To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Mundane culture.
Books on the topic 'Mundane culture'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 books for your research on the topic 'Mundane culture.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse books on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012.
Find full text
2
Ternovaya, Lyudmila. The Sacred in the Mundane: A Confessional Reading of International relations. ru: INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1817282.
Full textAbstract:
In the monograph, certain areas of international communication are presented through the spectrum of the influence of various manifestations of religion on them: from religious features of the worldview to stable behaviors of participants in international relations, which are dictated by their religious attitudes. Many processes of international life under the influence of the confessional factor can acquire opposite characteristics, in particular, develop in the spirit of harmony, understanding and cooperation, or, conversely, demonstrate tension that develops into a large-scale conflict. In order to maintain a stable state of international relations, it is necessary to listen sensitively to the wisdom that was laid down in ancient sacred texts and preserved in many manifestations of human relations to nature, in culture and public institutions of charity and charity that help bring the sacred closer to the mundane.
It is addressed to specialists in the field of history, geopolitics, cultural studies, religious studies. It may be of interest to a wide range of readers who are attracted by stories linking different spaces and times.
3
Bourdjolbo, Tchoudiba. Peuple moundang du Tchad: Histoire et culture. N'Djaména: Éditions Al-Mouna, 2018.
Find full text
4
Werner, Elvira. Mundart im Erzgebirge. Marienberg: Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft Marienberg, 1999.
Find full text
5
Gregory, Tullio. Mundana sapientia: Forme di conoscenza nella cultura medievale. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992.
Find full text
6
Angela, Meah, and Robinson Victoria 1959-, eds. Mundane heterosexualities: From theory to practices. New York, N.Y: Palgrave, 2007.
Find full text
8
Académicos y mundanos: Crítica de la cultura española. Madrid, España: Akal, 1985.
Find full text
9
1954-, Jung Markus Manfred, and Muettersprochgsellschaft (Germany), eds. D Hailiecher: Alemannische Anthologie : junge Mundart. Kehl: Morstadt, 1987.
Find full text
11
1950-, Montgomery Michael, ed. Annotated bibliography of Southern American English. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.
Find full text
12
Glut: Mastering information through the ages. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007.
Find full text
13
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Washington, D.C: Joseph Henry Press, 2007.
Find full text
14
Lemonnier, Pierre. Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication. Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
Find full text
15
Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication. Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Find full text
17
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, and Asta Cekaite. Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
Find full text
18
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, and Asta Cekaite. Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
Find full text
19
Hofman, Daniela. Magical, Mundane or Marginal?: Deposition Practices in the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik Culture. Sidestone Press, 2020.
Find full text
20
Hofman, Daniela. Magical, Mundane or Marginal?: Deposition Practices in the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik Culture. Sidestone Press, 2020.
Find full text
21
Lo, Jade, and Nina Eliasoph. Broadening Cultural Sociology's Scope: Meaning-Making in Mundane Organizational Life. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195377767.013.29.
Full textAbstract:
This article proposes a more serious engagement between the fields of cultural sociology and organizational sociology by studying how culture shapes daily organizational life and how, in turn, everyday activity can build up to large-scale cultural change. It argues that people’s everyday methods of coordinating action in organizations, no matter how mundane, are meaningful. To support its arguments, the article examines transformations of words’ meanings in everyday language use by looking at three examples, one from a study of changes in the publishing industry and the other two from a larger study of youth civic engagement projects in the United States. It also discusses the concept of typification, structuralism in practice, border disputes within organizations, and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s notion of “performance” within organizations. Finally, it considers the use of cultural sociology to see how people in organizations coordinate action.
22
Pennell, Sara. Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century ‘Britain’: The Matter of Domestic Consumption. Edited by Frank Trentmann. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561216.013.0004.
