Download or read book Recasting Ritual written by Mary M. Crain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recasting Ritual explores how ritualized action diversifies in response to varying cultural, political and physical contexts. The contributors look at how issues such as globalisation and technology affect ritual performance and how minorities often utilise performances to affirm their own identites while also speaking to outsiders. The contributors examine the relationship between ritual meaning and social identity through case-studies drawn from the Pacific, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Indonesia, and East and West Africa. Study of the theoretical underpinnings of social action affirms the independence of anthropology as a discipline from cultural, media and performance studies, according it a distinctive role in elucidating contemporary and emergent human conditions.
Download or read book Theorizing Rituals written by Jens Kreinath and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory. Instead of proposing yet another theory of ritual, the bibliography is a comprehensive monument documenting four decades of theorizing rituals.
Download or read book Recasting Ritual written by Mary M. Crain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recasting Ritual explores how ritualized action diversifies in response to varying cultural, political and physical contexts. The contributors look at how issues such as globalisation and technology affect ritual performance and how minorities often utilise performances to affirm their own identites while also speaking to outsiders. The contributors examine the relationship between ritual meaning and social identity through case-studies drawn from the Pacific, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Indonesia, and East and West Africa. Study of the theoretical underpinnings of social action affirms the independence of anthropology as a discipline from cultural, media and performance studies, according it a distinctive role in elucidating contemporary and emergent human conditions.
Download or read book Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives written by David Dodd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy. In this books an international group of experts including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf and Bruce Lincoln, critique many of these past studies, and challenge strongly the tradition of privileging the concept of initiation as a tool for studying social performances and literary texts, in which changes in status or group membership occur in unusual ways. These new modes of research mark an important turning point in the modern study of the religion and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, making this a valuable collection across a number of classical subjects.
Download or read book Sport Dance and Embodied Identities written by Noel Dyck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport and dance command the passions and devotion of countless athletes, dancers and fans worldwide. Although conventionally thought to reside within separate social realms, these two embodied cultural forms are revealed in this benchmark volume to share a vital capacity to constitute and express identities through their practiced movements and scripted forms. Thus, the work of choreographers and coaches along with the performances of dancers and athletes offer not merely entertainment and aesthetic accomplishment but also powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or, alternately, for imagining and advocating new ones.Drawing on a wide selection of sport and dance activities from around the world, this book elucidates the ways in which embodied performances both mirror and reshape social life. It traces, for example, how football, salsa and tango can each be employed to articulate or rewrite national and gender identities. Also examined are children's sport and the dynamics by which immigration and cultural integration, along with the socialization of children and youth, may be directed through the organization of community sport. The volume investigates the marshalling of sport and dance in settings from Africa to Ireland as vehicles for framing moral issues that revolve around the appropriate use, protection and exhibition of the body. This innovative study establishes the paradoxical fashion in which dance and sport can unite certain people and communities while at the same time serving exclusionary and nationalistic purposes.
Download or read book Women and Humor in Classical Greece written by Laurie O'Higgins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and Humor in Classical Greece examines the role of women as producers of joking speech, especially within cults of Demeter. This speech, sometimes known as aischrologia, had considerable weight and vitality within its cultic context. It also shaped literary traditions, notably iambic and Attic old comedy that has traditionally been regarded as entirely male. The misogyny for which ancient iambic is infamous derives in part from an oral world in which women's derisive joking voices reverberated. O'Higgins considers this speech from its mythical origins in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, through the reactive iambic tradition and into old comedy. She also examines the poems of Sappho and Corinna as literary jokers, responding in part to their own experience of joking women. The book concludes with a fresh appraisal of the three great 'women's' plays of Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriasouzae, and Ecclesiazousae.
Download or read book Wedding as Text written by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-12-18 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wedding serves as the beginning marker of a marriage; if a couple is to manage cultural differences throughout their relationship, they must first pass the hurdle of designing a wedding ceremony that accommodates those differences. In this volume, author Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz documents the weddings of 112 couples from across the United States, studied over a 10-year period. She focuses on intercultural weddings--interracial, interethnic, interfaith, international, and interclass--looking at how real people are coping with cultural differences in their lives. Through detailed case studies, the book explores how couples display different identities simultaneously. The concepts of community, ritual, identity, and meaning are given extensive consideration. Because material culture plays a particularly important role in weddings as in other examples of ritual, food, clothing, and objects are given special attention here. Focusing on how couples design a wedding ritual to simultaneously meet multiple--and different--requirements, this book provides: *extensive details of actual behavior by couples; *an innovative format: six traditional theoretical chapters, with examples integrated into the discussion, are matched to six "interludes" providing detailed descriptions of the most successful examples of resolving intercultural differences; *a methodological appendix detailing what was done and why these decisions were made; and *a theoretical appendix outlining the study's assumptions in detail. Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual is a distinctive study of those who have accepted cultural difference into their daily lives and how they have managed to do so successfully. As such, it is suitable for students and scholars in semiotics, intercultural communication, ritual, material culture, family communication, and family studies, and will be valuable reading for anyone facing the issue of cultural difference.
