Cultural Disenchantments

Author : Douglas R. Holmes
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780691225753

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Cultural Disenchantments by Douglas R. Holmes Pdf

Douglas Holmes develops the concept of peasant-worker society to analyze a kind of social formation that has until now gone largely unrecognized and unstudied. His book portrays the dissonant crosscurrents created at the interface of urban industrial and rural peasant spheres. Examining the region of Friuli in northeast Italy, it shows how wage labor was adopted by country folk who maintained ties to small-scale cultivation and indigenous traditions. Holmes draws on the Weberian notion of the "disenchantment of the world" to examine the cultural issues that animate peasant-worker life. What emerges is a vivid picture of the economic, political, religious, and ethnic struggles that infuse the peasant-worker milieu, as traditional representations of reality are pitted against bureaucratic definitions and formulas emanating from Church, state, and market institutions. In addition to providing a general theoretical framework for the analysis of peasant-worker society and culture, Cultural Disenchantments is the first anthropological study of Friuli to be published in English. As such, it elaborates on the historical insights developed by Carlo Ginzburg in his famous study of sixteenthcentury agrarian cults and folk traditions in Friuli.

Author : Paul Maltby
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2013-02-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780813933467

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Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment by Paul Maltby Pdf

Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.

Author : Jason Ananda Josephson Storm,Jason Ānanda Josephson
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2017-05-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226403366

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The Myth of Disenchantment by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm,Jason Ānanda Josephson Pdf

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Author : Paul Atkinson,Sara Delamont,William Housley
Publisher : Rowman Altamira
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0759107068

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Contours of Culture by Paul Atkinson,Sara Delamont,William Housley Pdf

In Contours of Culture the authors address practical and theoretical problems of using ethnographic methods in the study of culture, drawing on their field research with an opera company, Welsh artists, and classes on a popular Brazilian martial art.

Author : Camila Del Marmol,Marc Morell,Jasper Chalcraft
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2014-11-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781135013011

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The Making of Heritage by Camila Del Marmol,Marc Morell,Jasper Chalcraft Pdf

This volume explores the process of heritage making and its relation to the production of touristic places, examining several case studies around the world. Most existing literature on heritage and tourism centers either on its managerial aspects, the tourist experience, or issues related to inequality and identity politics. This volume instead establishes theoretical links between analyses of heritage and the production and reproduction of places in the context of the global tourist trade. The approach adopted here is to explore the production of heritage as a complex process shaped by local and global discourses that can have a deep impact on several policies and legislations. Heritage itself has now become not only a global discourse, but also a global practice, which may eventually lead to the use of heritage as a field for hegemony. From these perspectives, heritage making may be incorporated in the world economy, mainly through the global tourism trade. The chapters in this book stress the need for identifying the intrinsic political implications of these processes, relocating their study in political, economic and social settings. Combined with a diversified set of theoretical approaches and research methods, guided by a common thematic rationale, The Making of Heritage is at the forefront of current debates about heritage.

Author : Fadi A. Bardawil
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478007586

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Revolution and Disenchantment by Fadi A. Bardawil Pdf

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

Author : Michael L. Trujillo
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Espanola Valley (N.M.)
ISBN : 9780826347367

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Land of Disenchantment by Michael L. Trujillo Pdf

This experimental study of cultural dysfunction in New Mexico's Española Valley tells the stories of several of its Nuevomexicano residents, both famous and notorious.

Author : Gerard Delanty,Krishan Kumar
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 598 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2006-06-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781446206447

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The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism by Gerard Delanty,Krishan Kumar Pdf

′With its list of distinguished contributors and its wide range of topics, the handbook is surely destined to become an invaluable resource for all serious students of nationalism′ - Michael Billig, Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University and author of ′Banal Nationalism′ (SAGE 1995) ′The persistence - some would say: revival - of nationalism across the recent history of modernity, in particular the past two decades, has taken many scholars in the social sciences by surprise. In response, interest in the analysis of nationalism has increased and given rise to a great variety of new angles under which to study the phenomenon. What was missing in the cacophony of voices addressing nationalism was a volume that brought them together and confronted them with each other. This handbook does just that. It deserves particular praise for the wide range of approaches and topic included and for the systematic attempt at studying nationalism as a phenomenon of our time, not a remnant from the past′ - Peter Wagner, Professor of Social and Political Theory, European University Institute; and Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick ′For students concerned with the contemporary study of nationalism this will be an invaluable publication. The three-fold division into approaches, themes and cases is a very solid and sensible one. The editors have commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field [and]this handbook provides the best single-volume overview of contemporary nationalism′ - John Breuilly, Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Nationalism has long excited debate in political, social and cultural theory and remains a key field of enquiry among historians, anthropologists, sociologists as well as political scientists. It is also one of the critical media issues of our time. There are, however, surprisingly few volumes that bring together the best of this intellectual diversity into one collection. This Handbook gives readers a critical survey of the latest theories and debates and provides a glimpse of the issues that will shape their future. Its three sections guide the reader through the theoretical approaches to this field of study, its major themes - from modernity to memory, migration and genocide - and the diversity of nationalisms found around the globe. The overall aim of this Handbook is to relate theories and debates within and across a range of disciplines, illuminate themes and issues of central importance in both historical and contemporary contexts, and show how nationalism has impacted upon and interacted with other political and social forms and forces. This book provides a much-needed resource for scholars in international relations, political science, social theory and sociology.