Full textAbstract:
This article focuses on three issues: the historiographies which have made the period prior to that in which Neil McKendrick confidently told us a ‘consumer revolution’ occurred both a necessary staging post en route to revolution and a prelapsarian era in striking contrast to it; the relative absence of ‘mundane materiality’ within these accounts; and consumption as a matter of practice, rather than as an abstract phenomenon in the ‘long’ seventeenth century in Britain (c .1600–1720). In this, it follows Joan Thirsk in her important 1975 Oxford University Ford Lectures, in accepting Jacobean and Stuart Britain (or at least England) as very much concerned with production for the ends of domestic consumption, in both senses of the word ‘domestic’. Through the case studies of objects very rarely found in public museum displays thanks to their ‘everyday’ qualities, the article then argues for a re-evaluation of non-elite consumption within the domestic sphere as significant within any story we might wish to tell of changing consumption practices and material culture in Britain across the seventeenth century.
23
Hockey, Jenny, Angela Meah, and Victoria Robinson. Mundane Heterosexualities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Find full text
24
Schultz, Jaime. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038167.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This introductory chapter considers how something as seemingly mundane as a ponytail is actually shot through with substantial and varied cultural significance. Unquestionably, the hairstyle provides a practical solution for dealing with longer hair, but what it comes to mean, how it is taken up in mediated discourse, the ways it becomes synonymous with female athletes, and its relationships to sexuality, age, race, nationality, and culture engender a normative, athletic femininity in the context of U.S. women's sports. At the same time, there are dynamics of power, pleasure, agency, and resistance involved with the everyday act of styling one's hair. It is difficult to imagine women's sport without the ponytail, but the chapter argues that it is precisely because they seem so commonsense and commonplace that they are powerfully connected to gendered ideologies.
26
Bean, Hamilton. United States Intelligence Cultures. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.357.
Full textAbstract:
Organizational culture refers to the constellation of values, beliefs, identities, and artifacts that both shape and emerge from the interactions among the formal members of the US intelligence community. It is useful for understanding interagency cooperation and information sharing, institutional reform, leadership, intelligence failure, intelligence analysis, decision making, and intelligence theory. Organizational culture is also important in understanding the dynamics of US intelligence. There are four “levels” of, or “perspectives” on, organizational culture: vernacular and mundane organizational communication; strategic and reflective discourse; theoretical discourse; and metatheoretical discourse. Meanwhile, four overarching claims can be made about the intelligence studies literature in relation to organizational culture. First, explicit references to organizational culture within the literature do not appear until the 1970s. Second, studies of organizational culture usually critique “differentiation” among the subcultures of a single agency—most often the CIA or the FBI. Third, few intelligence scholars have provided audiences with opportunities to hear the voices of the men and women working inside these agencies. Finally, the majority of this literature views organizational culture from the dominant, managerial perspective. Ultimately, this literature evidences four themes that map to traditionally functionalist assumptions about organizational culture: (1) a differentiated or fragmented culture diminishes organizational effectiveness, while (2) an integrated or unified culture promotes effectiveness; (3) senior officials can and should determine organizational culture; and (4) the US intelligence community should model its culture after those found in private sector corporations or institutions such as law or medicine.
27
Hyers, Lauri L. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256692.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This introductory chapter discusses the history of the diary in popular culture and as a research method in the social sciences Over the last several centuries, diary keeping has evolved into a popular medium through which diarists can bear witness to their experiences and events of the world. The diary is a treasure trove, containing the riches of first-hand testimony on a wealth of subjects: from the adventures of travel to the despairs of prison, from the mundane ruminations of adolescence to the horrors of the battlefield. The embedded and contextualized nature of diary data appeals to those in the humanities and social sciences who are seeking the “thick description” that is the hallmark of qualitative research (Geertz, 2003).
28
Hockey, Jenny, Angela Meah, and Victoria Robinson. Mundane Heterosexualities: From Theory to Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Find full text
29
Bower, Hannah. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192849496.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts’ healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes’ traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.
30
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort and Convenience: Temporality and Practice. Edited by Frank Trentmann. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561216.013.0015.
