Yongho Kim

Author: yonghokim

  • Personality Assessment Assignment

    Yong Ho Kim, April 29th 2003

    1. What are some criticisms of trait theory in general?

    Possible criticisms include that subjects can falsify answers because the result of a personality test can be personally important to them, that very often the questions are culture-specific, and that subjects across different cultures don’t necessarily present the same main personality traits (Kalat points out that in the Chinese there is only an “loyalty to Chinese traditions” trait instead of “agreeableness” and “openness to experience”. This could be interpreted as meaning that in China a high agreeableness (being loyal to other people who follow the Chinese tradition) and being closed to experience (not trying other non-Chinese things) have always correlated together and could be lumped into one category.)

    It turns out that given personality tests chunk groups of people together, it will forego other less prominent differences in personality, considered by the creators of the big five as overlapping or unimportant. However, ignoring small individual differences can directly lead to stereotyping, which isn’t always a desirable result. Of course, there is the payoff that the more traits we add and intend to measure through tests, the less parsimonious the test becomes. It is possible to do the reverse and decrease the number of traits even further arguing that they still overlap (Eysenck), even though it might generalize the descriptions even more.

    2. Evaluate your lab section’s choice of traits.

    Overall it was a good sample, but “experimental” and “curious” seemed to overlap in meaning. To experiment, one needs to be curious. For “motivated” and “diligent”, it seems like one corresponds to a mental disposition while the other is a behavior. Isn’t it the case that being motivated will lead the person to work harder, thus being perceived by others as diligent?

    Also, “social” and “shy” were two degrees of the single trait. Hence, we would be using more titles than necessary, and making the accuracy of the test lower. Overall, it was about a good number of traits.

    3. Evaluate your lab section’s choice of questions to evaluate those traits.
    Questions such as “during the past week, I cried more than twice” were aimed at too narrow audiences to make any sense out of the results. No male subjects responded yes to that question, but it is possible that if the frequency had been reduced to once per month the number of respondents had been over zero (still including those who cry twice), and make a conclusion out of it, since a result of zero doesn’t tell us what the lower limit is.

    4. What are some of the difficulties associated with developing personality questionnaires?

    The problem lies in the fact that the questionnaires have to be created with human subjects in mind. If the test is too long, it will discourage subjects from finishing or volunteering to work on the test. But the more questions the questionnaire carries, the higher accuracy can be expected from it.

    5. What are some of the difficulties associated with administering personality questionnaires?

    Especially if subjects are acquaintances of the experimenter, they might hide those qualities deemed undesirable and emphasize those desirable. Also, often the pattern of answers subjects give is highly dependent on the social and emotional context in which the subject was situated at during the specific time and place of the day at which the subject took the questionnaire. Also, it is a written test, so people must sit down or at least stand still, which excludes an important population of Macalester College who are often running from class to class. (This is not a implicit reference to the “running boy”.)

    6. How could personality evaluation be improved?

    It is necessary to hide the “socially unacceptable behavior” tag from the questions as much as possible, in order to prevent social hindrance at the moment of responding questionnaires. Detaching the questions of positive remarks is also important, the idea being that questions should sound rather neutral. This has been done for the current test, but still “People I don’t know make me nervous” carries a strong negative implication that should be corrected. (I suggest, “I am mostly friendly towards people I know”). The conclusion seems to be that this is a embedded problem for self-administered tests.

    Also, the format of the question could be changed so that it could, for example, be read off a tv screen or heard from a cassette recorder. Or done orally individually. If this were to be done, it would increase the repertoire of subjects to be included in the pool.

    On a final note, I thought the effectiveness of personality tests could be improved if subjects didn’t realize that it was a personality test that they were taking at the moment of taking them, (so that they can be less conscientious and less censoring while answering questions) but this seems impossible given the access college students have to Psychology courses.

