Download or read book Ecstatic Consumption written by Pavlina Radia and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While modernity aspired to “fix” radical alienation through aesthetics by assigning an ethical value to narratives, contemporary literature and the arts are no longer immune to the impact of commodity culture amplified by globalization. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and cyborgs, the very notion of identity is frequently turned into a spectacle. Yet, it is also simultaneously mobilized by the search for what Jean Baudrillard describes as the “ecstatic” form that materializes aesthetics. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature investigates not only how these transformations affect gender, racial, and class relations, as well as how they impact the representation of historical events. Pop culture media and discourses of multiculturalism, both important venues of and vehicles for globalization, have had an extensive effect on contemporary writers like Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, and Jane Smiley, as have the discourses of terrorism and assimilation on the works of Diana Abu-Jaber, Chang-Rae Lee, Shalom Auslander, and Alissa Torres. As the works of these authors show, the tendency to unify the world as a global village has been frequently complicit in perpetuating oppressive, neo-colonial ideologies. As these writers reveal, literature no longer provides a solid cure for the somnambulist culture of instant gratification. On the global stage, the body becomes the ultimate commodity: the fetish of ecstatic consumption, as it is persistently mobilized by the search for ecstatic avatar (anti)forms. Whether these forms provide an escape into a utopian space or further enhance the dystopian ecstasy is a crucial query framing this book. As it shows, the works of DeLillo, Smiley, Piercy, Abu-Jaber, Lee, Auslander, and Torres provide important and challenging commentaries on the ecstatic gaze of global dystopia, particularly its appetite for alterity and the tragic, often disguised as interchangeable metaphors of Otherness, fear, anxiety, terror, pain, and pleasure, titillation, exoticism, and ecstasy. Consequently, the book sheds light on the ways in which the culture of spectacle is ever-evolving, manipulating and affecting the global dependence on the ecstasy of consumption and its many different forms.
Download or read book Determinants of ecstasy use and harm reduction strategies Informing evidence based intervention development written by Gjalt-Jorn Peters and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2008-10-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This PhD. thesis reports eight studies into the determinants of ecstasy use behaviours. Although all prior quantitative studies into ecstasy use determinants have examined the generic behavioural category 'using ecstasy', these studies may not be able to inform the development of interventions aiming to prevent ecstasy use or to promote cessation. The studies reported in this thesis indicate that the key determinants of 'using ecstasy' are not also the key determinants of 'trying out ecstasy' and 'ceasing ecstasy use'. Furthermore, ecstasy use cessation usually seems to be prompted by life style changes (e.g. job/work, relationships, losing interest in the dance scene), rather than by fear of ecstasy's health effects. This means that health promotion efforts would do better to adopt a harm reduction approach, rather than to focus on abstinence. The current thesis reports the studies on which these conclusions are based, and the first study into the determinants of a harm reduction strategy.
Download or read book Post Soul Satire written by Derek C. Maus and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip-hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called “post-black,” “post-soul,” and examples of a “New Black Aesthetic.” Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
Download or read book Ecstatic Consumption written by Pavlina Radia and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While modernity aspired to "fix" radical alienation through aesthetics by assigning an ethical value to narratives, contemporary literature and the arts are no longer immune to the impact of commodity culture amplified by globalization. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and cyborgs, the very notion of identity is frequently turned into a spectacle. Yet, it is also simultaneously mobilized by the search for what Jean Baudrillard describes as the "ecstatic" form that materializes aesthetics. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature investigates not only how these transformations affect gender, racial, and class relations, as well as how they impact the representation of historical events. Pop culture media and discourses of multiculturalism, both important venues of and vehicles for globalization, have had an extensive effect on contemporary writers like Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, and Jane Smiley, as have the discourses of terrorism and assimilation on the works of Diana Abu-Jaber, Chang-Rae Lee, Shalom Auslander, and Alissa Torres. As the works of these authors show, the tendency to unify the world as a global village has been frequently complicit in perpetuating oppressive, neo-colonial ideologies. As these writers reveal, literature no longer provides a solid cure for the somnambulist culture of instant gratification.On the global stage, the body becomes the ultimate commodity: the fetish of ecstatic consumption, as it is persistently mobilized by the search for ecstatic avatar (anti)forms. Whether these forms provide an escape into a utopian space or further enhance the dystopian ecstasy is a crucial query framing this book. As it shows, the works of DeLillo, Smiley, Piercy, Abu-Jaber, Lee, Auslander, and Torres provide important and challenging commentaries on the ecstatic gaze of global dystopia, particularly its appetite for alterity and the tragic, often disguised as interchangeable metaphors of Otherness, fear, anxiety, terror, pain, and pleasure, titillation, exoticism, and ecstasy. Consequently, the book sheds light on the ways in which the culture of spectacle is ever-evolving, manipulating and affecting the global dependence on the ecstasy of consumption and its many different forms."
