Cultures And Beyond

Download or read book Cultures and Beyond written by Randy Ellefson and published by . This book was released on 2018-12-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written to help fantasy and science fiction storytellers, game designers, gamers, and hobbyists, Cultures and Beyond (The Art of World Building, #3) is a how-to guide for filling an imaginary world with fascinating societies. It includes chapters on creating cultures, calendars, monetary systems, military groups, religions, the supernatural, systems of magic, magic items, names, and more. You'll also learn how to leverage real world cultures while making them seem original. Even those who've never invented a world will soon be masters as the authors decades of experience walk you through using pre-made templates that make world building faster, better, and easier to complete.Understand how to use analogues to quickly build unique societies based on Earth. Invent interesting crimes and punishments that involve imaginary creatures or technologies. Create currencies for different places while keeping them easy for your audience to fathom. Master the art of creating naming styles for different societies. Fashion new military groups in gritty detail. Dream up sensible rules for magic, its practitioners, the supernatural and what happens when things go wrong. Learn what kind of files you'll need to create, how to organize them, and get jump started with the free templates you'll use again and again.Cultures and Beyond is the third volume in The Art of World Building, the only multi-volume series of its kind. Readers will learn how much world building to do for each scenario they encounter and whether the effort will be rewarding for them and their audience.

Download or read book Beyond Culture written by Edward T. Hall and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1976-12-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a renowned American anthropologist comes a proud celebration of human capacities. For too long, people have taken their own ways of life for granted, ignoring the vast, international cultural community that srrounds them. Humankind must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, to the discovery of a lost self a sense of perspective. By holding up a mirror, Hall permits us to see the awesome grip of unconscious culture. With concrete examples ranging from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the mating habits of the bowerbird of New Guinea, Hall shows us ourselves. Beyond Culture is a book about self-discovery; it is a voyage we all must embark on if mankind is to survive. "Fascinating and emotionally challenging. . . . The book's graceful, non-technical style and the many illuminating, real-life illustrations make it a delight to read." —Library Journal "Hall's book helps us to rethink our values. . . . We come away from it exhilarated." —Ashley Montagu "In this penetrating analysis of the culturally determined yet 'unconscious' attitudes that mold our thought, feeling, communication and behavior. . . . Hall makes explicit taken-for-granted linguistic patterns, body rhythms, personality dynamics, educational goals. . . . Many of Hall's ideas are original and incisive . . . [and] should reward careful readers with new ways of thinking about themselves and others." —Publishers Weekly "A fascintaing book which stands beside The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language to prove Hall one of the most original anthropologists of our era." —Paul Bohannan

Download or read book Beyond Nature and Culture written by Philippe Descola and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies” —animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. “A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might go—and what we might imagine in its place.” —Somatosphere “The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale.” —Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “Descola’s challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Download or read book Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond written by Eric Adler and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scrutinizes the contentious ideological feuds in American academia during the 1980s and 1990s

Download or read book Reading Beyond the Book written by Danielle Fuller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers. The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring attraction of an old technology for readers, community organizers, and government agencies, exploring the social practices inspired by the sharing of books in public spaces and revealing the complex ideological investments made by readers, cultural workers, institutions, and the mass media in the meanings of reading.

Download or read book Anthropology Beyond Culture written by Richard G. Fox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture is a vexed concept within anthropology. From their earliest studies, anthropologists have often noted the emotional attachment of people to their customs, even in cases where this loyalty can make for problems. Do anthropologists now suffer the same kind of disability with respect to their continuing emotional attachment to the concept of culture? This book considers the state of the culture concept in anthropology and finds fault with a ‘love it or leave it' attitude. Rather than pledging undying allegiance or summarily dismissing it, the volume argues that anthropology can continue with or without a concept of culture, depending on the research questions being asked, and, furthermore, that when culture is retained, no single definition of it is practical or necessary.Offering sensible solutions to a topic of hot debate, this book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to learn what a concept of culture can offer anthropology, and what anthropology can offer the concept of culture.

Download or read book Beyond Human Nature written by Jesse J Prinz and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.