Journal articles: 'Gonzaga family'

Bibliography
Subscribe
News
Referencing guides Blog Automated transliteration Relevant bibliographies by topics

Українська Français Italiano Español Polski Português Deutsch

We are proudly a Ukrainian website. Our country was attacked by Russian Armed Forces on Feb. 24, 2022.
You can support the Ukrainian Army by following the link: https://u24.gov.ua/. Even the smallest donation is hugely appreciated!

Relevant bibliographies by topics / Gonzaga family / Journal articles

To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Gonzaga family.

Author: Grafiati

Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 29 January 2023

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

Consult the top 29 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Gonzaga family.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

Wanek,WolfgangD. "Das Brautinventar der Paola Gonzaga: Hochzeitswagen und Brauttruhen." historia.scribere, no.12 (June15, 2020): 278. http://dx.doi.org/10.15203/historia.scribere.12.633.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The Bride Inventory of Paola Gonzaga: Bridal Cart and ChestsThe following paper takes a closer look at the bridal cart and chests of the Mantuan princess Paola Gonzaga, who was sent to marry Leonhard of Gorizia in 1478. With her she brought an adequate dowry, which was listed in an inventory. Based on this document, aspects of the material culture of the time shall be discussed and used to gain insights into the daily life of women and their situation in the 15th century. The analysis will focus on two categories of Paola’s dowry: the partly preserved chests and the luxurious bride cart and its accessories. Those objects also shed light onto the socio-political situation of the late medieval period, and provide insights into the mechanism and imaginaries of medieval dynastic representation, namely of the Gonzaga family.

Saalman, Howard, Livio Volpi Ghirardini, and Anthony Law. "Recent Excavations under the "Ombrellone" of Sant'Andrea in Mantua: Preliminary Report." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no.4 (December1, 1992): 357–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/990735.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Recent excavations have revealed the existence of an integrated complex of vaulted rooms, stairs, and passages under the so-called ombrellone of the western portico of Sant'Andrea in Mantua. The authors suggest that this complex and its adjacent rooms may have been intended to serve for the exposition of the relics of the Most Precious Blood of Christ, preserved in Sant'Andrea, possibly in times of danger and plague, and for the guardian brotherhood of the relics, the Venerable Company of the Most Precious Blood, established in Sant'Andrea by Pius II in 1462. The adjacent rooms over the first side chapels of the nave may have served for "ritual habitation" by members of the ruling Gonzaga family, particularly for the patron, the marchese Ludovico Gonzaga.

BROWN,C.M. "THE FARNESE FAMILY AND THE BARBARA GONZAGA COLLECTION OF ANTIQUE CAMEOS." Journal of the History of Collections 6, no.2 (January1, 1994): 145–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhc/6.2.145.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Becker, Rotraud. "Scipione Gonzaga, Fürst von Bozzolo, kaiserlicher Gesandter in Rom 1634–1641." Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 102, no.1 (November1, 2022): 239–307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/qufiab-2022-0014.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract In the first half of the 17th century, the image of the imperial embassy in Rome was dominated by the long-standing service of the brothers Paolo and Federico Savelli. In comparison, the period in between, during which Scipione Gonzaga held the office, has left hardly any traces. Yet a closer look at his years of service reveals the political problems of those years and shows the prince of Bozzolo to be a committed diplomat. Furthermore, the circ*mstances of his life show the envoy’s activity in an unusual context, that of a lower-ranking prince in Imperial Italy who sought to gain stature for the empire in order to maintain the limited power attained by himself and his family, and to improve their overall status by acquiring another ancestral entail that had fallen into other hands. Beyond his personal involvement in the costly office, his brothers and other relatives placed themselves at the service of the empire and also entered a network of influential noble families close to the imperial court through marriage. The Gonzaga reigns in Bozzolo and Mantua ended with the War of the Spanish Succession. However, the social and cultural influence they had accumulated lasted longer. Through their family connections, the relatives of the former imperial envoy contributed to the pervasive adoption of the Italian language and way of life, which had become established among the upper classes of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary and remained dominant throughout the reign of Emperor Leopold I.

Jaffe-Berg, Erith. "Performance as Exchange: Taxation and Jewish Theatre in Early Modern Italy." Theatre Survey 54, no.3 (August29, 2013): 389–417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557413000276.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In early modern Italy, an unusual form of exchange between Jewish and Christian communities materialized in Mantua: Jews in Mantua were required to perform an annual play as a tribute to their Gonzaga rulers. Elsewhere in the Italian peninsula, far more onerous “performances” were extorted from the Jews during carnival, but in the Mantuan performances, several communities—the ruling Gonzaga family, the Jewish community, and Christian audience members—interacted. I consider these performances a form of taxation because the full cost, which was extensive, was borne by the Jewish community. However, the performances were more than mere payment; they also gave the Jewish community a degree of autonomy and expression and enabled performers to develop their artistic skills, albeit always as the members of the company of “the Jews,” a group that was set apart from the rest of society in early modern Mantua. These theatrical performances can be seen as a public reification of the Jewish community as a distinctively marked but legitimate component of Mantua's economy and social landscape. This dynamic continued in Mantua even as Jews in other parts of Italy were subjected to extremely harsh conditions during the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Inquisition.

Marques, Thais de Matos, Patrícia Rohr Pires, and Fernanda Leal Leães. "Avaliação da qualidade de leite cru refrigerado de produtores assistidos pela EMATER/RS no município de São Luiz Gonzaga (RS)." Revista Principia - Divulgação Científica e Tecnológica do IFPB 1, no.52 (November9, 2020): 117. http://dx.doi.org/10.18265/1517-0306a2020v1n52p117-128.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

As a relevant source of nutrients, cow’s milk is widely consumed worldwide and its production is an important source of income for small farmers. Considering the need for research on milk quality in the city of São Luiz Gonzaga (RS), the objective of this study was to evaluate the physicochemical and microbiological patterns of milk from producers assisted by EMATER/RS in the city of São Luiz Gonzaga (RS) and to characterize the profile of these producers regarding proper milking practice. The characterization of the producers profile was obtained after they filled in a form. Quality assays were performed with milk samples from 10 producers. In the form results, we observed that 70% of producers do not execute the pre-dipping, 60% do not execute post-dipping, 40% do not perform CMT test to check mastitis in animals and 60% declared that the milking sites are the stables. For physicochemical analyzes, the pH averages ranged from 6,51 to 6,81 and titratable acidity varied between 15 °Dand 21 °D. All density results were within the value required by the legislation (1,028 to 1,034). The averages of fat determination were between 2,5% and 5,9%, and for EST (total dry extract) results were found ranging from 10,72% to 15,27% and for ESD (dry extract defatted) from 7,92% to 9,37%. In the standard plate count, results ranged from 1,78x104 CFU/mL to 4,8x106CFU/mL. Regarding the presence of total coliforms, there was a variation between 28 MPN/mL to >1100MPN/mL and the results of thermotolerant coliforms were <3.0 MPN/mLto >1100 MPN/mL. The results demonstrate the need for corrective actions when obtaining raw milk, seeking to comply with legal norms and proper milking practice to preserve product quality.

Stankiewicz, Aleksander. "Triumphus meritorum gentilitio. Kreacja zasług i pochodzenia Franciszka Wielopolskiego (1670–1732)." Krakowski Rocznik Archiwalny 22 (2016): 22–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/12332135kra.16.002.15048.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Artykuł jest poświęcony kreacji propagandowego wizerunku Franciszka Wielopolskiego, hrabiego na Pieskowej Skale, pierwszego w rodzinie ordynata pińczowskiego, który przybrał nazwisko Gonzagi margrabiego Myszkowskiego. Zrozumienie stopnia manipulacji w zakresie genealogii i heraldyki stosowanej przez magnata jest możliwe w kontekście poznania dziejów rodziny Wielopolskich, która dzięki odpowiednim mariażom w XVII w. osiągnęła znaczny status. Najlepszym dowodem na to może być szybka kariera ojca Franciszka Jana, który piastował urząd kanclerza wielkiego koronnego, a przez małżeństwo z siostrą królowej Marysieńki stał się krewnym Jana III Sobieskiego. Franciszek nie osiągnął tak zawrotnej kariery jak ojciec, ale wykorzystując jego dokonania oraz ich przodków, skonstruował na nowo dzieje swojej rodziny, powołując się na domniemane pokrewieństwo Wielopolskich z Szafrańcami, a także na dziedzictwo Komorowskich, tytułujących się hrabiami na Żywcu. W momencie osiągnięcia urzędów senatorskich przejął po Józefie Gonzadze, margrabim Myszkowskim, ordynację pińczowską. Stało się to kolejną okazją do ponownego skonstruowania swojego wizerunku jako potomka wybitnych rodzin, ale też krewnego jednej z najznaczniejszych familii włoskich. Omówienie tych przemian oparto o analizę zachowanych dokumentów, herbów napieczętnych oraz zabytków sztuki. Triumphus meritorum gentilitio. Creation of the service and ancestry of Franciszek Wielopolski (1670–1732) This article is dedicated to the work behind creating the image of Franciszek Wielopolski, Count of Pieskowa Skala, the first of the Pinczow dynasty, who took the name Marquess Gonzaga-Myszkowski. Understanding the levels of manipulation in the area of genealogy and heraldry used by the magnate is possible in the context of the deeds of the Wielopolski family, who, thanks to appropriate marriages in the 17th century, obtained a significantly high status. The best proof of this is probably the rapid career of Franciszek’s father, Jan, who held the position of the Grand Chancellor and, through marriage to the sister of Queen Marysieńki, became a relative of John III Sobieski. Franciszek did not have such a rapid career as his father, however, using his achievements and those of his predecessors, he reconstructed the acts of his family, calling on the alleged kinship between the Wielopolski and Szafraniec families, as well as the heritage of the Komorowski family, the counts of Żywiec. When he became a Senate Clerk, he received the duty of representing the Pinczow Triumphus meritorum gentilitio. This was the next opportunity to reconstruct his image as the descendent of a distinguished family, and also as a relative of one of the most significant Italian families. Discussion of these changes is based on analysis of stored documents, family crests and works of art.

Nagaoka, Alberto Kazushi, Fernando César Bauer, Guinther Hugo Grudtner, Aldir Carpes Marques Filho, and Nuno de Campos Filho. "AVALIAÇÃO DO DESEMPENHO DE UMA PLANTADORA DE MANDIOCA SOB SISTEMA DE PLANTIO DIRETO TRACIONADA POR TRATOR DE RABIÇAS." ENERGIA NA AGRICULTURA 34, no.3 (September23, 2019): 323–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.17224/energagric.2019v34n3p323-330.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AVALIAÇÃO DO DESEMPENHO DE UMA PLANTADORA DE MANDIOCA SOB SISTEMA DE PLANTIO DIRETO TRACIONADA POR TRATOR DE RABIÇAS ALBERTO KASUSHI NAGAOKA1, FERNANDO CÉSAR BAUER2, GUINTHER HUGO GRUDTNER3, ALDIR CARPES MARQUES FILHO4, NUNO CAMPOS FILHO5 1 Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Centro de Ciências Agrárias, UFSC, (Rua Admar Gonzaga, 1346 –Itacorubi, Florianópolis, 88034-000), alberto.nagaoka@ufsc.br 2 Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Centro de Ciências Agrárias, UFSC, (Rua Admar Gonzaga, 1346 –Itacorubi, Florianópolis, 88034-000), Fernando.bauer@ufsc.br 3 Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Centro de Ciências Agrárias, UFSC, (Rua Admar Gonzaga, 1346 –Itacorubi, Florianópolis-SC, 88034-000), guinther_grudtner@hotmail.com 4 Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Universidade Estadual Paulista, UNESP, (Rua José Barbosa de Barros, 1780, Jd. Paraíso- Botucatu-SP, 18610-034), aldir.marques@gmail.com 5 Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Centro de Ciências Agrárias, UFSC, (Rua Admar Gonzaga, 1346 –Itacorubi, Florianópolis, 88034-000), nuno.campos@ufsc.br RESUMO: A produção de mandioca possui grande importância nas regiões onde predomina a agricultura familiar em pequenas propriedades rurais, assim a mecanização do cultivo pode promover o incremento de produtividade e otimizar o rendimento operacional. O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar o desempenho de uma plantadora de mandioca em sistema de plantio direto, tracionada por um trator de rabiças, através de dois ensaios de campo. No primeiro ensaio a plantadora foi avaliada em função de três velocidades distintas, obtendo dados de potência exigida pelo conjunto trator-plantadora e por cada parte constituinte da máquina. No segundo ensaio, avaliou-se a plantadora sob duas velocidades, dois modelos de discos de corte, dois modelos de rodas compactadoras e a potência exigida para tracioná-la, além da distribuição longitudinal das plantas de mandioca. Os resultados do primeiro ensaio mostraram que a marcha de menor velocidade exigiu menor potência do trator. Já os resultados do segundo ensaio, demonstraram que a potência exigida do trator variou em função do tipo de disco de corte e de roda compactadora da plantadora. Para a avaliação da distribuição longitudinal, a plantadora avaliada não apresentou diferenças estatísticas na percentagem de espaçamentos aceitáveis, falhos e duplos entre as linhas de plantio. Palavras-chave: manihot esculenta crantz, mecanização, máquina. EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE OF CASSAVA IN NO TILLAGE, WITH TRACTOR OF HANDLEBARS ABSTRACT: Cassava production is one of the greatest important in regions where family agriculture and small farms are predominant. The aim of this research was to evaluate the performance of a no-till cassava planter traced by a tractor of handlebar, through two field trials. In the first trial the planter was evaluated according to three speeds, obtaining data of power required by the tractor-planter assembly and each constituent part of the planter. In the second test, the planter was evaluated under two speeds, two models of cutting discs, two models of compacting wheels and the power required drawing it, besides the longitudinal distribution of cassava. The results of the first test showed that lower speed gear required less tractor power. The results of the second test, however, showed that the required power of the tractor varied according to the type of cutting disc and the compactor wheel of the planter. For the evaluation of longitudinal distribution, the planter evaluated did not present statistical differences in the percentage of acceptable, faulty and double spacing between the planting lines. Keywords: manihot esculenta crantz, mechanization, machine.

