Cultural Bodies

Cultural Bodies PDF Author: Helen Thomas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470776943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory is a unique collection that integrates two increasingly key areas of social and cultural research: the body and ethnography. Breaks new ground in an area of study that continues to be a central theme of debate and research across the humanities and social sciences Draws on ethnography as a useful means of exploring our everyday social and cultural environments Constitutes an important step in developing two key areas of study, the body and ethnography, and the relationship between them Brings together an international and multi-disciplinary team of scholars

Cultural Bodies

Cultural Bodies PDF Author: Helen Thomas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470776943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory is a unique collection that integrates two increasingly key areas of social and cultural research: the body and ethnography. Breaks new ground in an area of study that continues to be a central theme of debate and research across the humanities and social sciences Draws on ethnography as a useful means of exploring our everyday social and cultural environments Constitutes an important step in developing two key areas of study, the body and ethnography, and the relationship between them Brings together an international and multi-disciplinary team of scholars

Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health

Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health PDF Author: Elizabeth Ettorre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317155831
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health explores the boundaries between bodies and society with special reference to uncovering the cultural components of health and the ways in which bodies are categorized according to a form of culturally embedded 'health orthodoxy'. Illustrating the importance of contextualizing the body as a cultural entity, this book demonstrates that the spaces and boundaries between healthy bodies are becoming more diverse than ever before. The volumes international team of scholars engage with a range of issues surrounding the cultural construction of the body as a site of health and illness. As such, it will be of interest not only to sociologists, especially sociologists of health, but also to scholars of media and communication studies as well as cultural theorists.

Meaning in Motion

Meaning in Motion PDF Author: Jane Desmond
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319429
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
On dance and culture

Commodifying Bodies

Commodifying Bodies PDF Author: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761940340
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
With rapid developments in reproductive medicine, transplant ethics and bioethics, a new `ethic of parts' has emerged in which the body is increasingly seen as a commodity which can be bartered, sold or stolen. This book combines perspectives from anthropology and sociology to offer compelling new readings of the body.

Extraordinary Bodies

Extraordinary Bodies PDF Author: Rosemarie Garland Thomson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture PDF Author: Karen Raber
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."

Circus Bodies

Circus Bodies PDF Author: Peta Tait
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134331207
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies. Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement. Adeptly locating aerial performance within the wider cultural history of bodies and their identities, Circus Bodies explores this subject through a range of films such as Trapeze (1956) and Wings of Desire (1987) and Tait also examines live performances including: * the first trapeze performers: Léotard and the Hanlon Brothers * female celebrities; Azella, Sanyeah, black French aerialist LaLa, the infamous Leona Dare, and the female human cannonballs * twentieth-century gender benders; Barbette and Luisita Leers * the Codonas, Concellos, Gaonas, Vazquez and Pages troupes * imaginative aerial acts in Cirque de Soleil and Circus Oz productions. This book will prove an invaluable resource for all students and scholars interested in this fascinating field.

Bodies of Inscription

Bodies of Inscription PDF Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324676
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a more middle-class movement in the period from the 1970s to the present.

Bodies at War

Bodies at War PDF Author: Belinda Linn Rincón
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816537445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In the wake of U.S. military intervention abroad and collapsing domestic economies, scholars have turned their attention to neoliberalism and militarization, two ideological and material projects that are often treated as coincident, though not interdependent. Bodies at War examines neoliberal militarism, a term that signifies the complex ways in which neoliberalism and militarism interanimate each other as they naturalize dis/empowering notions of masculinity and femininity, alter democratic practices, and circumscribe the meaning of citizenship and national belonging. Bodies at War examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970s to the present and its transformation of political, economic, and social relations. It charts neoliberal militarism’s impact on democratic practices, economic policies, notions of citizenship, race relations, and gender norms by focusing on how these changes affect the Chicana/o community and, more specifically, on how it shapes and is shaped by Chicana bodies. The book raises important questions about the cultural legacies of war and the gendering of violence—topics that reach across multiple disciplinary fields of inquiry, including cultural and media studies. It draws attention to the relationship between war and society, to neoliberal militarism’s destructive social impact, and to the future of Latina soldiering. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Rincón offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262680912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.