Book Description
Modernity differs from all preceding forms of social order because of its dynamism, its deep undercutting of traditional habits and customs, and its global impact. It also radicallly alters the general nature of daily life and the most personal aspects of human activity. In fact, one of the most distinctive features of modernity is the increasing interconnection between globalizing influences and personal dispositions. The author analyzes the nature of this interconnection and provides a conceptual vocabulary for it, in the process providing a major rethinking of the nature of modernity and a reworking of basic premises of sociological analysis.
Building on the ideas set out in the authors The Consequences of Modernity
, this book focuses on the self and the emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity that are shaped by—yet also shape—the institutions of modernity. The author argues that the self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences. Rather, in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications.
The author sketches the contours of the he calls “high modernity”—the world of our day—and considers its ramifications for the self and self-identity. In this context, he analyzes the meaning to the self of such concepts as trust, fate, risk, and security and goes on the examine the “sequestration of experience,” the process by which high modernity separates day-to-day social life from a variety of experiences and broad issues of morality. The author demonstrates how personal meaninglessness—the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer—becomes a fundamental psychic problem in circumstances of high modernity. The book concludes with a discussion of “life politics,” a politics of selfactualization operating on both the individual and collective levels.
Customer Reviews:
The Emperor Has No Clothes.......2006-10-23
This book is, IMHO, intellectually bankrupt. However, it may serve as an excellent source of postmodern jargon for those who are lashing about for some tub to thump. Ironically, it does have some good primary sources in its bibliography; although, I must say, I am utterly at a loss as to how an acclaimed cultural mandarin could have, in fact, read through them all only to spout "reflexively-reflexive" gibberish for hundreds of pages!
The only theme that stands clear amid Giddens' din of twisted sentences (flecked with "socio-cultural" buzzwords), I later encountered quoted succinctly from Leo Frobenius in Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology (Penguin Books;1976; p. 30):
"We are concerned no longer with cultural inflections," he [Frobenius] declared, "but with the passage from one culture stage to another. In all previous ages, only restricted portions of the surface of the earth were known. Men looked out from the narrowest, upon a somewhat larger neighborhood, and beyond that, a great unknown. They were all, so to say, insular: bound in. Whereas our view is confined no longer to a spot of space on the surface of this earth. It surveys the whole planet. And this fact, this lack of horizon, is something new."
Campbell's book then looks much deeper into the spiritual problems of the modern soul--and, by the way, it too has an excellent bibliography for those with a more demanding appetite.
Live Dangerously.......2002-05-06
"What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone lining in circumstances of late modernity - an ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behavior. They are existential questions, although, as we shall see later, their relation to the existential issues discussed in the preceding chapter is problematic." Giddens (1991:70)
Perhaps one of the most difficult books I have had to write a review on despite, ironically, sounding more like a self-help book rather than one of deep existential examination. However, that might just mean that the book is based on self-help books of which Giddens is an avid reader. The importance of such books is that in modern societies - self identity is a central issue. With the advent to new technology and increased education, the modality of formulation of Self-Identity has changed. A dark cloud of self-reflexivity both on institutional level and the personal level looms over those who see change as a risk and fear it while those who see promise, there is a silver lining. The rules of the game has changed - forever. Sink or swim. For Giddens the change is profound:
"For it is arguable that the period of high modernity is one of fundamental transition - not just a continuation of modernity's endless dynamism, but the presaging of structural transformations of a more profound type. The expansion of internally referential system reaches its outer limits; on a collective level and in a day-to-day life moral/existential questions thrust themselves back to center-stage. Focused around processes of self-actualization, such issues call for a restructuring of social institutions, and raise issues not just of a sociological but of a political nature." Giddens (1991:208)
The importance of the questions of identity posed above is both cause and result of changes at the institutional level and interplay, if you will between the global and the regional. Within this framework, both the institution and the individual can change and adopt. One responsible for the other. All are interconnected. Giddens sees links between links between the individuals sense of identity and the global players - a shift from traditional sociology - which sees these players in isolation. If we take as an example, the changes that have taken place in the recent past, the high level of the rate of divorce (which it is argued can serve as a metaphor for modernity) sets people on a crisis mode - a mode that holds as much risk as it does promise. It becomes a significant time - for Giddens it is a "fateful moment":
