Visions of Culture

Visions of Culture

Author: Jerry D. Moore

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780759104112

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This new edition of Jerry D. Moore's Visions of Culture presents introductory anthropology students with a brief, readable, and balanced treatment of theoretical developments in the field. New to this edition are pieces on Sherry Ortner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eric Wolf, an Epilogue that describes key current debates over theory. This is an ideal text for classes on the theory or the history of anthropology.


Book Synopsis Visions of Culture by : Jerry D. Moore

Download or read book Visions of Culture written by Jerry D. Moore and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Jerry D. Moore's Visions of Culture presents introductory anthropology students with a brief, readable, and balanced treatment of theoretical developments in the field. New to this edition are pieces on Sherry Ortner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eric Wolf, an Epilogue that describes key current debates over theory. This is an ideal text for classes on the theory or the history of anthropology.


Visions of Culture

Visions of Culture

Author: Jerry D. Moore

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2012-05-24

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0759122172

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This classic textbook, now in its fourth edition, offers anthropology students a succinct, clear, and balanced introduction to twenty-five major theorists and theoretical developments in the field.


Book Synopsis Visions of Culture by : Jerry D. Moore

Download or read book Visions of Culture written by Jerry D. Moore and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic textbook, now in its fourth edition, offers anthropology students a succinct, clear, and balanced introduction to twenty-five major theorists and theoretical developments in the field.


Visions of Culture

Visions of Culture

Author: Jerry D. Moore

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1442270586

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Visions of Culture: A Reader, Second Edition, is an anthology of articles about anthropological theorists.


Book Synopsis Visions of Culture by : Jerry D. Moore

Download or read book Visions of Culture written by Jerry D. Moore and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Culture: A Reader, Second Edition, is an anthology of articles about anthropological theorists.


Border Visions

Border Visions

Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1996-11-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0816543852

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The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In today’s border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, Vélez-Ibáñez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.


Book Synopsis Border Visions by : Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Download or read book Border Visions written by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1996-11-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In today’s border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, Vélez-Ibáñez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.


A Culture of Conspiracy

A Culture of Conspiracy

Author: Michael Barkun

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780520248120

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Unravelling the genealogies and permutations of conspiracist worldviews, this work shows how this web of urban legends has spread among sub-cultures on the Internet and through mass media, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture.


Book Synopsis A Culture of Conspiracy by : Michael Barkun

Download or read book A Culture of Conspiracy written by Michael Barkun and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unravelling the genealogies and permutations of conspiracist worldviews, this work shows how this web of urban legends has spread among sub-cultures on the Internet and through mass media, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture.


Visions of Belonging

Visions of Belonging

Author: Judith E. Smith

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2004-09-01

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 023150926X

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Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun—entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging. The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide a point of entry into an extraordinary time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless. But changes were also fiercely contested, especially as the war's culture of unity receded in the resurgence of cold war anticommunism, and demands for racial equality were met with intensifying white resistance. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories, as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television. Visions of Belonging provides unusually close access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. Would the new appearance of white working class ethnic characters expand Americans'understanding of democracy? Would these stories challenge the color line? How could these stories simultaneously show that black families belonged to the larger "family" of the nation while also representing the forms of danger and discriminations that excluded them from full citizenship? In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of "normal." But by the end of the 1950s, the cold war cultural atmosphere discouraged probing of racial and social inequality and ultimately turned family stories into a comforting retreat from politics. The book crosses disciplinary boundaries, suggesting a novel method for cultural history by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Smith's innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception to show how both contribute to shaping the contested meanings of American belonging.


Book Synopsis Visions of Belonging by : Judith E. Smith

Download or read book Visions of Belonging written by Judith E. Smith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun—entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging. The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide a point of entry into an extraordinary time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless. But changes were also fiercely contested, especially as the war's culture of unity receded in the resurgence of cold war anticommunism, and demands for racial equality were met with intensifying white resistance. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories, as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television. Visions of Belonging provides unusually close access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. Would the new appearance of white working class ethnic characters expand Americans'understanding of democracy? Would these stories challenge the color line? How could these stories simultaneously show that black families belonged to the larger "family" of the nation while also representing the forms of danger and discriminations that excluded them from full citizenship? In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of "normal." But by the end of the 1950s, the cold war cultural atmosphere discouraged probing of racial and social inequality and ultimately turned family stories into a comforting retreat from politics. The book crosses disciplinary boundaries, suggesting a novel method for cultural history by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Smith's innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception to show how both contribute to shaping the contested meanings of American belonging.


