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What is culture? The history of our discipline – whether we call it ethnology or social anthropology – shows that there is not a constant answer to this question or even a constant object of study. How can we search for a unifying answer to what makes us human even as we observe how immensely varied we are? And how can we explain that such difference is the very core of what makes us similarly human? This book explores the idea of ethnography as a method for understanding cultural flow in particular contexts and suggests that anthropology can do its most important work by tracing the history of social formations. Nothing about culture is static, yet something best-called culture sustains itself over time. At the heart of anthropology is the attempt to understand the concept of culture, even as we continue to challenge its definition in our field. This short volume presents the Jensen Memorial Lectures delivered at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University, Frankfurt, in 2019. The lectures reflect on the current moment in – and the capacity of – contemporary anthropology to consider the discipline's basic premises, through the lens of its classical thinkers. Through a set of four lectures and an introduction, this book takes up anthropology's most basic question – the meaning of culture – and asks how it is that our unique method is able to elicit both fine-grained particularities about specific social orders and speak to the definition of that which makes us human.

One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres's interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of'porosity'to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.Contributors. Andreas Bandak, Jane Bennett, Tom Boylston, Steven D. Brown, Matei Candea, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, David Henig, Michael Jackson, Daniel M. Knight, Celia Lowe, Morten Nielsen, Stavroula Pipyrou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Shryock, Arpad Szakolczai

In this tenth edition of his award-winning introduction, John Storey presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of, and various approaches to, popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly applied across a number of disciplines.Retaining the accessible approach of previous editions and using appropriate examples from the texts and practices of popular culture, this new edition remains a key introduction to the area.New to this edition: updated throughout with contemporary examples of popular culture a chapter called'Culture and nature', which includes sections on culture in nature, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and popular culture and climate change updated student resources at routledgelearning.com/culturaltheoryandpopularculture This new edition remains essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, the sociology of culture, popular culture and other related subjects.

The book deals with what the author calls the new humanities: a broad and diversified front of orientations, directions, and turns grouped around five major currents: the digital humanities, engaged humanities, cognitive humanities, art-based research, and posthumanities. What links these approaches is their opposition toward the principles of the modern theory of humanistic cognition, which appears to be immaterial, external, impersonal, static, and neutral. Against this model, the new humanities posit a different type of cognition: embodied, penetrating the interior of the studied field, personalized (participatory), active (intervening), and situated (engaged). With this significant change, we proceed from the culture of disinterested observation, founded on the myth of contemplative view of the external world, to the real culture of participatory action, which is reconciled with the perspectivity and partiality of the subject's cognitive actions and which paves the way to reality from within and in its own right.

Vorliegender Sammelband widmet sich den politisch sehr heterogenen Europa-Ideen und Liberalismuskonzepten, die von 1900 bis 1950 in Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kulturkritik intensiv diskutiert werden. Die germanistischen, politologischen, ideen- und wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Beiträge entstanden im Zusammenhang eines Forschungsprojekts der Universitäten Heidelberg, Paris-Sorbonne und Venedig, das vom Centre interdisciplinaire d'études et de recherches sur l'Allemagne gefördert wurde. Das Buch befasst sich mit den philosophischen Ursprüngen, intellektuellen Konstellationen und literarischen Artikulationen dieser Europa-Ideen, die den Liberalismus und die Demokratie in einem größeren Zusammenhang mit Kulturdiagnosen der Moderne reflektieren. Gerade in der Zwischenkriegszeit zirkulieren nicht nur pazifistische und demokratische, sondern auch antiliberale und autoritäre Europa-Ideen, die auf den Untergang der Großreiche 1918 mit kontinentalen Größenphantasien reagieren und kaum als demokratische Vorläufer der EU gelten können. Sie werden von der Literatur aufmerksam beobachtet, kommentiert und teils auch in ihr entworfen.

