Beyond the Cultural Turn

Beyond the Cultural Turn PDF Author: Victoria E. Bonnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520922166
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Nothing has generated more controversy in the social sciences than the turn toward culture, variously known as the linguistic turn, culturalism, or postmodernism. This book examines the impact of the cultural turn on two prominent social science disciplines, history and sociology, and proposes new directions in the theory and practice of historical research. The editors provide an introduction analyzing the origins and implications of the cultural turn and its postmodernist critiques of knowledge. Essays by leading historians and historical sociologists reflect on the uses of cultural theories and show both their promise and their limitations. The afterword by Hayden White provides an assessment of the trend toward culturalism by one its most influential proponents. Beyond the Cultural Turn offers fresh theoretical readings of the most persistent issues created by the cultural turn and provocative empirical studies focusing on diverse social practices, the uses of narrative, and the body and self as critical junctures where culture and society intersect.

Beyond the Cultural Turn

Beyond the Cultural Turn PDF Author: Victoria E. Bonnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520922166
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nothing has generated more controversy in the social sciences than the turn toward culture, variously known as the linguistic turn, culturalism, or postmodernism. This book examines the impact of the cultural turn on two prominent social science disciplines, history and sociology, and proposes new directions in the theory and practice of historical research. The editors provide an introduction analyzing the origins and implications of the cultural turn and its postmodernist critiques of knowledge. Essays by leading historians and historical sociologists reflect on the uses of cultural theories and show both their promise and their limitations. The afterword by Hayden White provides an assessment of the trend toward culturalism by one its most influential proponents. Beyond the Cultural Turn offers fresh theoretical readings of the most persistent issues created by the cultural turn and provocative empirical studies focusing on diverse social practices, the uses of narrative, and the body and self as critical junctures where culture and society intersect.

Beyond the Cultural Turn

Beyond the Cultural Turn PDF Author: Richard Biernacki
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520216792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
A collection of engaging essays that look specifically at the effect of culturalism on history and sociology and propose new directions in the theory and practice of research.

Critical Junctions

Critical Junctions PDF Author: Don Kalb
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

Cultural Turns

Cultural Turns PDF Author: Doris Bachmann-Medick
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110403072
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The contemporary fields of the study of culture, the humanities and the social sciences are unfolding in a dynamic constellation of cultural turns. This book provides a comprehensive overview of these theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking reorientations. It discusses the value of the new focuses and their analytical categories for the work of a wide range of disciplines. In addition to chapters on the interpretive, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial and iconic turns, it discusses emerging directions of research. Drawing on a wealth of international research, this book maps central topics and approaches in the study of culture and thus provides systematic impetus for changed disciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the humanities and beyond – e.g., in the fields of sociology, economics and the study of religion. This work is the English translation by Adam Blauhut of an influential German book that has now been completely revised. It is a stimulating example of a cross-cultural translation between different theoretical cultures and also the first critical synthesis of cultural turns in the English-speaking world.

The Cultural Turn in U. S. History

The Cultural Turn in U. S. History PDF Author: James W. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226115070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
An account of one of the most dominant trends in recent historical writing, this book takes stock of the field even as it showcases exemplars of its practice. Taken together, the essays present a broad picture of the state of American cultural-historical scholarship.

Material Powers

Material Powers PDF Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134015151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns – from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonized in French colonial practices to the part played by the relations between museums and expeditions in the organization of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ‘cultural turn’. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.

War and the Cultural Turn

War and the Cultural Turn PDF Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In this stimulating new text, renowned military historian Jeremy Black unpacks the concept of culture as a descriptive and analytical approach to the history of warfare. Black takes the reader through the limits and prospects of culture as a tool for analyzing war, while also demonstrating the necessity of maintaining the context of alternative analytical matrices, such as technology. Black sets out his unique approach to culture and warfare without making his paradigm into a straightjacket. He goes on to demonstrate the flexibility of his argument through a series of case studies which include the contexts of rationale (Gloire), strategy (early modern Britaisn), organizations (the modern West), and ideologies (the Cold War). These case studies drive home the point at the core of the book: culture is not a bumper sticker; it is a survival mechanism. Culture is not immutable; it is adaptable. Wide-ranging, international and always provocative, War and the Cultural Turn will be required reading for all students of military history and security studies.

State/Culture

State/Culture PDF Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717782
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.

The Power of Religious Publics

The Power of Religious Publics PDF Author: William H. Swatos Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313371326
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Currently, public religion is in a time of flux and the notion of the common good—once associated with the Protestant voice in America—is openly contested by new religious coalitions seeking to communicate their version of the truth and plant their stake in the public domain. This edited volume reflects on the changing tone and form of the public voice of religion, on its function in American society, and on its relationship to the private world of religion. It proposes that public religion, when exercised in a civil and accountable way, can be a responsible and prophetic voice in public life and enrich the American experiment in liberal democracy. The contributors—first-rate scholars including Martin Marty and Robert Belah—focus on public religion's influence on controversial issues such as multiculturalism, economic inequality, abortion, and homosexuality.

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law PDF Author: Austin D. Sarat
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384752
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity—such as ethnicity, race, or religion—has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches—including legal realism, law and economics, and law and society. As Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon demonstrate, scholars of the law have begun to mine the humanities for new theoretical tools and kinds of knowledge. Crucial to this effort is cultural studies, with its central focus on the relationship between knowledge and power. Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions—as in Aldolph Eichmann’s 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts. Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young