Download or read book Meaning and Modernity written by Richard Madsen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-12-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This interesting volume of essays on contemporary religion and its ambivalent relationship to modernity not only serves as a testimony to the intellectual influence of Robert Bellah, it establishes a new school of comparative religious and social thought. This Bellahian school--at the intersection of sociological, theological, and contemporary philosophical thinking--has roots in Durkheim and Weber, borrows insights from Marx, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and finds its clearest voice in the writings of Bellah himself. The essays by some of Bellah's colleagues and former students that have been gathered in this volume address some of the most sagacious of these Bellahian themes: the religious dimension of contemporary civil societies, the relationship between religious and capitalist values, the cultural critique of modernity, and the moral visions that hold a promise of civic renewal."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (California, 2000). "This highly readable collection of original, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars provides fresh insights into the issues that Robert Bellah has addressed so fruitfully in his long career. Readers will learn much about such issues as how Calvinism contributed to political revolution, why democracies require an enlarged sense of political community, how the religious foundations of Japan and the United States differ, and what it means to be a Christian and an American."—Benton Johnson, coauthor of Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Protestant Baby Boomers (1994) and author of Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons (1975)
Download or read book Expectations of Modernity written by James Ferguson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.
Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.
Download or read book Hygienic Modernity written by Ruth Rogaski and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-11-29 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.
Download or read book Modernity and Its Discontents written by Steven B. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.
Download or read book Modernity and Subjectivity written by Harvie Ferguson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.
Download or read book Meaning and Modernity written by Richard Madsen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-12-04 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This interesting volume of essays on contemporary religion and its ambivalent relationship to modernity not only serves as a testimony to the intellectual influence of Robert Bellah, it establishes a new school of comparative religious and social thought. This Bellahian school--at the intersection of sociological, theological, and contemporary philosophical thinking--has roots in Durkheim and Weber, borrows insights from Marx, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and finds its clearest voice in the writings of Bellah himself. The essays by some of Bellah's colleagues and former students that have been gathered in this volume address some of the most sagacious of these Bellahian themes: the religious dimension of contemporary civil societies, the relationship between religious and capitalist values, the cultural critique of modernity, and the moral visions that hold a promise of civic renewal."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (California, 2000). "This highly readable collection of original, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars provides fresh insights into the issues that Robert Bellah has addressed so fruitfully in his long career. Readers will learn much about such issues as how Calvinism contributed to political revolution, why democracies require an enlarged sense of political community, how the religious foundations of Japan and the United States differ, and what it means to be a Christian and an American."—Benton Johnson, coauthor of Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Protestant Baby Boomers (1994) and author of Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons (1975)
Download or read book Meanings of Modernity written by Bernhard Rieger and published by Berg Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text addresses the history of Britain in the context of modernism, from Victorian debates about 'national character' to exhibitions of artefacts such as the 'moving pavement' that revolutionised the future appearance of cities.
Download or read book Meaning Subjectivity Society written by Karl E. Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who am I? Who are we? How are we to live? This book grapples with these perennial questions, primarily through a dialogue with Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, using an interdisciplinary-hermeneutical approach examining issues of meaning, subjectivity and modern society.
Download or read book Max Weber s Theory of Modernity written by Dr Michael Symonds and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weber’s theory of meaning and modernity is articulated through an understanding of his account of the way in which the pursuit of meaning in the modern world has been shaped by the loss of Western religion and how such pursuit gives sense to the phenomena of human suffering and death. Through a close, scholarly reading of Weber’s extensive writings and Vocation Lectures, the author explores the concepts of ‘paradox’ and ‘brotherliness’ as found in Weber’s work, in order to offer an original exposition of Weber’s actual theory of how meaning and meaninglessness work in the modern world.
Download or read book Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London written by Joseph De Sapio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph De Sapio examines how individuals not only understood their contacts with industrial modernity as distinct from the inherited traditional rhythms of the eighteenth century, but how they conceived of their own positions within the increasingly sophisticated political, social, and commercial paradigms of the Victorian years.
Download or read book Disciplining Modernism written by P. Caughie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Poiret dress, a Catholic shrine in France, Thomas Wallis's Hoover Factory building, an Edna Manley sculpture, the poetry of Bei Dao, the internal combustion engine- what makes such artifacts modernist? Disciplining Modernism explores the different ways disciplines conceive modernism and modernity, undisciplining modernist studies in the process.
Download or read book Charles Taylor written by Nicholas H. Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is a key figure in contemporary debates about the self and the problems of modernity. This book provides a comprehensive, critical account of Taylor's work. It succinctly reconstructs the ambitious philosophical project that unifies Taylor's diverse writings. And it examines in detail Taylor's specific claims about the structure of the human sciences; the link between identity, language, and moral values; democracy and multiculturalism; and the conflict between secular and non-secular spirituality. The book also includes the first sustained account of Taylor's career as a social critic and political activist. Clearly written and authoritative, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and theology.
Download or read book Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning written by Peter L. Berger and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion and Modernity written by Detlef Pollack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a book that provides a new integrated theory of religious change in modern societies, but rather one that develops theoretical elements that contribute to the understanding of some contemporary religious developments. Most of the approaches in sociology of religion are prone to emphasize either processes of religious decline or of religious upswing. For example, secularization theory usually includes a couple of relevant factors--such as functional differentiation, economic affluence or social equality--in order to account for religious change. However, the result of such a theory's empirical analyses seems to be certain in advance, namely that the social relevance of religion is decreasing. In contrast, the religious market model devised by sociologists of religion in the US is inclined to detect everywhere processes of religious upsurge. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison avoids a purely theoretically based perspective on religious changes. For this reason, Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta do not begin with theoretical propositions but with questions. The authors raise the question of how the social significance of religion in its various facets has changed in modern societies, and explain what factors and conditions have contributed to these changes.
Download or read book What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity written by Philip Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-02-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.
Download or read book Measuring Time Making History written by Lynn Hunt and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is the crucial ingredient in history, and yet historians rarely talk about time as such. These essays offer new insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of “modernity” as a new epoch in human history. Are the Gregorian calendar, world standard time, and modernity itself simply impositions of Western superiority? How did the idea of stages of history culminating in the modern period arise? Is time really accelerating? Can we—should we—try to move to a new chronological framework, one that reaches back to the origins of humans and forward away or beyond modernity? These questions go to the heart of what history means for us today. Time is now on the agenda.