Acevedo-Silva, Martha Magdalena, Luisa Julieta Camargo-Cardona, and Elizabeth Fajardo-Ramos. "Family protective factors for the prevention of the use of psychoactive substances in fifth grade students of educational institution San Luis Gonzaga the village Chicoral (El Espinal, Tolima)." Salud Uninorte 32, no.3 (August5, 2021): 461–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.14482/sun.32.3.9746.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Objetivo: Determinar los factores protectores familiares que previenen el uso de sustancias psicoactivas en los estudiantes del grado quinto de primaria de la Institución Educativa San Luis Gonzaga de Chicoral corregimiento de El Espinal Tolima. Materiales y métodos: La metodología utilizada fue de tipo cuantitativo, descriptivo y transversal. El análisis y procesamiento de la información se llevó a cabo mediante la utilización del paquete estadístico Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) versión 18. La recolección de la Información se realizó a través de la aplicación de una encuesta, una escala tipo Lickert autoaplicable. La muestra estuvo constituida por un total de 130 estudiantes de quinto de primaria de la Institución educative pertenecientes al estrato 1 y 2 de acuerdo al régimen subsidiado SISBEN Resultados: Para la realización del análisis se empleó la estadística descriptiva con tablas de frecuencias, figuras de barras y cruces de variables. Conclusiones: El estudio permitió reconocer la importancia que tienen los factores protectores para el desarrollo integral y saludable de los adolescentes. La comunicación es un posibilitador de los factores protectores familiares. El fenómeno de consumo a SPA no tiene características diferenciales para el contexto urbano y el contexto rural.

Valencia, Adrián, and Libi Caamaño. "Incidencia del dinero electrónico en el proceso de las actividades económicas." Revista Científica y Tecnológica UPSE 3, no.1 (December28, 2015): 85–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.26423/rctu.v3i1.75.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

El nuevo sistema de dinero electrónico es una tendencia innovadora del sistema monetario que favorece las políticas bancarias que tienen como objetivo suministrar los medios de pago necesarios para que el sistema económico opere con eficiencia, por eso es de mayor importancia analizar la incidencia de este, frente al procesos de la actividades económicas en las diferentes áreas comerciales, a partir de dos técnicas de estudio utilizadas, las encuestas realizadas a la población del cantón La Libertad provincia de Santa Elena, y las entrevistas de profundidad realizadas a los representantes de los entes de acuerdo a las inversiones realizadas por el Econ. Mateo Villalba, gerente del Banco Central del Ecuador y el Econ. César Robalino Gonzaga, director de la Asociación de Bancos Privados del Ecuador. En base al estudio, obtuvimos como resultados que cuando entre en vigencia este sistema monetario en las actividades económicas, incidirá en los siguientes procesos, con un 33% en la vida cotidiana de las personas, debido al cambio, seguido con un 20% se menciona dos procesos; incidiendo de manera positiva que se agilizaran las transacciones comerciales y de manera negativa afectaría la economía familiar. Abstract The new electronic money system is an innovative trend of the monetary management, that favors banking policies that are intended to provide the means a payment way; necessary for the economic system for efficient operations, so it is more important to analyze the impact of this, comparing the processes of economic activities in different business areas, from two study techniques used, surveys the population of La Libertad province of Santa Elena, and in-depth interviews conducted to two important entities of the economy the economist Mateo Villalba, manager of the Central Bank of Ecuador and the economist César Robalino Gonzaga, director of the Association of Private Banks of Ecuador. Based on the study, we obtained as results that the effect in monetary system of economic activities, will affect the following processes; with a 33% in the daily lives of people, because of the change, along with 20% in two mentioned processes: impacting positively the commercial transactions and affect negatively the family finances.

Acevedo-Silva, Martha Magdalena, Luisa Julieta Camargo-Cardona, and Elizabeth Fajardo-Ramos. "Family protective factors for the prevention of the use of psychoactive substances in fifth grade students of educational institution San Luis Gonzaga the village Chicoral (El Espinal, Tolima)." Salud Uninorte 32, no.3 (November15, 2016): 461–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.14482/sun.32.2.9746.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Bolici, Roberto, Matteo Gambaro, and Cristiana Giordano. "The regaining of public spaces to enhance the historic urban landscape." Journal of Public Space 2, no.1 (May1, 2017): 45. http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/jps.v2i1.49.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Open spaces in the urban landscapes suffer from deterioration caused by man that leads to two major outcomes: on one side they are abandoned because of newer contemporary needs, on the other hand they tend to be “cannibalized” in the attempt to satisfy our society. This has caused a progressive retraction of urban open spaces that have become residual spaces with no shape and no name. This course of crisis has damaged the identity of places and this is more acute in historic urban landscapes that are recognised as cultural heritage and world heritage. The historic urban landscape approach suggested by UNESCO recognises public spaces’ importance for society and promotes the acknowledgement of public spaces and their dynamism aiming to the integration of preservation, social development and economic targets. To understand how “historic urban landscapes” are taking care of their public spaces, a few Management Plans of UNESCO’s World Heritage cities have been compared. Only Italian UNESCO sites with an “urban complex” characterisation have been considered, this means a limited part of a city with hom*ogenous characteristics from a spatial, historic and cultural point of view. We have focused our attention on the specific interventions for the management of open spaces, in order to identify the major targets and their executive tools, projects and actions. In the light of the above-mentioned analyses, we propose some strategies to fight the decline of public spaces (streets, squares, gardens, etc.) and to enhance these spaces with great attention, trying to improve their fruition and comfort according to their historic and cultural values. The need to identify design strategies to enhance public spaces within the historic urban landscape is included in the research and test activities carried out in the UNESCO site of Mantova and Sabbioneta. This site is an excellent area of applicability because of its urban shape, molded in years by the Gonzaga family. Together with the UNESCO Mantova e Sabbioneta office, we have involved citizens in the requalification design to activate regaining process and test the applicability of our analyses in the city of Mantova, a very articulated and complex reality, starting from the fruition of its places and according to its morphological, environmental, cultural and perceptive aspects.

Насонов,Р.А., and М.Л.Насонова. "Beata Vergine and Heavenly Jerusalem (On the Belief System in the Monteverdi’s Vespro)." Научный вестник Московской консерватории, no.2(29) (June26, 2017): 68–139. http://dx.doi.org/10.26176/mosconsv.2017.29.2.03.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

В статье рассматривают ся текстовая и музы кальная символика, а также исторический контекст создания Мессы и Вечерни, опу бликованных Клаудио Монтеверди в 1610 году. Публикация трактуется как единая и цельная богословская концепция, в которой излагаются христианская богородичная догматика и специфические взгляды части средневековой католической церкви, впоследствии оформившиеся в виде догматов о Непорочном зачатии Девы Марии и о Ее Взятии на небеса. Композитор отразил эти воззрения предположительно под влиянием последовательной иммакулятистской позиции рода герцогов Гонзага; наиболее открыто они декларированы в мотете Audi cœlum. Проанализирована драматургия Вечерни, представленная двумя параллельно развивающими ся «сюжетами»: историей жизни Богородицы как части предвечного замысла об искуплении человечества — в мотетах; историей народа Божьего, восходящего в Небесный Иерусалим, — в псалмах. Показано ключевое для богословского содержания Вечерни значение образа Девы Марии как «врат Востока» (согласно пророчеству Иезекииля). Вознесшая ся на Небеса и сияющая путеводной звездой Дева Мария становит ся вратами Небесного Иерусалима. Исцелившему ся от греха человеческому роду предстоит прошествовать через эти врата, а враги никогда не смогут проникнуть через них в грозную не бесную крепость, жители которой хранят и со блюдают Слово Божие подобно тому, как восприняла в свое чрево Божественный Логос Богородица. The article deals with textual and musical symbols, as well as with the historical context of the creation of the Missa and Vespro published by Claudio Monteverdi in 1610. The publication is treated as a single and integral theological concept, which enunciates both the Christian Marian doctrine and the specific views of the part of the medieval Catholic Church; the latter in future took the form of dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of the Virgin Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven. The composer reflected these views presumably under the influence of the consistent immaculatist position of the Gonzaga family; most explicitly they are declared in the motet Audi cœlum. According to accomplished analysis, the narrative of Vespro is represented by two parallel developing “stories”: the life of the Mother of God as part of the eternal plan of Redemption, in the motets, the history of the people of God rising into Heavenly Jerusalem, in the psalms. The Virgin Mary’s image as the porta orientalis (according to the prophecy of Ezekiel) is of key importance for the theological content of Vespro. Rising to Heaven and shining as the guiding star (maris stella) the Virgin Mary turns to the gates of Heavenly Jerusalem. After healing from sin mankind is to be passed through these gates, but the enemies will never be able to penetrate through them into the strong heavenly fortress, the inhabitants of which keep and observe the Word of God, just as the Theotocos took the Divine Logos into her womb.

Szylar, Anna. "Nasze naymilsze siestrzyczki... czyli habitki w klasztorze Wizytek Warszawskich w XVII wieku." Biuletyn Historii Wychowania, no.26 (March10, 2019): 19–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/bhw.2010.26.2.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The sisters of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, more commonly known as Visitationists, were brought to Poland from France by Marie Louise Gonzaga (known in Poland as Ludwika Maria) in 1654. Visitationists ran a boarding school for girls and provided education for inner-city girls from less well-to-do backgrounds. In addition, the religious order for women accommodated a novitiate for young girls admitted to this religious order for women – the so-called habitki (from the habit of a member under vows), i.e. candidates for the convent. The present article provides the reader with some detailed information on the mentioned group of candidates in relation the period covering the years from the establishment of the convent to the end of the seventeenth century. Habitki’s cells were located in the part of the convent that also accommodated nuns, wore habits and participated in regular religious services and prayers with nuns. As a rule, they were usually minors up to girls of several years of age or older. They were supervised by a master-nun, appointed by Mother Superior, who took care of them, while a special rule of conduct determined their duties and responsibilities in the convent. The reasons behind a decision to send little girls to the nunnery varied. At times, still unborn babies were sacrificed to God even before delivery, a custom to be found in particular within families where children were long in coming or where successive deliveries were death experiences for parents. Girls in the convent usually had both parents, but oftentimes they were orphans, disabled, hated by their parents or came from large families. By sending a daughter to a convent parents believed that her future was somehow secured. Occasionally, by doing so they simply got rid of a crippled child that often required extra care, or cleared the situation in prospective property settlement agreements in the family. More often than not, the plans conceived by parents, or foster parents, were not in line with intentions or expectations of girls. A decision to stay within the confinement of the convent, however, was up to a candidate, who, after reaching the age of 15, was entitled to seek for admittance to the full novitiate and, at the age of 16, could take simple vows. Between 1658 and 1697, the Warsaw-based convent had 23 habitki. Only 7 of them took vows. At the time, no other religious order and convent had such a specific rule for child.

Evangelista-Ávila, Iram Isaí, Erbey Mendoza, and JuanD.Machin-Mastromatteo. "What is Latin American? Literary perspectives for reflecting on our identity." Information Development 35, no.2 (March 2019): 342–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266666919828979.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This article presents certain Latin American traits from the works of four prestigious and contemporary Latin American writers: Gioconda Belli, Gonzalo Rojas, Augusto Monterroso y Juan José Arreola. The traits discussed include politics, the religious cult, the messianic vision, family, couples and the father figure. We argue that it is very important for people to understand their own culture and identity, to explore and not abandon the conversations about their countries’ literary works, as they reflect, report and critique them.

Ezquerro, Arturo. "Captain Aguilera and filicide: an attachment-based exploration." Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis 15, no.2 (December22, 2021): 279–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.33212/att.v15n2.2021.279.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This article aims to explore a constellation of individual-attachment, family-attachment, and group-attachment experiences, as well as other psychosocial, cultural, and political factors, which contributed to the dual filicide perpetrated by Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro—a count, landowner, cavalryman, and propaganda press officer for General Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War. Learning from Luis Arias González and, above all, Paul Preston’s biographies of Captain Aguilera, the article will employ a combined methodology of historical investigation, psychiatric clinical formulations, and group analysis. In doing so, it will take into account a highly complex context of brutal group dynamics of national depression and exaltation, unresolved trauma, military rebellion, war, genocide, holocaust, and dictatorship.

