International Trade Essay -- essays papers

International Trade In today’s world there are many issues in need of reformation, one of which is international trade, otherwise known as globalization. Although there are a great deal of rules, regulations, and policies imposed on international trade, the manner in which those rules have been enforced is a major controversy that seems to be escalating day by day. At the center of the controversy is the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO was established in 1995 in order to transform the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into an enforceable global commercial code. Critics of the WTO say that instead of being run democratically and in the interest of member countries, it has become the enforcer of corporate managed trade. A system whose ethics are not in favor of the public interest, instead the focus has shifted to large corporations and making money. Profit is the motivating factor behind decisions made by the WTO. By looking at international trade from the rational perspective, the WTO has not only failed to protect consumers, workers, and the environment, it has also acquired a number of opponents and protestors. Recent issues concerning the WTO include President Clinton’s signing of a bill, which grants permanent normal trade relations to China and virtually guarantees them membership into the WTO. Not concerned with China’s communist regime that abuses its workers, supporters of the bill call it a â€Å"major victory for U.S. companies like Microso...

Grief and Rosaldo’s Rage Essay

She had not suffered much. Her death came and went quickly. Michelle was dead, gone forever at the blink of an eye. As her husband looked over her body at the bottom of a 65 foot sheer precipice, many ideas and emotions fluttered in his mind. Renato Rosaldo describes his experience at the site of the fatal accident, overlooking the body of his lifeless wife, Michelle Rosaldo: â€Å"I felt like in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving (476).† Although at the time of the tragedy and many months after, Renato Rosaldo found himself in an almost delusional state of grief, the calamity helped Rosaldo reach a state of enlightenment with his study of the Ilongot tribe. Michelle and Renato Rosaldo had studied the Ilongot tribe in the northern part of the Philippines as anthropologists. Renato Rosaldo’s past attempts at understand the Ilongot’s reason for head hunting, â€Å"rage, born of grief,† had failed using his method of hermeneutics. The conclusions Rosaldo drew from this explanation were, at best, educated guesses. Trying to be objective to his study of the Ilongot tribe, Rosaldo could not understand the driving factor behind killing a fellow human as a way of dealing with the loss of someone close to you. What he later started to understand was that the ritual was something that could not easily and readily be described. It was not until the time of his wife’s death that he could comprehend the force of anger possible in bereavement. The force was so strong within him that drawing parallels with the ways Rosaldo’s own culture had molded him into dealing with bereavement started to overlap with the Ilongot way. This emotional force became the key in helping Rosaldo unlock the mystery of this rage via bereavement, and unfortunately, it could only come at the price of Michelle Rosaldo. Renato Rosaldo’s explanation of why the Ilongot used head hunting as a way of dealing with bereavement is compelling due to his understanding of emotional force through his own personal experience. After the loss of his brother, then four years later, the loss of his colleague, friend, and wife Michelle Rosaldo, Rosaldo experienced  bereavement and the emotional force that accompanies it first hand. Spending months grieving, Rosaldo’s insights on the topic of head hunting had changed dramatically. Shortly after his wife’s death, an excerpt from his journal concurs with the change of perception of the Ilongot people. My journal went on to reflect more broadly on death, rage, and headhunting by speaking of my ‘wish for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So, I need a place to carry my anger – and can we say a solution of the imagination is better than theirs? And can we condemn them when we napalm villages? Is our rationale so much sounder than theirs (478)? Rosaldo’s experience with personal bereavement left him with a sense of what despair and rage could conjure up in the human being. Wishing for the Ilongot solution himself, Rosaldo finally realized that the Ilongot were not as different as he had originally thought. The emotional force Rosaldo had felt has the same core as the force that pushed the older tribesman into a headhunting raid. Rosaldo’s comparison of his solution of the imagination and the ritualistic headhunting had rage as the common seed. Rosaldo’s initial attempts to find what drives the older Ilongot men to headhunt using traditional ethnographic methods failed. Renato and Michelle Rosaldo played a tape of a headhunting celebration five years prior, evoking great emotion from the crowd of Ilongot because the celebrator on the tape had already been deceased and headhunting was now forbidden. â€Å"The song pulls at us, drags our hearts, it makes us think of our dead uncle†¦Leave off now, isn’t that enough? Even I, a woman, cannot stand the way it feels inside my heart†¦At the time I could only feel apprehensive and diffusely sense the force of the emotions experienced†¦(473-474).