This book seeks to understand culture through the lens of scenes, analyzing them aesthetically and culturally as well as understanding them through the frameworks of gender, social networks, and artworlds. It is common to talk about the cultural and intellectual scenes of early twentieth-century Vienna, the visual art scene of postwar New York, and the music and fashion scene of the swinging London. We often think about artists and works of art as essentially belonging to a certain scene. Scenes might offer a new approach to study what is possible, what is a tradition, and/or to discuss what are the relevant units of contemporary culture for research. The book posits that scenes explain a lot about how the artworld and the cultural field function. Vivienne Westwood, Rene Magritte, Roman Jakobson, Arthur C. Danto, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Didier Eribon are among the figures included in the book, which examines scenes in cities such as Moscow, Bombay, New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Helsinki, and Bratislava. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, philosophy, film, literature, and urban studies.

En fervent défenseur de l'interdisciplinarité, le Professeur Jean-Chrysostome Akenda Kapumba perçoit la philosophie comme « animatrice et médiatrice interdisciplinaire ». Dans cette optique, toute connaissance suppose une culture sous-jacente qui la porte, la féconde et la détermine. C'est que toute culture peut s'apprendre, se développer et se partager. L'étude complexe des perceptions et des interactions entre « nature » et « culture » ne permet pas seulement de démontrer leur unicité, mais aussi de jeter des ponts conceptuels et structurels, permettant d'établir des dénominateurs communs (socles communs de connaissance). En dépit de leur diversité d'approches, l'unité des savoirs en forme de compréhension mutuelle est possible, quitte à échanger sur les différents modes d'approche et de perceptions culturelles de la nature. C'est pourquoi, il est important d'élargir les horizons et de préciser que l'objectif est de mettre en rapport des connaissances transversales, afin de montrer comment elles peuvent se répondre et s'entrenrichir. La capitalisation de ces expériences cognitives implique une nouvelle articulation interdisciplinaire. Par ces mélanges en l'honneur du Professeur Akenda, ce grand philosophe de la modernité africaine, ses anciens étudiants veulent réduire leur « éternelle dette de reconnaissance », tout en s'obligeant à servir de « relais généalogiques et épistémiques ».

This volume addresses, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the philosophical question of how to understand other cultures. It develops an approach to this question that emphasizes the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects, bringing into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural philosophical traditions, notably from Japan, China, India and the West-African Yoruba communities.

In this new and persuasively argued study, philosopher Rod Cameron argues that definitive absolute Idealism changes the definition of logic, annuls ethics, and diminishes objective truth. Entitlement to “logic” is due to knowledge of the logos. The logos is religion and reasoning's common origin. They are thus made compatible. Logic accesses ontology: a metaphysical realm of causation. Logic performs philosophy's missing function: synthesis. The individual and the nation, Cameron argues, share the same essences. This correlation allows the nation to cater to the individual. It answers major political questions and discloses purposefulness in history. Ontology and this teleology define culture, which allows “race” to be categorized as an attribute of culture. Joined to absolute truths, race matters. Defending culture rebuffs both multiculturalism and antiracism. The ability to defeat pseudo-absolutes is vital for our existence and effectively preempts authoritarianism. Those searching for meaning in these troubled times will absorb Cameron's clear exposition of these concepts with great interest.

La Historia Conceptual de Reinhart Koselleck constituye, desde finales del siglo XX, una metodología indispensable de la investigación histórica. El presente volumen colectivo la aplica al análisis de algunos «conceptos fundamentales» de nuestro vocabulario actual que se han gestado en determinadas disputas filosóficas o culturales de la época moderna y contemporánea, y que por su naturaleza intrínsecamente polémica son de por sí polisémicos, es decir, están expuestos a diversas interpretaciones en función de las diferentes experiencias y expectativas que concitan en los distintos hablantes. De este modo, el lector puede encontrar aquí, examinados con precisión y claridad en el momento de su aparición histórica, conceptos básicos de nuestra cultura como ateísmo, panteísmo, positivismo, historicismo, pesimismo, Ilustración, modernidad o psicologismo, entre otros. Mediante su esclarecimiento se pretende así contribuir a un uso social responsable de nuestro lenguaje.

