This open access book provides a detailed exploration of the British media coverage of the press reform debate that arose from the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry. Gathering data from a content analysis of 870 news articles, Ogbebor shows how journalists cover debates on media policy and illustrates the impact of their coverage on democracy. Through this analysis, the book contributes to knowledge of paradigm repair strategies; public sphere; gatekeeping theory; the concept of journalism as an interpretive community; political economy of the press; as well as the neoliberal and social democratic interpretations of press freedom. Providing insight into factors inhibiting and aiding the role of the news media as a democratic public sphere, it will be a valuable resource for the press, media reform activists, members of the public, and academics in the fields of journalism, politics and law.

Robert Williams attempts to write Indians back into Indian law by developing a greater appreciation for the contributions of American Indian legal visions and demonstrating how ancient treaty visions can speak to the modern, multicultural age. Prior to European colonization, in countless treaties, councils, and negotiations, American Indians had adhered to the principles contained in traditional rituals such as the Gus-Wen-Tah, the sacred treaty belt, for achieving justice between different peoples. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the survival of the European colonies in North America required reaching accommodation with surrounding Indian tribes. However, European Common law and the white man's Indian law eventually became dominant, and came to be regarded as the salvation of the Indian in North America.
Williams maintains there is an important need for a more complete account of the legal visions of the American Indians. In this work, he examines the Indians' role in the history of legal traditions which have determined Indian rights in the U.S., including the Indian conceptions of justice, their traditions, and practices. Doing so is essential to protecting Indian tribalism's survival under U.S. law. In addition, understanding how the American Indian legal traditions have worked to help perpetuate Indian tribalism might also assist in beginning to understand how U.S. law may achieve racial justice more generally.

Among the most significant features of Sims and Dennehy's book are a focus beyond valuing and managing cultural diversity, and a demonstration of the interdependency that exists between a number of important individual differences (i.e., alienation, receptivity, style, power). They discuss some personal yet theoretical insights on answers and questions that are important in increasing our recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and differences in general. In eleven original essays contributors examine a wide assortment of behaviors, issues, and individual differences while offering their reflections on answers and future questions that are key to leveraging diversity and difference in organizations.

Recent literature has emphasized the projected changes in organizational demographics and the fact that globalization also is changing the face of organizational landscapes. Taken together these trends are serving to increase the need to understand and appreciate cultural diversity in virtually all organizations. Many books already exist that attempt to address this topic. Each one attempts to provide a guide to dealing with a variety of racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds. The intent of Sims and Dennehy's book is to go beyond offering ideas or to serve simply as a guide to improve the management of diversity. Thus, a major goal of this book is to have its readers reflect on their personal diversity and difference experiences and to create a forum for answers and questions on the value of diversity and differences for all. The main thread that ties everything together in this book is the strategy of creating value through repeated emphasis on our need to look beyond valuing and managing diversity to the interdependency of a variety of individual variables that shape our lives.

The book begins by offering a bridge-building model as a tool that colleges and universities can use to decrease the alienation experienced by minority students on predominantly white campuses and to increase the social consciousness of all institutional constituents. The next chapter suggests that diversity is essential to learning, and good conversation is a powerful way to learn from diversity. The book then introduces a model that seeks to place the issue of diversity management as one part of an overall development change process. The notion that the success of some organizations in enhancing diversity is dependent upon the vision and strength of management is emphasized in the next chapter, which, by taking a different perspective, presents the argument that current corporate infrastructures do not promote diversity. Unless a company builds new internal support systems that encourage diversity of thought and action, employees hired to make the company more diverse will merely be homogenized into the prevailing culture. In the following chapter the role of training in U.S. organizations is discussed as a major component in increasing the recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and difference. The concept of difference-based approach to advocacy and its relation to issues of gender are introduced as cornerstones of creating work environments that are supportive of employees' needs to balance work and family. The next chapter provides data for analysis of the expatriate's learning experience and applies the learning from expatriate experiences to those issues faced by minorities in a domestic setting. A need to create new intellectual diversity that focuses on foreign language skills applicable to the needs of economic, scientific, and technological markets is emphasized in the next chapter. Next, a comparison is made of the decision-making processes and practices of Japanese and American managers at a Japanese company in the United States. The author's pioneering findings can be generalized to understand decision-making in different cultures and organizations. The role of diversity educator is then discussed and the author persuasively argues that active learner participation, self-disclosure, and a trusting supportive environment are prerequisites to understanding and appreciating diversity. The book concludes with a review of the important points discussed by the contributors to this book, offers questions in need of answers, and identifies future issues on diversity and differences.

