abstract: Buddhism is thriving in US-America, attracting many converts with college and post-graduate degrees as well as selling all forms of popular culture. Yet little is known about the communication dynamics behind the diffusion of Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions into the United States. Religion is an underexplored area of intercultural communication studies (Nakayama & Halualani, 2010) and this study meets the lacuna in critical intercultural communication scholarship by investigating the communication practices of US-Americans adopting Asian Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions. Ethnographic observations were conducted at events where US-Americans gathered to learn about and practice Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions. In addition, interviews were conducted with US-Americans who were both learning and teaching Buddhism. The grounded theory method was used for data analysis. The findings of this study describe an emerging theory of the paracultural imaginary -- the space of imagining that one could be better than who one was today by taking on the cultural vestments of (an)Other. The embodied communication dynamics of intercultural exchange that take place when individuals adopt the rituals and philosophies of a foreign culture are described. In addition, a self-reflexive narrative of my struggle with the silence of witnessing the paracultural imaginary is weaved into the analysis. The findings from this study extend critical theorizing on cultural identity, performativity, and cultural appropriation in the diffusion of traditions between cultural groups. In addition, the study addresses the complexity of speaking out against the subtle prejudices in encountered in intercultural communication. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2013

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luis G Galeao_Silva.pdf: 820815 bytes, checksum: da4f4d6c658489cbe9489b6dfdc19a3e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-05-10 / Recently, Brazilian society has experienced a shift in the perception of racial inequality. Few years ago, it was widely spread the notion that there was no racism in Brazil and that the social conditions were the main problem of black population. Nowadays, however, it seems that the majority of Brazilians has realized there is, indeed, racism in Brazil. The nature of racial prejudice against black people raises many questions. Here we had proposed to explore one of these questions: the relationship between subtle prejudice, explicit prejudice and tendency to Fascism. We hypothesized that subtle and explicit prejudice against black people are correlated to a tendency to Fascism. To investigate this hypothesis, it was applied a questionnaire to 103 students of a Business Administration School, who self-declared being white. It was performed a critical social research. The questionnaire was composed by the F-scale (Fascism) blatant prejudice and subtle prejudice. In our results it was found a correlation between F-scale and both types of prejudice. In addition, we found a higher mean in the F-scale, subtle prejudice and blatant prejudice, respectively. The most relevant correlation occurred between F-scale and subtle prejudice. We interpreted that students with subtle prejudice against black people have higher tendency to Fascism. It was done a factor analyses with the principal factor method. We concluded from the correlation and the data analysis that the subtle prejudice signalizes similarities between psychological conditions and adhesion to Fascism and the contemporary racist ideology. We suggested that the need of social measures for black and white people should be followed by a critic perspective and by changes of social conditions that lead to authoritarianism / Ao longo dos últimos anos, muitas pessoas mudaram sua percepção sobre a desigualdade racial no Brasil. Antes, era senso comum que não havia racismo e que os negros só não se destacavam na sociedade por condições sociais. Hoje, a maioria dos brasileiros acredita que existe racismo no Brasil. Mas a compreensão da natureza do preconceito racial contra negros no Brasil ainda gera muitas questões. Esta pesquisa foi orientada para a busca da compreensão de uma dessas questões: a relação entre o preconceito sutil, o preconceito flagrante e a tendência à adesão ao fascismo. Para isso, foi realizada uma pesquisa social crítica que como hipótese estabeleceu que o preconceito sutil e o preconceito flagrante contra negros estão relacionados à tendência à adesão ao fascismo. Para investigar essa hipótese, cento e três universitários (103) do curso de Administração de Empresas, auto-identificados como brancos, responderam a um questionário. O questionário foi composto pelas escalas F (fascismo), preconceito flagrante e preconceito sutil. Foram verificadas correlações significativas entre os escores das três escalas. Também foi observado que os sujeitos, em média, obtiveram escores mais altos na escala F, seguida da de preconceito sutil e, por último, da escala de preconceito flagrante. Foi realizada uma análise fatorial pelo método dos componentes principais das três escalas. A correlação entre a escala F e a escala do preconceito sutil chama a atenção porque se esperava uma relação maior entre a tendência à adesão ao fascismo e ao preconceito flagrante do que entre a tendência à adesão ao fascismo e ao preconceito sutil. Mas os estudantes mais preconceituosos sutis contra os negros tendem ao fascismo, do mesmo modo que os preconceituosos flagrantes. Outra conclusão importante, a partir dessa correlação e da análise dos componentes principais das escalas, é que o preconceito sutil sinaliza semelhanças entre as condições psicológicas para a adesão ao fascismo e à ideologia racista contemporânea. Essas conclusões indicam a necessidade de que as medidas igualitárias entre brancos e negros sejam acompanhadas da crítica e da mudança das condições sociais que levam ao autoritarismo, uma vez que o fascismo e o preconceito contra negros, inclusive o sutil, estão relacionados