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Social Psychology Commons

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social Psychology

Groundhog Oracles And Their Forebears, Daniel S. Capper Jan 2016

Groundhog Oracles And Their Forebears, Daniel S. Capper

Faculty Publications

Groundhog Day animal weather forecasting ceremonies continue to proliferate around the United States despite a lack of public confidence in the oracles. This essay probes religio-historical and original ethnographic perspectives to offer a psychological argument for why these ceremonies exist. Employing Paul Shepard’s notion of a felt loss of sacred, intimate relationships with nonhuman nature, as well as Peter Homans’ concept of the monument that enables mourning, this essay argues that groundhog oracles serve as monuments that allow humans experientially to attempt to heal lost sacred relationships with animals like weather forecasting bears, hedgehogs, and badgers


Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai Jan 2002

Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai

Faculty Publications

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in articulating feminist and postcolonial politics, raises issues of importance for both first world and third world feminists as well as enacting some of the very dangers which accompany those tenuous relationships. Spivak's essays, "French Feminism in an International Frame" (1981) and "French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics" (1992), provide a rich arena in which she presents powerful cautions regarding international solidarities and explores the complicated dynamics of ethical relationships on multiple levels, including that between mother and daughter, bourgeois postcolonial feminist and the woman of the "ground," as well as between metropolitan and postcolonial feminists.