This study presents the moratorium debate as a phenomenon of its own time. The challenges the moratorium debate poses to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Southern African/Central Diocese come under the spotlight. The AICs have taken the lead in attempting to live up to the “four selves” principle, that is, self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating and self-theologizing, and areas which ELCSA/CD can learn from the AICs are highlighted. Finally the study explores issues of mutuality and interdependence, and few guidelines are proposed for ELCSA/CD. / Christian Spirituality / M. Th. (Missiology)

In this study we seek to understand how ordinary Chinese people perceive Westerners as the Other through examining their intercultural experiences. In contrast to the numerous studies of social elites’ Occidentalism, this study shifts the attention to ordinary people’s perceptions in a fast changing Chinese society. From an interpretive perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 participants living in a coastal city in Mainland China. The key findings suggest that the Chinese public has its own way of perceiving and presenting the Western Other. Also, this Other, being defined in an on-going process of intercultural interaction, connotes a wider meaning – a unity of opposition and complementarity, exclusion and inclusion. Thus this study has deepened our understanding of the Chinese construction of the Western Other. The findings can be used in developing intercultural communication training programs to facilitate deeper contact and better dialogue between the Chinese and Westerners.

This study aimed to investigate public attitudes towards the sexuality of people with learning disabilities within a UK residing sample, and compare such attitudes between people from White Western and South Asian backgrounds. A mixed-method approach using an online questionnaire was employed. Three-hundred and thirty-one UK residing adults were recruited. Participants provided demographic details, completed five attitudes towards sexuality scales, in addition to measures of recognition and prior contact of a person with a mild learning disability. One of the sexual attitudes scales measured attitudes towards sexual openness in the typically developing men or women. The other four measured attitudes towards the sexuality of men or women with learning disabilities. These included four different aspects of sexuality (sexual rights, non-reproductive sexual behaviour, parenting and self-control). Participants completed either a male or female version of these scales. One open-ended question that asked about the sexuality of either men or women with learning disabilities was also included and responses to this question were analysed via a thematic analysis. Mean scores indicated that compared to White Westerners, South Asians had significantly more negative attitudes towards the sexual openness of men and women in the developing population and also towards the sexual rights of men and women with learning disabilities. Recognition was found to be poor in both ethnic groups, although White Westerners were found to be significantly more likely to be able to recognise mild learning disabilities compared to South Asians. These findings implicate the need to develop culturally sensitive interventions in improving knowledge and awareness of learning disabilities in addition to being aware of the differences in attitudes towards the sexuality of people with learning disabilities that may exist between different ethnic groups. These implications, the limitations of the study and suggested directions for future research are discussed.

In this study we seek to understand how ordinary Chinese people perceive Westerners as the Other through examining their intercultural experiences. In contrast to the numerous studies of social elites’ Occidentalism, this study shifts the attention to ordinary people’s perceptions in a fast changing Chinese society. From an interpretive perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 participants living in a coastal city in Mainland China. The key findings suggest that the Chinese public has its own way of perceiving and presenting the Western Other. Also, this Other, being defined in an on-going process of intercultural interaction, connotes a wider meaning – a unity of opposition and complementarity, exclusion and inclusion. Thus this study has deepened our understanding of the Chinese construction of the Western Other. The findings can be used in developing intercultural communication training programs to facilitate deeper contact and better dialogue between the Chinese and Westerners.

By employing the theory of Imagology, this work examines four literature workswritten in overseas study movements in modern Chinese history: Wang Tao's shortstories in Songyin Manlu, Lao She's The Two Mas, Bai Xianyong's A Death in Chicagoand Zhou Li's Manhattan's Chinese Lady. While tracing how Chinese intellectuals workthrough the dichotomy of China/West and Tradition /Modernity, this study alsoendeavors to reveal theoretical issues arising from inter-cultural communication andrepresentation. It argues that the literary projection of the west manifests a complex senseof the Chinese self primarily due to the portrayals of western cities and westerners as anembodiment of Chinese understandings of western modernity at different periods. In theLate Qing, the depiction of London in Songyin Manlu only focuses on gunboats, cannons,museums, and factories, because western modernity for the Chinese at the time wassignified by the mighty weaponry of British navy and advanced technology. In the 1920s,however, the portrayal of London in The Two Mas shifts to reveal how Londoners'lifestyle and culture make Britain the most powerful nation in the world, as the Chineseintellectuals advocated the westernization of Chinese culture in order to strengthen China.In the 1960s, the Chinese protagonist Wu Hanhun in A Death of Chicago feels estrangedand sexually seduced in Chicago, subsequently loses his sense of purpose in life andeventually commits suicide, the depiction of which is consistent with similar themes inwestern modernist literature. This is due to the fact that the modernist movement thrivedin Taiwan in the 1960s, and as such, had a large impact on Taiwanese writers. The 1990seraManhattan's Chinese Lady displays spectacles of America's wealth on the FifthAvenue in Manhattan, as common Chinese strive for becoming rich in contemporaryChina owing to the Chinese government's promotion of market reform after 40 years ofpoverty in socialist China. The study concludes that regardless of whether or not theimages of the west presented in Chinese discourse are idealizations, demonizations, orother related cultural determinations, they all manifest a type of anxiety in regard to theChinese Self.