Download or read book An Anthropology of Indirect Communication written by Joy Hendry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes we convey what we mean not by what we say but by what we do. This type of indirect communication is sometimes called 'indirection'. From patent miscommunication, through potent ambiguity to pregnant silence this incisive collection examines from a rare anthropological perspective the many aspects of indirect communication. From a Mormon Theme Park to carnival time on Montserrat the contributors analyse indirection by illustrating how food, silence, sunglasses, martial arts and rudeness call constitute powerful ways of conveying meaning. An Anthropology of Indirect Communication is an engaging text which provides a challenging introduction to this subject.
Download or read book Old Schools written by Ramsey McGlazer and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner: AAIS First Book Prize Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition. The book makes sense of an apparent anachronism in twentieth-century literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in progressive pedagogical theories. Advocates of progressive education turned against Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested means including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. Yet McGlazer’s remarkable book reminds us that progressive education was championed not only by political progressives, but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci’s critique. Building on Gramsci’s pages on the Latin class, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, returned to and reimagined the old school. Strikingly, the works that McGlazer considers valorize this school’s outmoded techniques even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away. Registering the past’s persistence even while they respond to the mounting pressures of modernization, writers and filmmakers from Pater to Joyce to Pasolini retain what might look like retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive forms. But the counter-progressive pedagogies that they devise repeat the past to increasingly radical effect. Old Schools teaches us that this kind of repetition can enable the change that it might seem to impede.
Download or read book Living Kinship in the Pacific written by Christina Toren and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as “knowledge that counts.” It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.
Download or read book Meeting Once More written by Elise M. Prébin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thoughtfully written, drawing on her own life experience as well as her anthropological training, Prébin provides us with a new window into the complex world of trans-national adoption. She weaves together kinship, media, and globalization as well as recent Korean history to offer us lessons about today's adoption practices." —Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Weaving A Family: Untangling Race and Adoption A great mobilization began in South Korea in the 1990s: adult transnational adoptees began to return to their birth country and meet for the first time with their birth parents—sometimes in televised encounters which garnered high ratings. What makes the case of South Korea remarkable is the sheer scale of the activity that has taken place around the adult adoptees' return, and by extension the national significance that has been accorded to these family meetings. Informed by the author’s own experience as an adoptee and two years of ethnographic research in Seoul, Meeting Once More sheds light on an understudied aspect of transnational adoption: the impact of adoptees on their birth country, and especially on their birth families. The volume offers a complex and fascinating contribution to the study of new kinship models, migration, and the anthropology of media. Elise Prébin was born in South Korea in 1978, was raised in France, and is now living in New York City with her husband and daughter. In 2006 she obtained her PhD at University of Paris X-Nanterre in social anthropology, was a postdoc and lecturer at Harvard University from 2007 to 2009 and served as Assistant Professor at Hanyang University (South Korea) from 2010 to 2011. She is now an independent scholar.
Download or read book The History of Education Under Apartheid 1948 1994 written by Peter Kallaway and published by Pearson South Africa. This book was released on 2002 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Approaches to the Study of Religion written by Peter Antes and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2004 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Renewal of the Priesthood written by C. J. Fuller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has changed for the priests at the Minakshi Temple, one of the most famous Hindu temples in India. In The Renewal of the Priesthood, C. J. Fuller traces their improving fortunes over the past 25 years. This fluidly written book is unique in showing that traditionalism and modernity are actually reinforcing each other among these priests, a process in which the state has played a crucial role. Since the mid-1980s, growing urban affluence has seen more people spend more money on rituals in the Minakshi Temple, which is in the southern city of Madurai. The priests have thus become better-off, and some have also found new earnings opportunities in temples as far away as America. During the same period, due partly to growing Hindu nationalism in India, the Tamilnadu state government's religious policies have become more favorable toward Hinduism and Brahman temple priests. More priests' sons now study in religious schools where they learn authoritative Sanskrit ritual texts by heart, and overall educational standards have markedly improved. Fuller shows that the priests have become more "professional" and modern-minded while also insisting on the legitimacy of tradition. He concludes by critiquing the analysis of modernity and tradition in social science. In showing how the priests are authentic representatives of modern India, this book tells a story whose significance extends far beyond the confines of the Minakshi Temple itself.
Download or read book Civilisation Recast written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows what humanity has borrowed and shared as a common heritage.
Download or read book Toward a New Socialism written by Anatole Anton and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward a New Socialism offers a critical analysis of capitalism's failings and the imminent need for socialism as an alternative form of government. This book demonstrates that capitalism is destructive and limiting to the many ongoing campaigns to increase freedom, equality, and security. Dr. Richard Schmitt joins with Dr. Anatole Anton to compile a volume of essays exploring the benefits and consequences of a socialist system as an avenue of increased human solidarity and ethical principle. The essays offer a new definition of socialism by investigating the theories and principles of socialism, its influence on social institutions, and its role in work dynamics. Raising important and unavoidable questions for contemporary society, Toward a New Socialism is a vital resource for scholars of political theory and the globalization movement, as well as a necessary read for every citizen under capitalism.
Download or read book Non Humans in Amerindian South America written by Juan Javier Rivera Andía and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.
