Download or read book The Political Landscape written by Adam T Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-10-07 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This highly original and challenging book defies every easy form of classification. Ostensibly about early polities, its penetrating and erudite asides extend with equal facility into contemporary politics and the symmetrical deficiencies of modernism and postmodernism. To my knowledge, imaginative reflections of spatial representations have never previously found their way into the theoretical base of what has been thought of as an essentially materialistic archaeological science. It is a pleasure and a discovery to see the permanent and rightful place Adam Smith has now fashioned for them."—Robert McC. Adams, Secretary Emeritus, The Smithsonian Institution "If social theory in cultural anthropology was transformed in the last decades by a 'linguistic turn,' research by archaeologists into the development and practices of early states now seems to be undergoing a 'geographic turn.' Adam Smith's book, although drawing from modern currents in geography, anthropology, sociology, and political philosophy, brings original archaeological contributions to social theory by examining the making and re-making of landscapes in early complex polities (especially in Mesopotamian, Urartian, and Maya states). Smith observes these (and other) early states as 'political landscapes,' in which monuments come to constitute authority and shape memories. Smith's book represents a comprehensive turn from metahistorical reifications of the state to investigations of how the content of social roles was determined through the production of landscapes. The landscape of archaeology will be changed decisively by this book."—Norman Yoffee, Professor, Dept. of Near Eastern Studies and Dept. of Anthropology, University of Michigan. "This book emerges as both a remarkable scholarly achievement and something of a manifesto for contemporary political thinking and engagement."—Susan E. Alcock, author of Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories
Download or read book Political Landscape written by Martin Warnke and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know what "the political landscape" is, and politicians and journalists never tire of referring to it. But in this ingenious and original book, Martin Warnke takes that well-worn metaphor literally and uses it to reveal just how politicized the real landscape of continental Europe has been for centuries. The author finds his evidence of humanity's intervention in nature in the form of monuments and milestones, gardens, roads and border crossings, in landscape paintings and maps – even, in fact, in the anthropomorphic interpretations once given to formations of hills and rocks. The Political Landscape is underpinned with a fascinating array of examples and illustrations, many of which will be new even to experts in the art of landscape and related disciplines.
Download or read book The American Political Landscape written by Byron E. Shafer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes. Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence. This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.
Download or read book Mapping the Political Landscape written by Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping the Political Landscape: An Introduction to Political Science, second edition explores many issues that reflect the large diversity of Canadian society. Taking into account the increasing globalization of issues, this text/reader relates classical concepts of political science to differing political and cultural experiences. Mapping the Political Landscape is divided in to four thematic parts: Politics as Discipline, Ideas, Institutions and Change, with a small section of classic and contemporary readings following each chapter. The text assists the students with the readings by providing a set of questions relating to the readings and thematic commentary.
Download or read book Political Landscapes of Capital Cities written by Jessica Joyce Christie and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Parmly Toxey, Alexei Vranich
Download or read book China s Changing Political Landscape written by Cheng Li and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While China's economic rise is being watched closely around the world, the country's changing political landscape is intriguing, as well. Forces unleashed by market reforms are profoundly recasting state-society relations. Will the Middle Kingdom transition rapidly, slowly, or not at all to political democracy? In China's Changing Political Landscape, leading experts examine the prospects for democracy in the world's most populous nation. China's political transformation is unlikely to follow a linear path. Possible scenarios include development of democracy as we understand it; democracy with more clearly Chinese characteristics; mounting regime instability due to political and socioeconomic crises; and a modified authoritarianism, perhaps modeled on other Asian examples such as Singapore. Which road China ultimately takes will depend on the interplay of socioeconomic forces, institutional developments, leadership succession, and demographic trends. Cheng Li and his colleagues break down a number of issues in Chinese domestic politics, including changing leadership dynamics; the rise of business elites; increased demand for the rule of law; and shifting civil-military relations. Although the contributors clash on many issues, they do agree on one thing: the political trajectory of this economic powerhouse will have profound implications, not only for 1.3 billion Chinese people, but also for the world as a whole.
Download or read book Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape written by Jody C Baumgartner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade various studies have examined how political humor may influence various political attitudes and voting behavior; whether it affects learning, cognition and media literacy, how it might shape political participation; how people process different forms of political humor; and more. This book is devoted to anticipating and addressing where the field of political humor and its effects will move in the next generation of scholarship, exploring the continued evolution of the study of political humor as well as the normative implications of these developments. It includes research accounting for important changes and developments "on the ground" in the political humor landscape. These include the fact that the cadre of late-night television hosts have completely changed in the past 3 years; there are now more late night television choices; and many hosts have become more overtly political in their presentations. Recommended for scholars of communication, media studies, and political science.
