Download or read book Culture and Customs of Spain written by Edward F. Stanton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-05-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Spain is a revelation in this up-to-date overview. Stanton vibrantly describes the startling variety of landscape, people, and culture that make up Spain today. Included are a context chapter and others on religion, customs, media, cinema, literature, performing arts, and visual arts. Students of Spanish and a general audience will be rewarded with engrossing insights into what writer Ernest Hemingway called the very best country of all. Spain is a modern European nation, yet Spaniards are fiercely tied to their individual towns and regions—with their distinct social customs, dialects or languages, foods, landscape, and lifestyles—more than to a united country. Culture and Customs of Spain conveys the extremes, such as the hard-working Catalan contrasted to the leisurely paced Castilian, coexisting in first and third world conditions, and the love/hate relationship with the Catholic Church. Spain's institutions are described, and its contributions to the world—from unparalleled literature and cuisine to flamenco and filmmaker Pedro Almodovar—are celebrated. A chronology and glossary complement the text.
Download or read book Spain Culture Smart written by Culture Smart! and published by Kuperard. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't just see the sights—get to know the people. In the popular imagination Spain conjures up a picture of rapacious conquistadores, fiery flamenco dancers, and brilliant artists. All true enough but how closely does everyday life in modern Spain conform to these dramatic stereotypes? Culture Smart! Spain explores the complex human realities of contemporary Spanish life. It describes how Spain s history and geography have created both strongly felt regional differences and shared values and attitudes. It reveals what the Spaniards are like at home, and in business, how they socialize, and how to build lasting relationships with them. The better you understand the Spanish people, the more you will be enriched by your experience of this vital, warm, and varied country where the individual is important, and the enjoyment of life is paramount. Have a richer and more meaningful experience abroad through a better understanding of the local culture. Chapters on history, values, attitudes, and traditions will help you to better understand your hosts, while tips on etiquette and communicating will help you to navigate unfamiliar situations and avoid faux pas.
Download or read book France written by Andrew Whittaker and published by Thorogood Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guidebook can show you where to go, a phrase-book what to say when you get there. Only Speak the Culture: France will lead you to the nation's soul. This easy-to-use cultural companion reflects what it means to have grown up with Camus, Cézanne, De Gaulle and Bardot; it captures the spirit of France and delves deep into the Gallic psyche. Through exploring the people, the movements and the lifestyles that have shaped the French experience, you will come to an intimate understanding of France and the French. There are many travel guides and manuals on living in France. Speak the Culture: France is different: a superbly designed, informed and entertaining insight into French life and culture and who the French really are. Recommended by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni, the Official French Government Centre of Language and Culture in the UK For new residents, business travellers, holidaymakers, students and lovers of France everywhere, Speak the Culture: France is an engaging companion and guide to an enviably rich civilization at the heart of Europe. Excerpt "It would be wrong to imagine that your average Frenchwoman just pops into Chanel on the Rue du Faubourg-St-Honoré whenever she needs a new bag, cardy or fragrance. While a significant minority do indulge in ready-to-wear lines produced by designer labels, most are happy with less brand-conscious garments. Small boutiques and historic department stores like Le Bon Marché and Les Galeries Lafayette sell the big brands, but many French are happy to buy anonymous clothes at knockdown prices in chain stores like Tati, or even in the hypermarket."
Download or read book Postmodern Spain written by Antonio Sánchez and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodern Spain examines the cultural transformation experienced by Spanish society during the late 1980s and 1990s. By looking at specific aspects of culture, the representation of the human subject, the past, and the transformation of the city this book critically re-assesses the validity of postmodernism in Spain. Focusing on the novels written by Juan Goytisolo during this period this book examines the representation and development of the human subject and its identification with the marginalized 'other(s)'. It further analyses various representations of the Spanish Civil War, challenging the prevalent view of post-Franco Spain as suffering from amnesia, and thereby vindicates postmodern historical representations as a valid dialogue with the past. The third chapter examines Barcelona's urban redevelopment, analysing the transformation effected in some of its popular sites as a postmodern re-formulation of the city as a fluid, flexible public space. Finally it brings its previous findings to bear on an analysis of the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games. It argues that these celebrations constituted a performance of Spain's 'new' cultural identity designed for global, national and local consumption. Thus, these cultural celebrations corroborated the emergence of postmodernism as a cultural dominant which has exceeded modern and pre-modern cultural practices while, paradoxically, containing and enhancing both.
Download or read book Culture Shock written by Marie Louise Graff and published by Graphic Arts Center Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives informative tips on the do's and don'ts of custom in Spain and provides interesting insights into the social and business attitudes of the Spanish people.
Download or read book Documenting Spain Artists Exhibition Culture and the Modern Nation 1929 1939 written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The news media have given us potent demonstrations of the ambiguity of ostensibly truthful representations of public events. Jordana Mendelson uses this ambiguity as a framework for the study of Spanish visual culture from 1929 to 1939--a decade marked, on the one hand, by dictatorship, civil war, and Franco's rise to power and, on the other, by a surge in the production of documentaries of various types, from films and photographs to international exhibitions. Mendelson begins with an examination of El Pueblo Español, a model Spanish village featured at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. She then discusses Buñuel's and Dalí's documentary films, relating them not only to French Surrealism but also to issues of rural tradition in the formation of regional and national identities. Her highly original book concludes with a discussion of the 1937 Spanish Pavilion, where Picasso's famed painting of the Fascist bombing of a Basque town--Guernica--was exhibited along with monumental photomurals by Josep Renau. Based upon years of archival research, Mendelson's book opens a new perspective on the cultural politics of a turbulent era in modern Spain. It explores the little-known yet rich intersection between avant-garde artists and government institutions. It shows as well the surprising extent to which Spanish modernity was fashioned through dialogue between the seemingly opposed fields of urban and rural, fine art, and mass culture.