Santos, Cláudio Félix dos, Adalgiza Gonçalves Gobbi, and Ana Carolina Galvão Marsiglia. "O POPULAR E O ERUDITO NA EDUCAÇÃO ESCOLAR." Germinal: Marxismo e Educação em Debate 7, no.1 (November4, 2014): 68. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/gmed.v7i1.12399.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Analisar e problematizar a relação entre o conhecimento erudito e o saber popular como desafios para o desenvolvimento do trabalho educativo histórico-crítico apresenta-se como objetivo deste artigo. Tomando como ponto de partida um breve resumo da trajetória dos compositores Luiz Gonzaga e Humberto Teixeira, fizemos um percurso teórico explorando a formulação da pedagogia histórico-crítica acerca da necessidade de produzir as maneiras dos explorados terem acesso ao saber sistematizado de modo que expressem de forma elaborada os seus interesses.

Pfeiffer, Lukas, Peter Axmann, and Margret Wohlfahrt-Mehrens. "Na_xMn_yNi_1-YO₂ Cathode Materials for Sodium-Ion Batteries: Structure, Synthesis, Electrochemistry and Influence of Ambient Storage." ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2022-02, no.4 (October9, 2022): 448. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2022-024448mtgabs.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Expanding energy generation from renewables is inevitable to reduce the impact of man-made climate change. With that, the need for intermediate energy storage is gaining in significance. Today, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are dominating mobile drive-trains and also play a key role in stationary energy storage. LIBs are incorporating critical raw materials in view of availability and economic importance, such as cobalt, lithium, copper and graphite. Sodium-based batteries, in which sodium replaces lithium as ionic charge-carrier, utilize the same working principles but substitute critical raw materials for abundant and cost-effective alternatives. Hard carbon replaces graphite as anode active material, copper foils are substituted by aluminum current collectors and manganese-based cobalt-free layered host lattices offer promising performance as cathode active material 1,2. By applying established production processes, investment costs are reduced and a rapid scale-up is enabled (Drop-In technology) 3, making SIBs a sustainable, efficient and cost-effective complementary technology to LIBs 4. Among various known cathode active materials for SIBs, the family of layered sodium transition metal oxides (NaxMO2, 1>x>0) offers promising electrochemical performance 2,5–7. These compounds show a wide structural variety (O3, P3, P2) due to the ionic radius of sodium and the tendency for Na+/vacancy ordering 8. The scope of our presentation will be low-cost manganese-based, cobalt-free layered NaxMnyNi1-yO2 cathode active materials for SIBs. We will discuss the influence of the transition metal stoichiometry y on the structure based on Neutron and X-ray diffraction experiments. Using advanced electrochemical methods and diffraction experiments, these structural models are then correlated with physical and electrochemical properties such as Na+/vacancy orderings, solid diffusion coefficients and potential profiles. For y = 3/4, a synthesis phase diagram will be presented covering a broad range of sodium content x and calcination temperature. For phase-pure P2-NaxMn3/4Ni1/4O2, we will present the influence of the calcination process on the structure and discuss the electrochemical properties in half-cells in-depth. For optimized materials, attractive initial specific discharge capacities beyond 220 mAh g-1 are obtained in sodium half-cells between 1.5 – 4.3 V. A capacity decay occurs during electrochemical cycling within this full voltage window. The origin of the capacity decay will be discussed based on electrochemical studies and ex-situ investigations of the morphology with SEM and local structure with HRTEM. Finally, we will present the influence of storage in ambient air to gain insights on the large-scale processability of the materials. The chosen synthesis route adapts industrially established processes for NCM production for SIB cathode materials, enables to tune powder properties to technical specifications and is highly scalable. The broad scope of this work addresses raw material questions, fundamental investigations and industrially relevant production processes. ACKNOWLEDMENTS: The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) supported this work within the project TRANSITION (03XP0186C) and ExcellBattMat (03XP0257A and 03XP0257C). REFERENCES Larcher, D. & Tarascon, J.-M. Towards greener and more sustainable batteries for electrical energy storage. Nature Chem 7, 19–29; 10.1038/nchem.2085 (2015). Hasa, I. et al. Challenges of today for Na-based batteries of the future: From materials to cell metrics. Journal of Power Sources 482, 228872; 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2020.228872 (2021). Tarascon, J.-M. Na-ion versus Li-ion Batteries: Complementarity Rather than Competitiveness. Joule 4, 1616–1620; 10.1016/j.joule.2020.06.003 (2020). Vaalma, C., Buchholz, D., Weil, M. & Passerini, S. A cost and resource analysis of sodium-ion batteries. Nat Rev Mater 3, 1–11; 10.1038/natrevmats.2018.13 (2018). Nagore Ortiz-Vitoriano, Nicholas E. Drewett, Elena Gonzalo & Teófilo Rojo. High performance manganese-based layered oxide cathodes: overcoming the challenges of sodium ion batteries. Energy Environ. Sci. 10, 1051–1074; 10.1039/C7EE00566K (2017). Nuria Tapia-Ruiz et al. 2021 roadmap for sodium-ion batteries. J. Phys. Energy 3, 31503; 10.1088/2515-7655/ac01ef (2021). Gonzalo, E., Zarrabeitia, M., Drewett, N. E., López del Amo, Juan Miguel & Rojo, T. Sodium manganese-rich layered oxides: Potential candidates as positive electrode for Sodium-ion batteries. Energy Storage Materials 34, 682–707; 10.1016/j.ensm.2020.10.010 (2021). Kubota, K., Kumakura, S., Yoda, Y., Kuroki, K. & Komaba, S. Electrochemistry and Solid‐State Chemistry of NaMeO 2 (Me = 3d Transition Metals). Adv. Energy Mater. 8, 1703415; 10.1002/aenm.201703415 (2018).

Parashar, Kaustubh, Julie Clor, Dana Piovesan, Casey Mitchell, LC Stetson, Ke Jin, Gonzalo Barajas, et al. "Abstract B08: AB598, a therapeutic anti-CD39 antibody, elevates ATP and increases immunogenicity in the tumor microenvironment." Cancer Immunology Research 10, no.12_Supplement (December1, 2022): B08. http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/2326-6074.tumimm22-b08.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract AB598, an IgG1 Fc-silent antibody that blocks CD39 (ENTPD1) enzymatic activity, is being developed as a novel cancer immunotherapy. CD39 is highly expressed on immune and stromal cells within the tumor microenvironment (TME) and is responsible for the conversion of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into adenosine monophosphate (AMP). AB598 can bind and inhibit CD39 activity on primary human immune cells, leading to an increase in local levels of immunostimulatory ATP. In the TME, elevated ATP exerts its effects by signaling through the purinergic family of P2X and P2Y receptors. Using a combined approach of nanostring profiling of myeloid cell subsets derived from healthy donors, flow cytometry on healthy human peripheral blood, and bioinformatic analysis of the MET500 and TCGA databases, we define a profile of relevant receptors that can act as effectors to promote anti-tumor responses upon CD39 inhibition. Nanostring and flow cytometry show CD39 and P2X7 are ubiquitously expressed across the myeloid cell lineage. P2RX7, CASP1, and GSDMD gene expression is highest in M1 macrophages, a finding corroborated by the boost in inflammasome activation seen on in vitro-derived macrophages with AB598 treatment. P2RY11 gene expression shows a bimodal distribution with the highest expression in monocyte-derived dendritic cells (moDCs) and M2 macrophages, a finding that supports previously published work identifying P2Y11 as the receptor responsible for ATP-induced maturation of moDCs. Using CD83 and CD86 as markers, we show that AB598 enhances ATP-induced moDC activation in a concentration-dependent manner. Supportive of the broad expression of CD39 on myeloid cell subsets, analysis of TCGA data shows an inverse correlation of ENTPD1 gene expression and tumor purity. ENTPD1 expression is positively correlated with P2RX7, NLRP3, ITGAM (CD11b), and ITGAX (CD11c) expression, establishing the presence of the machinery for AB598 inhibition of CD39 to promote myeloid cell activation in the TME. Clinically, immunostimulation in the TME can be achieved by the administration of an immunogenic cell death (ICD)-inducing chemotherapy capable of releasing ATP; however, the ATP can be degraded by CD39. Using continuous ATP monitoring, we show that AB598 treatment increases and maintains the pool of extracellular ATP from human cancer cell lines treated with ICD-inducing agents. Our results demonstrate that the TME has the machinery to respond to an environment rich in immunostimulatory ATP, common chemotherapeutic agents can cause tumor cells to release ATP extracellularly, and AB598 can effect immunogenic change through inflammasome activation and dendritic cell maturation when ATP is present in the TME. Overall, the findings presented here establish AB598 as a promising agent targeting CD39 for cancer immunotherapy and provide a rationale for the combination of AB598 with ICD-inducing chemotherapy in the clinic. Citation Format: Kaustubh Parashar, Julie Clor, Dana Piovesan, Casey Mitchell, LC Stetson, Ke Jin, Gonzalo Barajas, Sean Cho, Janine Kline, Stephen W. Young, Nigel P. Walker, Matthew J. Walters, Ester Fernandez-Salas, Christine E. Bowman. AB598, a therapeutic anti-CD39 antibody, elevates ATP and increases immunogenicity in the tumor microenvironment [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference: Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy; 2022 Oct 21-24; Boston, MA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Immunol Res 2022;10(12 Suppl):Abstract nr B08.

Chiong,CharlotteM. "Tierry F. Garcia, MD (1919-2016) “The Most Good for the Most People”." Philippine Journal of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery 31, no.2 (November30, 2016): 67. http://dx.doi.org/10.32412/pjohns.v31i2.251.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Dr. Tierry Garcia was born December 20, 1919 as one of nine children of Dr. Silverio F. Garcia from Bocaue, Bulacan (UPCM 1912) and Elisea Trijo Ballesteros (UP Pharmacy) from Sorsogon. He was married to Amanda, wife of 63 years, and the couple was blessed with three children: Tierry, Jr., Sofia Garcia – Buder, M.D. (a third generation UPCM graduate), and Angela. According to Sofia he “led a life of service to God and to his fellowman, both professionally and personally. His greatest professional legacies for posterity include being among the founding fathers and past Chairman of the Department of Ear, Nose and Throat at the UP-PGH; the Philippine Society of Otorhinolaryngology; and the Manila Doctors' Hospital. He was the last of the small group of pioneers over six decades ago who helped pave the way for the delivery of modern day ENT care to the Filipino people whom he loved.” She continues: “like his father before him, a former surgeon and governor of Sorsogon,” he “strived towards doing ‘the most good for the most people’." On a personal note, his father used to play tennis with my grandfather Col. Antonio Martinez, a Bicolano who was Philippine Constabulary Officer in Sorsogon at that time. Because of this, there formed a special bond between Dr. Tierry and my father. Here are the thoughts and recollections of my father Dr. Armando T. Chiong on this great man: “I first met Dr. Tierry Garcia in 1960. I was 30 years old and he was 40. My first impression of Dr. Garcia was that he was a visionary leader with strong intellect. When he talked in meetings and conferences everybody listened. He was well respected such that he was able to establish the first separate Department of Otolaryngology from Ophthalmology at Manila Doctors Hospital in 1956 in spite of much objections. He established his clinic beside those of famous physicians like Dr. Ambrocio Tangco, founder of the Department of Orthopedics at the Philippine General Hospital, then Dean of UP College of Medicine Benjamin Barrera, Dr. Gonzalo Austria, former Dean of the UE College of Medicine, Dr. Constantino Manahan (world renowned OB-Gynecologist) and Dr. Carlos Sevilla , famous EENT specialist who were among the 14 of his co-founders of Manila Doctors Hospital. Most importantly, he also founded the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology and Bronchoesophagology in 1956.” “When he left for the United States in 1972, I took over his clinic and practice. All his medical instruments that he left with me are still intact and I have them in our hospital in Malolos, Bulacan. As for my last impression of Dr. Garcia, he was a generous and kind person. He helped in my first appointment to the Department of Otolaryngology at UP College of Medicine in 1964 apart from giving me his clinic at the Manila Doctors Hospital.” That he graduated from UPCM at the top ten of his class in 1942 and ranked in the top ten in the Physician’s Licensure Board Exams followed by a three year residency training in surgery at PGH then another residency in the U.S. finishing as chief resident in otolaryngology at Columbia Presbyterian prepared him well for the trail blazing and pioneering work. His bold, and inspiring spirit proved a great influence to succeeding generations of what he had ascribed as the “best and the brightest” otolaryngologist Fellows of PSOHNS now numbering 694 from the original heroic 9 that rallied to establish a separate society 60 years ago in the midst of great opposition. He firmly believed that serving others was the “true path to happiness” as gleaned from one of my own conversations with him after a PGH grand rounds he attended. As proof, he caused the establishment of a PGH Patient Endowment Fund in ORL to help indigent patients undergo much needed surgeries with meager financial resources. We have been most fortunate indeed that he was able to join us in the 2015 Annual Congress last December and on the 60th anniversary of the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery last February. Proof perhaps that not all “the good die young.” He has bequeathed to us a most precious legacy, a specialty we have chosen as careers and where we have all found some of life’s most important rewards. In his own words, a meaningful life that can only be measured by what he thought constitutes “true happiness” – a life lived in the service of our God and country, while enjoying a journey filled to the brim by love of family, friends and fellowmen.

