significantly increased over the past 10 years. Limitations: Data were self-reported and restricted to past-year suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Conclusion: The increase in the death by suicide rate in the United States over the past 10 years was not mirrored by the proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide during this period.


2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phia S. Salter ◽  
Glenn Adams

Inspired by “Mother or Wife” African dilemma tales, the present research utilizes a cultural psychology perspective to explore the dynamic, mutual constitution of personal relationship tendencies and cultural-ecological affordances for neoliberal subjectivity and abstracted independence. We administered a resource allocation task in Ghana and the United States to assess the prioritization of conjugal/nuclear relationships over consanguine/kin relationships along three dimensions of sociocultural variation: nation (American and Ghanaian), residence (urban and rural), and church membership (Pentecostal Charismatic and Traditional Western Mission). Results show that tendencies to prioritize nuclear over kin relationships – especially spouses over parents – were greater among participants in the first compared to the second of each pair. Discussion considers issues for a cultural psychology of cultural dynamics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

By identifying two general issues in recent history textbook controversies worldwide (oblivion and inclusion), this article examines understandings of the United States in Mexico's history textbooks (especially those of 1992) as a means to test the limits of historical imagining between U. S. and Mexican historiographies. Drawing lessons from recent European and Indian historiographical debates, the article argues that many of the historical clashes between the nationalist historiographies of Mexico and the United States could be taught as series of unsolved enigmas, ironies, and contradictions in the midst of a central enigma: the persistence of two nationalist historiographies incapable of contemplating their common ground. The article maintains that lo mexicano has been a constant part of the past and present of the US, and lo gringo an intrinsic component of Mexico's history. The di erences in their historical tracks have been made into monumental ontological oppositions, which are in fact two tracks—often overlapping—of the same and shared con ictual and complex experience.


2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.


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