Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Simon Bacon Katarzyna Bronk John L. Hochheimer Stephen Morris Peter Twohig Ana Borlescu Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter John Parry Karl Spracklen 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 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-346-8 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition. Table of Contents Introduction Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara Part I Xenophobia ‘The Invasion from the East’: European Fears over Romanian Migration Stefania Alina Cherata Patriotism as Fear of Alterity Catalin Ghita Part II vii 3 17 Islamophobia Tough Asher: Mass Sport after 9/11 Leonore Bell 31 Liminal Moments: Fears and Anxieties between Peace and War Ismee Tames 39 Part III Russophobia Part IV Part V Fear as an Integrating Factor in Post-Soviet Countries Katarzyna Czerewacz-Filipowicz 53 Transnistrian Conflict: The Next Stage of Putin’s Scenario? Agnieszka Konopelko 63 Cultural Dimensions of Fears and Anxieties What Are Romanians Afraid Of? Romanians’ Fears and Anxieties in Today’s Press Melitta Szathmary 79 Anxiety and Dyslexia: A Cross-Cultural Study Shally Novita and Evelin Witruk 91 Imaginary Aspects of Fears and Anxieties Fear, Ghouls and Politics: Obscure Power Games in an Equally Obscure Village in the Danube Plains Nicolae Panea and Vlad Preda 107 Is Literary Interpretation Conditioned by Inherited Determinants? The Case of the Haunted House Clara Pallejá Lopez Part VI 117 Fears and Anxieties: Between the Transcendent and the Immanent Scientific Explanations of Fear and Anxiety Relating to the Choice of Deity Sukran Karatas 129 Fear of Commitment: Fear of ‘I Love You’ Izabela Dixon and Magdalena Hodalska 141 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 viii Introduction __________________________________________________________________ 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 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 x Introduction __________________________________________________________________ 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 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. 1 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.