Research Group

Forum for Contemporary Women’s Reflections Research Institue

CULTURAL MEMORY, FEMININITY AND SUSTAINABILITY

"Our society has always been dominated by the yang, or masculine values and attitudes while neglecting their yin or feminine counterparts. Read more self-assertion over assimilation, analysis over synthesis, rational knowledge over intuitive wisdom, science over religion, competition over cooperation, growth over conservation, and so on. This one-sided development has entered an alarming stage - the social, ecological, moral and spiritual crisis.

At the same time, however, we are witnessing the beginning of a huge evolutionary movement that seems to reflect the ancient Chinese saying that "the yang, having reached its peak, retreats to the foreground to give way to the yin."

(Fritjof Capra: The Tao of Physics. Tericum Publishing, p. 15)

The Forum for Contemporary Women's Reflections has as its fundamental objective - the contemporary state of femininity. The main objective of the Forum for Contemporary Women's Reflections is to provide a forward-looking, non-ideological, culturally anthropological approach to the current situation of women a future-oriented discussion space. It is motivated by three problems:

1. The situation of femininity is unresolved.

2. There is no known theoretical or practical experiment that is independent of the interests and influences of the moment such as ideologies and there is no current or attempt to address the problem.

3. There is no conceptual framework in the public discourse that can be used to understand the problem in all its complexity.

The last of the above three points is the primary challenge. As long as this is not understandable and the concept is therefore not available in order to communicate the essence of the problem, no further progress can be made. There is no doubt that instinctive feminist movements have tryed to resolve the problem, but the result-centricity and economic aspects have determined the search for a solution, further this has been undertaken in the same masculinist cultural context in which the problem was created. This in turn has had an impact on the scientific apparatus for setting up the background, as well as on the political embedding processes.

We see the liberation of the interpretative framework as possible only in the historical perspective within which the interpretation of the reality of women can be traced through a sufficiently thorough analysis, with all the changes that have brought us to the present-day social context, which is fraught with tensions in the environment. The starting point is the myths that have survived from antiquity, in which the feminine functionality was much more nuanced and much more pronounced than in today's culture. This was followed by the masculine and feminine traditions of Christianity, which have their roots in the Old Testament in the context of a consolidating system of feudal social relations which transformed the thinking of the whole of Europe. Starting from symbolism, the operable human functions, the cultural indoctrination that is still valid today which is now so masculine in its approach and value preferences that the feminine functions of the human body are no longer in accordance with their social value seems unnatural. To resolve this disproportionality, the symbolic world of myths, their historical metamorphosis and changes in social relations, we can see the social changes of societies. In this way, particular attention will be paid to symbolism, myth, religion and theology, the arts, psychology and psychiatry, which will be used to reinterpretations, can be used to build a framework for articulating the real problem - a conceptual framework. The Forum for Contemporary Women's Reflections - in its name - carries that intellectual position, which it must take as a given in the discursive space of femininity previously opened up by others. It is forced to reflect on previous trends in order to define itself in a coordinated way, such in a way not only of discrimination, but also of self-initiated trajectories of thought and new strategies of resolution are also reflected. We intend to resolve this disproportion by interpreting the symbolic world of myths, their historical bmetamorphosis, and changes in social conditions.