Cultural

by Matthew J Wolf-Meyer , Language: English

Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs, therapy, and other remedies trying to get a good night’s sleep. Anxieties about not getting enough sleep and the impact of sleeplessness on productivity, health, and happiness pervade medical opinion, the workplace, and popular culture. In The Slumbering Masses, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer addresses the phenomenon of sleep and sleeplessness in the United States, tracing the influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on the sleeping habits of Americans from the nineteenth century to the present.B

by Arne Johan Vetlesen , Language: English

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing.

by Les Back , Language: English

Cultural Sociology: An Introduction is the first dedicated student textbook to address cultural sociology as a legitimate model for sociological thinking and research. Highly renowned authors present a rich overview of major sociological themes and the various empirical applications of cultural sociology.A timely introductory overview to this increasingly significant field which provides invaluable summaries of key studies and approaches within cultural sociologyClearly written and designed, with accessible summaries of thematic topics, covering race, class, politics, religion, media, fashion, and musicInternational experts contribute chapters in their field of research, including a chapter by David Chaney, a founder of cultural sociologyOffers a unified set of theoretical and methodological tools for those wishing to apply a cultural sociological approach in their work

by David M Carballo , Language: English

Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition’s role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action.D

by Jane Lydon , Language: English

Historically, photographs of Indigenous Australians were often produced under unequal and exploitative circumstances. Today, however, such images represent a rich cultural heritage for descendants who can use this archive to explore Aboriginal history, to identify relatives, and to reclaim culture. In Calling the Shots, contributors investigate the Indigenous significance of engaging with images from each of the former colonies. The result is a fresh perspective on Australia’s past, and on present-day Indigenous identities.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates , Language: English

AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA, IN THE FORM OF A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR’S 14-YEAR-OLD SON
A bold and beautifully written exploration of America’s fraught racial history and its contemporary echoes that will redefine wider understanding of race and the roots of American identity.
In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (the abolition of slavery), the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets.

by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich , Ivan Gaskell , Sara Schechner , Sarah Anne Carter , Language: English

In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link beween present and past.The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage–from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles–in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course.

by Gaurav Gajanan Desai , Language: English

Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented” Africa as a locus of difference and alterity.P

by (Anthropologist Erik Harms , Language: English

Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds.Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both.

by Istvan Praet , Language: English

The central purpose of this book is to help change the terms of the debate on animism, a classic theme in anthropology. It combines some of the finest ethnographic material currently available (including firsthand research on the Chachi of Ecuador) with an unusually broad geographic scope (the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Edward B. Tylor originally defined animism as the first phase in the development of religion. The heyday of cultural evolutionism may be over, but his basic conception is commonly assumed to remain valid in at least one respect: there is still a broad consensus that everything is alive within animism, or at least that more things are alive than a modern scientific observer would allow for (e.g

by Thomas Heberer , Language: English

Mountainous Liangshan Prefecture, on the southern border of Sichuan Province, is one of China’s most remote regions. Although Liangshan’s majority ethnic group, the Nuosu (now classified by the Chinese government as part of the Yi ethnic group), practiced a subsistence economy and were, by Chinese standards, extremely poor, their traditional society was stratified into endogamous castes, the most powerful of which owned slaves. With the incorporation of Liangshan into China’s new socialist society in the mid-twentieth century, the Nuosu were required to abolish slavery and what the Chinese government considered to be superstitious religious practices.

by Jenny Chio , Language: English

While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor.A

by Lara Deeb , Jessica Winegar , Language: English

U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests?This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S

by Yolanda Covington-Ward , Language: English

In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the Lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flash points in the last ninety years of Congo’s troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power.

by Jeffrey S Juris , Alex Khasnabish , Language: English

Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods.

by Allen S Weiss , Language: English

Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism. Through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Cros, Paul Valéry, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, Allen S. Weiss shows how sound recording’s uncanny confluence of human and machine would transform our expectations of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring our intimate relation to death.

by Iain Wilkinson , Arthur Kleinman , Language: English

What does human suffering mean for society? And how has this meaning changed from the past to the present? In what ways does “the problem of suffering” serve to inspire us to care for others? How does our response to suffering reveal our moral and social conditions? In this trenchant work, Arthur Kleinman—a renowned figure in medical anthropology—and Iain Wilkinson, an award-winning sociologist, team up to offer some answers to these profound questions.A Passion for Society investigates the historical development and current state of social science with a focus on how this development has been shaped in response to problems of social suffering.

by Barry J Kemp , Language: English

Gain insights into a vanished world with this unique look at powerful Egyptian hieroglyphs.Barry Kemp presents one hundred of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, their pronunciations, their history, and meanings, revealing aspects of day-to-day life in ancient Egypt.Kemp explains the myriad meanings behind symbols for physical objects such as "Sun" and "Serpent," and concepts such as "Truth" and "to love," building a picture of the historical and mythological references that were the cornerstones of Egyptian thought.

by Jeffrey K Olick , Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi , Daniel Levy , Language: English

In the last few decades, there are few concepts that have rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers. Seen by scholars in numerous fields as a hallmark characteristic of our age, an idea crucial for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions, collective memory now guides inquiries into diverse, though connected, phenomena.

by J M Roberts , Language: English

Comprehensive in its scope and brilliantly readable, this is a superb follow-up to the author’s bestselling Penguin History of the World. Beginning with prehistory and the early civilizations of the Aegean, The Penguin History of Europe traces the development of European identity in its many guises, through the age of Christendom, the Middle Ages, early Modern history and the old European order.

by Paul Smith , Language: English

A collective manifesto for the future of cultural studies

by R D Grillo , Language: English

The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to manage their family relationships.

by Howard Zinn , Language: English

The postwar boom in the U.S. brought about massive changes in U.S. society and culture. In this accessible volume, historian Howard Zinn offers a view from below on these vital years in American history. By critically examining U.S. militarism abroad and racism at home, he raises challenging questions about this often romanticized era.

by Peter Turchin , Language: English

Follow Peter Turchin on an epic journey through time. From stone-age assassins to the orbiting cathedrals of the space age, from bloodthirsty god-kings to India’s first vegetarian emperor, discover the secret history of our species—and the evolutionary logic that governed it all.