Staying close by moving out. The contextual meanings of personal autonomy in the life stories of women of Moroccan descent in The Netherlands

This article focuses on the themes of personal autonomy and communion in the life stories of highly educated women of Moroccan descent in The Netherlands. It is argued that the task to make the most of what The Netherlands have to offer whilst staying loyal to parents who have paved the road, creates a double bind which is the motor behind the development of the ‘plot’ of all collected life stories. While the interviewees tend to interpret the dilemmas they face in finding a satisfactory balance between autonomy and communion in terms of differences between ‘the Dutch individualistic society’ and ‘the collectivistic values’ which characterize ‘the Moroccan’ or ‘Islamic culture,’ comparison with the life stories of members from the established Dutch working class who have socially moved upward, demonstrates that the dilemmas faced are similar. In many instances, climbing up the social ladder appears to play a bigger role than ethnic or religious background in ambivalent feelings abouth belonging. Where the life stories of migrant daughters differ is in narrations on the inheritance of loss and aspirations intrinsic to migration. Also, Moroccan colours, smells, objects, symbols and patterns of conduct inform the interviewees’ sense of belonging and supply them with powerful images and words to describe their experiences.

African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the African Diaspora

Racism is defined as a psychopathology and the ground in which the covenant of whiteness is rooted and mirrored in the system of apartheid structured by American Constitutional Jurisprudence between 1857 and 1954. This historical period overshadowed Carl Jung's visit to America between 1909 and 1937. The spirit of the times and practices of racism coloured Jung's views, attitudes, and theories about African Americans, just as colonialism coloured his attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Consequently Jung failed to see the African Diaspora and the extraordinary intellectual and artistic period of the Harlem Renaissance (1919‐1929). Its introduction here foregrounds the exceptionalism of African Americans and the cultural continuity of African ancestry. This exceptionalism was not seen by Jung and there have been no attempts to redress its omission from analytical psychology and other sub‐disciplines of Western psychology. Jung's theories of personality and psychoanalysis and his negative projections about primitivism among Africans and African American ‘Negroes’ would have been mediated by knowledge of a legislated American apartheid and the Harlem Renaissance which occurred within the barriers of apartheid. In this paper I posit that culture, kinship libido, and the African principle of Ubuntu are healing modalities that play a critical role in instinct and the relational ground of human psychology and biology, from which culture as an environmental expression constellates around common goals of the human species. Cultural equivalencies and expressions within the wisdom traditions and mythologies of the Africa Diaspora are considered. Specifically, the Bantu principle of Ubuntu or ‘humanity’ is identified as the relational ground in African cultures, while the Kemetic‐Egyptian deity Maat, as an archetypal anima figure and the religio‐mythology offer a transcendent position from which to critique the inequities and constitutional jurisprudence that structured American apartheid. Maat is the personification of truth, justice, balance and weighing of the heart in orderly judicial processes. In her we find the alignment of the spirit and matter in the law and judgement. The paper concludes with reflections on pathways toward healing the psychopathology of racism and recommendations to enhance clinical training and practice.     

Symbols of Diaspora Jewish identity: An international survey and multi-dimensional analysis

Symbols are important in representing religious and ethnic identity, particularly in the postmodern age. Using a case study of Jewish adolescents, this article explores the use of symbols in expressing identity. A structural typology of symbols is developed, based on responses to a list of 20 symbols of Jewish identity by over 40,000 Jewish youth from around the world, who were surveyed during educational tours to Israel. The multi-dimensional smallest space analysis (SSA) technique is used to develop the typology by graphically representing the correlations between the symbols. Symbols representing the struggle of the weak against the strong are at the core of the typology. This core is surrounded by sets of symbols related to religion, family, Israel, the Holocaust, justice, and contribution to world culture. A parallel centre–periphery structure indicates that people are more central symbols than places or objects. Sub-populations of self-defined “religious” and “non-religious” Jewish youth are compared in relation to this typology of symbols by introducing them into the SSA as “external variables”. Applications of the typology of symbols to other ethnic and religious groups are explored.     

