Suchergebnisse

Between 1989 and 1993, with the end of the Cold War, Tiananmen, and Deng Xiaoping's renewed reform, Chinese intellectuals said goodbye to radicalism. In newly-founded journals, interacting with those who had left mainland China around 1949 to revive Chinese culture from the margins, they now challenged the underlying creed of Chinese socialism and the May Fourth Movement that there was 'no making without breaking'. Realistic Revolution covers the major debates of this period on radicalism in history, culture, and politics from a transnational perspective, tracing intellectual exchanges as China repositioned itself in Asia and the world. In this realistic revolution, Chinese intellectuals paradoxically espoused conservatism in the service of future modernization. They also upheld rationalism and gradualism after Maoist utopia but concurrently rewrote history to re-establish morality. Finally, their self-identification as scholars was a response to rapid social change that nevertheless left their concern with China's fate unaltered.

Against the background of the rise of 'diaspora institutions' since the early 2000s, this commentary reflects on China's diaspora engagement and India's interest in it in the context of its own institutionalisation of diaspora engagement since the early 2000s. It argues that notwithstanding historical and political differences, some lessons could be learned from China. These pertain to the importance of recognising the various segments of the diaspora; the role of community organisations; the centrality of diaspora research; and the connection between diaspora policies and shifting national priorities. However, both in China and in India, some principal limits remain in terms of diaspora engagement due to the prioritising of the socio-economically advantaged; the tension among cultural, ethnic and territorial understandings of the nation; and because political inclusion lags behind the focus on economic and knowledge contributions. These limits lead us to reconsider some of the shared ideas, assumptions and practices behind the rise of 'diaspora institutions' in a broader sense.

In this article, the author shows how a cultural model of consultation and community thinking –the dutch "polder model"– together with specialization and separation of tasks can lead to fragmentation and paradoxes in mental health care that –in turn– result in dilemmas and costly negotiations between mental patients and therapists. The author discusses the development of the model in psychiatry since 1970 and shows by ethnographic data how therapists and patients are engaged in a struggle in which metaphors, counter transference and patients' resistance and how they transform the "polder model" into a compromise and double therapeutic perspectives. The author argues that the democratic model only works by unequal power relationships, fragmentation of therapeutic work and ambiguity and results in a pragmatic attitude that denies the ontological status of the patients. ; En este artículo la autora muestra cómo un modelo cultural de consulta y pensamiento comunitario –el "modelo pólder"–, junto a una especialización y separación de tareas, puede conducir a fragmentación y paradojas en la atención a la salud mental que, a su vez, da lugar a dilemas y costosas negociaciones entre pacientes psiquiátricos y terapeutas. La autora discute el desarrollo del modelo en psiquiatría desde los años 70 y muestra, a través de datos etnográficos, cómo terapeutas y pacientes se encuentran implicados en una lucha en la que metáforas, contra transferencia y la resistencia de los pacientes transforman el "modelo pólder" en un compromiso y en perspectivas terapéuticas dobles. La autora argumenta que el modelo democrático sólo funciona a través de relaciones de poder desiguales, de la fragmentación del trabajo terapéutico y de ambigüedades, y genera una actitud pragmática que niega el estatus ontológico de los pacientes.

In this article, the life story of a Polish woman in South Africa is used to illustrate that stories of exile are 'matter out of place' in host countries. Space is a central category in both the story of exiles and in the collective history of receiving countries, but it has different emotional, social, cultural and political meanings. Sometimes stories of exile are denied a place in the social memory of a society. Therefore, recollection and making sense of experienced misery in foreign contexts is often a difficult and lonely undertaking. The article links the story to macro-political processes and attempts to answer questions regarding the consequences of the lack of meaningful space for exiles to remember. Collective and national memories and ceremonies are often exclusive and offer no place for 'alien' memories. Therapeutic repertoires often fail to address the emotional value of communal sharing a socio-cultural and (meta) physical space. It is argued that because the state does not take responsibility for providing a (symbolic) space for the mourning and reconciliation of people whose memories are out of place, transcultural psychiatry – its subsystem – will have to reflect on how to provide such a space.