Full textAbstract:
Despite being embedded in the practices and discourses of daily life, comfort and convenience are not terms around which theories and studies of consumption have traditionally revolved. Over the last decade or so, the tides of intellectual fashion have begun to turn, bringing the mundane into view and highlighting previously invisible dimensions of consumer culture. In reviewing changing interpretations of comfort and convenience, this article captures some of the processes through which the contours of social life are simultaneously sustained and transformed. It also examines how interpretations of comfort and convenience come to be as they are today, and in understanding the types of consumption and demand they entail. This more substantive angle is important in that contemporary definitions of physical well-being and temporal order imply and rely upon forms of resource consumption which are unsustainable in the longer run or on a global scale. The article concludes by considering time and timing, convenience and compromise, convenience and the time–space profiles of practice, and changing patterns of consumption in relation to comfort and convenience.
31
Crawford, Sally, Dawn M. Hadley, and Gillian Shepherd, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199670697.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Real understanding of past societies is not possible without including children, and yet they have been strangely invisible in the archaeological record. In this volume, experts from around the world investigate childhood in the past, showing why it is important to understand childhood, why different cultures construct different ideas of how to rear children, what part children play in the community, and when and why childhood ends. The contributors also question why childhood has so often been missing from archaeological interpretation. Their answers are astonishing and thought provoking, challenging archaeologists to reconsider common assumptions about ways of looking at material culture in the past, and to reconsider the place of children in creating the archaeological record itself. However marginal the traces of children’s bodies and bricolage may seem compared to those of adults, archaeological evidence of children and childhood can be found in the most astonishing places and spaces, as well as in the most mundane. The archaeology of childhood is one of the most exciting and challenging areas for new discovery about past societies. Children are part of every human society, but childhood is a cultural construct. Each society develops its own idea about what a childhood should be, what children can or should do, and how they should be trained to take their place in the world. The archaeological record for children and childhood is regionally and chronologically diverse. Children are also increasingly being recognised as having played a part in creating the archaeological record itself. In this volume, the contributors ask questions about childhood—thresholds of age and growth, childhood in the material culture, the death of children, and the intersection of the childhood and the social, economic, religious, and political worlds of societies in the past. The volume spans the periods from earliest prehistory to the present day to provide a rich and nuanced perspective on childhood, revealing the commonalities and the very great differences in childhood experiences the world over.
32
Florini, Sarah. Beyond Hashtags. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892464.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
In a culture dominated by discourses of “colorblindness” but still rife with structural racism, digital and social media have become a resource for Black Americans navigating a society that simultaneously perpetuates and obscures racial inequality. Though the Ferguson protests made such Black digital networks more broadly visible, these networks did not coalesce in that moment. They were built over the course of years through much less spectacular, though no less important, everyday use, including mundane social exchanges, humor, and fandom. This book explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a network of Black American digital media users and content creators. These digital networks are used not only to cope with and challenge day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the discourses that have since exploded onto the national stage. This book tells the story of an influential subsection of these Black digital networks, including many Black amateur podcasts, the independent media company This Week in Blackness (TWiB!), and the network of Twitter users that has come to be known as “Black Twitter.” Grounded in her active participation in this network and close ethnographic collaboration with TWiB!, Sarah Florini argues that the multimedia, transplatform nature of this network makes it a flexible resource that can then be deployed for a variety of purposes—culturally inflected fan practices, community building, cultural critique, and citizen journalism. Florini argues that these digital media practices are an extension of historic traditions of Black cultural production and resistance.
33
Huerta, Monica. Magical Habits. Duke University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478021483.
