Why is culture a problem that can never be solved? Charles W. Nuckolls poses this question to his readers, and offers a genuinely synthetic approach to culture that is both cognitive and psychoanalytic. He develops a theory of cultural dialectics based on the concept of paradox, in which he shows how ambivalence and conflicts, and the desire to resolve them, are at the heart of all cultural knowledge systems.
Nuckolls combines and synthesizes the ideas of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud—major influences in the cognitive and psychoanalytic paradigms—and develops the concept basic to both: the dialectic. He recovers the legacy of Gregory Bateson, who provided the foundation for a theory of paradox in culture. With his integrated theory, Nuckolls explains the conflicts of knowledge and desire in a South Asian knowledge system, in particular the religious mythology and divinatory system of the Jalaris, a Telugu-speaking fishing caste on the southeastern coast of India.
This provocative book allows us to rethink the relationship between the currently competing discourses in psychological and cultural anthropology, and at the same time offers a general synthetic theory of cultural dynamics.
A powerful exposition of how culture shapes social and political change.
"Transition" is the name typically given to the time of radical change following the fall of communism, connoting a shift from planned to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy. Transition is also, in Michael Kennedy’s analysis, a culture in its own right-with its own contentions, repressions, and unrealized potentials. By elaborating transition as a culture of power and viewing it in its complex relation to emancipation, nationalism, and war, Kennedy’s book clarifies the transformations of postcommunism as well as, more generally, the ways in which culture articulates social change. This ambitious work is, in effect, a nuanced critical-cultural sociology of change.
Kennedy examines transition culture’s historical foundation by looking at the relationship among perestroika, Poland, and Hungary, and considers its structure and practice in the following decade across fields and nations. His wide-ranging analysis-of the artifacts of transition culture’s proponents, of interviews with providers and recipients of technical assistance in business across Eastern Europe, and of focus groups assessing the successes and failures of social change in Estonia and Ukraine-suggests a transition culture deeply implicated in nationalism. But this association, Kennedy contends, is not necessarily antithetical to transition’s emancipation. By reconsidering transition culture’s relationship to the Wars of Yugoslav Succession and communism’s negotiated collapse in Poland and Hungary, he shows how transition might be reconceived in terms of solidarity, freedom, and peace. Distinguished by its focus on culture, not only within particular nations but in the transnational community organized around transition, this book will help reframe the debate about postcommunist social change.In health care delivery and health care research, basic concepts of cultural behavior are ignored—at a high personal and financial cost—because both fields are dominated by technical solutions and quantitative analysis. They have little use for what is often regarded as irrelevant information.
In this wide-ranging book, written for students and non-specialists, Gesler applies cultural geography to health care and shows that throughout the world, in western and developing countries alike, the social sciences can inform the medical sciences nd make them more effective and less expensive.
All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.
When the first Disneyland opened its doors in 1955, it reinvented the American amusement park and transformed the travel, tourism, and entertainment industries forever. Now a global vacation empire, the original park in Anaheim, California, has been joined by massive complexes in Florida, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Spanning six decades, three continents, and five distinct cultures, Sabrina Mittermeier presents an interdisciplinary examination of the parks, situating them in their proper historical context and exploring the distinct cultural, social, and economic landscapes that defined each one at the time of its construction. Mittermeier then spotlights the central role of class in the subsequent success or failure of each venture. The first comparative study of the Disney theme parks, the book closes a significant gap in existing research and is an important new contribution to the field.
This edited volume is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and commercial implications of the trailblazing reality television series RuPaul’s Drag Race. Going beyond mere analysis of the show itself, the contributors interrogate the ways RuPaul’s Drag Race has affected queer representation in media, examining its audience, economics, branding, queer politics, and every point in between.
Since its groundbreaking and subversive entry into the reality television complex in 2009, the show has had profound effects on drag and the cultures that surround it. Bringing together scholarship across disciplines—including cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology, marketing, and theater and performance studies—the collection offers rich academic analysis of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and its lasting influence on fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.
Increasingly, the role of heritage management is to anticipate and guide future environmental change rather than to simply protect landscapes of the past. This charge presents a paradox for those invested in the preservation of the past: in order to preserve the historic environment, they have to collaborate with others who wish to change it, and in order to apply their expert knowledge, they must demonstrate its benefits for policy and society. The solution advocated here is an integrative landscape approach that draws on multiple disciplines and establishes links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning and between research and policy.
