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Riis's images of the slums of New York have influenced every subsequent generation of photographers, while his insightful exploration of the problems of urban life continues to be educational for societies around the world.
"At its heart, Pasztory's thesis is simple and yet profound. She asserts that humans create things (some of which modern Western society chooses to call "art") in order to work out our ideas - that is, we literally think with things. Pasztory draws on examples from many societies to argue that the art-making impulse is primarily cognitive and only secondarily aesthetic. She demonstrates that "art" always reflects the specific social context in which it is created, and that as societies become more complex, their art becomes more rarefied."--Jacket.
The Human Imperative
President Theodore Roosevelt called Jacob Riis "the best American I ever knew." The pioneering photojournalist, an immigrant from Denmark, drew attention to the poverty and evils of slum life in the late 1800s. Riis won national acclaim when his photos illustrated his bestselling book How the Other Half Lives. The book focused on the difficult time immigrants faced as thousands of newcomers flooded into the United States each year. Riis called for reform and hoped to prod government officials to help the poor people who were forced to live under horrible conditions. The impact of Riis' photos came from capturing the poor and homeless as they lived and worked, with the subjects' eyes often staring directly into the camera. The great photographer Ansel Adams called them "magnificent achievements in the field of humanistic photography." But the reforms that came from Riis' work have not eliminated urban poverty and homelessness, and important work remains to be done.
In Race in Mind, Alexander Alland challenges the idea that intelligence is related to race, offering critiques of the biological determinism of Carlton Coon, Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, William Shockley, and others. Presenting evolutionary genetics in understandable and accessible language, Alland demonstrates that biologically, "race" cannot explain human variation. Written in a lively, conversational style, Alland imparts real, substantive scientific arguments and cuts through the ideological posturing and jargon that so often characterizes our discussions about race, showing us a more nuanced and scientifically valid way to understand the diversity that is the human conditio
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"Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics explores the relationship between rhetoric's materiality and the social world in the late modern political context. Taking as their point of departure a reprint of Michael Calvin McGee's 1982 call to reconceptualize rhetoric as the palpable +experience; of sociality, the authors in this volume grapple anew with the role of communication practices in contemporary collective life. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, these twelve original essays supplement, extend, and challenge McGee's position, collectively advocating on behalf of a shift in theoretical and critical attention from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric's materiality." --Book Jacket.
Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called “art,” and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species’ four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biologi...
This set traces Herbert Spencer's influence, from his contemporaries to the present day. Contributions come from across the social science disciplines and are often taken from sources which are difficult to access.
This Festschrift celebrates the multifaceted career of Raphael Patai, presenting twenty-two articles on Jewish folklore and mythology, Jewish and Middle Eastern ethnology and anthropology, the social psychology of Arabs and Jews, Jewish cultural history, and Zionism. All of these are fields in which Raphael Patai has made major contributions.