  • Depth of Processing Assignment

    April 4th, 2003
    Yong Ho Kim

    Kalat (2002) summarizes the traditional consensus in the psychological community regarding short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory is a “temporary storage of the information that someone has just experienced’ and long-term memory is “a relatively permanent store of mostly meaningful information”. Additionally, short-term memory stores up to seven (plus or minus two) bits of distinct information for a few seconds, and can store an kind of information. For the long-term memory, the capacity is not known but certainly very large, and the information needs to be closely tied down inside the learner’s mind to be successfully stored.

    Often information is first stored in the short-term memory and then passed to the long-term memory. This is called consolidation. Controversy in the psychological community arises on the understanding of this process. Traditionally it has been understood that it is a matter of repetition for the information to pass to the long-term memory. However, recent research disagrees based on the fact that some very personal information don’t require several rehearsals for them to be learnt. It is suggested that the information must be meaningfully and emotionally tied to the learner in order to be transferred to the long-term memory.

    Jacoby (1973) tested the effect of rehearsal on memory improvement. By “rehearsal” Jacoby means “a subject’s covert or overt repetition of an item”, so that “increasing rehearsal frequency simply means that the person says the item more often”. He asked a random group of college students to memorize words from a pool of 200 words rated A and AA (obtained from Thorndike and Lorge word book). Ten lists were presented to subjects with a delay interval between each list. Each list consisted of 20 words. During the delay, some subjects were instructed to study the words in silence. Other group was instructed to study the words aloud, and another was instructed to perform arithmetic calculations. After a delay, the subjects were requested to recall all 20 words.

    In a laboratory hour of an Introduction to Psychology course in Macalester College, 35 students replicated Jacoby’s experiment with a slight modification. Instead of studying the words aloud, the students were instructed to say the word “Hello” aloud throughout the delay. Instead of performing random arithmetic calculations, students were instructed to think of a 3-digit number and keep subtracting 3 from the number throughout the delay. Instead of studying in silence, students were instructed to remain silent, with no specific duties. The subjects were not divided in groups, but were all asked to perform the same task at a given time.

    Based on Jacoby’s results, it is expected that students remembered words better for lists followed by silent study. In my individual test, I remembered 37 words for the interrupted and non-interrupted free recall test, and 14 words when asked to recall the whole list. For recognition, I recognized 37 words. It seemed like recognition would be much an easier task, but I recognized as the exact same amount of words that I recalled during the list-by-list free recall. It might be the case that the number of words recognized dropped from their expected number because that was the last activity and the total list free recall activity interfered with the memory.

    Reference

    Jacoby, L. L. (1973). Ending Processes, Rehearsal, and Recall Requirements. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12, 302-310
    Kalat, J. W. (2002). Introduction to Psychology. Pacific Groove, CA: Wadsworth

  • Shaping lever press behavior and fixed ratio training for water-deprived rats

    Yong Ho Kim
    Macalester College

    Operant conditioning is a particular type of conditioning in which the subject associates particular behaviors with particular responses, and performs the behavior whenever it desires the response. (more…)

  • Reflective Essay on Readings of Marx’s Early Writings

    Professor Peter Rachleff
    January 29th, 2003
    Yong Ho Kim

    While at Mac, I got to hear of current humanities theories during my Intro HCST class. Under professor Kordela’s guidance, I was introduced to Zizek and his approach to Lacan, and followed a survey of western thought from ancient Greece to Debord and Derrida, and came back to Lacan and film theory. Throughout the course, and after I had finished it and kept reviewing books from Saussure and Burke, I felt I needed a more firm grounding that would fill in the gaps among these thinkers. Could I get a foundation for contemporary theory without going all the way back to Renaissance? That’s where I think Marx fits in. (more…)

  • Integration Paper on Race and Ethnicity

    Introduction to Sociology
    Professor Sharon Preves
    Due by December 9th
    Turned in by December 16th (7 days late)

    The U.S. banned the discrimination based on race, sex or ethnicity, through the Civil Rights Act, almost 40 years ago in 1964. However, more subtle, permeating forms of racism are prevalent in today’s U.S. society according to sociologists. Newman argues that to end racism it is necessary to recognize first the artificial nature of race as concept and then to differentiate between the various types of racism in society.

