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Face in the Chinese language and culture is a sociological concept that is a composite and unified expression of honor, dignity, self-worth, and prestige given by others and felt by the self in social situations. Face plays a vital role in people's social lives as a cultural value, influencing consumers' reactions and consumption decisions, especially luxury goods. In traditional Chinese culture, the concept of face also includes activities to enhance, protect, and improve reputation and prestige. With the development of the economy and society, conspicuous consumption with face as the core has become an everyday activity in China, providing a new research topic for academic studies. This paper examines the consumption of rock tea and its relationship with face through business ethnography to reveal the deeper connection between face culture and conspicuous consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features Lewis Coser who was born in Berlin, Germany on November 27, 1913 from a privileged Berlin family. Topics discussed include his capacity for cosmopolitan comparison, skilled aesthetic and sociological judgment, how he was a celebrated master in writing interesting and informative review of difficult books and his intellectual achievements especially as a sociologist of culture.

Comments on the paper "The Unfinished Business of Welfare Reform," by Neil Gilbert, which centered on proposals for addressing the burden of teenage parenting in the U.S. in the 1980s. Concerns raised on the unidimensionality that characterizes the analysis of problem evolution and resolution; Influence of ethnic and cultural variations on adolescent family life; Disadvantages of the concept of removing the teenage mother and her infant from their home to a residential facility.

The article comments on Peter Lawler's paper about contemporary Western culture. The dare generated by Lawler's writing is that he positions anyone who disagrees with him as a proponent of indifferent non-judgmentalism, Viagra and tyranny. Lawler's discussion of communism was taken to be largely rhetorical. The argument about the basic commonalities of communism and libertarianism runs aground on the fundamental shoal of private property. Lawler argues that one thing communism and libertarianism share is a utopian sentimentality.

This essay describes the eminent Americanist, critic, and New York intellectual, Alfred Kazin’s creation of a Lionel Trilling “character” in his 1978 autobiography, New York Jew, and his use of that character to critique significant features of the country’s Cold War literary culture. Among these are: the narrowing and hardening of intellectual discourse in a cultural-political climate dominated by the “liberal consensus,” the discrediting of the progressive impulse in American writing, the subordination of “class” to “culture” in evaluations of American writers, and the changing status of Jews and Jewish writers in post-war America. Tapping into strong personal feelings, Kazin creates in Trilling a harsh, thoughtful and compelling portrait of an era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A frustrating feature in the Chinese higher educational landscape is the ubiquitous and appalling lack of student responsiveness in the classroom. Most of the explanations that have been provided for the causes of the unilateralism in the classroom discourse of Chinese higher education have placed under scrutiny various factors, from personal traits of students, such as shyness, to Confucianism. All these explanations attribute this unilateralism to, if not blame it on, the same external factor: the cultural specificity of Chinese college student. Whereas it is right to narrow the search for the causes down to the domain of culture, it does not really make much sense to simply single out parts of the Chinese culture for explanations. Instead of dwelling on specific components of the Chinese culture, the present article proposes drawing the attention to a certain functional mechanism within the culture: self-construal, which is also manifested in other cultures. It argues that the students' minimum discourse performance in Chinese university classrooms can be understood as a result of their semi-conscious act of internal modeling, which entails confirming and reinforcing their identities based on evaluations of the situation and conforming to certain social norms that are prevalent in school. The self-construal in Chinese university classrooms perfectly reflects a kind of power imbalance between the teacher and students, which has a profound shaping force upon the students in their modeling of self-identity in regard to that of the teacher and is not conducive to students' overall development, as it inhibits critical thinking and real academic innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unfortunate admixture of history-blinding 'presentist' bias, exacerbated by today's sound bite culture, academic overspecialization by scholars and professional historians, and polarizing polemics have led to a consensus regarding the topics of Pius XII's conduct toward European Jewry during the fascist era. In the wake of the eightieth anniversary of the July 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Vatican and the Third Reich, the moment is timely to revisit the main issues. This essay re-examines the key arguments, introduces overlooked historical evidence, and considers the reports on Pius XII by prewar and wartime contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most basic and accessible social codes, food has many social and cultural connotations. This article aims to offer a semiotic reading of ordinary Chinese meals. The three-meal structure and four binary oppositions (Cooked/Raw, Fan/Cai, Solids/Liquids, and Vegetable/Meat) are discussed. The laws that govern the Chinese meal system reveal how Chinese people see themselves and others, how they connect the past and present, and how they identify themselves with their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars constitute an endangered species and must be studied as an ecological system. They form a transcultural and transhistorical group. Though generally considered as pathological, their existence is a necessity for the survival of any society. They are now threatened in three ways: by technology, by the university and by the new definitions of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franz Boas is among the most important public intellectuals in American history because the authority of his expertise was joined with the purposes to which he applied his citizenship. His contributions to the discipline of anthropology were as towering as anyone has ever made; he also tapped his scholarly credentials to fight for good causes, such as civil rights and civil liberties. His origins as a Jewish immigrant and his political ideals as a cosmopolitan liberal predisposed him to reject the racialism that dominated late-nineteenth-century thought, and to advance an alternative social science that would be unpolluted by condescension towards lesser breeds. So persuasive was his research that a paradigm shift occurred; and buttressed with the authority of scholarship, Boas was decisive in changing public discourse on the often radioactive subject of race. He honored the ideal of the scholar as activist and as social conscience, and virtually no one in modern American history came closer to satisfying that standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meanings and implications of cultural relativism have been debated for decades. Reprising this debate, Roger Sandall offers a pointed critique of the anthropological concept of culture and identifies relativism as the internal and corrosive enemy of the open society. I challenge his reading of our predicament. Considering the work of Franz Boas and his debts to the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, I distance the social science concept of culture from positions—the rejection of standards of truth, beauty, and morality; the belief that cultural value systems and practices are all equally true (or untrue); the valorization of primitivism—that are not intrinsic to it. Next, I consider the use of culture in the “philosophy of primitivism” and its meanings in multiculturalism and identity politics. I argue that many ostensibly relativist claims are used to serve non-relativist agendas, or hide universalistic claims in unstated but essential premises and background assumptions. Rather than a world dominated by relativism, where cultural differences are held to be inviolable and cross-cultural judgments have been rendered impossible, I see something like the reverse. Our problem is not that we overvalue cultural differences but that we underestimate them. Even in our multiculturalism, we imagine a sameness of outlook and aspiration, an unwitting projection of ourselves in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how some prominent figures in American cultural and intellectual life reacted to what was happening to the Jews of Europe and Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and how some of their successors regard the present moment in Jewish life, which is a complex and, in some ways, sharply polarizing one, marked by a high degree of individual comfort, prosperity, and success, on the one hand, and, on the other, by more than a healthy dose of collective anxiety and perceived peril. History never quite duplicates itself, and today's circumstances do not, in fact, closely resemble those of several decades ago. And yet serious challenges once again face the Jews, and they need to be responded to in clear-headed and resolute ways.

