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This book analyses issues related to the political use and economical misappropriation of urban cultural events, cultural infrastructures, public resources, and cultural traditions in the city of Valencia, Spain. It deals critically with a variety of sociological questions related to cultural production in the city, including geographical segregation as culturally defined in the city; misogyny and the peripheral role of women in traditional cultural events, xenophobia; and nationalism/regionalism. As such, the book will be useful to students and scholars of sociology of the arts, cultural policy, and museum management, and urban sociology.
For over a decade the cult of La Santa Muerte has grown rapidly in Mexico and the United States. Thousands of people—ranging from drug runners and mothers to cabdrivers, soldiers, police, and prison inmates—invoke the protection of La Santa Muerte. Devotees seek her protection through practicing popular vows, attending public rosaries and masses at street altars, and constructing and maintaining home altars. This book examines La Santa Muerte’s role in people’s daily lives and explores how popular religious practices of worship and devotion developed around a figure often associated with illicit activities. She represents life with the possibility of respite but without ultimate redemption, and she speaks to the complexities of lives lived at the fringes of violence, insecurity, impunity, and economic hardship. The essays collected here move beyond the visually arresting sight of La Santa Muerte as a tattoo or figurine, suggesting that she represents a major movement in Mexico.
Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowermen...
Together with changes in the nature of modernity, globalisation is restructuring society. The sovereignty of the nation-state is undermined, the structuring of identity is realigned and a sense of individualism (which involves a freedom of choice re institutional alignments) prevails. English emerges as the global lingua franca. At the heart of these developments is the knowledge economy within which work is organised according to principles quite different from those of the Taylorism that prevailed in the industrial economy. Language and culture play a crucial role in the elaboration of the shared meaning that is crucial for learning within team working. The book argues that creativity is enhanced by the use of multilingualism within working practices. It concludes with an overview of how our understanding of language is also changing.
Literature is an institution per se, as is justice, and these two institutions enact each other in complex ways. Justice appears in many forms from divine right and religious ordainment to metaphysical imperative and natural law, to national jurisdiction, social order, human rights, and civil disobedience. What is just and right has varied in time and place, in war and peace. A sense of justice appears inextricable from human concerns of ethics and morals. Literature includes a vast range of writing from holy texts to banned books. Parts of literature, particularly in the past, have laid down the law. In more recent history, literature has gradually assumed radical roles of critique, subversion, and transformation of the existing law and order, in contents, themes, language, and form. Literature’s Critique, Subversion, and Transformation of Justice offers a selection of research that examines how various types of literature and arts give shape and significance to ideas of justice in various fields.
This book provides a cultural history of Spanish politics from the civil war of 1833 to the Spanish adoption of the Euro in 2002, a period dominated for the most part by violent military interventions in the political process, a succession of weak, unstable, but repressive governments, and the ever-present threat of rebellion from below, and culminating in the victory and repressive dictatorship of General Franco. Using a wide range of sources, both textual and material, Mary Vincent focuses on the question of how ordinary people came to identify themselves both as citizens and as Spaniards throughout this turbulent period. She argues that a weak state rather than a weak sense of nation was ...
The essays in this text, written by distinguished specialists, examine the different trajectories in Spain and several nations in Latin America, and seek to explain the different outcomes.
Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. She reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.