Download or read book Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe written by Eszter Krasznai Kovacs and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths. This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been. Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics.
Download or read book Justice Power and the Political Landscape written by Kenneth Olwig and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the socio-political context of landscape as polity and place (rather than as scenery) it becomes necessary to consider the role of power, and the importance of justice, in the shaping of the landscape as an area of practice and performance with both cultural and environmental implications.
Download or read book A Sense of Place written by David Spafford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Sense of Place examines the vast Kantō region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete locales, where struggles over land rights played out alongside debates about the meaning of ties between families and their holdings. Spafford also provides the first historical account in English of medieval castle building and the castellan revolution of the late fifteenth century, which militarized the countryside and radically transformed the exercise of authority over territory.Simultaneously, the book reinforces a sense of the eastern elite’s anxieties and priorities, detailing how, in their relation to land and place, local elites displayed a preference for past precedent and inherited wisdom. Even amidst the changes wrought by war, this inclination, although quite at odds with their conventional reputation for ruthless pragmatism and forward thinking, prevailed."
Download or read book From Politics to the Pews written by Michele F. Margolis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most substantial divides in American politics is the “God gap.” Religious voters tend to identify with and support the Republican Party, while secular voters generally support the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom suggests that religious differences between Republicans and Democrats have produced this gap, with voters sorting themselves into the party that best represents their religious views. Michele F. Margolis offers a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, arguing that the relationship between religion and politics is far from a one-way street that starts in the church and ends at the ballot box. Margolis contends that political identity has a profound effect on social identity, including religion. Whether a person chooses to identify as religious and the extent of their involvement in a religious community are, in part, a response to political surroundings. In today’s climate of political polarization, partisan actors also help reinforce the relationship between religion and politics, as Democratic and Republican elites stake out divergent positions on moral issues and use religious faith to varying degrees when reaching out to voters.
Download or read book Landscape Nature and the Body Politic written by Kenneth Olwig and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002-06-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is an exploration of the origins and lasting influence of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, and, nature.
Download or read book How the Obama Presidency Changed the Political Landscape written by Larry J. Walker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering key issues ranging from education to political mobilization to racial stratification, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the Obama Presidency. President Barack Obama's election and subsequent reelection represent a critical paradigm shift in American political history. But are there lasting effects of the election of an African American to the highest office in the land in terms of the United States' economic, educational, political and social realities? A valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, state and federal policymakers, and general readers, this book poses critical questions and offers insightful answers from expert contributors, provides a balanced critique of President Obama's accomplishments and challenges, and considers the national and international impact President Obama's tenure had on politics. The numerous contributors to this book provide a range of perspectives on President Obama's presidency that question conventional thinking, covering key issues that include health care, education, political mobilization, gender, racial stratification, voting patterns, and criminal justice. Readers will come away with a heightened comprehension of the complex relationships between political structures, economic policies, and minority interests; how Congress, traditional and contemporary activists, and domestic and international issues all shaped the Obama Presidency; and how micro and macro issues such as voting rights, voting patterns, and Get Out the Vote (GOTV) initiatives are connected.
Download or read book Approaches to Landscape written by Richard Muir and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-20 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaches to Landscape introduces and explores the main perspectives in this increasingly popular field of study. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout with relevant photographs, maps and diagrams, it provides a comprehensive review of the literature and key concepts for Landscape Studies.
Download or read book The City as Text written by James S. Duncan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that landscapes are not only culturally produced, but they also influence governing ideas of political and religious life.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics written by Jeffrey Schultz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-12-14 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, such issues as abortion, capital punishment, sex education, racism, prayer in public schools, and family values keep religion and politics closely entwined in American public life. This encyclopedia is an A-to-Z listing of a broad range of topics related to religious issues and politics, ranging from the religious freedom sought by the Pilgrims in the 1620s to the rise of the religious right in the 1980s.
Download or read book Neopolitics The Changes in the Modern Political Landscape written by Igor Lys and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, French expert in international relations Igor Lys explains the main changes that undergoes the politics of the modern times. The changes brought by the new technologies and that have no precedent in the history of political science and practice. Discussing a variety of topics, from fake news to big data, from new approaches to political branding to the importance of the viral videos, Igor Lys offers a short yet precise glance at what the new political challenges are about.