This article reflects on the meaning of being a conservative woman after the sexual revolution. If conservatives are right about human nature and the moral order, of course, conservative women who have the courage of their convictions can take comfort of a kind. If indeed family is the solution to the problem of how sexual desire is intended to serve human flourishing, then that solution does not cease to be true because we have failed to uphold it--it has merely fallen into disuse. It needs to be dusted off and burnished. Conservatives, who are always the first to admit the perversity of the human heart, have no excuse for surprise or even gloom at the culture's having strayed, enticed by the liberation conjured up by modern birth control. Rather, they should throw themselves into the work--already admirably joined in many quarters--of holding out to the young the conservative ideal and supporting them in their worthiest aspirations as men and women.

This article looks at three different senses in which museums and historic sites are political. They are: the plainly corrupt and manipulative, the ideologically imposed and the decent but difficult. There are three categories of culture as political: a would-be civilized democracy will not abuse culture for immediate political ends, nor impose its own pre-determined definition of culture on its people. It will be open and demotic, not bullying; and not endlessly relativist or populist or trivial. It will offer perspectives on the better and the best, and its people will be free to be both inside and outside their own cultural overcoats.

The article deals with the concept of culture. Culture by very definition can not be primitive. It is among the highest achievements of mankind. It is not merely descriptive but prescriptive. And it is evaluative, judgmental. It calls attention to standards of tested excellence in art, music and literature, and even to humanist aspirations in social behavior. Culture, with or without life-style, is the demiurge of the times, half-Moloch, half-Leviathan. It feeds the spirit of dynamic economies, and denies others the ethos to survive and flourish. It can lie down and become the culture of the night, of sleeping and the stuff dreams are made of. Culture has become a thing of global magic, with resounding incantatory powers everywhere.

The article explores the workings of contemporary therapeutic culture in Great Britain. An exploration of the workings of contemporary therapeutic ethos inexorably leads to a consideration of the prevailing ideas about human subjectivity and personhood, that is British culture's ethnopsychology. Ideas about the character of personhood, what motivates people to act, how their minds work and how they display their emotions are reflected through a community's ethnopsychology. Therapeutic culture incites people to regard themselves as objects rather than as subjects of their destiny.