In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that “everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.” The essays in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics, and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment when interpretation (including “ideology critique” and “symptomatic reading”) has been variously supplanted by descriptivism, empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism. Spanning a wide range of cultural sites—from recent Hollywood cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape photography, contemporary West African art, and “new materialism” in philosophy—they ask what the “formal tendencies” of contemporary cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors.
Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller, Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve YueA Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2002
As ideas, goods, and people move with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries and geographic distances, the economic changes and technological advances that enable this globalization are also paradoxically contributing to the balkanization of states, ethnic groups, and special interest movements. Exploring how this process is playing out in Guatemala, this book presents an innovative synthesis of the local and global factors that have led Guatemala's indigenous Maya peoples to assert and defend their cultural identity and distinctiveness within the dominant Hispanic society.
Drawing on recent theories from cognitive studies, interpretive ethnography, and political economy, Edward F. Fischer looks at individual Maya activists and local cultures, as well as changing national and international power relations, to understand how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed in the modern world. At the global level, he shows how structural shifts in international relations have opened new venues of ethnic expression for Guatemala's majority Maya population. At the local level, he examines the processes of identity construction in two Kaqchikel Maya towns, Tecpán and Patzún, and shows how divergent local norms result in different conceptions and expressions of Maya-ness, which nonetheless share certain fundamental similarities with the larger pan-Maya project. Tying these levels of analysis together, Fischer argues that open-ended Maya "cultural logics" condition the ways in which Maya individuals (national leaders and rural masses alike) creatively express their identity in a rapidly changing world.
"Raymond Williams was the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals born before the end of the age of Europe (1492-1945)."-Cornel West
The work of Raymond Williams is of seminal importance in rethinking the idea of culture. He is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of international cultural studies. In tribute to his legacy, this edited volume is devoted to his theories of cultural materialism and is the most substantial and wide-ranging collection of essays on his work to be offered since his death in 1988. For all readers grappling with Williams's complex legacy, this volume is not to be missed.Contributors include Stanley Aronowitz, Graduate School, CUNY; John Brenkman, Baruch College, CUNY; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge University; Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley; Stephen Heath, University of California, Santa Cruz; John Higgins, University of Cape Town; Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, CUNY; Cora Kaplan, Rutgers University; David Lloyd, University of California, Berkeley; Robert Miklitsch, Ohio University; Michael Moriarty, Cambridge University; Morag Shiach, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London; David Simpson, University of Colorado, Boulder; Gillian Skirrow; Kenneth Surin, Duke University; Paul Thomas, University of California, Berkeley; Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University; and Cornel West, Harvard University.The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel a uniquely American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. Despite school dropout rates over 40 percent, a third spending time in prison, chronic unemployment, and endemic violence, black youth are among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the world. They also espouse several deeply-held American values. To understand this conundrum, the authors bring culture back to the forefront of explanation, while avoiding the theoretical errors of earlier culture-of-poverty approaches and the causal timidity and special pleading of more recent ones.
There is no single black youth culture, but a complex matrix of cultures—adapted mainstream, African-American vernacular, street culture, and hip-hop—that support and undermine, enrich and impoverish young lives. Hip-hop, for example, has had an enormous influence, not always to the advantage of its creators. However, its muscular message of primal honor and sensual indulgence is not motivated by a desire for separatism but by an insistence on sharing in the mainstream culture of consumption, power, and wealth.
This interdisciplinary work draws on all the social sciences, as well as social philosophy and ethnomusicology, in a concerted effort to explain how culture, interacting with structural and environmental forces, influences the performance and control of violence, aesthetic productions, educational and work outcomes, familial, gender, and sexual relations, and the complex moral life of black youth.
Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.
Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.
Bridging the worlds of activism and academia-social movement theory informed with the real experiences of activists-this volume of accessible essays brings together insights from European New Social Movement theorists, U.S. scholars of social movements, and activists involved in social movements from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Contributors: Alice Echols, Barbara Epstein, Richard A. Cloward, Marcy Darnovsky, Jeffrey Escoffier, Ilene Rose Feinman, Richard Flacks, Cynthia Hamilton, Allen Hunter, L. A. Kauffman, Rebecca E. Klatch, Margit Mayer, Alberto Melucci, Bronislaw Misztal, Osha Neumann, Frances Fox Piven, Craig Reinarman, Roland Roth, Arlene Stein, Mindy Spatt, Andrew Szasz, Noél Sturgeon, Howard Winant.