"A Shrunken Head (Tsantsa) In The Gonzaga of Mantua Collections, In 1627?" Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 5, no.2 (April8, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.33140/jhss.05.02.09.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Mantua, a North-Italian Po Valley city sided by the Mincio river spreading into three lakes, was ruled by the Gonzaga family from 1328 to 1707. The Gonzaga were famous all around Europe for the marvellous palace they had built: the Ducal Palace, that could more properly described as a city-scale architectural complex, made up by a number of different buildings. Gardens, squares and galleries, huge halls and precious cabinets make it a unique creation worldwide. The Gonzaga were also renown for the rich and variety of the collections they had there gathered.

"On Some Drawings by Giulio Romano from His Mantuan Period." Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 4, no.2 (November25, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.33140/jhss.04.02.16.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This article examines and discusses some drawings by Giulio Pippi, known as Romano (c.1495–1546) [1]. One sheet is unpublished, while a few others are already known, although their exact destination is unknown [2]. All of them concern the Mantuan period of Giulio, who worked for the Gonzaga family from 1524 until his death. The sheets all relate to Palazzo Te, except for one linked to an altarpiece carried out by his workshop

James, Carolyn. "The Diplomacy of Clara Gonzaga, countess of Montpensier‐Bourbon: Gendered perspectives of family duty, honour and female agency." Renaissance Studies, July27, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/rest.12698.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Jesus, Janaína Taíza Araújo de, Tamires Zumira de Oliveira, Cristiane Alves Paz de Carvalho, and Fábio Silva de Carvalho. "Autopercepção em saúde bucal de acordo com risco familiar." ARCHIVES OF HEALTH INVESTIGATION 9, no.1 (July16, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.21270/archi.v9i1.4671.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introdução: A autopercepção em saúde bucal é um dos fatores que determina a procura por atendimento odontológico. Objetivo: Este estudo possui como objetivo verificar a autopercepção em saúde bucal de acordo com o risco familiar. Material e Métodos: Trata-se de um estudo descritivo, transversal e de natureza quantitativa, realizado com 100 participantes adultos e idosos em uma Unidade de Saúde da Família. Para coleta de dados, foram aplicados dois questionários, sendo um para verificar a autopercepção em saúde bucal e o outro para classificar o risco familiar. Resultados: Quanto à autopercepção em saúde bucal, observou-se que 66,0% dos participantes consideraram fraco o impacto da saúde bucal na qualidade de vida, no entanto, o médio impacto foi mais prevalente entre os indivíduos pardos (32,8%) e entre 45 e 54 anos de idade (38,5%). A dor física e o desconforto psicológico foram as dimensões que mais impactaram na qualidade de vida dos participantes, sendo que a média foi mais alta entre os indivíduos negros, pardos e acima de 35 anos de idade. De acordo com o risco familiar, 43,0% dos usuários foram classificados como "sem risco" e 26,0% como "risco maior". A maioria dos participantes que considerou como fraco o impacto da saúde bucal na qualidade de vida, pertencia às famílias classificadas em maior risco familiar (84,6%). Conclusão: O uso dessas ferramentas pode auxiliar na priorização do atendimento odontológico de acordo com a necessidade do indivíduo, reorganizando a demanda do serviço de saúde bucal.Descritores: Saúde Bucal; Autoimagem; Qualidade de Vida; Fatores de Risco.ReferênciasVilla Nova FA, Ambrosano GMB, Pereira SM, Pereira AC, Meneghin Mde C. Associação do risco familiar com saúde bucal, qualidade de vida e variáveis socioeconômicas. Rev Bras Med Fam Comunidade. 2015;10(34):1-9.Camargos MCS, Gonzaga MR. Viver mais e melhor? Estimativas de expectativa de vida saudável para a população brasileira. Cad Saúde Pública. 2015;31(7):1460-72.Miotto MHMB, Almeida CS, Barcellos LA. Impacto das condições bucais na qualidade de vida em servidores públicos municipais. Ciênc saúde coletiva. 2014;19(9):3931-40.Rosell FL, Oliveira ALBM, Tagliaferro EPS, Silva SRC, Valsecki Júnior A. Impacto dos problemas de saúde bucal na qualidade de vida de gestantes. Pesq Bras Odontoped Clin Integr. 2013;13(3):287-93.Sarti TD, Campos CEA, Zandonade E, Ruschi GEC, Maciel ELN. Avaliação das ações de planejamento em saúde empreendidas por equipes de saúde da família. Cad Saúde Pública. 2012;28(3):537-48.Cheachire LA, Cortellazzi KL, Vazquez FL, Pereira AC, Meneghim MC, Mialhe FL. Associação entre risco social familiar e risco à cárie dentária e doença periodontal em adultos na estratégia de saúde da família. Pesq Bras Odontoped Clin Integr. 2013;13(1):101-10.Peres Neto J, Mendes KLC, Wada RS, Sousa MDLRD. Relação entre classificações de risco utilizadas para organização da demanda em saúde bucal em município de pequeno porte de São Paulo, Brasil. Cienc saúde coletiva. 2017;22(6):1905-11.Kobayashi HM, Pereira AC, Meneghim MC, Ferreira Ri, Ambrosano GMB. Family risk as adjunct for organizing the demand for oral health service in the Family Health Strategy. Rev Odontol UNESP. 2015;44(2):85-91.Rosendo RA, Sousa JNL, Abrantes JGS, Cavalcante ABP, Ferreira AKTF. Autopercepção de saúde bucal e seu impacto na qualidade de vida em idosos: uma revisão de literatura. Rev Saúde Ciência. 2017;6(1):89-102.Menezes AHR, Cardelli AAM, Vieira GB, Martins JT, Fernandes MV, Marrero TL. Classificação do risco familiar segundo escala de Coelho e Savassi: Um relato de experiência. Cienc Cuid Saude. 2012;11(1):190-95.Slade GD. Derivation and validation of a short form oral health impact profile. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 1997;25(4):284-90.Savassi LCM, Lage JL, Coelho FLG. Sistematização de instrumento de estratificação de risco familiar: a Escala de Risco Familiar de Coelho-Savassi. J Manag Prim Health Care. 2012;3(2):179-85.Bastos RS, Carvalho ES, Xavier A, Caldana ML, Bastos JR, Lauris JR. Dental caries related to quality of life in two Brazilian adolescent groups: a cross-sectional randomised study. Int Dent J. 2012;62(3):137-43.Carvalho C, Manso AC, Escoval A, Salvado F, Nunes C. Tradução e validação da versão portuguesa do Geriatric Oral Health Assessment Index (GOHAI). Rev Port Sau Pub. 2013;31(2):166-72.Gomes R, Nascimento EF, Araújo FCA. Por que os homens buscam menos os serviços de saúde do que as mulheres? As explicações de homens com baixa escolaridade e homens com ensino superior. Cad Saúde Pública. 2007;23(3):565-74.População total e respectiva distribuição percentual, por cor ou raça, segundo as Grandes Regiões, Unidades da Federação e Regiões Metropolitanas - 2009. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE).Souza DDO, Silva SEVD, Silva NDO. Determinantes Sociais da Saúde: reflexões a partir das raízes da" questão social". Saúde soc. 2013;22(1):44-56.Gabardo MCL, Moysés ST, Moysés SJ. Autopercepção de saúde bucal conforme o Perfil de Impacto da Saúde Bucal (OHIP) e fatores associados: revisão sistemática. Rev Panam Salud Pública. 2013;33(6):439-45.Luchi, CA, Peres KG, Bastos JL, Peres MA. Desigualdades na autoavaliação da saúde bucal em adultos. Rev Saúde Pública. 2013;47(4):740-51.Ferreira AAA, Piuvezam G, Werner CWA, Alves MSCF. A dor e a perda dentária: representações sociais do cuidado à saúde bucal. Ciênc saúde coletiva. 2006;11(1):211-18.Coelho FLG, Savassi LCM. Aplicação de escala de risco familiar como instrumento de priorização das visitas domiciliares. Rev Bras Med Fam Comunidade. 2004;1(2):19-26.