This article focuses on the attempt of sociologist David Riesman to understand the culture of modern U.S. All of Riesman's work is shot through with a deep engagement with the problem of freedom and its meaning in American life. In particular, with those areas of freedom that foster autonomy. One of his greatest concerns has been that modern capitalist U.S. had spawned a mass culture that threatens to violate and destroy what he holds most dear: personal autonomy. The pressures of the mass media, of the peer group and of the many identity-groups in the country, he saw relentlessly steering people toward an other-directed conformism that was devastating for any true meaning of freedom. If there is one thing that all the great and small thinkers, and all the great and small leaders of the country from its Founding Fathers onwards are agreed on, it is that freedom is the most cherished ideal and the foundation of the country's greatness. What's more, that U.S. cherishes and experiences freedom more than any other country on earth.

The article presents the author's views on deterioration of the American culture due to racism in sports. White Americans have opinion that most African-Americans are less intelligent, are more likely to use drugs, are violent and more inclined to be violent against women. African-Americans being dominating the sports in America, whites get the chance to talk about athletes in a way that reinforces their views about African-Americans.

Discusses the author's views on culture, the arts and the state in countries such as Great Britain. Arguments against the claim that all cultures are equal; Characteristics of cultural studies; Sense of class in Europe; Kinds of literacy which dominate the thinking of British people.

The article discusses the changing culture of British people in terms of lawsuits and litigations. A drastic increase in the number of inventive lawsuits has been observed in Great Britain. A study found that very few people in Britain sought compensation for suffering injuries in comparison to Australia and the U.S. However, it is becoming fashionable for British adults to revisit past grievances and make them the subject of new compensation claims. Changes in the British civil justice system is encouraging more litigations.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to the article "High Culture as Mass Culture," by Judith R. Blau, published in the May/June 1986 issue of this periodical.

This article discusses the use of direct-satellite television broadcasting as an active threat to the integrity of national cultures. It is hard to take this allegation seriously when there is no imminent prospect of direct-satellite television broadcasts to countries that do not wish to receive them. Other media pose more significant threats to the integrity of national cultures, such as syndicated reruns of television tapes. Nonetheless, many people are alarmed by the prospect of direct-satellite broadcasting and thus it becomes a political, if not physical, reality.

Presents the author's views on a conflict between issues of scholarship, teaching and culture in the U.S. Details of the writings of Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley; Information on a national debate about higher education and the allocation of resources to higher education; Criticism on the emphasis given by the university community on research; Discussion on the claim of critics that teaching is undervalued.

This article focuses on the concept of the culture of war. The culture of war is not like the culture of ordinary peacetime life. It is a culture dominated by fear, blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous results. It is the only culture in which the concept of morale is crucial, and that is a significant point. Morale is crucial in the culture of war because at all times the troops are engaging in activities sure to undermine cheerfulness and hope. Lastly, the culture of war is necessarily adversarial and dualistic.

This article discusses the political system in the U.S. The culture factor had been ignored by U.S. social scientists with interests in international relations research until it was suddenly sprung by some of them in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 to 1990 European revolt against Sovietism as a revolutionary discovery in scholarship. The civilization model for understanding and conducting international relations does not pretend to have anything to do with civilization. It is a paradigm that was fashioned by deconstructing culture as concept and reality.

This article reports on the effects of the decline in mass culture on the ideological polarization of contemporary society. Pop culture is forever, but mass culture is little more than a hundred years old, and it is showing its age. What mass culture gained in cosmopolitanism, it lost in personal relations. Pop culture en masse was no longer intimate or spontaneous, but more and more structured and planned, with a constant search for newer substitutes for the old familiarity of local pop culture forms. Mass culture's tendency to bring diverse people together but to lose the small-town feeling of older popular culture accelerated in the twentieth century.

This article explores the sheer intellectual whimpishness of anthropology. Understanding alien cultures is hard. This is the point of having anthropologists to do it. They take vows, go through awful initiation ceremonies to become members of the tribe and then suffer hardships on the vision quest to understand another culture. Some of their techniques may well be too culture-bound to be helpful. They have to relearn category systems from scratch so as not to distort native meanings. Languages can seem impenetrable barriers. But no one ever said it was easy.

This article examines the role of mass communication in U.S. culture, and the nature of the media system that disseminates the messages. Culture may be defined as the whole body of beliefs, practices and material artifacts that a society uses. contemporary U.S. culture is commercial because, it is produced for sale to meet marketing requirements. In this respect U.S. culture differs from the cultures, in which expression has either been valued as an end in itself or because of its ability to please a patron. Commercial culture is said to perpetuate the existing social and economic structure by making its principles the dominant and unquestioned ideology, suppressing any indications of its evils and impermanence and lulling the masses of the population into a mindless acceptance of the status quo.

Focuses on the effects of state hostility or indifference to the developers of culture in Africa. African countries that have experienced the truncation of their artistic and intellectual potential in the process of nation building; Arrest of Nigerian dramatist Hubert Ogunde for his play "Bread and Bullets"; Contribution of the artist to development of culture in Africa.