The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1950 to 1992. By piecing together and studying these popular narratives, he divides the history of prisoners and punishment into four eras, each marked by a shift in value system. He argues that the discourse, or rhetoric, surrounding prisoners and punishment on the public level works as a historical force that shapes contemporary culture.
The author is concerned that the public seems to have an inability or unwillingness to question or resist cultural definitions of normalcy and legal behavior. He explains that ideally moral behavior should be a matter of public debate rather than of unquestioned perpetuation, and he urges increased understanding of institutional and cultural discipline and our questioning the ways in which the constitution of punishment and prisoners influences us culturally.
The"cultural prison" refers to the way in which this study acts as an investigation of "the discipline of discipline"; it is an examination of the way in which discipline is shaped and formed in public discourse. The volume concludes with a fascinating account of the move to electronic means of surveillance; coupled with the representations of the prisoner along the lines of race and gender, it explains what these new techniques mean to contemporary culture.
The protection and accumulation of intellectual property rights—like property rights in general—is one of the most important contemporary American values. In his cogent book, The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights, Sean Johnson Andrews shows that the meaning, power, and value of intellectual properties are the consequence of an extended process of cultural production.
Johnson Andrews argues that it is deeper ideological and historical roots which demand that, in the contemporary global, digital economy, all property rights be held sacrosanct and all value must flow back to the legal owner.
Johnson Andrews explains that if we want to rebalance the protection of copyrights and trademarks, we should focus on undermining the reified culture of property that underpins capitalism as a whole. He outlines a framework for analyzing culture; situates intellectual property rights in the history of capitalist property relations; synthesizes key theories of media, politics, and law; and ultimately provides scholars and activists a path to imagining a different future where we prioritize our collective production of value in the commons.
A complex portrait of postdictatorial Chile by one of that country’s most incisive cultural critics, this book uses memoirs, photographs, the plastic arts, novels, and other texts—the “residues” of a culture—to analyze the political-cultural Chilean landscape in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year military rule. Such residual areas reveal the flaws and lapses in Chile’s transition from violent military dictatorship to electoral democracy.
Nelly Richard's analysis ranges from an exploration of false memories of the recent past—especially memories of violence—to a discussion of the university under neoliberalism; from debates about the use of the word “gender” to an examination of refractory texts and cultural activities such as Diamela Eltit’s “testimonio” of a schizophrenic vagabond, Eugenio Dittborn’s use of photography in art installations, and transvestite performances. In Cultural Residues, each instance becomes a suggestive metaphor for understanding a rapidly modernizing Chile attempting to re-democratize its public life.
Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.
The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.
The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.
The seven essays in this issue represent a broad spectrum of academic approaches that include sociology, anthropology, legal studies, film studies, literary studies, and cultural theory. One essay investigates Taiwanese who have relocated to Shanghai in search of a secure economic future. Another uses psychoanalysis to examine potentially fascist representations of Taiwan in Japanese manga. The third essay addresses the legal status of women in Taiwan in various marital situations and historical periods. The fourth discusses literary representations of the juancun, or soldiers’ villages, which were common enclaves for retired military personnel and their families. Also featured in this issue are explorations of literary portrayals of the aftermath of the February 28, 1947, massacre and resulting White Terror events, as well as a consideration of the philanthropy practiced by the massive Ciji corporation, which holds more power in the world than Taiwan’s recognized government. The final essay offers a careful study of the films of Cai Mingliang and Chen Guofu and focuses on the way that contemporary Taiwanese cinema handles questions of consumer society, urban alienation, and sexual and emotional relationships.
The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.
The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.
In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.
Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl
This collection of material seeks to interpret the events of September 11, 2001 from the perspective of cultural theory — that is, from the perspective of anthropological and social forces that motivate human beings and give meaning to their thoughts, actions, and feelings. Though contributors to this volume work within various disciplines, their approach is necessarily holistic—because of the very nature of the event, which resonates on many levels and in diverse spheres of human activity.
Clearly the perception of who one’s enemy is has a cultural and psychological impact that goes far beyond the superficial media representations consumed on a daily basis; the very curriculum of American universities has been altered as a result of the 9/11 attacks, and this will have profound and far-reaching effects.