"Most of these dilemmas become particularly acute, or are experienced with special force, during the fateful moment of an individual's life. Since fateful moments, by definition, are highly consequential, the individual feels at a crossroad in terms of overall life-planning. Fateful moments are phases when people might choose to have recourse to more traditional authorities. In this sense, they may seek refuge in pre-established beliefs and in familiar modes of activity. On the other hand, fateful moments also often mark periods of reskilling and empowerment. They are points at which, no matter how reflexive an individual may be in shaping of her Self-Identity, she has to sit up and take notice of new demand as well as new possibilities. At such moments, when life has to be seen anew, it is not surprising that endeavors at reskilling are likely to be particularly important and intensely pursued. Where consequential decisions are concerned, individuals are often stimulated to devote the time and energy necessary to generate increased mastery of the circumstances they confront. Fateful moments are transition points which have major implications not just for the circumstances of an individual's future conduct, but for self identity. For consequential decisions, once taken, will reshape the reflexive project of identity through the lifestyle consequences which ensue." Giddens (1991:142-143)
Based on the three dynamics of modernity: the separation of time and space, the disembedding mechanism and institutional reflexivity plus added to that the notion of an acute sense of crisis the self is beset with this fateful moments. To this, Giddens replies with Life Politics.
"Life-political issues place a question mark against the internally referential systems of modernity. Produced by the emancipatory impact of modern institutions, the life-political agenda exposes the limits of decision-making governed purely by internal criteria. For life politics brings back to prominence precisely those moral and existential questions repressed by the core institutions of modernity. Here we see the limitations of accounts of `postmodernity' developed under the aegis of poststructuralism. According to such views, moral questions become completely denuded of meaning or relevance in current social circumstances. But while this perspective accurately reflects aspects of the internally referential systems of modernity, it cannot explain why moral issues return to the center of the agenda of life politics. Life-political issues cannot be debated outside the scope of abstract systems: information drawn from various kinds of expertise is central to their definition. Yet because they center on questions of how we should live our lives in emancipated social circumstances they cannot but bring to the fore problems and questions of a moral and existential type. Life-political issues supply the central agenda for the return of the institutionally repressed. They call for a remoralising of social life and they demand a renewed sensitivity to questions that the institutions of modernity systematically dissolve." Giddens (1991: 223-224)
Changes therefore cannot be seen in isolated areas or pockets of consideration. We cannot focus on the individual only. The changes must bee seen within the context of the macro and micro revel. Within the realm of reflexivity, we do not only look at changes within ourselves as individuals and institutions but how we institute change. Using divorce as a metaphor for modernity, we can see all the hurts and pains and promise, much like Nietzsche said....live dangerously.
Miguel Llora
A lucid and engaging synthesis.......2001-10-12
This book is indeed a work of social science, and not a work of formal logic, dialectic, or philosophy. And as such, it seeks to avoid the subject-object aporias and non-explanatory vocabulary of "postmodernism" so fashionable in some academic circles in favor of an integrated model of the self and society that not only makes sense, but resonates with the modern reader and social scientist in a way not easily dismissable by concerns of validity claims. Phenomenology, it must be noted, is less than a water-tight system of defendable truth-claims; postmodernism in its extreme denies the notion of objective knowledge altogether. This book has different aims.
The strength of Giddens' work has always been his identification of reflexivity as the central mechanism behind social and psychological transformations - the nested critique of society that sets up progressively complex turnovers in psyche and structure, one on the heels of the other, institutionalizing doubt as a central feature of existential and social life. Giddens makes clear that "postmodernity" is a meaningless term for his purposes; instead he takes the more sensible route (alongside contemporaries such as the brilliant Scott Lash) and employs the term "high modernity" to describe the present times as of the same conceputal order (albeit much more "intense" in critical ways) than preceding centuries. He compares and contrasts the self and the other, the mechanics of disembedding and reimbedding, the dynamics of intensionality and extensionality, and the twin states of trust and risk in a way that convincingly demonstrates that modernity is a game whose time is not yet up - and whose textures social science is capable of elegantly describing, and possibly even explaining. Giddens' theory of the "pure relationship" and his related analyses of self-society relationships are extremely important theoretically to many areas of the social sciences, including nation-state theory, globalization, development ethnography, refugee studies, and cultural studies. His work is even beginning to exert an influence on parallel disciplines as well, for example discourse analysis.