This study presents the moratorium debate as a phenomenon of its own time. The challenges the moratorium debate poses to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Southern African/Central Diocese come under the spotlight. The AICs have taken the lead in attempting to live up to the “four selves” principle, that is, self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating and self-theologizing, and areas which ELCSA/CD can learn from the AICs are highlighted. Finally the study explores issues of mutuality and interdependence, and few guidelines are proposed for ELCSA/CD. / Christian Spirituality / M. Th. (Missiology)

In this study we seek to understand how ordinary Chinese people perceive Westerners as the Other through examining their intercultural experiences. In contrast to the numerous studies of social elites’ Occidentalism, this study shifts the attention to ordinary people’s perceptions in a fast changing Chinese society. From an interpretive perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 participants living in a coastal city in Mainland China. The key findings suggest that the Chinese public has its own way of perceiving and presenting the Western Other. Also, this Other, being defined in an on-going process of intercultural interaction, connotes a wider meaning – a unity of opposition and complementarity, exclusion and inclusion. Thus this study has deepened our understanding of the Chinese construction of the Western Other. The findings can be used in developing intercultural communication training programs to facilitate deeper contact and better dialogue between the Chinese and Westerners.

Representations of Dutch contacts with coastal inhabitants of Africa, 1475-1652. Prior to 1996, South African Dutch studies had largely been determined by traditional rigid historical and geographic boundaries set in 1933. The framework exclusively focused on the period after the arrival of Van Riebeeck in 1652 to 1925 (when Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language) and on topics regarded as typically South African. Siegfried Huigen in 'De Weg naar Monomotapa' (1996) not only questioned these limitations but introduced a revised time frame including the period “about 1596 to 1652”. The revised framework has provided an opportunity to study texts prior to 1652 including both the earliest recorded Dutch contacts with the coastal inhabitants of Africa as well as the significant 1595 record of the initial Dutch cross-cultural encounters on the coast of Southern Africa. Where the role of the Dutch East India Company after 1602 had previously been considered foremost, the maritime forces of the Dutch States General and independent Dutch traders before 1602 and the activities of the Dutch West Indies Company after 1621 on the entire African coast had attracted little attention. Contact between the Dutch and coastal inhabitants of Africa and the textual representations of such contacts had contributed to a more extensive Dutch frame of reference than had previously been presumed. Previous assumptions attributing the nature of representations to the frequency and length of contacts had somehow not accounted for similar factors not influencing representations of coastal inhabitants elsewhere in Africa nor had the actual extent of the Dutch frame of reference been fully considered. Since the initial 1595 textual representation of Willem Lodewycksz describing the contact between the Dutch and Khoikhoi in Mossel Bay, the texts have had a profound influence on the South African discourse. Comparative studies of the initial representations and early 20th century compilations of the primary texts indicate that the elucidation prevalent in the more recent works has been the source of questionable interpretations and conclusions that have erroneously been attributed to the late sixteenth century seafaring scribes. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

This thesis examines the history of the Mi'kmaq people inhabiting Kmitkinag (Nova Scotia) and Unimaki (Cape Breton Island) from before contact to 1760. While contact precipitated change in Mi'kmaq society, the process was gradual, the result of the particular historical circumstances in which interactions between the two societies evolved. In the late seventeenth century, the Mi'kmaq established an alliance with the French Crown, made possible by previous social and economic relationships between Mi'kmaq families and French traders, fishermen and settlers. As European settlement increased and imperial rivalry in North America intensified in the eighteenth century, tensions emerged in the alliance, revealing the cultural differences between the Mi'kmaq and France's subjects. The thesis demonstrates that economic and political factors were more important than national identity in influencing the texture of Mi'kmaq-European relations.

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