Playful Visions

Playful Visions

Author: Meredith A. Bak

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0262358050

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The kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and other nineteenth-century optical toys analyzed as “new media” of their era, provoking anxieties similar to our own about children and screens. In the nineteenth century, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the stereoscope, and other optical toys were standard accessories of a middle-class childhood, used both at home and at school. In Playful Visions, Meredith Bak argues that the optical toys of the nineteenth century were the “new media” of their era, teaching children to be discerning consumers of media—and also provoking anxieties similar to contemporary worries about children's screen time. Bak shows that optical toys—which produced visual effects ranging from a moving image to the illusion of depth—established and reinforced a new understanding of vision as an interpretive process. At the same time, the expansion of the middle class as well as education and labor reforms contributed to a new notion of childhood as a time of innocence and play. Modern media culture and the emergence of modern Western childhood are thus deeply interconnected. Drawing on extensive archival research, Bak discusses, among other things, the circulation of optical toys, and the wide visibility gained by their appearance as printed templates and textual descriptions in periodicals; expanding conceptions of literacy, which came to include visual acuity; and how optical play allowed children to exercise a sense of visual mastery. She examines optical toys alongside related visual technologies including chromolithography—which inspired both chromatic delight and chromophobia. Finally, considering the contemporary use of optical toys in advertising, education, and art, Bak analyzes the endurance of nineteenth-century visual paradigms.


Book Synopsis Playful Visions by : Meredith A. Bak

Download or read book Playful Visions written by Meredith A. Bak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and other nineteenth-century optical toys analyzed as “new media” of their era, provoking anxieties similar to our own about children and screens. In the nineteenth century, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the stereoscope, and other optical toys were standard accessories of a middle-class childhood, used both at home and at school. In Playful Visions, Meredith Bak argues that the optical toys of the nineteenth century were the “new media” of their era, teaching children to be discerning consumers of media—and also provoking anxieties similar to contemporary worries about children's screen time. Bak shows that optical toys—which produced visual effects ranging from a moving image to the illusion of depth—established and reinforced a new understanding of vision as an interpretive process. At the same time, the expansion of the middle class as well as education and labor reforms contributed to a new notion of childhood as a time of innocence and play. Modern media culture and the emergence of modern Western childhood are thus deeply interconnected. Drawing on extensive archival research, Bak discusses, among other things, the circulation of optical toys, and the wide visibility gained by their appearance as printed templates and textual descriptions in periodicals; expanding conceptions of literacy, which came to include visual acuity; and how optical play allowed children to exercise a sense of visual mastery. She examines optical toys alongside related visual technologies including chromolithography—which inspired both chromatic delight and chromophobia. Finally, considering the contemporary use of optical toys in advertising, education, and art, Bak analyzes the endurance of nineteenth-century visual paradigms.


Visions in a Seer Stone

Visions in a Seer Stone

Author: William L. Davis

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1469655675

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In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.


Book Synopsis Visions in a Seer Stone by : William L. Davis

Download or read book Visions in a Seer Stone written by William L. Davis and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.


