Download or read book Spectacular Accumulation written by Morgan Pitelka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spectacular Accumulation, Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in late sixteenth-century Japan, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. The story of Ieyasu illustrates the close ties between people, things, and politics and offers us insight into the role of material culture in the shift from medieval to early modern Japan and in shaping our knowledge of history. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan reframes the relationship between culture and politics. Like the collection of meibutsu, or "famous objects," exchanging hostages, collecting heads, and commanding massive armies were part of a strategy Pitelka calls "spectacular accumulation," which profoundly affected the creation and character of Japan's early modern polity. Pitelka uses the notion of spectacular accumulation to contextualize the acquisition of "art" within a larger complex of practices aimed at establishing governmental authority, demonstrating military dominance, reifying hierarchy, and advertising wealth. He avoids the artificial distinction between cultural history and political history, arguing that the famed cultural efflorescence of these years was not subsidiary to the landscape of political conflict, but constitutive of it. Employing a wide range of thoroughly researched visual and material evidence, including letters, diaries, historical chronicles, and art, Pitelka links the increasing violence of civil and international war to the increasing importance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to the tea utensil collections of Ieyasu, from the exchange of military hostages to the gift-giving rituals of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Spectacular Accumulation traces Japanese military rulers' power plays over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies.

Download or read book Spectacular Accumulation written by Morgan Pitelka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spectacular Accumulation, Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in late sixteenth-century Japan, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. The story of Ieyasu illustrates the close ties between people, things, and politics and offers us insight into the role of material culture in the shift from medieval to early modern Japan and in shaping our knowledge of history. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan reframes the relationship between culture and politics. Like the collection of meibutsu, or "famous objects," exchanging hostages, collecting heads, and commanding massive armies were part of a strategy Pitelka calls "spectacular accumulation," which profoundly affected the creation and character of Japan's early modern polity. Pitelka uses the notion of spectacular accumulation to contextualize the acquisition of "art" within a larger complex of practices aimed at establishing governmental authority, demonstrating military dominance, reifying hierarchy, and advertising wealth. He avoids the artificial distinction between cultural history and political history, arguing that the famed cultural efflorescence of these years was not subsidiary to the landscape of political conflict, but constitutive of it. Employing a wide range of thoroughly researched visual and material evidence, including letters, diaries, historical chronicles, and art, Pitelka links the increasing violence of civil and international war to the increasing importance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to the tea utensil collections of Ieyasu, from the exchange of military hostages to the gift-giving rituals of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Spectacular Accumulation traces Japanese military rulers' power plays over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies.

Download or read book Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games written by Jules Boykoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Olympic Games have become the world’s greatest media and marketing event—a global celebration of exceptional athletics gilded with corporate cash. Huge corporations vie for association with the "Olympic Image" in the hope of gaining a worldwide marketing audience of billions. In this provocative critical study of the contemporary Olympics, Jules Boykoff argues that the Games have become a massive planned economy designed to shield the rich from risk while providing them with a spectacle to treasure. Placing political economy at the center of the analysis, and drawing on interdisciplinary research in sociology, politics, geography, history, and economics, Boykoff develops an innovative theory of "celebration capitalism", the manipulation of state actors as partners that drives us towards public–private partnerships in which the public pays and the private profits. He argues that the Athens Games in 2004 marked the full emergence of celebration capitalism, with London 2012 representing its quintessential expression, characterized by a state of exception, unfettered commercialism, repression of dissent, questionable sustainability claims, and the complicity of the mainstream media. Controversial, challenging, and forthright, this book opens up a fascinating new avenue for understanding the contemporary Olympics in the context of global capitalist society. It is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Olympic Games, the relationship between sport and society, or global politics and culture.

Download or read book The Truth about Nature written by Bram Büscher and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation efforts are transformed through the political economy of platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Developing a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, Bram Büscher shows how environmental actors attempt to mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingent histories and contexts of particular environmental issues. Bringing efforts at wildlife protection in Southern Africa into dialogue with a sweeping analysis of truth and power in the twenty-first century, Büscher makes the case for a new environmental politics that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power.

