From Personal Threat to Cross-Cultural Learning: an Eidetic Investigation

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Eugene M. DeRobertis ◽  
Andrew M. Bland

Abstract This study was an eidetic, phenomenological investigation of cross-cultural learning that involves overcoming an experience of personal threat. The study and its findings were placed within the context of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and the extant humanistic literature on cross-cultural encounter. This appeared especially appropriate given phenomenology’s history “within the movement of the so-called ‘Third Force’ psychology” (Giorgi, 1970, p. xi). The eidetic reduction revealed the phenomenon to be rooted in an essential unfamiliarity with the other compounded by presumptions of the other as representing a substandard foreignness harboring danger. For the phenomenon to unfold required the learner to witness spontaneous emotional expression and empathically discover that the other struggles and suffers “like any other human being.” Openness to the other progressively builds and new meanings emerge from the interpersonal exchange as compartmentalized, intellectualized understandings of the other are outmoded.

Author(s):  
Pi-Chi Han ◽  
John A. Henschke

Dr. Malcolm Shepherd Knowles popularized andragogy as the theory of adult learning and was referred to as the Father of Adult Education in the United States (US). As his doctoral students, the authors had extensive personal contacts with him. This paper utilizes the method of autoethnography to explore how cross-cultural learning and cross-cultural mentoring facilitate transformative learning with the development of intercultural competencies for sojourners when they interact with a significant human being in cross-cultural settings.


1999 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Klass

The article explores the state of the field in developing a cross-cultural model of grief. Dialogues within several disciplines bear on the question, but those dialogues are very separated from each other. After drawing a distinction between cross-cultural and multi-cultural, the article reviews research from a broad range of psychological and social sciences. The issue of psychic unity vs. cultural diversity had prevented fuller use of anthropologists' work, but sociology of knowledge mediates between those poles. Contemporary work on the universality of emotions provides the concept of innate meta interpretive schemas within cognitive models supplied by culture. Cultural historians trace changes in how death is perceived and in the acceptability of emotional expression. The article concludes with two suggestions to carry the field forward: one a large scale cross-cultural survey and the other qualitative study in both the researcher's culture and in other cultures.


1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosario Martínez-Arias ◽  
Fernando Silva ◽  
Ma Teresa Díaz-Hidalgo ◽  
Generós Ortet ◽  
Micaela Moro

Summary: This paper presents the results obtained in Spain with The Interpersonal Adjective Scales of J.S. Wiggins (1995) concerning the variables' structure. There are two Spanish versions of IAS, developed by two independent research groups who were not aware of each other's work. One of these versions was published as an assessment test in 1996. Results from the other group have remained unpublished to date. The set of results presented here compares three sources of data: the original American manual (from Wiggins and collaborators), the Spanish manual (already published), and the new IAS (our own research). Results can be considered satisfactory since, broadly speaking, the inner structure of the original instrument is well replicated in the Spanish version.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Tzu-Hui Chen

This narrative aims to explore the meaning and lived experiences of marriage that a unique immigrant population—“foreign brides” in Taiwan—possesses. This convergence narrative illustrates the dynamics and complexity of mail-order marriage and women's perseverance in a cross-cultural context. The relationship between marriage, race, and migration is analyzed. This narrative is comprised of and intertwined by two story lines. One is the story of two “foreign brides” in Taiwan. The other is my story about my cross-cultural relationship. All the dialogues are generated by 25 interviews of “foreign brides” in Taiwan and my personal experience.


