This open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle's polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail-itself an embodiment of movement-is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.

The Druze and the Maronites, arguably the two founding communities of modern Lebanon, have the reputation of being primordial enemies. Makram Rabah attempts to gauge the impact of collective memory on determining the course and the nature of the conflict between these communities in Mount Lebanon. He takes as his focus 'the War of the Mountain' in 1982, reconstructing the events of this war through the framework of collective remembrance and oral history. He challenges the idea that these group identities were constructed by their respective centres of power within the Maronite and Druze community, providing an alternative to the prevailing meta-narrative. Telling the stories of the many people who took part in these events, or who simply suffered as a consequence, helps to expose the intrinsic motives which led to this conflict and makes a valuable contribution to the field of Lebanese historical scholarship.

This book analyses issues related to the political use and economical misappropriation of urban cultural events, cultural infrastructures, public resources, and cultural traditions in the city of Valencia, Spain. It deals critically with a variety of sociological questions related to cultural production in the city, including geographical segregation as culturally defined in the city; misogyny and the peripheral role of women in traditional cultural events, xenophobia; and nationalism/regionalism. As such, the book will be useful to students and scholars of sociology of the arts, cultural policy, and museum management, and urban sociology.

In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies. The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also what could be considered the core of Elias's work: the concept of civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias's African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias's time in Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown fascinating story of Elias' encounter with Malcolm X in an epilogue.

How does culture affect action? This question has long been framed in terms of a means vs ends debate-in other words, do cultural ends or cultural means play a primary causal role in human behavior? However, the role of socialization has been largely overlooked in this debate. In this book, Vila-Henninger develops a model of how culture affects action called "The Sociological Dual-Process Model of Outcomes" that incorporates socialization. This book contributes to the debate by first providing a critical overview of the literature that explains the limitations of the sociological dual-process model and subsequent scholarship-and especially work in sociology on "schemas". It then develops a sociological dual-process model of moral judgment that formally explains Type I processes, Type II processes, and the interaction between Type I and Type II processes. The book also expands sociological dual-process models to include a temporal dimension-the "Sociological Dual-Process Model of Outcomes". Finally, the book integrates a theory of socialization into the sociological dual-process model and creates empirical indicators that confirm Vila-Henninger's theorization and contribute to the literature on measures of dual-process models.

This book explores how to compose sounds and visualisations that represent psychedelic hallucinations and experiences of synaesthesia. Through a detailed discussion regarding compositional methodologies and technical approaches, the book aims to educate students, practitioners, and researchers working in related areas. It weaves together sound, visual design, and code across a range of media, providing conceptual approaches, theoretical insights, and practical strategies, which unlock new design frameworks for composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations.

This book provides extensive information on craftsmen-built houses in China. Though some inroads have been made in studying this folk custom, this work represents the first comprehensive and systematic monograph. The book examines the topic at the two main levels of "history" and "theory". Combining historical textual research, contemporary textual research, and field study, the book presents systematic information on the folk custom of craftsmen-built houses in China. At the level of theoretical research, it puts forward some original opinions on the major theoretical issues, such as the folk custom of religious belief, the boundary between superstition and religion, and the relationship between oral literature and ritual. The book provides a guide to help readers systematically understand the folk custom of craftsmen-built houses in China. Sharing valuable insights into Chinese architectural history, as well as religious studies, cultural anthropology, and folklore, it will appeal to researchers in the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, and architecture and can also serve as a popular science book for understanding Chinese architectural culture.

This book explores the relationship between the food culture of Israel and the creation of its national identity. It is an effort to research what the mundane, everyday behaviours such as cooking and feeding ourselves and others, can tell us about the places we were born and the cultural practices of a nation. With the aim of developing a better understanding of the many facets of Israeli nationalism, this ethnographic work interrogates how ordinary Israelis, in particular women, use food in their everyday life to construct, perform and resist national narratives. It explores how Israeli national identity is experienced through its food culture, and how social and political transformations are reflected in the consumption patterns of Israeli society. The book highlights understudied themes in anthropology, food studies and gender studies, and focuses on three key themes: food and national identity construction, the role of women as feeders of the nation, and everyday nationhood. It is a relevant work for researchers and students interested in the study of food, gender, nationalism and the Middle East; as well as for food writers and bloggers alike.