When Verschuur-Basse, a French sociologist specializing in the family, was invited by the Academy of Social Sciences to Beijing in 1985, she interviewed women from three generations and a variety of professions about their lives as women, wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Over a five-year period she conducted in-depth, non-directed interviews with educated women who were able to analyze and interpret their lives in the context of important formative factors such as the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, and other social reforms. The difference between urban and rural expectations from women is particularly apparent in the life stories of the 13 women included in this book. The women voice common concerns as wives and mothers who work outside the home and comment on the prevalence of abortion and preference for male children, the increase in divorce rates, and the place of women as decision-makers in the family. Originally published in French as "Paroles de Femmes Chinoises: La Famille Autrement" (Harmattan, 1993), the study received critical acclaim from academy and media as a revealing portrayal of social reality in China.

The book is based on a series of unique oral histories and interviews with actors who love the stage first and foremost. Editor Joan Jeffri focuses on the experience of actors in their training and career development, and on their relationships to society, culture, and institutions. Although names like Alan Alda are recognizable from other media, these actors all grew up being nourished by the stage. Their stories show that theatre is everywhere in this country--not only on Broadway, but also in churches, in schools, in regions, and in towns. These interviews and a thorough introduction provide a history of the American theatre for almost a century--the Yiddish theatre, the WPA, the start of regional theatre, off- and off-off-Broadway, and the Great White Way--through the voices of those who lived it.

This work addresses the cultural background of stewardship as a progression from individual personal aesthetics to a deeply informed environmental ethic that could become a national environmental policy. Howell begins by assessing our personal cultural background and our philosophical notions of our role in the natural world. She looks at the evolution of Western civilization and changing worldviews in relation to nature, examining especially early conceptions of a more appealing, simpler life closer to nature in contrast to the perceived civilized world that is portrayed as decadent. Howell examines archetypes from literature and the popular arts, finding examples in Jungian psychology and in contemporary film and television that support the Wild Man image and promote the Simple Life yearning. She then looks at the early 20th-century conservation and preservation writers as the most direct ancestors of today's environmental movement and an immediate source of inspiration.

Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities. Without incorporating food into the design process - how it is grown, transported, and bought, cooked, eaten and disposed of - it is impossible to create truly resilient and convivial urbanism. Moving from the table and home garden to the town, city, and suburbs, Food and Urbanism explores the connections between food and place in past and present design practices. The book also looks to future methods for extending the 'gastronomic' possibilities of urban space. Supported by examples from places across the world, including the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Australia and the USA, the book offers insights into how the interplay of physical design and socio-spatial practices centred around food can help to maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Susan Parham brings together the latest research from a number of disciplines - urban planning, food studies, sociology, geography, and design - with her own fieldwork on a range of foodscapes to highlight the fundamental role food has to play in shaping the urban future.

