Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History

Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History PDF Author: Martyn Hudson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000867412
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History looks at the global phenomena of the dead in world history, examining the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy. From Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ to Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, there is a recurring obsession with the ‘spirits’ of modernity. This book explores the relationships and interactions between those spirits and materiality in five broad areas: the nature of the dead in modernity, shape-shifting and mobile souls, the spirit in accounts of prehistory and archaeology, the phenomenology of spirits and the relation to statues and stone, and the nature of spirit as it is manifested in wooden artefacts and folklore. It offers a counter-modernity to that of classical social science and philosophy and new ways of thinking about our crises and catastrophes in social theory and the world and the worlds beyond this world. Building on the author’s previous work on the sociology of haunted houses and landscapes, it examines the body and the individual as the locus of haunting. The book will appeal to academics in philosophy, history, social theory, anthropology and cultural studies in its omni-disciplinarity and in its import for rethinking the histories of social thought.

Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History

Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History PDF Author: Martyn Hudson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000867412
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History looks at the global phenomena of the dead in world history, examining the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy. From Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ to Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, there is a recurring obsession with the ‘spirits’ of modernity. This book explores the relationships and interactions between those spirits and materiality in five broad areas: the nature of the dead in modernity, shape-shifting and mobile souls, the spirit in accounts of prehistory and archaeology, the phenomenology of spirits and the relation to statues and stone, and the nature of spirit as it is manifested in wooden artefacts and folklore. It offers a counter-modernity to that of classical social science and philosophy and new ways of thinking about our crises and catastrophes in social theory and the world and the worlds beyond this world. Building on the author’s previous work on the sociology of haunted houses and landscapes, it examines the body and the individual as the locus of haunting. The book will appeal to academics in philosophy, history, social theory, anthropology and cultural studies in its omni-disciplinarity and in its import for rethinking the histories of social thought.

Art Worlding

Art Worlding PDF Author: Julie Crawshaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000536769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Tracing the associations between artists, planners and engineers with and within the materials of our environment, this book introduces the relational theory of ‘art worlding’ as a way of coming to know our organic continuity. Through a series of ‘sculptural’ ethnographies of the making and doing of art in urban and rural contexts, the author re-orientates the art-planning relationship in recognition of art practice as a mode of inquiry and way of knowing. Methodologically innovative, the book traces public art as practice and integrates artistic practice within planning research. Inspired by the classical pragmatism of John Dewey the fieldwork illuminates the opportunity afforded by the art-planning relationship in understanding relational continuity at differing scales. It introduces a new paradigm for the field of public art and for art and planning practice more broadly. Art Worlding: Planning Relations will appeal to sociologists and social anthropologists with interests in art, as well as artists and art scholars, and those working in the fields of urban and rural planning, urban regeneration, art and ecology, curating, public art, and cultural management.

Ghosts in the Middle Ages

Ghosts in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory

Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory PDF Author: Martyn Hudson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315306662
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising ‘social haunting’: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again. Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about these figures, but for their significance for our, constantly re-invented, re-vivified, re-ghosted social world. With chapters on haunted houses and castles, slave ghosts, the haunting airs of music, the prehistoric origin of spirits, Marxist spectres, Freudian revenants, and the ghosts in the machine, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory adopts multi-disciplinary methods for understanding the past, the dead and social ghosts and the landscapes they appear in. A sociology of haunting that illustrates how social landscapes have their genesis and perpetuation in haunting and the past, this volume will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in memory, haunting and culture.

The Haunted

The Haunted PDF Author: O. Davies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230237100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'The Haunted' is the first truly comprehensive social history of ghosts. Using fascinating and entertaining examples, Davies places the history of ghosts within their wider social and cultural context, and examines why a belief in ghosts continues to be vibrant, socially relevant and historically illuminating.

Building Modern Antiquity

Building Modern Antiquity PDF Author: Georgia Giannakopoulou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040259928
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book considers post-19th-century Athens as a unique instance of a secret side of metropolitan capitalism. With a focus on modern antiquity as the hidden element of the dialectic between the past and the present, it suggests that the sociological study of one of the great European capital cities – a city not intended as a modern capital – and its architectural representations may expose part of the veiled processes of the reconstruction of the past, thus shedding light on the abuse of antiquity for the celebration of European capitalist metropolitan modernity. From the "glorious" white-marble cityscape of the 19th century that aimed at "re-enchanting" metropolitan modernity, to the inglorious grey reinforced-concrete 21st-century metropolis, modern Athens exposes the battle between the modern and a modern image of antiquity: a false, socially constructed historiography born of the dialectics between the ancient and the modern, the new and the old, collective memory and collective forgetting. As such, The Building of a Modern Antiquity will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social and critical theory, urban studies, sociology of architecture, and visual sociology.

Ghostly Matters

Ghostly Matters PDF Author: Avery F. Gordon
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452913862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz “The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.” —American Studies International “Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations. Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

Ghosts

Ghosts PDF Author: Roger Clarke
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466857862
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A comprehensive, authoritative and readable history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behavior of the subject in its preferred environment: the stories we tell each other. "Roger Clarke tells this [the story that inspired Henry James' The Turn of the Screw] and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within... [An] erudite and richly entertaining book." —New York Times Book Review No matter how rationally we order our lives, few of us are completely immune to the suggestion of the uncanny and the fear of the dark. What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly do those who have been haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there? Taking us through the key hauntings that have obsessed the world, from the true events that inspired Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw right up to the present day, Roger Clarke unfolds a story of class conflict, charlatans, and true believers. The cast list includes royalty and prime ministers, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Harry Houdini, and Adolf Hitler. The chapters cover everything from religious beliefs to modern developments in neuroscience, the medicine of ghosts, and the technology of ghosthunting. There are haunted WWI submarines, houses so blighted by phantoms they are demolished, a seventeenth-century Ghost Hunter General, and the emergence of the Victorian flash mob, where hundreds would stand outside rumored sites all night waiting to catch sight of a dead face at a window. Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe.

Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching

Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching PDF Author: Ainslie T. Embree
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317476476
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1042

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Book Description
A guide aimed at introducing students to the history of Asia in conjunction with Western and world history.

Ghosts

Ghosts PDF Author: Lisa Morton
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780235372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
From that cheerful puff of smoke known as Casper to the hunkiest potter living or dead, Sam Wheat, there is probably no more iconic entity in supernatural history than the ghost. And these are just recent examples. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today’s ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and every culture in human history. In this book, Lisa Morton uses her scholarly prowess—more powerful than any proton pack—to wrangle together history’s most enduring ghosts into an entertaining and comprehensive look at what otherwise seems to always evade our eyes. Tracing the ghost’s constantly shifting contours, Morton asks the most direct question—What exactly is a ghost?—and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants. She asks how a ghost is related to a soul, and she outlines all the different kinds of ghosts there are. To do so, she visits the spirits of the classical world, including the five-part Egyptian soul and the first haunted-house, conceived in the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy, Mostellaria. She confronts us with the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages—who could incinerate priests and devour children—and reminds us of the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism, a religion essentially devoted to ghosts. She visits with the Indian bhuta and goes to the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, and of course she spends time in Mexico, where ghosts have a particularly strong grip on belief and culture. Along the way she gathers the ectoplasmic residues seeping from books and film reels, from the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto to the 2007 blockbuster Paranormal Activity, from the stories of Ann Radcliffe to those of Stephen King. Wide-ranging, informative, and slicked with over fifty unearthly images, Ghosts is an entertaining read of a cultural phenomenon that will delight anyone, whether they believe in ghosts or not.