American Dreamtime

American Dreamtime PDF Author: Lee Drummond
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Americans consider themselves practical, realistic people engaged in building a complex technological civilization. At the same time, however, we spend countless billions on activities that fly in the face of our supposed commitment to down-to-earth realism: our movies, television programs, and sports events seem to be the pastimes of a whimsical, fantasy-ridden people. American Dreamtime explores these conflicting images through an analysis of blockbuster movies, revealing the intimate ties our daily activity and thought have with a world of myth.

American Dreamtime

American Dreamtime PDF Author: Lee Drummond
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Americans consider themselves practical, realistic people engaged in building a complex technological civilization. At the same time, however, we spend countless billions on activities that fly in the face of our supposed commitment to down-to-earth realism: our movies, television programs, and sports events seem to be the pastimes of a whimsical, fantasy-ridden people. American Dreamtime explores these conflicting images through an analysis of blockbuster movies, revealing the intimate ties our daily activity and thought have with a world of myth.

The US Sports Film: A Genre of American Dream Time

The US Sports Film: A Genre of American Dream Time PDF Author: Danny Gronmaier
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110760398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Sports and film are media that create time. They are temporal not only in the sense that they are defined and regulated by certain temporalities as a result of processes of social negotiation, but also in the sense of modulating and intervening in these processes in the first place. They are determined by multiple temporalities referring to and aligning along perceptual corporeality; but at the same time, they also produce time through and along temporalities of bodily expression and perception. Thus, as much as we perceive and understand sports and film by means of our culturally coded conceptions of time, this comprehension is itself already the product of these media’s fabrication and modulation of certain audiovisual imaginations of time. This book examines these imaginations with regard to US team sports feature films, understanding the former as the latter’s constitutive conflict which makes these films graspable as a genre in the first place. By addressing temporality as an ever-new crystallization of a heroic past and an unattainable future in a saturated yet volatile present, this conflict connects substantially to the American Dream as an idea of community-building historicity. Departing from a non-taxonomic approach in genre theory and such philosophical recognition of the American Dream as less an ideological narrative but more a social and socially effective imaginary embedded in an audiovisual discourse of time, this book demonstrates the interrelation of sports, cinema and “American” subjectivization along close readings of the poetics of affect of five exemplary sports films (FIELD OF DREAMS, WE ARE MARSHALL, KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN, JIM THORPE – ALL-AMERICAN, MIRACLE).

Symbolizing America

Symbolizing America PDF Author: Hervä Varenne
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803296039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Anthropologists since Franz Boas and Margaret Mead have traditionally gone off to study ?primitive? cultures. This collection of original essays breaks new ground in showing how anthropological theories and techniques can be applied to the culture of contemporary middle-class Americans. ø InSymbolizing America, ten well-known anthropologists pursue self and identity as cultural rather than psychological matters. Looking homeward, they ask ?What Is American about America?? ?How do we know?? and ?What difference does it make?? They analyze such aspects of American culture as advertising, mass-audience movies, patriotic and ethnic parades, church minutes, college parties, greetings, and the dilemmas of adolescent sexuality. Concerned with familiar interactions, they arrive at new insight into the experience of daily life in America. ø In their symbolic and semiotic approaches, the authors express the variety yet surprising unity of a dynamic American culture. Chapters include ?Creating America,? ?Doing the Anthropology of America,? and ??Drop in Anytime?: Community and Authenticity in American Everyday Life? by the editor, Hervä Varenne, Teachers College, Columbia University; ?Freedom to Choose: Symbols and Values in American Advertising? by William O. Beeman, Brown University; ?The story of [James] Bond? by Lee Drummond, McGill University; ?The Melting Pot: Symbolic Ritual or Total Social Fact?? by Milton Singer, University of Chicago; ?The Los Angeles Jews ?Walk for Solidarity?: Parade, Festival, Pilgrimage? by Barbara Myerhoff and Stephen Mongulla, University of Southern California; ?History, Faith, and Avoidance? by Carol Greenhouse, Cornell University; ?The Discourse of the Dorm: Race, Friendship, and ?Culture? among College Youth? by Michael Moffatt, Rutgers University; ?Why a ?Slut? is a ?Slut?: Cautionary Tales of American Middle-Class Teenage Girls? Morality? by Joyce Canaan, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; and an epilogue, ?on the Anthropology of America,? by John Caughey, University of Maryland.

Anthropology & Mass Communication

Anthropology & Mass Communication PDF Author: Mark Allen Peterson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571812780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media productio and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists. A former Washington D.C. journalist, Mark Allan Peterson is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He has published numerous articles on American, South Asian and Middle Eastern media, and has taught courses on anthropological approaches to media t at he American University in Cairo, the University of Hamburg, and Georgetown University.

