TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY

Abstract. The presence of a basic and general form of creativity in people is investigated through experiments with music. The results indicate that "generative" creativity—-the ability to spontaneously generate a music by varying a basic set of musical elements—is a basic human endowment, unlike "constructive" creativity—-the type of creativity exhibited by composers and other artists—-which is the result of training and the spehal development of faculties. Generative creativity's coming to the fore in contemporary people would contribute to the development of the personality and help bring about more fulfilled, better balanced people and societies.     

Dance becomes therapeutic in the mid to late 20th century

The convergence of dance art and therapeutic culture engendered the development of dance-movement therapy in the mid to late 20th century internationally. This article traces the sociopolitical, institutional, and aesthetic influences that coalesced in this process by contrasting histories of dance-movement therapy in Hungary and in the United States. The professionalization dance-movement therapy, through which it established its own theory, practice, and training institutions, occurred first in the United States in the late 1940s. Modern dancers in the United States began to conceptualize their activity as therapeutic, and the dancer as a (secular) healer, a therapist. The influx of therapeutic concepts into the field of dance is viewed as an example of therapeutic discourse permeating various areas of life in the 20th century. The Hungarian case provides a contrasting history of therapeutic culture, one that deviates from the predominant view of the phenomenon as a product of the global spread of Western modernization and the growth of free-market capitalism. Hungarian movement and dance therapy indeed developed independently from its American predecessor. Its history is intimately tied to the sociopolitical context of state-socialist period, particularly to the institutionalization of psychotherapy in public hospitals, and to the adaptation of Western group psychotherapies within the informal setting of the “second public sphere.” The legacy of Michael Balint and the British object-relations school provided its theoretical framework. Its methodology was rooted in postmodern dance. The methodological differences between American dance-movement therapy and the Hungarian method reflects the shift in dance aesthetics that occurred internationally between 1940 and 1980s.     

The power within: Mass media,scientific entertainment,and the introduction of psychical research into China, 1900–1920

How did a new science initially promoted by only a few individuals eventually become a widespread cultural phenomenon practiced and known by thousands of people? Following a transnational approach, this article traces the introduction of psychical research into China during the first two decades of the 20th century. Known in the Republican period (1912–1949) as Spiritual Science (xinling kexue or xinling yanjiu), psychical research flourished between the 1920s and 1930s, playing a key role in the popularization of applied psychology and mind-cure across China. This article takes a step back from the heyday of Spiritual Science by looking at the period that immediately preceded and helped define it. Focused on wide-circulation newspapers, popular manuals, and stage performances, it teases out the ways in which Chinese popular culture translated European, American, and Japanese psychical research to local Chinese audiences in the midst of China's search for modernity. By naturalizing the reality of psychic powers, spiritual scientists blurred the boundaries between science and superstition in a period when these were posited as diametrically opposed.     

Pan-Islamism in Afghanistan in the Early Twentieth Century: From Political Discourse to Government Policy, 1906–22

The idea of pan-Islamism in Afghanistan emerged after the foundation of the Constitutional Party in the early 1900s. The party was an underground organization which had cells in an educational institution, the royal court and among the foreign group (Indians) employed in government departments. Pan-Islamism served to unite various political forces toward certain political and cultural goals. After the accession of Amanullah to the throne in 1919, pan-Islamism became a state policy. It served as the key to the government's foreign policy, especially towards the two imperial powers in the region, Britain and Russia. Amanullah used it as a means to fulfil his political expansionist ambitions. This article examines what pan-Islamism meant to the Constitutional Party and to King Amanullah, the reasons behind their approaches, and the political context that made pan-Islamism the most appealing ideological and political strategy for them. The article also explores the means the party and Amanullah used to propagate pan-Islamism.     

The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Traditional Confucianism in modern China: Ma Yifu’s ethical thought

Modern neo-Confucianism is studied at two levels, one is at the historical level and the other at the academic level. Modern neo-Confucianism at the historical level was developed in the modern context, but its basic content belongs to the traditional Confucianism or the study of Confucian classics. Modern neo-Confucianism at the academic level recognizes both the deficiencies of the traditional Confucianism and rationality of western learning, and dedicates itself to the modernization of Confucianism. Though Ma Yifu’s moral philosophy is developed in the context of modern Chinese culture, it fails to deal with the problem of modern transformation of Confucian ethical values and its content still belongs to the traditional Confucianism. So it should be labeled as the modern neo-Confucianism in the historical sense. In this paper, the author makes a systematic exploration and an evaluation of Ma Yifu’s ethical thought. __________ Translated from Lunlixue Yanjiu 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethics), Vol. 18, 2005 (4) by Yang Xu     

A contemporary interpretation of Marx’s thoughts on modernity

Unlike some western scholars who limit their interpretation of modernity and its source to conceptual, cultural, value, and psychological dimensions, Marx pointed out that modernity came mainly from modern production system. Starting from the historical context of his time, Marx explored various aspects of modernity and pointed out that modernity was inherent in the logic of capital, resided in the process of historical evolution, arose in social conflicts and segmentation, and presented itself in a global horizon. The logic of capital, the historical viewpoint, the theory of contradiction and a global perspective are fundamental in Marx’s analysis of the problems of modernity. Marx’s ideas of modernity are methodologically significant to the construction of modernity in contemporary Chinese society. __________ Translated from Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学 (China Social Sciences), 2005 (4) by Xing Lijun     

中国传统女性伦理与礼仪及其现代价值

中国传统女性伦理与礼仪内容庞杂,糟粕精华并存。现代女性伦理与礼仪建设应当摒弃其中维护男性特权,束缚女性人身自由的非人道性的糟粕,承继其中具有现代价值的精华,从而建立人道、文明、科学的现代女性伦理与礼仪新体系。     

《管子》论“且怀且威”及其现代启示

《管子》认为,治理国家既要采用怀柔政策,主张为政者"先之以德",通过整饬四维来形成良好的社会风尚;又强调"法不可不审",主张通过严刑峻法来树立君主的权威,赏罚严明,使人们严格遵守各项法令制度,坚持"且怀且威",礼法并重,其思想对现代社会有很好的启迪意义。