Holmes County, Ohio, is home to the largest and most diverse Amish community in the world. Yet, surprisingly, it remains relatively unknown compared to its famous cousin in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell conducted seven years of fieldwork, including interviews with over 200 residents, to understand the dynamism that drives social change and schism within the settlement, where Amish enterprises and nonfarming employment have prospered. The authors contend that the Holmes County Amish are experiencing an unprecedented and complex process of change as their increasing entanglement with the non-Amish market causes them to rethink their religious convictions, family practices, educational choices, occupational shifts, and health care options.

The authors challenge the popular image of the Amish as a homogeneous, static, insulated society, showing how the Amish balance tensions between individual needs and community values. They find that self-made millionaires work alongside struggling dairy farmers; successful female entrepreneurs live next door to stay-at-home mothers; and teenagers both embrace and reject the coming-of-age ritual, "rumspringa."

"An Amish Paradox" captures the complexity and creativity of the Holmes County Amish, dispelling the image of the Amish as a vestige of a bygone era and showing how they reinterpret tradition as modernity encroaches on their distinct way of life.

This collection of high quality, largely previously published essays, analyses a range of controversies in the field of the sociology of culture and consumption. Campbell made a major contribution to the development of this field and he has a clear and coherent theoretical position which he employs to comment on interesting disputes among scholars seeking to understand consumer culture. Containing a brand new expansive essay reflecting on consumption in the age of a pandemic and drawing out some of the conceptual and practical implications of the relationship between wants and needs, science and norms, this synthesis will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of consumption, consumer and cultural sociology.

Semiotic Sociology provides solid ground for cultural analysis in the social sciences by building up a mediation between structuralist semiology (Saussure), pragmatist semiotics (Peirce), and phenomenological sociology (Schutz, Garfinkel, Berger and Luckmann). This is a deviation from the common view that these traditions are seen as mutually exclusive alternatives and thus competitors of each other. The net result of the synthesis is that a new social theory emerges wherein action theories (Weber and rational choice) are based on phenomenological sociology and phenomenological sociology is based on neostructuralist semiotics, which is a synthesis of the Saussurean and the Peircean traditions of understanding habits of interpretation and interaction. The core issues of social research are then addressed on these grounds. The topics covered include the economy/society relationship, power, gender, modernity, institutionalization, the canon of current social theory including micro/macro and agency/structure relations, and the grounds of social criticism.

This book is the second volume in a series presenting new English translations of L.S. Vygotsky's writings on the holistic science of the child he called "pedology". It presents unique materials which reflect the development of Vygotsky's theoretical position at the last stage of his creative evolution in 1932-1934 and contributes to the number of original Vygotsky texts available in English. It includes the problem of age and age periodization; the structure and dynamics of age, psychological characteristics of age crises and diagnostics of development in relation to age, and the zone of proximal development, which became his most widely known but least understood theoretical innovation. This book places that concept in its context and makes it fully understandable for the first time. In addition, there are lectures and notes that Vygotsky made in preparation for lectures on six critical periods: birth, one year old, three, seven, and thirteen. Vygotsky also devotes chapters to the stable periods of infancy and early childhood and two whole chapters to school age. Future volumes in this series will explore Vygotsky's pedology of the adolescent.

The book provides insights into the prevailing patriarchal system in rural Pakistan. It elaborates on the kinship system in rural Sindh and explores how young married women strategize and negotiate with patriarchy. Drawing on qualitative methodologies, the book reveals the strong relationship between poverty and the perpetuation of patriarchy. Women's strategies help elevate their position in their families, such as attention to household tasks, producing children, and doing handicraft work for their well-being. These conditions are usually seen as evidence of women's subordination, but these are also strategies for survival where accommodation to patriarchy wins them approval. The book concludes that women's life-long struggle is, in fact, a technique of negotiating with patriarchy. In so doing, they internalize the culture that rests on their subordination and reproduce it in older age in exercising power by oppressing other junior women.

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of 'belonging' which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

This book examines postsocialist transformations reflected in urban middle-class domestic spaces and in museums dedicated to socialism in Romania. It focuses on the significance and circulation of porcelain and crystal sets and ornaments during late socialism and after 1989, following the experiences of consumers, workers in the glassware and porcelain industry, and artists. By tracing the values and temporalities embedded in materiality, the book sheds light on how objects shape daily life in a time of cultural, economic, and social change. Drawing on ethnographic research, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the ambiguous relation between the middle-class and the socialist state, using materiality and consumption to shed light on contradictions between aspirations and resources and between official discourses and everyday practices. The book reveals changes in practices of display, gift exchange, and barter, in the perception and use of time, as well as in gender and inter-generational relations. This work will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians, especially researchers interested in consumption, material culture, postsocialism, the anthropology of value and gift, the study of social time, practices of the middle-class, and the history of consumption in Eastern Europe.

