Being and Landscape: An Ontological Inquiry into a Japanese Rural Community

This essay aims to reflect on the idea of landscape and our relationship with it by taking the Japanese notion of furusato (native place) in its ontological dimension. Grounded in Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of Being’ and ‘ontology’, a phenomenological understanding of fieldwork experience in a Japanese rural community will be developed in order to rethink both the furusato and the ‘Being-landscape’ relation. As a consequence, we will be concerned not with how people speak about landscape, but with how the landscape speaks through people. What will be brought to light are the landscape’s moral and relational dimensions: namely, (i) the responsibility towards both our communities and future generations and (ii) a more-than-physical understanding of landscape that alerts us to our belonging to a common world comprised of relationships and tasks.     

Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

Grounding Twenty-first-Century Public Relations Praxis in Aristotelian Ethos

ABSTRACT

By grounding public relations praxis in Aristotelian ethos, practitioners can function as liaison officers with balanced perspectives, capable of co-creating meaning with both client organizations and their publics between whom experts are hired to facilitate mutually beneficial relationships. This approach locates persuasion at the nexus of speaker ethos in the public relations process. It allows practitioners to balance their commitment to the ethics of their profession with loyalty to clients, while empowering audiences (organizations and their publics) to function as the final arbiters of any courses of action proposed to them. Moreover, because the approach enables practitioners, based on their credible ethos, to participate in organizational decision-making, it has the potential to transfer their ethical worldview to client organizations. Ultimately, the central theoretical contribution of this essay is an alternative approach to public relations praxis founded on an analysis of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, arête, and eunoia.     

The Listener as Addressee in Face-to-Face Dialogue

Face-to-face conversation is a unique listening setting, with a particular kind of listener; the person the speaker is directly addressing is the addressee. Our research program has included several experiments involving detailed, reliable examinations of the subtle yet crucial behaviors that addressees use to collaborate with the speaker in face-to-face dialogue. We have found that addressees respond to speakers using either generic back channels (e.g., “m-hm” or nodding) or responses that specify what the addressee has understood (e.g., opening eyes wide to show surprise). Addressees timed these specific responses to precise moments in the speaker's narrative, and they tailored their responses to that moment (e.g., wincing when the speaker described something painful). Distracting addressees with a task that prevented them from following the speakers' narratives made these addressees unable to contribute specific responses, which, in turn, had a deleterious effect on the speakers' storytelling. Further research showed that addressees who were not distracted used a wide variety of behaviors to contribute to dialogue without interrupting the speaker, such as brief vocalizations, facial displays, and even gestures. Speakers and addressees regulated the timing of addressee responses using an interactive pattern of gaze. Addressees also indicated understanding by their formulations, which summarized or paraphrased what the speaker had said. However, our analysis showed that these formulations were not neutral. The analysis of addressees in face-to-face dialogue generates a deeper understanding of the listening process and has implications for listening in applied settings, such as psychotherapy or health care interactions.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Recipes,love, and forgetting: a sparse domestic archive from colonial Natal

This essay uses the genre of creative nonfiction to tell the story of two particular women, and to explore the inextricable relations between femininity, food and love as experienced in one family who lived in a neighbourhood of colonial Natal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning as a conversation with the speaker’s ageing and forgetful mother, the narrative becomes an attempt to discover more about her mother, Madge Smallie. In the process, it unpacks a small domestic archive in which the only published books are a colonial recipe book and an early feminist novel, and the only words written in Madge’s hand are recipes for food and domestic preparations.     

‘He is Quirky; He is the World's Greatest Psychologist’: On the Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common

In this article, we challenge the concept of the therapeutic relationship as an operationalisable entity. In contrast to this idea, we introduce Alphonso Lingis’ concept of community, and his distinction between the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common. This is done through speculative analysis of a transcribed sequence from a research interview with a boy who speaks about his experiences of receiving mental health care. This boy and his family were helped through a network‐oriented, dialogical approach. In the sequence highlighted here, the boy speaks of the significance of a particular mental health practitioner. The boy expresses appreciation for the help he has received, yet it is difficult to translate the boy's utterances into meaningful professional jargon. Although the paper makes use of an actual sequence from a research interview, the argument is not empirical in nature. The purpose of the paper is to elaborate on theory, and to examine some possible consequences for future practice.     