† Rosaldo’s emotional detachment from the man speaking on the tape recorder prevents him with identifying with the Ilongot tribesmen. This lack of emotional connection is understandable, as Rosaldo himself was obviously not as close to the man practicing the ceremony as his family. This understanding of the rage and sorrow that the Ilongot members had felt during the listening is a crucial element of how the dynamic between bereavement and sorrow function. Rosaldo understood that his analysis could easily be brought under fire due to the tying in of personal experiences during his ethnography of the Ilongot culture. Rosaldo concurs that there is potential for risk by saying, â€Å"Introducing myself into this account requires a certain hesitation both because of the discipline’s taboo and because of its increasingly frequent violation by essays laced with trendy amalgams of continental philosophy and autobiographical snippets (475).† The possibility for an anthropologist who brings personal experience into an analysis of a foreign culture to become too self absorbed is always possible. Rosaldo avoids this frequent ethnographic infringement by separating self righteousness from applying personal experiences for comparison in anthropology. Rosaldo claims that his and all interpretations are provisional, stating that â€Å"they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others (476),† which presents that he only began to fathom the force of what the Ilongot’s had been describing as the anger held because of bereavement. Although some would argue that the risks with mixing emotion during anthropological study are too great, total objectivity can not always provide a complete analysis. Although being objective and getting the factual aspects of rituals and cultural symbols provides great insight of a culture and its formal procedures, it does not necessarily give the ethnographer the true experience of the event; let it be bereavement or something else. The true meaning behind many events and cultural symbols that are looked at objectively are really quite open to interpretation. Who is to say that what the ethnographer interprets as being one thing, in turn, does not represent something totally different for the subject actually being studied? Although it is not true for all cases, bereavement and the emotional forces that are its byproduct can only be successfully analyzed and interpreted when the observer’s experience overlaps or parallels that of the subject’s. Rosaldo later found his own experience overlapping that of the Ilongot’s. After suffering through not only the loss of his young brother’s life, but the loss of his wife’s, Renato Rosaldo’s view of headhunting had drastically  changed. Although Rosaldo had spent fourteen years attempting to conclude the actual drive behind the Ilongot murderous ritual using current anthropological methodology, in one swift moment, he had felt the drive within himself. This emotional force had left him seeking for the Ilongot solution. Realizing that this rage within him had pieced together the ethnographic puzzle of the Ilongot headhunting, Rosaldo masterfully avoided becoming too self absorbed while giving his account of the Ilongot ritualistic beheading. Rosaldo posed the question, â€Å"Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them (470)?† After review of Rosaldo’s essay, one will most likely conclude that the answer is no. Works Cited Rosaldo, Renato. â€Å"Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.† Literacies. Ed. Terence Brunk Suzanne Diamond Priscilla Perkins Ken Smith New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 469-487

Childhood Amnesia - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 3 Words: 957 Downloads: 3 Date added: 2019/03/13 Category Sociology Essay Level High school Tags: Childhood Essay Did you like this example? Childhood Amnesia It is evident in humans around the world to lack the ability to recall childhood events such as the places they were and what emotions they felt. The first and most famous explanation comes by Sigmund Freud in 1953, who first offered an explanation to this phenomenon and introduced the term of Childhood Amnesia. In 1910, Freud referred to this phenomenon as the inability to recall episodic memories from the first two years of life and he credited repression of traumatic events as the cause to Childhood Amnesia. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Childhood Amnesia" essay for you Create order Many have investigated and questioned whether repression is the correct explanation to infantile amnesia, which is, another name for Childhood Amnesia however, this explanation by Freud had only raised more questions. Considering the number of several explanations about childhood amnesia there is surprisingly very little evidence supporting its existence. Most memory theories fall into two categories: neurological theory, which attributes the cause of Childhood Amnesia to the underdevelopment of brain structures in roles of the hippocampus (HPC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which is essential in forming and retaining the episodic memories in the brain. It appears that an explanation for rapidly forgetting early-life events is due to cognitive development. As the brain matures it causes an inability in adults to recall memories from their early life because they were never formed, or the memories were once formed, but later they became unreachable due to the cerebral changes in order for language to develop. On the other hand, some psychological findings do support and weaken both theories and more importantly, we need to understand their causes. In 1967 Piaget investigated the Neurological theory where he suggested that at 18-24 months of age, language starts to develop in the brain structure where it is required to recall memories and it also starts to develop episodic memories which are very essential since Childhood Amnesia is the inability to form, retain and recall episodic memories. This theory implies that the cause of Childhood Amnesia is underdevelopment of the brain structures at 18-24 months of age then, a child would not be able to remember coming out of the womb or the first birthday party. Regardless, of the neurological theory Howe and Courage (1993) were able to find that children of two years of age could accurately recall events that took place in the first age of life. According to the neurological theory Childhood Amnesia is due to a delayed development of the structures required to form episodic memories, this theory is conflicting because we clearly see through other studies that children, who have not yet reached the indicated age have developed the ability to form, retain and recall episodic memories. Another study done by the Program in Neurosciences Mental Health, The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada proposed the neurogenic hypothesis. The Neurogenic hypothesis focuses on the postnatal brain development of new neurons to the hippocampus. They stated that infants including humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents display in the hippocampal high levels of neurogenesis and the infants were not capable of forming long term lasting memories. In the same way, there was a decrease of new neuron levels to the hippocampus to have the ability to form stable long-term memory. They insinuated that neurogenesis levels negatively controls the ability to form long-term memories by replacing synaptic connections in preexisting hippocampal memory circuits. On the contrary, it has been discovered that there are several species with the ability to form long lasting memories increasing significantly when the neurogenesis decreases. Thirdly, Nelson Fivush investigated the theory of language development in 2004 by comparing two groups. The first group being the parents that discussed past memories with their children and the second group of parents that did not discuss past memories with their children. They discovered that the children that discussed their memories with the parents reported a superior number of memories than the children that did not. As a result, Nelson Fivush (2004) found that the memories that occurred before the ability to communicate verbally would develop at risk of being lost because the lack of communication prevents children from processing their memories. Anyhow, as per language developmental theory, the ability to recall episodic memories requires the development of language; nevertheless, we are able to confirm that animals do not have the ability to communicate with sounds in saying words, then, if they are not able to communicate with spoken words, they should not be able to form episodic memories at all. Psychologists suggest that episodic memory is a human phenomenon however, recently, was little evidence found that animals could recall a unique past experience and respond appropriately. Clayton, Dickinson Griffiths (1999) confirmed that birds have an episodic like components of memory, as they were able to locate and remember when and where they found a variety of food. Conclusion In conclusion, we witnessed a number of supportive evidences explaining all the theories however, they are conflicted by contradictory evidence. The first contradictory evidence suggested that children, who have not yet reached the indicated age have developed the ability to form, retain and recall episodic memories. Second, the neurogenic hypothesis contradictory evidence, discovered that there are several species with the ability to form long lasting memories increasing significantly when the neurogenesis decreases. Third, as per language developmental theory the contradictory evidence stated confirmed that animals cannot communicate with spoken words, but they were able to form episodic memories. It is clear that childhood amnesia is not being understood by looking at the biological or developmental theories. The researches lack culture, emotion, and repression that should be considered to better understand the cause of infantile amnesia. Even a more objective method such us the usage of a fMRI, could bring light to understanding this phenomenon.