Full textAbstract:
In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
34
Rosenberg, Anat. The Rise of Mass Advertising. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192858917.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract This book is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass advertising circa 1840–1914 and its legal shaping. The emergence of this new system disrupted the perceived foundations of modernity. The idea that culture was organized by identifiable fields of knowledge, experience, and authority came under strain as advertisers claimed to share values with the era’s most prominent fields, including news, art, science, and religiously inflected morality. While cultural boundaries grew blurry, the assumption that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted, itself closely related to concepts of boundaries, was undermined as enchanted experiences multiplied with the transformation of everyday environments by advertising. Non-rational ontologies and a play of mystery became apparent, involving possibilities for metamorphoses, magical efficacy, animated environments, affective connections between humans and things, imaginary worlds and fantasies that informed mundane lifed. These disrupted assumptions that the capitalist economy was a victory of reason. The Rise of Mass Advertising examines how contemporaries came to terms with the disruptive impact by mobilizing legal processes, powers, and concepts. Law was implicated in performing boundary work that preserved the modern sense of field distinctions. Advertising’s cultural meanings and its organization were shaped dialectically vis-à-vis other fields in a process that mainstreamed and legitimized it with legal means, but also construed it as an inferior simulation of the values of a progressive modernity, exhibiting epistemological shortfalls and aesthetic compromises that marked it apart from adjacent fields. The dual treatment meanwhile disavowed the central role of enchantment, in what amounted to a normative enterprise of disenchantment. One of the ironies of this enterprise was that it ultimately drove professional advertisers to embrace enchantment as their peculiar expertise.
35
Kolstø, Pål. Strategic Uses of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474495004.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The cataclysmic upheavals in the Soviet Union during and after perestroika led to an upsurge of nationalism and ethnic conflicts. Not only the communist regime, but the unitary Soviet state exited the historical scene, leaving behind a power vacuum. Politics became a free-for-all: power was up for grabs, and nationalism in various guises – both as a programme for state legitimation and for ethnic mobilisation outside of and against the state –made itself felt on numerous political arenas. This development engendered renewed interest in nationalism studies generally, influencing the interpretation of conflicts also in other parts of the world. In this book, I do not try to answer the question what nationalism “is”, instead, I accept as a fact that nationalism has become a ubiquitous feature of politics in the modern world. I examine some of the ways nationalism has been used as a political strategy, by whom and for what purposes. I argue that national identities cannot be conjured out of thin air. they have to be based on the cultural reservoirs and historical memories of groups. Nationalism is mobilisation to promote the interests of an identity group, the imagined community of ‘the nation’. For some members of the nation (however understood), immaterial goods such as the possibilities to practise one’s culture and language may be paramount, whereas others hope to reap more mundane rewards. Precisely in situations when large numbers of people are caught up in nationalist enthusiasm, some may tap into this fervour, basing their careers on it.
36
Hohmann, Jessie, and Daniel Joyce, eds. International Law's Objects. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198798200.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
International law’s rich existence in the world can be illuminated by its objects. International law is often developed, conveyed, and authorized through its objects and/or their representation. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state and the symbols of sovereignty), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or their image, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to found authority (for instance, maps and charts). This volume considers these questions: firstly what might the study of international law through objects reveal? What might objects, rather than texts, tell us about sources, recognition of states, construction of territory, law of the sea, or international human rights law? Secondly, what might this scholarly undertaking reveal about the objects - as aims or projects - of international law? How do objects reveal, or perhaps mask, these aims, and what does this tell us about the reasons some (physical or material) objects are foregrounded, and others hidden or ignored. Thirdly what objects, icons, and symbols preoccupy the profession and academy? The personal selection of these objects by leading and emerging scholars worldwide will illuminate the contemporary and historical fascinations of international lawyers. By considering international law in the context of its material culture the authors offer a new and exciting theoretical perspective on the subject.
37
Moore, Gordon, John A. Quelch, and Emily Boudreau. The Decision-Making Process. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190886134.003.0004.
Full textAbstract:
Even seemingly mundane decisions involve a fair amount of individual decision-making. Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the consumer decision-making process, considering (1) the process itself; (2) the individuals and groups that make up the decision-making unit; and (3) other common factors that affect decision-making. How people make healthcare decisions, and how quickly they make them, varies greatly depending on a large range of factors, with cultural, economic, psychological, and social influences affecting the outcome at each step. This chapter reviews each of these areas in greater depth and also explores how and why the decision-making process often breaks down in healthcare markets today.
