Essays on Man and Culture

Essays on Man and Culture
Author: Manqing Zheng
Publisher: Frog Books
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781883319267
GET BOOK

Following Master of Five Excellences, the previously published volume of Cheng Man-Ch'ing's teachings, comes this volume in which Man-Ch'ing expounds his views in 49 essays. His lessons of inner development and comments on daily life will be of particular interest to both t'ai chi adherents and those interested in Chinese culture. Photos & line drawings.

The Interpretation of Cultures

The Interpretation of Cultures
Author: Clifford Geertz
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0465093566
GET BOOK

One of the twentieth century's most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something thickly, Geertz argues, is the fundamental role of the anthropologist. Named one of the 100 most important books published since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement, The Interpretation of Cultures transformed how we think about others' cultures and our own. This definitive edition, with a foreword by Robert Darnton, remains an essential book for anthropologists, historians, and anyone else seeking to better understand human cultures.

Out in Culture

Out in Culture
Author: Corey K. Creekmur
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 574
Release: 1995
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822315414
GET BOOK

Out in Culture charts some of the ways in which lesbians, gays, and queers have understood and negotiated the pleasures and affirmations, as well as the disappointments, of mass culture. The essays collected here, combining critical and theoretical works from a cross-section of academics, journalists, and artists, demonstrate a rich variety of gay and lesbian approaches to film, television, popular music, and fashion. This wide-ranging anthology is the first to juxtapose pioneering work in gay and lesbian media criticism with recent essays in contemporary queer cultural studies. Uniquely accessible, Out in Culture presents such popular writers as B. Ruby Rich, Essex Hemphill, and Michael Musto as well as influential critics such as Richard Dyer, Chris Straayer, and Julia Lesage, on topics ranging from the queer careers of Agnes Moorehead and Pee Wee Herman to the cultural politics of gay drag, lesbian style, the visualization of AIDS, and the black snap! queen experience. Of particular interest are two "dossiers," the first linking essays on the queer content of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and the second on the production and reception of popular music within gay and lesbian communities. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography--the most comprehensive currently available--of sources in gay, lesbian, and queer media criticism. Out in Culture explores the distinctive and original ways in which gays, lesbians, and queers have experienced, appropriated, and resisted the images and artifacts of popular culture. This eclectic anthology will be of interest to a broad audience of general readers and scholars interested in gay and lesbian issues; students of film, media, gender, and cultural studies; and those interested in the emerging field of queer theory. Contributors. Sabrina Barton, Edith Becker, Rhona J. Berenstein, Nayland Blake, Michelle Citron, Danae Clark, Corey K. Creekmur, Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Heather Findlay, Jan Zita Grover, Essex Hemphill, John Hepworth, Jeffrey Hilbert, Lucretia Knapp, Bruce La Bruce, Al LaValley, Julia Lesage, Michael Moon, Michael Musto, B. Ruby Rich, Marlon Riggs, Arlene Stein, Chris Straayer, Anthony Thomas, Mark Thompson, Valerie Traub, Thomas Waugh, Patricia White, Robin Wood

Notes on the Death of Culture

Notes on the Death of Culture
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0374710317
GET BOOK

The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle. In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation—penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics. Taking his cues from T.S. Eliot—whose essay “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished—Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

Essays on Work and Culture

Essays on Work and Culture
Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1898
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:
GET BOOK

A complete man is so uncommon that when he appears he is looked upon with suspicion, as if there must be something wrong about him. If a man is content to deal vigorously with affairs, and leave art, religion, and science to the enjoyment or refreshment or enlightenment of others, he is accepted as strong, sounds and wise; but let him add to practical sagacity a love of poetry and some skill in the practice of it; let him be not only honest and trustworthy, but genuinely religious; let him be not only keenly observant and exact in his estimate of trade influences and movements, but devoted to the study of some science, and there goes abroad the impression that he is superficial. It is written, apparently, in the modern, and especially in the American, consciousness, that a man can do but one thing well; if he attempts more than one thing, he betrays the weakness of versatility. If this view of life is sound, man is born to imperfect development and must not struggle with fate. He may have natural aptitudes of many kinds; he may have a passionate desire to try three or four different instruments; he may have a force of vitality which is equal to the demands of several vocations or avocations; but he must disregard the most powerful impulses of his nature; he must select one tool, and with that tool he must do all the work appointed to him.

Dilthey’s Dream

Dilthey’s Dream
Author: Derek Freeman
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2017-04-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1922144819
GET BOOK

With great eloquence, Derek Freeman takes the reader on an intellectual journey through the complexities of philosophical anthropology. Even while the controversial Nature–Nurture debate raged, Freeman contended that the crucial fact that humans had the capacity to make choices was ‘both intrinsic to our biology and basic to the very formation of cultures’. Thus the scene was set for his widely publicised criticism of Margaret Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa. Publishing her research in 1926, Mead concluded that all human behaviour was the result of social conditioning. Freeman refuted this assumption in 1983, urging closer interactions between the biological sciences and cultural studies to bridge the ever-widening chasm threatening all studies of humankind. Dilthey’s Dream is an engagingly powerful set of essays depicting the depth of one man’s thinking on issues, which consumed a lifetime.

Masscult and Midcult

Masscult and Midcult
Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1590174682
GET BOOK

A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

The Artificial White Man

The Artificial White Man
Author: Stanley Crouch
Publisher: Civitas Books
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009-03-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786737905
GET BOOK

In this penetrating collection of original essays, legendary gadfly and esteemed critic Stanley Crouch tackles the notion on authenticity-what it is, what it isn't, and what we make of it, for good or for bad. While the question of who's the real deal and who isn't has now seeped into nearly every corner of American culture, nowhere does the idea of authenticity hold greater sway than in the realm of ethnicity. In this bracing collection of original essays, Crouch brings all his rhetorical skills to bear on this animating-and polarizing-idea, and investigates the motives behind those who present themselves as authentic, those who claim to expose the inauthentic, and what this all tells us about the state of the arts-from the vaulted halls of literary fiction to the arena of soft drink-shilling pop stars-in America today. For Crouch, this is not simply an academic exercise, but a summation of our peculiar historical moment. Living in a time in which much of the conventions that defined and limited people's futures-whether it be race, class, or sex-have been obliterated, we're both liberated from bigotries and yet-still-facing profound disillusionment. As influences come and go at breakneck speed, as traditions are remade and re-imagined, it has become hard to tell which metaphorical end is up. The result, Crouch argues, is not only a national paranoia that someone may have put something over on us-i.e. that we have too often been duped into believing that the counterfeit is authentic-but also a deep retrenchment of imagination and artistic expression, from white and black alike. As he promises in his introduction: "This book is an argument with all of that, however sympathetic it might be to the search for alternatives to our disappointments. It hopes to present, through affirmation, a new form of rebellion in our time of cosmetic dissent."

White

White
Author: Richard Dyer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136145249
GET BOOK

White people are not literally or symbolically white, yet they are called white. What does this mean? In Western media, whites take up the position of ordinariness, not a particular race, just the human race. How is this achieved? White takes these questions as starting points for an examination of the representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture. Dyer places this representation within the contexts of Christianity, 'race' and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he shows the construction of whiteness in the technology of photography and film as part of a wider 'culture of light', discusses heroic white masculinity in muscle-man action cinema, from Tarzan and Hercules to Conan and Rambo; analyses the stifling role of white women in end-of-empire fictions like The Jewel in the Crown and traces the associations of whiteness with death in Falling Down, horror movies and cult dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.