    The relativistic meaning of the word “Race”

    Various sociologists throughout the world have proven that the same color is recognized as different races in different societies. For instance, what in the U.S. might be classified as simply “black” can be divided up as “zambos” and “mulatos” in Chile. To group them together as “black” would make no sense since the term “negro” is reserved for a particular tone of black skin and facial shape. In England or Ireland, any skin color that is not white is considered black. And white in Ireland does not signify the skin color, but rather to be of Irish descent. These kinds of multifaceted terminology around the world prove that race is not a given biological fact.

    Recently, as people with markedly different facial and skin characteristics began marrying each other, to define race has become even more complicated. In the church I go to, the pastor has a Korean mother and a U.S. father – what race does he belong to? He has brown hair and non-epicanthic eyes, but his cheek bones and cranium shape belong to those of the Ural-Altaic people.

    Personal racism, stereotypes, and Prejudice

    Personal racism is manifested through individual contact of a person to another person, in such acts as threats, avoidance, or verbal or physical insult. The use of stereotypes gives an easy solution when justifying personal racism. Stereotyping involves exaggerating certain features in a given group of people from the same race and assuming that a particular feature applies to everybody. For example, since the Los Angeles riot in 1993, during which a large number of stores in the city were destroyed and ransacked by a mob which was, rumors say, mostly black, Korean communities in the west coast assume black people will be violent by nature. I had some uncles in Los Angeles, who kept saying that it was all very evident that black people are poor and hence prone to vandalism and violence. Common reactions are moving to the opposite side of the sidewalk when one sees a black person coming on the other side, or moving to another table (or getting out of the restaurant, to “protect the kids”) if large groups of black people enter a restaurant.

    Stereotypes are hard to break because both the agent and victim of stereotyping are active, not passive, agents of the process. Furthermore, proofs against stereotypes are often refuted with arguments that claim the proof to be an isolated exception, but that the majority of the population keeps being “violent” or “greedy” or “lazy”, etc. In this is the self-fulfilling prophecy theory again applied.
    As seen in an article of past chapters from Newman, victims of stereotyping actively use the stereotype to their purposes. Thus, a group of black kids in ghettos pretend to be more violent that what they are, just to keep people away from them.
    Newman presents the research of Steele, who obtained more biased results when he explicitly told his subjects -black students- that he was testing something related to their stereotyped image – something like intelligence, the students performed in accordance to their expected social stereotyped images. Thus, it seems like there is an unconscious component to the self-fulfilling prophecy in race, because the black students didn’t meant to score lower than when they were not told that it was about intelligence, but rather their societal selves reacted to the suggestion of Steele which reminded them of the pre-existing stereotypes.

    The ghost of “Race”

    On the other hand, it seems like “race” is not a concept that can be easily deconstructed just out of realizing that it was originally a social construct. In some communities, the whole identity of the group falls back on the idea of race. Koreans for example, pride themselves in being a mono-racial country [unlike China, Russia or the U.S., towards which they look down on because they’re “mixed”, and thus “less pure”] For example, the current presidential candidate representing a party that matches the Republicans in the U.S. politics, often recurs to the great mono-raciality of Korea when arguing for the need to defend national interests by increasing military funding.

    But even when “race” does not involve a sense of ethnic belonging, de-framing race seems a challenging task. Movements that counter the discrimination racial minorities suffer in the U.S., carry on the assumption that race exists, because if there was no race there could be no movement to protect a particular race. I wonder if the dilemma of Affirmative Action, which so far I understand is an attempt of the dominant race to purge itself of injustices of the past, is precisely the paradox of solidifying the notion that race exists, while at the same time combating the discrimination arising from the existence of race as a notion. This problem seems directly related to the fact that proponents of civil rights movements were opposed to the integration of the “multiracial” category in the U.S. census form (Mathews), because such blunder would not benefit the traditionally groups protected by such measurements.