Dreamways of the Iroquois

Dreamways of the Iroquois PDF Author: Robert Moss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594776210
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Explores the ancient Iroquois tradition of dreams, healing, and the recovery of the soul • Explains Native American shamanic dream practices and their applications and purpose in modern life • Shows how dreams call us to remember and honor our soul’s true purpose • Offers powerful Active Dreaming methods for regaining lost soul energy to restore our vitality and identity The ancient teaching of the Iroquois people is that dreams are experiences of the soul in which we may travel outside the body, across time and space, and into other dimensions--or receive visitations from ancestors or spiritual guides. Dreams also reveal the wishes of the soul, calling us to move beyond our ego agendas and the web of other people’s projections into a deeper, more spirited life. They call us to remember our sacred contracts and reclaim the knowledge that belonged to us, on the levels of soul and spirit, before we entered our present life experience. In dreams we also discover where our vital soul energy may have gone missing--through pain or trauma or heartbreak--and how to get it back. Robert Moss was called to these ways when he started dreaming in a language he did not know, which proved to be an early form of the Mohawk Iroquois language. From his personal experiences, he developed a spirited approach to dreaming and living that he calls Active Dreaming. Dreamways of the Iroquois is at once a spiritual odyssey, a tribute to the deep wisdom of the First Peoples, a guide to healing our lives through dreamwork, and an invitation to soul recovery.

Heading for the Scene of the Crash

Heading for the Scene of the Crash PDF Author: Lee Drummond
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
American anthropologists have long advocated cultural anthropology as a tool for cultural critique, yet seldom has that approach been employed in discussions of major events and cultural productions that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. This collection of essays aims to refashion cultural analysis into a hard-edged tool for the study of American society and culture, addressing topics including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abortion, sports doping, and the Jonestown massacre-suicides. Grounded in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays advance an inquiry into the nature of culture in American society.

Culture and Consumption II

Culture and Consumption II PDF Author: Grant David McCracken
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253345660
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
* New insights into modern consumer culture by a master critic

Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers PDF Author: Deanne Stillman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476773548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Nonfiction The little-known but uniquely American story of the unlikely friendship of two famous figures of the American West—Buffalo Bill Cody and Sitting Bull—told through the prism of their collaboration in Cody's Wild West show in 1885. “Splendid… Blood Brothers eloquently explores the clash of cultures on the Great Plains that initially united the two legends and how this shared experience contributed to the creation of their ironic political alliance.” —Bobby Bridger, Austin Chronicle It was in Brooklyn, New York, in 1883 that William F. Cody—known across the land as Buffalo Bill—conceived of his Wild West show, an “equestrian extravaganza” featuring cowboys and Indians. It was a great success, and for four months in 1885 the Lakota chief Sitting Bull appeared in the show. Blood Brothers tells the story of these two iconic figures through their brief but important collaboration, in “a compelling narrative that reads like a novel” (Orange County Register). “Thoroughly researched, Deanne Stillman’s account of this period in American history is elucidating as well as entertaining” (Booklist), complete with little-told details about the two men whose alliance was eased by none other than Annie Oakley. When Sitting Bull joined the Wild West, the event spawned one of the earliest advertising slogans: “Foes in ’76, Friends in ’85.” Cody paid his performers well, and he treated the Indians no differently from white performers. During this time, the Native American rights movement began to flourish. But with their way of life in tatters, the Lakota and others availed themselves of the chance to perform in the Wild West show. When Cody died in 1917, a large contingent of Native Americans attended his public funeral. An iconic friendship tale like no other, Blood Brothers is a timeless story of people from different cultures who crossed barriers to engage each other as human beings. Here, Stillman provides “an account of the tragic murder of Sitting Bull that’s as good as any in the literature…Thoughtful and thoroughly well-told—just the right treatment for a subject about which many books have been written before, few so successfully” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

A/V A to Z

A/V A to Z PDF Author: Richard W. Kroon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786457406
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 773

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Book Description
Defining more than 10,000 words and phrases from everyday slang to technical terms and concepts, this dictionary of the audiovisual language embraces more than 50 subject areas within film, television, and home entertainment. It includes terms from the complete lifecycle of an audiovisual work from initial concept through commercial presentation in all the major distribution channels including theatrical exhibition, television broadcast, home entertainment, and mobile media. The dictionary definitions are augmented by more than 700 illustrations, 1,600 etymologies, and nearly 2,000 encyclopedic entries that provide illuminating anecdotes, historical perspective, and clarifying details.

Superman in Myth and Folklore

Superman in Myth and Folklore PDF Author: Daniel Peretti
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496814592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Superman rose from popular culture—comic books, newspaper strips, radio, television, novels, and movies—but people have so embraced the character that he has now become part of folklore. This transition from popular to folk culture signals the importance of Superman to fans and to a larger American populace. Superman’s story has become a myth dramatizing identity, morality, and politics. Many studies have examined the ways in which folklore has provided inspiration for other forms of culture, especially literature and cinema. In Superman in Myth and Folklore, Daniel Peretti explores the meaning of folklore inspired by popular culture, focusing not on the Man of Steel’s origins but on the culture he has helped create. Superman provides a way to approach fundamental questions of human nature, a means of exploring humanity’s relationship with divinity, an exemplar for debate about the type of hero society needs, and an articulation of the tension between the individual and the community. Through examinations of tattoos, humor, costuming, and festivals, Peretti portrays Superman as a corporate-owned intellectual property and a model for behavior, a means for expression and performance of individual identity, and the focal point for disparate members of fan communities. As fans apply Superman stories to their lives, they elevate him to a mythical status. Peretti focuses on the way these fans have internalized various aspects of the character. In doing so, he delves into the meaning of Superman and his place in American culture and demonstrates the character’s staying power.