Download or read book The Social Production of Indifference written by Michael Herzfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Michael Herzfeld argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing primarily on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, he suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility. He points out that both formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices rely heavily on the symbols and language of the moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders; a ready means of expressing prejudice and of justifying neglect. It therefore happens that societies with proud traditions of generous hospitality may paradoxically produce at the official level some of the most calculated indifference one can find anywhere.
Download or read book The Social Production of Indifference written by Michael Herzfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Michael Herzfeld argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing primarily on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, he suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility. He points out that both formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices rely heavily on the symbols and language of the moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders; a ready means of expressing prejudice and of justifying neglect. It therefore happens that societies with proud traditions of generous hospitality may paradoxically produce at the official level some of the most calculated indifference one can find anywhere.
Download or read book Death Without Weeping written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.
Download or read book Siege of the Spirits written by Michael Herzfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when three hundred alleged squatters go head-to-head with an enormous city government looking to develop the place where they live? As anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows in this book, the answer can be surprising. He tells the story of Pom Mahakan, a tiny enclave in the heart of old Bangkok whose residents have resisted authorities’ demands to vacate their homes for a quarter of a century. It’s a story of community versus government, of old versus new, and of political will versus the law. Herzfeld argues that even though the residents of Pom Mahakan have lost every legal battle the city government has dragged them into, they have won every public relations contest, highlighting their struggle as one against bureaucrats who do not respect the age-old values of Thai/Siamese social and cultural order. Such values include compassion for the poor and an understanding of urban space as deeply embedded in social and ritual relations. In a gripping account of their standoff, Herzfeld—who simultaneously argues for the importance of activism in scholarship—traces the agile political tactics and styles of the community’s leadership, using their struggle to illuminate the larger difficulties, tensions, and unresolved debates that continue to roil Thai society to this day.
Download or read book Cultures of Insecurity written by Jutta Weldes and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genocide in Rwanda, instability in the Middle East, anarchy on the Internet -- insecurities abound. But do they occur "naturally, " or are they, as this pathbreaking volume suggests, cultural and social productions? Bringing together scholars from political science and anthropology, this collection of essays redirects long-standing views on culture as both a source of insecurity and an object of analysis. The authors present studies whose topics range from traditional security concerns, such as the Cuban missile crisis, the Korean War, and he Middle East, to less conventional issues, including the Internet and national security, multiculturalism and regional economy in New Mexico.
Download or read book Modernity and the Holocaust written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust. The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.
Download or read book Race and Social Analysis written by Caroline Knowles and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caroline Knowles combines biographical and spatial analysis to provide an up-to-date account of the ways race and ethnicity operate in a global context. She argues that race and ethnicity is intricately woven into the social landscapes in which we live.
Download or read book The Social Politics of Research Collaboration written by Gabriele Griffin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on large and interdisciplinary research configurations such as research networks, and centers of excellence including those in Social Sciences and Humanities research. Little research has been undertaken, however, to understand how these new large research structures that are being called forth by research funders and research/higher education institutions alike function socially, and what the impact of operating within such structures is on those working within, and those working with, them. Past writers have discussed the "intra-agentic" operations of human researchers and the material laboratory environment in its broadest sense. This volume is concerned with the social politics of research collaboration in relation to six key positions: leaders of large research formations, leaders of sub-projects within large collaborations, participant researchers, junior and early career researchers, advisory board members, and those who look in from the outside such as researchers who are un-funded. It explores the mostly unacknowledged but critical aspect of social structures in research, discussing issues such as struggles over leadership styles, the marginalization of researchers working cross-disciplinarily, power hierarchies and intellectual ownership, and the silencing of dissent in research.
Download or read book Critical Times in Greece written by Dimitris Dalakoglou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece’s history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.
Download or read book This Time We Knew written by Thomas Cushman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-10 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II.
Download or read book When the State Winks written by Michal Kravel-Tovi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.
Download or read book Social Theories of History and Histories of Social Theory written by Harry F. Dahms and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing a range of approaches and emphases, the chapters in this volume address and illustrate linkages between social theory and history; social theory and historical analysis as mutually supportive frames of analysis, and affinities between the history of social thought and the history of modern societies.
Download or read book Social Identity written by Richard Jenkins and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2008 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing the argument that identity is both individual and collective, the author explores the work of major social theorists such as Mead, Goffman and Barth to explain the experience of identity in everyday life.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies written by Patricia Hill Collins and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The SAGE Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies is one of the best handbooks outlining the latest thinking on race and ethnic studies published in recent years...The breadth of themes and the depth of discussion are ambitious, offering the reader an A-Z guide of contemporary thinking on race and ethnicity...a valuable resource for scholars and activists alike." - Runnymede Bulletin What is the state of race and ethnic studies today? How has the field emerged? What are the core concepts, debates and issues? This panoramic, critical survey of the field supplies researchers and students with a vital resource. It is a rigorous, focused examination of the central questions in the field today. The text examines: The roots of the field of race and ethnic studies. The distinction between race and ethnicity. Methodological issues facing researchers. Intersections between race and ethnicity and questions of sexuality, gender, nation and social transformation. The challenge of multiculturalism. Race, ethnicity and globalization. Race and the family. Race and education. Race and religion. Planned and edited by a distinguished team of Anglo-American scholars, the Handbook pools an impressive range of international world class expertise and insight. It provides a landmark work in the field which will be the measure of debate and research for years to come.
Download or read book Bureaucracy Belonging and the City in North India written by Michael S. Dodson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India’s most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyses two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sewerage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism. Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Studies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History.
Download or read book The Production of Space written by Henri Lefebvre and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1992-04-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.
Download or read book Good Victims written by Roxani Krystalli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Good Victims, Roxani Krystalli investigates the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade, Krystalli shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. The book also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.
