What Do You Do With Dead Porcupines? and other insights into slices of American life.

TMT posits that humans ingeniously, but quite unconsciously, solved this existential dilemma by developing cultural worldviews: All cultures provide a sense of meaning by offering an account of the origin of the universe, a blueprint for acceptable conduct on Earth, and a promise of immortality symbolically, by creation of large monuments, great works of art or science, amassing great fortunes, having children; and literally, through the various kinds of afterlives that are a central feature of organized religions to those who live up to culturally prescribed standards.

Thus, although cultures vary considerably, they share in common the same defensive psychological function: Most academics at the time rejected these ideas on the grounds that, having been derived from an existential psychodynamic perspective, they could not be tested. How does this theory relate to mortality salience MS?

And what's an experimental example of mortality salience at work? Our first experiment was conducted with 22 municipal court judges in Tucson, Ariz.

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We told the judges we were studying the relation between personality traits, attitudes and bond decisions. A bond is a sum of money a defendant pays prior to trial to be released from prison in the interim. The judges completed a set of questionnaires consisting of some standard personality assessment instruments. Embedded in the personality assessments were two questions designed to trigger mortality salience: The judges were then given a legal case brief virtually identical to one they would typically see before a trial.

The brief stated the arresting charge, which was prostitution, and the defendant's address, employment record and length of residency. A copy of the citation issued to the defendant when she was arrested was also included. Finally, the judges were given a form to set bond for the defendant.

• A Darker Crimson (Crimson City Book 4).
• From Genius to Madness.
• The Porcupine’s Quill | Book Listing | World Body.
• Reshaping Gender and Class in Rural Spaces (Gender in a Global/Local World).

We chose judges for the study because they are rigorously trained to make rational and uniform decisions based solely on evidence relative to existing laws. And we had them pass judgment on an alleged prostitute because prostitution offends the moral sensibilities of the average American. To the extent that cultural worldviews serve to mitigate mortal terror, we hypothesized that judges who thought about death would set higher bonds than those in the control condition.

The results were striking.

Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election

Since then, more than studies by independent researchers in approximately 20 countries have found support for hypotheses derived from TMT. Do you think this effect comes into play during election season[https: Yes, we think so. To test this hypothesis, we had participants read campaign statements purportedly written by three gubernatorial candidates after a MS or control induction.

The candidates varied in leadership style: For example, the charismatic leader stated: I am very careful in laying out a detailed blueprint of what needs to be done so that there is no ambiguity. I know that each individual can make a difference. In the control condition, only four of 95 participants voted for the charismatic candidate, with the rest of the votes split evenly between the task and relationship oriented leaders.

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Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there is life beyond your borders. Brilliant how Clark Blaise or rather Gerald Lander, his Faustian hero and anti-hero shaken by mid-life crisis, moves about in that part of the world which I myself know best, which has fascinated me since my childhood, my family ground, which nonetheless, will always be full of riddles for me. The ice of the Communist paralysis has melted, the submerged bonds of the neighbouring countries which had developed over centuries are finally becoming recognizable again.

But so are the scars, the wounds inflicted on the neighbours by German guilt. And naturally, I have to think of the poet, short story writer and novelist, Johannes Bobrowski, a native of Tilsit birthplace of my father , a town which is called Sovietsk today, and is a part of the Russian enclave, known as Kaliningrad Oblast.

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Sprache abgehetzt mit dem muden Mund auf dem endlosen Weg zum Hause des Nachbarn. In other stories, we find ourselves in Gdansk, Sopot or Pomerania. This is where they have always lived together: This is where they have learned and profited from one another in times of tolerance and this is where they turned life into hell for one another when times were bad. Not only here, have people come to know from painful experience that the varnish of civilization is very thin indeed. So that it is not forgotten that this danger is always dormant, it is important to speak about it and to write about it.

A patchwork novel, a novella composed of tales, an assembly of short stories, where each story taken by itself reveals great diversity in terms of style and perspective. Here is a master at work, a virtuoso taking us on a tour de force through time and space, and through the tricky history of the short story. Whoever knows this, whoever knows even one single person who has been in the claws of this incomprehensible disease will be touched especially by this aspect of the stories.

I have already mentioned the diversity of locations Blaise takes us to: Places Clark Blaise captures perfectly in his sensuous rendering of atmosphere. A journey through time and space, encompassing three generations and three continents, ending in the present-day Vienna, Berggasse number 19, where once a certain Dr Freud dissected the soul of the world. You must be dreaming. One could fill a library with all the stories, novels, travelogues, fairy tales, and poems of Western authors who have dared to explicate the Subcontinent.

Clark, too, has written with unusual insight and success about India and its people. His early work, in collaboration with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Nights in Calcutta , received great acclaim. This is how unjust history can be -- awarding the undeserving former colonial powers with new ideas, new sensibilities, new perspectives! Clark Blaise, though, is probably one of the very few Westerners who manage to give readers insight into the complicated structures of the Indian Diaspora.

What I value about Clark Blaise is the way in which he perceives the world: One can also say: May there be many translations of his work!

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In , he was elected president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Unpacking Poetry Guide 2: Wordless Novels in the Classroom Guide 3: Canada's Journal of the Printing Arts. Author comments In story collections, context is all.