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Book The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire

Download or read book The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire written by Charles William Nuckolls and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Culture

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charles W. Nuckolls
  • Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
  • Release : 1998-09-15
  • ISBN : 0299158934
  • Pages : 329 pages

Download or read book Culture written by Charles W. Nuckolls and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the conflict between the ideals of individualism and community defines American culture. In this groundbreaking new work, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls discovers that every culture consists of such paradoxes, thus making culture a problem that cannot be solved. He does, however, find much creative tension in these unresolvable opposites. Nuckolls presents three fascinating case studies that demonstrate how values often are expressed in the organization of social roles. First he treats the Micronesian Ifaluks’ opposition between cooperation and self-gratification by examining the nature versus nurture debate. Nuckolls then shifts to the values of community and individual adventure by looking at the conflicts in the identities of public figures in Oklahoma. Finally, he investigates the cultural significance in the diagnostic system and practices of psychiatry in the United States. Nuckolls asserts that psychiatry treats genders differently, assigning dependence to women and independence to men and, in some cases, diagnoses the extreme forms of these values as disorders. Nuckolls elaborates on the theory of culture that he introduced in his previous book, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, which proposed that the desire to resolve conflicts is central to cultural knowledge. In Culture: A Problem that Cannot Be Solved, Nuckolls restores the neglected social science concept of values, which addresses both knowledge and motivation. As a result, he brings together cognition and psychoanalysis, as well as sociology and psychology, in his study of cultural processes.

Book Methods of Desire

    Book Details:
  • Author : Aurora Donzelli
  • Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
  • Release : 2019-08-31
  • ISBN : 0824880471
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

Book Loving Nature

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kay Milton
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2003-09-01
  • ISBN : 1134525389
  • Pages : 196 pages

Download or read book Loving Nature written by Kay Milton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the full effects of human activity on Earth's life-support systems are revealed by science, the question of whether we can change, fundamentally, our relationship with nature becomes increasingly urgent. Just as important as an understanding of our environment, is an understanding of ourselves, of the kinds of beings we are and why we act as we do. In Loving Nature Kay Milton considers why some people in Western societies grow up to be nature lovers, actively concerned about the welfare and future of plants, animals, ecosystems and nature in general, while others seem indifferent or intent on destroying these things. Drawing on findings and ideas from anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, the author discusses how we come to understand nature as we do, and above all, how we develop emotional commitments to it. Anthropologists, in recent years, have tended to suggest that our understanding of the world is shaped solely by the culture in which we live. Controversially Kay Milton argues that it is shaped by direct experience in which emotion plays an essential role. The author argues that the conventional opposition between emotion and rationality in western culture is a myth. The effect of this myth has been to support a market economy which systematically destroys nature, and to exclude from public decision making the kinds of emotional attachments that support more environmentally sensitive ways of living. A better understanding of ourselves, as fundamentally emotional beings, could give such ways of living the respect they need.

Book When Men are Women

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Colman Wood
  • Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
  • Release : 1999
  • ISBN : 9780299165949
  • Pages : 260 pages

Download or read book When Men are Women written by John Colman Wood and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating exploration of the cultural models of manhood, When Men Are Women examines the unique world of the nomadic Gabra people, a camel-herding society in northern Kenya. Gabra men denigrate women and feminine things, yet regard their most prestigious men as women. As they grow older, all Gabra men become d'abella, or ritual experts, who have feminine identities. Wood's study draws from structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology to probe the meaning of opposition and ambivalence in Gabra society. When Men Are Women provides a multifaceted view of gender as a cultural construction independent of sex, but nevertheless fundamentally related to it. By turning men into women, the Gabra confront the dilemmas and ambiguities of social life. Wood demonstrates that the Gabra can provide illuminating insight into our own culture's understanding of gender and its function in society.