Our conception of cultures and cultural change has altered dramatically in recent decades: no longer do we understand cultures as isolated units; rather, we see them as hybrid formations constantly engaged in a multidirectional process of exchange and influence with other cultures. Yet the very process by which we represent these cultural transfers is itself subject to cultural, political, and ideological conditions that affect our understanding, acknowledgment, and representation of them. Built around concrete examples of controversial representations of cultural transfer from Asia, the Arab world, and Europe, Cultural Transfers in Dispute presents a critical self-reflection on the scholarly practices that underpin our attempts to study and describe other cultures.
French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the conflict between the ideals of individualism and community defines American culture. In this groundbreaking new work, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls discovers that every culture consists of such paradoxes, thus making culture a problem that cannot be solved. He does, however, find much creative tension in these unresolvable opposites.
Nuckolls presents three fascinating case studies that demonstrate how values often are expressed in the organization of social roles. First he treats the Micronesian Ifaluks’ opposition between cooperation and self-gratification by examining the nature versus nurture debate. Nuckolls then shifts to the values of community and individual adventure by looking at the conflicts in the identities of public figures in Oklahoma. Finally, he investigates the cultural significance in the diagnostic system and practices of psychiatry in the United States. Nuckolls asserts that psychiatry treats genders differently, assigning dependence to women and independence to men and, in some cases, diagnoses the extreme forms of these values as disorders.
Nuckolls elaborates on the theory of culture that he introduced in his previous book, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, which proposed that the desire to resolve conflicts is central to cultural knowledge. In Culture: A Problem that Cannot Be Solved, Nuckolls restores the neglected social science concept of values, which addresses both knowledge and motivation. As a result, he brings together cognition and psychoanalysis, as well as sociology and psychology, in his study of cultural processes.
Twenty four essays cover a broad range of topics in cultural anthropology, and represent the best writings of George Peter Murdock and reveal his theoretical orientation and his many landmark contributions to the field.
Investigating the late sixteenth through the nineteenth century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Choson state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. Seeking to define the meaning and constitutive elements of the hegemonic group and a particular marginalized community in this Confucian state, the contributors argue that the power of each group and the space it occupied were determined by a dynamic interaction of ideology, governmental policies, and the group's self-perceptions.
Collectively, the volume counters the static view of the Korean Confucian state, elucidates its relationship to the wider Confucian community and religious groups, and suggests new views of the complex way in which each negotiated and adjusted its ideology and practices in response to the state's activities.
Examines the prehistory of the American struggle to address cultural difference.
"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings-folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies-that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America.
The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference-American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works-which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference-is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.An important anthology putting the leading topics in Southern anthropology in the context of the 1960s
Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society:
No. 1, Essays on Medical Anthropology (1968), edited by Thomas Weaver, with contributions by Frank J. Essene, Thomas Weaver, Charles Hudson, Helen Phillips, Hazel Hitson Weidman, Dorothea C. Leighton, Nora F. Cline, Peter Goethals, Berton H. Kaplan, Alice H. Murphree, John G. Peck, and Gianna Hochstein
No. 2, Urban Anthropology: Research Perspectives and Strategies (1968, edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Elizabeth M. Eddy, Conrad M. Arensberg, Charles H. Fairbanks, H. W. Hutchinson, Anthony Leeds, Hans C. Buechler, Brian M. de Toit, Emilio Willems, Michael D. Olien, and John Gulick
No. 3, Concepts and Assumptions in Contemporary Anthropology (1969), edited by Stephen A. Tyler, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Stephen A. Tyler, Eric R. Wolf, Ann Fischer, E. Pendleton Banks, Munro S. Edmonson, Francis E. Johnston, William G. Haag, Arden R. King, and Jan Brukman
No. 4, The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture (1971), edited by J. Kenneth Morland, with contributions by Charles Hudson, J. Kenneth Morland, Helen Phillips Keber, Jared Harper, Edward E. Knipe, Helen M. Lewis, Milton B. Newton Jr., Ronald J. Duncan, John Gordon, H. Eugene Hodges, William L. Partridge, Max E. Stanton, Robert Sayers, James L. Peacock, and Christopher Crocker
No. 5, Red, White, and Black: Symposium on Indians in the Old South (1971), edited by Charles M. Hudson, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Louis De Vorsey Jr., William S. Pollitzer, Mary R. Haas, David J. Hally, Charles H. Fairbanks, F. N. Boney, Joseph L. Brent III, William S. Willis Jr., John H. Peterson Jr., and Charles Crowe.