    Newman points out that as people from different races mix, the distinguishing features across races are fading, and takes the optimistic prospect that a gradual fusion of races will end the problem of racial discrimination. I should agree with him, even though this idea is again brought from the Melting Pot theory, which happens to be a rhetoric of the dominant class in the U.S.

  • Integration Paper on Social Class and Inequality

    Integration Paper on Social Class and Inequality

    Introduction to Sociology
    Professor Sharon Preves
    Due by November 18th, 2002
    Turned in by November 25th, 2002
    Yong Ho Kim

    Any large enough society in the world today faces problems of individual and social inequality among its people. In chapter 10 of his book, Newman has addressed this issue through different approaches and mentioned theories from other sociologists who have talked about the poor class.

    Two opposing views on inequality
        Structural-Functionalists argue that inequality is unavoidable given the way society works. Some occupations, such as health and teaching, exert an important influence on society. Therefore, these occupations need to be occupied by talented and responsible people, and the only way to encourage those people is to offer them better rewards in the form of money and prestige. Through an analogous reasoning, if anybody, regardless of talent, could serve in a position, then that position needs not to be rewarded as highly, since somebody will fill it up anyways.
        Of course, the idea of competitive individualism is permeated in this thought, since the assumption is that since most people want to occupy important and influential positions, they will work hard to obtain such goal. And this idea, that people only need to put effort into their work regardless of their initial conditions to get those positions and thus “succeed in society”, is what competitive individualism is about.
        Conflict theorists state that there is a starting difference for people that is almost impossible to break given the desire of the wealthy and powerful class to maintain their status. According to conflict theory, since people will try to get their best out of the circumstances, the very rich simply exploit the better chances they have of making higher profit because of their initial resources.
        Marx divides people into three classes depending on the factors of ownership and control of labor. Those who don’t neither control nor own labor, are called proletariat. Those who own labor but do not control it, are called the petite bourgeoisie. And, those who both manage and own labor are called Capitalists. However, as capitalism evolved and systems of production became more complex, there was a need to add the managerial class into the model, who are those who control labor but don’t own it.
        I was vaguely aware of the Marxian model of class, but couldn’t really place my family – or my parents – neatly in the opposing proletariat-bourgeois model, until I found Wright’s model which included the managers. From the strictly social point of view, my parent’s job as missionary involved hiring people using resources of the supporting foundation. I could glimpse the dilemmas of the managerial class (and the ambiguity they represent to the rest of the social divisions) as my dad had to fire several people who opposed foundation-led local projects. He would have built close-knit friendships with co-workers, but still it was him who decided their hire.

    Absolute/relative poverty
    According to Newman, absolute poverty and relative poverty are different concepts. Absolute poverty refers to the absolute minimum to sustain life. Relative, on the other hand, refers to the standards of “minimum” as defined by the particular culture the poor person is located in. Strictly speaking, for example, not having a bathroom at home would still be considered above absolute poverty levels.
    This leads to the issue of inequality across countries around the globe. Various sociologists point out that the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries in the world keeps on increasing. Newman to several authors who point at the causes of such increasing gap as colonization and other factors, but I think it’s more extended.
    Tak points out that there are numerous and various regulations in the international arena today than there was two hundred years ago. Back in the 1800s, while Europe and the U.S. was undergoing the intense process of industrialization and development, no country slowed them down with concerns of the growing deterioration in the ozone or health care and minimum wage rights of the workers. Stabilization of worker’s living standards and environmental concern rose only after a firm industrial base for mass production was already grounded. Tak is a Korean philosopher, but I believe many third world country politicians do think this way too. It is unfair, hence, that governments of developed countries point at third world country industries, charging them of deterioration of the ozone cap when the current hole has mainly been produced by the western circle’s contaminants in the past century, and this way slow the process of development down and in check with the developed country’s own interests.

