The Work Process as Spatial Situation: A Sketch

Interacting with the work of art entails a spatial situation, which is double. On a mental plane it is encapsulated reverie, on a physical plane it is production and consumption. These two are woven together as an orthogonal text or texture. The space of the work of art thus contains both the process of its making and its viewing. Seen as a dimensional space it is non linear. It is characterized by oscillations, discepancies, misalignements, multiplicity and recurrence. There is a correspondance between the studio and the exhibition area, as well as a dialogue between privileged and unprivileged spaces. The situation has something in common with oneiric space, where weightlessness and gravity oscillate.     

How Lutherans Read the Bible: A North American and Global Conversation

Abstract: Recent debates and conflicts over the interpretation of the Bible among Lutherans both in the U.S. and in other parts of the world impel us to consider our history in a Lutheran tradition, our present challenges, and an agenda for future directions. This introductory essay briefly introduces some of the distinctive Lutheran emphases in the use of Scripture, provides an overview of the other essays in this issue of Dialog which are largely focused on the North American context, and then offers a sample of what two Lutheran scholars in places other than the U.S. are thinking about their experiences as Lutherans using the Bible in places like Malaysia and Argentina.     

Guilt: A gendered bond within the transnational family

Between 1999 and 2003 Argentinians lived an economic, social and political crisis that led some of them to emigrate, mainly to the United States and Spain. There are few studies on Argentinean migration and even fewer studies that take emotions and gender during the migration process into account. The aim of this work was to understand the link between gender and guilt within the migration process. In order to consider this, I analyzed the expression of guilt within the narrative of Argentinean migrants in Miami, United States and Barcelona, Spain. In-depth interviews of Argentinean migrants were conducted in both cities. Research shows that guilt is a gendered emotion, which allows migrants to temporarily stay attached to their family in a gendered way during the migration process. Nonetheless, its expression depends on four different factors that are interrelated: representations of gender role and “imagined family”, representations' changes during the migration process and the context of departure and the context of arrival.     

Sorting Out Support for Democracy: A Q‐Method Study

Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant survey‐based measures are fraught with validity problems and say little about the democratic beliefs individuals most strongly hold or reject. To address these problems, this study blends focus groups, interviews, and Q‐sort methodology to examine patterns of subjective, behavioral renderings of democratic support profiles. It finds seven shared profiles of beliefs concerning democracy, alternative regimes, and political and civil freedoms across Chile and Argentina. Their resemblance to democratic belief systems found with other methods bolsters their validity and generalizability. The analyses reveal the relative weight of each orientation within each belief profile and their intensity across profiles. In so doing, they identify which items are crucial for within‐ and across‐case comparisons. Altogether, these insights should inform survey‐based approaches to detecting and describing the democratic support profiles latent in the polity.     

Development and validation of an Argentine set of facial expressions of emotion

Pictures of facial expressions of emotion are used in a wide range of experiments. The last decade has seen an increase in the number of studies presenting local sets of emotion stimuli. However, only a few existing sets contain pictures of Latin Americans, despite the growing attention emotion research is receiving in this region. Here we present the development and validation of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Expresiones de Emociones Faciales (UNCEEF), a Facial Action Coding System (FACS)-verified set of pictures of Argentineans expressing the six basic emotions, plus neutral expressions. FACS scores, recognition rates, Hu scores, and discrimination indices are reported. Evidence of convergent validity was obtained using the Pictures of Facial Affect in an Argentine sample. However, recognition accuracy was greater for UNCEEF. The importance of local sets of emotion pictures is discussed.     

