A Culture of Ambiguity PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download A Culture of Ambiguity PDF full book. Access full book title A Culture of Ambiguity by Thomas Bauer. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Thomas Bauer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553323
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
Author: Thomas Bauer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553323
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
Author: Thomas Bauer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231170642
Category : Ambiguity
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
1. Introduction -- 2. Cultural Ambiguity -- 3. Does God Speak in Textual Variants? -- 4. Does God Speak Ambiguously? -- 5. The Blessing of Dissent -- 6. The Islamization of Islam -- 7. Language: A Serious Business and a Game -- 8. The Ambiguity of Sexual Desire -- 9. The Serene Look at the World -- 10. In Quest of Certainty -- Bibliography.
Author: Thomas Bauer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231170659
Category : Ambiguity
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Get Book Here
Book Description
1. Introduction -- 2. Cultural Ambiguity -- 3. Does God Speak in Textual Variants? -- 4. Does God Speak Ambiguously? -- 5. The Blessing of Dissent -- 6. The Islamization of Islam -- 7. Language: A Serious Business and a Game -- 8. The Ambiguity of Sexual Desire -- 9. The Serene Look at the World -- 10. In Quest of Certainty -- Bibliography.
Author: David Tracy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226811263
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Plurality and Ambiguity, David Tracy lays the philosophical groundwork for a practical application of hermeneutics, while constructing an innovative model of theological interpretation developed out of the notions of conversation and argument. He concludes with an appraisal of the religious significance of hope in an age of radically different voices and constantly shifting meanings.
Author: Jennifer Ann Ho
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813575370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Get Book Here
Book Description
The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications. Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.
Author: Christopher Tilley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138818095
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Originally published in 1991, this is the first book-length exploration of post-structuralist discourse theory in archaeology. It tackles the most basic problem of historical and archaeological analysis - the relationship between text and artefact - in an analysis of prehistoric art fusing theory and the practice of interpretation to create a fresh framework for understanding the relationship between past and present. Focusing on a collection of rock carvings from northern Sweden, the author shows how alternative conceptualizations of the material from structuralist, hermeneutic and structural-Marxist frameworks substantially alter our understanding of their meaning and significance. Engaging readers in an interpretive process, this book is for specialists in archaeology, anthropology, art history and cultural studies.
Author: Steven Palmer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Get Book Here
Book Description
Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, typically depicted as an illegitimate period in the nation's history, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado at best a prologue to the "real" revolution of 1959. State of Ambiguity brings together scholars from North America, Cuba, and Spain to challenge this narrative, presenting republican Cuba instead as a time of meaningful engagement—socially, politically, and symbolically. Addressing a wide range of topics—civic clubs and folkloric societies, science, public health and agrarian policies, popular culture, national memory, and the intersection of race and labor—the contributors explore how a broad spectrum of Cubans embraced a political and civic culture of national self-realization. Together, the essays in State of Ambiguity recast the first republic as a time of deep continuity in processes of liberal state- and nation-building that were periodically disrupted—but also reinvigorated—by foreign intervention and profound uncertainty. Contributors. Imilcy Balboa Navarro, Alejandra Bronfman, Maikel Fariñas Borrego, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Marial Iglesias Utset, Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras Arenas, Ricardo Quiza Moreno, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, Rebecca J. Scott, Robert Whitney
Author: Sam Migliore
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802079220
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book Here
Book Description
The evil eye has received considerable attention in the literature of disciplines as diverse as anthropology and medicine. Researchers have attempted to identify and explain this essentially ambiguous and variable phenomenon from a number of perspectives - as a culture-bound syndrome, an idiom of distress, a mechanism of social control, and a representation of psychobiological fear. In Mal'uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress, Sam Migliore shifts the focus of discussion from paradigms to a practical examination of how people use the notion of the evil eye in a variety of sociocultural contexts, particularly in various aspects of Sicilian-Canadian culture and experience. Drawing on the theories of Luigi Pirandello and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Migliore argues that mal'uocchiu, and by implication other folk constructs, is like a character in search of an author to give it 'form' or 'meaning.' The book begins by considering the indeterminate nature of the evil-eye complex. Migliore proposes that this indeterminacy allows people to create myriad alternative meanings and messages to define and make sense of their personal experiences. He then examines how the evil eye relates to Sicilian-Canadian conceptions of health and illness, and discusses treatment and prevention strategies. Throughout the study, the author blends context-setting, case studies, personal recollection, and interpretation to provide readers with an accessible, alternative look at the multifaceted nature of this folk tradition. His position as both an anthropologist and a community 'insider' affords him a unique perspective on the subject. This study will be essential reading for students of medical anthropology, religion, and ethnic studies.
Author: Dr. Debbie Sutherland
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1632994623
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Get Book Here
Book Description
Have you ever been faced with a puzzling pattern of events, been stuck in a confusing situation, or felt trapped by your own routine thinking patterns? Or have you wondered about how you think and make decisions during messy and unexpected situations? In The Business of Ambiguity, Dr. Debbie Sutherland guides you to implement five key thinking and behavior strategies to explore business uncertainties and build an ambiguity mindset—the cognitive and behavioral capacity to untangle and understand the nuances of ambiguous situations. Using research and powerful real-life stories from dozens of executives whose roles involve a high degree of ambiguity, Dr. Sutherland provides you with the tools, resources, and insights to help you increase your comfort with the unknowns. If you are a business leader who wants to expand your thinking and leadership capacity, someone who wants to explore a knowing gap in life or business, or someone who has felt that it might be time to understand your biases and assumptions on a deeper level, this book is for you.
Author: Adam B. Seligman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019991527X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
The authors argue that resorting to rules and categories cannot adequately address the pervasive problems of ambiguity, difference, and boundaries - that is to say, the challenge of pluralism in our world. They show that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience may attune more closely with contemporary problems of living with difference.
