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Internal Contradictions (internal + contradiction)
Selected AbstractsPerinatal Sadness among Shuar Women: Support for an Evolutionary Theory of Psychic PainMEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2007Edward H. Hagen Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an important evolved function. If so, then under some definitions of psychiatric disorder, these emotions are not disorders. We investigate the applicability of parental investment theory to maternal postpartum emotions among Shuar mothers. Shuar mothers' conceptions of perinatal sadness closely match predictions of parental investment theory. [source] Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment BanksCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2005Karen Ho The project of conceptualizing powerful subjects and intervening against Wall Street investment banks' hegemonic claims is thwarted by social scientific norms of approaching late capitalism and globalization. Overarching scripts of capitalist globalization not only prevent understanding the heterogeneous and complicated particularities of Wall Street's approaches to the global but also ironically parallel the marketing schemes and hyped representations of Wall Street capitalist promoters. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork with investment bankers, this article portrays Wall Street's uses and understandings of the global and the contingencies and contexts of its global imaginings. It demonstrates that even for the most seemingly globalized and powerful of actors, global ambitions can implode and generate internal contradictions. [source] Neoliberalism, Contingency and Urban Policy: The Case of Social Housing in OntarioINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006JASON HACKWORTH Various authors have argued that common understandings of neoliberalism are flawed because they do not adequately account for its geographical contingency or internal contradictions. Many have suggested that neoliberalism is either too internally riven with contradiction to be considered a singular consistent project, or that its implementation is so locally contingent that we cannot plausibly speak of one ideal-type placeless ideology. Primarily based on interviews with over half of the municipal housing providers in Ontario, this article explores the extent to which the meta-ideas of neoliberalism are filtered and manifest (or not) locally. Social policy has been neoliberalized in Ontario at least since the advent of the ,common sense revolution' in 1995, when a Tory government was elected on a platform of neoliberal reform. The experience of social housing in the province, before, after and during the transition offers a useful window into the debate about the dissonance (or lack thereof) between ideal-type and contingent neoliberalism. Based on this case, we argue that, despite its obvious conceptual flaws, it is politically and analytically important to understand ideal-type neoliberalism better. [source] Too much of a good thing: the ,problem' of political communications in a mass media democracyJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2007Ivor Gaber Francis Fukuyama asks: ,,,is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?' This paper argues that one of these ,internal contradictions' is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system,but such an undermining is not inevitable. The problem can be described as follows: Democratic systems require that citizens are kept fully informed by governments (and others) in the interests of transparency and ultimately accountability. Hence, all political communications have, as their final objective, the accountability of politicians at the ballot box. Thus all political communications have what can be described as ,above' and ,below' the line content. The above-the-line is the actual content of the message, the below-the-line is the implicit one of ,think better of me and my colleagues think worse of my opponents'. Consequently, no matter how personally honest and open an individual politician might be, the democratic system requires her or him to be always thinking about securing a successful result at the ballot box. Thus we have the ,political communications paradox'. Voters want politicians to be honest and accountable but this very demand means that politicians, implicitly, always have to have another agenda in operation when they are communicating with the public, i.e. securing their approval and then their support. As a result the trust which is a fundamental to the workings of a democratic system is constantly being undermined. This has two effects. First, that governments are obliged to make communications, rather than delivery, their real priority and second trust, not just in politicians but in the political system as a whole, tends to wane over time, which in turn endangers the very system it was designed to underpin. But this decline is not inevitable because the system has some in-built self-correcting mechanisms These include: the rise of new parties and/or leaders who portray themselves as ,new' and ,untainted',New Labour, New Conservatives, etc., an almost regular ,re-balancing' of the power relationship that exists between politicians and the civil service, particularly in the communications field, the rise of new forms of communication that seek to by-pass the institutional roadblocks that are perceived as being the cause of the problems and finally increased attention by journalists and academics to the process of political communications makes it more difficult for politicians to continue with ,business as usual' as far as their communication activities are concerned. