A privileged childhood? : Autobiographies of growing up in the Norwegian Foreign Service

This PhD thesis is a phenomenological and narrative inquiry into the lives of adults who have grown up within the institutional framework of the Norwegian Foreign Service (NFS). They have been mobile child dependents of employees who are sent on multiple missions overseas, commonly referred to as ‘classic’ “Third Culture Kids” (TCKs). The thesis asks: What does it mean to have had a childhood within the NFS? This is explored both as childhood experiences and circumstances, and in terms of how participants perceive themselves and live their lives as adults. Through narrative analysis of 43 written and oral retrospective autobiographies, the thesis aims to provide a bottom-up narrative of globalisation through participants’ eyes. Approaches from psychological anthropology and sociology of emotions are applied, conceiving cultural narratives as carriers of “feeling rules”. Article 1 finds a possible disconnection towards the emotional self and towards parents, due to a mismatch between a “privileged” narrative as told versus childhood as experienced. Narratives of ascribed “privilege” tighten the range of socially acceptable emotions. Article 2 finds that multiple relocations can lead to a disconnection towards place, friends and community. However, participants who negotiated “home” and “journeying” with their parents kept a connection to home, and journeys were experienced as predictable and meaningful. Article 3 finds that the diplomat child exists in a legal loophole from a child welfare perspective. Further, TCKs can face barriers to realising their rights because assumptions over “privileged mobility” foster others' non-involvement of the private sphere. Participants seek to resolve these tensions of disconnection. There is a tendency to go from serial mobility in young adult life, towards seeking connection to one location and to locally bound relationships in later adulthood. From fragmented pasts, participants create coherent narrative selves like a melody moving back and forth between perspectives: between opposing tones of push- and pullmigration; between the child and the adult self; between ascribed “privileged” status and selfperceived gratitude. Their gratitude is anchored in abilities to shift mental and emotional perceptions, and towards their accumulated values. A salient underlying value is a wide empathy map, stretching across cultural differences and physical distances, but rooted in local childhood encounters. These findings shed light on dimensions of disconnection, stereotypes and narrative power which will have relevance for a growing number of children and adults as 21st century professions become increasingly mobile

Cold War Anthropology

In a wide-ranging and in-depth study of the recent history of anthropology, David Price offers a provocative account of the ways anthropology has been influenced by U.S. imperial projects around the world, and by CIA funding in particular. DUAL USE ANTHROPOLOGY is the third in Price’s trilogy on the history of the discipline of anthropology and its tangled relationship with the American military complex. He argues that anthropologists’ interactions with Cold War military and intelligence agencies shaped mid-century American anthropology and that governmental and private funding of anthropological research programs connected witting and unwitting anthropologists with research of interest to military and intelligence agencies. Price gives careful accounts of CIA interactions with the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the development of post-war area studies programs, and new governmental funding programs articulated with Cold War projects. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, American anthropologists became increasingly critical of anthropologists’ collaborations with military and intelligence agencies, particularly when these interactions contributed to counterinsurgency projects. Awareness of these uses of anthropology led to several public clashes within the AAA, and to the development of the Association’s first ethics code. Price compares this history of anthropological knowledge being used by military and intelligence agencies during the Cold War to post-9/11 projects. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched

Religious change experiences of the participants of the Inner Healing Retreat at the English-speaking site of the Divine Retreat Centre, Kerala, India

The Divine Retreat Centre, Muringoor, Kerala, India is internationally known for the changes it effects in the lives of its retreat participants. To date, over ten million participants have attended the retreats over a decade. However there is a dearth of empirical research on the change processes involved in this retreat experience. This study was formulated to investigate the following research question: how do the participants at the Divine Retreat Centre come to be what they come to be as a result of each day‟s experience of the six day Inner Healing Retreat? This study is a qualitative investigation and the research strategy of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was broadly adopted for collecting and analysing the data. Eight participants of the Inner Healing Retreat were interviewed at the end of each of the six days of this Retreat. The participants ranged between 19-55 years and included five men and three women who met the criteria for homogeneity: Goan-Catholic lineage, English-speaking, firsttime Retreat participants. The findings reveal that the change process unfolded through seven super-ordinate themes: Crisis, Surrender, Opening up, Confession, Counselling, Inner Healing and Baptism in the Spirit. These themes contribute to an understanding of the nature of religious change or the change processes operating at the Divine Retreat Centre. The implications of these findings are discussed and recommendations for future research suggested

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Intercultural dialogues and the creativity of knowledge - A study on Daya Krishna

Zusammenfassung Diese Arbeit bespricht den Beitrag des Philosophen Daya Krishna (1924-2007) für den Bereich interkultureller Dialoge. Als eine maßgebliche Person akademischer indischer Philosophie hinterließ Daya Krishna ein umfangreiches und vielseitiges, jedoch hauptsächlich unentdecktes Werk. Zuerst biete ich einen Zugang zu seiner diversen Philosophie an, indem ich mich auf sein philosophisches Projekt als ganzes fokussiere. Sein Projekt versucht, die Voraussetzungen des Denkens sichtbar zu machen, was nur mittels Dialogen über philosophische Traditionen mit verschiedenen Voraussetzungen hinweg durchgeführt werden kann. In Anwendung seines Projekts auf den Bereich interkultureller Dialoge stelle ich erst einige Grenzen heraus, an welche aktuelle interkulturelle Theorien stoßen, die in Reaktion auf ihr postmodernes europäisches Erbe den Eurozentrismus zu dekonstruieren und einen globalen philosophischen Dialog zu etablieren versuchen. Als Kontrapunkt dazu stelle ich die Herausforderungen englischsprachiger indischer Philosophen in Indien vor, welche einer Entwurzelung ihrer eigenen Traditionen ausgesetzt sind. Ihrer eigenen philosophischen Vergangenheit beraubt, erfahren sie diese Entwurzelung als eine kulturelle Unterwerfung. In diesem Kontext verband Daya Krishna isolierte Gemeinschaften von Denkern,...This work discusses the contribution of the philosopher Daya Krishna (1924-2007) to the realm of intercultural dialogues. A leading figure of academic Indian philosophy, Daya Krishna left an immense and eclectic, yet mainly unexplored, corpus. Firstly, I offer one approach to his diverse philosophy by focusing on his philosophical project as a whole. His project attempts to unveil the presuppositions of thinking, which can only be effectuated in dialoguing across philosophical traditions founded on different presuppositions. Applying his project to the realm of intercultural dialogues, I begin by questioning the limits encountered by recent intercultural theories aiming at deconstructing Eurocentrism and establishing a global philosophical dialogue while responding to their postmodern European heritages. As a counterpoint, I introduce the challenges of Anglophone Indian philosophers in India, facing an uprooting from their own traditions. They feel this uprooting as cultural subjection, deprived of their own philosophical past. Within this context, Daya Krishna connected isolated communities of thinkers by organizing multilingual dialogues (called 'saṃvāda') between traditional paṇḍits, ulama and Anglophone philosophers. I reconstruct some of these experiments, thereby emphasizing methodological...Doktorský obor Německá a francouzská filosofiePhD. - German and French PhilosophyFaculty of HumanitiesFakulta humanitních studi