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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions
This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel
synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece.
It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties
southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how
processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular
religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in
Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil
eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality
in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant
research themes, including lived and vernacular religion,
alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and
religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social
scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while
engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical
directions. It contributes to current key debates in social
sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious
pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement,
gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative
therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the
spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of
religion in a multicultural world.
In the neoliberal world, rising individualism has frequently been
linked to rising inequality. Drawing on social theory, philosophy,
history, institutional research and a wealth of contemporary
empirical data, this innovative book analyzes the tangled
relationship between individualism and inequality and explores the
possibilities of rediscovering individualism's revolutionary
potential. Ralph Fevre demonstrates that a belief in individual
self-determination powered the development of human rights and
inspired social movements from anti-slavery to socialism, feminism
and anti-racism. At the same time, every attempt to embed
individualism in systems of education and employment has eventually
led to increased social inequality. The book discusses influential
thinkers, from Adam Smith to Herbert Spencer and John Dewey, as
well as the persistence of discrimination despite equality laws,
management and the transformation of individualism, individualism
in work and mental illness, work insecurity and intensification.
This multi-disciplinary book will be essential reading for students
and scholars of sociology, economics, philosophy, political
science, management science and public policy studies, among other
subjects. It will also be of use to policymakers and those who want
to know how the culture and politics of the neoliberal world are
unfolding.
Technology is rapidly advancing, and each innovation provides
opportunities for such technology to mesh with the human enactment
of physical intimacy or to be used in the quest for information
about sexuality. However, the availability of this technology has
complicated sexual decision making for young adults as they
continually navigate their sexual identity, orientation, behavior,
and community. Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age is a
pivotal reference source that improves the understanding of the
combination of technology and sexual decision making for young
adults, examining the role of technology in sexual identity
formation, sexual communication, relationship formation and
dissolution, and sexual learning and online sexual communities and
activism. While highlighting topics such as privacy management,
cyber intimacy, and digital communications, this book is ideally
designed for therapists, social workers, sociologists,
psychologists, counselors, healthcare professionals, scholars,
researchers, and students.
This issue moves beyond the binary of life and death to explore how
the gray areas in between-precarious life, slow death-call into
question assumptions about the social in social theory. In these
"collateral afterworlds," where the line between life and death is
blurred, the presumed attachments of sociality to life and solitude
to death are no longer reliable. The contributors focus on the
daily experiences of enduring a difficult present unhinged from any
redeeming future, addressing topics such as drug treatment centers
in Mexico City, solitary death in Japan, Inuit colonial violence,
human regard for animal life in India, and intimacies forged
between grievously wounded soldiers. Engaging history, film,
ethics, and poetics, the contributors explore the modes of
intimacy, obligation, and ethical investment that arise in these
spaces. Contributors. Anne Alison, Naisargi N. Dave, Angela Garcia,
Fady Joudah, Julie Livingston, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Solmaz
Sharif, Lisa Stevenson, Zoe H. Wool
In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J.
Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana's remarkably diverse
cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections
between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the
Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals
adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state's
folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates
how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation
as well as contact among cultural communities. In particular, he
examines the ways in which collective traumas experienced by
Louisiana's major ethnic groups-slavery, the grand d? (R)rangement,
linguistic discrimination-resulted in fundamental changes in these
folktales in relation to their European and African counterparts.
Rabalais points to the development of an altered moral economy in
Cajun and Creole folktales. Conventional heroic qualities, such as
physical strength, are subverted in Louisiana folklore in favor of
wit and cunning. Analyses of Black Creole animal tales like those
of Bouki et Lapin and Tortie demonstrate the trickster hero's
ability to overcome both literal and symbolic entrapment through
cleverness. Some elements of Louisiana's folklore tradition, such
as the rougarou and cauchemar, remain an integral presence in the
state's cultural landscape, apparent in humor, popular culture,
regional branding, and children's books. Through its adaptive use
of folklore, French and Creole Louisiana will continue to retell
old stories in innovative ways as well as create new stories for
future generations.
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