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Project English: Lessons From Curriculum Reform PastLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2007Wayne O'Neil Project English was born in 1962, a late addition to the curriculum reform movement in the USA that grew out of the Cold War race to dominate outer space. The Oregon Curriculum Study Center, one of the initial 12 Project English centers, took as its goal the complete reformation of the secondary-school language arts curriculum and the education of its teachers. During its 6-year run, the Oregon Curriculum Study Center produced a new secondary-school curriculum in grammar, rhetoric, and literature, the result of collaborative work between the teachers in the field and members of the University of Oregon English Department. Examining the Oregon Curriculum Study Center's work on the grammar component of the curriculum, this article describes the pedagogical (Socratic) and theoretical (transformational) bases of this component, its content, and its development, and offers some lessons to be learned in the context of explaining why this attempt to replace the old grammar with a new one ultimately failed, the result of both internal contradictions and of external forces beyond the Oregon Curriculum Study Center's control. [source] The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms, democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain,NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 2 2010FERNANDO MOLINA ABSTRACT. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ,Basque problem'. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity , and later of Basque identity , than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ,ethnic conflict' requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses. [source] Utopias Re-imagined: A Reply to PanizzaPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2006Sara Motta This article is a reply to Panizza's recent article, ,Unarmed Utopia Revisited: The Resurgence of Left-of-Centre Politics in Latin America'. It contests the claims that there are no alternatives to market economies and liberal democracy in contemporary Latin America. It does this by disentangling the conceptual assumptions that underlie the analysis presented, which, it argues, construct a loaded dice that makes the conclusions of the arguments seemingly inevitable and objective. It also explores the internal contradictions within the alternative presented. This analysis is developed through the use of critical social theory and with reference to the ,movements from below' engaged in the struggle to re-imagine and reconstruct utopias. This involves bringing to the heart of analysis a theoretical orientation in which structures become a series of concrete social relations, not objects, and power is mediated at a variety of spatial levels. It necessitates a conceptualisation of politics, structure and the agents and nature of structural change that expand the boundaries of traditional political science categories. Such conceptual expansion and theoretical repositioning make visible, and politically central, the movements from below normally categorised as marginal in political analysis. [source] Too much of a good thing: the ,problem' of political communications in a mass media democracyJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2007Ivor Gaber Francis Fukuyama asks: ,,,is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?' This paper argues that one of these ,internal contradictions' is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system,but such an undermining is not inevitable. The problem can be described as follows: Democratic systems require that citizens are kept fully informed by governments (and others) in the interests of transparency and ultimately accountability. Hence, all political communications have, as their final objective, the accountability of politicians at the ballot box. Thus all political communications have what can be described as ,above' and ,below' the line content. The above-the-line is the actual content of the message, the below-the-line is the implicit one of ,think better of me and my colleagues think worse of my opponents'. Consequently, no matter how personally honest and open an individual politician might be, the democratic system requires her or him to be always thinking about securing a successful result at the ballot box. Thus we have the ,political communications paradox'. Voters want politicians to be honest and accountable but this very demand means that politicians, implicitly, always have to have another agenda in operation when they are communicating with the public, i.e. securing their approval and then their support. As a result the trust which is a fundamental to the workings of a democratic system is constantly being undermined. This has two effects. First, that governments are obliged to make communications, rather than delivery, their real priority and second trust, not just in politicians but in the political system as a whole, tends to wane over time, which in turn endangers the very system it was designed to underpin. But this decline is not inevitable because the system has some in-built self-correcting mechanisms These include: the rise of new parties and/or leaders who portray themselves as ,new' and ,untainted',New Labour, New Conservatives, etc., an almost regular ,re-balancing' of the power relationship that exists between politicians and the civil service, particularly in the communications field, the rise of new forms of communication that seek to by-pass the institutional roadblocks that are perceived as being the cause of the problems and finally increased attention by journalists and academics to the process of political communications makes it more difficult for politicians to continue with ,business as usual' as far as their communication activities are concerned. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||