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Missing Persons
The Western cultural consensus based on the ideas of free markets and individualism has led many social scientists to consider poverty as a personal experience, a deprivation of material things, and a failure of just distribution. Mary Douglas and Steven Ney find this dominant tradition of social thought about poverty and well-being to be full of contradictions. They argue that the root cause is the impoverished idea of the human person inherited through two centuries of intellectual history, and that two principles, the idea of the solipsist self and the idea of objectivity, cause most of the contradictions. Douglas and Ney state that Economic Man, from its semitechnical niche in eighteenth...
From Duty to Desire
In the 1980s, Jane Collier revisited a village in Andalusia, where she and others had conducted fieldwork twenty years earlier, to investigate changes in family relationships and to explore the larger question of the development of a "modern subjectivity" among the people. Whereas the villagers she met in the sixties stressed the importance of meeting social obligations, the people she interviewed more recently emphasized the need to think for oneself: status concerns in choosing a spouse had apparently been replaced by romantic love, patriarchal authority by partnership marriages, parental demands for obedience by hopes of earning children's affection, mourners' respect for the dead by pers...
Spain
Perhaps more than any other European country, Spain has undergone a remarkable transformation in the post-war period. To the surprise of many, it has succeeded in making the leap from a predominantly agricultural and politically repressed country, to a modern European democracy with a diversified economy containing important manufacturing and service sectors. Yet, despite the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century Spain is the world's eighth largest economy, old stereotypes that see the Iberian nation as an inflexible, unchanging society, persist. As such, scholars will welcome this new study which challenges the picaresque and outdated notions of Spanish economic development...
The Age of Visions and Arguments
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism—the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government—Kyu Hyun Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given. Bringing a fresh perspective as well as drawing on seldom-studied archival materials, Kim examines how parliamentarianism came to dominate the public sphere in the 1870s and early 1880s and gave rise to the movement among local activists and urban intellectuals to establish a national assembly. At the same time, Kim co...
Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain
This is a book about the role of culture in social change and the Spanish transition to democracy after Franco. Laura Desfor Edles takes a distinctively culturalist approach to the 'strategy of consensus' deployed by the Spanish elite and uses systematic textual interpretation (with a particular focus on Spanish newspapers) to show how a new symbolic framework emerged in post-Franco Spain which enabled the resolution of specific events critical to the success of the transition. In addition to uncovering underlying processes of symbolization, she shows that politico-historical transitions can themselves be understood as ritual processes, involving as they do phases and symbols of separation, liminality and re-aggregation.
The Return of Civil Society
This study covers the transition of Spain from a pre-industrial economy, an authoritarian government, and a Roman Catholic-dominated culture, to a modern state based on the interaction of economic and class interests, on a market society and a culture of moral autonomy and rationality.
Public Spheres and Collective Identities
Today it is assumed that we understand contemporary nationalism and nation-building. Researchers rarely consider the very different traditions from which such state-building emerged. Instead, there is almost too much discussion of the "global village," with its supposed uniformity and inevitable trajectories. We need to view modernity as something other than a single condition with a preordained future. New visions of a modern civilization are emerging throughout the world, calliing for a far-reaching appraisal of the older visions of modernization. Following Eisenstadt's and Schluchter's introduction, Bjrn Wittrock explores the varieties and transitions of early modern societies, noting tha...
Social Capital in Developing Democracies
Explores the contribution of social capital to the process of democratization and the limits of that contribution.
Big Picture Realities
In the post-NAFTA era, Canada and Mexico face dramatic and irreversible changes from the Bush revolution in foreign public policy, the rising economic power of China and India, new concerns about border security and human rights, and the trends of economic integration. The essays in Big Picture Realities: Canada and Mexico at the Crossroads address the sea change in the political economic order of North America and chronicle the attempts of Canada and Mexico, two very different societies, to come to terms with the accumulated and often contradictory effects of micro and macro changes. Contributors are Canadian and Mexican scholars and leading authorities in security, immigration, human rights, foreign policy, Canada-Mexico relations, and market integration. This book is particularly valuable for public policy experts and scholars and students in international relations.
Russia's Liberal Project
A study of contemporary politics in Russia, assessing the attempted transition from totalitarianism to liberal democracy. It shows that although liberal institutions have been tentatively established, the weak social and cultural supports threaten the success of Russia's liberal project.
