Eric Mark Kramer

Cultural fusion theory: An alternative to acculturation

ABSTRACT This article lays out a theoretical framework for cultural fusion theory. This theory borrows from various theoretical frameworks to provide a more realistic description of the immigrant experience. Specifically, cultural fusion theory describes how newcomers acculturate into the dominant culture and maintain aspects of their minority culture, while at the same time the dominant or host culture also fuses aspects off the newcomer’s culture into the dominant culture to create a fused intercultural identity. Boundary conditions, assumptions, axioms, and theorems are presented to define cultural fusion theory.

“It’s Not Like You Need to Live 10 or 20 Years”: Challenges to Patient-Centered Care in Gynecologic Oncologist–Patient Interactions

The literature suggests that the patient-perspective approach (i.e., eliciting and responding to patients’ perspectives, including beliefs, preferences, values, and attitudes) to patient-centered care (PCC) is not a reliable predictor of positive outcomes; however, little is known about why the patient-perspective approach does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes. By using discourse analysis to examine 44 segments of oncologist–patient interactions, we found that providers’ use of patient-perspective contextualization can affect the quality of care through (a) constructing the meanings of patient conditions, (b) controlling interpreting frames for patient conditions, and (c) manipulating patient preferences through strategic information sharing. We concluded that providers’ use of patient-perspective contextualization is an insufficient indicator of PCC because these discursive strategies can be used to control and manipulate patient preferences and perspectives. At times, providers’ patient-perspective contextualization can silence patients’ voice and appear discriminatory.

A critique of Bernstein’s beyond objectivism and relativism: science, hermeneutics, and praxis

This analysis comments on Bernstein’s lack of clear understanding of subjectivity, based on his book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Bernstein limits his interpretation of subjectivity to thinkers such as Gadamer and Habermas. The authors analyze the ideas of classic scholars such as Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche. Husserl put forward his notion of transcendental subjectivity and phenomenological ramifications of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Nietzsche referred to subjectivity as “perspectivism,” the inescapable fact that any and all consciousnesses exist in space and time. Consciousness is fundamentally constituted of cultural, linguistic, and historical dimensions.

Neoliberalism and the Production of Enemies: The Commercial Logic of Yahoo! News

The study of commercial media offers one of the best ways to gain an understanding of the role of violence in contemporary society, not in terms of an instrumental concern with “the effects” of violence on individuals, though this question has some limited importance, but rather in the sense of how, within the contemporary neoliberal context, media systematically normalize and justify violence as an outcome of their commercial organization. Such an approach focuses on several aspects of how media operate including (1) how commercial media collapse the distinction between news, entertainment, and advertising, (2) how conceptualizing audiences as commodities leads to their segmentation and isolation, (3) how this process of segmentation breaks down the possibility of reasonable democratic deliberation while (4) reinforcing biases and other polarizing dynamics among audiences, (5) how violence and the production of enemies serve useful marketing goals within commercial content, and (6) the role of commercial media in the broader neoliberal political economy. This chapter examines these intertwined questions by taking Yahoo! News as a case study of commercialized media content and exemplar of contemporary sophism.

Phenomenology Of International Images

This article comprises the first attempt to investigate “international image” phenomenologically. First a review and critique of current social scientific measurement of public opinion is demonstrated to be an essentially different phenomenon from “international image,” despite the popular confusion of the two. Then using Husserl’s analysis of “certitude,” international image is demonstrated to be essentially an expression of the natural attitude towards the “actual.” The logocentric aspect of television is explored as a major contributor to the blind faith in international images. Doxic sedimentation consisting in large part of a world consituted of video images is addressed as the source of international images and also of perspectival nationalism.

Immigrant Identity: Part I

In this article first conventional definitions and the major traditional theories of self and identity are summarized. Because immigrant identity is central to other processes they too are summarized. They include the concepts of integration, assimilation, acculturation, adaptation, adjustment, and adoption. It is important and useful to review the distinctions made between integration and assimilation as well as the distinctions between self and identity that exist in the conventional sociology and psychology literature. Too often these concepts are confused or used as synonyms. Then a final section presents a discussion of contemporary theories of immigrant identity specifically and the widely observed process of enclaving, which manifests in-group and out-group identification. The theories of cultural fusion, semantic field theory, and dimensional accrual and dissociation are summarized and applied to the phenomenon of immigrant identity.

Anticulture and aging

In this chapter, we synthesize two powerful theories: the theory of symbolic violence and the theory of social death. The result is a new concept, a new way to conceptualize social structures, institutions that breed social and physical death, what I call anticultures.