Culture Through Time

Anthropological literature has traditionally been static and synchronic, only occasionally according a role to historical processes. but recent years have seen a burgeoning exchange between anthropology and history, each field taking on a powerful new dimension in consequence. Just what this means for anthropologists has not been clear, and this collection (eight core papers plus introduction and final commentary) introduces focus and direction to this interface between anthropology challenges several basic assumptions long held by anthropologists. Researchers can no longer be satisfied with approaches epitomized in 'the ethnographic present'. Society may be a bounded entity, but culture cannot be treated as such; a culture should be examined as it has interacted with other cultures and with its environment over time. Many traditionalists in anthropology, faced with these disturbing new challenges, fear the disintegration of the discipline; but these thoughtful papers demonstrate, on the contrary, its vitality, growth, and promise. In this volume, major figures in symbolic/semiotic anthropology offer various approaches to examining culture through time - culture mediated by history and history mediated by culture - in its complexity and dynamics. The eight core papers focus on particular cultures in various locales: Hawaii, Nepal, Spain, Japan, Israel, India, and Indonesia. No artifical unity - theoretical, thematic, or epistemological - has been imposed. The strength of the volume derives from a complementary diversity and tension, as each player, drawing on a particular culture, offers an original way of penetrating that culture's historical dimensions.

Within its wide boundaries, culture creates written and visual reflection areas for itself. As the reflection area expands through time, space and nature, it becomes richer, and, in doing so, it needs to be appreciated. The cultural reflection of historical accumulation leaves us in front of an immense mirror. In general terms, this book presents the reader with the intertwined relationships between culture and literature, culture and language, and culture and history or art history. More specifically, it investigates the joy of a birth, a funeral ritual, the merriness of a melody, and the taste of a meal as they are reflected within the texts that Asia has accumulated throughout its history. Its central concern is the investigation of issues related to culture and how it is reflected in literature, language, or history in a particular place.

This book is the culmination of 15 years of research and travels that have taken the author completely around the world twice, as well as on other travels in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and around the Pacific rim. Its purpose has been to try to understand the role of cultural differences within nations and between nations, today and over centuries of history, in shaping the economic and social fates of peoples and of whole civilizations. Focusing on four major cultural areas(that of the British, the Africans (including the African diaspora), the Slavs of Eastern Europe, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere -- Conquests and Cultures reveals patterns that encompass not only these peoples but others and help explain the role of cultural evolution in economic, social, and political development.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time. Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare. While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the death of God. This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to havestructured the Cubist war that followed.

Differentiate content, process, and product and promote content-area literacy with this dynamic kit about world cultures through time. This kit provides leveled informational texts featuring key historical themes and topics embedded within targeted literacy instruction. Teachers can assess comprehension of informational text using the included Culminating Activity. Additionally, teachers can use multimedia activities to engage students and extend learning. The 60 colorful Leveled Text Cards in this kit are written at four distinct reading levels, each card featuring subtle symbols that denote differentiated reading levels, making differentiation strategies easy to implement. Leveled Texts for Differentiated Content-Area Literacy: World Cultures Through Time Complete Kit includes: Leveled Text Cards; digital resources; Lessons; a Culminating Activity; Tiered Graphic Organizers; Assessment Tools; and audio recordings (of thematic raps and leveled texts).

The notion of time travel marked by both possibility and loss: making the case for cultural research that is oriented toward the future. Visual Cultures as Time Travel makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St. George's Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad. It visits a marine research institute on a third island, Seili in Finland, to consider how notions of temporality and adaptation are produced in the climate emergency we face. Henriette Gunkel introduces the idea of time travel through notions of dizziness, freefall, and of being in vertigo as set out in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings, exploring what counts as technology, how it operates in relation to time, including deep space time, and how it interacts with the different types of bodies—human, machine, planetary, spectral, ancestral—that inhabit the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. In conversation, Hameed and Gunkel propose a notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss—in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of blackness and time, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures, of deep geological time, and of falling. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

The trade between peoples of differinf cultures, from the ancient world to the commercial revolution.

Sex, the Illustrated History: Volume III continues a courageous exploration of sexual customs and conflicts into the modern world. This work explores the fight for sexual freedom in a world of often-repressed sexuality. The conflict with the church and its control of sexuality and law has stood as a barrier against freedom of human sexuality. The focus of this work is primarily the European and American theater, as they strive to rise above the ancient precepts that have girdled sexuality. The fight was a long and hard-fought one; prejudice and prudery and claims of morality and law stood rigidly against a new rationalism beginning in the Reformation. The book explores in depth historical and contemporary worldwide slavery, forced marriage, child brides, abuses of the Catholic Church, and sexual trafficking. Also explored are the history of homosexual movements, bisexuality, and the larger LGBT+ movements.