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.

While the writing of other ethnic women has already been receiving considerable attention, the writing of Asian American women has not. (Un)Doing is the first feminist theoretical work to look at writing by such contemporary Asian American writers as Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, R. A. Sasaki, Gish Jen, and Cynthia Kadohata. Viewing them as feminist and postfeminist writers, Kafka argues that gender asymmetry in all its varied forms and guises is the major issue that they confront. Satirizing this world-wide oppression as "the missionary position," Kafka urges ethnic and women of color feminist critics to focus more on commonalities rather than view differences as impenetrable barriers.

"Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what waysskin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals"--

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 systematic examination of Chinese communication scholarship and comprehensive critique of its theories and methodologies are long overdue, and in this new collection of essays by a multicultural group of scholars, both aims are achieved. Focusing on such relatively new fields as Chinese health communication and Chinese communication on the internet, the volume addresses key questions about the state and the future of its field. Both challenging and complementing the Western views of communication, it advances theories of cultural and intercultural communication while at the same time broadening our understanding of the relevance of Chinese communication studies to communication studies overall, and the ways in which this subdiscipline points the way toward a new and more complicated future. The essayists, whose origins include the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, bring their many perspectives to bear on what is the most comprehensive and inclusive review of Chinese communication research literature published in English. Of great benefit to Western and Eastern communication theorists, philosophers of social science, and Asian studies scholars, Chinese Communication Theory and Research is an invaluable guide to an increasingly complex and significant field of study.

Read Chapter One.

"a]it will alter - or perhaps confirm - your thinking about 'public religion' and how traditional and immigrant congregations address (or don't) member and community needs and attitudes and actions towardslarger social issuesa]an obvious choice for religious andcongregational studies and urban sociology programs. It is alsovaluable reading for any cleric or layperson interested in howcontemporary urban religious collectives are shaped by and help shape the lives of their own members, surrounding communities, and the larger society."
"--Congregations"

"Rich in cultural analysis, thick description, maps, photographs, and anecdotes, this book should be read by scholars, policy makers, religious leaders, and anyone who wishes to better understand one of the most exciting stories on the American urban landscape at the turn of a new century."
"--Robert Michael Franklin, President, Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta, Georgia"

"This book presents the initial results of a team-based ethnographic study aimed at understanding better the richness of religious life in the multiplicity of communities that make up modern Chicago."
--"Journal of Contemporary Religion"

"The highly successful result of a team-based, ethnographic approach to understanding the diversity-racial, ethnic, cultural, economic-of Chicago's religious communities, exploring important questions about religion's public role in the metropolis. A must read for those interested in the religious diversity and pluralism of American society or contemporary urban restructuring."
"--Penny Edgell Becker, Department of Sociology, Cornell University, and Author of Congregations inConflict"

"An interesting example of the challenge immigrants face as they attempt to emulate established American institutions while retaining those elements that allow them to function as cohesive communities of ethnic and religious identity."
"--Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Professor of Islamic History, Georgetown University"

"Reaches across the boundaries of private faith and public action, of traditional turf and challenging new populations, of older generations and restless youth, of growing ethnic/religious groups where there can be no majority, and, as yet, no consensus . . . Uncomfortable but essential reading."
"--Carl S. Dudley, Codirector of Hartford Institute for Religion Research and Professor of Church and Community, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, CT"

"Furnishes a rich and diverse insight into the changing American metropolis. Unlike virtually any other book I have read, it does so by examining how church leaders and members cope with these changes. In the end, we get stories not merely of churches and religious change, but of how a major social institution helps people of diverse faiths and backgrounds survive and succeed in the modern American metropolis."
"--Anthony M. Orum, author of City-Building in America"

American cities are in the midst of fundamental changes. De-industrialization of large, aging cities has been enormously disruptive for urban communities, which are being increasingly fragmented. Though often overlooked, religious organizations are important actors, both culturally and politically in the restructuring metropolis.

Public Religion and Urban Transformation provides a sweeping view of urban religion in response to thesetransformations. Drawing on a massive study of over seventy-five congregations in urban neighborhoods, this volume provides the most comprehensive picture available of urban places of worship-from mosques and gurdwaras to churches and synagogues-within one city.

