The myth of Orpheus articulates what social theorists have known since Plato: music matters. It is uniquely able to move us, to guide the imagination, to evoke memories, and to create spaces within which meaning is made. Popular music occupies a place of particular social and cultural significance. Christopher Partridge explores this significance, analyzing its complex relationships with the values and norms, texts and discourses, rituals and symbols, and codes and narratives of modern Western cultures. He shows how popular musics power to move, to agitate, to control listeners, to shape their identities, and to structure their everyday lives is central to constructions of the sacred and the profane. In particular, he argues that popular music can be important edgework, challenging dominant constructions of the sacred in modern societies. Drawing on a wide range of musicians and musical genres, as well as a number of theoretical approaches from critical musicology, cultural theory, sociology, theology, and the study of religion, The Lyre of Orpheus reveals the significance and the progressive potential of popular music.

This study of Feng Xiaogang also explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes of party film policy, industry reforms, the party's promotion of Main Melody films and the emergence and growth of popular cinema. Feng emerges as a filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a personal socio-political agenda. Rui Zhang is a research fellow at Tsinghua University, PRC.

This study of Feng Xiaogang also explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes of party film policy, industry reforms, the party's promotion of Main Melody films and the emergence and growth of popular cinema. Feng emerges as a filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a personal socio-political agenda. Rui Zhang is a research fellow at Tsinghua University, PRC.

How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade away? What becomes known and seen as a global iconic event? In Stories without Borders, Julia Sonnevend considers the ways in which we recount and remember news stories of historic significance. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event in a variety of ways - from Legoland reenactments to slabs of the Berlin Wall installed in global cities - Sonnevend discusses how certain events become built up so that people in many parts of the world remember them for long periods of time. She argues that five dimensions determine the viability and longevity of international news events. First, a foundational narrative must be established with certain preconditions. Next, the established narrative becomes universalized and a mythical message developed. This message is then condensed and encapsulated in a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene. Counter-narratives emerge that reinterpret events and in turn facilitate their diffusion across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. Sonnevend examines these five elements through the developments of November 9, 1989 - what came to be known as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stories Without Borders concludes with a discussion of how global iconic events have an enduring effect on individuals and societies, pointing out that after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may be all that we have to bring hope and unity.

Calvet's Web is a study of a circle of French antiquarians, naturalists, and bibliophiles in the period 1750-1810. By using the surviving correspondence of its members, Laurence Brockliss assembles a vivid picture of the French Republic of Letters in an era of rapid change, showing how the world of scholarship relates to the movement historians call the Enlightenment and how it is torn apart, then reconstructed, in the social and political turmoil of the French Revolution.

Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.

Composed by Isaiah and Galilee Shembe between 1910 and 1940, Izihlabelelo zama Nazaretha - Shembe Hymns is one of the earliest known books in the isiZulu language. Drawing on the poetic traditions of Izibongo (Praises), Biblical Psalms, and local renditions of African American Spirituals, these texts speak to conditions of oppression and suffering, but also to the will of joy and hopefulness in such moments. The texts are brought to life with an accompanying CD of song, story, and interview excerpts. These include details about a seminal moment of change and controversy in the 1990s, when the organ was introduced by ethnomusicologist, Bongani Mthethwa, to accompany the Shembe hymnal repertory. The initiative gave birth to dozens of youth choirs who sang the hymns in a new style, and began to compose their own repertory about Shembe in a more 'gospel-inflected' musical version of their faith. The hymns were translated by the late Bongani Mthethwa, and are edited and introduced by Carol Muller, who also produced the accompanying CD.

Continuing on from the success of the first four Necronomicon books, Necronomicon Book Five again seeks out controversial and transgressive cinema from around the globe. Tease away the skin from the dark underbelly of this tome to reveal yet more perverse delights within the cult, horror and erotic cinema which is explored.

The title needs explaining. Why back? We haven't been there yet In 1939 the same team of Maurice Gorham (text) and Edward Ardizzone (illustrations) published The Local. Like so many books of that time it had a short life, all the remaining stock being destroyed in the Blitz. After the war, they decided to do a new edition with a revised text and redrawn, in some cases completely new, illustrations. It is this book, Back to the Local, first published in 1949, that Faber Finds is reissuing.

Prepare yourself for the most delightful of nostalgic rambles around the pubs of London in the late 1940s. Text and illustrations are in perfect harmony as we are introduced to The Regulars, Barmaids Old and New, as we venture into The Saloon Lounge, The Saloon Bar, The Public Bar and squeeze into The Jug-And-Bottle Bar. We visit The Mews Pub, The Wine-House, the Riverside Pub and The Irish House. These are all chapter headings and eloquently testify to what awaits you. Treat yourself to a memorable pub crawl

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

The fragmentation of social groups in the face of the global mass media has begun to threaten the survival of popular theatre companies. This study traces the development of various types of community theatre in Britain and Canada, from the '70s to the present day.
Attention is drawn to several key issues including: distinctions between popular and mainstream theatre; the Theatre in Education movement; influence of Theatre for Development from Africa and Asia; popular theatre as an art form, a process of self-empowerment and an instrument of cultural intervention. The book follows an innovative structure, integrating a comparative history of popular theatre with the contributions of current, active popular theatre makers. The co-authors, one British, one Canadian, shape their discourses around these contributions so that the the authentic voices are neither mediated nor distorted. The book is thus designed to appeal both to the theatrical practitioner and to the academic.

The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries.
But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?

Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa, merengue, and reggaeton, the musical manifestations that young people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people themselves often have little in common with the stereotypical image of them that exists in the American imagination.
Bridging this divide between perception and reality, Music and Youth Culture in Latin America brings together contributors from throughout Latin America and the US to examine the ways in which music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American countries and among Latinos in the US. From young Latin American musicians who want to participate in the vibrant jazz scene of New York without losing their cultural roots, to Peruvian rockers who sing in their native language (Quechua) for the same reasons, to the young Cubans who use music to construct a post-communist social identification, this volume sheds new light on the complex ways in which music provides people from different countries and social sectors with both enjoyment and tools for understanding who they are in terms of nationality, region, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and migration status. Drawing on a vast array of fields including popular music studies, ethnomusicology, sociology, and history, Music and Youth Culture in Latin America is an illuminating read for anyone interested in Latin American music, culture, and society."

What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English 'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects of Athenian mousike are another central concern, with the figure of the dancing philosopher as an emblem of music's role in intellectual life. The book as a whole provides an integrated cultural analysis of central aspects of Greek mousike, which will be of interest to classical scholars, to cultural historians, and to anyone concerned with understanding the power of music as a cultural phenomenon.

James McHugh offers the first comprehensive examination of the concepts and practices related to smell in pre-modern India. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources, from poetry to medical texts, he shows the deeply significant religious and cultural role of smell in India throughout the first millennium CE. McHugh describes sophisticated arts of perfumery, developed in temples, monasteries, and courts, which resulted in worldwide ocean trade. He shows that various religious discourses on the purpose of life emphasized the pleasures of the senses, including olfactory experience, as a valid end in themselves. Fragrances and stenches were analogous to certain values, aesthetic or ethical, and in a system where karmic results often had a sensory impact-where evil literally stank-the ethical and aesthetic became difficult to distinguish. Sandalwood and Carrion explores smell in pre-modern India from many perspectives, covering such topics as philosophical accounts of smell perception, odors in literature, the history of perfumery in India, the significance of sandalwood in Buddhism, and the divine offering of perfume to the gods.

From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. PARALLEL TRACKS is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history. This highly original work reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. It will be eagerly received by those involved in film studies, American studies, feminist theory and the cultural study of modernity. It will also have appeal to general readers interested in silent films or in the history of the railroad.

The Age of New Waves examines the origins of the concept of the "new wave" in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in world cinema over the past three decades. The book suggests that youth, cities, and the construction of a global market have been the catalysts for the cinematic new waves of the past half century. It begins by describing the enthusiastic engagement between French nouvelle vague filmmakers and a globalizing American cinema and culture during the modernization of France after World War II. It then charts the growing and ultimately explosive disenchantment with the aftermath of that massive social, economic, and spatial transformation in the late 1960s. Subsequent chapters focus on films and visual culture from Taiwan and contemporary mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s, and they link the recent propagation of new waves on the international film festival circuit to the "economic miracles" and consumer revolutions accompanying the process of globalization. While it travels from France to East Asia, the book follows the transnational movement of a particular model of cinema organized around mise en scene-or the interaction of bodies, objects, and spaces within the frame-rather than montage or narrative. The "master shot" style of directors like Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Jia Zhangke has reinvented a crucial but overlooked tendency in new wave film, and this cinema of mise en scene has become a key aesthetic strategy for representing the changing relationships between people and the material world during the rise of a global market. The final chapter considers the interaction between two of the most global phenomena in recent film history-the transnational art cinema and Hollywood-and it searches for traces of an American New Wave.

Making it National argues that we need to rethink the way national identity is constructed in Australia today. Graeme Turner takes a series of recent instances - the mythologising of Bond and the larrikin entrepreneurs, the Spycatcher trials, Maralinga and the Bicentenary - showing how popular images of national identity are used to serve specific rather than national interests.'Graeme Turner's writing has a remarkable power to engage its readers with all the immediacy, vividness and drama of our very best journalism, while putting cultural theory to work in new and creative ways.' - Meaghan Morris'Making it National could be to the 1990s what Richard White's Inventing Australia was to the 1980s.' - Tony Bennett, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University

Up until the end of World War II, academe in central Europe showed little interest in American culture. However, this rapidly changed as American culture became an increasingly inescapable part of everyday life in the postwar period. Drawing on a series of transatlantic encounters in the years following 1945, George Blaustein chronicles how issues like race, gender, and empire, as they relate to the United States, became areas of intense interest among members of the European academy. A major part of Blaustein's book revolves around the exchange of ideas that took place at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, founded in 1947. Through the period of occupation, the seminar hosted a who's-who of American and European intellectual life: figures like F. O. Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and John Hope Franklin. In four concise chapters, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories explores how the ruin of postwar Europe led writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to understand America in new ways. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories will interest scholars in the fields of American Studies, postwar intellectual history, and cultural diplomacy.

'An alluvial goldfield of social theorists - nuggets lying around all over the place.'Bob ConnellWho's who in the social theory zoo? This book introduces some of the leading social theorists in short, lively entries by leading Australian scholars. Social Theory covers thinkers from Althusser to Williams, by locals from Alexander to Yeatman.For beginner and enthusiast alike, it gives a sense of the state of the art in classical and modern social theory. Social Theory is an indispensable reference for undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and anyone else interested in the ideas behind social and political theory and cultural studies today.

In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser in practice and performance as well as resources that influence movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore. In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion, and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent a lifetime exploring it.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.