Trictrac ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petru Adrian Danciu

Starting from the cry of the seraphim in Isaiahʹ s prophecy, this article aims to follow the rhythm of the sacred harmony, transcending the symbols of the angelic world and of the divine names, to get to the face to face meeting between man and God, just as the seraphim, reflecting their existence, stand face to face. The finality of the sacred harmony is that, during the search for God inside the human being, He reveals Himself, which is the reason for the affirmation of “I Am that I Am.” Through its hypnotic cyclicality, the profane temporality has its own musicality. Its purpose is to incubate the unsuspected potencies of the beings “caught” in the material world. Due to the fact that it belongs to the aeonic time, the divine music will exceed in harmony the mechanical musicality of profane time, dilating and temporarily cancelling it. Isaiah is witness to such revelation offering access to the heavenly concert. He is witness to divine harmonies produced by two divine singers, whose musical history is presented in our article. The seraphim accompanied the chosen people after their exodus from Egypt. The cultic use of the trumpet is related to the characteristics and behaviour of the seraphim. The seraphic music does not belong to the Creator, but its lyrics speak about the presence of the Creator in two realities, a spiritual and a material one. Only the transcendence of the divine names that are sung/cried affirms a unique reality: God. The chant-cry is a divine invocation with a double aim. On the one hand, the angels and the people affirm God’s presence and call His name and, on the other, the Creator affirms His presence through the angels or in man, the one who is His image and His likeness. The divine music does not only create, it is also a means of communion, implementing the relation of man to God and, thus, God’s connection with man. It is a relation in which both filiation and paternity disappear inside the harmony of the mutual recognition produced by music, a reality much older than Adam’s language.


ARCHALP ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 66-75
Author(s):  
Antonio De Rossi ◽  
Roberto Dini

The contemporary architectural production in the Alps of Piedmont has to be studied taking into consideration the contrasting phenomena of depopulation and tourism that have involved the mountain areas of the region during last century. In the fifties and sixties the percentage of abandonment of the high valleys reaches even 80-90%. Entire communities move to industrial urban centers in the cities on the plain. On the other side we witness to a strong polarization of the winter stations that become real “banlieues blanches” for the free time of the citizens and where the architecture of alpine modernism, with various forms, shapes. The paradox nowadays is that the rarefaction of abandoned and depopulated territories is necessary to force to start and choose new innovative paths. We witness a contemporary situation with different shades: on one side the well-established touristic territories that need projects to promote the redevelopment and diversification, on the other side the marginal places where are rising new visions are practices of reactivation of the territory in which architecture is fundamental. The topic of quality of the construction of the physical space intersects with the regeneration of places on a cultural basis, new agriculture and green economy, innovative development of the patrimony, sustainable tourism, with inclusive and participative paths of nature, by giving new meanings to places and building new economies and identities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Sepúlveda Ferriz

Freedom and Justice have always been challenged. Since the most remote times, and in the most varied circumstances of places and people, human beings have tried to clarify and put into practice these two controversial concepts. Freedom and Justice, in effect, are words, but also dreams, desires and practices that, not being imperfect, are less sublime and ambitious. Reflecting on them on the basis of an ethics of development and socioenvironmental sustainability is still a great challenge in our contemporaneity. This book is born from the need that we all have to reflect, understand what our role is in relation to the OTHER, understood as the other as Environment. Doing this from such disparate areas and at the same time as current as Economics, Philosophy and Ecology, is still a great opportunity to discuss complexity, transdisciplinarity and the inclusion of diverse themes, but which all converge in the Human Being and its relationship with the world. Endowing human beings with Freedom and a sense of Justice means RESPONSIBILITY. To be free and to want a better and fairer world is to endow our existence with meaning and meaning. Agency, autonomy, functioning, dignity, rights, are capacities that must be leveraged individually and collectively for authentic development to exist. Development as Freedom is a valid proposal for thinking about a socio-environmental rationality that interferes in the controversial relations between economics, ethics and the environment.


2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.


1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Stimpfl

The literature annotated here is from a subset of literature in cultural anthropology that deals with ethnographic fieldwork: the basic research exercise of cultural immersion. This bibliography is meant to offer a representative sample of literature in anthropology that deals with the fieldwork experiences of researchers. Cultural anthropology is devoted to the concept of “discovering the other.” Its method of inquiry is often referred to as participant/observation: the researcher lives the culture while observing it. Since so much of the fieldwork experience deals with personal adjustments to living in different cultures, the literature is charged with the problems of adjustment and understanding so common to study abroad experiences. This literature is particularly relevant to those interested in cross-cultural learning and issues in cultural adjustment. 


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document