ECN 7 enthält Texte über Mythos, Sprache und Kunst, die Cassirer als zentrale symbolische Formen darstellt. Diese Texte sind entweder im direkten Zusammenhang mit der »Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg«, bzw. dem Warburg Institute (London), entstanden oder greifen in den amerikanischen Jahren Probleme auf, zu deren Behandlung Cassirer durch seine Kontakte zu der Bibliothek angeregt wurde. Der systematische Vortrag »Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture« fasst seine Ansichten über das Verhältnis zwischen Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften zusammen. Inhalt: Begriffs- und Klassenbildung im mythischen und religiösen Denken. Vortrag, Religionswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, Hamburg, 14.7.1921 / Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture (Warburg Institute lecture, 1936) / Language and Art [Für einen Vortrag am 23.3.1942 bei Bryn Mawr College und am 23.4.1942 bei Cornell University] / Language, Myth, Art« (Letztes Sprach-Seminar 11.5.42) / The Educational Value of Art. 10.03.1943 / Beilage: [Materialien zu »Language and Art«

The “idea” of culture comprises almost all human activities, from science to art, from music to microscopy. Does anything important escape the limits of this idea? The authors of this collection argue that all philosophy is really the philosophy of culture, since in some way each and every discipline and subdiscipline is foremost a manifestation of our collective cultural effort. Further, they argue that by engaging with philosophy as a cultural activity and as a discipline to meaningful engage with all dimensions of (inter)cultural life, we can live more meaningful, flourishing, and wisely guided lives.

An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description.

El libro Filosofía, método y otros prismas: Historia y actualidad de los problemas filosóficos tiene, como su nombre indica una perspectiva amplia, plural, abarcadora, aunque su eje central sea la Filosofía. Esta disciplina ha mostrado a lo largo de su historia que, tanto en su dimensión teórica, como en la práctica, puede transformarse, de acuerdo con las diversas preocupaciones de las sociedades y culturas en las que se inserta. Sea como fuere, aunque los prismas en los que se refleja la Filosofía puedan ser muy distintos, y con ello dar pie a la creación de nuevos y variados métodos, los problemas de los que trata la reflexión filosófica tienen unos perfiles definidos, que nos permiten reconocerlos, tanto en el pasado más remoto como en la actualidad.

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres's work in the context of 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres's philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres's unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres's work into a promising philosophy of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres's commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres's philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history and sociology of science. Showing how Serres's philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life.

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy's production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo – not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of “roiling” within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings – writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte.

One of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) made reflection on culture a fundamental part of his academic work. He published a substantial number of papers on the topic, and many of his concepts would go on to significantly influence the social sciences and humanities. Bauman began his theoretical studies on culture when working at the University of Warsaw and continued them all his life. Inspired by the many intellectual currents he encountered over his more than six decades of work, Bauman wrote on culture in the contexts of such issues as Marxism and socialism, modernity and the Holocaust, postmodernity and liquid modernity, and contemporary nostalgia. In Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture Dariusz Brzeziński uses the evolution of Bauman's theory of culture as a prism through which to offer a comparative analysis, putting Bauman's work in conversation with the writings of other contemporary intellectuals.In this first comprehensive and critical assessment of Bauman's lifelong work on culture, Brzeziński includes Bauman's Polish-language papers and books, as well as his works discovered only posthumously, presenting them to an international audience.

Individuals often view'culture'as activities beyond their interests, associating the concept with exclusivity or high art. To be cultured is often synonymous with engaging in physical expressions of art, like opera, a classical music concert, a museum exhibit or a theater performance. While culture does indeed extend to all these things, it is the internal processes of memory, language, imagination and thought that frequently have more significance than any real-world activity. Culture is day-to-day life, ideas, identity and perception. This book investigates the ways in which thought and belief have inspired collective human endeavors and traditions. It brings the act of thinking into focus, outlining its effect on civic development while exploring the history of cultural epistemology. Spanning time periods and geographic regions, chapters derive new meaning from the connections between thought, belief, tradition and the cultures they create. They explore how active thinking leads to group identity and document the multigenerational ideas and attitudes that have strengthened cultural memory.