38
Saito, Yuriko. The Aesthetics of Laundry. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199672103.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
As one of the most mundane aspects of daily life, laundry rarely garners aesthetic attention. However, this practical chore turns out to contain numerous aesthetic considerations beyond ensuring hygiene and cleanliness. Furthermore, the aesthetics of laundry is not limited to the sensuous appearance of the laundered items. The activity of laundering also has aesthetic dimensions, including bodily engagement, imaginative camaraderie with women across cultural and historical boundaries, satisfaction with the tangible expression of love for the family, and appreciation of the outdoor environment when hanging laundry. Finally, the consequences of the aesthetics of laundry extend beyond personal experiences. Namely, the appearance of clothing is often regarded as a reflection of one’s moral character, and the ‘eyesore’ effect of outdoor laundry hanging leads to its prohibition in some communities in the United States.
39
Spannaus, Nathan. Theology in Central Asia. Edited by Sabine Schmidtke. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696703.013.020.
Full textAbstract:
Despite its image as a cultural and intellectual backwater in later centuries, the scholarly environment in Central Asia, primarily in Bukhara and Samarqand, remained vibrant and active into the twentieth century. Theology was an important part of that environment, and this chapter addresses the evolution of the Sunni, Maturidikalāmtradition in Central Asia in the post-classical period (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries). Following earlier developments made by scholars such as Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), Ibn ‘Arabī, and Taftāzānī, questions of ontology and metaphysics, such as God’s status as the Necessary of Existence, became central for Sunnikalāmin the region. Central Asianmutakallimūnincorporated ideas from a number of sources, including these earlier scholars, as well as the Shirazi philosophical school and Ahmad Sirhindī’s Sufi reformism, to form a refined discourse for sophisticated theological reasoning. Debates over issues such as the status of God’s attributes and the nature of mundane existence flourished in public disputations and commentaries and supercommentaries on important works of theology, up until the modern era.
40
Chan, Kenneth, and Andrew Stuckey, eds. Sino-Enchantment. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474460842.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Although Chinese film audiences, including those in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, have always maintained a foundational cultural interest in the fantastic, this trend has dramatically increased over the last decade. Sino-Enchantment is the first work in English to approach this recent explosion of fantastic films in Chinese cinemas, where each re-envisioning of the form is determined by cultural, economic, political and technological factors to produce fresh inventions and creative reinventions of familiar narratives, characters and tropes. As a whole, the book argues that fantastic cinemas serve a fundamental function of re-enchanting mundane modern society with wonder and awe. Individual chapters present detailed examinations of works by famous filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, Tsui Hark and Stephen Chow, as well as case studies of films like The Assassin (2015), Monster Hunt (2015) and The Great Wall (2016). The book focuses on a range of cinematic forms, practices and themes, which include blockbuster films, art cinema, exploitation B-movies, digital effects, ecocinema, film blanc and contemporary adaptations of traditional Chinese classics. Sino-enchantment functions as a new theoretical lens through which readers can engage with elements of the fantastic in Chinese cinema in nuanced, complex and innovative ways.
41
Orsini, Alessandro. Sacrifice. Translated by Sarah J. Nodes. Cornell University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501709838.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book's author is one of Italy's premier analysts of political extremism. His investigation of the beliefs and mindsets of Europe's political fringe has largely focused on anarchist and far-left groups, but this book turns inquiry to the rapidly expanding neofascist movement. The author joined local groups of a neofascist organization he names Sacrifice in two neighboring cities with very different political cultures. This “insider” book, which features dialogues with various militia members, shows how fascists live day to day, how they understand their world, and how they build a parallel universe in which the correctness and probity of their attitudes are clear. The book describes the long, troubled process by which these two groups slowly accepted the author as an investigator-activist and later expelled him for his ideologically uncommitted stance and refusal to subject his observations to censorship. The author's activities as a fascist were often mundane: leafleting, distributing food parcels to the indigent, and attending public rallies. This book describes from within the masculine ethos of the militias, the groups' relations with local police and politicians, and the central role of violence and anticommunist actions in building a sense of fascist community.
