The End of Culture

The End of Culture
Author: Eric Lawrence Gans
Publisher:
Total Pages: 345
Release: 1985
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520051812

Gans demonstrates that human representation—language, ritual, art—could only have originated as an event taking place on a scene present to the consciousness of its participants. This volume lays the foundation for an important revision of our understanding of cultural achievement.

Final Days

Final Days
Author: Susan Orpett Long
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780824829100

"Grounded in ethnographic data, the book offers an examination of how policy and meaning frame the choices Japanese make about how to die. As an essay in descriptive bioethics, it engages an extensive literature in the social sciences and bioethics to examine some of the answers people have constructed to end-of-life issues. Like their counterparts in other postindustrial societies, Japanese find no simple way of handling situations such as disclosure of diagnosis, discontinuing or withholding treatment, organ donation, euthanasia, and hospice. Through interviews and case studies in hospitals and homes, Susan Orpett Long offers a window on the ways in which "ordinary" people respond to serious illness and the process of dying."--BOOK JACKET.

The End of Victory Culture

The End of Victory Culture
Author: Tom Engelhardt
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781558495869

"Sets out to trace the vicissitudes of America's self-image since World War ll as they showed up in popular culture: war toys, war comics, war reporting, and war films. It succeeds brilliantly ... Engelhardt's prose is smart and smooth, and his book is social and cultural history of a high order." Boston Globe, from the bookjacket.

Anthropology's Wake

Anthropology's Wake
Author: Scott J. Michaelsen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780823228775

Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology's grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others. Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a "new" anthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology's problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology's wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.

The End of the World

The End of the World
Author: Maria Manuel Lisboa
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1906924503

Our fear of the world ending, like our fear of the dark, is ancient, deep-seated and perennial. It crosses boundaries of space and time, recurs in all human communities and finds expression in every aspect of cultural production - from pre-historic cave paintings to high-tech computer games. This volume examines historical and imaginary scenarios of apocalypse, the depiction of its likely triggers, and imagined landscapes in the aftermath of global destruction. Its discussion moves effortlessly from classic novels including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, to blockbuster films such as Blade Runner, Armageddon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Lisboa also takes into account religious doctrine, scientific research and the visual arts to create a penetrating, multi-disciplinary study that provides profound insight into one of Western culture's most fascinating and enduring preoccupations.

The End of Illusions

The End of Illusions
Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509545719

We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'
Author: The Subcultures Network
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317628209

This book examines youth cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that affected Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which elements of youth culture and popular music served to contest the notion of ‘consensus’ that historians and social commentators have suggested served to frame British polity from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The collection argues that aspects of youth culture appear to have revealed notable fault-lines in and across British society and provided alternative perspectives and reactions to the presumptions of mainstream political and cultural opinion in the period. This, perhaps, was most acute in the period leading up to and after the seemingly pivotal moment of Margaret Thatcher’s election to prime minister in 1979. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Prophetic Culture

Prophetic Culture
Author: Federico Campagna
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021-06-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350149640

Throughout history, different civilisations have given rise to many alternative worlds. Each of them was the enactment of a unique story about the structure of reality, the rhythm of time and the range of what it is possible to think and to do in the course of a life. Cosmological stories, however, are fragile things. As soon as they lose their ring of truth and their significance for living, the worlds that they brought into existence disintegrate. New and alien worlds emerge from their ruins. Federico Campagna explores the twilight of our contemporary notion of reality, and the fading of the cosmological story that belonged to the civilisation of Westernised Modernity. How are we to face the challenge of leaving a fertile cultural legacy to those who will come after the end of our future? How can we help the creation of new worlds out of the ruins of our own?

British culture and the end of empire

British culture and the end of empire
Author: Stuart Ward
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526119625

This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation.

Culture, Power, Place

Culture, Power, Place
Author: Akhil Gupta
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1997-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822382083

Anthropology has traditionally relied on a spatially localized society or culture as its object of study. The essays in Culture, Power, Place demonstrate how in recent years this anthropological convention and its attendant assumptions about identity and cultural difference have undergone a series of important challenges. In light of increasing mass migration and the transnational cultural flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world, the contributors to this volume examine shifts in anthropological thought regarding issues of identity, place, power, and resistance. This collection of both new and well-known essays begins by critically exploring the concepts of locality and community; first, as they have had an impact on contemporary global understandings of displacement and mobility, and, second, as they have had a part in defining identity and subjectivity itself. With sites of discussion ranging from a democratic Spain to a Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia, from Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania to Asian landscapes in rural California, from the silk factories of Hangzhou to the long-sought-after home of the Palestinians, these essays examine the interplay between changing schemes of categorization and the discourses of difference on which these concepts are based. The effect of the placeless mass media on our understanding of place—and the forces that make certain identities viable in the world and others not—are also discussed, as are the intertwining of place-making, identity, and resistance as they interact with the meaning and consumption of signs. Finally, this volume offers a self-reflective look at the social and political location of anthropologists in relation to the questions of culture, power, and place—the effect of their participation in what was once seen as their descriptions of these constructions. Contesting the classical idea of culture as the shared, the agreed upon, and the orderly, Culture, Power, Place is an important intervention in the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies. Contributors. George E. Bisharat, John Borneman, Rosemary J. Coombe, Mary M. Crain, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Kristin Koptiuch, Karen Leonard, Richard Maddox, Lisa H. Malkki, John Durham Peters, Lisa Rofel