Schelling war einer der wenigen Philosophen seiner Zeit, die versuchten, den Eigenwert der Mythen zu rehabilitieren, indem er zeigte, dass Mythen nicht nur bizarre Fiktionen der menschlichen Imagination sind, sondern die Seinsformen des religiösen Bewusstseins. Schellings Schriften zum Problem der Mythologie sind im Kontext der in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts geführten Debatte über den Ursprung der Mythen zu verstehen. F. Creuzer war ein bedeutender Autor, der den vorherrschenden Hellenozentrismus der klassischen Philologie in Frage stellte. Schelling kannte die Arbeit von Creuzer, und viele seiner Texte können als Dialog mit dem Philologen verstanden werden. Fernando Wirtz untersucht die dunkle Seite der Schellingschen Philosophie, eine Philosophie, die sich dem Bereich der Irrationalität und der Angst nähert. Der Begriff der Angst bezieht sich auf die Erfahrung des religiösen Bewusstseins, das von den Bildern seiner Andersheit überrascht wird. In diesem Sinne hört die Philosophie auf, eine rein diskursive Aufgabe zu sein und wird zu einer Phänomenologie der Angst.

How to do cultural studies in the twenty-first century? This essay collection is not a handbook, encyclopedia, or a »state of the field« compendium. Instead, it is a reflexive exercise in cultural studies, featuring fifteen accessible essays on a selection of critical key works published since 2000. The contributors aim to provide readers with a fresh and engaging look at recent criticism, exploring the interdisciplinary traffic of theories, methods, and ideas within the field of cultural and literary studies. This book shows how the work of Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Fred Moten, Anna Tsing, and others can inspire new thinking and theorizing for the twenty-first century.

La philosophie du langage s'est développée au XXe siècle comme prima philosophia. L'auteure entend montrer que le vivant humain ne peut se réaliser qu'en forgeant sa faculté philosophique de juger à l'aide du dialogue. Mais il ne peut affirmer ses vérités qu'en jaugeant celles-ci aux effets de bonheur qu'elles transmettent. Cette régulation de l'usage du langage par l'esthétique inhérente à l'usage du jugement de vérité est en effet autant une condition de vie qu'une condition de son bonheur. Le tournant esthétique qu'opère la conception de la philosophie comme esthétique culturelle prétend, quant à elle, que l'usage du langage n'est condition de vie de l'être humain qu'en déployant la dynamique d'harmonisation du monde, de soi-même et d'autrui à l'aide de l'imagination dialogique et du jugement de vérité. Seul l'exercice de ce jugement permet de juger si l'harmonie de vie exprimée dans la pensée et la parole rend aussi heureux les interlocuteurs que celle-ci leur fait partager sa vérité.

This book joins the contemporary recovery of Kant's empirical works to highlight the relevance of his concept of culture for understanding the sources of various characteristic modern dilemmas, such as the tension between culture and happiness, the morally ambivalent nature of cultural progress, or the existing conflicts between a factual plurality of cultures and the historical forces pressing toward a universal civilization. The book will be of special interest for Kantian scholars, moral and political philosophers, as well as philosophers of culture.

This book explores the question of what it means to be a human being through sustained and original analyses of three important philosophical topics: relativism, skepticism, and naturalism in the social sciences.Kevin M. Cahill's approach involves an original employment of historical and ethnographic material that is both conceptual and empirical in order to address relevant philosophical issues. Specifically, while Cahill avoids interpretative debates, he develops an approach to philosophical critique based on Cora Diamond's and James Conant's work on the early Wittgenstein. This makes possible the use of a concept of culture that avoids the dogmatism that not only typifies traditional metaphysics but also frequently mars arguments from ordinary language or phenomenology. This is especially crucial for the third part of the book, which involves a cultural-historical critique of the ontology of the self in Stanley Cavell's work on skepticism. In pursuing this strategy, the book also mounts a novel and timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences.Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture will be of interest to researchers working on the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein, and philosophical anthropology.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780367638238, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Mediadas por su interés en los estudios subalternistas, el autor aborda la crítica cultural rearticulando una idea básica: el concepto sin intuición es vacío, y la intuición sin concepto es ciega. Así, Kraniauscas sugiere que la crítica ideológica sin la cultural es vacía, y que ésta sin aquélla es ciega, y se entra en diálogo con conceptos clave como'estudios culturales','hibridez','transculturación','imperio','desarrollo'o'subalternidad'; y con autores como Stuart Hall, García Canclini, Bhabha, Ángel Rama, Antonio Negri, Althusser y Laclau. El propósito es discutir y analizar las políticas explícitas e implícitas de las teorías o conceptos; esclarecer la política de la teoría en la teoría