Klabbers, Johannes, and Anna Poletti. "Doubt." M/C Journal 14, no.1 (March22, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.360.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Donald Crowhurst wanted to sail around the world. Or he wanted the world to believe he had sailed around it. Whilst the rest of the competitors in the 1968-9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailed their wonky crafts through treacherous seas, Crowhurst dropped anchor in the quiet waters of the South Atlantic and falsified his logs. For artist Tacita Dean, who has made a number of works about Crowhurst (Disappearance at Sea, Teignmouth Electron): Crowhurst's problem was that he had an imagination. You can't have any imagination if you are going to sail around the world, otherwise you have doubt. Crowhurst had doubt, he imagined failure ... . I think it’s crucial to art as well that you somehow imagine failure. Doubt is very important (17). ** In developing this issue of M/C Journal we were interested in two related questions about doubt. On the one hand, we hoped to gather case studies that can give some indication of where and how doubt surfaces in contemporary media, culture and politics. We have collected a diverse sample of case studies considering the role of doubt in the American political response to 9/11 (Burns), the media’s reporting of sexual assault (Waterhouse-Watson), how scientists talk about climate change (Simpson) and the philosophy of religion (Brown). However, we were also interested in attracting articles that could contribute to our thinking about doubt as a method and mode of practice. Our feature article, by Sydney based artist and writer Ryszard Dabek presents both a case study, discussing Jean Luc Godard’s doubts about cinema through selected films from his oeuvre, while also demonstrating how a methodology of doubt can produce insightful cultural criticism. Elisabeth Hanscombe writes from a perspective that seeks to hold in tension the doubts that haunt interdisciplinary research (and the researcher) with the need to produce rigorous research outcomes. David Macarthur has written a useful and accessible introduction to how doubt can be applied to this end, making an argument for the pragmatist approach to doubt as a tool for valuable, critical thinking. Gonzalo Echeverria's series of delicate black and white landscape photographs, one of which we have placed at the opening of each article, are all located within walking distance of his home in Nidé, Turkey. He deliberately avoids the 'true' blacks and whites of black and white photography which were once the holy grail of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and with which we are now so familiar. Working with analogue equipment and on film, and printing his work in a traditional darkroom (and even mixing his own custom chemicals) Echeverria creates a range of greys which recall the early days of photography. Yet these images are undeniably rooted in the present both culturally and photographically. The recurring presence, and at times almost absence, of the minuets in the photographs asks us to consider doubt as much faith. In our formulation then, doubt has two sides. It can be a subject – like any other – which we can study and consider using the tools of scholarship founded on objectivity and the norms of knowledge production. Yet, doubt also has the potential to challenge those accepted methods. The definition of knowledge at the base of all scholarship, and by association the methods used to acquire it, has its foundations in Descartes’s formulation that what counts as knowledge is a conviction which is beyond doubt (Newman). In the method that leads to knowledge so-defined “doubt is predicated only to be ingeniously harnessed as the means of its own overcoming” (Fleissner 116). In her fascinating analysis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as being founded on doubt rather than obsession, Fleissner traces the extent to which the role of doubt in the project of modernity is far more complicated than this definition of knowledge and its production implies. It appears, Fleissner argues, that Descartes’s revolutionary formulation of the cogito (“I am thinking, therefore I exist”) (Baron) “depends on recasting… doubts as themselves proof of the one thing, thought, that cannot be doubted” (Fleissner 115). Indeed, the use of doubt in the methodology inaugurated by Descartes “construes sceptical doubts as the ground clearing tools of epistemic demolition” (Newman, emphasis in original). As Fleissner discusses, the perceived potential for this demolition to produce mania and madness has haunted modernity, and proved a difficult problem for psychology. Despite Descartes’s insistence that this demolition ultimately lead to construction (Newman, see also Macarthur in this issue), there is a persistent fear that once doubting has begun, it cannot be brought to an end (Fleissner 113-20). Over the years that we have discussed the possibility of a methodology of doubt with colleagues and peers, an expression of this fear has been the most consistent response. On closer inspection we can see that doubt is asked to play numerous, conflicting roles in the epistemology inaugurated by Descartes: it is a tool (or, as Newman characterisies it, a “bulldozer”) in the project of knowledge production; its presence is used as criteria for dismissing false knowledge; and its presence in the mind of the philosopher is taken as evidence of his existence. As Fleissner suggests: Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy is the sense that Descartes wishes both to be rid of doubt and to preserve it; it is this combination, not the final overcoming of doubt in favour of the certainty of the mind’s powers, that the cogito might be said most strongly to install. (133) Let us now apologise if the above paragraphs offend our philosopher colleagues, for we have likely clumsily wandered through foundational arguments in the discipline that have a level of nuance and complexity to which we have not given adequate acknowledgment. However, m/c is a journal of media and culture, and for us what is interesting about the argument presented above is its potential to draw our attention to the conundrum presented by doubt and doubting in fields far removed from disciplined and technical arguments about epistemology. We are interested in how the foundational arguments presented by Descartes, and the complex status of doubt within them, have continued ramifications far beyond their original context. We are interested, in a way, in their trace in contemporary media culture and in the scholarship and creative practice that engages with it. At the end of her article, Fleissner concludes with a hope “for a doubt with a voice of its own” (134), and it is the potential for doubt to positively influence our ways of writing about our thinking that has attracted us to it. We should not hold Descartes responsible for the flow-on effects that his epistemology has had on writing in the humanities, but we do believe that the continued trace of the Cartesian method has lead to ossification of the expression of research. This part of the introduction is a perfect example of this: dense, littered with references, cautious yet authoritarian. The doubts I have had whilst writing it are silenced in order for the writing to proceed. The speaking-position required to perform the Cartesian method is, let’s be honest, not one which can often result in writing that can even hope to engage or inspire readers who do not wish to be the audience for a performance of the author’s ability to be disciplined. (And of course, as I write that sentence I consider how many readers will not make it through the proceeding paragraphs to get to this point. They’ll find the whole ‘Descartes bit’ too dry or dense.) We too want to know about how doubt might find a voice of its own, and are particularly interested in how doubt might be kept in focus in the writing of research, rather than be a point of departure that is ultimately erased. ** (The Dutch writer Gerard van't Reve once began an autobiographical piece with the words: “I was born stupid, as my father used to say”. My father never said this — and in fact I rather suffered from the inverse or opposite problem — but it is such a lovely opening that I would like to make use of it.) I was born stupid, but my mother was always telling people how smart I was. And like most people I just assumed that my parents always spoke the truth. Luckily, I was good at creating the impression that I was intelligent. But it took me a long time to work out that my mother was wrong and that parents are capable of saying things that are not true. For example my father was a great practical joker. He loved the idea that a child would believe anything you said. When I was five he told me that chewing gum was made from old bicycle tyres. It was not until I was about thirty years old that I suddenly realised this was not the case. It was not as if I actively continued to believe for a quarter of a century that chewing gum is actually made from old bicycle tyres. It is unlikely that I thought about what chewing gum is made of during those twenty five years at all. But my five year old self had stored this 'fact' in the part of my brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And when I accidentally chanced upon it there many years later, he had been dead for more than ten years. It was like the last pocket money cheque he sent which I received the day after I arrived home from his funeral, only funnier. My father loved to laugh and he loved to make other people laugh. This is why my mother fell in love with him. The problem was he also loved a drink or two and my mother didn't drink, neither did my grandmother, or anyone else in her family. This would later turn into a problem for everyone. But his alcoholism was still in its early stages when he married my mother, and it is easy to hide your drinking from people who don't drink: it is just not within their realm of possibilities that you would go to a bar after you kiss them goodbye at the end of the evening instead of going home to go to bed and sleep. I think it was because my mother desperately wanted an intelligent child that she was always telling people how smart I was. I think all of my family on my mother’s side spent their lives wishing they were just a little bit more intelligent, and pretending that they were. So this is where I got my gift. I just did what everyone else did. This stood me in good stead when I moved to an English speaking country where, when I had no idea what was being said, I just tried to look intelligent and pretended to understand. And generally that worked pretty well. Not many people are game to challenge other people's understanding. If it seems like you do (or should) understand, most people assume that you do. In places where you would expect people’s understanding to be challenged, such as universities, this now results in negative student feedback which academics have to explain at their performance management meetings. In today’s universities academics are expected to be dispensers of information who only utter absolute truths. The job of a student is to put the received information into that part of the brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And in Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society, "where the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty" (4), the ability to conceal your doubt is your most crucial weapon. ** In her mythologising of Donald Crowhurst, Tacita Dean unwittingly animates the key terms of any consideration of doubt: fear, imagination and denial. For many, doubt cannot be disconnected from these properties that can be energised by its presence. Doubt always carries with it the potential to turn on those who acknowledge it and seek to apply it, to ricochet off the subject of doubt and create a doubting subject. Doubt is seen as the trigger for uncontrollable fantasies of failure. This issue attempts to untie this association. And we look forward to the companion issue of m/c, on failure, that will hopefully appear in the journal’s future. We would like to thank: the authors, Gonzalo Echeverria, Stephen Hetherington, and our peer reviewers for their willingness to assist us in developing this issue. We also thank Axel Bruns for his support. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Obsessional Modernity: The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt’.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007): 106-134. Newman, Lex. “Descartes' Epistemology”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/›. Reed, Baron. "Certainty." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/certainty/›. Warner, Marina. “Interview with Tacita Dean.” In Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner and Germaine Greer. Tacita Dean. New York: Phaidon, 2006. 7-41.

Hanscombe, Elisabeth. "A Plea for Doubt in the Subjectivity of Method." M/C Journal 14, no.1 (January24, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.335.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

Brown, Malcolm David. "Doubt as Methodology and Object in the Phenomenology of Religion." M/C Journal 14, no.1 (January24, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.334.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (Wittgenstein 1e). The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the “heart”, or “core”, of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some “new” definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and “apophatic”, thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.The question of how to define religion has had real significance in a number of court cases round the world, and therefore it does have an impact on people’s lives. In Germany, for example, the courts ruled that Scientology was not a religion, but a business, much to the displeasure of the Church of Scientology (Aldridge 15). In the United States, some advocates of Transcendental Meditation (TM) argued that TM was not a religion and could therefore be taught in public schools without violating the establishment clause in the constitution—the separation of church and state. The courts in New Jersey, and federal courts, ruled against them. They ruled that TM was a religion (Barker 146). There are other cases that I could cite, but the point of this is simply to establish that the question has a practical importance, so we should move on.In the classical sociology of religion, there are a number of definitions of religion that are quite well known. Edward Tylor (424) defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings. This definition does not meet with widespread acceptance, the notable exception being Melford Spiro, who proposed in 1966 that religion was “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings” (Spiro 96, see also 91ff), and who has bravely stuck to that definition ever since. The major problem is that this definition excludes Buddhism, which most people do regard as a religion, although some people try to get round the problem by claiming that Buddhism is not really a religion, but more of a philosophy. But this is cheating, really, because a definition of religion must be descriptive as well as prescriptive; that is, it must apply to entities that are commonly recognised as religions. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that religion had two key characteristics, a separation of the sacred from the profane, and a gathering together of people in some sort of institution or community, such as a church (Durkheim 38, 44). However, religions often reject a separation of the sacred from the profane. Most Muslims and many Calvinist Christians, for example, would insist strongly that everything—including the ostensibly profane—is equally subject to the sovereignty of God. Also, some religions are more oriented to a guru-pupil kind of relationship, rather than a church community.Weber tried to argue that religion should only be defined at the end of a long process of historical and empirical study. He is often criticised for this, although there probably is some wisdom in his argument. However, there seems to be an implicit definition of religion as theodicy, accounting for the existence of evil and the existence of suffering. But is this really the central concern of all religions?Clarke and Byrne, in their book Religion Defined and Explained, construct a typology of definitions, which I think is quite helpful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of classical definition. Firstly, there are substantive definitions (6), such as Tylor’s and Spiro’s, which posit some sort of common “property” that religions “have”—“inside” them, as it were. Secondly, functionalist definitions (Clarke and Byrne 7), such as Durkheim’s, define religion primarily in terms of its social function. What matters, as far as a definition of religion is concerned, is not what you believe, but why you believe it.However, these classical definitions do not really work. I think this is because they try to do too many things. For a strict definition of religion to work, it needs to tell us (i) what religions have in common, (ii) what distinguishes religion on the one hand from non-religion, or everything that is not religion, on the other, and (iii) it needs to tell us something important about religion, what is at the core of religion. This means that a definition of religion has to be in three places at once, so to speak. Furthermore, a definition of religion has to be based on extant religions, but it also needs to have some sort of quasi-predictive capacity, the sort of thing that can be used in a court case regarding, for example, Scientology or Transcendental Meditation.It may be possible to resolve the latter problem by a gradual process of adjustment, a sort of hermeneutic circle of basing a definition on extant religions and applying it to new ones. But what about the other problem, the one of being in three places at once?Another type identified by Clarke and Byrne, in their typology of definitions, is the “family resemblance” definition (11-16). This derives from the later Wittgenstein. The “family resemblance” definition of religion is based on the idea that religions commonly share a number of features, but that no one religion has all of them. For example, there are religious beliefs, doctrines and mythos—or stories and parables. There are rituals and moral codes, institutions and clergy, prayers, spiritual emotions and experiences, etc. This approach is of course less precise than older substantive and functional definitions, but it also avoids some of the problems associated with them.It does so by rethinking the point of defining religion. Instead of being precise and rigorous for the sake of it, it tries to tell us something, to be “productive”, to help us understand religion better. It eschews certainty and embraces doubt. Its insights could be applied to some schools of philosophy (e.g. Heideggerian) and practical spirituality, because it does not focus on what is distinctive about religion. Rather, it focuses on the core of religion, and, secondarily, on what religions have in common. The family resemblance approach has led to a number of “new” definitions (post-Durkheim definitions) being proposed, all of which define religion in a less rigorous, but, I hope, more imaginative and heuristic way.Let me provide a few examples, starting with two contrasting ones. Peter Berger in the late 1960s defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant”(37), which implies a consciousness of an anthropocentric sacred cosmos. Later, Alain Touraine said that religion is “the apprehension of human destiny, existence, and death”(213–4), that is, an awareness of human limitations, including doubt. Berger emphasises the high place for human beings in religion, and even a sort of affected certainty, while Touraine emphasises our place as doubters on the periphery, but it seems that religion exists within a tension between these two opposites, and, in a sense, encompasses them both.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church and arch-nemesis of the conservative Anglicans, such as those from Sydney, defines religion as like good poetry, not bad science. It is easy to understand that he is criticising those who see religion, particularly Christianity, as centrally opposed to Darwin and evolution. Holloway is clearly saying that those people have missed the point of their own faith. By “good poetry”, he is pointing to the significance of storytelling rather than dogma, and an open-ended discussion of ultimate questions that resists the temptation to end with “the moral of the story”. In science (at least before quantum physics), there is no room for doubt, but that is not the case with poetry.John Caputo, in a very energetic book called On Religion, proposes what is probably the boldest of the “new” definitions. He defines religion as “the love of God” (1). Note the contrast with Tylor and Spiro. Caputo does not say “belief in God”; he says “the love of God”. You might ask how you can love someone you don’t believe in, but, in a sense, this paradox is the whole point. When Caputo says “God”, he is not necessarily talking in the usual theistic or even theological terms. By “God”, he means the impossible made possible (10). So a religious person, for Caputo, is an “unhinged lover” (13) who loves the impossible made possible, and the opposite is a “loveless lout” who is only concerned with the latest stock market figures (2–3). In this sense of religious, a committed atheist can be religious and a devout Catholic or Muslim or Hindu can be utterly irreligious (2–3). Doubt can encompass faith and faith can encompass doubt. This is the impossible made possible. Caputo’s approach here has something in common with Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard, to whom I shall return later.I would like to propose another definition of religion, within the spirit of these “new” definitions of religion that I have been discussing. Religion, at its core, I suggest, is non-propositional and apophatic. When I say that religion is non-propositional, I mean that religion will often enact certain rituals, or tell certain stories, or posit faith in someone, and that propositional statements of doctrine are merely reflections or approximations of this non-propositional core. Faith in God is not a proposition. The Eucharist is not a proposition. Prayer is not, at its core, a proposition. Pilgrimage is not a proposition. And it is these sorts of things that, I suggest, form the core of religion. Propositions are what happen when theologians and academics get their hands on religion, they try to intellectualise it so that it can be made to fit within their area of expertise—our area of expertise. But, that is not where it belongs. Propositions about rituals impose a certainty on them, whereas the ritual itself allows for courage in the face of doubt. The Maundy Thursday service in Western Christianity includes the stripping of the altar to the accompaniment of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), ending the service without a dismissal (Latin missa, the origin of the English “mass”) and with the church in darkness. Doubt, confusion, and bewilderment are the heart and soul of this ritual, not orthodox faith as defined propositionally.That said, religion does often involve believing, of some kind (though it is not usually as central as in Christianity). So I say that religion is non-propositional and apophatic. The word “apophatic”, though not the concept, has its roots in Greek Orthodox theology, where St Gregory Palamas argues that any statement about God—and particularly about God’s essence as opposed to God’s energies—must be paradoxical, emphasising God’s otherness, and apophatic, emphasising God’s essential incomprehensibility (Armstrong 393). To make an apophatic statement is to make a negative statement—instead of saying God is king, lord, father, or whatever, we say God is not. Even the most devout believer will recognise a sense in which God is not a king, or a lord, or a father. They will say that God is much greater than any of these things. The Muslim will say “Allahu Akhbar”, which means God is greater, greater than any human description. Even the statement “God exists” is seen to be well short of the mark. Even that is human language, which is why the Cappadocian fathers (Saints Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Naziansus) said that they believed in God, while refusing to say that God exists.So to say that religion is at its core non-propositional is to say that religious beliefs are at their core apophatic. The idea of apophasis is that by a process of constant negation you are led into silence, into a recognition that there is nothing more that can be said. St Thomas Aquinas says that the more things we negate about God, the more we say “God is not…”, the closer we get to what God is (139). Doubt therefore brings us closer to the object of religion than any putative certainties.Apophasis does not only apply to Christianity. I have already indicated that it applies also to Islam, and the statement that God is greater. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names—or at least 99 that have been revealed to human beings. Many of these names are apophatic. Names like The Hidden carry an obviously negative meaning in English, while, etymologically, “the Holy” (al-quddu-s) means “beyond imperfection”, which is a negation of a negation. As-salaam, the All-Peaceful, means beyond disharmony, or disequilibrium, or strife, and, according to Murata and Chittick (65–6), “The Glorified” (as-subbuh) means beyond understanding.In non-theistic religions too, an apophatic way of believing can be found. Key Buddhist concepts include sunyata, emptiness, or the Void, and anatta, meaning no self, the belief or realisation that the Self is illusory. Ask what they believe in instead of the Self and you are likely to be told that you are missing the point, like the Zen pupil who confused the pointing finger with the moon. In the Zen koans, apophasis plays a major part. One well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Any logical answers will be dismissed, like Thomas Aquinas’s statements about God, until the pupil gets beyond logic and achieves satori, or enlightenment. Probably the most used koan is Mu—Master Joshu is asked if a dog has Buddha-nature and replies Mu, meaning “no” or “nothing”. This is within the context of the principle that everything has Buddha-nature, so it is not logical. But this apophatic process can lead to enlightenment, something better than logic. By plunging again and again in the water of doubt, to use Wittgenstein’s words, we gain something better than certainty.So not only is apophasis present in a range of different religions—and I have given just a few examples—but it is also central to the development of religion in the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers’s term for the period from about 800-200 BCE when the main religious traditions of the world began—monotheism in Israel (which also developed into Christianity and Islam), Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In the early Hindu traditions, there seems to have been a sort of ritualised debate called the Brahmodya, which would proceed through negation and end in silence. Not the silence of someone admitting defeat at the hands of the other, but the silence of recognising that the truth lay beyond them (Armstrong 24).In later Hinduism, apophatic thought is developed quite extensively. This culminates in the idea of Brahman, the One God who is Formless, beyond all form and all description. As such, all representations of Brahman are equally false and therefore all representations are equally true—hence the preponderance of gods and idols on the surface of Hinduism. There is also the development of the idea of Atman, the universal Self, and the Buddhist concept anatta, which I mentioned, is rendered anatman in Sanskrit, literally no Atman, no Self. But in advaita Hinduism there is the idea that Brahman and Atman are the same, or, more accurately, they are not two—hence advaita, meaning “not two”. This is negation, or apophasis. In some forms of present-day Hinduism, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (commonly known as the Hare Krishnas), advaita is rejected. Sometimes this is characterised as dualism with respect to Brahman and Atman, but it is really the negation of non-dualism, or an apophatic negation of the negation.Even in early Hinduism, there is a sort of Brahmodya recounted in the Rig Veda (Armstrong 24–5), the oldest extant religious scripture in the world that is still in use as a religious scripture. So here we are at the beginning of Axial Age religion, and we read this account of creation:Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal.Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.All that existed then was void and form less.Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.(Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, abridged)And it would seem that this is the sort of thought that spread throughout the world as a result of the Axial Age and the later spread of Axial and post-Axial religions.I could provide examples from other religious traditions. Taoism probably has the best examples, though they are harder to relate to the traditions that are more familiar in the West. “The way that is spoken is not the Way” is the most anglicised translation of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. In Sikhism, God’s formlessness and essential unknowability mean that God can only be known “by the Guru’s grace”, to quote the opening hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib.Before I conclude, however, I would like to anticipate two criticisms. First, this may only be applicable to the religions of the Axial Age and their successors, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and early Jewish monotheism, followed by Jainism, Christianity, Islam and so on. I would like to find examples of apophasis at the core of other traditions, including Indigenous Australian and Native American ones, for example, but that is work still to be done. Focusing on the Axial Age does historicise the argument, however, at least in contrast with a more universal concept of religion that runs the risk of falling into the ahistorical hom*o religiosus idea that humans are universally and even naturally religious. Second, this apophatic definition looks a bit elitist, defining religion in terms that are relevant to theologians and “religious virtuosi” (to use Weber’s term), but what about the ordinary believers, pew-fillers, temple-goers? In response to such criticism, one may reply that there is an apophatic strand in what Niebuhr called the religions of the disinherited. In Asia, devotion to the Buddha Amida is particularly popular among the poor, and this involves a transformation of the idea of anatta—no Self—into an external agency, a Buddha who is “without measure”, in terms of in-finite light and in-finite life. These are apophatic concepts. In the Christian New Testament, we are told that God “has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong…, the things that are not to shame the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The things that are not are the apophatic, and these are allied with the foolish and the weak, not the educated and the powerful.One major reason for emphasising the role of apophasis in religious thought is to break away from the idea that the core of religion is an ethical one. This is argued by a number of “liberal religious” thinkers in different religious traditions. I appreciate their reasons, and I am reluctant to ally myself with their opponents, who include the more fundamentalist types as well as some vocal critics of religion like Dawkins and Hitchens. However, I said that I would return to Kierkegaard, and the reason is this. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Of course, religion has an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, and in some religions these dimensions are particularly important, but that does not make them central to religion as such. Kierkegaard regarded the religious sphere as radically different from the aesthetic or even the ethical, hence his treatment of the story of Abraham going to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, in obedience to God’s command. His son was not killed in the end, but Abraham was ready to do the deed. This is not ethical. This is fundamentally and scandalously unethical. Yet it is religious, not because it is unethical and scandalous, but because it pushes us to the limits of our understanding, through the waters of doubt, and then beyond.Were I attempting to criticise religion, I would say it should not go there, that, to misquote Wittgenstein, the limits of my understanding are the limits of my world, whereof we cannot understand thereof we must remain silent. Were I attempting to defend religion, I would say that this is its genius, that it can push back the limits of understanding. I do not believe in value-neutral sociology, but, in this case, I am attempting neither. ReferencesAldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa of Christian Teaching”. An Aquinas Reader. ed. Mary Clarke. New York: Doubleday, 1972.Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Barker, Eileen. New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction. London: HMSO, 1989.Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.Caputo, John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.Clarke, Peter, and Peter Byrne, eds. Religion Defined and Explained. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1993.Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995.Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Caqnongate, 2002.Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. London: Penguin, 1992.———. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1986.Murata, Sachiko, and William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.Spiro, Melford. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock, 1966. 85–126.Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. London: Wilwood House, 1974.Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. London: Murray, 1903.Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nottingham: Brynmill Press, 1979.