So, while the philosopher might dismiss this work as dependent on the truth-claims of modern psychology, the sociologist (at whatever level of expertise) will find this to be an engaging, challenging, and clearly written work with far-ranging application to empirical social-scientific material.
A Branch of Structuration Theory.......2000-06-21
The question of self identity is a classical philosophical question and also a fundamental issue for any social/ sociological theory which deals with the subject, the active agent. The approach to this issue can be either set out in a philosophical manner or that of a social science. By "social science" I refer to the narrow sense of a somewhat empirical and experimental tradition.
Giddens adopts the latter. He argues from results of psychological experiments that human beings are subject to a sense of security since a newborn. By the sense can one assure the continuity of the self-identity. The continuity furtherly guarantees that the person not get into psychological disorder.
The self-identity in "high-modernity" has to cope with new problems. Giddens avoids using the term "postmodern", but he does points out the failure of the Enlightenment project which other postmodernists recognize. Giddens admits that human knowledge cannot reach so far as to set out a orderly plan of the society. The uncertainty signified by the sphere of the unknown/ unrealizable forms a great challenge to the self identity he mentioned above. Giddens tries to describe the society in high-modernity as a "risk community" and politics of life. The former concept may be inspired by Ulrich Beck. And the latter means an incorporation of global or domestic issues into everyday decisions, such as whether or not to buy environment-friendly products.
The style of this book can be seemed as a detail part of his structuration theory, which attempts to combined the conflicting individualist and structuralist perspectives. Those who are familiar with the agent/ structure controversies may find this book helpful.
On the contrary, those who have a better taste for philosophy or postmodern discourse would find the arguments of Giddens implausible. He seeks justifications from the validity and reliability of psychological experiments. Unfortunately, psychology itself is suspicious, since the explanation and attribution of experiment results are also subject to our cognitive framework. This critique may leads to phenomenological or postmodern reflexions, the former of which remains in line with subject philosophy while the latter of which de-construct the subject and put their eyes on language, discourse and desire.
Book Description
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.
Customer Reviews:
In the name of Iran.......2006-11-21
This is book is discussing how Iranian ladies took active role in shaping Iran's fabric of society. Women were able to have social mobility because Iranian women began to make progress in educational field. Having said that, the book also discussed Iran's Lion and Sun flag. This book also mentioned how King of Kings Reza/Riza PAHLAVI contributed to women progress in Iran. Dr. Afsaneh NAJMABADI did a good job.
Gender Bending Images of Beauty: a Mind-boggling Read .......2005-09-08
Living in Iran for five years, I became fascinated by one particular image of Iranian women. Not the woman in the black, cover-all chador, but the round-faced curly-haired sun lady, or Khorshid Khanoum, seen on everything from key-rings to hand-painted crockery. I wrote to Afsaneh Najmabadi, asking if she knew the origin of the image, and found to my delight that it would be the subject of a chapter in her new book, "Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards." It's a fascinating and revealing detective story of how images of beauty have changed over the centuries.
In the 19th century, the sun lady, rising from the back of a lion, was the national symbol of Iran, but gradually her face mysteriously disappeared. At that time, portraits of beautiful men and women were remarkably similar -- moon-faced, beardless, but sometimes with mustaches, and with heavy eyebrows joining in the middle. Further back, the most famous Persian love poetry was written to young, beautiful, beardless men, for which there was a word, amrad. Embarrassed scholars have never quite managed to agree on whether this important genre of poetry was homoerotic and sexual in nature or whether the beloved somehow represented an allegorical, neo-Platonic, divine love.
"Women with Mustaches" challenges our assumptions about beauty and whether it is inextricably and immutably linked with gender, male or female. The book includes beautifully chosen illustrations which make the argument all the more convincing.
Najmabadi, a Harvard University professor, uses Iranian history to explore ground-breaking ideas which may turn out to show a new way forward in gender studies.