Revisiting the primary site of research for the early members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, the volume focuses on Chicago, which provides an exceptionally clear lens on the ways in which religious organizations both reflect and contribute to changes in American pluralism.

From the churches of a Mexican American neighborhood and of the Black middle class to communities shared by Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims and the rise of "megachurches," Public Religion and Urban Transformation illuminates the complex interactions among religion, urban structure, and social change at this extraordinary episode in the history of urban America.

This book reviews the sources of the air pollutants responsible for building damage and the mechanisms involved. Studies investigating the relationships between pollution concentration (dose) and the resulting damage (response) are described and the latest research findings for dose-response functions are presented.

Trends in pollutant emissions, ambient concentrations and building damage over time are described and future predictions are presented. Methodologies for assessing the extent of the potential problem in a region the stock at risk are presented. Procedures for estimating the economic implications are described and the consequences are discussed in detail, because economic factors are important for reaching policy and management decisions at local, national and international scales.

Damage to cultural heritage buildings is an important additional effect which needs to be considered as the standards are revised and the factors which will need to be brought into the assessment are presented.

How men and women interact, the respect young show old and old show young, and who doffs their hat to whom provides a telling window on American cultural history. Bowing To Necessities is the chronologically most wide-ranging study, covering the long period of 1620 to 1860, of its kind. Working through two centuries of conduct literature, Professor Hemphill provides a wonderful retelling of American history to the Civil War, illuminating crucial connections between evolving class, gender, and age relations along the way.

By exploring indigenous people's knowledge and use of sea ice, the SIKU project has demonstrated the power of multiple perspectives and introduced a new field of interdisciplinary research, the study of social (socio-cultural) aspects of the natural world, or what we call the social life of sea ice. It incorporates local terminologies and classifications, place names, personal stories, teachings, safety rules, historic narratives, and explanations of the empirical and spiritual connections that people create with the natural world. In opening the social life of sea ice and the value of indigenous perspectives we make a novel contribution to IPY, to science, and to the public

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.

This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.

Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning by examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts.

The pictorial turn in the humanities and social sciences has foregrounded the political power of images and the extent to which historical, political, social, and cultural processes and practices are shaped visually. Political iconographies are taken to interpret norms of actions, support ideological formations, and enhance moral concepts. Visual rhetorics are understood as active players in the construction and contestation of the political realm and public space. The twenty-one articles by scholars from Europe and the United States explore the political function and cultural impact of images from the perspectives of Art History, American Studies, Visual Culture Studies, History, and Political Science. The contributions in particular address the complex interplay between agent and addressee in the public space as well as issues of national identity, discourses of inclusion and exclusion, and the designation of political spaces within transnational contexts. The publication is part of the interdisciplinary research initiative "Perceiving and Understanding: Functions, Perception Processes, Forms of Visualizations, Cultural Strategies of Pictures and Texts" at the University of Regensburg.

This book is a landmark in contemporary cultural psychology. Ernest Boesch's synthesis of ideas is the first comprehensive theory of culture in psychology since Wilhelm Wundt's Volkerpsychologie of the first decades of the twentieth century. Cultural psychology of today is an attempt to advance the program of research that was charted out by Wundt-yet at times we are carefully avoiding direct recognition of such continuity. While Wundt's experimental psychology has been hailed as the root for contemporary scientific psychology, the other side of his contribution- ethnographic analysis of folk traditions and higher psychological functions- has been largely discredited as something disconnected from the scientific realm. As an example of ""soft"" science-lacking the ""hardness"" of experimentation-it has been considered to be an esoteric hobby of the founding father of contemporary psychology. Of course that focus is profoundly wrong-the opposition ""soft"" versus ""hard"" just does not fit as a metalevel organizer of any science.Yet the rhetoric discounting the descriptive side of Wundt's psychology is merely an act of social guidance of what psychologists do-not a way of creating knowledge.

