Today, more Americans than ever are going abroad to visit, work, or study. Increasingly, the ability to communicate and work in cross-cultural situations is seen as an important determinant of success in business, government, education, and the social services. Being successful depends less on what you know of a particular culture than it does on what you know about managing new cultural situations.

This book provides a comprehensive and practical guide to communicating, learning, and adapting within any new cultural environment. It begins by examining what culture is and why it is important. It then goes on to outline the process of cross-cultural adjustment, and presents some highly effective tools and strategies for avoiding culture shock, while encouraging learning. Advice on learning a language, preparing for the transition, settling in, working and living overseas, and planning re-entry into U.S. culture is given. One of the book's most useful features is the presentation of a detailed plan for actually making the transition from one culture to another. It also provides a detailed chapter on re-entering the home environment, again to aid in minimizing shock and anxiety. The skills learned from this book are essential to success and can be put to use in any new culture, anywhere in the world.

The concept of 'wilderness' as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought has become the subject of vigorous debates. Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives offers a taxonomy of the forms that wilderness writing has taken in Australian and Canadian literature, re-emphasizing both country's origins as colonies.

Although Eugene O'Neill's work has generated much scholarship, his one-act plays have not received the critical attention they deserve. Given that O'Neill began his career writing such plays, including his justly famous "Sea Plays," associated with the Provincetown Players, it is surprising that his one-acts have been largely neglected. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

This book is a collection of essays covering a range of issues related to socioeconomic inequalities and diversities. The authors, leading social scientists of diverse nationalities, represent varied perspectives. The book has essays on multiculturalism, social inclusion and exclusion of minorities and other marginalized groups such as low castes, linguistic minorities, Adivasis (tribals), persons with disability and unemployed youth. The book focuses on some innovative concepts considered necessary to understand the very process and evolution of aspects of social development such as pro-sociality, authentic responsible self and leadership ideology. The book deals with the challenges for achieving social development and societal harmony. The book will be a very useful resource for social science scholars and particularly for social and cultural psychologists, development professionals and administrators interested in the issues related to social development, social diversity and inter-group relations. The book will also be useful for policy formulation and action.

Through the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.

Winner: Spur Award, Best Western Nonfiction "Yeeeeehaaah!" Nightly that raucous cry breezes out from beneath the broad-brimmed Stetsons of boot-scootin line dancers at boisterous bars called Cadillac Ranch, Cactus Moon, or Stallions & Stars. And that, Michael Johnson tells us, is just one of the many signs that Americans have rekindled--and refashioned--their love affair with the American West. These "New Westers," Johnson reveals, line-dance and two-step, listen to Garth Brooks and George Strait, drink beer from long-neck bottles, wear clothes ordered from Sheplers, watch rodeo on ESPN, play Wild West arcade games, eat fajitas and tacos in stucco-style Mexican cafes, collect Western art and Native American crafts, and vacation in and move to the West. "New Westers" rewrite the history and biography of the West. They re-imagine the West in cowboy sagas and poetry, Native American novels, Mexican-American drama, nature writing, revisionist films, eclectic visual artwork, and neo-traditional music. They flock to movies like Thelma and Louise, Unforgiven, and Dances with Wolves or mini-series like Lonesome Dove and read bestsellers like The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses. "New Westers" are men and women who may or may not have ever hitched up a horse but who want a "personal" West. At the end of an urbanized century adrift in confusing change, they seek a more natural home, a fuller and wider sense of place, and a deeper and more colorful personal identity. They also want, Johnson shows, to revive the dream of the mythic West--but on new and different terms. They overrun the Old West and yet strive to preserve it, raising troubling new concerns about the differences between the mythic and the real, between traditional and contemporary cultural influences. Infused with true grit and true affection, Johnson's immensely entertaining book takes us on a lively jaunt through a colorful and amazing landscape. His celebration of things Western will be treasured by all armchair cowpokes or anyone who's ever dreamed of riding the high country.

During the American Civil War, political ideology was the most important determinant of French journalistic attitudes. Conservatives usually supported the South while Liberals usually supported the North. Provincial newspapers, however, less consistently followed ideological patterns than their Parisian and big-city colleagues. Slavery was not a determinant of French attitudes, since all French were opposed to slavery; rather, both Conservatives and Liberals used the issue of slavery as a device to garner support. While Conservatives remained firm in believing that the South would prevail until the very end, Liberal journalists sometimes despaired of a Union triumph in the face of Northern military defeats.

In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music examines the important issues surrounding the music and image of one of the most innovative and successful rock bands ever. The band influence is examined both through an explication of the music and an ethnographic study of Led Zeppelin fans, who are quite candid about their likes and dislikes in the band's history. More than just a sampling of opinion, Fast uses this research to underscore her own findings on gender and sexuality, the creation of myth and the use of ritual, the appropriation of Eastern musics and the blues, the physicality of the music, and the use of the body in performance. Specific pieces, "Dazed and Confused", "Kashmir", "Stairway to Heaven", and "Whole Lotta Love" form the basis of an examination of the group's long-lasting appeal and their musical development.

