Theories Of Culture

This authoritative but concise guide describes the most significant cultural theories from the 19th to the 21st century and their originators, as well as the links between them and their mutual influences. This guide explores ideas around what culture is, when and why cultures change over time and whether there are any rules or principles behind culture-related phenomena and processes. For those seeking to answer questions on culture, familiarity with these topics is essential. From refugee movements caused by wars, to the ongoing demographical changes in regions of the world like sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian subcontinent, understanding the underlying mechanisms of culture-related processes has become an immediate and essential task. Covering everything from the processes of cultural change to counterculture and destabilisation, the book explains different ideas in a clear and objective fashion and includes approaches that have been unduly neglected but which have high explanatory value regarding culture and its phenomena. Providing readers with an up-to-date idea of what culture is, and how our understanding of it has been established over the past century, this text is the perfect companion for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers.

Since the 1970s exciting new directions in the study of culture have erupted to critique and displace earlier, largely static notions. These more dynamic models stress the indeterminate, fragmented, even conflictual character of cultural processes and completely alter the framework for thinking theologically about them. In fact, Tanner argues, the new orientation in cultural theory and anthropology affords fresh opportunities for religious thought and opens new vistas for theology, especially on how Christians conceive of the theological task, theological diversity and inculturation, and even Christianity's own cultural identity.

With the increasing focus on the concept of culture by sociologists and other social scientists, there is now a need for clarifying and developing theoretical perspectives on this issue. The contributors to this volume have answered this call, each adding new insight to the debate over culture, its definition, and its relationship with other basic categories in sociological theory. Along the way they touch on other fundamental issues, such as the interrelationship of culture with society, the human personality, and the wider environment of the human condition.

In this book, Marvin Harris presents his current views on the nature of culture addressing such issues as the mental/behavioral debate, emics and etics, and anthropological holism.

New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores new directions and territories for cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School. It is a generation whose whole education has been shaped by theory, and who frequently turn to it as a means to think through some of the issues and current problems in contemporary culture and cultural studies. In a period when departments which were once hotbeds of "high theory" are returning to more sociological and social science oriented modes of research, and 9/11 and the war in Iraq especially have helped create a sense of "post-theoretical" political urgency which leaves little time for the "elitist," "Eurocentric," "textual" concerns of "Theory," theoretical approaches to the study of culture have, for many of this generation, never seemed so important or so vital. New Cultural Studies explores theory's past, present, and most especially future role in cultural studies. It does so by providing an authoritative and accessible guide, for students and teachers alike, to: the most innovative members of this "new generation" the thinkers and theories currently influencing new work in cultural studies: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Kittler, Laclau, Levinas, and iek the new territories currently being mapped out across the intersections of cultural studies and cultural theory: anti-capitalism, ethics, the posthumanities, post-Marxism, and the transnational

Among the theories and ideas the book introduces are mass culture, the Frankfurt School and the culture industry, semiology and structuralism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and cultural populism.

The best known, most often cited history of anthropological theory is finally available in paperback! First published in 1968, Harris's book has been cited in over 1,000 works and is one of the key documents explaining cultural materialism, the theory associated with Harris's work. This updated edition included the complete 1968 text plus a new introduction by Maxine Margolis, which discusses the impact of the book and highlights some of the major trends in anthropological theory since its original publication. RAT, as it is affectionately known to three decades of graduate students, comprehensively traces the history of anthropology and anthropological theory, culminating in a strong argument for the use of a scientific, behaviorally-based, etic approach to the understanding of human culture known as cultural materialism. Despite its popularity and influence on anthropological thinking, RAT has never been available in paperback_until now. It is an essential volume for the library of all anthropologists, their graduate students, and other theorists in the social sciences.

Most anthologies of Renaissance writing include only (or predominantly) male writers, whereas those that focus on women include women exclusively. This book is the first to survey both in an integrated fashion. Its texts comprise a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing -- including some new and important discoveries. The texts are arranged so that writing by women and men is presented together, not in a "point-counterpoint" system that would "square off" female and male writers against one another, but rather in pairs, sometimes clusters, of texts in which women's writing is foregrounded even as it appears with writing by men. The anthology arranges recently recovered texts into intriguing patterns, juxtaposing, for example, Aemelia Lanyer's country house poem with an expression of a different type of nostalgia by Surrey. It includes unconventional voices, as in the homoerotic poems by Richard Barnfield or the possibly lesbian poems by Katherine Philips. It makes newly available the voices of English Marrano women (secret Jews) and the Miltonic poetry of Jean Lead. -- D. Aldrich-Watson, University of Missouri - St. Louis