    Enduring disparities in income and wealth
    Sociologists agree in that the difference between the upper and lower class is becoming bigger through the years.
    I can recall a clear example of this during my half year stay in college in Chile. I enrolled in the math engineering program, and a close friend of mine went to medicine (in Chile, as in most other countries, medicine is an undergraduate program). The annual tuition for math engineering is $1500, whereas medicine is $2800. Most of the entering class in math eng. were often too poor to pay the tuition in an annual basis, so they paid monthly with an interest fee. Some of them could have gotten into the civil engineering program (which pays more after graduation) but couldn’t afford the tuition, which was $230 higher.
    Later in the semester, students from the engineering division, along with the humanities and forestry division went on a campus-wide strike because the state financial aid didn’t meet requested need. The medicine division didn’t join the strike, since no med students were under state aid. Once this body of students graduated, the ones who paid most during it would be making more money out of their respective jobs, and the opposite was to happen to those in the lower end. This is how I could see that a poor family would almost eternally be driven back to the cycle of being poor, simply because better paying jobs would require college degrees that cost more.

    Social benefits of poverty
    The structural-functionalist approach can reason further in the usefulness of the poor class. First of all, society can hardly function without a group of laborers on a very low wage. Few people are willing to work on time consuming activities that don’t pay well. Thus, having people pushed by their daily necessities to work in conditions otherwise intolerable serve the interests of the bourgeois class. On the same line of argument, the poor purchase goods that wouldn’t be acceptable in regular conditions, such as food that run a high risk of being corrupt or houses without a window, or worn out clothes. Inability to be on an insurance plan is frequent.
    The poor depend on a welfare system that requires a specific (governmental or otherwise) bureaucracy, which generates employment for middle-class laborers such as economists, doctors, social workers, and urban planners.

  • Gender – China

    Intro. To talk about current issues of gender inequality in China is to talk about the consequences of a quickly developing socialist society with a patriarchal, agriculturally intensive and confucianist tradition.

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  • Critical Book Review of Tracing the Veins

    History of Modern Latin America
    Profesor Javier Morillo-Alicea
    November 11th, 2002
    Yongho Kim

    The book Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata by Janet Finn is a study of two mining societies owned by one company. She intends to break off from the traditional way of viewing local histories as the stories of nations, and to instead approach a company, Anaconda, which exercised heavy influence over both Butte and Chuquicamata, as the analytic unit. By doing so, she is arguing that to bracket objects of study in terms of nations is not as obvious as we might think, but that it even produces confusion in places like Chuquicamata, in which the prevalent social issues not only arise from the local situation but of a larger situation.

    In her first two chapters, Janet outlines the history of Butte’s laboral movement in relationship with the Anaconda Corporation. She then proceeds to define the history of Chuquicamata, the background of the region as a producer of nitrates and later copper. The particular domestic political history of Chile and the international background of such events as the Vietnam War are provided as a reference to domestic situations, ending with Salvador Allende’s nationalization of the mines, and the following military government. In doing so she follows a more or less official storyline along with remarks on superficial social inequalities within the mining industry, particularly Chuquicamata.

    In the next chapters, Finn delves into the daily lives of the people and the organization of the labor movement in both Chuquicamata and Butte. She describes the propagandistic methods of the Anaconda Corporation to create a contrasting image of developed Yankees and underdeveloped Chileans, and the tradition being continued after the nationalization, the military government, and the “democratic” civil government. Particularly, I believe the author had more to say about the chapter on “the crafting of everyday life” but she chose to omit for political reasons or lack of particular examples.

    The author’s thesis, although not explicitly stated in the introductory pages, seems to be a reaffirmation of contemporary anthropological concept of approaching the non-western civilization just as a sociologist would approach the western civilization.
    Still, the way Finn approaches the two societies says something about the current pre-conceived idea of history as a discipline in many history students. She struggles to bring the individual narratives of working women and men up to the sociological meticulosity of those living in Butte. Despite her efforts and a much better result than classical anthropological writings, I still read a notion of “them” towards the people of Chuquicamata who talk in Finn’s book. They’re given special consideration throughout the argument, and it’s good that Butte’s people are represented as thoroughly as their Chilean counterparts.

