Herding Words

Learn how to deliver on the brand promise and become a better copywriter through the art of authentic storytelling. Today's consumer tolerance for clutter -- baseless product pitches, poor or mistimed messaging, and fluff marketing speak -- has all but flatlined. Tired and frustrated with empty words, consumers have little time to waste on filtering marketing vapor to get to a brand's truth. And the fact is, if you won't tell them what they need to know about your brand upfront -- in a simple, honest, and informative way -- your competitors will be happy to step up. That's why every copywriter needs Herding Words: A Brand Copywriter's Guide by David R. Woodruff. Aimed at those responsible for crafting brand narrative, it elevates writers’ expertise as brand storytellers, inspiring them to go beyond features and benefits, get to the core truth about a brand's promise, then transform those insights into powerful brand narrative for print, digital, and web marketing communications.

What does it mean to be a westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe "how it was, how it is, here, in the West—just that," in the words of Lynn Stegner? Starting with that challenge, Stegner and Russell Rowland invited several dozen members of the western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a western writer in particular. West of 98 gathers sixty-six literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel—a kind of Greek chorus of the most prominent voices in western literature today, who seek to "characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming." In West of 98, western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the western landscape—how it has been revered and abused across centuries—and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development. They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country. The writers seek to define the essence of both actual and metaphoric wilderness as they journey toward a West that might honestly be called home. A collective declaration not of our independence but of our interdependence with the land and with each other, West of 98 opens up a whole new panorama of the western experience.

""This work is a masterpiece already as it stands now! It presents an unusually rich ethnography of a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on: the conversion of a so-far hardly known group of reindeer nomads to radical evangelical Baptism / Pentecostalism." - Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the "End of the Land" "Although not working from within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from "pagan" to Christian. He finds a complex interweaving of speaking and refraining from speaking is key to Nenets personhood, and demonstrates how we have to understand cultural ways of speaking in order to understand Nenets Baptists and Pentecostals. [...] I have been reviewing book manuscripts for two decades for over a dozen presses, and this is by far the most polished and impressive manuscript I have read." - Alexander D. King, author of Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia Words and Silences tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization but soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them became fervent fundamentalist Christians. By exploring differing concepts of how traditional and convert Nenets use and define words, and of the meanings they ascribe to the withholding of speech, Vallikivi shows how a local form of global Christianity has emerged through intricate negotiations of self, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for indigenous peoples, Words and Silences invites us to view not only religious devotees, but words themselves, as agents of a complex and ongoing transformation"--

The history and mechanisms of the convergence of ancient Aryan and non-Aryan cultures has been a subject of continuing fascination in many fields of Indology. The contributions to Aryan and Non-Aryan in India are the fruit of a conference on that topic held in December 1976 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the auspices of the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies. The express object of the conference was to examine the latest findings from a variety of disciplines as they relate to the formation and integration of a unified Indian culture from many disparate cultural and ethnic elements.

This book presents 29 revised invited and selected lectures given by top-researchers at the First International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, IWIC 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan. This state-of-the-art survey increases mutual understanding in our multicultural world by featuring collaboration support, social psychological analyses of intercultural interaction, and case studies from field workers.

Eminent anthropologist Keith Hart draws on the humanities, popular culture and his own experiences to help readers explore their own place in history. We each embark on two life journeys – one out into the world, the other inward to the self. With these journeys in mind, anthropologist, amateur economist and globetrotter Keith Hart reflects on a life of learning, sharing and remembering to offer readers the means of connecting life’s extremes – individual and society, local and global, personal and impersonal dimensions of existence and explores what it is that makes us fully human. “This is a work of great originality. Keith Hart has had an unorthodox academic career and it has liberated him in many ways from academic pieties. His background in African ethnography gives him a fascinating angle on all sorts of things, not least the possibility of a more African-influenced global future. The book is full of surprises and mind-shifting observations. I actually couldn't put it down.”—Sherry B. Ortner, UCLA From the introduction: People have many sides, but I will focus here on two. Each of us is a biological organism with a historical personality that together make us a unique individual. But we cannot live outside society which shapes us in unfathomable ways. Human beings must learn to be self-reliant (not self-interested) in small and large ways: no-one will brush your teeth for you or save you from being run over while crossing the street. We each must also learn to belong to others, merging personal identity in a plethora of social relations and categories. Modern ideology insists that being individual and mutual is problematic. The culture of capitalist societies anticipates a conflict between them. Yet they are inseparable aspects of human nature.

Introduction and Chapter 10 available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book examines the contemporary social care realities and practices of Finland, a small nation with a history enmeshed in social relations as both coloniser and colonised. Decolonising Social Work in Finland: · Interrogates coloniality, racialisation and diversity in the context of Finnish social work and social care. · Brings together racialised and mainstream White Finnish researchers, activists and community members to challenge relations of epistemic violence on racialised populations in Finland. · Critically unpacks colonial views of care and wellbeing. It will be essential reading for international scholars and students in the fields of Social Work, Sociology, Indigenous Studies, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Education.