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This revised collection of articles from magazines, newspapers, books and journals expands the readers awareness and understanding of what dress is all about. The essays in The Meanings of Dress, 2nd Edition, illustrate essential topics, such as dress and sociology, cultural studies, gender, religion, modesty and technological changes. Design and merchandising students will gain insight into how and why consumers buy clothing and other products related to dress and will grasp ways to forecast future trends. The book serves all interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary course needs.
Now that consumption has become the defining phenomenon of human life and society, this book addresses the effects of critical life events on consumption motives and the sociological and intergenerational influences on consumers.
This volume focuses largely on the British Isles, with papers on dress terms in two major works of literature, the Welsh Mabinogion and the Middle English Pearl; a study of a 13th-century royal bride's trousseau.
Buying into Change examines how the development of a mass consumer society under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1939–1975) inserted Spain into transnational consumer networks and set the stage for Spain’s transition to democracy during the late 1970s.
With more than 130 illustrations, The Photographed Cat: Picturing Close Human-Feline Ties, 1900–1940 is both an archive and an analytical exploration of the close relationships between Americans and their cats during a period that is significant for photography and for modern understandings of animals as pets. This volume examines the cultural implications of feline companions while also celebrating the intimacy and joys of pets and family photographs. In seven thematic sections, Arluke and Rolfe engage with the collection of antique images as representations of real relationships and of ideal relationships, noting the cultural trends and tropes that occur throughout this increasingly popular practice. Whether as surrogate children, mascots, or companions to women, cats are part of modern American life and visual culture. Entertaining, smart, and filled with a collector’s trove of wonderful images, The Photographed Cat pays homage to the surprising range of relationships we have with cats and offers thoughtful consideration of the ways in which we represent them.
Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici reveal, they follow similar paths in their American experience. Heilman and Bilici immerse readers in three layers of discussion for each religious group: historical evolution, sociological transformation, and a comparative understanding of certain parallel beliefs and practices, each of which is used as a window onto the lived reality of these communities. Written by two sociologists, one a religiously observant American Jew and the other an American Muslim, Following Similar Paths offers lively insider and outsider perspectives that deepen our understanding of American diversity and what it means to be religious in a modern society.
Many parents, teachers, and doctors believe that childhood obesity is a social problem that needs to be solved. Yet, missing from debates over what caused the rise in childhood obesity and how to fix it are the children themselves. By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children. Weighty Problems details processes of embodied inequality: how the children came to recognize inequalities related to their body size, how they explained the causes of those differences, how they responded to micro-level injustices in their lives, and how their participation in a weight loss program impacted their developing self-image. The book finds that embodied inequality is constructed and negotiated through a number of interactional processes including resocialization, stigma management, social comparisons, and attribution.
This book tackles the charged and frequently painful subject of how appearance affects social interaction and the role of larger social structures in perpetuating and institutionalizing it as an evaluative criterion.
"... Hopper's aim is to begin to reveal to us the complex world of telephone conversation, and that is what he succeeds marvellously in doing." --Discourse & Society "A guided tour through the interior world of phone interactions, Telephone Conversation is a playful, often poetic excursion into the dance-like qualities of language as and in technology." --Wayne A. Beach " Telephone Conversation is an engagingly written book, peppered with snippets of telephone chat that enable readers to see the extraordinariness of ordinary talk." --Quarterly Journal of Speech "... the first comprehensive work on telephone interaction... Written in a lucid, often poetic manner, it keeps the reader's interest to the end." --Anthropological Linguistics Voice mail, answering machines, car phones, call-waiting, call-forwarding--it seems the telephone at times controls our lives. Here Robert Hopper eavesdrops on the sounds of telephone conversation, the most important yet least examined province of contemporary communication and an important aspect of contemporary life.
Who is today's white-collar man? The world of work has changed radically since The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and other mid-twentieth-century investigations of corporate life and identity. Contemporary jobs are more precarious, casual Friday has become an institution, and telecommuting blurs the divide between workplace and home. Gender expectations have changed, too, with men's bodies increasingly exposed in the media and scrutinized in everyday interactions. In Buttoned Up, based on interviews with dozens of men in three U.S. cities with distinct local dress cultures—New York, San Francisco, and Cincinnati—Erynn Masi de Casanova asks what it means to wear the white collar now. Despit...