Worlds Apart Modernity Through The Prism Of The Local

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images. Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers.

How are global forces impacting on local lifestyles? Where does the personal stand in relation to globalization? Global Forces and Local Life-Worlds explores these questions using a mixture of sociological and anthropological analysis and case study methods. Demonstrating the tensions between retaining cultural integrity in the face of the levelling processes associated with modernity, this book: locates the problems of globalization and localization in the appropriate anthropological and sociological dimensions; examines the relationship between culture and identity; and explores the varieties of modernity.

From renowned author Ulrike Schuerkens comes an in-depth exploration of social transformations and developments. Combining an international approach with up-to-date research, this book provides a comprehensive introduction perfect for a range of Sociology courses taught at first and second year.

This book analyses how global transactions have been progressively conducted and negotiated in the last 25 years. Achieving a new understanding of sustainability transition in the Anthropocene requires a deeper analysis on culture. The development of new positions of international institutions, national governments, scientific organizations, private fora and civil society movements on culture and nature shows how global transactions must take place in a rapidly transforming world. In her book the author provides a multi-situated ethnography of live debates on culture, global environmental change, development and diversity directly recorded by the author as a participating and decision-making anthropologist from 1988 to 2016. She examines the politicization and internationalization of culture by recognizing, negotiating and diversifying views on cultures and re-thinking culture in the Anthropocene. The merging of science and policy in taking up cultural and natural challenges in the Anthropocene is discussed.

Across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe during the socialist period, food emerged as a symbol of both the successes and failures of socialist ideals of progress, equality, and modernity. By the late 1980s, the arrival of McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain epitomized the changes that swept across the socialist world. Not quite two decades later, the effects of these arrivals were evident in the spread of foreign food corporations and their integration into local communities. This book explores the role played by food--as commodity, symbol, and sustenance--in the transformation of life in Russia and eastern Europe since the end of socialism. Changes in food production systems, consumption patterns, food safety, and ideas about health, well-being, nationalism, and history provide useful perspectives on the meaning of the postsocialist transition for those who lived through it.

To Be Continued... explores the world's most popular form of television drama; the soap opera. From Denver to Delhi, Moscow to Manchester, audiences eagerly await the next episode of As the World Turns, The Rich Also Weep or Eastenders. But the popularity of soap operas in Britain and the US pales in comparison to the role that they play in media cultures in other parts of the world. To Be Continued... investigates both the cultural specificity of television soap operas and their reception in other cultures, covering soap production and soap watching in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America. The contributors consider the nature of soap as a media text, the history of the serial narrative as a form, and the role of the soap opera in the development of feminist media criticism. To Be Continued... presents the first scholarly examination of soap opera as global media phenomenon.

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music Volume 1 provides an overview of media, industry, and technology and its relationship to popular music. In 500 entries by 130 contributors from around the world, the volume explores the topic in two parts: Part I: Social and Cultural Dimensions, covers the social phenomena of relevance to the practice of popular music and Part II: The Industry, covers all aspects of the popular music industry, such as copyright, instrumental manufacture, management and marketing, record corporations, studios, companies, and labels. Entries include bibliographies, discographies and filmographies, and an extensive index is provided.