    But Butte’s people are portrayed as a certain standard against which Chuquicamata people must be compared. For example, the labor movement in Butte has an intellectual basis but in Chuquicamata it does not seem to be so. The beginning of each chapter has a citation to one person from either community, and one social theorist who will always be either European or North American. Also, the interviews seem to have been carried in such a way that the miners in Chuquicamata will sound in more simplistic, or less learned ways. I don’t know if this is because of a rough translation, or the disposition of the interviewed people, but this definitely comes to reaffirm the stereotype that latin American people enjoy raw nature and dancing while “Westerners” are serious workers. In this sense, then, I would question the author’s claim in that she overcame the cultural bias prevalent in the western social sciences.

    In sum, the book challenges and breaks the notion of nation as an analytic unit, and contributes to a better knowledge of the so-called underdeveloped societies by describing the complexities and similarities of such societies to those considered western.

  • Proposal: Nationalism in Argentina

    Paper Topic Proposal

    History of Modern Latin America
    Profesor Javier Morillo-Alicea
    November 5th, 2002
    Yongho Kim

    I will write my paper on the influence that Argentinian nationalistic self-image had on the ignition of dirty war and regional violence during Peronism and the military coup.
    In Prisoner without a name, cell without a number, Timberman indicates that for the government and all major terrorist groups in Argentina “this barbarism… must be eradicated before it is possible to enter Civilization” (20) I believe he intentionally paraphrases Sarmiento’s idea that there is a barbarous portion to Argentina, an alien portion that doesn’t “naturally” belong to it, and thus must be cleaned in order to hold a national “soul”. This argument justifies the militia that intends to exterminate every person related to the political opposing their own, anyone who protests publicly against them, and all “those who remember their names”. (50)
    My argument develops from a hint Timberman leaves in the end of his book. He suggests on a passing note that Argentina, being the most advanced nation of Latin America, was overcome with the same Nazi paranoia that once overcame the most advanced nation of Europe. I have a vague intuition from our previous readings that nationalism, at the same time it delineates the citizens of a nation in a “horizontal camaraderie”, also isolates the population as a group against all other groups not recognized as “our nation”.
    For this, I am looking forward to read several articles on the pre-peronist development of nationalism and the “standardized” imagined nation in Argentina, and on the racial melting-pot ideology. Argentine media coverage on the political issues of the time would be helpful if available.

    The already assigned readings including: Keyth/Haynes, Sarmiento, Anderson and Knudson.

    Rock, David. Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact. (University of California, 1993)

    Joseph, Galen. “Taking Race Seriously: Whiteness in Argentina’s National and Transnational Imaginary. (Whiteness in the Field)”, Identities, Sept 2000 v7 i3 p333-72
    Abstract: Middle class portenos (the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) display their ambivalence about the whiteness of Argentina and their own belonging to the nation through their use of the intermittently racializing discourse of “seriousness.” The discourse of “seriousness” is used to talk about the status of Argentina’s political, economic, and cultural “development” and Argentina’s place in the global hierarchy of nations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1994-1997), this essay analyzes the contradictions of porteno articulations and disarticulations of their own Argentine-ness in relation to racial identity. The analysis centers on how portenos’ assessments of President Carlos Menem’s representative-ness reflect the instability of racial norms in contemporary Argentina. Portenos’ ambiguous position in their own national and transnational imaginary – privileged within Argentina but marginal in the world – is reflected in their use of racial categories and racializing discourses.

