To what extent can semiotics illuminate key problems in religious studies, given the centrality of symbols, language, and other modes of signification in religion and theology? The volume explores semiotic methodologies for the study of religion, with an emphasis on their critical and creative reconfigurations. The contributors come from different specialties, such as cognitive science, ethnography, linguistics, communication studies, art studies, religious studies, philosophy of religion, and theology. Part One consists of chapters focusing on theoretical perspectives. Part two focuses on applications in texts and case studies while still considering methodological issues. Many specific traditions and perspectives are taken up, such as C. S. Peirce, A. J. Greimas and the Paris School, Juri Lotman's semiotics of culture, Bruno Latour and material semiotics, linguistic anthropology, social semiotics, cognitive semiotics, embodied and enactive perspectives on language and mind, semiotics of the image and iconicity, multimodality, intertextuality, and semiotics of colors. The book provides readers with a succinct overview of how contemporary semiotics can be useful in understanding a broad array of topics in the study of religion.

In Life Advice from Below, Eric C. Hendriks offers the first systematic, comparative study of the globalization of American-style self-help culture and the cultural conflicts this creates in different national contexts. The self-help guru is an archetypical American figure associated with individualism, materialism and the American Dream. Nonetheless, the self-help industry is spreading globally, thriving in China and other seemingly unlikely places. Controversy follows in its wake, as the self-help industry, operating outside of formal education and state institutions, outflanks philosophical, religious and political elites who have their own visions of the Good Life. Through a comparison of Germany and China, Hendriks analyzes how the competition between self-help gurus and institutional authorities unfolds under radically different politico-cultural regimes. "This witty book charms its way through a very serious sociology of the seriously quirky field of self-help books. Read it for its fascinating pop-culture insights and you'll come away with a deep understanding of contemporary sociological theory. Highly recommended." - Salvatore Babones, University of Sydney "Hendriks' finding that Germany rather than China is more resistant to self-help gurus offers a powerful corrective to the assumption in much of the globalization literature that the greatest cultural divide is between the Anglo-Western European sphere and the rest of the globe." - Rodney Benson, New York University

Listen to the podcast about this book. In Intercultural Friendship: The Case of a Palestinian Bedouin and a Dutch Israeli Jew Daniel J.N. Weishut focuses on the interface between interculturality and friendship in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After a literature study, the author describes the socio-cultural context of his boundary-crossing friendship in the realm of the Israeli occupation and then investigates it through the perspective of Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The tremendous cultural differences as they appear are in line with Hofstede's theory for three of the value orientations but in the field of "uncertainty avoidance" they conflict with the theory. Challenges and opportunities in the friendship, and their implications for personal growth, among others, are illustrated by a series of intriguing stories of friendship.

The transnational migration of health care practitioners has become a critical issue in global health policy and ethics. Doctors beyond Borders provides an essential historical perspective on this international issue, showing how foreign-trained doctors have challenged - and transformed - health policy and medical practice in countries around the world. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from immigration records and medical directories to oral histories, the contributors study topics ranging from the influence of South Asian doctors on geriatric medicine in the United Kingdom to the Swedish reaction to the arrival of Jewish physicians fleeing Nazi Germany and the impact of the Vietnam War on the migration of doctors to Canada. Combining social history, the history of health and medicine, and immigration history, Doctors beyond Borders is an impressive selection of essays on a topic that continues to have global relevance.

Deviant and Useful Citizens explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body in the eighteenth century throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until 1776 comprised modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Mariselle Melendez introduces the reader to a female rebel, Micaela Bastidas, whose brutal punishment became a particularly harsh example of state response to women who challenged the system. She explores the cultural representation of women depicted as economically productive and vital to the health of the culture at large. The role of women in religious orders provides still another window into the vital need to sustain the image of women as loyal and devout -- and to deal with women who refused to comply. The book focuses on the different ways male authorities, as well as female subjects, conceived the female body as deeply connected to notions of what constituted a useful or deviant citizen within the Viceroyalty. Using eighteenth-century legal documents, illustrated chronicles, religious texts, and newspapers, Mariselle Melendez explores in depth the representation of the female body in periods of political, economic, and religious crisis to determine how it was conceived within certain contexts. Deviant and Useful Citizens presents a highly complex society that relied on representations of utility and productivity to understand the female body, as it reveals the surprisingly large stake that colonial authorities had in defining the status of women during a crucial time in South American history.

