You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the pa...
Across North America, hundreds of reconstructed living history sites, which traditionally presented history from a primarily European perspective, have hired Native staff in an attempt to communicate a broader view of the past. Playing Ourselves explores this major shift in representation, using detailed observations of five historic sites in the U.S. and Canada to both discuss the theoretical aspects of Native cultural performance and advise interpreters and their managers on how to more effectively present an inclusive history.
This book argues that transparency is a concept that has gained increasing currency and favour as an organizing principle and administrative goal in recent years. Calls for transparency have been directed towards states, markets, corporations and national political processes as well as towards large institutions such as the European Union. Focusing on empirically rich case studies, the contributors explore the ideas and practices of transparency in different contexts, encouraging a discussion of the many facets of the term and its strengths, ambiguities and limitations. They aim to shed light on the powerful global discourse and practices contained in the concept, and to fill a gap in the li...
Based on the Race in the Humanities conference, held in Nov. 2001 at Univ. of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, Wisconsin.
This book proposes a comprehensive discussion of the issue of linguistic feeling, the subject’s metalinguistic capacity to intuitively apprehend the normative – lexical, syntactic, morphological, phonological... – dimensions of a definite language he or she is acquainted with. The volume’s twelve contributions aim to revisit a concept that, through a fluctuating terminology (“Sprachgefühl,” “sentiment de la langue,” “linguistic intuitions,” etc.), had developed, since the late 18th century, within a variety of cultural contexts and research traditions, and whose theoretical, epistemological, and historical ins and outs had not been systematically explored so far. Beginning with a long opening chapter, the book consists of two parts, one tracing the multifaceted approaches to linguistic feeling from Herder to Wittgenstein, and one offering a representative overview of the debates about the issue at stake in current linguistics and philosophy, while addressing the question of the place of metacognition, normativity, and affectivity in language processes.
Biotechnology and the Challenge of Property addresses the question of how the advancement of property law is capable of controlling the interests generated by the engineering of human tissues. Through a comparative consideration of non-Western societies and industrialized cultures, this book addresses the impact of modern biotechnology, and its legal accommodation on the customary conduct and traditional beliefs which shape the lives of different communities. Nwabueze provides an introduction to the legal regulation of the evolving uses of human tissues, and its implications for traditional knowledge, beliefs and cultures.
A critical examination of core issues in social and cultural theory.
"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings -- folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies -- that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference -- American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultur...
This study of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union develops an original account of the interlocking and opposed nationalisms of national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national homelands to which they are linked by external ties.
Defining Memory uses case studies of exhibits from around the country to examine how local museums, defined as museums whose collections are local in scope or whose audiences are primarily local, have both shaped and been shaped by evolving community values and sense of history. Levin and her contributors argue that these small institutions play a key role in defining America's self-identity and should be studied as seriously as more national institutions like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.