Marginality And Modernity

This book traces the major stages in the evolution of the sociological concept of marginality, highlighting in particular the contribution made by Gino Germani. Its purpose is to analyse, starting with the sociological theory of the early 1960s, the progressive maturation of the scientific status of the concept of marginality, and to test the theoretical premise that gave rise to Germani's theory of marginality.The author begins by examining the contribution of the Chicago School. He explores the complex relationship between the theory of marginality and modernization by analysing North American theses and the criticisms mainly generated in Latin America. The goal is to reconstruct Germani's theoretical model of marginality, addressing its application to contemporary social and economic conditions.Giardiello's analysis is intertwined with two themes that are central to Germani's thought about marginality. The first concerns the origin of the concept of social exclusion within sociological thought. The second shows how marginality is clearly a phenomenology connected to the contradictions of modernity. Germani's paradigm of marginality enables the social scientist to resolve the contradictions between the analytical perspectives that deal with marginality in an objective way and the one that observes it subjectively.

"This book traces the major stages in the evolution of the sociological concept of marginality, highlighting in particular the contribution made by Gino Germani. Its purpose is to analyse, starting with the sociological theory of the early 1960s, the progressive maturation of the scientific status of the concept of marginality, and to test the theoretical premise that gave rise to Germani's theory of marginality.The author begins by examining the contribution of the Chicago School. He explores the complex relationship between the theory of marginality and modernization by analysing North American theses and the criticisms mainly generated in Latin America. The goal is to reconstruct Germani's theoretical model of marginality, addressing its application to contemporary social and economic conditions.Giardiello's analysis is intertwined with two themes that are central to Germani's thought about marginality. The first concerns the origin of the concept of social exclusion within sociological thought. The second shows how marginality is clearly a phenomenology connected to the contradictions of modernity. Germani's paradigm of marginality enables the social scientist to resolve the contradictions between the analytical perspectives that deal with marginality in an objective way and the one that observes it subjectively."--Provided by publisher.

This volume is a collection of articles by leading scholars from all over the world on the Baloch, one of south west Asia's largest yet least studied ethnic groups.

Examines commentary written in the margins of the text to show how the pages of the first printed books became the arena for struggled among authors, readers, and cultural authorities. Focuses on four controversies: the printed English Bible, two rivals for court favor, Martin Marprelate's theological pamphlets, and the glossed works of Ben Jonson. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant, who claims to subvert colonialist values in La Rose de sable; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet. Crucially Genet, who was typecast as France's moral pariah, in charting Palestinian statelessness in his last work, Un Captif amoureux (1986), reflects ethically on the dispossession of the Other and the violence inherent in the West's marginalization of cultural difference.

In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity. Students of Islam in Africa have similarly examined politics of knowledge, the transmission of learning in written form, and the influence of new media. Until now, however, these arenas—Christianity and Islam, digital media and “old” media—have been studied separately. Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies. Contributors: Heike Behrend, Andre Chappatte, Maria Frahm-Arp, David Gordon, Liz Gunner, Bruce S. Hall, Sean Hanretta, Jorg Haustein, Katrien Pype, and Asonzeh Ukah.

In this book, Oluwatoyin Oduntan offers a critical intervention in the scholarly fields of Nigerian, and West African history, as well as towards understanding the intellectual ideas by which modern African society was formed, and how it functions. The book traces the shifting dynamics between various segments of the African elite by critically analyzing existing historical accounts, traditions and archival documents. First, it explores the lost world of native intellectual thoughts as the perspective through which Africans experienced the colonial encounter. It thereby makes Africans central to contemporary debates about the meanings and legitimacy of colonial empires, and about the African cultural experience. It shows that the resettlement of liberated and Westernized Africans in Abeokuta and after them, European missionaries, merchants and colonial agents from the 1840s, did not dismantle preexisting power structures and social relations. Rather, educated Africans and Europeans entered into and added their voices to ongoing processes of defining culture and power. By rendering a continuing narrative of change and adaptation which connects the pre-colonial to the post-colonial, Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria leads Africanist scholarship in new directions to rethink colonial impact and uncover the total creative sites of changes by which African societies were formed.

Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico. After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.