This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a "total social fact"-a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture-to identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politics-Greek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general "ortherworldly-nesses." This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of the Internet on Malaysian politics and how it has played a pivotal role in influencing the country's political climate. It lays out the background of Malaysia's political history and media environment, and addresses the ramifications of media-isation for the political process, including political public relations, advertising and online campaigns. The book examines the Internet's transformative role and effect on Malaysian democracy, as well as its consequences for political actors and the citizenry, such as the development of cyber-warfare, and the rise of propaganda or "fake" news in the online domain. It also investigates the interplay between traditional and new media with regard to the evolution of politics in Malaysia, especially as a watchdog on accountability and transparency, and contributes to the current discourse on the climate of Malaysian politics following the rise of new media in the country. This book is particularly timely in the wake of the 2018 Malaysian general election, and will be of interest to students and researchers in communications, politics, new media and cultural studies.

This book takes readers into stories of love, loss, grief and mourning and reveals the emotional attachments and digital kinships of the virtual 3D social world of Second Life. At fourteen years old, Second Life can no longer be perceived as the young, cutting-edge environment it once was, and yet it endures as a place of belonging, fun, role-play and social experimentation. In this volume, the authors argue that far from facing an impending death, Second Life has undergone a transition to maturity and holds a new type of significance. As people increasingly explore and co-create a sense of self and ways of belonging through avatars and computer screens, the question of where and how people live and die becomes increasingly more important to understand. This book shows how a virtual world can change lives and create forms of memory, nostalgia and mourning for both real and avatar based lives.

This book explores varieties of spiritual movements and alternative experiments for the generation of beauty, dignity and dialogue in a world where the rise of the religious in politics and the public sphere is often accompanied by violence. It examines how spirituality can contribute to human development, social transformations and planetary realizations, urging us to treat each other, and our planet, with evolutionary care and respect. Trans-disciplinary and trans-paradigmatic to its very core, this text opens new pathways of practical spirituality and humanistic action for both scholarship and discourse and offers an invaluable companion for scholars across religious studies, cultural studies and development studies.

The Irish folklore of the Otherworld is rich in its many manifestations of supernatural beings and personages. This is represented in many different genres of folklore, such as folktales, legends, ballads, memorates, beliefs and belief statements, and exists within the context of rich literary, historical and imaginative parallels. This book presents a new reading of Irish religious belief and legend in a meaningful socio-historical context, examining popular belief and narratives of sinful women and unbaptised children, as a way of understanding a particular worldview in Irish society. Blending postmodern approaches with traditional methodologies, the author reviews the representation of women, sin and repentance in Irish folklore. The author suggests new ways of seeing this legend material, indicating strong links between the Irish and the French, specifically Breton, religious tradition, and tracing the nature of this inter-relationship through the post-Tridentine Counter Reformation Roman Catholic Church and its teachings. In this way aspects of Ireland's popular religious and cultural inheritance are examined.

While the term 'culture' has come to be very widely used in both popular and academic discourse, it has a variety of meanings, and the differences among these have not been given sufficient attention. This book explores these meanings, and identifies some of the problems associated with them, as well as examining the role that values should play in cultural analysis. The development of four, very different, conceptions of culture is traced from the nineteenth century onwards: a notion of aesthetic cultivation associated with Matthew Arnold; the evolutionary view of culture characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology; the idea of diverse cultures characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century anthropology; and a conception of culture as a process of situated meaning-making - found today across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. These conceptions of culture are interrogated, and a reformulation of the concept is sketched. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and education.

This book investigates death as part of contemporary everyday experience and practices. Through a cultural sociological lens, it studies death as it remains constantly at the edge of our consciousness, shaping the ways in which we move through social reality. As such, Death Matters is a significant contribution to death studies, going beyond traditional parameters of the field by addressing the cultural omnipresence of death. The contributions analyse several death-related meaning-making processes, arguing that meanings emerging from culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions, are just as important as 'death practices' in understanding the role of death in society. Drawing on the related themes of places of absence and presence, disease and bodies, and persons and non-persons, the authors explore a variety of areas of social life, from haunting to celebrity deaths, to move the notion of death from the margins of social reality to ongoing everyday life. This far-reaching collection will be of use to scholars and students across death studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, culture, media and communication studies.

Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The detailed analysis focuses on the management of pilgrimage settings as heritage and tourism linked to the shrine of Saint James and gives particular attention to investment guidelines, land use planning regulations, environmental stewardship, information dissemination and museology.

Mahasu is the joint name of four gods whose influence is widespread throughout the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Like other deities in the Western Himalayas, they are regarded as royal gods who rule over territories and people. This book traces changes in faith and practices surrounding the Mahasu brothers, and shows how the locals understand these changes by emphasizing the dominant role of humans in the decisions of the gods. The locals are also constantly testing the authenticity of the human mediumship. Thus, the book presents the claim that the gap between local conceptions of divinity and the perceptions of anthropologists regarding gods may be narrower than we think. The Biography of a God: Mahasu in the Himalayas is based on ethnographic research, resulting in an important contribution to the study of Indian village deities, Himalayan Hinduism, lived Hinduism, and the anthropology of religion.

