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It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the
world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same
physical shape-where, for example, a song is sung or a story
retold. It is another thing altogether, as Greg Urban demonstrates,
to think about cultural motion when something new is created-a new
song or a new story. And this, the creating of new culture, is the
overarching value of the contemporary world, as well as the guiding
principle of the capitalist entrepreneur. From the Declaration of
Independence to the movie Babe, from the Amazon River to the film
studio, from microscopic studies of the words making up myths and
books to the large-scale forces of conquest, conversion, and
globalization that drive history, Urban follows the clues to a
startling revelation: "metaculture" makes the modern,
entrepreneurial form of culture possible. In Urban's work we see
how metaculture, in its relationship to newness, explains the
peculiar shape of modern society and its institutions, from the
prevalence of taste and choice to the processes of the public
sphere, to the centrality of persuasion and hegemony within the
nation.
President Theodore Roosevelt once proclaimed, "Great corporations
exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our
institutions, and it is therefore our right and duty to see that
they work in harmony with those institutions." But while
corporations are ostensibly regulated by citizens through their
governments, the firms in turn regulate many aspects of social and
political life for individuals beyond their own employees and the
communities that support them. Corporations are endowed with many
of the same rights as citizens, such as freedom of speech, but are
not themselves typically constituted around ideals of national
belonging and democracy. In the wake of the global financial
collapse of 2008, the question of what relationship corporations
should have to governing institutions has only increased in
urgency. As a democratically sanctioned social institution, should
a corporation operate primarily toward profit accumulation or
should its proper goal be to provision society with needed goods
and services? Corporations and Citizenship addresses the role of
modern for-profit corporations as a distinctive kind of social
formation within democratic national states. Scholars of legal
studies, business ethics, politics, history, and anthropology bring
their perspectives to bear on particular case studies, such as
Enron and Wall Street, as well as broader issues of belonging,
social responsibility, for-profit higher education, and regulation.
Together, these essays establish a complex and detailed
understanding of the ways corporations contribute positively to
human well-being as well as the dangers that they pose.
Contributors: Joel Bakan, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Cynthia
Estlund, Louis Galambos, Rosalie Genova, Peter Gourevitch, Karen
Ho, Nien-he Hsieh, Walter Licht, Jonathan R. Macey, Hirokazu
Miyazaki, Lynn Sharp Paine, Katharina Pistor, Amy J. Sepinwall,
Jeffery Smith, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, Greg Urban.
Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society Starting
with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in
discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg
Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation.
His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more
prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to
radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western
thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and
the understandings we form of them. Metaphysical Community proposes
that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of
discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its
sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This
insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the
uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena
and noumena. Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie
social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences
and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all
those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary
criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.
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