This book shows how many previously contingent social processes have gradually been re-organised and transformed into entangled processes of 'discontinuance' and 'continuance' through the implementation of digital logic. Together with the necessary co-evolution of our collective digital literacy, this persistent process of transformation throughout modernity is theorised here as one of 'social digitalisation.' Social digitalisation highlights the ways in which material digital technology, like preceding material technologies, has been fitted into the longer term trajectory of digital transformation. This new social theory thus reverses prevailing accounts of the 'digital revolution' that focus exclusively on changes allegedly caused by material digital technology in recent decades. The book also demonstrates the fruitfulness of applying the theory of social digitalisation as a holistic approach in researching the wide-ranging consequences of contemporary digitalisation, including its contrasting effects on different social groups. It will be useful to students and researchers of sociology, communications, media and history, but also for general readers interested in understanding the overall complexity of digitalisation and how digital transformation has come to dominate the ways we live today.

In a critical, comparative study of the sociological literature, this book explores the term "time," and the various interconnections between time and a broad cluster of topics that create a conceptual labyrinth. Various understandings of time manifest themselves in the context of many individual social problems-there is no single vision in sociology of how to grasp time and address within social theory. This book, therefore, attempts to define an approach to the concept of time and its associated terms (duration, temporality, acceleration, compression, temporal structures, change, historical consciousness, and others). The volume is guided by a critical engagement with three main questions: a) the formation of human understanding of time; b) the functioning of temporal structures at different levels of social reality; c) the role and place of time in general sociological theory.

Combining global, media, and cultural studies, this book analyzes the success of Hallyu, or the "Korean Wave" in the West, both at a macro and micro level, as an alternative pop culture globalization. This research investigates the capitalist ecosystem (formed by producers, institutions and the state), the soft power of Hallyu, and the reception among young people, using France as a case study, and placing it within the broader framework of the 'consumption of difference.' Seen by French fans as a challenge to Western pop culture, Hallyu constitutes a material of choice for understanding the cosmopolitan apprenticeships linked to the consumption of cultural goods, and the use of these resources to build youth's biographical trajectories. The book will be relevant to researchers, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, global studies, consumption and youth studies.

This edited book demonstrates a new multidimensional comprehension of the relationship between war, the military and civil society by exploring the global rise of paramilitary culture. Moving beyond binary understandings that inform the militarization of culture thesis and examining various national and cultural contexts, the collection outlines ways in which a process of paramilitarization is shaping the world through the promotion of new warrior archetypes. It is argued that while the paramilitary hero is associated with military themes, their character is in tension with the central principals of modern military organization, something that often challenges the state's perceived monopoly on violence. As such paramilitization has profound implications for institutional military identity, the influence of paramilitary organizations and broadly how organised violence is popularly understood

This anthology examines how immigrants and their US-born children use media to negotiate their American identity and how audiences engage with mediated narratives about the immigrant experience (cultural adjustments, language use, and the like). Where this work diverges from other collections and monographs is the area is its intentional focus on how both first- and second-generation Americans' complex identities and hybrid cultures interact with mediated narratives in general, alongside the extent to which these narratives reflect their experience. In a three-part structure, the collection examines representations, "zooms in" to explore the reception of these narratives through autoethnographic essays, and concludes in a section of analysis and critique of specific media.

This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here 'below' has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city-from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.

How can one live by impossible ideals and values? The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book draws upon a detailed study of an urban Jain community in Jaipur, north-west India, to offer the fullest account yet given of Jain religious belief and practice. It shows how renunciation and asceticism play a central part in the life of a thriving business community, and how world-renunciation combines for Jain families with the pursuit of worldly happiness. The book is in five parts. Part I introduces the vivid mythology and doctrine of Jainism, and the traditions of Jain renouncers. Part II discusses the relations of Jains with other groups in Indian society, the politics of leadership on Jain communities, and the history, character, and composition of the Jain community in Jaipur. Part III contains detailed analyses of lay ascetic practices such as fasting and confession, traditions of imagery and iconography, and key religious ideas, such as the paradoxical doctrine of 'non-violence' (ahimsa). These are shown to turn on complex conceptions of the body and contrasting moral topographies of self. Part IV concerns relations between lay Jains and renouncers, and draws on recent writing on exchange and value to analyse the pivotal place of alms-giving in the Jain religion. Part V describes some of the closest connections between riches and renunciation, and shows how the pan-Indian festival of Diwali is adapted to distinctively Jain values and concerns.