Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity

Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity
Author: Kimberly DaCosta Holton
Publisher: Tagus Press
Total Pages: 654
Release: 2009
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Offers insight into the histories, cultures, and social dynamics of Portuguese and other Lusophone and Luso-African of the northeastern seaboard of the U.S.

The Making of the Modern Self

The Making of the Modern Self
Author: Dror Wahrman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0300102518

Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

Reconstructing the House of Culture

Reconstructing the House of Culture
Author: Brian Donahoe
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857452762

Notions of culture, rituals and their meanings, the workings of ideology in everyday life, public representations of tradition and ethnicity, and the social consequences of economic transition— these are critical issues in the social anthropology of Russia and other postsocialist countries. Engaged in the negotiation of all these is the House of Culture, which was the key institution for cultural activities and implementation of state cultural policies in all socialist states. The House of Culture was officially responsible for cultural enlightenment, moral edification, and personal cultivation—in short, for implementing the socialist state’s program of “bringing culture to the masses.” Surprisingly, little is known about its past and present condition. This collection of ethnographically rich accounts examines the social significance and everyday performance of Houses of Culture and how they have changed in recent decades. In the years immediately following the end of the Soviet Union, they underwent a deep economic and symbolic crisis, and many closed. Recently, however, there have been signs of a revitalization of the Houses of Culture and a re-orientation of their missions and programs. The contributions to this volume investigate the changing functions and meanings of these vital institutions for the communities that they serve.

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
Author: Dorothy Holland
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2001-03-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780674005624

This text addresses the central problem in anthropological theory of the late 1990s - the paradox that humans are both products of social discipline and creators of remarkable improvisation.

Dress in the Making of African Identity: A Social and Cultural History of the Yoruba People

Dress in the Making of African Identity: A Social and Cultural History of the Yoruba People
Author: Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1621967190

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

Mestizos Come Home!

Mestizos Come Home!
Author: Robert Con Davis-Undiano
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806158069

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

Making and Molding Identity in Schools

Making and Molding Identity in Schools
Author: Ann Locke Davidson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1996-08-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1438400535

Making and Molding Identity in Schools delves into the lives of adolescents to examine how youths assert ethnic and racial identities in the face of policies, discourses, and practices that work both to reproduce and challenge social categories. Detailed case studies illuminate adolescent voices and perspectives, revealing that identity and academic engagement emanate not just from societal and cultural forces, but also from ordinary, day to day interactions and experiences within school settings. Drawing on contemporary social theory, the author emphasizes the political and relational nature of race and ethnicity, and illustrates the potential for identities and ideologies to vary over time and across school settings. The book provides a needed expansion of theories that link youth identities and ideologies solely to cultural, economic and political forces, and provides insight into settings that allow students to engage without discarding their ethnic and racial selves.

Making Sense of Cultural Studies

Making Sense of Cultural Studies
Author: Chris Barker
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2002-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780761968962

In Chris Barker's sequel to Cultural Studies, the author addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the discipline and investigates its practical and academic boundaries. The author also clarifies its underlying themes of study.

Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927

Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927
Author: Swarupa Gupta
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004349766

In Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927, Swarupa Gupta outlines a fresh paradigm moving beyond stereotypical representations of eastern India as a site of ethnic fragmentation. The book traces unities by exploring intersections between (1) cultural constellations; (2) place-making and (3) ethnicity. Centralising place-making, it tells the story of how people made places, mediating caste / religious / linguistic contestations. It offers new meanings of ‘region’ in Eastern Indian and global contexts by showing how an interregional arena comprising Bengal, Assam and Orissa was forged. Using historical tracts, novels, poetry and travelogues, the book argues that commonalities in Eastern India were linked to imaginings of Indian nationhood. The analysis contains interpretive strategies for mediating federalist separatisms and fragmentation in contemporary India.

The Making of... Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary

The Making of... Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary
Author: Jan Cronin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030283496

This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores the cultural work done by these sites, why recognition of “Making of” sites as adaptations matters, and why our conception of adaptation matters. Part one focuses on the adaptive domain presented by the “Making of” John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Part two attends to “Making of” Gone with the Wind sites, and concludes with “Making of” The Lord of the Rings texts as the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in earlier chapters.