Cultural Residues

Download or read book Cultural Residues written by Nelly Richard and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complex portrait of postdictatorial Chile by one of that country's most incisive cultural critics, this book uses memoirs, photographs, the plastic arts, novels, and other texts--the "residues" of a culture--to analyze the political-cultural Chilean landscape in the wake of Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year military rule. Such residual areas reveal the flaws and lapses in Chile's transition from violent military dictatorship to electoral democracy. Nelly Richard's analysis ranges from an exploration of false memories of the recent past--especially memories of violence--to a discussion of the university under neoliberalism; from debates about the use of the word "gender" to an examination of refractory texts and cultural activities such as Diamela Eltit's "testimonio" of a schizophrenic vagabond, Eugenio Dittborn's use of photography in art installations, and transvestite performances. In "Cultural Residues, each instance becomes a suggestive metaphor for understanding a rapidly modernizing Chile attempting to redemocratize its public life.

Download or read book Race, Class, and Culture written by Robert C. Smith and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1992-07-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race is arguably the most profound and enduring cleavage in American society and politics. This book examines the sources and dynamics of the race cleavage in American society through a detailed analysis of intergroup and intragroup differences at the level of mass opinion. The ethclass theory, which examines the intersection of ethnicity and class, is used to analyze interracial differences in mass attitudes. This analysis yields three clusters of opinion that distinguish African Americans from whites — religiosity, interpersonal alienation, and political liberalism. The authors then examine the intragroup sources of these opinion differences among blacks in terms of class, gender, age, region, and religion. While the authors demonstrate an embryonic trend of more black middle class opinion agreement with whites, the book confirms the ethclass character of the black experience whereby race and race consciousness are still more significant than class in shaping black attitudes. Given the growing class bifurcation in black America and the continuing debate about its significance in shaping black attitudes and behavior, this book offers a refreshing new analysis of the homogeneity as well as heterogeneity of black mass public opinion.

Download or read book Theatre and Residual Culture written by Christopher Collins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-29 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in Synge’s plays and performances. By dramatising a residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be “modern” at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book draws extensively on Synge’s archive to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget. Each of Synge’s plays is considered in an individual chapter, and they identify how Synge’s dramaturgy was informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual.

Download or read book Cultural Beings written by Yuval Lurie and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human beings are a cultural species. This predicament enables them to take on many different cultural identities, all of which transcend the bounds of natural behavior of other species. To contemplate this predicament through philosophy is to reflect on such questions as, What makes cultural forms of life possible? What is encompassed in them? What lies at their core? What distinguishes them from natural forms of life? What brings them about, sustains, and causes them to change? Philosophical answers to these questions predate abstract ways of thinking, as they are sometimes embedded in ancient mythical and religious narratives. Such is the story told in the first three chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible, revealing how human beings became the cultural beings that they are. This study suggests how that ancient and most celebrated story in the literature of the West may be read as harboring insightful philosophical observations on the cultural nature of human beings. It first focuses on the very concept of cultural forms of life, revealing its complicated conceptual links to natural forms of life. It then offers an interpretive framework for reading mythical, symbolic narratives. Using these ideas, it provides a philosophical reading of the Biblical narrative, disclosing it to harbor a metaphysically oriented conception of nature and two insightful philosophical overviews of the cultural nature of human beings. Both overviews endow human beings with an ability to manipulate nature, but in different ways: the first by subjugating parcels of nature to human will; the second by subjugating human beings themselves to a value-laden conception of things and ethical forms of life. Thus, human beings are portrayed as natural creatures possessed of a cultural nature that enables them to transform nature and recreate themselves through their unique cultural predicament.

Download or read book Academic Culture: An Analytical Framework for Understanding Academic Work written by Kazumi Okamoto and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That we live in a world ruled and confused by cultural diversity has become common sense. The social sciences gave birth to a new theoretical paradigm, the creation of cultural theories. Since then, social science theorizing applies to any social phenomenon across the world exploring cultural diversities in any social practice—except the social sciences and how they create knowledge, which is is off limits. Social science theorizing seemingly assumes that creating knowledge does not know such diversities. In this book, Kazumi Okamoto develops analytical tools to study academic culture, analyze how social sciences create and distribute knowledge, and the influence the academic environment has on knowledge production. She uses the academy in Japan as a case study of how social scientists interpret academic practices and how they are affected by their academic environment. Studying Japanese academic culture, she reveals that academic practices and the academic environment in Japan show much less diversity than cultural theories tend to presuppose.

Download or read book Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture written by Laszlo Muntean and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality, this book applies recent theories of new materialism to explore the material dimension of memory in art and popular culture. The book’s underlying premise is twofold: on the one hand, memory is performed, mediated, and stored through the material world that surrounds us; on the other hand, inanimate objects and things also have agency on their own, which affects practices of memory, as well as forgetting. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Download or read book J.J. Smolicz on Education and Culture written by Jerzy Jaroslaw Smolicz and published by James Nicholas Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a selection of major articles by the author and focuses on cultural diversity in Australia, core values and cultural interaction, case studies in Australian pluralism and the interplay between tradition, education and change.