Urban Elite Culture

Urban Elite Culture PDF Author: Luisa Radohs
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
ISBN: 3412528617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 693

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Book Description
Medieval towns were vibrant and complex social environments where diverse groups and lifestyles encountered and influenced each other. Surprisingly, in the study of urban archaeology, the aristocracy, one of the leading and most influential groups in medieval society, has so far been neglected. This book puts "aristocracy in towns" on the archaeological research agenda. The interdisciplinary and comparative study explores the significance and representation of aristocrats and their interaction with civic elites in sea-trading towns of the southwestern Baltic from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Essentially, however, the analysis of urban elite culture leads to discussion of a much more fundamental issue: the informative value of material culture for the investigation of social conditions. The book provides new archaeological approaches to the study of social differentiation in towns, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexity of urban social structures.

Urban Elite Culture

Urban Elite Culture PDF Author: Luisa Radohs
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
ISBN: 3412528617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 693

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval towns were vibrant and complex social environments where diverse groups and lifestyles encountered and influenced each other. Surprisingly, in the study of urban archaeology, the aristocracy, one of the leading and most influential groups in medieval society, has so far been neglected. This book puts "aristocracy in towns" on the archaeological research agenda. The interdisciplinary and comparative study explores the significance and representation of aristocrats and their interaction with civic elites in sea-trading towns of the southwestern Baltic from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Essentially, however, the analysis of urban elite culture leads to discussion of a much more fundamental issue: the informative value of material culture for the investigation of social conditions. The book provides new archaeological approaches to the study of social differentiation in towns, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexity of urban social structures.

The Cultures of Cities

The Cultures of Cities PDF Author: Sharon Zukin
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781557864376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city's central spaces - the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants - which are the great public spaces of modernity. While cultural gentrification may contribute to making our cities both safer and more civilised places to live, it has its darker side. Beneath the perceptions of "civility" and "security" nurtured by cultural strategies, Zukin shows an aggressive private-sector bid for control of public space, a relentless drive for expansion by art museums and other non-profit cultural institutions, and an increasing redesign of the built environment for the purposes of social control. Tying these developments to a new "symbolic economy" based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the central spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture? Combining cultural critique, interviews, autobiography and ethnography, The Culture of Cities is a compelling account of the public spaces of modernity as they are transformed into new, more troubling landscapes.

Urban Elites and Aristocratic Behaviour in the Spanish Kingdoms at the End of the Middle Ages

Urban Elites and Aristocratic Behaviour in the Spanish Kingdoms at the End of the Middle Ages PDF Author: María Asenjo González
Publisher: Brepols Pub
ISBN: 9782503546445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This collection of studies presents the results of research to discover the scope of aristocratic ambitions of the urban elites in the Hispanic kingdoms in the Late Middle Ages. The goal is to gain a greater knowledge of the urban elites in order to discover the social and political motivations of the privileged, those who were able to profit from the mechanisms of social ascension. Aristocratisation is also related to the adoption of values which determined the behavior and mentality under the mark of the dominant feudal culture. The strategies, the resources to move up the social ladder and the ambition of the urban social elite and the occasions used to ensure successful promotion and the results obtained should be brought to light. The variety in the urban elites within the Iberian Peninsula offers comparative possibilities and supposes an important advancement in the knowledge of aspects related to social promotion.

What Is Islam?

What Is Islam? PDF Author: Shahab Ahmed
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178313
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
A bold new conceptualization of Islam that reflects its contradictions and rich diversity What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an analytical term? In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation—one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory. A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

Medieval Conduct

Medieval Conduct PDF Author: Kathleen M. Ashley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Focusing on a broad range of texts from England, France, Germany, and Italy -- conduct and courtesy books, advice poems, devotional literature, trial records -- the contributors to Medieval Conduct draw attention to the diverse ways in which readers of this literature could interpret such behavioral guides, appropriating them to their own ends. Medieval Conduct expands the concept of conduct to include historicized practices, and theorizes the connection between texts and their concrete social uses; what emerges is a nuanced interpretation of the role of gender and class inscribed in such texts. By bringing to light these subtleties and complexities, the authors also reveal the ways in which the assumptions of literary history have shaped our reception of such texts in the past two centuries.

Knowing Your Place

Knowing Your Place PDF Author: Barbara Ching
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136048383
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Knowing Your Place directs groundbreaking attention to the role of rural and urban places in identity construction. Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated. The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. Topics covered include the uses of popular and high culture, the explosion of high technology, the social and economic impact of ecological policy, the role of labor in the global marketplace, museum curatorship, and post-colonial politics. Throughout, the essays address the many ways in which place identity alters and influences the experience of race, class, gender and ethnicity.

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India PDF Author: Nandini Gooptu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521443660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Nandini Gooptu's magisterial 2001 history of the labouring poor in India represents a tour-de-force.

Shakespeare and Tourism

Shakespeare and Tourism PDF Author: Robert Ormsby
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429619081
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Tourism provides a dialogical mapping of Shakespeare studies and touristic theory through a collection of essays by scholars on a wide range of material. This volume examines how Shakespeare tourism has evolved since its inception, and how the phenomenon has been influenced and redefined by performance studies, the prevalence of the World Wide Web, developments in technology, and the globalization of Shakespearean performance. Current scholarship recognizes Shakespearean tourism as a thriving international industry, the result of centuries of efforts to attribute meanings associated with the playwright’s biography and literary prestige to sites for artistic pilgrimage and the consumption of cultural heritage. Through bringing Shakespeare and tourism studies into more explicit contact, this collection provides readers with a broad base for comparisons across time and location, and thereby encourages a thorough reconsideration of how we understand both fields.

An Imperial Possession

An Imperial Possession PDF Author: David Mattingly
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101160403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 709

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Book Description
Part of the Penguin History of Britain series, An Imperial Possession is the first major narrative history of Roman Britain for a generation. David Mattingly draws on a wealth of new findings and knowledge to cut through the myths and misunderstandings that so commonly surround our beliefs about this period. From the rebellious chiefs and druids who led native British resistance, to the experiences of the Roman military leaders in this remote, dangerous outpost of Europe, this book explores the reality of life in occupied Britain within the context of the shifting fortunes of the Roman Empire.

Propagandists of the Book

Propagandists of the Book PDF Author: Lecturer in Latin American Christianity Pedro Feitoza
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197761771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Pedro Feitoza traces the history of Protestantism in Brazil through an analysis of the production and circulation of evangelical texts. Examining a wide range of periodicals, tracts, correspondence, and other archival records and delving into the ideology of religious thinkers and evangelists of the time, Feitoza considers how Protestant veneration of the written word led to a complex infrastructure for the distribution of religious texts and the fostering of literacy in Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.