Download or read book Clubbing written by Ben Malbon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clubbing explores the cultures and spaces of clubbing. Divided into three sections: Beginnings, The Night Out and Reflections, Clubbing includes first-hand accounts of clubbing experiences, framing these accounts within the relevant research and a review of clubbing in late-1990s Britain. Malbon particularly focuses on: the codes of social interaction among clubbers issues of gender and sexuality the effects of music the role of ecstasy clubbing as a playful act and personal interpretations of clubbing experiences.
Download or read book The Consuming Temple written by Paul Lerner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Department stores in Germany, like their predecessors in France, Britain, and the United States, generated great excitement when they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Their sumptuous displays, abundant products, architectural innovations, and prodigious scale inspired widespread fascination and even awe; at the same time, however, many Germans also greeted the rise of the department store with considerable unease. In The Consuming Temple, Paul Lerner explores the complex German reaction to department stores and the widespread belief that they posed hidden dangers both to the individuals, especially women, who frequented them and to the nation as a whole.Drawing on fiction, political propaganda, commercial archives, visual culture, and economic writings, Lerner provides multiple perspectives on the department store, placing it in architectural, gender-historical, commercial, and psychiatric contexts. Noting that Jewish entrepreneurs founded most German department stores, he argues that Jews and "Jewishness" stood at the center of the consumer culture debate from the 1880s, when the stores first appeared, through the latter 1930s, when they were "Aryanized" by the Nazis. German responses to consumer culture and the Jewish question were deeply interwoven, and the "Jewish department store," framed as an alternative and threatening secular temple, a shrine to commerce and greed, was held responsible for fundamental changes that transformed urban experience and challenged national traditions in Germany's turbulent twentieth century.
Download or read book The Future of Humanity written by Pavlina Radia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the future of humanity? What does it mean to be ‘human’ in the posthuman age? What responsibility does humankind have towards others and their environments? How are the stories that humans tell themselves implicated in the very power asymmetries and eco-political challenges that they bemoan? Taking a cross-disciplinary approach to the posthuman age, the essays in this collection speak to the multifaceted geographies and counter-geographies of humanity, probing into the possible futures we face as planetary species. Some of these include: ecological issues generated by centuries of neglecting our environment(s); power asymmetries stemming from economic and cultural globalization; violence and its affective politics informed by cultural, ethnic, and racial genocides; religious disputes; social inequities produced by consumerism; gender normativity; and the increasing impact of digital and AI (artificial intelligence) technology on the human body, as well as historical, socio-political, not to mention ethical relations.