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

A case study of why Third World countries are still poor, the premise of this book is that while some progress has been made in transforming the political economy of Ecuador, certain behaviors, beliefs and attitudes have kept the country from developing in ways that otherwise would have been possible. As the author asserts, for almost five centuries the cultural habits of Ecuadorian citizens have constituted a stumbling block for individual economic success. Still, he concludes, people's cultural values are not immutable: inconvenient customs can be changed or influenced by the economic success of immigrants. This is the challenge that Ecuador faces in the twenty-first century.

Shlapentokh . . . former senior fellow at MoscoW's Institute of Sociology, has written an important study of responses to the general domestic crisis of the USSR. The first half of the book is devoted to examination of the background of the current crisis; the second half covers major ideological tendencies, conservative, ' neo-Stalinist, ' and liberal.' Shlapentokh shows how Gorbachev has gradually absorbed much, but by no means all, of the liberal' ideology but concludes that future prospects for liberalizing tendencies are highly uncertain. . . . Shlapentokh's insights make this first comprehensive treatment of Soviet ideology in the Gorbachev era one of the more significant studies of the USSR in recent years. "Choice"

The mid-1970s found almost all spheres of Soviet society in economic, social, and moral decline, a decline that generated conflicting ideologies offering solutions. "Soviet Ideologies in the Period of Glasnost" provides a penetrating examination of these unofficial ideologies, both historically and analytically, based upon studies of Soviet media, literature, films, underground literature, and Western scholarly works. It is a thorough and well-documented discussion of unofficial thinking trends in the Soviet Union during the post-Brezhnev era.

A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today. This book offers a response to the culture of metrics, mass digitisation, and accountability (as opposed to responsibility, or citizenship) that has developed in higher education world wide, as exemplified by the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF), and the increasing bureaucracy that limits the time available for teaching, research, and even conversation and collaboration. Ironically, these are problems that will be solved only by academicsfinding the time to talk and to work together. The essays collected here both critique the culture of speed in the neoliberal university and provide examples of what can be achieved by slowing down, by reclaiming research and research priorities, and by working collaboratively across the disciplines to improve conditions. They are informed both by recent research in medieval studies and by the problematic culture of twenty-first century higher education. The contributions offer very personal approaches to the academic culture of the present moment. Some tackle issues of academic freedom head-on; others more obliquely; but they all have been written as declarations of theacademic freedom that comes with slow thinking, slow reading, slow writing and slow looking and the demonstrations of its benefits. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Leeds. Contributors: Lara Eggleton, Karen Jolly, Chris Jones, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Heather Pulliam

Researchers in the new field of literary-and-cultural studies look at social issues - especially issues of change and mobility - through the lens of literary thinking. The essays range from cultural memory and migration to electronic textuality and biopolitics.

There is a wealth of scholarship on tourism from a variety of different disciplines, but few attempts to synthesize its broad themes into a coherent analytical framework. This book addresses this problem by analyzing tourism in light of contemporary social theory. By focusing on tourism in terms of consumption, commodification, and the political and cultural economy, the relationships between tourism, globalization, people, and place are explored in an empirically grounded but theoretically informed analysis.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a "topographic turn" in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France's diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape "scapes" our understanding of French culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of France's shared common space, topographic photographs animate conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the politics and impact of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation in flux.

Shortlisted in Scotland's National Book Awards By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine had experienced period pain, childbirth, and early menopause, alongside love and laughter, a career in journalism, and raising two daughters. Like many of her peers, along the way she'd dieted, jogged, sweated, tanned, permed, and plucked-always attempting to conform to prevailing standards of "acceptable womanhood." But when a medical crisis comes along, she can no longer pummel her body into submission and is forced to take stock. From growing up on a farm where veterinarians were more common than doctors, and where illness was "a nuisance," she now faces the nuisance of a lifetime. One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious, and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to drop the unattainable standards imposed on her body, and simply appreciate the skin she is in.

Japanese culture is inscrutable-but then, so is American culture seen from the viewpoint of the Japanese. As Hayashi and Kuroda make clear, the problem is one of perspective. Neither is really an enigma if the viewer can free him- or herself from the mother culture and look at the other culture from within its own context. Along the way, the authors answer many questions about Japan from the never-ending nature of its trade disputes to the reasons for the misconceptions of many Western writers. The authors challenge those who think every culture perceives, thinks, and expresses alike. They also challenge those who believe that Japanese culture has changed significantly in recent years. Hayashi and Kuroda look at ancient poems and 7th-century documents as well as the writings of Japan's Nobel laureate, Oe, to show that the essence of Japanese culture remains unchanged. By examining the use of language as well as analyzing modern statistical data, Hayashi and Kuroda show how the Japanese concept of self is indistinct and how the Japanese live in a mental world of multiple truths. Along the way the authors provide new interpretations and insights that are invaluable to all students of Japan, from policy makers to poets and painters.