Europeans are eating out in unprecedented numbers - in cafs, pubs, brasseries and restaurants. Globalization brought about changes in patterns of leisure and consumption, as well as a democratization of restaurant culture. But what if we open up this concept of 'eating out' to include any eating that takes place outside the home? What cultural shifts can we see through time? What differences can we discover about pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies?Eating Out in Europe addresses such questions as it examines changes in eating patterns through time. 'Eating out' is broadly conceived to cover everything from nibbling a pizza at work to dining in an exquisite restaurant, from suffering an institutional lunch at the school cafeteria to enjoying the natural world with a picnic. The meaning of eating out clearly varies enormously depending on the setting, circumstances and significance of the meal. The contributors describe and interpret the huge changes that occurred in eating habits throughout Europe by analyzing such factors as urbanization, technological innovation, demographic growth, employment patterns and identity formation. Case studies include the evolution of the pub, the rise of the fast food industry in Britain, picnicking in nineteenth-century France, snack culture in the Netherlands, industrial canteens in Germany, the rise of restaurants in Norway and countryside traditions in Hungary, among others. Fully comprehensive and illustrated, the contributors draw on examples throughout Europe from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

From the outset, Silvio Berlusconi's career was expected to be short, and he has been considered finished several times, only to have reemerged victorious. This fascinating political and historical study shows that Berlusconi's success and resilience have lain in his ability to provide answers to longstanding questions in Italian history.

The practiceof archaeology has many different facets: from academia, to government, tocultural resource management, to public media.

Considering the place of archaeology in society means understanding the rolesthat archaeology has in the present day and a sense of the contributions thatit can make in each of these areas, both now and in the future. Archaeologistscome to the field to pursue a variety of interests: teaching, examininghistory, preserving the environment, or studying a specialized time period orinterest. The outside world has a number of other expectations of archaeology: preservation, tourism, and education, to name but a few.

From a broad and varied background, the editors have compiled a rare group ofcontributors uniquely qualified to address questions about the current state ofarchaeology and its relevance in society. There is no single answer to thequestion of how the field of archaeology should develop, and what it can do forsociety. Instead, the authors in this volume lay out the many ways in which archaeology isrelevant to the present day - considering, for example, climate change, energyexploration, warfare, national identity, the importance of stories and how theyare told, and how and why opportunities to engage with the past throughmuseums, digs, television, classes, and the print media have the formsthey currently do - creating a state-of-the-art tool for archaeologists, policymakers and the public alike to understand thework of many in the fieldand address the challenges we all face."

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"Staiger's" Blockbuster TV" artfully balances formal analysis, inflected with and informed by various theoretical perspectives, of four different sitcoms with an examination of their reception. "JUMPCUT"

"Staiger offers a radical counter-approach to traditional film-centered analysis."
--"Jump Cut"

Archie Bunker. Jed. Laverne and Shirley. Cliff Huxtable. Throughout the entire history of American prime-time television only four sitcoms have been true blockbusters, with Nielsen ratings far above the second- and third-rated programs. Weekly, millions of Americans of every age were making a special effort to turn on the set to see what Archie, Jed, Laverne, and Cliff were doing that week. The wild popularity of these shows--"All in the Family," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Laverne & Shirley" (and its partner "Happy Days"), and "The Cosby Show"--left commentators bewildered by the tastes and preferences of the American public. How do we account for the huge appeal of these sitcoms, and how does it figure into the history of network prime-time television?

Janet Staiger answers these questions by detailing the myriad factors that go into the construction of mass audiences. Treating the four shows as case studies, she deftly balances factual explanations (for instance, the impact of VCRs and cable on network domination of TV) with more interpretative ones (for example, the transformation of "The Beverly Hillbillies" from a popular show detested by the critics, to a blockbuster after its elevation as the critics' darling), and juxtaposes industry-based reasons (for example, the ways in which TV shows derive success fromplacement in the weekly programming schedule) with stylistic explanations (how, for instance, certain shows create pleasure from a repetition and variation of a formula).

Staiger concludes that because of changes in the industry, these shows were a phenomenon that may never be repeated. And while the western or the night-time soap has at times captured public attention, Blockbuster TV maintains that the sitcom has been THE genre to attract people to the tube, and that without understanding the sitcom, we can't properly understand the role of television in our culture.