Sketching and carving both visualize and memorize a given image, but within Nowau culture the manner in which this is achieved in a canoe prowboard is entirely different than in a conventional drawing. When studying the impressive ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, G.M.G. Scoditti became struck by the absolute predominance of the artist's mind in the process of creating images: all its stages, its uncertainties and experimentation, must unfold within its silent, rarefied space. Only once fully formed can the image be revealed to the village in material form. Reflecting on the absence of orthographic writing within Nowau culture, and finding parallels with poetic and musical composition, Scoditti gained further insight into the Nowau processes of creation through the critiques the Kitawan carvers made of his own fieldwork sketchbooks. Spurred on by their curiosity, the anthropologist handed over his art materials to the master carvers to make their own drawings on paper or cardboard. Traditional pigments used on the polychrome canoe prowboards were added to the unfamiliar media of watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencils and ballpoint pen. Three-dimensional ornamentation became two-dimensional as images of self-decoration and huts were added to those of prowboards. This exercise was all the more fascinating given the prohibition of drawing on the surface of the wood before carving. On return to Italy, further graphic dialogues unfolded when an architect and an artist from the tradition of Italian Abstraction responded with their own intriguingly different interpretations of the canoe prowboard and its relationship to the Nautilus shell. All these drawings are brought together in this book, along with Scoditti's own sketches from fieldwork and ethnographic collections in Newcastle upon Tyne and Rome. 'The fieldworker's or museum ethnographer's sketches are never going to be quite the same. Through the double filter of Kitawan philosophy and Scoditti's ruminations, the apparently simple triad of sketch - drawing - carving opens out into a discourse on the creative mind. The Kitawan creator - here primarily the male carver - does not have to demonstrate how he creates, and what springs from these pages have a fascination of their own. Several distinctive hands, Kitawan and Italian, reflect from different interpretive and professional vantage points on the very process of drawing through doing exactly that, drawing. The result are images that delight and challenge, sensitively assembled, beautifully reproduced. An extraordinary record of creativity, and a rare corpus of visual memorials.' - Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

Ce volume presente vingt-trois essais consacres a l'art francais et francophone des vingt-cinq dernieres annees et propose des analyses critiques d'une cinquantaine d'artistes majeurs qui travaillent sur des modes richement varies. The volume offers 23 new critical essays on contemporary French and francophone art, dealing with some fifty major artists working in a wide range of mediums.

This mesmerizing book is the ultimate American almanac, a unique record of life in the United States since 1900. For the first time, all the news, entertainment, art, literature, science and technology, sports, and fashion highlights are recorded in a single book, and this documentation is enriched by anecdotes, facts and figures, ads and fads, headlines, and memorable quotations -- as well by as more than a thousand photographs. And in addition to the listings, a lively and perceptive essay by Lois and Alan Gordon introduces each decade, capturing the flavor of each period.

The section on the 1900s, for example, commemorates Teddy Roosevelt, conservation, the first movie theater, the first World Series, vaudeville, ragtime, Henry James, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The section on the fifties considers the significance of Joseph McCarthy, I Like Ike, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Power of Positive Thinking, "Father Knows Best, " "Rebel Without a Cause, " The Lonely Crowd, Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Parks, and Sputnik. With its extraordinary wealth of information, American Chronicle ultimately conveys the unique imprint of each year and provides the stuff of contemporary memory. It will evoke and expand the contexts of all our lives.

Ray Barfield has done something quite new in media studies. Rather than trace the history of radio through the usual route, he has sought out a body of oral history from those who grew up with and listened to radio. He has not only collated the responses of his informants but placed their comments in a larger cultural and historical context and thus provided a kind of history from the ground up. He demonstrates thereby just how important and influential radio was in the lives of ordinary Americans. General readers and scholars alike will learn something from Barfield's engaging narrative about why radio was once such a compelling force in our culture. (From the "Foreword" by Thomas Inge.) This fresh and engaging account of early radio's contributions to U.S. social and cultural life brings together varied perspectives of listeners who recall the programs that delighted and entranced them. The first electronic medium to enter the home, radio is examined as a chief purveyor of family entertainment and as a bridge across regional differences. Barfield draws from over 150 accounts, providing a forum and a context for listeners of early radio to share their memories--from their first impressions of that magical box to favorite shows. Opening chapters trace the changing perceptions of radio as a guest or an invader in U.S. homes during the exuberant 1920s, the cash-scarce 1930s, and the rapidly changing World War II and post-war years. Later chapters offer listener responses to every major program type, including news reporting and commentary, sportscasts, drama, comedy series, crime and terror shows, educational and cultural programs, children's adventure series, soap operas, audience participation shows, and musical presentations.

