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Around the world, when people think of vacation it's the beach they want--even when long distances must be traversed, the seashore is the place to escape the rigors of modern life. How did this come to be, and what does our ongoing love affair with the beach mean? How do shore vacations differ from traditional tourism, and what does this tell us about our fears and dreams? In At the Beach, Jean-Didier Urbain offers witty and insightful answers to these questions. Urbain traces the transformation of the beach from a place of mythological threats and a demanding workplace fraught with danger to a destination for medical treatment and the pursuit of pleasure. He looks to the emergence of the mo...
Pilote’s unique position in a new and fast developing youth press market The French comic magazine Pilote hebdomadaire arrived in a weakening comics market in 1959 largely dominated by syndicated translations of American comics and comics inspired by a Catholic ethos. It tailored its content and tone to an older adolescent reader far removed from that of France’s infant comic. Pilote’s profile set it on a turbulent course subject to the vicissitudes and fickleness of fashion which situated it within an emerging teenager press under pressure to renew and innovate to survive. When it made cartoons its defining characteristic in 1963, Pilote articulated its uniqueness by channelling teena...
This book investigates the interface of ethnicity with occupation, empirically observed in luxury international hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It employs the two main disciplines of anthropology and sociology in order to understand the root causes and meaning of ethnicity at work within the hospitality industry sector. More specifically, it observes social change in a multi-ethnic and non-secular society through an ethnographic study located in a micro organisation: the Grand Hotel. At the individual level, this research shows how identity shifts and transformation can be mediated through the consumption and manipulation of food at the workplace. In addition, it combines an ambitious theo...
How was human (in)equality built across the table? Why were the first great banquets at the origin of the communal goods of humanity? Who, after forcing men from eating bread, wanted to forbid them chestnuts and popularized the potato? The Egyptian food table invented the notion of "symbols for food." The Greek food table invented the notion of sharing. The Roman food table invented the concept of pleasure. How was the person, caught eating and drinking alone, punished? Why did people die less of hunger in ancient times than in Africa in the 21st century? Why in China do people eat round things to show their love? How and why do we choose to eat this way? Why do societies choose to express t...
Food represents an unalienable component of everyday life, encompassing different spheres and moments. What is more, in contemporary societies, migration, travel, and communication incessantly expose local food identities to global food alterities, activating interesting processes of transformation that continuously reshape and redefine such identities and alterities. Ethnic restaurants fill up the streets we walk, while in many city markets and supermarkets local products are increasingly complemented with spices, vegetables, and other foods required for the preparation of exotic dishes. Mass and new media constantly provide exposure to previously unknown foods, while “fusion cuisines” ...
This book provides a new interpretation of the relationship between consumption, drinking culture, memory and cultural identity in an age of rapid political and economic change. Using France as a case-study it explores the construction of a national drinking culture -the myths, symbols and practices surrounding it- and then through a multisited ethnography of wine consumption demonstrates how that culture is in the process of being transformed. Wine drinking culture in France has traditionally been a source of pride for the French and in an age of concerns about the dangers of 'binge-drinking', a major cause of jealousy for the British. Wine drinking and the culture associated with it are, f...
In the late nineteenth century, dreams became the subject of scientific study for the first time, after thousands of years of being considered a primarily spiritual phenomenon. Before Freud and the rise of psychoanalytic interpretation as the dominant mode of studying dreams, an international group of physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists pioneered scientific models of dreaming. Collecting data from interviews, structured observation, surveys, and their own dream diaries, these scholars produced a large body of early research on the sleeping brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book uncovers an array of case studies from this overlooked period of dream scholarship. With contributors working across the disciplines of psychology, history, literature, and cultural studies, it highlights continuities and ruptures in the history of scientific inquiry into dreams.
In Dreamtelling, Pierre Sorlin does not deal with our nocturnal visions per se, but rather with what we say regarding them. He explores the influence of dreams on our imaginations, and the various – sometimes inconsistent, always imperfect – theories people have contrived to elucidate them.
In this book, contributors examine the many meanings of the term 'nomad' through the study of food habits. Food and beverage products have become just as nomadic as other objects, such as telephones and computers, whereas in the past only food and money were able to move about with their carriers. Food industries have seized control of this trend to make it the characteristic feature of consumption outside the home - always faster and more convenient, the just-in-time meal: 'what I want, when I want, where I want', snacks, finger food, and street food. The terms reveal the contemporary modernity and spread of food practices, but they are only modified versions of older and more uncommon forms of behavior. Mobility, in the sense of multiple forms of moving about using public or individual, and possibly intermodal, means of transport, on spatial scales and temporal rhythms which are frequent and recurring but variable, responding to professional or leisure needs, can serve as a basic premise in order to gain insight into the concept of food nomadism.