Eduardo Acuña Duran

"This book presents a theoretical discussion of problems and issues encountered in the Native American community from a perspective that accepts Native knowledge as legitimate. Native American cosmology and metaphor are used extensively in order to deal with specific problems such as alcoholism, suicide, family, and community problems. The authors discuss what it means to present material from the perspective of a people who have legitimate ways of knowing and conceptualizing reality and show that it is imperative to understand intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression in order to understand the issues facing Native Americans today."--pub. website.

As both ethnoracial and sex/gender categories come to be increasingly understood as fluid, contextual, and constructed, transgender identities have gained cultural legitimacy, yet transracial claims remain widely contested. This contrast has prompted the question, “If transgender, why not transracial?” I contend that this comparison overlooks fundamental differences between ethnoracial and sex/gender systems—particularly in their modalities of division and structures of exclusion—that render the analogy problematic. Drawing out these distinctions, I argue that transgender identification emerges as a plausible outcome of a sex/gender system—constituted through culturally elaborated nomenclatures, institutions, and practices—that has historically given rise to variable categories of “deviance” from cis-heteronormative standards. By contrast, transracialism remains unintelligible and will likely remain so within ethnoracial systems that sustain hierarchical boundaries between legitimized racialized groups, boundaries that are reinforced through collective loyalties. Recognizing this distinction, this study calls for greater precision in theorizing how culturally elaborated categories acquire specific structural forms.

This study explores the centrality of the senses for the maintenance or disruption of people’s commonsensical familiarity with the world. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people affected by depersonalization/derealization, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as a dissociative condition in which people perceive the world as dream-like, I conceptualize what I term somatic defamiliarization. I define somatic defamiliarization as a process whereby people experience previously unquestioned sensory phenomena, such as mundane objects or their bodies, as unfamiliar. Building on Berger and Luckmann’s work, I contend that somatic defamiliarization is a perpetual, albeit latent, condition of social life that threatens reality maintenance. I discuss how the concept of somatic defamiliarization can be applied to explore the somatic qualities of experiential ruptures that people may undergo in various circumstances, such as immigration or war.

Within Ajzen's Planned Behavior Theory framework, this article tests a model to estimate the predictors of entrepreneurial intention in academic scientists working in Chile. We adapted into Spanish the entrepreneurship intention questionnaire. We tested the entrepreneurship intention model on a sample of 1,027 scientists leading research projects funded by the Chilean Scientific and Technological Development Fund, the country's primary scientific research grant. The results show strong empirical support for the entrepreneurship intention model proposed while highlighting some critical issues specific to entrepreneurial intention in scientists. In particular, we found an indirect effect of perceived subjective social support on entrepreneurial intention, which is mediated by entrepreneurial attitude and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship. These results suggest that policies orientated toward promoting academic entrepreneurship should include developing a healthy social environment toward it, meaning that entrepreneurial intention is not only an individual but an organizational challenge. These policies should analyze the social norms guiding the scientists' reference groups to increase their effectiveness.