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An explosive reinterpretation of the history of 20th century Japanese expansionism, Hirohito goes beyond the myth of the remote figurehead and shows that Emperor Hirohito was actively involved in the direction of Japan's conduct in World War II.
Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-defi nition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.
In the remote highlands of the country of Georgia, a small group of mountaindwellers called the Khevsurs used to express sexuality and romance in ways that appear to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, their practices were romantic, but could never lead to marriage. On the other hand, they were sexual, but didn't correspond to what North Americans, or most Georgians, would have called sex. These practices were well documented by early ethnographers before they disappeared completely by the midtwentieth century, and have become a Georgian obsession. In this fascinating book, Manning recreates the story of how these private, secretive practices became a matter of national interest, concern, and fantasy. Looking at personal expressions of love and the circulation of these narratives at the broader public level of the modern nation, Love Stories offers an ethnography of language and desire that doubles as an introduction to key linguistic genres and to the interplay of language and culture.
The use of illegal drugs is so common that a number of commentators now refer to the 'normalisation' of drug consumption. It is surprising, then, that to date very little academic work has explored drug use as part of contemporary popular culture. This collection of readings will apply an innovatory, multi-disciplinary approach to this theme, combining some of the most recent research on 'the normalisation thesis' with fresh work on the relationship between drug use and popular culture. In drawing upon criminological, sociological and cultural studies approaches, this book will make an important contribution to the newly emerging field positioned at the intersection of these disciplines. The particular focus of the book is upon drug consumption as popular culture. It aims to provide an accessible collection of chapters and readings that will explore drug use in popular culture in a way that is relevant to undergraduates and postgraduates studying a variety of courses, including criminology, sociology, media studies, health care and social work.
News and News Sources offers a fresh introduction to the sociology of news. News and News Sources: reviews new research in the rapidly expanding field of political communication, drawing upon material from Britain, Europe and the USA; provides a clear introduction to the processes of news production and the implications of the rise in global electronic news communication; and assesses the various theoretical frameworks available for analysing these developments including fuctionalism, pluralism, Marxism, political economy, hegemony theory, discourse theory and postmodernism.
A comparative study of how drinks and drinking, as embodied semiotic and material forms, mediate modern social life.
This edited collection from leading scholars in the fields of media, communications, cultural studies and a number of aligned areas looks to the intersection of capitalism, crime and the media. The text is founded on the principles of cultural criminology – that how we determine and understand crime lies in the social world and that the determination of crime and its mediation in popular culture have a political basis. The book consists of eleven chapters and is divided into three sections. Section one considers the intersection of crime and capitalism in a range of contemporary cultural texts. Section two examines how various power systems influence the operation of the media in its role of reporting crime and holding the powerful to account. Section three considers how texts in a variety of formats are used to conduct politics, communicate politics and enact political decision making.
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First published in 1998, this volume asks: are groups or organisations beyond the sphere of Westminster politics doomed to be marginalised in mainstream news coverage, or can the currently fashionable emphasis upon media techniques and 'spin doctoring' offer such non-official news sources a means of securing media success?. This question is now surfacing as a major issue within politics and cultural debates, as well as within the sociology of the mass media and communication studies. We are living through a period of remarkable transformation in politics, culture and social arrangements. Communications experts in the 'new Labour' camp believe that trade unions must respond by becoming more s...