Identity Against Culture

Identity Against Culture PDF Author: Anthony Appiah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cultural pluralism
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description

Identity Against Culture

Identity Against Culture PDF Author: Anthony Appiah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cultural pluralism
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Get Book Here

Book Description


There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity

There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity PDF Author: François Jullien
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509547037
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
As people throughout the world react to globalization and revert to nationalism, they are proclaiming distinct cultural identities for themselves. Cultural identity seems to offer a defensive wall against the homogenizing effects of globalization and a framework for nurturing and protecting cultural differences. In this short and provocative book, François Jullien argues that this emphasis on cultural identity is a mistake. Cultures exist in relation to one another and they are constantly mutating and transforming themselves. There is no cultural identity, there are only what Jullien calls ‘resources’. Resources are created in a certain space, they are available to all and belong to no one. They are not exclusive, like the values to which we proclaim loyalty; instead, we deploy them or not, activate them or let them fall by the wayside, and each of us as individuals is responsible for these choices. This conceptual shift requires us to redefine three key terms – the universal, the uniform and the common. Equipped with these concepts, we can rethink the dialogue between cultures in a way that avoids what Jullien sees as the false debate about identity and difference. This powerful critique of the modern shibboleth of cultural identity will appeal to anyone interested in the great social and political questions of our time.

The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity

The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity PDF Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631493841
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year As seen on the Netflix series Explained From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction. Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation—of self-rule—is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiah’s own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities. These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities—from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns. Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who—and what—“we” are.

Culture and Identity

Culture and Identity PDF Author: Charles Lindholm
Publisher: Oneworld
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
In this newly revised and updated edition, Lindholm provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological anthropology, deftly tracing the growth of the field, introducing the key theorists, and covering a broad range of contemporary topics such as identity, emotions, symbolic systems, and the psychology of groups.

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds PDF Author: Dorothy Holland
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674005624
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This text addresses the central problem in anthropological theory of the late 1990s - the paradox that humans are both products of social discipline and creators of remarkable improvisation.

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-ascription

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-ascription PDF Author: Andrew J. Pierce
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739171909
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription argues that groups have an irreducibly collective right to determine the meaning of their shared group identity, and that such a right is especially important for historically oppressed groups. The author specifies this right by way of a modified discourse ethic, demonstrating that it can provide the foundation for a conception of identity politics that avoids many of its usual pitfalls. The focus throughout is on racial identity, which provides a test case for the theory. That is, it investigates what it would mean for racial identities to be self-ascribed rather than imposed, establishing the possible role racial identity might play in a just society. The book thus makes a unique contribution to both the field of critical theory, which has been woefully silent on issues of race, and to race theory, which often either presumes that a just society would be a raceless society, or focuses primarily on understanding existing racial inequalities, in the manner typical of so-called "non-ideal theory."

Public Culture, Cultural Identity, Cultural Policy

Public Culture, Cultural Identity, Cultural Policy PDF Author: Kevin V. Mulcahy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137435437
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book places the study of public support for the arts and culture within the prism of public policy making. It is explicitly comparative in casting cultural policy within a broad sociopolitical and historical framework. Given the complexity of national communities, there has been an absence of comparative analyses that would explain the wide variability in modes of cultural policy as reflections of public cultures and cultural identity. The discussion is internationally focused and interdisciplinary. Mulcahy contextualizes a wide variety of cultural policies and their relation to politics and identity by asking a basic question: who gets their heritage valorized and by whom is this done? The fundamental assumption is that culture is at the heart of public policy as it defines national identity and personal value.

Identity

Identity PDF Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717486
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law

Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law PDF Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472023769
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
We are witnessing in the last decade of the twentieth century more frequent demands by racial and ethnic groups for recognition of their distinctive histories and traditions as well as opportunities to develop and maintain the institutional infrastructure necessary to preserve them. Where it once seemed that the ideal of American citizenship was found in the promise of integration and in the hope that none of us would be singled out for, let alone judged by, our race or ethnicity, today integration, often taken to mean a denial of identity and history for subordinated racial, gender, sexual or ethnic groups, is often rejected, and new terms of inclusion are sought. The essays in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law ask us to examine carefully the relation of cultural struggle and material transformation and law's role in both. Written by scholars from a variety of disciplines and theoretical inclinations, the essays challenge orthodox understandings of the nature of identity politics and contemporary debates about separatism and assimilation. They ask us to think seriously about the ways law has been, and is, implicated in these debates. The essays address questions such as the challenges posed for notions of legal justice and procedural fairness by cultural pluralism and identity politics, the role played by law in structuring the terms on which recognition, accommodation, and inclusion are accorded to groups in the United States, and how much of accepted notions of law are defined by an ideal of integration and assimilation. The contributors are Elizabeth Clark, Lauren Berlant, Dorothy Roberts, Georg Lipsitz, and Kenneth Karst.

Difference Matters

Difference Matters PDF Author: Brenda J. Allen
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478607696
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Allens proven ability and flare for presenting complex and oftentimes sensitive topics in nonthreatening ways carry over in the latest edition of Difference Matters. Her down-to-earth analysis of six social identity categories reveals how communication establishes and enacts identity and power dynamics. She provides historical overviews to show how perceptions of gender, race, social class, sexuality, ability, and age have varied throughout time and place. Allen clearly explains pertinent theoretical perspectives and illustrates those and other discussions with real-life experiences (many of which are her own). She also offers practical guidance for how to communicate difference more humanely. While many examples are from organizational contexts, readers from a wide range of backgrounds can relate to them and appreciate their relevance. This eye-opening, vibrant text, suitable for use in a variety of disciplines, motivates readers to think about valuing difference as a positive, enriching feature of society. Interactive elements such as Spotlights on Media, I.D. Checks, Tool Kits, and Reflection Matters questions awaken interest, awareness, and creative insights for change.