An exploration of the rich complexity of the worship of the deity Inari in contemporary Japan. The work covers institutional and popular power in religion, the personal meaningfulness of religious figures and the communicative styles that preserve homogeneity in the face of factionalism.

How can we understand consumption in a region known for its cultural richness and vast inequalities? What do Latin Americans consume, and why? Examining topics from tango and samba to sex workers in Costa Rica, from eating tamales to selling ice in the Andes, and from building and moving houses to buying cell phones, this collection brings together original research on some of the many forms of consumption and consumers that contribute to Latin American cultures and histories. Contributors include sociologists, anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, geographers and historians, showcasing diverse approaches to understanding Latin American consumption practices and consumer culture.

Bloggers around the world produce material for local, national and international audiences, yet they are developing in ways that are distinct from the U.S. model. Through case studies of blogs written in English, Chinese, Arab, French, Russian, and Hebrew, this book explores the way blogging is being conceptualized in different cultural contexts. The authors move beyond the most highly trafficked sites to shed light on larger developments taking place online, calling into question assumptions that form the foundation of much of what we read on blogging and, by extension, on global amateur or do-it-yourself media. This book suggests a more nuanced approach to understanding how blogospheres serve communication needs, how they exist in relation to one another, where they exist apart as well as where they overlap, and how they interact with other forms of communication in the larger media landscape.

With the growing interest in the great number of culturally, linguistically, and ethnically different families entering the United States, it is essential for researchers and mental health practitioners to acquire a working knowledge that can aid in a healthier adjustment of these families. Although it is impossible for any therapist to understand the traditions, values, and languages of all immigrant groups, a therapist may be guided by a conceptual operational principle that can be implemented across diverse groups and circumstances. Dr. Gopaul-McNicol introduces a model for assessment; the techniques and strategies proposed by this model range from cognitive behavioral interventions to multimodal and multisystems approaches to treatment.

The book covers historical and contemporary perspectives of the influence of culture on an individual's functioning. Assessment issues include intellectual, educational and visual motor assessment and its applicability with culturally diverse clients. The author also highlights ways of misassessing the personality of culturally different individuals and examines the major treatment approaches in counseling the culturally different.

This book explores the dimensions and characteristics of social vulnerability in Western Europe. It provides a broad empirical foundation for recent theories on the emergence of new social risks in post-industrial societies, revealing to what extent social risks are compromising the 'normal' functioning of the European population.

Armed with cheap digital technologies and a fiercely independent spirit, millions of young people from around the world have taken cultural production into their own hands, crafting their own clothing lines, launching their own record labels, and forging a vast, collaborative network of impassioned amateurs more interested in making than consuming.
"DIY Style" tells the story of this international do-it-yourself (DIY) movement through a major case study of one of its biggest, but least known contingents: the "indie" music and fashion scene of the predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia. Through rich ethnographic detail, in-depth historical analysis, and cutting-edge social theory, the book chronicles the rise of DIY culture in Indonesia, and also explores the phenomenon in Europe and the United States, painting an evocative portrait of vibrant communities who are not only making and distributing popular culture on their own terms, but working to tear down the barriers between production and consumption, third and first world, global and local. What emerges from the book is a cautiously optimistic view of the future of global capitalism - a creative, collectivist alternative built from the ground up.
This exciting and original study is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, fashion, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Nineteenth-century fiction writer and journalist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) is best known for her novella Life in the Iron Mills. Its publication in 1861 launched her stunning fifty-year career that yielded a corpus of some 500 published works, including short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, and social commentary. Davis's unique mode of writing anticipated literary realism twenty years before the time usually associated with its genesis. Today, her life and work continue to figure prominently in the study of American literature and culture. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the annotated edition of her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable - and sometimes scandalous - people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the ""daughters of the Southland"" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still. Whereas Bits of Gossip expands our understanding of Davis as cultural critic and observer of life, the family history offers new information on Davis's early life and the influences that led her to become one of the nineteenth century's pioneering Realists and cultural commentators. Together they bring a human voice to the nineteenth-century American milieu.