Download or read book New Frontiers of Land Control written by Nancy Lee Peluso and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Download or read book Transformative Jars written by Anna Grasskamp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term 'jar' refers to any man-made shape with the capacity to enclose something. Few objects are as universal and multi-functional as a jar – regardless of whether they contain food or drink, matter or a void, life-giving medicine or the ashes of the deceased. As ubiquitous as they may seem, such containers, storage vessels and urns are, as this book demonstrates, highly significant cultural and historical artefacts that mediate between content and environment, exterior worlds and interior enclosures, local and global, this-worldly and otherworldly realms. The contributors to this volume understand jars not only as household utensils or evidence of human civilizations, but also as artefacts in their own right. Asian jars are culturally and aesthetically defined crafted goods and as objects charged with spiritual meanings and ritual significance. Transformative Jars situates Asian jars in a global context and focuses on relationships between the filling, emptying and re-filling of jars with a variety of contents and meanings through time and throughout space. Transformative Jars brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars with backgrounds in curating, art history and anthropology to offer perspectives that go beyond archaeological approaches with detailed analyses of a broad range of objects. By looking at jars as things in the hands of makers, users and collectors, this book presents these objects as agents of change in cultures of craftsmanship and consumption.

Download or read book Japan s Empire of Birds written by Annika A. Culver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a transnational history of science, Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology focuses on the political aspects of highly mobile Japanese explorer-scientists, or cosmopolitan gentlemen of science, circulating between Japanese and British/American spaces in the transwar period from the 1920s to 1950s. Annika A. Culver examines a network of zoologists united by their practice of ornithology and aristocratic status. She goes on to explore issues of masculinity and race related to this amidst the backdrop of imperial Japan's interwar period of peaceful internationalism, the rise of fascism, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, and war in China and the Pacific. Culver concludes by investigating how these scientists repurposed their aims during Japan's Allied Occupation and the Cold War. Inspired by geographer Doreen Massey, themes covered in the volume include social space and place in these specific locations and how identities transform to garner social capital and scientific credibility in transnational associations and travel for non-white scientists.

Download or read book Housing Displacement written by Guy Baeten and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice – a central issue in urban injustices. With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification’s unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of ‘displacement’, as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective. This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.

Download or read book Capitalism and Conservation written by Dan Brockington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of case studies from around the world, Capitalism and Conservation presents a critique of conservation's role as a central driver of global capitalism. Features innovative new research on case studies on the connections between capitalism and conservation drawn from all over the world Examines some of our most popular leisure pursuits and consumption habits to uncover the ways they drive and deepen global capitalism Reveals the increase in intensity and variety of forms of capitalist conservation throughout the world

Download or read book The Anthropology of Conservation NGOs written by Peter Bille Larsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how NGOs have been influential in shaping global biodiversity, conservation policy, and practice. It encapsulates a growing body of literature that has questioned the mandates, roles, and effectiveness of these organizations–and the critique of these critics. This volume seeks to nurture an open conversation about contemporary NGO practices through analysis and engagement.

Download or read book The Recreational Frontier written by Michael Kleinod and published by Göttingen University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study treats ecotourism in National Protected Areas of Lao PDR as a “recreational frontier” which instrumentalizes the recreation of human natures in capitalism’s centers for that of nonhuman natures at capitalism’s (closing) frontiers. This world-ecological practice of ecorational instrumentality – i.e. of nature domination in the name of “Nature” – presents a remedy for capitalism’s crisis that is itself crisis-ridden, enacting a central tension of ecocapitalism: that between “conservation” and “development”. This epistemic-institutional tension is traced through the preconditions, modes and effects of ecotourism in Laos by gradually zooming from the most general scale of societal nature relations into the most detailed intricacies of ecotouristic practice. The combination of Bourdieu, Marx and Critical Theory enables a systematic analysis of the recreational frontier as enactment of various contradictions deriving from the “false-and-real” Nature/Society dualism.

