Author: Bennett M. Berger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520377591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
The result of thirty-five years of thought and research on culture by one of the best and most literate writers in sociology, this wide-ranging review of the meaning and study of culture is Bennett Berger at his best. Drawing on his unsurpassed knowledge of the scholarly literature and on his wealth of personal experience, Berger reviews and synthesizes recent work in cultural sociology from a materialist perspective. An Essay on Culture culminates in a call for an empirical research program focused on the relation between symbolic choices and social locations, rather than on interpretive accounts of the meanings of texts or performances. Among his unusual insights are a defense of reductionism, sympathetic accounts of peer pressure and special interests, an attempt to restore some dignity to the word “ideology,” and a fresh perspective on conspiracy theory. Scholars and students of culture will find here stunning discussions and theoretical insights on ideological work, morality and culture, and on the relations between social structure and cultural structure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
Author: Jacques Barzun
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819562371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
The essence of culture is interpenetration. From any part of it the searching eye will discover connections with another part seemingly remote. If from my descriptions the reader finds this wide-angled view sharpened or expanded, my purpose in publishing these pages will have been served.
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710317
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle. In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation—penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics. Taking his cues from T.S. Eliot—whose essay “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished—Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.
Author: Alessandro Baricco
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847842967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
From one of Italy's most respected literary voices, a manifesto on the state of global culture and how connectivity is changing the way we experience it. For the gatekeepers of traditional high culture, the rise of young ambitious outsiders has indeed seemed like nothing short of a barbarian invasion. In this concise and powerful manifesto, Alessandro Baricco explores a handful of realms that have been "plundered"-wine, soccer, music, and books-and extrapolates that it is not a case of old values against new but a widespread mutation that we are all part of, leading toward a different way of having experiences and creating meaning.
Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Orbit Books
ISBN: 9780356512112
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Iain M. Banks, the modern master of SF, created many original drawings detailing the universe of his bestselling Culture novels. Now these illustrations - many of them annotated - are being published for the very first time in a book that celebrates Banks's grand vision, with additional notes and material by Banks's longtime friend and fellow SF author Ken MacLeod. Praise for the Culture series:'Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution' Independent on Sunday'Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future' Guardian'Jam-packed with extraordinary invention' Scotsman'Compulsive reading'Sunday Telegraph The Culture series: Consider PhlebasThe Player of GamesUse of WeaponsThe State of the ArtExcessionInversionsLook to WindwardMatterSurface DetailThe Hydrogen Sonata Other books by Iain M. Banks: Against a Dark BackgroundFeersum EndjinnThe Algebraist
Author: L. T. Hobhouse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135068496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
Originally published in 1915, this pioneer study has long occupied an important place in the literature of sociology. An exercise in the statistical correlation of the economic and social institutions of the working classes of the early twentieth century, the book is an important link between contemporary sociology, with a focus on the problems of social development, and the classical social liberalism on which L. T. Hobhouse left his mark. The reissue includes the introduction written by Morris Ginsberg in the 1965 reprint, where he explains what he and his colleagues set out to achieve and responds to the criticism faced by the study. This is a classic work which is still of great value to sociologists and anthropologists today.
Author: C. P. Snow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107606144
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.
Author: Grace Perry
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250760151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman A Lambda Literary Award Finalist "Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” —Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL "If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book.” —Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell. Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.
Author: Marshall Sahlins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 662
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Book Description
Essays that span the career of a prominent anthropologist and address the fundamental questions of the field. Culture in Practice collects the academic and political writings from the 1960s through the 1990s of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. More than a compilation, Culture in Practice unfolds as an intellectual autobiography. The book opens with Sahlins's early general studies of culture, economy, and human nature. It then moves to his reportage and reflections on the war in Vietnam and the antiwar movement, the event that most strongly affected his thinking about cultural specificity. Finally, it offers his more historical and globally aware works on indigenous peoples, especially those of the Pacific islands. Sahlins exposes the cultural specificity of the West, developing a critical account of the distinctive ways that we act in and understand the world. The book includes a play/review of Robert Ardrey's sociobiology, essays on "native" consumption patterns of food and clothes in America and the West, explorations of how two thousand years of Western cosmology affect our understanding of others, and ethnohistorical accounts of how cultural orders of Europeans and Pacific islanders structured the historical experiences of both. Throughout, Sahlins offers his own way of thinking about the anthropological project. To transcend critically our native categories in order to understand how other peoples have historically constructed their modes of existence--even now, in the era of globalization--is the great challenge of contemporary anthropology.
Author: Melissa Leach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317415191
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
For pathways to be truly sustainable and advance gender equality and the rights and capabilities of women and girls, those whose lives and well-being are at stake must be involved in leading the way. Gender Equality and Sustainable Development calls for policies, investments and initiatives in sustainable development that recognize women’s knowledge, agency and decision-making as fundamental. Four key sets of issues - work and industrial production; population and reproduction; food and agriculture, and water, sanitation and energy provide focal lenses through which these challenges are considered. Perspectives from new feminist political ecology and economy are integrated, alongside issues of rights, relations and power. The book untangles the complex interactions between different dimensions of gender relations and of sustainability, and explores how policy and activism can build synergies between them. Finally, this book demonstrates how plural pathways are possible; underpinned by different narratives about gender and sustainability, and how the choices between these are ultimately political. This timely book will be of great interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers working on gender, sustainable development, development studies and ecological economics.