Follow for Now, Vol. 2 picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn't crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. Featuring conversations with thinkers like Carla Nappi, Rita Raley, Dominic Pettman, Ian Bogost, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, and Dave Allen, and musicians like Tyler, The Creator, Matthew Shipp, Sean Price, Rammellzee, and Sadat X, as well as writers like Ytasha L. Womack, Chris Kraus, Pat Cadigan, Bob Stephenson, Simon Critchley, Simon Reynolds, Malcolm Gladwell, and William Gibson, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 is another critical cross-section of the now.

Until rather recently, philosophy, when practiced as a way of life, was, for most, a communal enterprise of mutually reinforced personal cultivation. In these times of social isolation, including in academic philosophy itself, it is time, yet again, to revitalize this lost, but vital, intercultural mode of philosophy. This volume characterizes a neglected communal mode of philosophy — the philosophical community — by describing the constellation of metaethical principles (general, axiological, cultural, and dialectical) that cultivates its values. The book draws on examples from across the globe and history, including interviews of adherents of living philosophical communities.

Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Žižek's pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek's own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and Žižek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek's own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Žižek (just as Žižek in his collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek's ideas.

In this ninth edition of his award-winning introduction, John Storey presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of, and various approaches to, popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly applied across a number of disciplines.Retaining the accessible approach of previous editions and using appropriate examples from the texts and practices of popular culture, this new edition remains a key introduction to the area.New to this edition: updated throughout with contemporary examples of popular culture revised and expanded sections on Richard Hoggart and Utopian Marxism brand new discussions on Black Lives Matter and intersectionality updated student resources at www.routledge.com/cw/storey This new edition remains essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, the sociology of culture, popular culture and other related subjects.

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries.The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others.Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of'culture'and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of'culture'as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the classical age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a'symbolic animal.'The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post-Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of'culture'by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition.

Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of culture has been much discussed in recent years. However, it remains unclear how it evolved from his older theory of knowledge. This study deals with this question on the basis of Cassirer's ‘disposition'of a ‘philosophy of the symbolic', reconstructed here for the first time. This text shows that the ‘symbolic'refers to culture as a whole and to its inherent diversity. Therefore, ‘the symbolic'includes the relationship between the general transcendental conditions of culture and its empirical specificities in language and languages, art and the arts, myth and myths, science and disciplines. Cassirer does not comprehend this empirical and specific reality of symbolization depending on pre-existing transcendental conditions. Instead, he proceeds from the empirical diversity of the symbolisations and reflects on their simultaneously general and specific conditions. Thus, Cassirer embarks on a path that he finds paved in Kant's'Critique of Judgement': He consequently defines ‘the symbolic'as the horizon for a reflective approach based on empirical findings – and not as the foundation of a systematic derivation of the diversity of culture in the style of the idealistic tradition.

This book provides the first synthetic review of the literature on cultural roads and itineraries, providing a template for developing typologies and clarity on existing research. It additionally develops a unique conceptual framework for understanding the social, political, ethical, and spatial dynamics behind cultural roads and itineraries. The book takes the discussion on cultural roads in two different directions. Firstly, by taking a step back from tourism studies, leisure studies, and heritage studies in order to further the conversation on cultural roads with a broader set of disciplines, namely those in the humanities and social sciences. Secondly, through a series of broader theoretical reflections and considerations, the book draws its focus back to the development of the cultural road and cultural itineraries with a new conceptual apparatus that can inspire new questions for research and new ideas for practice. Throughout the text, concepts, theories, principles, and practices are explored and explained through detailed case study analyses.

This book discusses Stuart Hall's unique contribution to criminology. It suggests that this is captured best in Hall's commitment to understanding a given historical moment, or conjuncture, in its full complexity, and his continuous deployment of an appropriate methodology, conjunctural analysis, to do so. This provides a running thread linking Hall's early work on youth subcultures, the media, the state and hegemony to his later work on racial identities, racism and the politics of difference. This is contrasted with more theoretically-driven work in cultural criminology. Its failure to adopt a conjunctural approach constitutes, for the author, something of a missed moment. To demonstrate the continuing relevance of this form of analysis, the book provides a conjunctural analysis of Brexit, including its psychosocial dimension and concludes with a brief analysis of Trump's failure to get re-elected. The book is intended for students of criminology and cultural studies.