This book addresses the question: how can we talk about race in a world that is considered post-racial, a world where race doesn't exist? Kamaloni engages with the tradition of everyday racism and traces the process of racialisation through the interaction of bodies in space. Exploring the embodied experience exposes the idea of post-racialism as a response to continued cultural anxieties about race and the desire to erase it. Understanding Racism in a Post-Racial World presents a broader question about what everyday encounters about race might tell us about the current cultural construction of race. The book provides a much-needed investigation of the intersection of race, bodies and space as a critical part of how bodies and spaces become racialised, and will be of value to students and scholars interested in understanding and discussing race across interdisciplinary areas such as cultural studies, communication, gender studies, geography, body studies, literature studies and urban studies.

Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat: Crossroads as Ritual examines the form and function of ritual in four of Danticat's fictional works-The Dew Breaker; The Farming of Bones; Claire of the Sea Light; and Breath, Eyes, Memory-to reveal how these texts create textual topography that heals and clarifies Africana consciousness. Filtering ritual through the symbolic iconography of the cosmogram and Africana women's literary tradition, Joyce White investigates modern articulations of the cosmogram's cosmological and philosophical iterations within the life and existence of Africana people and establishes set systems and beliefs that are manifest through ritual practices. White argues that emblemed by the cruciform symbol of the crossroads, the cosmogram within Danticat's texts emanates extendable textual, liminal, and ritualized spaces through the inscription of the symbol that exists within and without the boundaries of pagination. The extension of textual landscape expands the borders and boundaries of a given text and provides additional space for contemplation and rumination incongruent to those spaces in its common and normal iterations.

This book is a novel and original collection of essays on Italians and food. Food culture is central both to the way Italians perceive their national identity and to the consolidation of Italianicity in global context. More broadly, being so heavily symbolically charged, Italian foodways are an excellent vantage point from which to explore consumption and identity in the context of the commodity chain, and the global/local dialectic. The contributions from distinguished experts cover a range of topics including food and consumer practices in Italy, cultural intermediators and foodstuff narratives, traditions of production and regional variation in Italian foodways, and representation of Italianicity through food in old and new media. Although rooted in sociology, Italians and Food draws on literature from history, anthropology, semiotics and media studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of food studies, consumer culture, cultural sociology, and contemporary Italian studies.

This international edited collection examines how racism trajectories and manifestations in different locations relate and influence each other. The book unmasks and foregrounds the ways in which notions of European Whiteness have found form in a variety of global contexts that continue to sustain racism as an operational norm resulting in exclusion, violence, human rights violations, isolation and limited full citizenship for individuals who are not racialised as White. The chapters in this book specifically implicate European Whiteness - whether attempting to reflect, negate, or obtain it - in social structures that facilitate and normalise racism. The authors interrogate the dehumanisation of Blackness, arguing that dehumanisation enables the continuation of racism in White dominated societies. As such, the book explores instances of dehumanisation across different contexts, highlighting that although the forms may be locally specific, the outcomes are continually negative for those racialised as Black. The volume is refreshingly extensive in its analyses of racism beyond Europe and the United States, including contributions from Africa, South America and Australia, and illuminates previously unexplored manifestations of racism across the globe.

This book provides qualitative analyses of intercultural sense making in a variety of institutional contexts. It relies on the assumption that in an increasingly culturally diverse world, individuals often enter contexts that have communal, historically determined and stable sets of values, norms and expected identities, with little cultural compass to find their bearings in them. The book goes beyond interpreting differences in people's ethnic or linguistic roots and discusses instead people's interpretive efforts to navigate different sociocultural situations. The contributors examine such situations in educational, organizational, medical and community settings and look at how participants with different levels of sociocultural competences (such as, migrant patients, migrant adult learners, children) try to cope with institutional constraints and expectations, how they understand symbols, practices and identities in institutional contexts, and how their creative adjustments come to light. This book provides insights from the fields of psychology, education, anthropology and linguistics, and is for a wide readership interested in cultural meaning-making.

This book focuses on the ways in which North American Muslim women artists "talk back" to dominant discourses about Muslim identity and work to counter mainstream stereotypes and representations. It examines the possibilities of constructing discourses of resistance to domination. Against a backdrop of dominant media representations of oppressed and passive Muslim women, the media interventions of the exceptional women artists whose voices are showcased in this book, demonstrate that Muslim women are diverse and autonomous agents who have, historically, and continue contemporarily, to fight against all forms of injustice including those that seek to circumscribe their realities and experiences. To explore expressions and articulations of alternative discourses, this book analyzes the media texts of exceptional women artists: the stand-up comedy of Palestinian-American Maysoon Zayid, the cinematic interventions of Iranian-American Shirin Neshat, and the television comedy of Pakistani-Canadian Zarqa Nawaz. Using a methodology consisting of a textual analysis grounded in the theoretical framework of postcolonial theory and informed by gender studies and alternative media research, the analysis is supplemented with semi-structured interviews with the artists. This book is suitable for scholars and students in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Politics.

