Download or read book The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living written by Vassos Argyrou and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European thought is often said to be a gift to the rest of the world, but what if there is no gift as such? What if there is only an economy where every giving is also a taking, and every taking is also a giving? This book extends the question of economies by making a case for an “economy of thought” and a “political economy.” It argues that all thinking and doing presupposes taking, and therefore giving, as the price to pay for taking; or that there exists a “cost of living,” which renders the idea of free thinking and living untenable. The argument is developed against the Enlightenment directive to think for oneself as the means of becoming autonomous and shows that this “light,” given to the rest of the world as a gift, turns out to be nothing.
Download or read book Singing Ideas written by Tríona Ní Shíocháin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.
Download or read book The Technologisation of the Social written by Paul O'Connor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life.
Download or read book From Anthropology to Social Theory written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rethinking of contemporary social theory that provides a vision about the modern world through key ideas developed by 'maverick' anthropologists.
Download or read book Political Alchemy Technology Unbounded written by Agnes Horvath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-21 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores politics as a form of alchemy, understood as the transformation of entities through an alteration of their identities. Identifying this process as a common denominator of many political phenomena, such as EU integration, mediatisation, communism or globalisation, the author demonstrates not only the widespread presence of alchemical techniques in politics, but also the acceleration of their deployment. A study of the steady growth of power as it reaches a continuous and permanent stage, thus avoiding the inherent difficulties connected with birth and death of political organisations and institutions, this volume reveals political alchemy to be a form of self-sustaining growth through sterile multiplication, devoid of meaning. Revealing both the integrative and disintegrative nature of a political process that, while appearing to work in the interests of all, in fact produces apathy, desperate mobilisation and despair by crushing concrete entities such as personality and tradition, Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory and political thought.
Download or read book European Products written by Gisela Welz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, rural villages, traditional artefacts, even atmospheres and experiences are considered heritage. Heritage making not only protects, but also produces, things, people, and places. Since the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, heritage making and Europeanization are increasingly intertwined in Greek-Cypriot society. Against the backdrop of a long-term ethnographic engagement, the author argues that heritage emerges as an increasingly standardized economic resource, a “European product.” Implemented in historic preservation, rural tourism, culinary traditions, nature protection, and urban restoration projects, heritage policy has become infused with transnational market regulations and neoliberal property regimes.
Download or read book Common Sense in Environmental Management written by Jonathan Woolley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common Sense in Environmental Management examines common sense not in theory, but in practice. Jonathan Woolley argues that common sense as a concept is rooted in English experiences of landscape and land management and examines it ethnographically - unveiling common sense as key to understanding how British nature and public life are transforming in the present day. Common sense encourages English people to tacitly assume that the management of land and other resources should organically converge on a consensus that yields self-evident, practical results. Furthermore, the English then tend to assume that their own position reflects that consensus. Other stakeholders are not seen as having legitimate but distinct expertise and interests – but are rather viewed as being stupid and/or immoral, for ignoring self-evident, pragmatic truths. Compromise is therefore less likely, and land management practices become entrenched and resistant to innovation and improvement. Through a detailed ethnographic study of the Norfolk Broads, this book explores how environmental policy and land management in rural areas could be more effective if a truly common sense was restored in the way we manage our shared environment. Using academic and lay deployments of common sense as a route into the political economy of rural environments, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of socio-cultural anthropology, sociology, human geography, cultural studies, social history, and the environmental humanities.
Download or read book Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book substantiates two claims. First, the modern world was not simply produced by "objective" factors, rooted in geographical discoveries and scientific inventions, to be traced to economic, technological or political factors, but is the outcome of social, cultural and spiritual processes. Among such factors, beyond the Protestant ethic (Max Weber), the rise of the absolutist state and its disciplinary network (Michel Foucault), or court society (Norbert Elias), a prime role is played by theatre. The modern reality is deeply theatricalized. Second, a special access for studying this theatricalized world is offered by novels. The best classical novels not simply can be interpreted as describing a world "like" the theatre, but they capture and present a world that has become thoroughly transformed into a global theatre. The theatre effectively transformed the world, and classical novels effectively analyze this "theatricalized" reality – much better than the main instruments supposedly destined to study reality, philosophy and sociology. Thus, instead of using the technique of sociology to analyze novels, the book will treat novels as a "royal road" to analyze a theatricalized reality, in order to find our way back to a genuine and meaningful life.