Book Rethinking Psychological Anthropology

Download or read book Rethinking Psychological Anthropology written by Philip K. Bock and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After over three decades of continual publication in multiple editions, the Third Edition of Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, now with coauthor Stephen Leavitt, describes the latest interests, concepts, and approaches in the field with the inclusion of four new chapters and updates to earlier topics. The premise of the previous editions remains: that all anthropology is psychological and that the interplay between anthropological methods and the psychological theories existing in different times is dialectical. Psychological anthropologists have grappled with changing trends in both disciplines, including psychoanalytic, holistic, cognitive, interpretive, and developmental approaches. It is important to appreciate these currents of thought to understand the state of the field today. This text is thus a guide to that history along with a critique that may lead to a new synthesis. It is an ideal choice for courses in psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of anthropology.

Book Politics of Female Genital Cutting  FGC   Human Rights and the Sierra Leone State

Download or read book Politics of Female Genital Cutting FGC Human Rights and the Sierra Leone State written by Tom Obara Bosire and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics of Female Genital Cutting (FGC), Human Rights and the Sierra Leone State: The Case of Bondo Secret Society provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary post-war Sierra Leone politics through ethnographic examination of key cultural institutions like the Bondo society, the law, media and state actors. The book discusses historical, medical and socio-cultural underpinnings of the Female Genital Cutting (FGC) practice among members of the Bondo society in Sierra Leone by pointing out inherent and apparent tensions of a secret society dedicated to the continuation of long established gender practices at the counter-point of concerted international condemnation against the practice. Drawing on ethnography, the study highlights the complexity of FGC as practiced in Sierra Leone owing to the fact that it is interlaced in multifarious ways to politics, cosmology, community idioms of inclusion, medical metaphors and the sociological vernacular of people that practice it. In the Bondo society, some women have access to considerable forms of powers which endear them to political actors in Sierra Leone. On account of this and in a context of donor aid conditionality tied to efforts at ending FGC, a stage is therefore set where the local political elite ambivalently attend to competing interests from FGC adherents and eradication proponents in the high stakes politics of legitimatizing power. The book’s subtle and nuanced view of power handy to members of the Bondo society, however, does not lead to a vindication of FGC but is an attempt to go beyond blunt condemnation of the practice in order to explore the cultural and socio-political underpinnings that animate the practice.

Book Walls of Empowerment

    Book Details:
  • Author : Guisela Latorre
  • Publisher : University of Texas Press
  • Release : 2009-09-17
  • ISBN : 029277799X
  • Pages : 325 pages

Download or read book Walls of Empowerment written by Guisela Latorre and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print. An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas." Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.

Book ON KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MEDICINE

Download or read book ON KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MEDICINE written by Roland Littlewood and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2007-02-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 12 essays examines the ways a variety of cultures locate boundaries of medical knowledge, understand conflicts and changes, and create cultures of health.

Book International Encyclopedia of the Social   Behavioral Sciences

Download or read book International Encyclopedia of the Social Behavioral Sciences written by Neil J. Smelser and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The largest work ever published in the social and behavioural sciences. It contains 4000 signed articles, 15 million words of text, 90,000 bibliographic references and 150 biographical entries.

Book Culture and Identity

Download or read book Culture and Identity written by Charles Lindholm and published by Oneworld. This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this newly revised and updated edition, Lindholm provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological anthropology, deftly tracing the growth of the field, introducing the key theorists, and covering a broad range of contemporary topics such as identity, emotions, symbolic systems, and the psychology of groups.

Book The Debated Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Harvey Whitehouse
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2020-08-12
  • ISBN : 1000180867
  • Pages : 183 pages

Download or read book The Debated Mind written by Harvey Whitehouse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content and organization of culture. In the study of mental activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart? Evolutionary psychologists argue that cultural transmission is constrained by our genetic inheritance. Few social and cultural anthropologists have found this argument to be relevant to their work and many would doubt its validity. This book uniquely pitches the arguments for innatism against ethnographic perspectives that call into question the theoretical foundations of orthodox evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Ultimately the aim of the debate is to create an original set of mutually compatible theories that will open up new areas for interdisciplinary research.