    Delaney, Jean H. “Imagining El ser Argentino: cultural nationalism and romantic concepts of nationhood in early twentieth-century Argentina”, Journal of Latin American Studies, August 2002 v34 i3 p625-59
    Abstract: This article reexamines early twentieth-century Argentine cultural nationalism, arguing that the movement’s true significance rests in its promotion of a vision of Argentine nationhood that closely resembled the ideal of the folk nation upheld by German romanticism. Drawing from recent theoretical literature on ethnic nationalism, the article examines the political implications of this movement and explores the way in which the vigorous promotion of the ethnocultural vision of argentinidad by cultural nationalists served to detach definitions of Argentine identity from constitutional foundations and from the ideas of citizenship and popular sovereignty. It also challenges the accepted view that Argentine cultural nationalism represented a radical break with late nineteenth-century positivism. Positivist ideas about social organicism, collective character and historical determinism all helped paved the way for the Romantic vision of nationhood celebrated by the cultural nationalists.

    Spektorowski, Alberto. “The Ideological Origins of Right and Left Nationalism in Argentina, 1930-43”, Journal of Contemporary History, v29, i1 (Jan 1994), 155-184

    Metz, Allan. “Leopoldo Lugones and the Jews: the contradictions of Argentine nationalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jan 1992 v15 n1 p36-61
    Abstract: The purpose of this article is to present the opinions of the Argentine intellectual, Leopoldo Lugones, regarding the Jews and the reasons for his seemingly contradictory attitudes towards them that mirror both the general precariousness of Jewish existence in Argentina and the contradictions of Argentine nationalism. Moreover, these writings also reveal other related aspects of Lugones’ thought and provide a partial overview of Argentine nationalistic thought from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1930s, thereby offering insights into the nature and evolution of Argentine nationalism in reaction to Jews and other immigrant groups.

    Carlson, Eric S. “The Influence of French “Revolutionary War” Ideology on the Use of Torture in Argentina’s “Dirty War””, Human Rights Review, April-June 2000 v1 i4 p71
    Extract: In this article, I explore the influence of the French mission on the Argentine Armed Forces, specifically as it relates to El Proceso’s campaign of mass torture [5] from 1976-1982. In doing so, I shall outline what I consider the three essential components of the fused French/Argentine ideology: the holy mission of the soldier; the demonic nature of the enemy; and the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with a struggle between the two.

    Schneider, Arnd. Futures Lost: nostalgia and identity among Italian immigrants in Argentina. (Peter Lang, 2001)
    Extract: Schneider deems Argentine identity to be extremely fragile; a consequence of the dominant position of the melting-pot ideology and the attempts by the Argentine state to overcome the particularities of immigrant cultures offering a standardized idea of Argentina through education. This, he argues, has impeded the individual’s anchorage for his or her identity in a specific tradition.

  • Alsino and the Condor: The Choice of Identity Over the Law

    Yong Ho Kim
    Professor Kiarina Kordela
    HCST 10 : Introduction to Humanities and Cultural Studies
    25 April 2002

    Alsino and the Condor is a movie filmed by the Nicaraguan Film Institute and co-produced by Mexico, Cuba and Costa Rica. According to The New York Times, it “is a film about injustice and revolution, not looked at directly but seen, as if passing, by Alsino, a solemn little peasant who, more than anything else, wants to fly.” . The description is more or less appropriate; the movie is the story of a kid named Alsino, who dreams of flying and jumps from a tall tree. This storyline is filled with a somber account of the Sandinista revolution in its effort to undermine the Somoza dictatorship, which presents a sharp contrast (seemingly) to the dreamlike pursuits of Alsino.

    Having been produced during the height of the “democratization of the arts” policy of the Sandinista government , the movie occasionally contains typically propagandistic elements. However, close examination of its dialectic structure reveals methods that sweep the audience away with the political message.

    The movie’s plot is based on Alsino: Novela , a novel by Pedro Prado, a modernist Chilean writer. Both stories share the same initial settings and similar proceeding. But halfway through the story, the movie takes a detour towards the negation of flight and justification of a new regime (Sandinista Government). The extreme polarity of the two stories will ease the observation of relevant elements for analysis. This paper will utilize Lacanian psycho-analytic theories to decipher the foundations laid in the movie to make the Sandinista discourse possible, and social theories from Guy Debord and application of Lacanian theories by Žižek Slavoj to discuss the discourse’s actual body.

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