|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
For its millions of readers, the "National Geographic" has long
been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this
fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz
and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in
purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us
much more about our own.
Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to
investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select
images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures.
Through interviews with the editors, they describe the process as
one of negotiating standards of "balance" and "objectivity,"
informational content and visual beauty. Then, in a close reading
of some six hundred photographs, they examine issues of race,
gender, privilege, progress, and modernity through an analysis of
the way such things as color, pose, framing, and vantage point are
used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, through
extensive interviews with readers, the authors assess how the
cultural narratives of the magazine are received and interpreted,
and identify a tension between the desire to know about other
peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class
American values.
The result is a complex portrait of an institution and its role in
promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges
universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers
to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We
see the magazine and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of
taste, wealth, and power in America, and we get a telling glimpse
into middle-class American culture and allthe wishes, assumptions,
and fears it brings to bear on our armchair explorations of the
world.
<div>"An outstanding contribution to psychological
anthropology. Its excellent ethnography and its provocative theory
make it essential reading for all those concerned with the
understanding of human emotions."—Karl G. Heider,
<i>American Anthropologist</i></div>
A look at Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg, that poses the question,"Are we all military dependents?" Fayetteville has earned the nicknames of Fatalville and Fayettenam. Unusual and not-sounusual features of the town include gross income inequalities, an extraordinarily high incidence of venereal disease, miles and miles of strip malls, and a history of racial violence. Through interviews with residents and historical research, Catherine Lutz immerses herself in the life of the town to discover how it has supported the military for over a century. From secret training operations that use civilians as mock enemies and allies to the satellite economy of the town, Lutz"s history of Fayetteville reveals the burdens that military preparedness creates for all of us. "Any reader will find [Lutz"s] conclusions . . . provocative. --Publishers Weekly "Rich in storytelling, history, and political commentary, with implications far beyond Fayetteville." --Michael Sherry, author of In the Shadow of War "In no small part, Homefront chronicles Fayetteville through the trials and triumphs of the downtrodden, the underdogs and the disfranchised." --Greg Barnes, Fayetteville Observer "First rate." --Louis B. Cei, Richmond Times Dispatch "Penetrating." --Ann Jarmusch, San Diego Union-Tribune Catherine A. Lutz is professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Unnatural Emotions and coauthor, with Jane L. Collins, of Reading National Geographic.
The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal
since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and
Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its
early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the
study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing
practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a
number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience
and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were
fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the
psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of
cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity
have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to
treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological
anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of
cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are
all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and
they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the
book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology,
psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been
integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being
transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and
communicative practice.
Emotions have long been a central concern in philosophy,
psychological and sociological studies. When anthropologists began
to study emotion, they challenged many assumptions shared by
Western academics and lay persons by exposing the cultural
variability of emotional meanings. In this collection of original
essays by anthropologists concerned with the relationship of
language and emotion, it is argued that the key focus to the study
of emotion might be the politics of social life rather than the
psychology of the individual. Through close studies of talk about
emotion and emotional discourses in social contexts from poetry and
song to therapeutic narratives, scholars who have worked in India,
Fiji, the United States, Egypt, Senegal and the Solomon Islands
show how emotion is tied to politics of everyday interaction. Their
arguments and cross-cultural findings will intrigue and provoke
anyone who has thought about the relationship between emotion,
language and social life. The book will be of special interest to
those who find the boundaries between cultural, psychological and
linguistic anthropology, sociology, cross-cultural psychiatry, and
social psychology too confining.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Personal Shopper
Kristen Stewart, Nora von Waldstätten, …
DVD
R86
Discovery Miles 860
|