Download or read book Framing Majismo written by Tara Zanardi and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.
Download or read book Italy Culture Smart written by Barry Tomalin and published by Bravo Limited. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy delights and stimulates with its magnificent cities and monuments, its stunningly beautiful landscapes, the glory of its art and architecture, the richness and variety of its food, the elegance of its design and fashion, and the vitality and charm of its people. Italian style and culture have been exported all over the world. What is it like at home? Almost ten years after the 2008 banking crisis, Italy struggles to maintain its standard of living, the stability of the currency, and its ability to provide jobs for its school leavers and university graduates, many of whom now leave to work elsewhere in Europe. In addition, the influx of refugees from southeast Europe and across the Mediterranean is putting pressure on both its security and its economy. How are traditional Italian society and politics changing to deal with these challenges, with its most famous political personality of the last ten years, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, still apparently waiting in the wings? The Italians are the most European-minded of nations, having emerged from a long history of regional fragmentation." Culture Smart! Italy" introduces you to their history and culture and offers an insider s guide to their daily lives, passions, and preoccupations. This is your chance to get to know them better."
Download or read book At the First Table written by Jodi Campbell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance and maintenance of social identity"--
Download or read book Spain a Global History written by Luis Francisco Martinez Montes and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.
Download or read book Culture and Customs of Morocco written by Raphael Chijioke Njoku and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-12-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moroccan culture today is a blend of Berber, African, Arab, Jewish, and European influences in an Islamic state. Morocco's strategic position at the tip of North Africa just below Spain has brought these cultures together through the centuries. The parallels with African and Middle Eastern countries and other Muslim cultures are drawn as the major topics are discussed, yet the uniqueness of Moroccan traditions, particularly those of the indigenous Berbers, stand out. The narrative emphasizes the evolving nature of the storied subcultures. With more exposure to Western-style education and pop culture, the younger generations are gradually turning away from the strict religious observances of their elders. General readers finally have a substantive resource for information on a country most known in the United States for the Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca, images of the souks (markets), hashish, and Berber rugs. The strong introduction surveys the people, land, government, economy, educational system, and history. Most weight is given to modern history, with French colonial rule ending in 1956 and a succession of monarchs since then. The discussion of religion and worldview illuminates the Islamic base and Jewish communities but is also notable for the discussion of Berber beliefs in spirits. In the Literature and Media chapter, the oral culture of the Berbers and the new preference for Western-style education and use of French and even English are highlights. The Moroccans are renowned as skilled artisans, and their products are enumerated in the Art and Architecture/Housing chapter, along with the intriguing descriptions of casbahs and old quarters in the major cities. Moroccans are hospitable and family oriented, which is reflected in descriptions of their cuisine and social customs. Moroccan women seem to be somewhat freer than others in Muslim countries but the chapter on Gender Roles, Marriage, and Family shows that much progress is still needed. Ceremonies and celebrations are important cultural markers that bring communities together, and a wealth of religious, national, and family rites of passage, with accompanying music and dance, round out the cultural coverage.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics written by Diego Muro and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates, as well as a foundation for future research. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences"--
Download or read book The Culture of Cursiler a written by Noël Valis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-16 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilería refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería, Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture. Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity. The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.
Download or read book The A to Z of Spanish Culture written by Pilar Orti and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-04-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author Pilar Ort' was born and bred in Spain. She grew up in a society trying to figure out how to adapt to its new found freedom and how best to join the rest of Europe. Having lived in London now for over twenty years (time flies!), Pilar has written this ""A to Z of Spanish Culture"" with plenty of perspective, a bit of nostalgia and above all, a desire to demystify a country that is still represented abroad by toros and flamenco. This light book about Spain is divided into different chapters, each headed by a Spanish word that opens up a whole aspect of Spanish culture: Spain's history, its society, traditions, art, gastronomy or language
Download or read book Balenciaga and Spain written by Hamish Bowles and published by Skira. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., on the occasion of the exhibition Balenciaga and Spain, on view at the de Young Museum from March 26 through July 4, 2011"--T.p. verso.
Download or read book Negotiating International Business written by Lothar Katz and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pt. 1. International negotiations. -- Pt. 2. Negotiation techniques used around the world. -- Pt. 3. Negotiate right in any of 50 countries.
Download or read book Avant Garde Cultural Practices in Spain 1914 1936 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical reinterpretation of the Spanish avant-garde, focusing on narrative, transculturality, and intermediality. Narrative, because it prioritizes the analysis of prose over poetry, against the traditional use of critical literature on the subject up to this point. Transculturality, because the Spanish avant-garde simply cannot be understood without the acknowledgement of its multi-linguistic reality and the transnational scope of the experience of Modernism in Europe – of which Spain was an integral yet underexposed component. And intermediality, because the interrelations of painting, photography, film, and literature articulate a correlation and mutual affect among different media, creating a rich cultural tapestry that needs to be addressed. Contributors: Rosa Berland, Jennifer Duprey, Marcos Eymar, Regina Galasso, Eduardo Gregori, Juan Herrero-Senés, John McCulloch, Andrés Pérez-Simón, Lynn Purkey, Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Evelyn Scaramella and Antonio Sáez Delgado.