This fresh and engaging account of early radio's contributions to U.S. social and cultural life brings together varied perspectives of listeners who recall the programs that delighted and entranced them. The first electronic medium to enter the home, radio is examined as a chief purveyor of family entertainment and as a bridge across regional differences. Barfield draws from over 150 accounts, providing a forum and a context for listeners of early radio to share their memories--from their first impressions of that magical box to favorite shows.

Opening chapters trace the changing perceptions of radio as a guest or an invader in U.S. homes during the exuberant 1920s, the cash-scarce 1930s, and the rapidly changing World War II and post-war years. Later chapters offer listener responses to every major program type, including news reporting and commentary, sportscasts, drama, comedy series, crime and terror shows, educational and cultural programs, children's adventure series, soap operas, audience participation shows, and musical presentations.

Psychoanalytic thought has already transformed our basic assumptions about the psychic life of individuals and cultures. Those assumptions often take on the valence of common sense. However, this can mean that their original and important meanings often become obscured. Disruptive ideas become domesticated. At War with the Obvious aims to return those ideas to their original disruptive status. Donald Moss explores a wide range of issues-the loosening of constraints on deep systematized forms of hatred, clinical, and technical matters, the puzzling status of revenge and forgiveness, a consideration of the dynamics of climate change denial, and an innovative look at the problem of voice in the clinical situation. Because it is rooted in a profound reconsideration of the origins of psychic life, psychoanalysis remains vital, in spite of the perennial efforts to keep it effaced and quieted. Moss covers a range of central psychoanalytic concepts to argue that only by examining and challenging our everyday assumptions about issues like sexuality, punishment, creativity, analytic neutrality, and trauma, can psychoanalysis offer a radical alternative to other forms of therapy. At War with the Obvious will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, cultural theorists and anyone for whom incisive psychoanalytic thought matters.

Dworkin and Wachs analyze 10 years of health and fitness magazines to uncover how bodies are made in popular culture Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal-not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut-that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be "fit"? And how is it that having an unfit, or "bad," body gets conflated with being an unfit, or "bad," citizen? Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men's and women's health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are "made" in today's culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women's and men's bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.

"Most of the contributions strongly project the authors' perceptions of the role of race on their subjects, and essays should elicit lively discussions in the classroom."
--"CHOICE"

Frederick Douglass liked to say of West Indian boxer Peter Jackson that "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question." His comment reflects the possibilities for social transformation that he saw in the emerging modern sports culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century developed, sports have become an important cultural terrain over which various racial groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and inter-ethnic identities.

Sports Matters brings critical attention to the centrality of race within the politics and pleasures of the massive sports culture that developed in the U.S. during the past century and a half. The contributors collected here address such issues as popular representations of blacks in sports. They consider baseball--from Nisei players in Oregon to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. And they look at the use of warrior imagery in representations of Native American athletes and the evolution of black expressive style within basketball.

Sports Matters challenges our presumptions about sports, illuminating in the process the complexities of race and gender as they relate to popular culture.

Contributors include Amy Bass, John Bloom, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Gena Caponi, Montye Fuse, Randy Hanson, Michiko Hase, George Lipsitz, Keith Miller, Sharon O'Brien, Connie Razza, Sam Regalado, Greg Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Willard, and Henry Yu.

Across Western cities, there is an increasing obsession with producing manicured landscapes. Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin which accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-coded, over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and a tactile encounter with space and materiality. Tim Edensor highlights the danger of eradicating such evocative urban sites through policies that privilege homogeneous new developments. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place. Stunningly illustrated throughout, this book celebrates industrial ruins and reveals what they can tell us about ourselves and our past.

Popular religion rarely expresses itself in the artifacts of "high" culture. In this book, Lippy approaches the study of popular religion by asking how ordinary people have gone about the process of being religious in America. Along the way, he examines popular religious periodicals, newspapers, novels, diaries, devotional materials, hymnals, promotional materials for revivals and camp meetings, religious tracts, as well as vernacular art and architecture, other artifacts, and, especially in the 20th century, radio, film, and television. He avoids the traditional focus on religious movements and institutions, choosing instead to illuminate the cultural impact of what people in America think and do when they are being religious by highlighting aspects of private life.