Mourning the dead,mourning the disappeared: The enigma of the absent–presence

Freud's interest in the impact of death on the living goes back further than Mourning and Melancholia (1917e, [1915]). In Totem and Taboo (1912–13) Freud noted the ambivalence of the emotions we experience in relation to the dead. In this paper, I focus on Mourning and Melancholia as a landmark in the understanding of both the normal and psychopathological aspects of mourning and depressive processes in human beings. Mourning and Melancholia bridges Freud's first and second topographic theories of the psychic apparatus and constitutes for many authors the foundation of his theory of internal object relations. With this psychoanalytic understanding of mourning as a framework, I discuss ‘special mourning processes,’ such as the those confronted by psychoanalysts in Argentina when treating the relatives of thousands of people who were ‘disappeared’ by the military dictatorship in the 1970s; they are ‘special’ in the sense that the external reality [which] constitutes the starting point of the psychic mourning process, as described by Freud, is absent. I argue that the ‘absent–presence’ of the body as an enigmatic message initiates a special mourning process that bears certain characteristics of, and is isomorphic to, Laplanche's seduction theory.     

Mate preferences in Argentinean transgender people: An evolutionary perspective

Transgender people provide a unique opportunity to examine the effect of biological sex versus gender identity on mating preferences. This study aimed at identifying the mate characteristics that are most and least valued by transgender people and at examining to what extent their biological sex or their gender identity determined their mate preferences. A convenience sample of 134 male‐to‐female (MTF) and 94 female‐to‐male (FTM) individuals from Argentina rated Buss's list of 18 mate attributes. Compared to FTM, MTF individuals placed significantly more emphasis on attractiveness and socioeconomic status, whereas FTM, more than MTF individuals, valued partners with a dependable character. Although biological sex differences were present in both groups, providing support to the evolutionary theory, MTF individuals valued the same characteristics as both biological male and female individuals do.     

‘I dreamt about it,just like this,exactly the way it is’: Haunting emotional geographies in Buenos Aires

This article deepens feminist scholarship on emotional geographies of fear via an engagement with haunting and memorialization in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during and after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. I take the recuperated Space for Memory Virrey Cevallos as a case study of emotional geographies of fear to assess how fear becomes temporally and spatially fixed in the landscape. I argue that recuperation and memorialization disrupt the haunting of this emotional geography of fear, and that attention to everyday experiences of fear nuances broader discourses on justice. I develop my analysis with testimonies from neighbors of Virrey Cevallos to follow the endurance of fear leading up to the site's recuperation as a national Space for Memory. Tracing a timeline of this geography from the dictatorship to the present shows the haunting effects of fear, and asks how memorialization, as a material and temporal intervention in emotional geographies of fear, addresses the (dis)continuities of this geography. This research shows that everyday emotional geographies of fear are intertwined with the (dis)continuities of time. Further, this case study suggests that disrupting haunting requires an intervention that bridges the legacies of the past with reparative justice that attends to place.     

I'll Take the High Road: Two Pathways to Altruistic Political Mobilization Against Regime Repression in Argentina

What led Argentine human rights activists to risk challenging state repression in the late 1970s? Chi‐square analyses of 78 interviews with early activists and nonactivists suggested few commonalities among activists but revealed two distinct and inverse routes to high‐risk other‐centered political activism. Activists directly affected by regime violence tended to be relatively inexperienced politically, to have little experience with fear, and to see groups as comprising individuals rather than as monolithic wholes. An inverse pattern characterized activists not directly affected by regime violence: Their activism was preceded by experience in politics and survival of previous fear‐evoking episodes.     

Newman's application of the offices of the Church in the search for a reformed Catholicism

From an anthropological and historical perspective, and focusing mainly on the Argentinean situation, this article analyses Catholic male monasticism in Hispanic America, with the particular objective of evaluating the crisis, religious change and monastic imagination identified in contemporary Benedictine communities. It is argued that imagination, as a process of symbol production, has been intrinsically related to the practice of a new monastic spirituality; it has in fact been the force behind the appearance of religious experiences ideologically anchored in early Christian traditions. Empirical data on the Benedictine Order in Argentina suggests that at least three models of consecrated life can be identified in twentieth century Hispanic America, namely, the ministerial model, the social model and the patristic model. Research leads to the conclusion that these paradigms emerged through processes of imagination applied to the reinvention of tradition – creatively but, also, conservatively – in a global context in which both the monastic institution and society face changing demands.