Philosophy Interrogates Culture

A series of transdisciplinary essays offering a critical look at central philosophical debates in cultural theory today.

This is an excellent treatment, by fourteen distinguished scholars, of some of the central strands in the philosophy of Simone Weil.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Transforming Encounters and Critical Reflection: African Thought, Critical Theory, and Liberation Theology in Dialogue" that was published in Religions

First Published in 1975. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume explores a variety of ’harmful cultural practices’: a term increasingly employed by organizations working within a human rights framework to refer to certain discriminatory practices against women in the global South. Drawing on recent work by feminists across the social sciences, as well as activists from around the world, this volume discusses and presents research on practices such as veiling, forced marriage, honour related and dowry violence, female genital ’mutilation’, lip plates and sex segregation in public space. With attention to the analytic utility of the notion of harmful cultural practices, this volume explores questions surrounding the contribution of feminist thought to international and NGO policies on such practices, whether western beauty practices should be analysed in similar terms, or should the notion as such from an anthropological perspective be rejected, how harmful cultural practices relate to processes of culturalization, religionization and secularization, and how they can be challenged, come to transform and disappear. Presenting concrete, empirical case studies from Africa, South East Asia, Europe and the UK Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology, development and law with interests in gender, the body, violence and women’s agency.