The Religious Composition of the Chinese Diaspora,Focusing on Canada

The religious composition of the Chinese Diaspora varies by countries with the highest Christian share in the Philippines (86 percent) and the highest Buddhist share (84.3 percent) in Cambodia. The religiously unaffiliated are more likely found in Vietnam (74.7 percent), Canada (70.1 percent), and Austria (63 percent) and less likely found in the Philippines (0.6 percent) and Malaysia (1.5 percent). A further analysis of high‐quality Canadian census data allows for a more in‐depth focus. In 2001, 81 percent of the 125,000 Chinese migrants (those born in mainland China who had moved to Canada between 1996 and 2001) were unaffiliated, 11 percent were Christian, and 7 percent Buddhist. Relative to the topic of conversion, data on Chinese migrants admitted to Canada between 1981 and 1990 reveals growth in the proportion that self‐identified as religiously affiliated (Christian as well as Buddhist) and a decline in the proportion who reported no religion.     

Coming Home/Coming Out

Abstract

This article is a theological reflection on one Queer Asian American woman’s experience of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease. Using Coming Out/Coming Home as a frame and metaphor, the author explores the complexity of “home” for many Koreans/Korean-Americans whose very lives intersect with and are disrupted by major events in Korean and world history. For them, the act of coming home is complex, textured, and layered with experiences of loss, trauma, dislocation, resilience and hope. Through dis-ordered memories of a mother with Alzheimer’s, this article attempts to re-order what it means to come home. Grace Cho’s “ghostly haunting” provides a methodology. Layering theory with personal narratives, stories and a dream, ot is an experiment in performance—phantomogenic words that become “staged words.” In three parts, “coming home”, “ghostly hauntings”, and “tug-of-war”, this article performs coming home/coming out of one queer family’s experience of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s.     

Is this a good time? Political activism and other in the temenos

This paper discusses raciality and Africanist culture as elements of the analytical clinical experience. The history of American Jungian psychology, and its relationship with the African diaspora, is reviewed with a perspective that seeks to deepen understanding of racism as an aspect of psychoanalytical institutional life. An attempt to separate political activism from the clinical setting is explored with consideration of the necessary intertwining relationship between socialization, racial identity and racism. Diversity and inclusion are becoming cultural signature markers of clinical work with individuals who have oftentimes, within the psychoanalytical clinical setting, been described due to ethnicity, as other. Political activism such as the Black Lives Matter movement stretches consciousness towards an insistence that blackness matters, skin colour matters and the lives of Africanist individuals matter. This paper reflects on cultural racial identity, the influence of politics on the individual, and the effects of these on the analytical relationship.     

Continuities across continents: Assessing African American cultural themes among Black and Coloured South Africans

Much of the scholarship concerning African American culture is premised on the notion that it is a legacy of African origins but there has been essentially no attempt to document that relationship empirically. This paper briefly reviews existing evidence for cultural continuity in the Diaspora and then compares the responses of Black and Coloured South African and African Americans on measures of culture emic to African American populations. The observed patterns of psychometric performance, participants' responses, and the predictive utility of the measures employed were consistent with the thesis that despite inevitable variation, these three groups of the African Diaspora share similar orientations on the cultural themes assessed. This research hopes to initiate empirical work on the continuity thesis as it applies to connecting African American culture with a legacy of Africa and as related more broadly to the study of global Diasporas.     

Between the Diaspora and Zion: Cecil Roth and his American friends

Near the start of his career (1925–1930) Cecil Roth developed a vision of the significance of the Diaspora to Jewish life, which he articulated during his tenure at the Intercollegiate Menorah Society Summer School of 1930. For Roth, Jewish creativity could be expressed only by possessing a firm grasp of Jewish history and its essentials. In his summer school lectures Roth sought to integrate Jewish history into the broader sweep of European history, while at the same time he introduced students to historical sources beyond traditional Jewish texts. In the aftermath of World War II Roth entered into a prolonged correspondence with the American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, who had recently founded the American Jewish Archives, whose purpose was to forward the study of Jewish history by collecting the documents that would enable future research. In their correspondence, Roth and Marcus enunciated an approach to Jewish history that would influence the field for a generation.