Download or read book The Ecstatic Experience written by Belinda Gore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-27 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trance-inducing postures for shamanic journeying, initiation, healing, divination, and transformation of the soul • Provides practices from Mayan, Egyptian, African, Native American, Sumerian, and other ancient and indigenous traditions • Shows how these practices can detoxify the energy body The human need for ecstasy--the ability to be free of the limitations of ordinary consciousness--is as imperative as the need for food. Renowned anthropologist Felicitas Goodman claimed that being deprived of ecstasy was the fundamental cause of all forms of addiction. Indigenous cultures and the civilizations of antiquity were aware of this and developed specific rituals to induce and channel trance energies to detoxify and nourish the subtle body in order to experience the ecstatic reality that gives life to matter. The body postures seen in ancient art from Mayan, Egyptian, African, Native American, Sumerian, and other ancient and indigenous traditions are a doorway to inducing this kind of ecstatic trance. People who assume these postures in a ritual context are able to experience expanded and transformative states of consciousness. Following up on the groundbreaking introduction of this practice in her first book, Ecstatic Body Postures, Belinda Gore provides a new series of 20 sacred postures and exercises that allow for a deeper understanding and utilization of these shamanic practices. She shows how to use the energy awakened by these practices for healing, shapeshifting, initiations into the mysteries of death and rebirth, divination, spirit journeying, and restoring balance to the cosmic patterns disrupted by destructive human activity.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of Cannibalism written by Ctlin Avramescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-28 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Based on the research he undertook in rare book collections housed in Scotland, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Holland, Germany and Austria, the author presents a systematic history of cannabalism as reflected in the mirror of philosophy.
Download or read book Soma written by David Spess and published by Inner Traditions / Bear & Co. This book was released on 2000-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shrouded in mystery for centuries, Soma is simultaneously a sacred hallucinogenic plant, a personified God, and a cosmological principle. With the renewed interest in the ritual use of psychoactive substances, shamanism, and alternative modalities of healing, Soma provides an important key to understanding the earliest systemized methods of medicine, psychology, magic, rejuvenation, longevity, and alchemy.
Download or read book The Commonplace of the Transfigurative written by Eric Lunde and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: analysis of contemporary Aesthetics from a Systems Theory Perspective
Download or read book Cannabis written by Robert Clarke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.
Download or read book The Ecstatic Quotidian written by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World written by Diana Stein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.
Download or read book Football and Community in the Global Context written by Adam Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Football clubs across the world continue to embody many of the collective symbols, identifications and processes of connectivity which have long been associated with the notion of ‘community’. In recent years, however, the very term ‘community’ has become the focus of renewed interest within popular discourse and amongst academics, politicians and policy makers. It has become something of a ‘buzz’ word, wheeled out as both a lament to more certain times and as an appeal to a better future: a term imbued with all the richness associated with human interaction. ‘Community’ has also been employed increasingly within football, for instrumental reasons concerned with policy and stadium redevelopment, and in broader rhetoric about clubs, their localities and fans. This book brings together a range of key debates around contemporary understandings of ‘community’ in world football. Split into four sections, it considers political and theoretical debates around football and its connection with community; different national and ethnic football communities; instrumental uses of football to bridge gaps within and between groups; future directions in the football and community debate. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.
Download or read book Sport and Modern Social Theorists written by Richard Giulianotti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-08-03 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport and Modern Social Theorists is an innovative and exciting new collection. The chapters are written by leading social analysts of sport from across the world, and examine the contributions of major social theorists towards our critical understanding of modern sport. Social theorists under critical examination include Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Adorno, Gramsci, Habermas, Merton, C.Wright Mills, Goffman, Giddens, Elias, Bourdieu and Foucault. This book will appeal to students and scholars of sport studies, cultural studies, modern social theory, and to social scientists generally.
Download or read book Socialisation During the Life Course written by Klaus Hurrelmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive text highlights new developments in sociological, educational and psychological aspects of socialisation, examining how human beings as 'subjects' – experiencing, thinking and acting individuals – confront the material, social and cultural 'objects' of their environment and sustain their position. The authors provide an overview of the most important theories of socialisation, then integrate these using the Productive Processing of Reality (PPR) model. This novel approach is applied to a life course analysis, examining developmental tasks and the challenges of productive processing of the internal and external reality at various stages of development. The book also considers contexts, addressing the inequalities between different socio-economic and ethnic groups and genders, to consider how humans – with their genetic dispositions and their individual instincts and needs – solve the task of coping with the requirements of society, culture and economy while at the same time safeguarding their status as unique individuals. It is core reading for advanced students on socialisation modules in developmental or social psychology and educational sciences and is additionally of value for the professional training of sociologists, teachers and social workers. It is also relevant for all those interested in elementary questions of how the interaction between the society and the individual works; how human beings deal not only with themselves but also with their social and physical environment, and how they shape it in their own way.