Durch die Entwicklung von Staat und Demokratie ist es in den westeuropäischen Gesellschaften schwierig geworden, an dem Begriff nationaler Identität als Identifikation mit dem Staat festzuhalten. Der Autor zeigt, daß neue soziokulturelle Identitätsformen entstehen, die die nationale Identität ersetzen, verschieben oder relativieren. Die neuen sozialen Bewegungen werden als ein gesellschaftlicher Lernprozeß interpretiert, in dessen Verlauf neben den fortbestehenden alten Identitäten neue Identitätsvorstellungen entstehen. Unveränderter Nachdruck

This reader investigates the changing face of the notion of culture, tracing how it emerged in some of the most important and controversial phases of the lively Anglo-American debate on the subject from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, including the crucial years of Modernism. Shedding light on the cross-disciplinary approaches that characterized the debate and focusing especially on the legacy of anthropology, the volume presents a selection of some of the most distinguished voices from such assorted fields as literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and ethnology, whose interests and areas of enquiry apparently converged and partly overlapped. A selection of primary sources from leading figures such as Matthew Arnold, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley provide an overview of the crucial issues raised on a wide array of topics: civilization, race, nation, progress, evolution, education, art, science, literature and politics. The primary sources are accompanied by critical essays that offer new insights into these classic texts. This reader will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to scholars exploring the cross-disciplinary or transatlantic nature of the study of culture.

The Humanities in Transition explores how the basic components of the digital age will have an impact on the most trusted theories of humanists. Over the past two generations, humanists have come to take basic postmodern theories for granted whether on language, knowledge or time. Yet Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and similar philosophers developed their ideas when the impact of this digital world could barely be imagined. The digital world, built on algorithms and massive amounts of data, operates on radically different principles. This volume analyzes these differences, demonstrating where an aging postmodernism cannot keep pace with today's technologies. The book first introduces the major influence postmodern had on global thought before turning to algorithms, digital space, digital time, data visuals and the concept to digital forgeries. By taking a closer look at these themes, it establishes a platform to create more robust humanist theories for the third millennium. This book will appeal to graduate students and established scholars in the Digital Humanities who are looking for diverse and energetic theoretical approaches that can truly come to terms with the digital world.

Dieses Buch ist das Ergebnis eines langfristigen Projekts, das Forscher Brasiliens und Europas verbindet. Daran anknüpfend sind auch zwei Vilem Flusser gewidmete Symposien nennenswert, die 2011 in Ouro Preto und Mannheim stattgefunden haben. Im Buch thematisieren Texte von Myriam Ávila, Rodrigo Duarte, Thomas Friedrich, Rainer Guldin, Oliver Ruf und Chirly dos Santos-Stubbe verschiedene Aspekte der Kultur auf der Basis des Flusserschen Denkens. Außerdem werden vier bisher unveröffentlichte Quellentexte vom tschechisch-brasilianischen - viel von der deutschen Kultur beeinflussten - Autor Vilem Flusser präsentiert.

Antitheory has long been a venerable brand of theory and – although seemingly opposite – the two impulses have long been intertwined. Antitheory is the first book to explore this vexed relationship from the 20th century to the present day, examining antitheory both in its historical context and its current state. The book brings together leading scholars from a wide range of Humanities disciplines to ask such questions as: · What is antitheory? · What does it mean to be against theory in the new millennium? · What is the current state of post-theory, the alleged deaths of theory, and the critique of critique?

This book explores the demise of the grand narrative of European modernity. That once commanding narrative located the meaning of the past in the present and the meaning of the present in an ever-receding future. Today, instead, the present defines both the past and the future. The ‘contemporary'has replaced ‘modern'and ‘post-modern'self-understandings. The times of the past and the future have been transformed into versions of ‘now'while the present has acquired its own history. History of the Present describes the emergence of this ‘contemporary'historical consciousness across a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena ranging from historiography to heritage and museum studies, and from the globalization of the novel to the rise of science fiction. The culture of the ‘contemporary'appears particularly clearly in the merging of high and low culture along with art and fashion. This book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and social theory, museum and heritage studies, and literary history and criticism.