Originally distributed by the University of Georgia Press, are all combined herein with a historical overview in the new introduction by Miles Richardson and with a new index to the complete anthology.
A foundational work in the study of the globalization of culture.
First published in 1991, Culture, Globalization and the World-System is one of the inaugural books discussing the increasing tendency of cultural practices to cross national boundaries. Now widely available in the United States for the first time and updated with a new preface, these influential essays by a distinguished group of scholars and cultural critics lay the groundwork for a vital and exciting new field of inquiry.
Culture, Globalization and the World-System views culture through different prisms and categories—including race, gender, ethnicity, class, and nation. The contributors consider how socially organized systems of meaning are produced and represented. Drawing from sociology, art history, film studies, and anthropology, these essays—many of them representing their authors’ only treatment of globalization—provide paradigms for understanding cultures and the representation of identity in “the world as a single place.” Contributors: Barbara Abou-El-Haj, SUNY, Binghamton; Janet Abu-Lughod, New School for Social Research; Stuart Hall, Open U, UK; Ulf Hannerz, U of Stockholm, Sweden; Roland Robertson, U of Pittsburgh; John Tagg, SUNY, Binghamton; Maureen Turim, U of Florida, Gainesville; Immanuel Wallerstein, SUNY, Binghamton; Janet Wolff, U of Rochester.In this wide-ranging and informative work, Patrick Colm Hogan draws on cognitive science, psychoanalysis, and social psychology to explore the cultural and psychological components of social consent. Focusing in particular on Americans’ acquiescence to a system that underpays and underrepresents the vast majority of the population, Hogan moves beyond typical studies of this phenomenon by stressing more than its political and economic dimensions.
With new insights into particularly insideous forms of consent such as those manifest in racism, sexism, and homophobia, The Culture of Conformism considers the role of emotion as it works in conjunction with belief and with the formation of group identity. Arguing that coercion is far more pervasive in democratic societies than is commonly recognized, Hogan discusses the subtle ways in which economic and social pressures operate to complement the more obviously violent forces of the police and military. Addressing issues of narcissism, self-esteem, and empathy, he also explains the concept of “rational” conformity—that is, the degree to which our social consent is based on self-interest—and explores the cognitive factors that produce and sustain social ideology.
Social activists, economic theorists, social psychologists, and political scientists will be intrigued and informed by this book.
Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to
argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity.
The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.
At the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, literature and history were wrenched apart. Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of painful depression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger remain essential resources for contemporary critical thought.
The culture of literacy is on the wane, Godzich argues. Throughout the modern period, language has been the institution that provided the condition of possibility for all other institutions, from university to church to state. But the pervasive crisis of meaning we now experience is the result of a shift in the modes of production of knowledge. The culture of literacy has been faced with transformations it cannot accommodate, and the existing organization of knowledge has been challenged. By wedding literature to a reflective practice of history, Godzich leads us toward a critique of political reason, and a profound sense of how postmodernity can overcome by deftly sidestepping the modern. This book will bring to a wider audience the work of a writer who is recognized as one of the most commanding figures of his generation for range, learning, and capacity for innovation.
The Culture of Love interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.
Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips.
Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontës, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gérôme, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, in particular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."
Migration is a way of life for many individuals and even families in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some who leave their rural communities go only as far as the state capital, while others migrate to other parts of Mexico and to the United States. Most send money back to their communities, and many return to their homes after a few years. Migration offers Oaxacans economic opportunities that are not always available locally—but it also creates burdens for those who stay behind.
This book explores the complex constellation of factors that cause rural Oaxacans to migrate, the historical and contemporary patterns of their migration, the effects of migration on families and communities, and the economic, cultural, and social reasons why many Oaxacans choose not to migrate. Jeffrey Cohen draws on fieldwork and survey data from twelve communities in the central valleys of Oaxaca to give an encompassing view of the factors that drive migration and determine its outcomes. He demonstrates conclusively that, while migration is an effective way to make a living, no single model can explain the patterns of migration in southern Mexico.
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