This study is an attempt to locate the practice of consumption within more general strategies of social self-definition. The essays in this volume are addressed to the understanding of consumption in terms of a larger matrix of social identity and the cultural strategies connected with it. The present volume focuses upon the relation between consumption and culturally specific strategies for self-definition, both on an individual and a group basis. Many of the essays are explicit attempts to deal with the complex articulation of modern commodities and "non-modern" modes of appropriation. The papers reflect and engage recent developments in anthropology such as the growing interest in personhood expressed in the numerous works of cultural psychology, and an increasing emphasis on the re-envisioning of culture as continually constructed in socially differentiated practice. As such, these papers deal with consumption as part of the practice of social identity and the construction of culturally specific forms of life.

This study is an attempt to locate the practice of consumption within more general strategies of social self-definition. The essays in this volume are addressed to the understanding of consumption in terms of a larger matrix of social identity and the cultural strategies connected with it. The present volume focuses upon the relation between consumption and culturally specific strategies for self-definition, both on an individual and a group basis. Many of the essays are explicit attempts to deal with the complex articulation of modern commodities and "non-modern" modes of appropriation. The papers reflect and engage recent developments in anthropology such as the growing interest in personhood expressed in the numerous works of cultural psychology, and an increasing emphasis on the re-envisioning of culture as continually constructed in socially differentiated practice. As such, these papers deal with consumption as part of the practice of social identity and the construction of culturally specific forms of life.

This extraordinary book presents a refreshing and innovative overview of the changes to the global system over the last 5000 years. Featuring renowned contributors - each specialists in their field - this is the only volume to offer so c-oordinated a study of continuity and change in the global social, economic and political system. Key areas covered include:
· International Political Economy - Denemark
· Archaeology - Jonathan Freidman
· Economic development - Andre Gunder Frank
· History - George Modelski
· Sociology - Christopher Chase-Dunn


eBook available with sample pages: 0203467701

No other volume offer so coordinated a picture of the issues of the prospects for the unified study of world system history. The kind of transdisciplinary cooperation needed to make sense of our complex world is made clear through the range of contributors' perspectives, Jonathan Freidman's archaeology to Andre Gunder Frank's economic development, George Modelski's history to Christopher Chase-Dunn's sociology. This extraordinary book shows that in order to understand contemporary issues we must study the long term history of the world system. It will be a vital overview of perspective on the history of the world system for all graduates and researcher in a variety of fields such as international political economy, world history and sociology.

Although the United States is currently the world's only military and economic superpower, the nation's superpower status may not last. The possible futures of the global system and the role of U.S. power are illuminated by careful study of the past. This book addresses the problems of conceptualizing and assessing hegemonic rise and decline in comparative and historical perspective. Several chapters are devoted to the study of hegemony in premodern world-systems. And several chapters scrutinize the contemporary position and trajectory of the United States in the larger world-system in comparison with the rise and decline of earlier great powers, such as the Dutch and British empires. Contributors: Kasja Ekholm, Johnny Persson, Norihisa Yamashita, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Karen Barkey, Jonathan Friedman, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rebecca Giem, Andrew Jorgenson, John Rogers, Shoon Lio, Thomas Reifer, Peter Taylor, Albert Bergesen, Omar Lizardo, Thomas D. Hall.

Although the United States is currently the world's only military and economic superpower, the nation's superpower status may not last. The possible futures of the global system and the role of U.S. power are illuminated by careful study of the past. This book addresses the problems of conceptualizing and assessing hegemonic rise and decline in comparative and historical perspective. Several chapters are devoted to the study of hegemony in premodern world-systems. And several chapters scrutinize the contemporary position and trajectory of the United States in the larger world-system in comparison with the rise and decline of earlier great powers, such as the Dutch and British empires. Contributors: Kasja Ekholm, Johnny Persson, Norihisa Yamashita, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Karen Barkey, Jonathan Friedman, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rebecca Giem, Andrew Jorgenson, John Rogers, Shoon Lio, Thomas Reifer, Peter Taylor, Albert Bergesen, Omar Lizardo, Thomas D. Hall.

The first edition of System, Structure, and Contradiction was an important step in merging the materialist determinism of the structuralist Marxists with the cultural, ideological approach favored by anthropologists. By reconciling these two traditionally warring schools of thought, the author provided a more nuanced understanding of the various factors that drive social change and social complexity. Though viewed through the lens of an ethnographic and historical case study of the Kachin of Burman, Friedman's theory has had a major impact on the work of archaeologists, anthropologists, world-systems scholars, and Marxist theorists alike. This new edition of Friedman's much-cited work contains the full text of the original volume (never published in North America) along with two related articles by the author, and a comprehensive new introduction that brings his theoretical notions, and the debate over this book, to the present. A classic work of anthropological and social theory, it will be of interest to scholars and their advanced students in anthropology and related disciplines.

This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and at specific critical historical conjunctures at which new elites attempt to redefine social reality. Focusing on the crises over the last thirty years of immigration and multiculturalist politics in Sweden, the book examines cases, some in which the author was himself involved, but also comparative material from other countries.

The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside, or marginal to, Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued). The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.

Historical Transformations represents the work of two distinguished anthropologists over three decades on the history and importance of global thinking in the social sciences. The authors consider numerous examples for which local phenomena can only be understood within the contexts of global systems. Their multidisciplinary work touches on many aspects of social and individual life as well as long-term historical processes.