Book Intercultural Communication

Download or read book Intercultural Communication written by Houman A. Sadri and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Book Quest for Self Knowledge

    Book Details:
  • Author : Joseph Flanagan
  • Publisher : University of Toronto Press
  • Release : 1997-07-05
  • ISBN : 1442690720
  • Pages : 308 pages

Download or read book Quest for Self Knowledge written by Joseph Flanagan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1997-07-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of self-knowledge, introduced by classical philosophers, was taken up and extended by Bernard Lonergan in his major work, Insight. In this innovative and complex study, Lonergan developed a systematic method for understanding the development of self-knowledge. Joseph Flanagan shares with Lonergan the premise that the problem of self-knowledge can be resolved methodically. The purpose of this book is to introduce teachers and students to this difficult subject and to provide readers with a transcultural, normative foundation for a critical evaluation of self-identity and cultural identity. Flanagan elucidates the complicated historical context in reference to the emergence of Lonergan's positions; in particular he relates Lonergan's thought to the development of modern science. He then retraces the main arguments of Insight as they relate to the theme of self-knowledge, and invites readers to discover and verify within their own conscious experiences a foundational identity that they share with all knowers in an ever-expanding search for truth. This method of self-appropriation not only reveals a new philosophical method, but also transforms the traditional science of metaphysics by subsuming it into a richer and more comprehensive ethical context. Quest for Self-Knowledge establishes new ground for philosophical and religious dialogue and demonstrates how Lonergan's philosophy provides a context that complements and enriches the analytic and phenomenological approaches that dominate Western schools of philosophy.

Book Caged in on the Outside

Download or read book Caged in on the Outside written by Gregory M. Simon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caged in on the Outside is an intimate ethnographic exploration of the ways in which Minangkabau people understand human value. Minangkabau, an Islamic society in Indonesia that is also the largest matrilineal society in the world, has long fascinated anthropologists. Gregory Simon’s book, based on extended ethnographic research in the small city of Bukittinggi, shines new light on Minangkabau social life by delving into people’s interior lives, calling into question many assumptions about Southeast Asian values and the nature of Islamic practice. It offers a deeply human portrait that will engage readers interested in Indonesia, Islam, and psychological anthropology and those concerned with how human beings fashion and reflect on the moral meanings of their lives. Simon focuses on the tension between the values of social integration and individual autonomy—both of which are celebrated in this Islamic trading society. The book explores a series of ethnographic themes, each one illustrating a facet of this tension and its management in contemporary Minangkabau society: the moral structure of the city and its economic life, the nature of Minangkabau ethnic identity, the etiquette of everyday interactions, conceptions of self and its boundaries, hidden spaces of personal identity, and engagements with Islamic traditions. Simon draws on interviews with Minangkabau men and women, demonstrating how individuals engage with cultural forms and refashion them in the process: forms of etiquette are transformed into a series of symbols tattooed on and then erased from a man’s skin; a woman shares a poem expressing an identity rooted in what cannot be directly revealed; a man puzzles over his neglect of Islamic prayers that have the power to bring him happiness. Applying the lessons of the Minangkabau case more broadly to debates on moral life and subjectivity, Simon makes the case that a deep understanding of moral conceptions and practices, including those of Islam, can never be reached simply by delineating their abstract logics or the public messages they send. Instead, we must examine the subtle meanings these conceptions and practices have for the people who live them and how they interact with the enduring tensions of multidimensional human selves. Borrowing a Minangkabau saying, he maintains that whether emerging in moments of suffering or flourishing, moral subjectivity is always complex, organized by ambitions as elusive as being “caged in on the outside.”

Book Chicana o Murals of California

Download or read book Chicana o Murals of California written by Guisela Latorre and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Women  Islam and Modernity

Download or read book Women Islam and Modernity written by Linda Rae Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-03-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In popular debates about reproductive and sexual rights, formal religions, especially Islam, are seen as barriers providing institutional and ideological resistance to women's realization of reproductive and social autonomy. This book challenges this simplified view of Islam. Based on original fieldwork in Eastern Indonesia, the book explores the complex factors that affect how young Indonesian women form their sexual subjectivities, discusses the cultural and historical conditions under which single Muslim women repress or express their sexuality, and examines how the cultural context, including other factors besides Islam, simultaneously influence the ways in which young single women approach courtship, and issues of sexuality and reproductive health. It demonstrates that Islam is neither alone in trying to control female sexuality, nor entirely successful in doing so.