Download or read book Democratizing Luxury written by Annika A. Culver and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese companies at key historical moments assigned value, or "luxury," to mass-produced products as an important business model. Japanese name-brand luxury evolved alongside a consumer society emerging in the late nineteenth century, with iconic companies whose names became associated with quality and style. At the same time, Western ideas of modernity merged with earlier artisanal ideals to create Japanese connotations of luxury for readily accessible products. Businesses manufactured items at all price points to increase consumer attainability, while starkly curtailing production for limited editions to augment desirability. Between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, control over family disposable income transformed Japanese middle-class women into an important market. Growth of purchasing power among women corresponded with Japanese goods diffusing throughout the empire, and globally after the Asia-Pacific war (1931–1945). This book offers case studies that examine affordable luxury consumer items often advertised to women, including drinks, beauty products, fashion, and timepieces. Japanese companies have capitalized on affordable luxury since a flourishing domestic mercantile economy began in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), showcasing brand-name shops, renowned artisans, and mass-produced woodblock prints by famous artists. In the late nineteenth century, personalized service expanded within department stores like Mitsukoshi, Shiseidō cosmetic counters, and designer boutiques. Shiseidō now globally markets invented traditions of omotenashi, Japanese ”values” of hospitality expressed in purchasing and consuming its products. In postwar times, when a thriving democracy and middle-class were tied to greater disposable income and consumerism, companies rebuilt a growing consumer base among cautious shoppers: democratizing luxury at reasonable prices and maintaining business patterns of accessibility, high quality, and exemplary service. Nationalism amid economic success soon blended with myths of unique Japanese identity in a mass consumer society, suffused by commodity fetishism with widely available brand names. As the first comprehensive history of iconic Japanese name brands and their unique connotations of luxury and accessibility in modern Japan and elsewhere, Democratizing Luxury explores company histories and reveals strategies that lead customers to consume these alluring commodities.

Download or read book Globalization the State and Violence written by Jonathan Friedman and published by AltaMira Press. This book was released on 2004-09-08 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedman and a distinguished group of contributors offer a compelling analysis of globalization and the lethal explosiveness that characterizes the current world order. In particular, they investigate global processes and political forces that determine networks of crime, commerce and terror, and reveal the economic, social and cultural fragmentation of transnational networks. In a critical introduction, Friedman evaluates how transnational capital represents a truly global force, but geographical decentralization of accumulation still leads to declining state hegemony in some areas and increasing hegemony in others. The authors examine the growth and increasing autonomy of indigenous populations, and the massively destabililizing effect of migration processes. They describe the rapid increase in criminalization of ethnic and immigrant groups as well as an increase in class stratification, creating new forms of social confrontation and violence. In addition to ethnic, identity-based conflict there are analyses of transnational criminal networks, which also represents disintegration of larger homogeneous territories or hierarchical orders. The authors ask us to reevaluate the dynamics of globalization—the contradictions of centralization and fragmentation around the world—as we discover how best to transform these conditions for the future. This research was originally funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Globalization, the State and Violence will be a valuable reference in anthropology, social theory, international politics and economics, ethnic conflict, immigration, and economic history.

Download or read book The Struggle for Asia 1828 1914 written by David Gillard and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Struggle for Asia 1828–1914 (1977) studies a classic case of rival imperialisms. British leaders tended to believe that Russian expansion threatened India; Russian leaders came to believe in a British threat to their empire. Each sought security by trying to control the policies of weaker states which lay between their imperial frontiers and on whose alignment depended the balance of power. By 1914, when both felt even more threatened by Germany than by one another, Russia seemed to have gained the upper hand in a struggle for hegemony in Asia which had been crucial for the course of world politics. This book examines the intellectual origins of the ‘Great Game’.

Download or read book Colonizing Animals written by Jonathan Saha and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942 populated by animals.

Download or read book Enduring Encounters Maps of Japan from Leiden University Library written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-12-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Asian and Western cartographies are often considered separate traditions, maps of Japan kept in Leiden University Libraries often show a commonality of method and purpose. Despite the expulsion of Phillip Franz von Siebold from Japan in 1829, the norm was for friendly exchanges of scientific knowledge. One of the highlights of this volume are annotated drafts and proofs of Siebold’s map of Japan, published and discussed for the first time alongside Japanese source maps. Five essays by worldwide experts in the history of cartography and of Dutch-Japanese relations accompany extensive catalogue entries for over fifty maps. Contributors are: Aoyama Hiro’o, Edward Boyle, Radu Leca, Martijn Storms, and Uesugi Kazuhiro.

Download or read book Cartographies of the Absolute written by Alberto Toscano and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can capital be seen? Cartographies of the Absolute surveys the disparate answers to this question offered by artists, film-makers, writers and theorists over the past few decades. It zones in on the crises of representation that have accompanied the enduring crisis of capitalism, foregrounding the production of new visions and artefacts that wrestle with the vastness, invisibility and complexity of the abstractions that rule our lives.