Clarity, Cut, and Culture

Clarity, Cut, and Culture PDF Author: Susan Falls
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479877433
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
"Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general.Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks?This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents"--

Clarity, Cut, and Culture

Clarity, Cut, and Culture PDF Author: Susan Falls
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479877433
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
"Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general.Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks?This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents"--

Creative Clarity

Creative Clarity PDF Author: Jon Kolko
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780978853815
Category : Creative ability in business
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Everyone wants to turn their company into a creative power-house, but few understand how to do it. In Creative Clarity, best-selling author Jon Kolko will teach you how to manage the complexity and chaos of creativity, as you bring it into your organization.

The Anthropology of Resource Extraction

The Anthropology of Resource Extraction PDF Author: Lorenzo D'Angelo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000505871
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book offers an overview of the key debates in the burgeoning anthropological literature on resource extraction. Resources play a crucial role in the contemporary economy and society, are required in the production of a vast range of consumer products and are at the core of geopolitical strategies and environmental concerns for the future of humanity. Scholars have widely debated the economic and sociological aspects of resource management in our societies, offering interesting and useful abstractions. However, anthropologists offer different and fresh perspectives – sometimes complementary and at other times alternative to these abstractions – based on field researches conducted in close contact with those actors (individuals as well as groups and institutions) that manipulate, anticipate, fight for, or resist the extractive processes in many creative ways. Thus, while addressing questions such as: "What characterizes the anthropology of resource extraction?", "What topics in the context of resource extraction have anthropologists studied?", and "What approaches and insights have emerged from this?", this book synthesizes and analyses a range of anthropological debates about the ways in which different actors extract, use, manage, and think about resources. This comprehensive volume will serve as a key reading for scholars and students within the social sciences working on resource extraction and those with an interest in natural resources, environment, capitalism, and globalization. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners within mining and development.

The Imperfects

The Imperfects PDF Author: Amy Meyerson
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1488057249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
A priceless inheritance leads an imperfect family on a life-changing pursuit of the truth in a “compassionate, thoughtful, and surprisingly moving” novel (Booklist). Estranged siblings Beck, Ashley and Jake Miller are forced to reunite when their eccentric matriarch, Helen, passes away. But in between airing old resentments, they find a secret inheritance hidden among her possessions: the Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow gemstone that went missing from the Austrian Empire a century ago. Desperate to learn how one of the world’s most elusive diamonds ended up in Helen’s bedroom, the Millers suddenly realize how little they know about their grandmother. As they race to determine whether they are the rightful heirs to the diamond and the fortune it promises, they uncover a past more tragic and powerful than they ever could have imagined. Inspired by the true story of the real, still-missing Florentine Diamond, The Imperfects illuminates the sacrifices we make for family, and how discovering our past can be the key to a better the future.

In Search of Lost Futures

In Search of Lost Futures PDF Author: Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303063003X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
In Search of Lost Futures asks how imaginations might be activated through practices of autoethnography, multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity—each of which has the power to break down methodological silos, cultivate novel research sensibilities, and inspire researchers to question what is known about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, audience, and intervention within and beyond the academy. By blurring the boundaries between the past, present, and future; between absence and presence; between the possible and the impossible; and between fantasy and reality, In Search of Lost Futures pushes the boundaries of ethnographic engagement. It reveals how researchers on the cutting edge of the discipline are studying absence and grief and employing street performance, museum exhibit, anticipation, or simulated reality to research and intervene in the possible, the impossible, and the uncertain.

White Gold

White Gold PDF Author: Susan Falls
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202694
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Women have shared breast milk for eons, but in White Gold, Susan Falls shows how the meanings of capitalism, technology, motherhood, and risk can be understood against the backdrop of an emerging practice in which donors and recipients of breast milk are connected through social media in the southern United States. Drawing on her own experience as a participant, Falls describes the sharing community. She also presents narratives from donors, doulas, medical professionals, and recipients to provide a holistic ethnographic account. Situating her subject within cross-cultural comparisons of historically shifting attitudes about breast milk, Falls shows how sharing "white gold"--seen as a scarce, valuable, even mysterious substance--is a mode of enacting parenthood, gender, and political values. Though breast milk is increasingly being commodified, Falls argues that sharing is a powerful and empowering practice. Far from uniform, participants may be like-minded about parenting but not other issues, so their acquaintanceships add new textures to the body politic. In this interdisciplinary account, White Gold shows how sharing simultaneously reproduces the capitalist values that it disrupts while encouraging community-making between strangers.

Back to the ‘30s?

Back to the ‘30s? PDF Author: Jeremy Rayner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030415864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s? In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions—the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and “militant democracy,” long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.

Under Pressure

Under Pressure PDF Author: Lindsay A, Bell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487548877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
In 2007, Canada became the third largest producer of diamonds in the world. Primarily mined on the edge of the Arctic, these diamonds are said to bring economic development and opportunity to nearby Indigenous communities. In Under Pressure, anthropologist Lindsay A. Bell examines the effects of diamond mining on an increasingly diverse northern population. Through an ethnographic focus on everyday life in Hay River, a multi-ethnic town in the Northwest Territories, this book illustrates the different ways Indigenous, settler, and immigrant northerners navigate the opportunities and obstacles created by large-scale resource development. By situating contemporary diamond mines within the long history of extraction in the region, Bell describes the social, cultural, and economic pressures that shape the people in this Northern community. In contrast to many polarizing accounts that deem mining as either good or bad, Under Pressure uses diamonds as an anthropological prism to consider larger issues related to Arctic extraction, globalization, Indigenous rights, and ethical consumption.

Anthropology of Precious Minerals

Anthropology of Precious Minerals PDF Author: Elizabeth Ferry
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Based on a Wenner-Gren international workshop, held at the Royal Ontario Museum, this book addresses the complexity of human-mineral engagements through ethnographic case studies and anthropological reflections on different people and the minerals they deem 'precious.'

Seductive Academic Writing

Seductive Academic Writing PDF Author: Danyal Freeman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527509869
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This volume teaches academics and graduate students how to write seductive academic prose by learning a literacy rarely taught in academic writing or style handbooks: to use literary devices and figures of speech to meet ideals of stylish communication; and how these ideals and supposed ‘literary’ techniques serve academic readers and writers. Part one explores the persistent problem of the bad academic writing style called ‘academese’ and argues stylish academic writers avoid it by writing with figures of speech. Part two teaches and illustrates figures of speech seductive writers write into academic prose to convey the music and rhythms of good speech, cohesion, coherence and storytelling, and the personality and passions of the author. Part three argues the academy will not heal itself of academese until academic writing pedagogies teach students to care enough for their readers to write with figures of speech that craft seductive academic writing.