Download or read book The Anthropology of Utopia written by Dan Chodorkoff and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we avert ecological catastrophe? How can we build community? What is the practical relevance of utopia? In this book, anthropologist Dan Chodorkoff explores a wealth of stimulating examples, from both urban and rural communities, that propose alternative ways of life that can help us create an ecological society.
Download or read book Utopian Encounters written by Maïté Maskens and published by Ralahine Utopian Studies. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an experiment: an enquiry into the possibilities and potentialities of a prospective anthropology of utopia. With different ethnographic contributions studying «empirical utopias» across the world (from ecotopias to religious havens, transnational policies, retirement homes and community agriculture), it looks beyond the commonsense understanding of utopia as a desire, an expectation, a form of imagination stemming from Western political thought. In the process, the volume explores the dynamic dialectic between human imagination and concrete action.
Download or read book Utopia and Neoliberalism written by Hana Horáková and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to unpack the uneasy relationship between utopia and rural spaces in the context of global pressures. The ethnographies presented here offer a rich array of examples combining rural spaces, utopian representations, and neoliberal practices. In attempting to reconcile the desire to preserve the traditional image of rural landscapes in the context of neoliberal practices that threaten the ideal of a rural utopia, imaginaries appear as powerful devices for understanding the world and motivating action.
Download or read book Surrendering to Utopia written by Mark Goodale and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration. In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community—for example, relativism and the problem of culture—to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of "neoliberal" human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.
Download or read book Urban Utopias written by Tereza Kuldova and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings anthropologists and critical theorists together in order to investigate utopian visions of the future in the neoliberal cities of India and Sri Lanka. Arguing for the priority of materiality in any analysis of contemporary ideology, the authors explore urban construction projects, special economic zones, fashion ramps, films, archaeological excavations, and various queer spaces. In the process, they reveal how diverse co-existing utopian visions are entangled with local politics and global capital, and show how these utopian visions are at once driven by visions of excess and by increasing expulsions. It’s a dystopia already in the making – one marred by land grabs and forced evictions, rising inequality, and the loss of urbanity and civility.
Download or read book The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias written by J. Friesen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias is a fascinating virtual catalogue of utopian societies and communes from past to present. The authors assert that the formation of a utopian society is both possible and feasible and give examples of how to create one of our own.
Download or read book A Place for Utopia written by Smriti Srinivas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope. From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging “Indian New Age” of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.
Download or read book Democratic Eco Socialism as a Real Utopia written by Hans A. Baer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have made one thing clear: the desperate need for an alternative to capitalism. In Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia, Hans Baer outlines the urgent need to reevaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. Democatic eco-socialism, as he terms it, is a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.
Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Download or read book Utopianism A Very Short Introduction written by Lyman Tower Sargent and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Bastards of Utopia written by Maple Razsa and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or "globalization from below." Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinching—an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth. More information on the film can be found at www.der.org/films/bastards-of-utopia.html.
Download or read book Utopian Movements Enactments and Subjectivities among Youth in the Global South written by Oscar Salemink and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on fine-grained ethnographies from Bissau, Chile, China, Egypt, Ecuador and Nepal, this volume explores how politically, religiously and (sub-)culturally inspired Utopias motivate youth in the Global South to imagine, enact and embody what was missing in the past and present. As a fluid age cohort and a social category between childhood and adulthood – and hence with tenuous links to the status quo – youth are variously described as ‘at risk’, as victims of precarious and unpredictable circumstances, or as agents of social change who embody the future. From this future-oriented generational perspective, youth are often mobilised to individually and collectively imagine, enact and embody Utopian futures as alternatives to reigning orders that moulded their subjectivities but simultaneously fail them. The contributions to this book look at how divergent Utopias inspire strategies, whereby young people come together in transient communities to ‘catch’ a fleeting future, cultivate alternative subjectivities and thus assume a sense of minimum control over their life trajectories, if only momentarily. As youth enact and embody their aspirations for the future in the present, this book will be of interest to those researching how utopian visions shape practices and subjectivities of youth in the present. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
Download or read book Images from Paradise written by Eszter Salgó and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.
