Time Fetishes

This work is a reading of the way humans have attempted to talk about the nature of time, in particular the idea of the periodic creation and destruction of the world and the cosmos--eternal recurrence.

This book demonstrates the importance of the study of fetishes and fetishism in the study of popular culture. Some of the essays cover rather "conventional" manifestations in the world today; others demonstrate the fetishistic qualities of some unusual items. But all illustrate without any doubt that, like the icon, the ritual, and many other items in society, fetishes, fetishism and fetishists must be studied and understood before we can begin to understand the complexity of present-day society.

Fetish Style traces the history, forms and tendencies of fetish fashions popular in both mainstream and subcultural fashion.

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from “past/future” and “anticipation/unexpected” to “extinction/adaptation” and “serial/simultaneous.” Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time—not space, as the postmoderns had it—is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology.

What exactly is Time? Time has often been counterpoised by the notion of Eternity as just that place, wherever it is, that is "timeless." Recently some physicists have sought to comprehend the universe as just one among many, or has denied the existence of Time outright. Through a use of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of the Eternal Recurrence of All Things once made compatible with Christian orthodoxy's notion of time and eternity, when combined with the latest in modern physics, the author posits here a new theory of Time that can account for human freedom in the midst of a deterministic world, while at the same time explaining the Uncertainty Principle and how Reality became what it is. With Time given ontological priority, all of our suspicions about lack of objectivity in scientific method are revealed as justified, while the hitherto indecipherable nature of the cosmos, and the role a Deity might have in it, are explained. "God and Eternity" is a brilliant intellectual tour de force that puts natural theology on an equal footing with post-modern wonderment and enlightenment at an historical moment when a host of crucial questions are being asked anew. JAMES BARLOW is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Andrew's College and Seminary, Lexington, North Carolina, and a Mathematics instructor at Nunavut Arctic College in Canada. He has studied and taught in the Philippines and Alaska in the United States. He currently lives in Iqaluit, on South Baffin Island, capital of the territory of Nunavut, Canada.

An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection focuses on the ways in which these cultural contacts were acted out on the real and metaphorical stages of theatre, literature, music, diplomacy and travel. The volume responds to the theatricalization of early modern politics, to contemporary anxieties about the tension between religious performance and belief, to the circulation of material objects in intercultural relations, and the eminent role of theatre and drama for the (re)imagination and negotiation of cultural difference. Contributors examine early modern encounters with and in the East using an innovative combination of literary and cultural theories. They stress the contingent nature of these contacts and demonstrate that they can be read as moments of potentiality in which the future of political and economic relations - as well as the players' cultural, religious and gender identities - are at stake.