Download or read book Impulse to Act written by Othon Alexandrakis and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What drives people to take to the streets in protest? What is their connection to other activists and how does that change over time? How do seemingly spontaneous activist movements emerge, endure, and evolve, especially when they lack a leader and concrete agenda? How does one analyze a changing political movement immersed in contingency? Impulse to Act addresses these questions incisively, examining a wide range of activist movements from the December 2008 protests in Greece to the recent chto delat in Russia. Contributors in the first section of this volume highlight the affective dimensions of political movements, charting the various ways in which participants coalesce around and belong to collectives of resistance. The potent agency of movements is highlighted in the second section, where scholars show how the emerging actions and critiques of protesters help disrupt authoritative political structures. Responding to the demands of the field today, the novel approaches to protest movements in Impulse to Act offer new ways to reengage with the traditional cornerstones of political anthropology.
Download or read book When the Cemetery Becomes Political written by Thorsten Kruse and published by Waxmann Verlag. This book was released on 2020 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title of this book ‘When the Cemetery Becomes Political’ implies the question: How can the cemetery – a place for the dead – become a space that develops a political dynamic? Scholars from different countries explored such dynamics further in three conferences – one held in Münster/Germany (2017) and the other two in Nicosia/Cyprus (2018/2019). Ten of the papers presented at these conferences are compiled in this volume. They investigate how religious heritage is dealt with in multi-ethnic/religious countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and Lebanon; one of the papers focuses on the fate of Thessaloniki’s huge Jewish cemetery destructed during the German occupation of Greece in World War II. Further questions addressed in this book are: Why does one group destroy or desecrate the cemeteries and places of worship of the other group(s) during interreligious or interethnic conflicts? What are the reasons behind such extreme actions, and what is the purpose of such acts of destruction? The book gives insights into the complex and complicated interaction between religion and politics – and thus contributes to the discussion of a hot topic of our times. This book contains papers by Elie Al Hindy, Dima de Clerck, Lisa Dikomitis with Vassos Argyrou, Ziad Fahed, Thorsten Kruse, Leon Saltiel, Petros Savvides, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert with Alexandra Bounia, Theodosios Tsivolas and Željana Tunić.
Download or read book The Spectacle of Critique written by Tom Boland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from being the preserve of a few elite thinkers, critique increasingly dominates public life in modernity, leading to a cacophony of accusation and denunciation around all political issues. The technique of unmasking ‘power’ or ‘hegemony’ or ‘ideology’ has now been adopted across the political spectrum, where critical discourses are routinely used to suggest that anything and everything is only a ‘construct’ or even a ‘conspiracy’. This book draws on anthropological theory to provide a different perspective on this phenomenon; critique appears as a liminal predicament combining imitative polemical and schismatic urges with a haunting sense of uncertainty. It thereby addresses a central academic concern, with a special focus on political critique in the public sphere and within social media. Combining historical interrogations of the roots of critique, as well as examining contemporary political discourse in relation to populism, as seen in presidential elections, historical commemorations and welfare reform, The Spectacle of Critique uses anthropology and genealogy to offer a new sociology of critique that problematises critique and diagnoses its crisis, cultivating acritical and imaginative ways of thinking.
Download or read book Socio Cultural Mobility and Mega Events written by Rodanthi Tzanelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world’s political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside the increased media attention and publicity, came accusations of governmental ‘corruption’ and overspending. In Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events, Tzanelli uses Brazil’s 2014 World Cup to explore how mega-events articulate socio-cultural problems. Critically examining the aesthetics and ethics of mobilities in the mega-event, this book explores these socio-cultural issues and controversies: the background of staging mega-events, including the bidding process and the host’s expectations for returns; ceremonial staging and communications between artistic representations and national symbolism; the clear reaction mega-events almost always generate in national, regional and global activist circles, including accusations of overspending and human rights violations. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of mobility, sociology of globalisation, cultural sociology, social and anthropological theory, as well as the sociology of sport, human and cultural geography, and leisure and tourism studies.