This book provides a bottom-up contribution to contemporary political and cultural theory, by presenting leisure activities as a democratic arena. Where much of the existing literature on leisure and play views participants as consumers, Kjolsrod presents these people as producers, who conduct micro-processes of social protection, become informed and skilled, and achieve influence via complex leisure. Through an in-depth analysis of a range of leisure practices, this book demonstrates where players belong in the political landscapes of modern democracies. Leisure as Source of Knowledge, Social Resilience and Public Commitment will be of interest to students and scholars of leisure, recreational, and cultural studies, as well as sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists studying identity construction, emerging social worlds, and novel channels of political participation in contemporary society.

Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how 'spirituality' has emerged as a relatively 'silent' category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality. This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

This book argues the crucial role of culture and cultural policies in defining the notion of urban citizenship in Barcelona since 1979. Through analysis of official documents, municipal publicity campaigns, sport - including the Olympic Games and Barcelona F.C - and film, Balibrea makes sense of the city as a global cultural destination and reveals how such transformation impacts local inhabitants. Scrutinizing municipal discourses on culture from the late 1970s, this interdisciplinary work unveils how ideas of the function and nature of citizenship articulate changing definitions of the city, from model to brand. Over the course of topics such as: tourism, social democracy and urban regeneration, Balibrea constructs an original argument for how the Barcelona image mobilizes neoliberal fantasies of subject transformation. A wide-ranging study, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban geography, sociology and cultural studies.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two "others." The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the "others" of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the "other" of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.

How to study the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world? Obviously, their relationship is not an empirical datum, liable to the procedures of verification or of logical deduction. We are in need of alternative conceptual and methodological tools. This volume argues that the concept of 'social imaginary' as it is used by Charles Taylor, is of utmost importance as a methodological tool to understand these dynamics. The first section is dedicated to the conceptual clarification of Taylor's notion of social imaginaries both through a historical study of their genealogy and through conceptual analysis. In the second section, we clarify the relation of 'social imaginaries' to the concept of (religious) worldviewing, understood as a process of truth seeking. Furthermore, we discuss the practical usefulness of the concept of social imaginaries for cultural scientists, by focusing on the concept of human rights as a secular social imaginary. In the third and final section, we relate Taylor's view on the role of social imaginaries and the new paths it opens up for religious studies to other analyses of the secular-religious divide, as they nowadays mainly come to the fore in the debates on what is coined as the 'post-secular.'

This book draws upon a range of theoretical and empirical research to explore contemporary debates about police leadership. Focusing upon leadership styles, ethics, integrity and professionalism, workforce diversity, legitimacy and accountability, it reviews the changing context and nature of leadership over time and explores the gains, losses, tensions and challenges that different leadership models bring to policing. Leadership is present at various levels within the police service and this collection reflects upon appropriate leadership qualities and requirements for different roles and at different ranks. The book also considers the difference between leadership and management in an attempt to capture fuller debates within police leadership. Part one surmises the contextual backdrop to current thinking and the primary challenges facing leadership in the police service. Part two highlights the changing face of leadership through an exploration of the call for greater diversity within the ranks of police leadership, and the final section examines police leadership beyond England and Wales. Through this, Police Leadership explores how the challenges facing police leadership in England and Wales share similarities with those in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Greece, North America, and Australia in the face of the pressures of political and economic uncertainty.

This book studies the Japanese-American coffee farmers in Kona, Hawaii. Specifically, it sheds light on the role of first and second generation immigrants in the emergence of the Kona coffee agricultural economy, as well as factors that contributed to the creation of the Japanese community in Kona. The people there have survived much turmoil, including harsh treatment on the sugar plantations, economic instability, Pearl Harbor and racial stigma, and ethnic and religious identity crises. Despite these challenges, the pillars of the Japanese coffee community have remained stable.

This edited collection explores different strands of social constructionist theory and methods to provide a critique of the prevailing discourse of work stress, and introduces a radical new approach to conceptualizing suffering at work. Over the last three decades, stress and other forms of suffering at work (including burn-out, bullying, and issues relating to work-life balance) have emerged as important social and medical problems in Western countries. However, stress is a contested category, not (as many argue) a well-defined clinical, biological and psychological state that affects people in the same way in different cultures and at different times. Thus, a social constructionist perspective helps to shed light on new approaches to prevention and interventions of work stress. This book will be of great interest for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social history, history of science, psychology, communication and management, as well as to practitioners (doctors and psychologists), policy makers and employers.