42
Young, Serinity. Women Who Fly. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195307887.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The desire to transcend the mundane and the terrestrial, and to reach new heights of spiritual experience, has been expressed through myths, folk tales, and the arts throughout the world and across centuries. Flight from both the captivity of earth’s gravity and the mental constraints of time-bound desire are the backbone of myth-making. Women and goddesses have figured prominently in such myths, both as independent actors and as guides for men. Women Who Fly is a history of religious and social ideas about such aerial females as expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. It is also about the varied symbolic uses of women in mythology, religion, and society that have shaped, and continue to shape, our social and psychological reality. The motif of the flying female is an intriguing and unstudied area of the history of both religion and iconography. It is a broad topic. Rather than place restrictions on this theme (or its imagery), or force it into the confines of any one discipline or cultural perspective, the goal here instead is to celebrate its thematic and cultural diversity, while highlighting commonalities and delineating the religious and social contexts in which it developed. Aerial women are surprisingly central to any full and accurate understanding of the similarities between various religious imaginations, through which these flying females have carved trajectories over time.
43
Quintana, Ryan A. Making a Slave State. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469642222.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina’s state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina’s earliest political development, materially producing the state’s infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves’ lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina’s roads, rivers, and canals. Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves’ daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.
44
Ahlgren, Angela K. Drumming Asian America. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199374014.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko’s sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, more than four hundred groups now exist across the United States and Canada, and these groups are comprised of people from a variety of racial and ethnic identities. Using ethnographic and historical approaches combined with performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author’s extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights not only the West Coast but also the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity. The book builds on insights from the fields of dance studies, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and Asian American studies to argue that taiko players from a variety of identity positions “perform Asian America” on stage, as well as in rehearsals, festivals, and schools and through interactions with audiences. While many taiko drummers play simply for the love of the form’s dynamism and physicality, this book demonstrates that politics is built into even the most mundane aspects of rehearsing and performing.
45
Lagerkvist, Amanda. Existential Media. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190925567.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book offers a reappreciation and revisiting of existential philosophy—and in particular of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy—for media theory in order to remedy the existential deficit in the field. The book thereby also offers an introduction to the young field of existential media studies. Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation is chosen as a privileged reality which allows for bringing limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when interrogating digital existence. Despite their all-pervasiveness the book argues that media speak to and about limits and limitations in a variety of ways. The book furthermore argues that the present age of deep technocultural saturation—and of escalating multifaceted and interrelated global crises—is a digital limit situation, in which there are both existential and politico-ethical stakes of media. To enter into these terrains, the book places the margin of mourners and the meek—the coexisters—at the center of media studies. The book provides an alternative mapping for approaching digital cultures in contexts of both the mundane and the extraordinary, and on scales traversing the individual and the global. Empirically Existental Media attends to mourning, commemorating, and speaking to the dead online as well as to the digital afterlife. It interrogates four cases that center on the voices from the field of online bereavement, and provides an arc of media instantiations of the digital limit situation: chapter 5: Metric Media; chapter 6: Caring Media, chapter 7: Transcendent Media and chapter 8: Anticipatory media.
46
Francis, Leslie P., and John G. Francis. Privacy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780190612269.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
We live more and more of our lives online; we rely on the internet as we work, correspond with friends and loved ones, and go through a multitude of mundane activities like paying bills, streaming videos, reading the news, and listening to music. Without thinking twice, we operate with the understanding that the data that traces these activities will not be abused now or in the future. There is an abstract idea of privacy that we invoke, and, concrete rules about our privacy that we can point to if we are pressed. Nonetheless, too often we are uneasily reminded that our privacy is not invulnerable-the data tracks we leave through our health information, the internet and social media, financial and credit information, personal relationships, and public lives make us continuously prey to identity theft, hacking, and even government surveillance. A great deal is at stake for individuals, groups, and societies if privacy is misunderstood, misdirected, or misused. Popular understanding of privacy doesn’t match the heat the concept generates, though understandably. With a host of cultural differences as to how privacy is understood globally and in different religions, and with ceaseless technological advancements, it is an increasingly slippery and complex topic. In this clear and accessible book, Leslie and John G. Francis guide us to an understanding of what privacy can mean and why it is so important. Drawing upon their extensive joint expertise in law, philosophy, political science, regulatory policy, and bioethics, they parse the consequences of the forfeiture, however great or small, of one’s privacy.