Download or read book The Political Anthropology of Ethnic and Religious Minorities written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents some arguments for why a political anthropological perspective can be particularly helpful for understanding the connected political and cultural challenges and opportunities posed by the situation of ethnic and religious minorities. The first chapter shortly introduces the major anthropological concepts used, including liminality, trickster, imitation and schismogenesis; concepts that are used together with approaches of historical sociology and genealogy, especially concerning the rise and fall of empires, and their lasting impact. The conceptual framework suggested here is particularly helpful for understanding how marginal places can become liminal, appearing suddenly at the center of political attention. The introduction also shows the manner in which minority existence can problematize the depersonalizing tendencies of modern globalization. Subsequent chapters demonstrate how the described political anthropological conceptual framework can be used in certain European regions, and in the case of certain ethnic and religious minority, and each illustrates that instead of charismatic leaders, trickster politicians are emerging and increasingly dominate, through the "public sphere", the space of modern politics emptied of real presence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
Download or read book Walking into the Void written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book starts by discussing the significance of walking for the experience of being human, including a comparative study of the language and cultures of walking. It then reviews in detail, relying on archaeology, two turning points of human history: the emergence of cave art sanctuaries and a new cultural practice of long-distance ‘pilgrimages’, implying a descent into such caves, thus literally the ‘void’; and the abandonment of walking culture through settlement at the end of the Ice Age, around the time when the visiting of cave sanctuaries also stopped. The rise of philosophy and Christianity is then presented as two returns to walking. The book closes by looking at the ambivalent relationship of contemporary modernity to walking, where its radical abandonment is combined with attempts at returns. The book ventures an unprecedented genealogy of walking culture, bringing together archaeological studies distant in both time and place, and having a special focus on the significance of the rise of representative art for human history. Our genealogy helped to identify settlement not as the glorious origin of civilisation, but rather as a source of an extremely problematic development. The findings of the book should be relevant for social scientists, as well as those interested in walking and its cultural and civilisational significance, or in the direction and meaning of human history.
Download or read book Olympic Ceremonialism and The Performance of National Character written by R. Tzanelli and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-04-24 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover to Rio 2016 as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. The ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel and created a tornadóros: an ideal form of 'human' that manipulates audiovisual narratives of culture and identity for global audiences.
Download or read book Mobility Modernity and the Slum written by Rodanthi Tzanelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only virtuous humans are supposed to move in time to meet their happy destiny or karma. The tale of Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire is such a case of serendipitous mobility towards riches and love – a ‘journey’ in which good heroes and urban communities respecting solidarity are successfully modernised. Unsurprisingly, the film became tangled in many controversies around India’s destiny in the world: the film inserted Mumbai into various financial, political and artistic scenes, increased tourism in its filmed slums, and brought about charity projects in which celebrities and tourist businesses were involved. Slumdog Millionaire served as a global example of a ‘developing country’s’ uneven but unique modernisation. This book examines such mobilities of ideas, art, tourism and activism together. In doing so, it reveals the significance of Mumbai as a post-colonial city in discussions of modernity – a form of mobile adaptation to new world realities. Tzanelli examines the various agents involved in controversies through multiple virtual and real journeys to India’s colonial history and present social complexity, with a view to actualise a post-colonial future, a ‘destiny’ as the country’s serendipitous destination. Addressed to interdisciplinary audiences, the book will be a useful text for students and scholars of globalisation, mobility, tourism, media and social movement theory.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology 2v written by William Outhwaite and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 1855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology offers a comprehensive and contemporary look at this evolving field of study. The focus is on political life itself and the chapters, written by a highly-respected and international team of authors, cover the core themes which need to be understood in order to study political life from a sociological perspective, or simply to understand the political world. The two volumes are structured around five key areas: PART 1: TRADITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES PART 2: CORE CONCEPTS PART 03: POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MOVEMENTS PART 04: TOPICS PART 05: WORLD REGIONS This future-oriented and cross-disciplinary handbook is a landmark text for students and scholars interested in the social investigation of politics.