"Art in the Service of Colonialism" throws new light on how nothing in the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956) escaped the imprints of metropolitan ideology and how the French transformed and dominated Moroccan society by looking at how the arts and crafts were transformed in the colonial period. Hamid Irbouh argues that during the Moroccan Protectorate (1912-1956), the French imposed their domination through a systematic modernisation and regulation of local arts and crafts. They also stewarded Moroccans into industrial life by establishing vocational and fine arts schools. The French archives, Arabic sources, and oral testimonies, which Irbouh used, demonstrate complex relationships between colonial administrators of both genders and their interactions with Moroccan officials, notables, and the poor. The French co-opted some locals into joining these educational institutions, which respected and reinforced familiar pre-Protectorate social structures. The artisans become The Best Workers in the French Empire, and artists exhibited abroad and cultivated a European and American clientele. The contradictions between reformist goals and the old order, nevertheless, added to social dislocations and led to rebellion against French hegemony. Irbouh focuses on how French women infiltrated the feminine Moroccan milieu to buttress colonial ideology, and how, at critical moments, Moroccan women and their daughters rejected traditional passive roles and sabotaged colonial plans. France's legacy in Moroccan arts and crafts provoked a backlash in the postcolonial period. After independence local artists, searching for their own identities, sought to reclaim their authenticity. The struggle to define a pristine visual heritage still rages, and the author, by underlining French contributions to Moroccan artistic and craft production, challenges the conclusions of the artists and critics who have argued for the establishment of an unadulterated art devoid of most or even all foreign influences. As in so many areas of Moroccan society, this book reveals that the weight of colonial history remains heavily present. In this well-conceived book based on original archival sources Hamid Irbouh investigates how French colonial administrators employed French women to inculcate colonial ideology by establishing new craft schools for notable and poor families in Moroccan cities. The French intended not only to teach modernized versions of old Moroccan crafts, but also wanted to instill new work habits and modern concepts of time into the girls and young women who attended their schools. Dr. Irbouh demonstrates how French women administrators took the lead in this effort and also shows how Moroccan women absorbed their lessons, but also resisted the colonial enterprise. His is a novel approach to colonial art history, situating Moroccan art production in large social, political and ideological contexts.

The question of ignorance occupies a central place in anthropological theory and practice. This volume argues that the concept of ignorance has largely been pursued as the opposite of knowledge or even its obverse. Though they cover wide empirical ground - from clients of a fertility treatment center in New York to families grappling with suicide in Greenland - contributors share a commitment to understanding the concept as a productive, social practice. Ultimately, The Anthropology of Ignorance asks whether an academic commitment to knowledge can be squared with lived significance of ignorance and how taking it seriously might alter anthropological research practices.

Across the world, there has been a polite uprising to the perceived meaninglessness and stress of our accelerated and consumer driven lifestyles. Described simply as the slow phenomenon, this new brand of living entails not simply slowing down, but an embracing of alternative activities that promote meaning, thoughtfulness, engagement and authenticity. Whether it is through different practices of food production and consumption, alternative modes of transportation such as cycling through to our intimate relations with others, this new ethic of living has grown immensely in popularity. In this volume of work, key authors from across the world have been brought together to illustrate these alternative approaches to modern lifestyles by analyzing them empirically and theoretically. Through rigorous debate and insightful commentary, this book presents a compelling case for seeing the slow phenomenon as a significant cultural practice in contemporary society.

Jewish identity in German culture remains in a critical state of flux. Analyzing its construction and perception in public discourse, the contributors of this volume discuss the works of a number of authors--from Kafka to new writers such as Irene Dische and Maxim Biller. In addition, topics covered include: American-Jewish writers in Germany, minority culture, homosexuality, and Jewish magazines.

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and post-memory of the Holocaust both scrutinises recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

In recent decades, religious fundamentalism has played an increasingly significant role in Western and Middle Eastern politics and culture. In this volume, an international group of scholars from fields such as religious studies, sociology, political science, history, and anthropology explore diverse dimensions of religious fundamentalism and relate it to a range of cultural and political issues. Although the focus is on fundamentalism in its Jewish guise, the methodological and comparative emphases make it valuable to specialists in a variety of fields.

Among the issues examined are: the characteristics that link fundamentalist movements within various religious traditions; the study of fundamentalist motifs as they appear specifically in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and whether or not this is a useful approach); the relationship between religion and modernity; the impact of fundamentalism on the Arab-Israeli conflict; and the interaction of modern Jewish fundamentalist movements with traditional Judaism. The book also provides important insights into the emergence of religious fundamentalism as a powerful social and political force in Jewish life, particularly in Israel.

Contributing to the volume are: Gerald Cromer (Bar-Ilan Univ.), Menachem Friedman (Bar-Ilan Univ.), Susan Harding (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), James Davison Hunter (Univ. of Virginia), Aaron Kirschenbaum (Tel Aviv University), Hava Larazus-Yafeh (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), Ian Lustick (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Alan Mittleman (Muhlenberg College), James Piscatori (Univ. College of Wales), Elie Rekhess (Tel Aviv Univ.), Laurence J. Silberstein (Lehigh Univ.), and Ehud Sprinzak (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem).