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Author: David Harris
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415111287
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
A Society of Signs? is an introduction to current debates around the themes of culture, identity and lifestyle. Such debates often begin with the assertion that we live in a "society of signs". A Society of Signs? will help students of sociology, media and cultural studies to make sense of these often complicated arguments. It summarizes and critically discusses some basic approaches in social theory and cultural analysis; offers specific reading of some of the work of writers including Barthes and Giddens; reviews work in more traditional areas, for example, the sociology of identity and the embedding process found in social life; and gives advice on further reading.
Author: David Harris
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415111287
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Society of Signs? is an introduction to current debates around the themes of culture, identity and lifestyle. Such debates often begin with the assertion that we live in a "society of signs". A Society of Signs? will help students of sociology, media and cultural studies to make sense of these often complicated arguments. It summarizes and critically discusses some basic approaches in social theory and cultural analysis; offers specific reading of some of the work of writers including Barthes and Giddens; reviews work in more traditional areas, for example, the sociology of identity and the embedding process found in social life; and gives advice on further reading.
Author: Richard J. Parmentier
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253025141
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
A major voice in contemporary semiotic theory offers a new perspective on potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology. In Signs and Society, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier demonstrates how an appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational work of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research. Parmentier’s concepts of “transactional value,” “metapragmatic interpretant,” and “circle of semiosis,” for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar’s Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity. Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology’s future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.
Author: Professor Scott M Lash
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781446227169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
This is a novel account of social change that supplants conventional understandings of society' and presents a sociology that takes as its main unit of analysis flows through time and across space. Developing a comparative analysis of the UK and US, the new Germany and Japan, Lash and Urry show how restructuration after organized capitalism has its basis in increasingly reflexive social actors and organizations. The consequence is not only the much-vaunted postmodern condition' but also a growth in reflexivity. In exploring this new reflexive world, the authors argue that today's economies are increasingly ones of signs - information, symbols, images, desire - and of space, where both signs and social subjects - refugees, financiers, tourists and "fl[ci]aneurs " - are mobile over ever greater distances at ever greater speeds.
Author: Webb Keane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Webb Keane argues that by looking at representations as concrete practices we may find them to be thoroughly entangled in the tensions and hazards of social existence. This book explores the performances and transactions that lie at the heart of public events in contemporary Anakalang, on the Indonesian island of Sumba. Weaving together sharply observed narrative, close analysis of poetic speech and valuable objects, and far-reaching theoretical discussion, Signs of Recognition explores the risks endemic in representational practices. An awareness of risk is embedded in the very forms of ritual speech and exchange. The possibilities for failure and slippage reveal people's mutual vulnerabilities and give words and things part of their power. Keane shows how the dilemmas posed by the effort to use and control language and objects are implicated with general problems of power, authority, and agency. He persuades us to look differently at ideas of voice and value. Integrating the analysis of words and things, this book contributes to a wide range of fields, including linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, social theory, and the studies of material culture, art, and political economy.
Author: John A. Jakle
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374522070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.
Author: Jesper Hoffmeyer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253112675
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
From reviews for the bestselling Danish edition: "... dashing and idiomatic language that is a pleasure to read." -- Berlingske Tidende "... an appetizer and eye opener... Hoffmeyer is a modernistic pioneer in the wide open spaces of the natural sciences... " -- Politiken "... extremely well written and interesting manifesto for a bioanthropology... " -- Inf. "It should be read by anyone who likes to be wiser and at the same time to be challenged in his habitual conception of the relations between culture and nature." -- Weekend Avisen On this tour of the universe of signs, Jesper Hoffmeyer travels back to the Big Bang, visits the tiniest places deep within cells, and ends his journey with us -- complex organisms capable of speech and reason. What propels this journey is Hoffmeyer's attempt to discover how nature could come to mean something to someone -- by telling the story of how cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals, even entire ecosystems communicate by signs and signals.
Author: Elizabeth Mertz
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483288862
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Approx.394 pages
Author: Margaret Bender
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Based on extensive fieldwork in the community of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, this book uses a semiotic approach to investigate the historic and contemporary role of the Sequoyan syllabary--the written system for representing the sounds of the Cherokee language--in Eastern Cherokee life. The Cherokee syllabary was invented in the 1820s by the respected Cherokee Sequoyah. The syllabary quickly replaced alternative writing systems for Cherokee and was reportedly in widespread use by the mid-nineteenth century. After that, literacy in Cherokee declined, except in specialized religious contexts. But as Bender shows, recent interest in cultural revitalization among the Cherokees has increased the use of the syllabary in education, publications, and even signage. Bender also explores the role played by the syllabary within the ever more important context of tourism. (The Eastern Cherokee Band hosts millions of visitors each year in the Great Smoky Mountains.) English is the predominant language used in the Cherokee community, but Bender shows how the syllabary is used in special and subtle ways that help to shape a shared cultural and linguistic identity among the Cherokees. Signs of Cherokee Culture thus makes an important contribution to the ethnographic literature on culturally specific literacies.
Author: Martin Ehala
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351985051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Signs of Identity presents an interdisciplinary introduction to collective identity, using insights from social psychology, anthropology, sociology and the humanities. It takes the basic concept of semiotics – the sign – as its central notion, and specifies in detail in what ways identity can be seen as a sign, how it functions as a sign, and how signs of identity are related to those who have that identity. Recognizing that the sense of belonging is both the source of solidarity and discrimination, the book argues for the importance of emotional attachment to collective identity. The argument is supported by a large number of real-life examples of how collective emotions affect group formation, collective action and inter-group relations. By addressing the current issues of authenticity and the Self, multiculturalism, intersectionality and social justice, the book helps to stimulate discussion of the contested topics of identity in contemporary society.
