The Weight of the Past

The Weight of the Past PDF Author: M. Lambek
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349730807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
In The Weight of the Past , Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life. Focusing on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted religious landscape, Lambek's analysis reveals the multiple ways that Sakalava 'bear' history. In Mahajanga, Madagascar, to bear history is at once a weighty obligation, a creative re-birthing, a scrupulous cultivation, and an exuberant performance of the past. To bear history is to serve and to suffer it, but also to be informed, enlightened, and sanctified. Royal ancestors emerge in spirit mediums to comment on the present from multiple voices and generate a refracted, ironic historical consciousness. This book describes the division of labour, creative production (poiesis), and ethical practice (phronesis) entailed in imagining, embodying, and serving the past. It is at once a vivid ethnography of Sakalava life and a significant intervention in anthropological debates on culture and history, structure and practice, advocating a theoretical approach informed by Aristotelian categories of understanding. Ethnographically rich and engagingly written, this book will be essential reading for courses in the anthropology of religion, ritual, or historical consciousness.

The Weight of the Past

The Weight of the Past PDF Author: M. Lambek
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349730807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book

Book Description
In The Weight of the Past , Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life. Focusing on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted religious landscape, Lambek's analysis reveals the multiple ways that Sakalava 'bear' history. In Mahajanga, Madagascar, to bear history is at once a weighty obligation, a creative re-birthing, a scrupulous cultivation, and an exuberant performance of the past. To bear history is to serve and to suffer it, but also to be informed, enlightened, and sanctified. Royal ancestors emerge in spirit mediums to comment on the present from multiple voices and generate a refracted, ironic historical consciousness. This book describes the division of labour, creative production (poiesis), and ethical practice (phronesis) entailed in imagining, embodying, and serving the past. It is at once a vivid ethnography of Sakalava life and a significant intervention in anthropological debates on culture and history, structure and practice, advocating a theoretical approach informed by Aristotelian categories of understanding. Ethnographically rich and engagingly written, this book will be essential reading for courses in the anthropology of religion, ritual, or historical consciousness.

The Return of Inequality

The Return of Inequality PDF Author: Mike Savage
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674259645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.

The Weight of the Past

The Weight of the Past PDF Author: Göze Orhon
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443879886
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The 12 September 1980 coup represented a ""milestone"" in Turkey, the consequences of which have shadowed the lives of the peoples of Turkey for more than thirty years. The coup was instrumental in the profound economic, political and social transformation of the country, while, on the other hand, it aimed at destroying any public opposition deemed likely to jeopardise the course of this transformation. The remembrance of the period as laden with experiences of profound transformation, alongsid ...

Devil Take the Hindmost

Devil Take the Hindmost PDF Author: Edward Chancellor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452281806
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day. Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed—and not changed—over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity”; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

Mass Starvation

Mass Starvation PDF Author: Alex de Waal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509524703
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The world almost conquered famine. Until the 1980s, this scourge killed ten million people every decade, but by early 2000s mass starvation had all but disappeared. Today, famines are resurgent, driven by war, blockade, hostility to humanitarian principles and a volatile global economy. In Mass Starvation, world-renowned expert on humanitarian crisis and response Alex de Waal provides an authoritative history of modern famines: their causes, dimensions and why they ended. He analyses starvation as a crime, and breaks new ground in examining forced starvation as an instrument of genocide and war. Refuting the enduring but erroneous view that attributes famine to overpopulation and natural disaster, he shows how political decision or political failing is an essential element in every famine, while the spread of democracy and human rights, and the ending of wars, were major factors in the near-ending of this devastating phenomenon. Hard-hitting and deeply informed, Mass Starvation explains why man-made famine and the political decisions that could end it for good must once again become a top priority for the international community.

Silencing the Past

Silencing the Past PDF Author: Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807080535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book’s enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot’s brilliant analysis of power and history’s silences.

Our Unfinished March

Our Unfinished March PDF Author: Eric Holder
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0593445740
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it’s too late—from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight Voting is our most important right as Americans—“the right that protects all the others,” as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act—but it’s also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump’s effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril. But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby—a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted. Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.

Let Go

Let Go PDF Author: Mark Huebner
Publisher: The Porcupine's Quill
ISBN: 0889844399
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A lost job. A cardboard box. A raging blizzard. After being fired from his job, a veteran ad man is escorted from the office, carrying a cardboard box packed with mementos of his career. He steps out into a blinding blizzard, burdened by the weight of his collection. Each object tells a story, and as he navigates the city and makes his way home, he indulges in memories from his past: former colleagues, an award-winning campaign, a lost love. But faced with the demands of the present—and the very real danger of the snow-bound city streets—he must decide whether to hold on to the objects of his past, or to let go in the hopes of surviving the night. The bold, honest linocuts in Mark Huebner’s Let Go form an evocative narrative that distills over twenty years of memories into a single night of intense struggle against nature both meteorological and human.

Absolutely American

Absolutely American PDF Author: David Lipsky
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547523750
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller: A “fascinating, funny and tremendously well written” chronicle of daily life at the US Military Academy (Time). In 1998, West Point made an unprecedented offer to Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky: Stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America’s most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars, and training exercises, from arrival through graduation. By telling their stories, he also examines the Academy as a reflection of our society: Are its principles of equality, patriotism, and honor quaint anachronisms or is it still, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, the most “absolutely American” institution? During an eventful four years in West Point’s history, Lipsky witnesses the arrival of TVs and phones in dorm rooms, the end of hazing, and innumerable other shifts in policy and practice. He uncovers previously unreported scandals and poignantly evokes the aftermath of September 11, when cadets must prepare to become officers in wartime. Lipsky also meets some extraordinary people: a former Eagle Scout who struggles with every facet of the program, from classwork to marching; a foul-mouthed party animal who hates the military and came to West Point to play football; a farm-raised kid who seems to be the perfect soldier, despite his affection for the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe; and an exquisitely turned-out female cadet who aspires to “a career in hair and nails” after the Army. The result is, in the words of David Brooks in the New York Times Book Review, “a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. . . . How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book.”

A Different Mirror

A Different Mirror PDF Author: Ronald Takaki
Publisher: eBookIt.com
ISBN: 1456611062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 787

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Book Description
Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.