Studying Contemporary Western Society

Studying Contemporary Western Society
Author: Margaret Mead
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2004
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781571818164

Few anthropologists today realize the pioneering role Margaret Mead played in the investigation of contemporary cultures. This volume collects and presents a variety of her essays on research methodology relating to contemporary culture. Many of these essays were printed originally in limited circulation journals, research reports and books edited by others. They reflect Mead's continuing commitment to searching out methods for studying and extending the anthropologist's tools of investigation for use in complex societies. Essays on American and European societies, intergenerational relations, architecture and social space, industrialization, and interracial relations are included in this varied and exciting collection.

The Study of Culture at a Distance

The Study of Culture at a Distance
Author: Margaret Mead
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781571812155

In 1953 Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux produced The Study of Culture at a Distance, a compilation of research from this period. This work, long unavailable, presents a rich and complex methodology for the study of cultures through literature, film, informant interviews, focus groups, and projective techniques.

The Power of Death

The Power of Death
Author: Maria-José Blanco
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782384340

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500

Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500
Author: Hugh Cunningham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 131786803X

This book investigates the relationship between ideas about childhood and the actual experience of being a child, and assesses how it has changed over the span of five hundred years. Hugh Cunningham tells an engaging story of the development of ideas about childhood from the Renaissance to the present, taking in Locke, Rosseau, Wordsworth and Freud, revealing considerable differences in the way western societites have understood and valued childhood over time. His survey of parent/child relationships uncovers evidence of parental love, care and, in the frequent cases of child death, grief throughout the period, concluding that there was as much continuity as change in the actual relations of children and adults across these five centuries. For undergraduate courses in History of the Family, European Social History, History of Children and Gender History.

Re-imagining the Modern American West

Re-imagining the Modern American West
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1996-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780816516834

Describes changes in how the West has been seen, from a male-dominated frontier, to a region with a powerful sense of place, to a modern center of both genders, ethnic groups, and environmental interests

Time and the Field

Time and the Field
Author: Steffen Dalsgaard
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785330888

In recent years, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to analytical scrutiny in anthropology. Ethnography remains anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized by distances in space. With updates on the discussion of contemporary requirements to ethnographic research practice, Time and the Field rethinks the notion of the field in terms of time rather than space. Such an approach not only implies a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time, but furthermore destabilitizes the relationship between fieldworker and fieldsite, allowing it to emerge as a dynamic and ever-shifting constellation.

Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas
Author: Paul Richards
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 180073980X

This handy, concise book covers the life of Mary Douglas, one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century. Her work focused on how human groups classify one another, and how they resolve the anomalies that then arise. Classification, she argued, emerges from practices of social life, and is a factor in all deep and intractable human disputes. This biography offers an introduction to how her distinctive approach developed across a long and productive career and how it applies to current pressing issues of social conflict and planetary survival. From the Preface: The influence of Professor Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007) upon each of the social sciences and many of the disciplines in the humanities is vast. The list of her works is also vast, and this presents a problem of choice for the many readers who want to get a general idea of what she wrote and its significance, but who are somewhat baffled about where to begin. Our book offers a short overview and suggests why her key writings remain significant today.

Conceptualizing Religion

Conceptualizing Religion
Author: Benson Saler
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2000
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781571812193

How might we transform a folk category - in this case religion - into a analytical category suitable for cross-cultural research? In this volume, the author addresses that question. He critically explores various approaches to the problem of conceptualizing religion, particularly with respect to certain disciplinary interests of anthropologists. He argues that the concept of family resemblances, as that concept has been refined and extended in prototype theory in the contemporary cognitive sciences, is the most plausible analytical strategy for resolving the central problem of the book. In the solution proposed, religion is conceptualized as an affair of "more or less" rather than a matter of "yes or no," and no sharp line is drawn between religion and non-religion.

A History of Western Society Since 1300

A History of Western Society Since 1300
Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 2349
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319218466

Praised by instructors and students alike for its readability and attention to everyday life, the thirteenth edition of A History of Western Society includes a greater variety of tools to engage todays students and save instructors time. This edition features an enhanced primary source program, a question-driven narrative, five chapters devoted to the lives of ordinary people that make the past real and relevant, and the best and latest scholarship throughout. Available for free when packaged with the print book, the popular digital assignment options for this text bring skill building and assessment to a highly effective level. The active learning options come in LaunchPad , which combines an accessible e-book with LearningCurve, an adaptive and automatically graded learning tool that—when assigned—helps ensure students read the book; the complete companion reader with quizzes on each source; and many other study and assessment tools. For instructors who want the easiest and most affordable way to ensure students come to class prepared, Achieve Read & Practice pairs LearningCurve adaptive quizzing and our mobile, accessible Value Edition e-book, in one easy-to-use product.

Russian Culture

Russian Culture
Author: Margaret Mead
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571812308

This volume brings together two classic works on the culture of the Russian people which have been long out of print. Gorer's Great Russian Culture and Mead's Soviet Attitudes towards Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character were among the first attempts by anthropologists to analyze Russian society. They were influential both for several generations of anthropologists and in shaping American governmental attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. Additionally they offer fascinating insights into the early anthropological use of psychological data to analyze cultural patterns. Read as part of the history of the anthropology of complex contemporary societies, they are as fascinating for their more questionable conclusions as for their accurate characterizations of Russian life.