Using compelling examples and analysis, How We Use Stories and Why That Matters shows what the New York Shakespeare Riots tell us about class struggle, what Death Cab for Cutie tells us about media, what Kate Moss's wedding dress tells us about authorship, and how Westworld and Humans imagine very different futures for Artificial Intelligence: one based on slavery, the other on class. Together, these knowledge stories tell us about how intimate human communication is organised and used to stage organised conflict, to test the'fighting fitness'of contending groups – provoking new stories, identities and classes along the way.This book guides the reader through the tangled undergrowth of communication and cultural expression towards a new understanding of the role of group-mediating stories at global and digital scale. It argues that media and networked systems perform and bind group identities, creating bordered fictions within which economic and political activities are made meaningful. Now that computational and global scale, big data, metadata and algorithms rule the roost even in culture, subjectivity and meaning, we need population-scale frameworks to understand individual, micro-scale sense-making practices. To achieve that, we need evolutionary and systems approaches to understand cultural performance and dynamics. The opposing universes of fact (science, knowledge, education) and fiction (entertainment, story and imagination) – so long separated into the contrasting disciplines of natural sciences and the humanities – can now be understood as part of one turbulent sphere of knowledge-production and innovation.

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for'the real thing'become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's “lives”. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as “things with attitude” differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

Simmels Essays zur Kulturphilosophie diskutieren im Zeitraum zwischen 1900 und 1918 auf aktuelle Weise einen doppelten Begriff von Kultur: eine objektive Kultur mit ihren Institutionen, Regeln und Praktiken und eine subjektive Kultur, die auf einem persönlichen Wertgefühl aufbaut. Im Konflikt dieser zwei Kulturen erörtert Simmel sowohl seine philosophischen Bezugspunkte (Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche) als auch die Möglichkeiten zur Ausbildung eines persönlichen Lebensstils in einer Welt der Dinge und Waren, im Großstadtleben oder im (Gegen-) Entwurf einer weiblichen Kultur. Simmels Kulturphilosophie mündet in eine Stellungnahme: Wir können unser Leben nur in und durch die kulturellen Formen (Sprache, Recht, Sitte u.a.) führen, die wir selbst geschaffen haben. Kultur als zweite Natur bleibt ein gefährdetes Projekt, weil sie in unserer Haltung zum Leben und in der Art der Lebensführung gründet. Und: Wir sind vor Aufgaben gestellt, die nicht aufzulösen, aber doch von uns zu bewältigen sind.

This book argues that despite the many real advantages that industrial modernity has yielded—including large gains in wealth, longevity, and (possibly) happiness—it has occurred together with the appearance of a variety of serious problems. Chief among these are probable losses in subjective existential purpose and increases in psychopathology. A highly original theory of the ultimate basis of these trends is advanced, which unites prior work in psychometrics and evolutionary science. This theory builds on the social epistasis amplification model to argue that genetic and epigenetic changes in modernizing and modernized populations, stemming from shifts in selective pressures related to industrialization, have lowered human fitness and wellness.

Diana Ingenhoff und Alexander Buhmann führen in den aktuellen Forschungs- und Wissensstand zu Public Diplomacy und insbesondere zu Landesimages ein. Sie reflektieren dabei Fragen der Messung, Entstehung und Gestaltung von Landesimages und geben Antworten auf die folgenden Leitfragen: · Welche Aspekte/Dimensionen eines Landes sind wichtig für sein Image und wie entsteht es? · Welches sind die für die Imagebildung wirksamen Kanäle? · Welche Handlungsrelevanz und Wirksamkeit hat das Landesimage? · Wie lässt sich die Wirksamkeit von Public Diplomacy und Landeskommunikation messen und evaluieren? Das Buch dokumentiert und diskutiert die facettenreiche Literatur zu Landesimages und Public Diplomacy. Es enthält zahlreiche Abbildungen, ein Glossar und ein Register und fördert damit den Dialog zwischen Forschung und Praxis.