Siting Culture


Book Description

Culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade and this is related to a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. At the same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized, the people studied by anthropologists are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities within global fields of relations. So far, much of the analysis of the role of place in culture has been carried out at a level of theoretical debate. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance of place in the global space of relations which mould the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture.




Siting Culture


Book Description

Siting Culture will be essential reading to the many students of culture who are looking for ways of siting culture in the diffuse and complex theoretical space of present day anthropology.




Siting Futurity


Book Description

It also shows how work with a connection to Vienna by international stars like David Bowie, Wes Anderson, and Christoph Schlingensief has absorbed the same principles.While the overwhelming scale of technological development and the ensuing problems and crises may not have been deliberately designed to induce resignation, passivity, and despair, those who benefit from the related hyperobjects of financialization and climate change must find it convenient that they do, as demoralization reduces resistance to their profit-making machinations. It is in this context that Red Vienna's proud tradition of social engagement and long tradition of resistance and radicality deserves to be better known. Susan Ingram is Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma for Comparative Literature and is affiliated with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies and the Research Group on Language and Culture Contact. .




Globalizing Cultural Studies


Book Description

The contributors to Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy take as their central topic the problematic status of «the global» within cultural studies in the areas of theory, method, and policy, and particularly in relation to the intersections of language, power, and identity in twenty-first century, post-9/11 culture(s). Writing against the Anglo-centric ethnographic gaze that has saturated various cultural studies projects to date, contributors offer new interdisciplinary, autobiographical, ethnographic, textual, postcolonial, poststructural, and political economic approaches to the practice of cultural studies. This edited volume foregrounds twenty-five groundbreaking essays (plus a provocative foreword and an insightful afterword) in which the authors show how globalization is articulated in the micro and macro dimensions of contemporary life, pointing to the need for cultural studies to be more systematically engaged with the multiplicity and difference that globalization has proffered.




Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture


Book Description

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.




Multi-Sited Ethnography


Book Description

Multi-Sited Ethnography has established itself as a fully-fledged research method among anthropologists and sociologists in recent years. It responds to the challenge of combining multi-sited work with the need for in-depth analysis, allowing for a more considered study of social worlds. This volume utilizes cutting-edge research from a number of renowned scholars and empirical experiences, to present theoretical and practical facets charting the development and direction of new research into social phenomena. Owing to its clear contribution to a rapidly emerging field, Multi-Sited Ethnography will appeal to anyone studying social actors, including scholars within human geography, anthropology, sociology and development and migration studies.




The Location of Religion


Book Description

The ways in which humans interact with their location is an important topic within sociological studies of religion. It is integral to the place of religion in secular society. 'The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis' offers an overview of the ways in which religion can be located within social, cultural and physical space. It examines contemporary spatial theory - notably the work of the influential sociologist Henri Lefebvre - and the many disciplines that have contributed to the spatial study of religion. This volume will be invaluable to all those interested in the role of religion in spatial analysis.




Everyday Culture in Europe


Book Description

This book discusses the history and contemporary practice of studying cultures 'at home', by examining Europe's regional or 'small' ethnologies of the past, present and future. With the rise of nationalism and independence in Europe, ethnologies have often played a major role in the nation-building process. The contributors to this book offer case studies of ethnologies as methodologies, showing how they can address key questions concerning everyday life in Europe. They also explore issues of European integration and the transnational dimension of culture in Europe today, and examine how regional ethnologies can play a crucial part in forming a wider 'European ethnology' as local participants have experience of combining identities within larger regions or nations.




Cultural Ideals of Home


Book Description

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture. Questions about meanings of ‘home’ and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about ‘home’: the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural history and cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; ‘media home’ imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of ‘homes of tomorrow’ and digital smart homes. A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies.




Destruction and Conservation of Cultural Property


Book Description

In 1991 the mosque at Ayodhya in India was demolished by Hindu fundamentalists who claim that it stood on the birthplace of a legendary Hindu hero. During recent conflicts in former Yugoslavia, ethnic groups destroyed mosques and churches to eliminate evidence of long-term settlement by other communities. Over successive centuries, however, a single building in Cordoba functioned as a mosque, a church and a synagogue. The Roman Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split is occupied today by shops and residential apartments. What circumstances have lead to the survival and reinterpretation of some monuments, but the destruction of others? This work asks whether the idea of world heritage is an essential mechanism for the protection of the world's cultural and natural heritage, or whether it subjugates a diversity of cultural traditions to specifically Western ideas. How far is it acceptable for one group of people to comment upon, or intercede in, the way in which another community treats the remains which it claims as its own? What are the responsibilities of multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations operating in the Developing World? Who actually owns the past: the landowner, indigenous people, the State or humankind?