Does globalization affect our dreams? An inquiry into the subject matter of dreaming

Abstract

Does globalization affect our dreaming? This would be the case if dreams, in an increasingly globalized world, showed a decrease in characteristic cultural traits. I maintain however that the specific culture of the dreamer is not relevant in dreams in the first place. Any effect globalization may have on us is therefore not essential to the subject matter of dreaming.

Following Martin Heidegger's philosophical analysis of human existence, dreams are found to deal with emotionally relevant issues of our existence with which we have difficulties to come to terms. Matters of normality which are felt to be matters of course are not a topic in dreams. Consequently, normal cultural features only become a topic for dreaming in some form of negation of their normal function. An impressive dream-report, centering on a denied handshake, serves as an illustration.

In conclusion, it is stated that dreams are concerned with those very individual responses to general human issues which do not comply with the collectively accepted so-called “normal” responses of the specific culture. Our cultural identity is only of very marginal interest in dreams. Dreams spring from and point to the psychoanalytic identity of the dreamer.     

Planetary Love: Ecofeminist Perspectives on Globalization

This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans).     

A Preface to Ethics:

This essay outlines a new preface for ethics demanded by the massive developments of the global age. It does so in and through the comparative use of “myths” to explicate the lived structure of experience. The essay begins by isolating main features of global dynamics, including proximity, the compression of the world and the expansion of consciousness, and also global, cultural reflexivity. In the second step of the “preface,” it is argued that globality itself is a moral space in which peoples must orient their lives. It is a moral space defined by the massive extension of human power in the modern world. In light of the challenge that global dynamics and the extension of human power now pose, the essay then isolates, methodologically, options for developing a global ethics, and advocates a distinctly hermeneutical approach. This approach is practiced in the last section of the “preface” by engaging ethically the biblical “myth” of creation and its reinterpretation in an epitome of Jesus's Torah teaching. The intention is to show how current religious thought can speak to massive challenges in a distinctive way. It is, again, to offer a preface to ethics.     

Globalization and the Evolution of Democratic Civil Society: Democracy as Spatial Discourse

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve “political society” into “civil society” and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society.     

Globalization and counterdevelopment: The importance of new narratives

The article is a personal recount of living under the called neoliberal regime installed in the post-Cold War in the region. Written from the perspective of a Latin American woman in the betweenness of the North and the South. Focusing on capitalism history shows how counterdevelopment has been the other face of globalization. The social protests in the whole continent request the respect of human dignity recovering an inclusive collective narrative and social justice caring of our common home, to build a more profound democracy and a more just world.     

Approaching Heidegger’s History of Being Through the Black Notebooks

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the importance of the Black Notebooks (GA 94-99) beyond their contribution to Heidegger’s political biography. While attention has up to now focused almost exclusively on other matters, the Black Notebooks offer new perspectives on Heidegger’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond. The essay argues, that any reading of Heidegger’s later work that tries to ignore the question for the History of Being, as it moves from a consideration of the Meaning of Being to the History of Being, is doomed to misunderstand the whole of Heidegger’s thought. Therefore, if one wants to mobilize Heidegger’s thinking as a response to the great questions of our age, which this essay identifies as those of Global Warming, Globalisation, Nihilism and the Nightmare of the Manipulated Human Being, then one needs to force the question of history as the central problem underlying any future potentiality of Heidegger's philosophical impact.     

Empirical Correlates of Cosmopolitan Orientation: Etiology and Functions in a Worldwide Representative Sample

Psychology has begun contributing to social theory by providing empirical measures of actually existing cosmopolitanism that complements more purely theoretical conceptions of the construct common in philosophy and sociology. Drawing from two waves of research on representative adult samples from 19 countries (N = 8740), metric invariance was found for the three factors of cosmopolitan orientation (COS): cultural openness (CO), global prosociality (GP), and respect for cultural diversity (RCD). In terms of etiology, among Wave 1 measures, the personality factor of agreeableness was the best predictor of the cosmopolitan factors of GP and RCD at Wave 2, whereas openness of personality best predicted CO. Wave 1 measures of education, political liberalism, and self-reported social status independently also explained a small amount of variance in COS. Functionally, COS was shown to predict less prejudice against immigrants, and more support for global civil society, even after controlling for social dominance orientation. All three COS factors independently predicted better attitudes towards immigrants. GP was the best predictor of trust in the United Nations, whereas RCD was the best predictor of support for environmental protection. The three-factor model of COS appears well-calibrated for assessing actually existing cosmopolitanism across cultures.     

Making a Case for the Common Good in a Global Economy: The United Nations Human Development Reports[1990–2001]

Whereas the chief development question of the past has been “how much is a nation producing?” the human development perspective that characterizes the United Nations Human Development Reports shifts the question to “how are its people faring?” This shift reflects the fundamental moral orientation of the human development perspective which makes a case for the common good in a global economy. Relating the themes and claims of the human development reports to Brian Stiltner’s recent study on religion and the common good, the author shows a variety of ways in which the common good as a moral norm is embedded in the human development perspective, without the context of religion. She explicates the presence and utility of this norm in these United Nations reports written by economists, development specialists, and policy advisors who seek to present and assess the humanizing and dehumanizing features of globalization.     

Religion and development ethics in global perspective: a case study of a foreign Christian NGO in China

ABSTRACT

Much academic writing on religion and development tends to focus on the values, beliefs, and modes of operation of religious organizations to examine whether religion contributes ethically to development. A problem with such an approach is its disregard of the contested and evolving nature of religious participation in development in broader national and global contexts. What constitutes ethical religious contribution to development? How can we study the question sociologically? To answer these two questions, I develop Roland Robertson’s notion of the global field to present a framework for analyzing the dynamic interaction between religion and development ethics. In terms of methodological contribution, the framework proposed here prompts us dynamically to contextualize the issue of religious development ethics with reference to four components that make up the global field: the religious agent, the national society, the global civil society, and the global discourse on wellbeing and development. This means that, from an analytical perspective, what is proper or ethical in religious development ethics should not be construed in absolute terms, but in terms of degree and variation. I demonstrate the usefulness of such a contextual approach by drawing on research on ‘GMV’ (pseudonym for an international Christian medical professional services group actively engaged in community development) in China and examining the relationship between religious NGOs, the party-state, and evolving discursive practice of development in the country.