In this probing exploration of what it means to be deaf, Brenda Brueggemann goes beyond any simple notion of identity politics to explore the very nature of identity itself. Looking at a variety of cultural texts, she brings her fascination with borders and between-places to expose and enrich our understanding of how deafness embodies itself in the world, in the visual, and in language.

Taking on the creation of the modern deaf subject, Brueggemann ranges from the intersections of gender and deafness in the work of photographers Mary and Frances Allen at the turn of the last century, to the state of the field of Deaf Studies at the beginning of our new century. She explores the power and potential of American Sign Language--wedged, as she sees it, between letter-bound language and visual ways of learning--and argues for a rhetorical approach and digital future for ASL literature.

The narration of deaf lives through writing becomes a pivot around which to imagine how digital media and documentary can be used to convey deaf life stories. Finally, she expands our notion of diversity within the deaf identity itself, takes on the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people, and offers compelling illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within Deaf culture.

Known as France's Ninth Art, the bande dessinee has a status far surpassing that of the equivalent English-language comic strip. This publication, one of the first predominantly in English on the subject, provides a thorough introduction to questions of BD history, context and bibliography. Theoretical issues - including the reception of the early proto-BD prior to its modern definition, approaches to the construction of a BD (presented here in BD form by leading artist Tanitoc), semiology and the reading of the current form, or the specificity of the French/US (non)overlap - complement historical approaches, such as Becassine read in the light of postcolonialism, Le Corbusier and BD techniques in architecture, post-war BD and nostalgia for the Resistance, or Pilote and the 1960s revolution. And whilst broaching issues such as feminism or masculinity, social class, AIDS, exoticism or futurism, the volume presents chapters on some of the cutting-edge artists in the field today: Baru, Moebius, Juillard, Binet, Bilal... This book supplies an introduction to the BD that will be of use to students and researchers at all levels. In addition, the format of the individual case studies provides in-depth analysis allowing the reader to grasp specific examples in terms both of their place vis-a-vis the evolution of the BD and, more generally, of the wider role they play within French and Francophone cultural studies.

Despite some enormous differences in pay among professional athletes, most aspects of their daily lives remain surprisingly constant across sports and income levels. Living out of Bounds provides answers to persistent questions about what it's really like to be an athlete and discusses the filtered image of the athlete that emerges through books and other media. Overman mines a wide array of sports biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries to construct a representative picture of the athlete's life from the rise of American sport in the late 19th century to the present day. In so doing, he reveals the person behind the sports celebrity, as he or she exists on a daily basis. Individual chapters cover such topics as college athletics, the pressure of celebrity, the difficulty of balancing sports and everyday life, sex and sexuality, race in sports, the obsession with the body, and the difficulties associated with retiring. In the course of the work, a portrait emerges that transcends the individual lives lived. The shared experiences of devoted training, of travel and hotels, and of tension within and beyond the clubhouse or gym, force us to appreciate the often oppressive reality of the sporting life, at the same time that the individual lives lived also provide us with a glimpse of the rewards that make sports so compelling to audiences and athletes across America.

Postcolonial discourse is fast becoming an area of rich academic debate. At the heart of coloniality and postcoloniality is the contested authority of empire and its impact upon previously colonized peoples and their indigenous cultures. This book examines various theories of colonization and decolonization, and how the ideas of a British empire create networks of discourses in contemporary postcolonial cultures. The various essays in this book address the question of empire by exploring such constructs as nation and modernity, third-world feminisms, identity politics, the status and roles of exiles, exilic subjectivities, border intellectuals, and the presence of a postcolonial body in today's classrooms. Topics discussed include African-American literature, the nature of postcolonial texts in first-world contexts, jazz, films, and TV as examples of postcolonial discourse, and the debates surrounding biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand and Australia.