Download or read book Concrete Utopianism written by Gary Wilder and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction Never before has it been more important for Left thinking to champion expansive visions for societal transformation. Yet influential currents of critical theory have lost sight of this political imperative. Provincial notions of places, periods, and subjects obstruct our capacity to invent new alignments and envision a world we wish to see. Political imagination is misread as optimism. Utopianism is conflated with idealism. Revolutionary traditions of non-liberal universalism and non-bourgeois humanism are rendered illegible. Negative critique becomes an end in itself. Pessimism is mistaken for radicalism and political fatalism risks winning the day. In this book, Gary Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism. These traditions offer precious resources to relate cultural singularity and translocal solidarity, political autonomy and worldwide interdependence. They develop modes of immanent critique and forms of poetic knowledge to envision alternative futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past ways of being, knowing, and relating that persist within an untimely present; or charged residues of unrealized possibilities that were the focus of an earlier generation’s dreams and struggles; or opportunities for dialectical reversals embedded in the contradictory tendencies of the given order. Concrete Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing what Wilder calls a politics of the possible-impossible. Attentive to the non-identical character of places, periods, and subjects, insisting that axes of political alignment and contestation are neither self-evident nor unchanging, reworking Lenin’s call to “transform the imperial war into a civil war,” he invites Left thinkers see beyond inherited distinctions between here and there, now and then, us and them. Guided by the spirit of Marx’s call for revolutionaries to draw their poetry from a future they cannot fathom yet must nevertheless invent, he calls for practices of anticipation that envision and enact, call for and call forth, seemingly impossible ways of being together. He elaborates a critical orientation that emphasizes the dialectical relations between aesthetics and politics, political imagination and transformative practice, concrete interventions and revolutionary restructuring, past dreams and possible worlds, means of struggle and its ultimate aims. This orientation requires nonrealist epistemologies that do not mistake immediate appearances with the really real. Such epistemologies would allow critics to recognize uncanny and untimely aspects of social life, whether oppressive or potentially emancipatory. They may help actors to render the world subversively uncanny and untimely. They may clear pathways for the kind of critical internationalism and concrete utopianism that Left politics cannot afford to ignore.
Download or read book Utopian Horizons written by Zsolt Cziganyik and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia has directed attention toward the importance of utopianism. This book investigates the possibilities of cooperation between the humanities and the social sciences in the analysis of 20th century and contemporary utopian phenomena. The papers deal with major problems of interpreting utopias, the relationship of utopia and ideology, and the highly problematic issue as to whether utopia necessarily leads to dystopia. Besides reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary utopian investigations, the eleven essays effectively represent the constructive attitudes of utopian thought, a feature that not only defines late 20th- and 21st-century utopianism, but is one of the primary reasons behind the rising importance of the topic. The volume’s originality and value lies not only in the innovative theoretical approaches proposed, but also in the practical application of the concept of utopia to a variety of phenomena which have been neglected in the utopian studies paradigm, especially to the rarely discussed Central European texts and ideologies.
Download or read book The Modernist City written by James Holston and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-09-08 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.
Download or read book Choosing Our Destiny written by Cyril Belshaw and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Table of Contents follows) Also see important information about non-US shipping at the end. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us feel helpless to resolve the world's problems. Cyril Belshaw provides a hopeful wake-up call, showing that a Utopian world is within our grasp. It is a matter of individual and public will, a determination in each of us to Choose Our Destiny. We cannot wave magic wants. W have to think about what we want, rather than passively allow events to overtake us, as if we were automatons. The world is what we make it; so let's take the responsibility. This is no pie in the sky, it is a matter of practicality. Belshaw builds his ideas on three themes. One is that each element in global society relates to each of the others, that is we must have a holistic perspective. We must be aware that family life impinges on crime which impinges on violence which impinges on law which impinges on nation states and global government. Another is that change obviously involves innovation. So what is innovation? How do we as individuals innovate in our personal and public lives? How do governments innovate, to make the globe a better place? Belshaw shows that innovation is with us all the time and explores how it works to show that it is very simple to maximize and manipulate - provided we have the goals in place. The third theme is to abandon our ethnocentric prejudices and to learn and observe from other peoples. Western values are not the be all and the end all. We must and can learn from others. We must not be bound by limited experience, confining our thinking to some sort of bounded box. We must roam freely in our ideas and search for solutions which remove the dysfunctionality from our world and replace it with lives and goals in which we trust. And that is just what Belshaw does. He examines the interlocking parts of global society and culture, its politics and its economics. You will identify with his critiques of family life, legal systems, education, nation states, the roots of poverty, and attempts at global government, among many others. You will NOT AGREE with many of his proposed solutions. That is not his point. But you will be forced to think about them and work out your own solutions, and apply them in a holistic manner to your view of the world, the globe you will be trying to create. Indeed, Belshaw challenges you to do exactly that. And he invites you to send your comments and disagreements in preparation for a potential revised second edition. Here are just a few random hypotheses to titillate your interest and challenge your conventions. Monogamy requires reform. Jealousy and envy are at the root of much crime and violence and must be removed. Schools will be replaced by Youth Maturity Institutes which will address the whole youth, and, among other things, remove violent characteristics, embrace risk, remove boredom, address personality disorders, and encourage cultural skills. Criminal law should be replaced by civil law, restitutional justice and therapy, leading to a merging of health and remedial services. There should b e a zero based re-examination of public finances. This would lead to the removal of all taxes which inhibit enterprise (corporate and personal). Replacement should be levied on consumption. World customs duties should be eliminated. There should be mandatory minimum incomes replacing social subsidies. Nation States should be downgraded in the global hierarchy to become essentially national administrators. Global Government should be strengthened by becoming a parliament of peoples and not a cabal of competing States. Global Government should have a full monopoly of armed force. There are many pros and cons to each of these, and other, hypotheses. They are for you to think about, argue about, and act upon when you have made up your mind. Don't try to ign