47
Hillewaert, Sarah. Morality at the Margins. Fordham University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823286515.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on the island of Lamu (Kenya) who live simultaneously “on the edge and in the center”: they are situated at the edge of the (inter)national economy and at the margins of Western notions of modernity; yet they are concurrently the focus of (inter)national campaigns against Islamic radicalization and are at the heart of Western (touristic) imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim in this context? And how are these denominators differently imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate different cultural, religious, political and economic pressures and expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. It thereby illustrates how seemingly mundane practices—from how young people greet others, to how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. A central concern of the book lies with the shifting meaning and ambiguity of such everyday signs and thus the dangers of semiotic misconstrual. By examining this uncertainty of interpretation in projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. Documenting how Lamu youth navigate this contested field in a fast-changing place with a fascinating history, this book offers a distinctly linguistic anthropological approach to discussions of ethical self-fashioning and everyday Islam.
48
Blithe, Sarah Jane, Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, and Breanna Mohr. Sex and Stigma. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479859290.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, legal prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels frequently face oppression and unfair labor practices while managing stigma and isolation associated with their occupational identities. Rooted in organizational communication and feminist theories, this book engages with stories of women living and working in these “hidden” organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, stigma, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system. Widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. Moral judgments about legal prostitutes are so pervasive that many women struggle to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. At the same time, legal brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and individuals must contend with balancing work and nonwork commitments, organizational cultures, and managerial relationships. Although legal prostitutes are independent contractors, they often live in their workplaces and must adhere to scheduling requirements, mundane job tasks, and emotional labor, like employees in other organizational settings. Ethnographic observations in the brothels and interviews with current and ex-brothel workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, lobbyists, and others provide a broad data set for analysis. The book includes a photo-elicitation project, featuring images captured by legal prostitutes about their lives in the brothels. Thorough archival research fills in gaps left from inconsistencies, illegal practices, and laws about brothel prostitution. In addition, the third author works as a legal prostitute, providing a deep (and deeply personal) autoethnographic insider look at the industry. As such, this book serves as both an updated resource about the laws and policies which guide legal prostitution in Nevada, and an intimate look at life and decision-making for women performing sex work.
49
Delogu, Paolo. Ivthe Spiritual EconomyDevozione longobarda. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198777601.003.0033.
Full textAbstract:
The investigation takes its inspiration from the book recently dedicated by Peter Brown (Through the Eye of a Needle, 2012) to the genesis of the Christian ethics of wealth and its good use. Brown had highlighted the transition from pagan evergetism to Christian charity; from the use of wealth for public display in favor of the city and the fellow-citizens, to its dispensation to the poor, who are the representatives of Christ. Thanks to this providence the rich can gain the divine mercy and save his soul. The Church, as a mundane institution, receives the pious gifts of the rich and administers them for the relief of the poor, but the poor are considered to be the real owners of the wealth accumulated by the Church. This ideological expedient allows the Church to consider itself poor. When this cultural process is complete, the Middle Ages have arrived. My aim has been to investigate how the precepts of the ancient Fathers were received and put into practice by the Langobardic society in Italy. Given the shortage of doctrinal texts similar to those exploited by Brown, I had recourse to more humble documents such as the deeds edited by Luigi Schiaparelli in the first two volumes of the Codice Diplomatico Longobardo. It is a collection of 296 documents, for the larger part concerning foundations or endowments of churches, monasteries, senodochia and oratoria, ordered by lay devotees. Most of them come from Tuscany; a lesser number from centres of the Po plain. These texts do not have any doctrinal purpose, but they give an insight into the way in which the Christian doctrine of wealth and its good use was received and put in practice by the Langobards in the 8th century.
50
Wolfram, Walt, and Jeffrey Reaser. Talkin' Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Find full text