A sequel to the groundbreaking volume, Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, the present volume examines in depth interactions between Western racial constructions of East Asians and local constructions of race and their outcomes in modern times. Focusing on China, Japan and the two Koreas, it also analyzes the close ties between race, racism and nationalism, as well as the links race has had with gender and lineage in the region. Written by some of the field's leading authorities, this insightful and engaging 23-chapter volume offers a sweeping overview and analysis of racial constructions and racism in modern and contemporary East Asia that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians' clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. The colonial administration's hookworm campaign involved many Puerto Rican physicians in complex struggles with other elites, rural peasants and U.S. colonial administrators for political legitimacy. Puerto Rican physicians did not gain the professional autonomy their counterparts in the United States enjoyed. Instead, they became centrally implicated in the struggle between labor and capital enforcing the island's subordination to a colonial modernity and the development of capitalism on the island.

This book examines 52 apologetic allocutions produced during federal sentencing hearings. The practice of inviting defendants to make a statement in their own behalf is a long-standing one and it is understood as offering defendants the opportunity to impress a judge or jury with their remorse, which could be a factor in the sentence that is imposed. Defendants raised the topics of the offense, mitigation, future behaviour and the sentence in different ways and this book explores the pros and cons associated with the different strategies that they used. Because there is no way of ascertaining exactly how effective (or ineffective) an individual allocution is, case law, sociolinguistic and historical resources, and judges' final remarks are used to develop hypotheses about defendants' communicative goals as well as what might constitute an ideal defendant stance from a judge's point of view. The corpus is unique because, unlike official transcripts, the transcripts used for this study include paralinguistic features such as hesitations, wavering voice, and crying-while-talking. Among its highlights, the book proposes that although a ritualized apology formula (e.g., "I'm sorry " or "I apologize ") would appear to be a good fit for the context of allocution and even appears to be expected, the use of these formulas carries implications in this context that do not serve defendants' communicative goals. I argue that the application of Austin's (1962) performative-constative continuum reveals that offense-related utterances that fall closer to the constative end are more consistent with the discursive constraints on the speech event of allocution. Further, I propose that the ideologies associated with allocution, in particular the belief that allocution functions as a protection for defendants, obscures the ways in which the context constrains what defendants can say and how effectively they can say it.

This book is jointly compiled by Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cyberspace Administration of China, Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Over the past several years, Chinese scholars have contributed numerous research works on the development of Chinese scientific information and technology, and produced a range of outstanding achievements. Focusing on the main topic of e-Science, this book explores the forefront of science and technology around the globe, the major demands in China and the main fields in China's economic development. Furthermore, it reviews the major achievements and the typical cases in China's e-Science research. It provides a valuable reference source for future technological innovations and will introduce researchers and students in the area of e-Science to the latest results in China.

A volume in Advances in Cultural Psychology Series Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Clark University This book is perhaps the first systematic treatment of politics from the perspective of cultural psychology. Politics is a complex that psychology usually fails to understand- as it assumes a position in society that attempts to be free of politics itself. Politics is associated both with an everyday practice, and the dynamics of globalization; with the way group conflicts, ideologies, social representations and identities, are lived and co-constructed by social actors. The authors of the book address these issues through their research grounded in different parts of the world, on democracy and political order, the social representation of power, gender studies, the use of metaphors and symbolic power in political discourse, social identities and methodological questions. The book will be used by social and political psychologists but is also of interest to the other social sciences: political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists, and it is at a level where sophisticated lay public would be able to appreciate its coverage. Its use in upperlevel college teaching is possible, and expected at graduate/postgraduate levels.

Exploring Sociology: Readings for Introductory Sociology provides students with a carefully selected collection of articles that highlight the influence of social forces on all people regardless of culture, ethnicity, gender, tradition, or faith. The anthology provides readers an introduction to the study of sociology and underscores how our lives are shaped in large part by external forces. Section I familiarizes students with the sociological perspective and ways in which to think sociologically. Section II provides readers with an introduction to social science research methods through a field experiment that investigates handwashing in public bathrooms. In Section III, students learn about the concept of culture, and in Section IV, socialization, group behavior, and conformity. The reading in Section V demonstrates how behaviors usually classified as deviant can be normalized given the right social conditions. Section VI explores various types of inequalities, including class, race, and gender. The final section examines social institutions, including marriage, family, education, religion, the economy, and government, and shows how these institutions form the foundation of modern societies and guide our daily lives. Engaging and approachable, Exploring Sociology is an exemplary supplemental textbook for foundational courses in sociology.