From nineteenth-century romantic friendships to childhood best friends and idealistic versions of feminist sisterhood, female friendship has been seen as an essential, sustaining influence on women's lives. Women are thought to have a special aptitude for making and keeping friends.

But notions of friendship are not constant-and neither are women's experiences of this fundamental form of connection. In Another Self, Linda W. Rosenzweig sheds light on the changing nature of white middle-class American women's relationships during the coming of age of modern America.

As the middle-class domesticity of the nineteenth century waned, a new emotional culture arose in the twentieth century and the intensely affectionate bonds between women of earlier decades were supplanted by new priorities: autonomy, careers, participation in an expanding consumer culture, and the expectation of fulfillment and companionship in marriage. An increased emphasis on heterosexual interactions and a growing stigmatization of close same-sex relationships fostered new friendship styles and patterns.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, journals, correspondence, and popular periodicals, Rosenzweig uncovers the complex and intricate links between social and cultural developments and women's personal experiences of friendship.

Based on a groundbreaking international conference held in Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of Artspace, this anthology explores the legacy and the future of multicultural discourses for the arts. Debates on art, culture, and theory are situated within the context of globalization. The issues arising from new hybrid and complex forms of cultural identity are examined with reference to both contemporary art practice and historical accounts of national identity. Contributors include Ricardo Dominguez, senior editor of "The Thing.Net, Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist teaching at Columbia University; Sneja Gunew, professor of English and women's studies at the University of British Columbia; and Fazal Rizvi, a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

Climb a mountain and experience the landscape. Try to grasp its holistic nature. Do not climb alone, but with others and share your experience. Be sure the ways of seeing the landscape will be very different. We experience the landscape with all senses as a complex, dynamic and hierarchically structured whole. The landscape is tangible out there and simultaneously a mental reality. Several perspectives are obvious because of language, culture and background. Many disciplines developed to study the landscape focussing on specific interest groups and applications. Gradually the holistic way of seeing became lost. This book explores the different perspectives on the landscape in relation to its holistic nature. We start from its multiple linguistic meanings and a comprehensive overview of the development of landscape research from its geographical origins to the wide variety of today's specialised disciplines and interest groups. Understanding the different perspectives on the landscapes and bringing them together is essential in transdisciplinary approaches where the landscape is the integrating concept.

This entry in the Food Culture around the World series helps those in the United States understand the new immigrants from Central America who have brought their food cultures with them. Food Culture in Central America illustrates the unique foodways of the region in depth-and in English-for the first time. Important foods and ingredients, techniques, and lore associated with food preparation are surveyed. Typical meals eaten at home are presented, with attention to the cultural context in which those meals take place, including regional or national differences. The book also examines various meal settings-street vendors, modest comedors, and fancy restaurants. The role of food in common festivals and life cycle rituals is explored as well, including Christmas, Semana Santa, and Quincineras. Author Michael R. McDonald emphasizes the living process of "metatezation," referring to the use of the traditional metate, a stone platform used to grind ingredients, resulting in the unique flavors and textures of the cuisines. The process echoes the concept of "mestizaje," the intense hybrid mixture of identities throughout Latin America, which is also explained. Photographs Maps An extensive glossary A resource guide A selected bibliography to facilitate further research

Spanish popular culture is one of the richest in the world. The absence of an efficient ruling class has allowed the people to stamp their personality on all major aspects of the country's life. This book describes the peculiar Spanish feeling for death and tragedy in popular religious practices, music and the bullfight; the fiesta sense of life, so foreign to the work ethic of other Western countries; the oral tradition that has managed to survive into the post-industrial age with its creative use of slang, proverbs and obscenity; popular literature, the press, radio, television and the movies.

Students and scholars will appreciate the first comprehensive treatment of Spanish popular culture in a single volume. The author has done first-hand research in all the major regions of Spain and has compiled a list of major archives and resource centers. An extensive bibliography on the major fields of popular Spanish culture is included at the end of each chapter.