Macarthur, David. "Pragmatist Doubt, Dogmatism and Bullsh*t." M/C Journal 14, no.1 (February1, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.349.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” (C. S. Peirce) Introduction Doubting has always had a somewhat bad name. A “doubting Thomas” is a pejorative term for one who doubts what he or she has not witnessed first-hand, a saying which derives originally from Thomas the Apostle’s doubting of the resurrected Christ. That doubt is the opposite of faith or conviction seems to cast doubt in a bad light. There is also the saying “He has the strength of his convictions” which seems to imply we ought correspondingly to say, “He has the weakness of his doubts”. One might recall that Socrates was likened to an electric eel because his peculiar form of questioning had the power to stun his interlocutors by crushing their pet convictions and cherished beliefs under the weight of the wise man’s reasonable doubts. Despite this bad press, however, doubting is a rational activity motivated by a vitally important concern for the truth, for getting things right. And our capacity to nurture reasonable doubts and to take them seriously is now more important than ever. Consider these examples: 1) In the modern world we are relying more and more on the veracity of the Internet’s enormous and growing mass of data often without much thought about its epistemic credentials or provenance. But who or what underwrites its status as information, its presumption of truth? 2) The global financial crisis depended upon the fact that economists and bank analysts placed unbounded confidence in being able to give mathematically precise models for risk, chance and decision-making under conditions of unavoidable ignorance and uncertainty. Why weren’t these models doubted before the crisis? 3) The CIA helped build the case for war in Iraq by not taking properly into account the scant and often contradictory evidence that Saddam Hussain’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. The neat alignment of US neo-conservative policy and CIA “intelligence” ought to have raised serious doubts that might have derailed the justification for war and its inevitable casualties and costs. (See Burns in this issue — Eds.) 4) On the other hand, it is quite likely that corporations that stand to lose large sums of money are fuelling unreasonable doubts about climate change—to what extent we are responsible for it, what the chances are of mitigating its effects, etc.—through misinformation and misdirection. In this paper I want to go a step beyond these specific instances of the value of appropriate doubt. Learning how to doubt, when to doubt and what to doubt is at the heart of a powerful pragmatist approach to philosophy—understood as reflective thinking at its best. After considering two ways of thinking about doubt, I shall outline the pragmatist approach and then briefly consider its bearing on the problems of dogmatism and bullsh*t in contemporary society. Two Notions of Doubt It is important to distinguish doubts about beliefs from doubts about certainty. That is, in everyday parlance the term “doubt” seems to have two connotations depending on which of these notions it is contrasted with. First of all, doubt can be contrasted with belief. To doubt a belief is to be in “twosome twiminds” as James Joyce aptly put it: a state of neither believing nor disbelieving but hovering between the two, without committing oneself, undecided. To doubt in this sense is to sit on the fence, to vacillate over a truth commitment, to remain detached. In this context doubt is not disbelief but, rather, un-belief. Secondly, doubt can be contrasted with certainty, the absence of doubt. To doubt something that we thought was certain is not to doubt whether it is true or reasonable to believe. If someone asks what the colour of my car is and I say it’s painted blue they might then say, “How do you know that someone has not painted it red in your absence?” This is, of course, possible but it is not at all likely. Even if it causes me to be very slightly doubtful—and, as we shall see, pragmatism offers reasons to block this step—it would not lead me to actually doubt what the colour of my car is. To be less than fully certain is consistent with continuing to believe and doing so for good (even overwhelming) reasons. Of course, some forms of belief such as religious faith may require certainty, in which case to doubt them at all is tantamount to undermining the required attitude. There is also a notion of absolute certainty, meaning the impossibility of doubt. Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy by employing a method of extreme and radical doubting in order to discover absolutely certain (i.e. indubitable) truths. His Meditations involves solipsistic doubts about whether there is an external world, including one’s own body and other people, since perhaps its all a myriad of one’s own subjective experiences. Clearly such philosophical doubt concerns matters that are not ordinarily doubted or even seen as open to doubt. As we shall see, pragmatism sides with common sense here. A Pragmatist Perspective on Doubt With this preliminary distinction in place we can now list four pragmatist insights about doubt that help to reveal its fruitfulness and importance for critical reflection in any field, including philosophy itself: 1) Genuine doubts require reasons. Genuine doubts, doubts we are required to take seriously, arise from particular problematic situations for definite reasons. One does not doubt at will just as one does not believe at will. I cannot believe that I am the Wimbledon tennis champion just by willing to believe it. So, too, I cannot doubt what I believe just by willing to doubt it. I cannot doubt that it is a sunny day if everything speaks in favour of its being so: I’m outside, seeing the sun and clear blue skies etc. Some philosophers think that the mere conceivability or possibility of error is enough to generate a live doubt but pragmatists contest this. For example, is knowledge of what I see before me now undermined because I am not able to rule out the possibility that my brain is being artificially stimulated to induce experiences, as seen in The Matrix? Such brain-in-a-vat doubts are not genuine for the pragmatist because they do not constitute a legitimate reason to doubt. Why? For one thing we have no actual machine that can create an artificial temporally extended “world image” through brain stimulation. These are merely conceivable or “paper” doubts, unliveable paradoxes that we think about in the study but do not take seriously in everyday life. Of course, if we did have such a machine—and it is not clear that this is even technically possible today—this situation would no doubt change. 2) There are no absolute certainties (guaranteed indubitable truths). As we have seen, ordinarily the term “certainty” stands for the actual absence of doubt. That is what we might call subjective certainty since where I am free of doubt another might be doubtful. Subjective certainty is the common state of most people most of the time about many things such as what their name is, where they live, who their family and friends are, what they like to eat etc. There is also Descartes’s notion of what cannot be doubted under any circ*mstances, which we might call absolute certainty. Traditional philosophy believed it could discover absolute certainties by means of reason alone, these truths being called a priori. At the heart of pragmatism are doubts about all propositions that were previously regarded as absolute certainties. That is, there are no a priori truths in the traditional sense according to the pragmatist. Nothing is guaranteed to be true come what may, even the truths of logic or mathematics which we currently cannot imagine being false. It was at one time thought to be a necessary truth that two straight lines both perpendicular to another straight line never meet… that was, until the nineteenth century discovery of Riemannian geometry. What was supposedly a necessary a priori truth turned out to be false in this context. That anything can be doubted does not mean that everything can be doubted all at once. The attempt to doubt all one’s worldly beliefs presumably includes doubting that one knows the meaning of the words one uses in raising this very doubt (since one doubts the meaning of the term “doubt” itself)—or doubting whether one knows the contents of one’s thoughts—in which case one would undermine the sense of one’s doubts in the very attempt to doubt. But that makes no sense. The moral is that if doubt is to make sense then it might be wide-reaching but it cannot be fully universal. The human desire for absolute certainty is probably inescapable so the lessons of fallibilism need to be hard won again and again. Anything can be doubted—in so far as it makes sense to do so. This is the pragmatist doctrine of fallibilism. It is the position one gets by making room for doubt in one’s system of beliefs without lapsing into complete skepticism. 3) Inquiry is the fallibilistic removal of doubt. Doubt is an unsettled state of mind and “the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, "Fixation" 375). We are, by nature, epistemically conservative and retain our body of beliefs, or as many of them as possible, in the face of positive reasons for doubt. A doubt stimulates us to an inquiry, which ends by dissolving the doubt and, perhaps, a slight readjustment of our network of beliefs. Since this inquiry is a fallible one nothing is guaranteed to be held fast: there are no eternal truths or indispensable methods. Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics developed techniques for doubting whether we have any reason to believe one thing rather than another. A famous argument-form they explored is called Agrippa’s Trilemma. If we ask why we should believe any given belief then we must give another belief to serve as a reason. But then the same question arises for it in turn and so on. If we are to avoid the looming infinite regress of reasons for reasons we seem to only have two unpalatable options: either to argue viciously in a circle; or to simply stop at some arbitrary point. The argument thus seems to show that nothing we believe is justified. Pragmatism blocks this trilemma at its origin by arguing that our beliefs conform to a default-and-challenge structure. Current beliefs have the status of default entitlements unless or until specific challenges to them (real doubts) are legitimately raised. On this conception we can be entitled to the beliefs we actually have without requiring reasons for them simply because we have them and lack any good reason for doubt. In an image owed to Otto Neurath, we rebuild our wooden ship of beliefs whilst at sea, replacing planks as need be but, since we must stay afloat, never all planks at once (Quine). Inquiry demands the removal of all actual doubt, not all possible doubt. A belief is, as Charles Peirce conceives it, a habit of action. To doubt a belief, then, is to undermine one’s capacity to act in the relevant respect. The ancient philosopher, Pyrrho, was reputed to need handlers to stop him putting his hands into fire or walking off cliffs because, as a radical skeptic, he lacked the relevant beliefs about fire and falling to make him aware of any danger. The pragmatist, oriented towards action and human practices, does not rest content with his doubts but overcomes them in favour of settled beliefs by way of “a continual process of re-experimenting and re-creating” (Dewey 220) 4) Inquiry requires a democratic ethics. The pragmatist conception of inquiry rehabilitates Plato’s analogy between self and society: the norms of how one is to conduct one’s inquiries are the norms of democratic society. Inquiry is a cooperative human interaction with an environment not, as in the Cartesian tradition, a private activity of solitary a priori reflection. It depends on a social conception of (fallible) reason—understood as intelligent action— which conforms to the democratic ethical principles of the fair and equal right of all to be heard, an invitation and openness to criticism, the toleration of dissenting voices, and instituting methods to help cooperatively resolve disagreements, etc. We inquire in medias res (in the middle of things)—that is, from the midst of our current beliefs and convictions within a community of inquirers. There is no need for a Cartesian propaedeutic doubt to weed out any trace of falsity at the start of inquiry. From the pragmatist point of view we must learn to live with the ineliminable possibility of error and doubt, and of inevitable shortcomings in both our answers and methods. Problems can be overcome as they arise through a self-correcting experimental method of inquiry in which nothing is sacred. A key feature of this conception of inquiry is that it places reasonable doubt at its centre: 1) a sustained doubting of old “certainties” of traditional authorities (e.g. religious, political) or of traditional a priori reason (philosophy); 2) a constant need to distinguish genuine or live doubts from philosophical or paper doubts; 3) and the idea that genuine doubts are both the stimulant to a new inquiry and, when dissolved, signal its end. Dogmatism The importance of the pragmatist conceptions of inquiry and doubt can be appreciated by seeing that various pathologies of believing—pathologies of how to form and maintain beliefs that—are natural to us. Of particular note are dogmatism and fanaticism, which are forms of fixed believing unhinged from rational criticism and sustained without regard to such matters as evidential support, reasonableness and plausibility within the wider community of informed inquirers. Since they divide the world into us and them, fellow-believers and the rest, they inevitably lead to disagreements and hostility. Dogmatists and fanatics loom large in the contemporary world as evidenced by the widespread and malevolent influence of religious, ideological and political dogmas, confrontational forms of nationalism, and fanatical “true believers” in all shapes and forms from die-hard conspiracy theorists to adherents of fad diets and the followers of self-appointed gurus and cult-leaders. The great problem with such forms of believing is that they leave no room for reasonable doubts, which history tells us inevitably arise in matters of human social life and our place in the world. And as history also tells us we go to war and put each other to death over matters of belief and disbelief; of conviction and its lack. Think of Socrates, Jesus, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero to name only a small few who have been killed for their beliefs. A great virtue of pragmatism is its anti-authoritarian stance, which is achieved by building doubt into its very methodology and by embracing a democratic ethos that makes each person equally answerable to reasonable doubt. From this perspective dogmatists and fanatical believers are ostracised as retaining an outmoded authoritarian conception of believing that has been superseded in the most successful branches of human inquiry—such as the natural sciences. Bullsh*t To bullsh*t is to talk without knowing what one is talking about. Harry Frankfurt has observed, “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullsh*t” (117); and he goes on to argue that bullsh*tters are “a greater enemy of truth than liars are” (132). Liars care about the truth since they are trying to deceive others into believing what is not true. Bullsh*tters may say what is true but more often exaggerate, embellish and window-dress. Their purposes lies elsewhere than getting things right so they do not really care whether what they say is true or false or a mixture of the two. Politicians, advertising agents, salesmen and drug company representatives are notorious for bullsh*tting. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a famous example of political bullsh*t. He said it for purely political reasons and when he was found to have lied (the evidence being the infamous unwashed dress of Monica Lewinsky) he changed the lie into a truth by redefining the word “sex”—another example of bullsh*t. The bullsh*tter can speak the truth but what matters is always the spin. The bullsh*tter need not (contra Frankfurt) hide his own lack of concern for the truth. He plays at truth-telling but he can do this more or less openly. The so-called bullsh*t artist may even try to make a virtue out of revealing his bullsh*t as the bullsh*t it is, thereby making his audience complicit. But the great danger of bullsh*t is not so much to others, as to oneself. Inveterate bullsh*tters are inevitably tempted to believe their own bullsh*t leading to a situation in which they do not know their own minds. Only one who knows his own mind is aware of what he is committed to, and what he takes responsibility for in the wider community of inquirers who rely on each other for information and reasonable criticism. Doubting provides a defence against bullsh*tters since it blocks their means: the doubter reaffirms a concern for the truth including the truth about oneself, which the bullsh*tter is wilfully avoiding. To doubt is to withhold a commitment to the truth through a demand not to commit too hastily or for the wrong reasons. A concern for the truth, for getting things right, is thus central to the practice of reasonable doubting. And reasonably doubting, in turn, depends on knowing one’s own mind, what truths one is committed to, and what epistemic responsibilities one thus incurs to justify and defend truths and to criticise falsehood. Democracy and fallibilist inquiry were borne of doubts about the benevolence, wisdom and authority of tyrants, dictators, priests and kings. Their continued vitality depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism about the beliefs of others and about whether we know our own minds. Only so can we sustain our vital concern for the truth in the face of the pervasive challenges of dogmatists and bullsh*tters. References Descartes, R. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. I-III. J. Cottingham et. al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985/1641. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 12. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Frankfurt, H. “On Bullsh*t.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. Penguin: London, 1999/1939. Peirce, C.S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” 1868. In The Essential Peirce.———. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. In The Essential Peirce. ———. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. In The Essential Peirce. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Trans. J. Barnes & J. Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. "(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations." M/C Journal 14, no.1 (January24, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.337.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Beyond reasonable doubt” is the standard of proof for criminal cases in a court of law. However, what happens when doubt, reasonable or otherwise, is embedded in the media reporting of criminal cases, even before charges have been laid? This paper will analyse newspaper reports of recent rape cases involving Australian footballers, and identify narrative figures that are used to locate blame solely with the alleged victims, protecting the footballers from blame. I uncover several stock female “characters” which evoke doubt in the women’s claims: the Predatory Woman, who hunts down footballers for sex and is always sexually available to any and all footballers; the Woman Scorned, who makes a false rape complaint out of revenge; and the Gold Digger, who makes a false complaint for money. I will argue that the news media thus effectively provide footballers with a criminal defence, before the cases can even reach court. Rape and Football in Australia The issue of football and rape first came to mass public attention in February 2004, when six players from National Rugby League (NRL) team the Canterbury Bulldogs allegedly raped a woman while at a New South Wales resort. Two weeks later, two players from the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team allegedly raped a woman following their pre-season cup victory. These two football codes are the nation’s most popular, with rugby league dominating the north-eastern states, with the southern, eastern and western the domain of Australian Rules. In neither case were charges laid, and although at least twenty distinct cases have been reported in the Australian media, involving more than fifty-six footballers and officials, only one–NRL star Brett Stewart–has yet been tried. Stewart was acquitted in September 2010. Former AFL footballer Andrew Lovett has also been ordered to stand trial in July 2011 for allegedly raping a woman on Christmas Eve, 2009. Nevertheless, the majority of cases never reach court. In criminal cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately decides whether to pursue charges through the courts, and, as most cases will be decided by a jury drawn from the general public, the DPP must decide whether the general public would accept the prosecution’s evidence as proof of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means that if a jury retains any doubt that the accused person is guilty, as long as that doubt is reasonable, they must return a verdict of “not guilty.” Public opinion in high-profile cases is therefore extremely important. If the DPP perceives a high level of public scepticism about a particular case, this indicates that the likelihood of the general public accepting the prosecution’s evidence is low, and they will often decide not to pursue the case. My analysis will show that media reports of the cases, which were published before any decision about laying criminal charges was made, can in fact work to create doubt, taking popular, victim-blaming stories to cast doubt on the complainants’ testimonies. Thus “reasonable doubt,” or a doubt that seems reasonable to many or most readers, is created before the case can even reach court. Predatory Women, Gold Diggers and Women Scorned When debate began in 2004 and explanations were sought for the high numbers of cases, stories abounded in which women have consensual sex with footballers, and then make a false rape complaint. I identify the principal characters of these stories as the Predatory Woman, Gold Digger and Woman Scorned. These stories were particularly prevalent amongst football representatives, blog contributors and talkback radio callers. Some media commentators provided alternative explanations (Magnay, for example), and others were explicitly critical of such stories (Pinkney, Wilson, for example); however, other journalists in fact evoked these same stereotypes. All of these characters have “common currency” (Smart 39), and have been used by defence lawyers in criminal trials for centuries, which means they are likely to be believed. These commentators therefore (indirectly) portray the complainants as liars, and reinforce the pervasive victim-blaming discourses in the wider public. The Predatory Woman The Predatory Woman character can be traced back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when so-called “fallen” women were frequently “scorned as predatory creatures who lured young men into sin” (Clark 59). In her study of newspaper articles on football and sexual assault, gender theorist Kim Toffoletti identified the “predatory female” as a recurrent figure who is used to portray footballers as victims of “deviant” female sexuality (432-3). Toffoletti argues that the assumption underlying the use of the predatory female is that “incidents of sexual assault can occur when women deviate from the ‘conventions’ of heterosexual relations that expect them to be passive and sexually available, and men to exude sexual virility” (433). However, I argue that commentators’ usage often carries this further, and rather than using the story to claim that a victim of rape “deserved” it, the Predatory Woman actually serves as a replacement for the Raped Woman, therefore implicitly claiming that the complainant was lying. The Predatory Woman is the aggressor in all sexual encounters with footballers, a “sexual predator” (McCabe 31) who is said to “target” players and “hunt in packs” (Lyon 1). In a 2004 interview, one footballer described the phenomenon as “frightening” (McCabe 31), and another in 2009 claimed that footballers are “given temptations,” and “some of them [women] are downright predators” (Cunningham 30). The hunting animal metaphor clearly represents women as sexual aggressors, virtually suggesting that they are committing violent acts–moving in on unsuspecting footballers for the “kill” (sex). Thus portraying a complainant as one who seeks out sex with footballers implies that she victimised the players. As a woman cannot be both sexual aggressor and rape victim, the character of the Predatory Woman replaces that of the Raped Woman, therefore invalidating a complainant’s testimony and creating doubt. The Woman Scorned The Woman Scorned, another popular character in footballer sexual assault narratives, has also been evoked by the defence in criminal rape trials for centuries (Sanday; Benedict 2, 39-40, 83; Larcombe 100, 104-106, 111; Lees 78). The prevalence of footballers’ beliefs in the Woman Scorned story when NRL player Simon Williams commented about the prevalence of group sex/rape incidents involving NRL players on the 2009 Four Corners “Code of Silence” episode: It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided, if they [players] had put them [women] in a cab and said thanks or that sort of thing not just kicked her out and called her a dirty whatever. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that stuff up. Williams’ implicit claim here is that no woman would make a rape complaint as long as footballers always “said thanks” after sex. He thus implies that “most” of the complaints have been about revenge from women who felt mistreated after consensual sex: Women Scorned. The Gold Digger The Gold Digger is also an established character in both football rape stories and criminal rape trials; Peggy Sanday identifies her in cases dating from the eighteenth century. In rape cases, the Gold Digger can be evoked when a prominent and/or wealthy man–such as a noble in the eighteenth century, or a footballer in the present context–is accused of rape, whether or not the alleged victim seeks or receives a financial settlement. Many football fans evoked the Gold Digger on Internet blog sites, even when there were no observable characteristics corresponding to the Gold Digger in any of the media narratives. One declared: “My mum said she was probably being a slu*t, then after they ‘did’ her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it [sic]” (in Baird 41). The Gold Digger stereotype invalidates a rape complaint, as a woman who alleges rape for financial gain must be lying, and was therefore not raped. Her claims are to be doubted. Narrative Immunity From 2009 onward, although traces of these characters remained, the focus of the debate shifted, from the possibility of sexual assault to players’ alcohol intake and the prevalence of “group sex.” Nina Philadelphoff-Puren identifies implicit claims that the complainants were lying in the statements of football representatives (37, 41-43), which imply that they must be Predatory Women, Women Scorned or Gold Diggers. In order to show clearly how journalists mobilised these characters more directly to evoke doubt, I conducted a search of the “Newsbank” newspaper database, for opinion pieces that sought to explain why the allegations were made, using varying combinations of the search terms “AFL,” “NRL,” “football,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” “rugby,” “sexual violence,” “sex” and “women.” Articles were sought in broadsheet newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and tabloids The Herald Sun (Melbourne) and Daily Telegraph (Sydney), the most widely read newspapers in the cities where the alleged incidents occurred. The time-frame selected was 27 February 2004 to 1 May 2004, which covered the period from when the Canterbury Bulldogs case was first reported, until debate died down after the announcement that no charges would be laid against St Kilda footballers Steven Milne and Leigh Montagna. Twenty articles were collected for analysis: two from the Daily Telegraph, eight from the Herald Sun, seven from the Age, and three from the Sydney Morning Herald. Of these, half (ten) overtly blamed the alleged victims, with seven of those explicitly evoking Predatory Woman, Woman Scorned and/or Gold Digger stereotypes, and one strongly implying them. Although it might be expected that tabloid newspapers would be much more likely to (re-)produce popular stereotypes than broadsheets, the same numbers were found in each type of newspaper. The “common currency” (Smart 39) these stories have means that they are more likely to be considered credible than other stories. Their use by respected media commentators–particularly broadsheet journalists, whose publications lay claim to an educated readership and more progressive attitudes–is of even greater significance. In this paper, I will analyse three broadsheet articles in detail, in order to illustrate the various strategies used to evoke the stereotyped characters for an educated readership. The articles selected are by writers from very different backgrounds–a former footballer, a feminist and a “life-skills” coach to AFL footballers–and although it might seem that they would provide markedly different perspectives on the issue, I will show that all three evoke stereotypes that cast doubt on the complainants’ claims. The Story of the “Insider” Former AFL footballer Tim Watson’s “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone” was published shortly after the allegations against the St Kilda AFL players were made public in 2004. The article features a number of Predatory Women, who make “victims” of footballers; however, while Watson does not provide direct narrative accounts of the alleged rapes, he instead recounts narratives of other interactions between footballers and women. Predatory Women therefore come to replace Raped Women as characters and invalidate the alleged victims’ claims; as Watson represents these women as the sole agents, full responsibility for these incidents is attributed to women. The bulk of Watson’s article relates two stories unconnected with any (known) sexual assault cases, about AFL teams travelling to the country for training and being harassed by women. Placing the narratives immediately after warnings about “trouble zones,” when the article is clearly responding to the sexual assault allegations, suggests that his narratives explain what “potential trouble” and “trouble zones” are. He therefore implies that his narratives illustrate what “really” happened with the St Kilda (and Canterbury) players. The only instances where players are given grammatical agency in this narrative is when they “mingled with the locals” and “left the function as a group”; all the narrative action is attributed to women. Mingling has no sexual connotation, and “the locals” is a gender neutral term, implying that the players’ only action at the function was to interact with men and women in a non-sexual way. The characters of “a couple of girls” are introduced, and according to Watson these “girls” made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions that she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players. The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. In order to portray the women more clearly as the sole sexual aggressors–Predatory Women–Watson leaves out any events where players actively participate, events which are highly likely to have occurred. For example, in Watson’s narrative there is no two-way flirtation, and the players do not seek out, encourage or even respond in any (positive) way to the female attention they receive, although anecdotal evidence suggests this is extremely unlikely to have happened (Mewett and Toffoletti 170, 172-73). The women are only grammatical agents with intentions–their agency relates to what they plan to do–however, emphasising the fact that the team left as a group suggests that it was only this defensive action which prevented the women from carrying out their intentions and instigating sexual activity. Using “sidled” rather than “went” or “approached” characterises the woman as sly and manipulative, casting her in a negative light and adding to the sense that she was solely responsible. The second story is described as “almost identical” to the first, but Watson takes even greater pains to emphasise the players’ passivity, again portraying them as victims of Predatory Women. Watson attaches only the passive voice to the players: he says that they were “woken in their hotel rooms” and “subject to determined, but unwanted, advances.” The women are entirely absent from these statements. They appear only as shadows presumed responsible for waking the players and making the unwanted advances. This erasure of the female agent only emphasises the players’ passivity in the face of female seduction and general resistance to overwhelming female sexual aggression. As in the first story, the only action attributed to a footballer is defensive: a senior player convincing the women to leave. This reinforces the idea that male footballers are the victims when it comes to casual sexual relations, and casts doubt on any claims of rape. The Story of the “Insider-Outsider” The second article, “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl…,” is by “life skills” coach to AFL players Damien Foster, who calls himself “a classic insider-outsider” to football (SBS). As a partial outsider, Foster would therefore presumably have less vested interest in protecting footballers than Watson; however, his narrative also denies the complaints’ credibility, clearly evoking a victim-blaming character: the Woman Scorned. Foster obliquely claims that the St Kilda and Canterbury cases arose simply because women and men view sex differently and therefore “a footballer may land himself in trouble because it just doesn’t occur to him to develop tactful, diplomatic methods of saying goodbye”. He continues, “When the girl [sic] realises the total indifference with which she is being treated after intimacy, bitterness sets in and it lingers. There are many girls in Australia now in this situation.” While Foster does not directly say that the “girls” who made rape complaints against the Bulldogs and St Kilda are Women Scorned, the fact that this story is used to explain why the allegations were made says it for him. According to Foster’s logic, if footballers learnt to say “thanks, love, that was great” after sex, then no rape complaints would ever be made. A “Feminist” Story? Controversial feminist Germaine Greer would seem even more likely to avoid victim-blame than men involved with football clubs, and she does not follow Watson’s portrayal of utterly passive, squeaky-clean footballers, or Foster’s narrative of undiplomatic players. In “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder,” she does acknowledge that some harm may have been done; however, Greer nevertheless portrays the complainants as Predatory Women, Women Scorned and Gold Diggers. Greer elects to tell a “history” of male footballer-female interactions, establishing male athletes’ disrespect for and mistreatment of women as a given. However, she goes on to evoke the Predatory Woman, portraying her as utterly desperate and willing to go to any lengths to have contact with players. Greer laments, good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies’ onslaught, believing that as long as they don’t kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven’t been genuinely unfaithful to their wives and sweethearts. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circ*mstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag, even. This explanation of footballers’ behaviour contains several grammatical patterns which represent the players as passive and not responsible for anything that takes place. In the first sentence, the only things these footballers actually do are succumbing and believing, both passive verbs; the rest of the sentence is devoted to what they do not do: “as long as they don’t kiss… as long as they make no move.” Thus it would seem that the players do not actively participate in the sexual activity instigated by these women, that they simply lie back and allow the women to do as they will. That the women are labelled “desperate creatures” who launch an “onslaught” to which footballers “succumb” confirms their sexual aggression. Although the second and third sentences depict violence and rape, these actions are not directly attributed to the players. The brutal treatment of the women the players have casual sex with has no grammatical agent–“the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with”–dissociating them from the brutality and subtly implying that “someone else” is responsible for it. Similarly, “pack rape” has no agent: no player commits or is involved in it, and it appears to happen independently of them. As Susan Ehrlich demonstrates, this denial of agency is a common tactic for accused rapists to use, in order to deny that they were responsible for their actions (36-61). Thus Greer uses the same grammatical patterns which deflect blame away from footballers, even when the behaviour involved is violent rape. This continual emphasis on the players’ passivity reinforces the portrayal of the women as sexually aggressive Predatory Women. Greer also introduces the figures of the Woman Scorned and Gold Digger. She claims that the only difference between the “old days” and the present scenarios is that now women are “not embarrassed to say that they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.” This paragraph appears almost directly after the one where Greer mentions pack rape and violence, and it may seem therefore that the redress these women seek is for rape. However, since Greer claims that at least some of the women who “want redress” want it because they have been “insulted or humiliated,” rather than raped, this evokes the Woman Scorned. Greer continues by introducing the Gold Digger as a further (and complementary) explanation for these insulted and humiliated women to seek “redress.” Greer writes that women now “also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers – namely, indecent amounts of money.” With this statement, she implies that some women have sex with footballers just so that they can make a rape complaint afterwards and obtain a large payment. She concedes that the women who make allegations against footballers may have been “abused,” but she trivialises them by claiming that they “scream and holler,” portraying them as hysterical. She thus discredits them and casts doubt on their claims. Greer ignores the fact that only one woman has either sought or obtained a financial settlement from footballers for a case of rape, and this woman only applied for it after charges against the players responsible were dropped. Whilst this argument is clearly unfounded, the strength of the Gold Digger story, along with the Woman Scorned and Predatory Woman, is likely to give the impression that the rape complaints made against the footballers were unfounded. Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt The fact that a significant number of media commentators employed tactics similar to those defence lawyers use in rape trials suggests that a de facto “trial” took place; one in which stories that discredit the complainants were prominent. These stories were enough to evoke “(un)reasonable doubt” in the women’s claims, and the accused footballers were therefore “acquitted.” That doubt can be evoked so easily in such high-profile cases is particularly problematic as rape cases in general are those least likely to be believed (Jordan 64-83). Further, many victims state that the fear of disbelief is one of the most important factors in deciding not to pursue criminal charges (Warshaw 50). Even if one leaves aside the likelihood that the prevalence of doubt in the media and the “blogosphere” contributed to the DPP’s decision not to pursue charges, the media “acquittal” is likely to have two further effects: it may deter future complainants from coming forward, if they assume that their claims will similarly be doubted; and it contributes to more generalised beliefs that women habitually lie about rape, particularly those who accuse footballers. While of course any accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, it is equally important to give an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, and not presume that all rape complainants are liars unless proven otherwise. References “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. ABC, 11 May. 2009. Television. Baird, Julia. “All Together, Boys, for a Weekend Roast.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 February. 2004: 41. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cunningham, Ryan. “A Footballer’s Life: Confusion, Temptation and Guilt by Association.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Jun. 2009: 30. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001. Foster, Damien. “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl...” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 13. “Foul Play.” Insight. SBS, 16 Apr. 2004. Television. Greer, Germaine. “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder.” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 1, 17. Jordan, Jan. The Word of a Woman?: Police, Rape and Belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Lyon, Karen. “They Love Their Footy, But Can They Keep the Faith?” Age 20 Mar. 2004: 1. Magnay, Jacquelin. “What Dogs Do.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Feb. 2004: 31 McCabe, Helen. “Perilous Games of Sport and Sex.” Daily Telegraph 1 May. 2004: 31. Mewett, Peter, and Kim Toffoletti. “Rogue Men and Predatory Women: Female Fans’ Perceptions of Australian Footballers’ Sexual Conduct.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43.2 (2008): 165-80. Pinkney, Matthew. “Don’t Make Their Excuses.” Herald Sun 22 March. 2004: 18. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. “Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 17. (2004): 35-51. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Smart, Carol. Feminism and the Power of Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (2007): 427-38. Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Watson, Tim. “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone.” Age 18 Mar. 2004: 16. Wilson, Caroline. “All the Dirty Linen Must — and Will — Be Aired.” Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4.

You might also be interested in the bibliographies on the topic 'Gonzaga family' for other source types:

Books

To the bibliography

Journal articles: 'Gonzaga family' – Grafiati (2024)

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles