Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century: The European Context and Beyond
Transcript of Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century: The European Context and Beyond
EDITED BY CATALIN GHITA AND ROBERT BESHARA
FEAR AND ANXIETYIN THE 21ST CENTURYTHE EUROPEAN CONTEXT AND BEYOND
INTER-DISCIPLINARY PRESS
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard
Dr Ken Monteith
Advisory Board
Simon Bacon Ana Borlescu
Katarzyna Bronk Ann-Marie Cook
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S Ram Vemuri
A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/
The Hostility and Violence Hub
‘Fear and Anxiety’
2015
Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century:
The European Context and Beyond
Edited by
Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015
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First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara
Part I Xenophobia
‘The Invasion from the East’: European Fears over 3
Romanian Migration
Stefania Alina Cherata
Patriotism as Fear of Alterity 17
Catalin Ghita
Part II Islamophobia
Tough Asher: Mass Sport after 9/11 31
Leonore Bell
Liminal Moments: Fears and Anxieties between Peace and War 39
Ismee Tames
Part III Russophobia
Fear as an Integrating Factor in Post-Soviet Countries 53
Katarzyna Czerewacz-Filipowicz
Transnistrian Conflict: The Next Stage of Putin’s Scenario? 63
Agnieszka Konopelko
Part IV Cultural Dimensions of Fears and Anxieties
What Are Romanians Afraid Of? Romanians’ Fears and 79
Anxieties in Today’s Press
Melitta Szathmary
Anxiety and Dyslexia: A Cross-Cultural Study 91
Shally Novita and Evelin Witruk
Part V Imaginary Aspects of Fears and Anxieties
Fear, Ghouls and Politics: Obscure Power Games in an 107
Equally Obscure Village in the Danube Plains
Nicolae Panea and Vlad Preda
Is Literary Interpretation Conditioned by Inherited 117
Determinants? The Case of the Haunted House
Clara Pallejá Lopez
Part VI Fears and Anxieties: Between the Transcendent and
the Immanent
Scientific Explanations of Fear and Anxiety Relating to 129
the Choice of Deity
Sukran Karatas
Fear of Commitment: Fear of ‘I Love You’ 141
Izabela Dixon and Magdalena Hodalska
Introduction
Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara
*****
This e-book contains a selection of the exciting chapters which were read and
thoroughly discussed at the 1st global conference on Fears and Anxieties in the 21st
Century: The European Context, a project initiated and led by Magdalena
Hodalska and Catalin Ghita with the support of Inter-Disciplinary.Net, which took
place at Mansfield College, Oxford between 29 and 31 July 2014. As volume
editors, we have decided to title this e-book Fears and Anxieties in the 21st
Century: The European Context and Beyond mainly because, though the main
focus of the inaugural edition remained present-day Europe, we have sought to
remain faithful to Inter-Disciplinary.Net’s global ethic and solid scientific
commitment. In 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The irony of this award becomes manifest as soon as one has noticed the obvious:
that its citizens are deeply and constantly disturbed by different forms of fears and
anxieties. Some of these are nurtured by real events, whilst others are rooted in
imaginary phenomena. What is even more relevant is that the fate of Europe
mirrors the fate of the world itself: events are no longer localized, but, as soon as
they have occurred, they have become part and parcel of our experience as a
genuinely cosmopolitan species.
What has happened in these 14 years since the inception of this unpredictably
tense and bloody century, which began under such boring auspices? Let us
summarize the main facts, for, as often is the case, they speack for themselves. In
2000, Vladimir Putin became President of Russia. In 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists
destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York City, the ‘War on Terror’ was
declared, the War in Afghanistan began, and Wikipedia was founded. In 2002, the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp was established. In 2003, the Iraq War began. In
2004, NATO was enlarged and the European Union incorporated most of the
former Eastern Bloc. In 2005, the 7/7 London bombings happened and Angela
Merkel became Germany’s first woman Chancellor. In 2006, Saddam Hussein was
executed. In 2007, the Global Financial Crisis began. In 2008, Barack Hussein
Obama became the first African American President of the United States. In 2009,
the Great Recession officially ended. In 2010, the Greek Depression became a
reality, the largest oil spill in US history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, the
Website Wikileaks released thousands of classified US documents, and Mohamed
Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia. In 2011, the Arab
Spring began, the Syrian Civil War began, the Occupy movement inspired
worldwide protests, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred, riots flared
across England, and Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jong-Il died,
and the Iraq War ended. In 2012, the Higgs Boson was discovered and the world
Introduction
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viii
did not end.1 In 2013, Edward Snowden released classified documents concerning
mass surveillance by the NSA, the Euromaidan protests began, Hugo Chávez,
Nelson Mandela, and Margaret Thatcher died, and Uruguay became the first
country to fully legalize cannabis.
Taking into account the afore-mentioned chronology, we may move ahead to
state, in a prudent manner, that fear and anxiety signify two related yet different
affects that are a part of the vast range of experiences which human beings can
have in this world. But one should equally note that fear and anxiety are two
concepts that have several meanings in distinct historical contexts, languages,
discourses, cultures, theories, etc. It is obvious, for space constraints, that it is not
our task, as editors, to give verdicts in this delicate respect, but, rather, to allow and
synchronize the various voices of the researchers, who set the tone during the
conference in diverse aspects of investigation, such as philosophy, literature,
linguistics, media studies, psychology, anthropology, history, cultural theory or
economics. We all shall have learnt more about the concepts of ‘fear’ and ‘alterity’
not by trying to define them outright, but by seeking to find their hidden meaning
by perusing the texts gathered in what we believe to be an exceptionally
challenging collective volume.
Thus, one may say that physiological psychologists have tested various theories
of emotions over the years to explain what causes emotions such as fear and
anxiety. Of course, they presuppose a reductionist paradigm as they attempt to
explain said emotions through linear, cause-effect relationships. We find such
explanations dissatisfactory because they do not honour the primacy, subtlety, and
complexity of human experience. According to physiological psychologists, fear
and anxiety are but neurochemical processes that are primarily associated with a
part of the brain called the amygdala, which is division of the limbic system—one
of the older sections of the brain according to the triune brain theory.2 An alarming
stimulus causes fear, which in effect results in the arousal of the sympathetic
nervous system, that element of the autonomic nervous system, which mobilizes
the body in a fight-or-flight response.
Expressed in a different manner, fear refers to a type of relating to a concrete
object/event in the world (be they definite, such as snakes, spiders, or indefinite,
such as darkness), which signals danger to us (i.e., the possibility of dying),
whereas anxiety refers to a fearful way of being in the world in relationship to no
specific object/event. Neurobiologically, fear is one of the six basic emotions,
according to Paul Ekman,3 that we are born into the world with; fear is beneficial
to mammals from an evolutionary perspective because it has survival value, which
explains why fear is an inheritable trait and why we adapted as a species to include
it as part of our makeup. After all, to experience fear in a dangerous situation
motivates us to instantly respond in proportion to circumstance: this is known as
the fight, flight, or freeze response, or simply, the stress response. Phobias, on the
other hand, activate our stress response as well, only disproportionately and to an
Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara
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ix
imagined object/event (e.g., the other) that does not signal danger to us in any
concrete or immediate way.
Along a well-known Freudian line of thought, if the primordial human fear is
fear of thanatos (death), which can be disguised in many forms as fear of
mutilation or fear of rejection (symbolic death), the remedy would be embracing
eros (sex/life/love). And if anxiety is deeply connected with uncertainty (or that
pervasive fear of the unknown), then hope may well be the long-awaited panacea.
After all, what is anxiety but untapped creativity that needs to be released in some
way, through, for example, sex, physical exercise, meditation or artistic
expression?
Without further ado, it is high time we briefly introduced the chapters contained
in this e-book. Concretely, in Part I, Xenophobia, Stefania-Alina Cherata presents
us with a case study which dissects Western Europeans’ irrational, yet constant,
fears of Romanian immigrants, whereas Catalin Ghita explores a theory of literary
xenophobia based on Emmanuel Levinas’s flexible concept of ‘alterity’. In Part II,
Islamophobia, Leonore Bell and Ismee Tames are curious about understanding
practices related to Islamophobia in a post-9/11 world as exemplified by popular
fitness movements (e.g. Crossfit and Tough Mudder) and emotional discourses in
digital Dutch newspapers, respectively. In Part III, Russophobia, Katarzyna
Czerewacz-Filipowicz and Agnieszka Konopelko are trying to unpack
Russophobia by trying to make sense of the complex and, at times, utterly
deceptive power dynamics between Russia and a number of post-Soviet countries.
In Part IV, Cultural Dimensions of Fears and Anxities, Melitta Szathmary, Shally
Novita and Evelin Witruk investigate cultural dimensions of fears and anxieties.
Szathmary scans the fears and anxieties of Romanians via a ‘radiography’ of the
Romanian press, whilst Novita and Witruk attempt to show the correlation between
anxiety and dyslexia among German and Indonesian children in relation to cultural
factors (e.g., individualism versus collectivism). In Part V, Imaginary Aspects of
Fears and Anxieties, Nicolae Panea and Vlad Preda, as well as Clara Pallejá Lopez
examine the way in which fears and anxieties are externalized via the faculty of
imagination. Panea and Preda focus on a case study in a Romanian village that
involves ‘ghouls’ and on how that story was taken up in the media and
subsequently creatively politicized, whereas Lopez is curious about the biology of
fear in relation to the haunted house in horror fiction. In Part VI, Fears and
Anxieties: Between the Transcendent and the Immanent, Sukran Karatas attempts
to prove scientifically that nonbelief in a deity presumed to have created the
universe is the cause of our fears and anxieties, whereas, using attractive anecdotes
and urban folklore as data, whilst Izabela Dixon and Magdalena Hodalska point to
European men’s insidious fear of commitment.
It is our hope that, though different and, at times, even dialectical, the various
voices which make up this volume are harmonized by their common commitment
to the integrity of research, as well as to the humanistic values which are menaced
Introduction
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x
by the seemingly-endless conflicts which beset present-day society. In the case of
this volume, at least, difference strives not to beget grim conflict, but stimulating
diversity.
Notes
1 This is, of course, a reference to the ‘2012 phenomenon’ that was a
misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. 2 Paul D. MacLean. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral
Functions. New York: Plenum Press, 1990, passim. 3 Tim Dalgleish and Michael J. Power. ‘Basic Emotions’. In Handbook of
Cognition and Emotion, 45-60. Chichester: Wiley, 1999.
Bibliography
Dalgleish, Tim and Michael J. Power. ‘Basic Emotions’. In Handbook of Cognition
and Emotion, 45-60. Chichester: Wiley, 1999.
Dalgleish, Tim and Michael J. Power. Handbook of Cognition and Emotion.
Chichester: Wiley, 1999.
MacLean, Paul D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral
Functions. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.
Catalin Ghita is Senior Lecturer at the University of Craiova, Romania and author
of numerous volumes of essays and literary criticism. He holds a PhD in Romanian
literature from the University of Craiova (2003), a PhD in English literature from
Tohoku University, Japan (2007) and Dr Habil title from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza
University of Iasi, Romania (2014). His main research interests include romantic
literature, the aesthetics of terror and the cultural relationship between Europe and
Asia.
Robert Beshara is a doctoral researcher at the University of West Georgia, where
he is also an instructor of Psychology. He is currently studying the relationship
between fear and identity vis-à-vis certain mediated political discourses.