Education for the love of the world: Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of education and communication studies

Amidst a challenging moment of transition in American higher education, this article uses Arendt’s examination of American educational institutions and her reflections on the human condition to develop a philosophy of education that speaks to communication studies. Sharply critical of the unreflective emphasis on newness and normalization that she saw in American schools, Arendt suggests an alternative philosophy of education grounded simultaneously in the contemplation of tradition and the pursuit of natality through the active life of labor, work, and action. Together, tradition and natality open a new approach to communication education in the liberal arts tradition that challenges educators and students alike not only to understand the world around them but also to take responsibility for its renewal.     

Diffusion of language change: Accommodation to a moving target

The paper focuses on motivations for the spread of new features within a speech community, and on the trajectories the changes follow during diffusion. One set of data represents language use, and here focus is on two changes which have been going on in Danish over the past 40 years, one grammatical and one phonetic. The other set of data are results from a nationwide speaker evaluation experiment which tests the subconscious attitudes to different types of speech among the youth in five different places covering Denmark from east to west. Results show that changes spread centrifugally from Copenhagen, even to the extent that reversal of changes spreads from Copenhagen. Furthermore, the attitudes reflected in the speaker evaluation experiment support the theory that language change is motivated by social psychological factors. Finally, it is argued that it is worthwhile considering the possibility of media being involved in processes of linguistic change.     

Promoting Adolescent Voice Through Latina Fiction

The voices of adolescent girls are often lost around the time they reach the middle school classroom. This paper reflects my experience in incorporating Latina literature into a curriculum that speaks to this disaffected group. Focusing on the reactions of three students, I examine the potential for this literature to change the nature of the middle school experience, especially for girls. I found that an active approach to reading books such as Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Esmerelda Santiago's autobiography When I was Puerto Rican can promote increased confidence, visible through candid writing.     

Discourse marker ‘oh’ as a means for realizing the identity potential of constructed dialogue in interaction1

This research explores how discourse marker oh works with constructed dialogue (quoted speech), identifying a use of oh not discussed in previous research in which it can serve to signal speaker stance towards quoted material. While both discourse markers and constructed dialogue have been widely discussed as identity resources in the discourse analytic and interactional‐sociolinguistic tradition, there has been little work considering how these linguistic features may work together. In this paper, I address this gap by illustrating how Bakhtin's (1984) notions of uni‐directional and vari‐directional double voicing articulate with information display and evaluation functions of oh identified by Schiffrin (1987) , suggesting that oh (when occurring as a preface to constructed dialogue), works both to display and evaluate quoted material for the purposes of identity construction in interaction. Such uses of this discourse marker provide illustration of how footing works together with related concepts of evaluation, positioning, and alignment as part of a process of stancetaking in interaction ( Du Bois 2007 ). Examples are taken from ethnographic interviews collected as part of a larger study of the linguistic style of a community of improv performers in Washington, D.C. focusing primarily on examples contributed by one speaker, Josh.     

Literary clinical practice: desire,depression and toxic masculinity in Hamlet

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the notion of a literary clinical practice for which it remains essential to continue to consider those texts that open up a place for a readership, or audience, or even a civilization to consider the endlessly generative failure of its literature to write mental health. Concerned with mental illness that is an effect of language on the subject, the body, and of the enigma of the truth as cause, psychoanalysis is the crucial interlocutor for any literary clinical concern with the maladies of literature and society. In order to re-assess the utility of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to contemporary problems such as depression – perhaps the dominant symptom of our time – this essay attempts a reconsideration of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on Hamlet from the perspective of the contemporary clinic of the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis led by Jacques-Alain Miller.     

I Don't Like the Tone of Your Voice: Infants Use Vocal Affect to Socially Evaluate Others

Infants can make social judgments about characters by visually observing their interactions with others (e.g., Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, Nature, 2007, 450, 557). Here, we ask whether infants can form similar judgments about potential social partners based solely on their tone of voice. In Experiment 1, we presented 10.5‐month‐olds with two visually neutral puppets. One puppet spoke in a positive affect and the other spoke in a negative affect. When the puppets were placed within reach of the infants, infants selected the formerly positive puppet. This preference disappeared when the voices were paired with nonsocial objects (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, 10.5‐month‐olds were once again exposed to the same emotionally negative and positive voices. However, no visual characters were present. At test, infants’ visual orientation controlled how long they heard the neutral versions of each voice. Here, infants listened longer to the neutral voice of the formerly positive speaker. That is, just as in Experiment 1, infants’ preferences for the emotionally neutral test stimuli were shaped by their earlier exposure to emotionally charged recordings of that voice. Our findings provide convergent evidence to suggest that infants possess sophisticated social evaluation abilities, preferring to interact with prosocial over antisocial others.     