Author : James B. Minahan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 800 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2000-07-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781567508581

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One Europe, Many Nations by James B. Minahan Pdf

Dominating world politics since 1945, the Cold War created a fragile peace while suppressing national groups in the Cold War's most dangerous theater—Europe. Today, with the collapse of Communism, the European Continent is again overshadowed by the specter of radical nationalism, as it was at the beginning of the century. Focusing on the many possible conflicts that dot the European landscape, this book is the first to address the Europeans as distinct national groups, not as nation-states and national minorities. It is an essential guide to the national groups populating the so-called Old World-groups that continue to dominate world headlines and present the world community with some of its most intractable conflicts. While other recent reference books on Europe approach the subject of nations and nationalism from the perspective of the European Union and the nation-state, this book addresses the post-Cold War nationalist resurgence by focusing on the most basic element of any nationalism—the nation. It includes entries on nearly 150 groups, surveying these groups from the earliest period of their national histories to the dawn of the 21st century. In short essays highlighting the political, social, economic, and historical evolution of peoples claiming a distinct identity in an increasingly integrated continent, the book provides both up-to-date information and historical background on the European national groups that are currently making the news and those that will produce future headlines.

Author : Gavin Smith
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2021-01-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000180879

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Confronting the Present by Gavin Smith Pdf

Anthropologists study other people and worry about it. In the past this took the form of a professional desire to make our politics always somewhere else and to do with persons characterized as in some way different from ourselves. Now distances shrink and old forms of difference melt as global forces give rise to new processes of differentiation and new possibilities for political collectivities. How does this affect the way we might design a politically relevant anthropology? This book examines these concerns in light of the author's shift from the study of rather distant people to people and places closer to home - a trend to be found within the discipline as a whole. How should anthropology respond to this change, as it increasingly finds itself in stamping grounds where other disciplines are already well-entrenched? How will work being done in anthropology intersect with that in other disciplines? Will anthropologists have anything to offer debates that have been ongoing in these other disciplines, such as those relating to social citizenship and collective identity, regionalism and the constitution of space and place, hegemony and resistance, political organization and cultural expression? Conversely, what can anthropologists learn from the way other disciplines formulate these issues and problems?Written to provoke discussion, this timely book aims to initiate a dialogue not only with anthropologists, but also with those in related disciplines who share a concern with people, politics and modernity. As well as anthropologists, the issues it tackles will be of interest to geographers, economists, political scientists, social historians and sociologists.

Author : Jeff Pratt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2016-09-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317991700

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The Rationality of Rural Life by Jeff Pratt Pdf

First published in 2004. The river Orcia flows westwards out of a majestic valley in central Italy, cuts a ravine through the northern flanks of Monte Amiata, and descends through rolling hills to the coastal plain, the Maremma. On its upper reaches, a thousand years ago, the first farms regulated by the mezzadria contract were created, a share-cropping system which established a stable farm population in the countryside, with half the produce going to an urban landlord class. There were some variations in its organization, and when in the 19th century the mezzadria was finally established on the hills and newly drained swamps of the Maremma the farms were much more commercially oriented and grouped into very large estates. The collapse of the mezzadria also created major fractures in rural society. The three main theoretical issues with which this book is concerned- capitalist agriculture, technological change and rationality.

Author : Peter Gran
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2021-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780815655442

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Beyond Eurocentrism by Peter Gran Pdf

Eurocentrism influences virtually all established historical writing. With the rise of Prussia and, by extension, Europe, eurocentrism became the dominant paradigm for world history. Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Peter Gran proposes a reconceptualization of world history. He challenges the traditional convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain and understand relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts. Gran maintains that there is no single developmental model but diverse forms of hegemony that emerged out of the political crisis following the penetration of capitalism into each nation. In making comparisons between seemingly disparate and distinctive nations and by questioning established canons of comparative inquiry, Gran encourages people to recognize the similarities between the West and non-West nations.

Author : Ananya Roy
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0816639337

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City Requiem, Calcutta by Ananya Roy Pdf

Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.

Author : Ananya Roy
Publisher : Pearson Education India
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2007-09
Category : Kolkata (India)
ISBN : 8131712990

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Calcutta Requiem: Gender And The Politics Of Poverty by Ananya Roy Pdf

Author : Ismael Vaccaro,Krista Harper,Seth Murray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2015-10-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317372783

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The Anthropology of Postindustrialism by Ismael Vaccaro,Krista Harper,Seth Murray Pdf

This volume explores how mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism affect places and people in peripheral regions and de-industrializing cities. While studies of globalization tend to emphasize localities newly connected to global systems, this collection, in contrast, analyzes the disconnection of communities away from the market, presenting a range of ethnographic case studies that scrutinize the framework of this transformative process, analyzing new social formations that are emerging in the voids left behind by the de-industrialization, and introducing a discussion on the potential impacts of the current economic and ecological crises on the hyper-mobile model that has characterized this recent phase of global capitalism and spatially uneven development.