Diasporas have become a visible phenomenon of our world. Wherever we go in the major metropolitan world centres, we run into not only China and India "Towns", but we also witness the individual faces of old and recent immigrants from a variety of other nations flooding the airports, shopping centres and city parks. The impact of these "worlds on the move" on globalisation, migration and identity negotiations is the subject matter of this book.

The organization 'Genocide Watch' estimates that 100 million civilians around the globe have lost their lives as a result of genocide in only the past sixty years. Over the same period, the visual arts in the form of documentary footage has aided international efforts to document genocide and prosecute those responsible, but this book argues that fictional representation occupies an equally important and problematic place in the process of shaping minds on the subject. Edited by two of the leading experts in the field, The History of Genocide in Cinema analyzes fictional and semi-fictional portrayals of genocide, focusing on, amongst others, the repression of indigenous populations in Australia, the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century, the Herero genocide, Armenia, the Holodomor (Stalin's policy of starvation in Ukraine), the Nazi Holocaust, Nanking and Darfur. Comprehensive and unique in its focus on fiction films, as opposed to documentaries, The History of Genocide in Cinema is an essential resource for students and researchers in the fields of cultural history, holocaust studies and the history of film.

Historical Transformations represents the work of two distinguished anthropologists over three decades on the history and importance of global thinking in the social sciences. The authors consider numerous examples for which local phenomena can only be understood within the contexts of global systems. Their multidisciplinary work touches on many aspects of social and individual life as well as long-term historical processes.

In Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization, two distinguished anthropologists look at how global processes have shaped the emergence of our dynamic and often difficult and contradictory modern world. The authors are particularly interested in structures that link individual human beings to more general social transformations. This book is a synthesis of the Friedmans' decades-long anthropological research into the human consequences-whether for good or bad-of globalization.

In Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization, two distinguished anthropologists look at how global processes have shaped the emergence of our dynamic and often difficult and contradictory modern world. The authors are particularly interested in structures that link individual human beings to more general social transformations. This book is a synthesis of the Friedmans' decades-long anthropological research into the human consequences-whether for good or bad-of globalization.

Friedman and a distinguished group of contributors offer a compelling analysis of globalization and the lethal explosiveness that characterizes the current world order. In particular, they investigate global processes and political forces that determine networks of crime, commerce and terror, and reveal the economic, social and cultural fragmentation of transnational networks. In a critical introduction, Friedman evaluates how transnational capital represents a truly global force, but geographical decentralization of accumulation still leads to declining state hegemony in some areas and increasing hegemony in others. The authors examine the growth and increasing autonomy of indigenous populations, and the massively destabililizing effect of migration processes. They describe the rapid increase in criminalization of ethnic and immigrant groups as well as an increase in class stratification, creating new forms of social confrontation and violence. In addition to ethnic, identity-based conflict there are analyses of transnational criminal networks, which also represents disintegration of larger homogeneous territories or hierarchical orders. The authors ask us to reevaluate the dynamics of globalization the contradictions of centralization and fragmentation around the world as we discover how best to transform these conditions for the future. This research was originally funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Globalization, the State and Violence will be a valuable reference in anthropology, social theory, international politics and economics, ethnic conflict, immigration, and economic history.

This ambitious work provides a unique statement on the question of place-based activism and its relationship to powerful forces of international capital. Arguing that specific places around the world are sites for the defense and enhancement of daily life in the context of rapidly expanding global technologies and investment options, the contributors reach for a vision of social development that supports sustainable, humane cultures. Bringing together the local and the global, this work provides the first sustained linkage of ethnic groups in diaspora to macrocosmic processes of world capital that inevitably reach down to mediate even the most local experiences. The essays, ranging in their discussion of place from Los Angeles and New York to New Zealand and Indonesia, offer both reasoned argument and authoritiative information on how local experience interacts with larger processes of global capital and the diasporic phenomenon. The book will be an invaluable resource and launching point for scholars and students in ethnic and identity studies and will interest all readers exploring the production of place and identification.

" The Lion and the Star not only offers an informed glimpse into the intricacies of daily German life but also confirms the continuing danger of making sweeping generalizations about German Jews and non-Jews. In the aftermath of World War II, many viewed the Third Reich as an aberration in German history and laid blame with Hitler and his followers. Since the 1960s, historians have widened their focus, implicating "ordinary" Germans in the demise of German Jewry. Jonathan Friedman addresses this issue by investigation everyday relations between German Jews and their Gentile neighbors. Friedman examines three German communities of different sizes -- Frankfurt am Main, Giessen, and Geisenheim. Symbolized by the Hessian heraldic lion, these communities represent a cross-section of both Gentile and Jewish society in Germany during the Weimar and Nazi years. Researching in the United States, Germany, England, and Israel, he gleaned information from interviews, memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers, church and synagogue records, censuses, government documents, and reports from Nazi and resistance organizations. Friedman's comparative analysis offers a balanced response to recent scholarly works condemning the entire German people for their complicity in the Holocaust.

Drawing on ideas ranging from world systems theory to postmodernism, Cultural Identity and Global Process analyzes the relations between the global and the local to show how cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are equally constitutive trends of global reality. Illustrating his thesis with examples from a variety of theoretical sources, ethnographic accounts, and historical eras, Jonathan Friedman considers elements as disparate as the cultural formations of ancient Greece, contemporary processes of Hawaiian cultural identification, and the Congolese internalization of modernity evidenced in beauty cults. Throughout his work, the author examines the interdependency of the world market and local cultural transformations, demonstrating the complex interrelations between globally structured social processes and the organization of identity.