CONCILIACION A JUNIO 30 DE 2015 CONTABILIDAD VS ALMACEN
7.3 PROCEDIMIENTOS DE CONTROL CON RESPECTO AL MANEJO DE LOS BIENES MUEBLES, ENSERES, EQUIPO DE OFICINA Y EQUIPO DE
In my mind, the ideal of the New Age in general, and Glastonbury in particular, conjures up the word harmony ; harmony with nature, harmony with others. People talk about acceptance, they aim to work through their anger at life , and they have a vision of a future peaceful society, the New Age . However, despite the prevalent ethos of
acceptance , situations of conflict do arise. In this section I wish to describe a means of explaining and reacting to conflict which was
common in the alternative community, that I both observed and became involved in during my fieldwork.
In this section I have taken the text of my fieldwork notes and transcribed them with very little alteration, because I feel the situation of conflict and the resulting projection theory’ I use to describe it, are best viewed through my direct and immediate reaction. As I have w ritten in
my notes,
"Because my engagement with the alternative community has been active, and because I have felt my values and New Age values clash on this issue, it is an aspect of my fieldwork where I have very much felt myself to be a tool. As a tool I can feel my subjectivity. As I was working with someone with a very
confrontational personality, a very strong and forceful personality, I experienced quite a lot of conflict at close quarters '
I would say that the key word for dealing with conflict in this community is projection. Projection has become a word used by New Agers and paperback psychologists' alike to describe one individual transferring their feelings onto another. The circumstance in which
projection is used is in explaining someone's anger or displeasure in terms of an element of their personality or mental state, rather than on the actual physical terms of the situation, either to explain someone else's
anger and thus diffuse the situation, or to justify one's anger with
someone else. Projection is a term recognized and used by the alternative community. In this section I adopt the term and describe how, I believe, projection is used as a means of conflict resolution within the alternative community. I will explain these two in turn, looking first at an event I witnessed, and secondly, at an event in which I was directly involved.
Diffusion-
as I previously mentioned, aggressive behaviour in thealternative community is for the most part avoided. I was once in a room where one person started to get angry at another, who in turn became frustrated and upset. A third party stepped in and said 1 think it's time for a group hug . However, when such at the moment' diffusion fails, a
more considered explanation to make sense of angry feelings is brought in.
For example, Tommy came into the room, having just come over the road from the cafe. He sat down and started to tell Jim and I how upset he was feeling. Tommy was upset because Sarah, who worked in the cafe, had accused him of playing in a very sexual manner with a three year old girl who was running around. Sarah said she had seen Tommy pull up the little girl's skirt. In turn Tommy said that he had not been playing with the little girl sexually, although he did have a very strong monthly sexual cycle which he needed to express sometimes. However he was adamant that his sexual expression did not extend to three year old girls, and felt most insulted that he had been accused of being a child-molester. Jim intervened in his bitter complaining, saying that there was no point in being angry at Sarah because she was just
going through her stuff " and should not be made to feel in the wrong for what are her more sensitive feelings. Jim said that her stuff at the
sexuality. He said that however misplaced her feelings were she should not be put in the wrong for them. This was designed to give an
explanation for Sarah s apparently unjust behaviour to Tommy, and, in turn, to diffuse the annoyance in him.
In this case, Jim explains to Tommy how Sarah is just projecting her feelings about her life onto him. She tries to make him feel bad' about his
sexuality because she feels senstive about her own. Not only does this take the responsibility for the situation away from Tommy but it also explains Sarah s anti-social behaviour as not entirely her fault. Thus the conf lict is diffused.
Justification-
the second case example I give is one where the angerwas directed at me. In this example, projection was used as a way of justifying anger. The woman whom I was assisting to run a small business had just taken it over after her partner left, when I began helping with it. Her partner had taken care previously of a lot of the technical sides to producing a newspaper, and she was very anxious about her ability to perform in this area. As a result, a lot of the working tensions in the office revolved round the word-processor. Contrary to many others in Glastonbury this particular woman, Jill, welcomed confrontation. She had spent a period of time at a Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh community which sees conflict as a means of freeing people from social conditioning and waking them up. Such influences were evident in her interaction with people, and alienated a lot of people in Glastonbury.
One day towards the end of my fieldwork, she started to get irritated with me because I did not know how to use the printer. A deadline was approaching and so the atmosphere was becoming
increasingly strained. My lack of knowledge was the straw that broke the camel's back, and Jill became very angry at me,
"f ‘m amazed at you, you've spent all these years at a university and yet you don’t know how to use a printer. Can't you learn? Honestly, you don't seem to have any sense of personal direction, you always seem to have to be taken through something as if I am teaching you, as if this is a tutorial ."
This, I knew was becoming a jibe at my position within the academic world, and a familiar line of attack from this particular person whenever any conflict arose. She continued,
"All you need to do is put the printer on, how are we going to reach this deadline? I can't cope - all these years you've spent at a
university have repressed you, and this should be your chance to let go and find your true self. "
Thus she explains her anger not so much in terms of me not being
competent with the particular computer programme, but in term s of her conception of my psychological state. By commenting on her perception of
my mental state, she is projecting, her anger and frustration about the computer onto my mental state.) However, in the example to follow it becomes clear that her anger with me is closely linked to her own frustration with the computer.
I was aware in the field that my consideration of these issues had been strongly influenced by my personal involvement in a conflict situation. Thus I was careful to check my ideas about projection with an
informant. I asked him to elaborate on projection in his term s and then to explain its role in Glastonbury. He took my idea a step further,
“In projection you take something which is objective and you place a subjective value onto it. In Glastonbury people act on a meta level with projection. They are aware of what projection is. So, most people just project, but in Glastonbury projection' is part of the language and people start manipulating and projecting their projections."
Quite an erudite explanation!
I can explain this with my second example of Jill; the first projection comes in her associating my incompetence with my lack of personal direction. This is her stating her conscious projecting explanation regarding anger. However she is also projecting onto me her own fears about technology, and giving a subjective explanation of my objective lack of knowledge of the printer.
Examining these events, I felt it came back strongly to the issue of individualism, and also personal responsibility. Projection places the responsibility back onto the individual by explaining events and courses of action in terms of the personal stuff of the individual. Just as health in Glastonbury places the well-being of one's body onto mental well-being, so conflict situations are explained in term s of the psychological stuff of the people involved, rather than citing any external factors.