The article compares the experiences of American Jews with the social experiences of their coreligionists in other countries. It has been argued that the ability of Jews to do so well in America reflects the fact that Jewish characteristics and values have been especially congruent with the larger culture, that they strongly resemble the modal national pattern. The U.S. began as a new society, formed by settlers in a wilderness. It is the most important country that is not post-feudal. Except for the situation of African Americans, it lacks the experience of fixed social status groups, the caste-like structures that in English are sometimes referred to as estates. Feudal and aristocratic systems require the explicit exhibition of deference to superiors.

This article examines the literary style of narrative accounts about the character, experiences and culture of Indians after World War II. A feature of the storyline about the Indian is arresting for its absence. The narrative is never presented as a whole. Yet the historical and cultural pieces of it do fit together, implying and depending on one another. The formula of the story rests on contrasts, themes, motifs, a double standard moral interpretation, the suppression of logic and critical thinking, selectivity of evidence, and reliance on folk styles of explanation rather than scientific ones. The narrations are factious because they serve to identify and set off as defined adversaries culturally constructed categories of humans.

This article advocates the need for the U.S. to make changes in its policies on politics, economics and culture towards reforms. After eight years of a presidency characterized by considerable accomplishments and also considerable failures, the country stands ready to preserve the former and address the latter. The outstanding successes of the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in reducing unemployment and inflation, for example, represent two areas of economic policy where there is a national consensus to stay the course. But at the same time, and again in the economic policy arena, the failure of the Reagan administration to curb the growth of the national debt by not balancing the budget presents an area where changes in existing policy are clearly recognized as needed. There are two ways in which the change that is underway in the U.S. can be characterized. One way is to focus on the immediate, the short term, the events that appear each day on the pages of the newspapers or on the evening news. Concerns over the federal budget, AIDS, the American addiction to chemicals, or foreign policy toward the Persian Gulf are but a few examples of the topics that dominate public discourse. The second of the undercurrents focuses on why it is that the U.S. seems to be sagging. The changes in the country in these past years--greatly increased national debt, a monthly multi-billion-dollar trade deficit, stagnant growth in productivity, growing gaps in health care coverage for American citizens, and the solidification of a large underclass are but a few examples--give pause to many about the direction the country is headed.

This article discusses alienation and the adversary culture. Alienation has increasingly come to mean an articulated discontent with existing social institutions and prevailing values, or with the gap between the ceremonial values and institutional realities. It is an outlook or state of mind that leads to or entails viewing one's own society with deep misgivings and suspicion; to be estranged means believing that the prevailing social order is deeply flawed, unjust, corrupt, and irrational, calculated to constrain or reduce human satisfactions. Such alienation readily shades into a chronic, low grade moral indignation and awareness of the ubiquitousness of injustice. In the final analysis the disposition to overlook the survival of the adversary culture--or to rejoice in its durability--may be related to broader shifts in the U.S. society over the last quarter-century. These include both changes in the attitude of many elite groups and changes in the general climate of opinion which itself has been sufficiently influenced by the adversary culture to make its discernment as a separate entity more difficult.

This article comments on the status of the performing arts in the U.S. in 1987. Despite the collaborative, social nature of the theater, which naturally militates against the Romantic role of the artist, the artist-as-adversary began to mount the stage in the 1880s. Surely a nation's theatrical art cannot be fixed by tinkering with the flotsam of fashion or even by occasional genius: flaws endemic to its role in the culture should be looked at, spread among not only its artists but its financial backers and its audiences as well. Only through radical reassessment there will find correctives.

The article proposes an approach to consider human sexuality in ways that are responsive to both the sociohistorical process and the necessary understandings that preserve a sense of individually experience lives. Scripts are a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behavior within social life. Most of social life most of the time must operate under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language is a precondition for speech. For behavior to occur, something resembling scripting must occur on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts. The relevance of the three levels of scripting is far from identical in all social settings and for all individuals in any given setting. The scripting of sexual behavior implies a rejection of the idea that the sexual represents a very special, if not unique, quality of motivation.

The article offers news briefs on U.S. social research. Studies have been released attempting to explain the leftist views of university professors, including one by researchers Neil Gross and Solon Simmons and another by researchers David Sloan Wilson and Ingrid Storm. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released a study on religious identity, indicating that American Protestantism is in decline. Statistics on immigration have been released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This article examines the relationship between the High Arts, specifically literature, and the general culture. Certainly, literature is the art most explicitly and openly involved in the exploration of human experience. Whatever some modern theories may argue it has at bottom its own meanings, not simply a series of different meanings drawn from it by whoever reads it. At its height it takes that most everyday tool, language, and transforms it into a way of leaving the everyday, inviting us to observe experience within another, not so contingent, perspective. It has many aspects but the one most pertinent here is its relationship with the moral texture of people's lives.