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville's estimated 40,000 inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-representation, truth, knowledge and power.     

Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze,stasis, and graffiti

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.     

Seymour Martin Lipset: The social uses of anomaly

Let me preface my remarks by saying that we are here to honor a living, breathing colleague. My great concern, and in this I am sure that I speak for my colleagues as well, is that any imputation of a postmortem be avoided. Indeed, I would like to believe that Marty will review these various contributions and make his own assessments-critical or approvingly. The fact that he is not present in this conference hall should not deter us from speaking frankly and forthrightly. Marty merits nothing less. What binds us all is the sure knowledge that the work of Lipset speaks to us in personal as well as professional ways. That he has touched so many of us in both the private and public realms is itself a testimonial of the magnitude of his contribution to the field of political sociology. So it is in that spirit of a collégial dialogue that I offer these remarks. Let us hope that a year from now a session of one person can be held, at which S. M. Lipset will provide rebuttals and responses to those of us herein gathered. His most recent work in the field is Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology. The two major sources for traching the written works of Seymour Lipset are contained in Reexamining Democracy: Essays in Honor of Seymour Martin Lipset, edited by Gary Marx and Martin Diamond. Newberry Park, California: Sage Publishers. 1992, especially pp. 332–355. For work done by Lipset after 1991; as embodied in his later work, see Lipset's essay on “Steady Work: An Academic Memoir,” Annual Review of Socialogy: Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1996, pp. 1–27. My reference to works mentioned in the narrative can be found in either of these bibliography sources.     

Loudness registers: Normalizing cosmopolitan identities in a narrative of ethnic othering

An analysis of one narrative shows how loudness of voice acquires indexical meaning in interaction and becomes a resource for the narrator to position himself along an axis of social differentiation defined in terms of morality. The narrative was collected among young, male, migrant hip hop artists in Delhi who experienced ethnic othering. In the narrative, loudness registers are used to establish voice contrasts between two antagonistic characters: the racist people of Delhi and the cosmopolitan hip hop self. The racist people speak in soft (piano) and loud (forte) registers, while the cosmopolitan self speaks in normal‐volume registers. The prosodic normalization of the self allows the narrator to differentiate himself from racist others, take moral stances on global solidarity, and construct his cosmopolitan identity.     

Stereotypes versus experience: Indexing regional identity in Bolivian Valley Spanish

Stereotypes of highland and lowland identity categories in the Santa Cruz valleys of Bolivia are linked to phonetic variation in the Spanish discourse marker pues. Highlanders are believed to say [pwes] or [ps] while lowlanders are believed to say [pweh] or [pwe]. However, these beliefs erase two types of differences. First, they erase a distinction among highlanders. While highlanders from the Potosí‐Oruro area pronounce pues as they are believed to, highlanders from Cochabamba do not. Secondly, these beliefs erase intra‐speaker variation. Highlanders sometimes use the lowland variants of pues, and vice versa. When people use atypical pronunciations, they invoke an indexical field linked to the group associated with that variant. This indexical field references stereotypical ideas about groups even when they are inaccurate. Specifically, highland variants index ‘pushy’ or ‘aggressive’ stances, which are associated with people from Cochabamba, even though people from Cochabamba do not use highland variants of pues.     

Stopped in our tracks: From ‘giving an account’ to an ethics of recognition in feminist praxis

When the Western Australian government announced in 2010 that Indigenous people would be compensated for unpaid wages, a Yindjibarndi woman named Bigali Hanlon submitted an application to access her government files so that she could lodge a claim. At the age of four, Bigali was taken from her home in Mulga Downs, Western Australia to live in a church‐run hostel for ‘fair‐skinned’ Indigenous children until she was sent into indentured domestic service as a teenager. Three large files document her history. These files, combined with in‐depth interviews, and a film about Bigali and other Indigenous Australian people, Walking Tracks Back Home, form the basis of this article. In reflecting on the issues raised by Bigali's story, we draw on feminist writing on the costs associated with being called to give an account of oneself, considering how listening might form the basis of an ethics of recognition in feminist praxis.     

Chapter Nine

Even though religious persons cannot rely on a generally accepted protocol for ethical decision-making, every religious person has a particular tradition out of which he or she speaks when making ethical choices in a given situation. This chapter describes a Christian perspective on the three cases.