Albert Cohen

Albert Cohen

Author: Jack I. Abecassis

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1421429101

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Honorable Mention winner in the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize competition for French and Francophone Literary Studies A major figure in twentieth-century letters, Albert Cohen (1895–1981) left a paradoxical legacy. His heavily autobiographical, strikingly literary, and polyphonic novels and lyrical essays are widely read by a devout public in France, yet have been largely ignored by academia. A self-consciously Jewish writer and activist, Cohen remained nevertheless ambivalent about Judaism. His self-affirmation as a Jew in juxtaposition with his satirical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes still provokes unease in both republican France and institutional Judaism. In Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, the first English-language study of this profound and profoundly misunderstood writer, Jack I. Abecassis traces the recurrent themes of Cohen's works. He reveals the dissonant fractures marking Cohen as a modernist, and analyzes the resistance to his work as a symptom of the will not to understand Cohen's main theme—"the catastrophe of being Jewish."For Abecassis, Cohen's diverse oeuvre forms a single "roman fleuve" exploring this perturbing theme through fragmentation and grotesquerie, fantasies and nightmares, the veiling and unveiling of the unspeakable. Abecassis argues that Cohen should not be read exclusively through the prism of European literature (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust), but rather as the retelling—inverting and ultimately exhausting, in the form of submerged plots—of the Biblical romances of Joseph and Esther. The romance of the charismatic Court Jew and its performance correlative, the carnival of Purim, generate the logic of Cohen's acute psychological ambivalence, historical consciousness and carnal sensuality—themes which link this modernist author to Genesis as well as to the literary practices of Sephardic crypto-Jews. Abecassis argues that Cohen's best-known work, Belle du Seigneur (1968), besides being an obvious tale of obsessive love and dissolution, is foremost a tale of political intrigue involving Solal, the meteoric-rising Jew in the League of Nations during the period of Appeasement (1936), and his ultimate self-destruction. Providing close readings and imaginative analyses of the entire literary output of one of twentieth-century France's most important Jewish writers, Abecassis presents here a major work of literary scholarship, as well as a broader study of the reception and influence of Jewish thought in French literature and philosophy.


Book Synopsis Albert Cohen by : Jack I. Abecassis

Download or read book Albert Cohen written by Jack I. Abecassis and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention winner in the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize competition for French and Francophone Literary Studies A major figure in twentieth-century letters, Albert Cohen (1895–1981) left a paradoxical legacy. His heavily autobiographical, strikingly literary, and polyphonic novels and lyrical essays are widely read by a devout public in France, yet have been largely ignored by academia. A self-consciously Jewish writer and activist, Cohen remained nevertheless ambivalent about Judaism. His self-affirmation as a Jew in juxtaposition with his satirical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes still provokes unease in both republican France and institutional Judaism. In Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, the first English-language study of this profound and profoundly misunderstood writer, Jack I. Abecassis traces the recurrent themes of Cohen's works. He reveals the dissonant fractures marking Cohen as a modernist, and analyzes the resistance to his work as a symptom of the will not to understand Cohen's main theme—"the catastrophe of being Jewish."For Abecassis, Cohen's diverse oeuvre forms a single "roman fleuve" exploring this perturbing theme through fragmentation and grotesquerie, fantasies and nightmares, the veiling and unveiling of the unspeakable. Abecassis argues that Cohen should not be read exclusively through the prism of European literature (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust), but rather as the retelling—inverting and ultimately exhausting, in the form of submerged plots—of the Biblical romances of Joseph and Esther. The romance of the charismatic Court Jew and its performance correlative, the carnival of Purim, generate the logic of Cohen's acute psychological ambivalence, historical consciousness and carnal sensuality—themes which link this modernist author to Genesis as well as to the literary practices of Sephardic crypto-Jews. Abecassis argues that Cohen's best-known work, Belle du Seigneur (1968), besides being an obvious tale of obsessive love and dissolution, is foremost a tale of political intrigue involving Solal, the meteoric-rising Jew in the League of Nations during the period of Appeasement (1936), and his ultimate self-destruction. Providing close readings and imaginative analyses of the entire literary output of one of twentieth-century France's most important Jewish writers, Abecassis presents here a major work of literary scholarship, as well as a broader study of the reception and influence of Jewish thought in French literature and philosophy.


Radical Visions and American Dreams

Radical Visions and American Dreams

Author: Richard H. Pells

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780252067433

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The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic catastrophe to many American writers and artists. Attracted to Marxist ideals, they interpreted the crisis as a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise that reflected the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and they advocated more sweeping social changes than those enacted under the New Deal. In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America. By placing cultural developments against the background of the New Deal, the influence of the American Communist Party, and the coming of World War II, Pells explains how these artists and intellectuals wanted to transform American society, yet why they wound up defending the American Dream. A new preface enhances this classic work of American cultural history.


Book Synopsis Radical Visions and American Dreams by : Richard H. Pells

Download or read book Radical Visions and American Dreams written by Richard H. Pells and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic catastrophe to many American writers and artists. Attracted to Marxist ideals, they interpreted the crisis as a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise that reflected the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and they advocated more sweeping social changes than those enacted under the New Deal. In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America. By placing cultural developments against the background of the New Deal, the influence of the American Communist Party, and the coming of World War II, Pells explains how these artists and intellectuals wanted to transform American society, yet why they wound up defending the American Dream. A new preface enhances this classic work of American cultural history.