The book follows various paths of research, including a study of the development of women's education in Iran, in particular the period at the turn of the 20th century known as the Constitutional Revolution. Stitched together from press reports, books, and the diaries of increasingly prominent women, this is interesting in itself. But Najmabadi uses it to support her argument that women's education became an integral part of the shaping of a modern nation. Women were among the first to recognise this. As one anonymous letter-writer put it: "I am a woman and according to you gentlemen I am mentally deficient, not quite human. Thanks to my father, I was not educated. But today it is clear to everyone that [even] any widowed woman has a claim to this National Assembly and today we demand our rights....We are fed up, we can no longer remain patient."
Najmabadi's distinct areas of research make it difficult to knit the arguments together, making the book sometimes appear disjointed. It is an academic book, not a light read. But it is original, authoritative and thought provoking, and not only because the image of women and the issue of compulsory hejab are still key political issues in today's Islamic Republic of Iran. This book will make you think long and hard about the depiction of beauty in Western culture too.
Book Description
Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines imagesâliterary, visual, and filmicâthat configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.
Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.
Racial Castration will make a landmark contribution to the fields of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic theory, ethnic studies, feminism, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, postcoloniality, and critical race theory.
Customer Reviews:
Ultimately less satisfying than one would hope.......2004-10-23
Although in some ways provocative, this book poses a question it never adequately grapples with--namely, can the "materiality" of race be properly characterized or understood as a "discursive limit" to ideological constructions of ethnicity without being understood as existing outside of discourse? It seems to me that Eng fails to address the question of whether such constructions may be regarded as either a pre- or extra-discursive "hard kernel of the Real," one the one hand, or simply another aspect of discourse, on the other hand. His work would benefit from a more thorough engagement with, and analysis of, the "objet petit a" in the work of Zizek and Lacan. Perhaps "race" in general ought to be regarded a primordial psychic "hole," an "absence" or pure negativity where a "grounding" for discourse ought to be but proves to be lacking. Unfortunately that is a proposition that Eng hints at but does not explore.
Of Limited Use.......2004-02-14
As a student of cultural studies who is interested in limning the taxonomic and theoretical relations among the "queer," the "Asian," and the "American," I must say that I found this book rather disappointing. Eng seems to have an unerring eye for the trivial, the irrelevant, and the beside-the-point. He also seems to be unfamiliar with current scholarship that highlights the errors underlying the view of the performative subject as a figure whose agency can, in any proper sense, be seen as "entailed" by virtue of its positionality vis-a-vis the rights-bearing subject. Eng would also have benefited from consulting recent legal scholarship on the "intersectionality" of the queer Asian male (or female), as well as the "co-synthesis" produced by juxtaposing various marginalized identities.
Refiguring the scrappy Asian/American field as such,.......2004-02-10
"Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America" offers lucid, theoretically rich, and original readings of an array of Asian American texts to reveal how patterns of melancholy, loss, impotence, hysteria, anxiety, and reverse hallucination relate to the racially traumatic history of Asian/American immigration, failed assimilation, diasporic dispersal and the formation of alternative histories, queer communities, and modes of multiple identification. Works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and Zack Linmark are read with deft lucidity, originality, juxtaposition, and care. The study weaves a lucid expostion of textual detail and racialized subject-formation at the same time it respects the shifting dynamics of social constraint and historical context. In related workd like the multi-sited anthology on "Loss" and the therapy-framed essay "A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia," Eng moves to provide a far-reaching psychoanalytical model of a melancholy subjectivity that is not pathological nor individualized but fully socialized, situated in US race relations, and productive of historical and political transformations. The push from Lacan to Benjamin suggests Eng's left-leaning will to achieve an historical materialism with range, impact, and care.
Speaking of David Eng..........2004-02-09
"Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America" offers lucid and original readings of an array of Asian American texts to reveal how patterns of melancholy, loss, impotence, hysteria, anxiety, and reverse hallucination relate to the traumatic history of Asian/American immigration, failed assimilation, diasporic dispersal and the formation of alternative histories, communities, and modes of multiple identification. Works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and Zack Linmark are read with great lucidity, originality, juxtaposition, zest, and care. The study weaves a lucid expostion of textual detail and racialized subject-formation at the same time it respects the shifting dynamics of social constraint and historical context.
In related projects like his multi-sited anthology on Loss and the therapy-framed essay ýA Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,ý Eng works in and upon a politicized version of theory (as such) to provide a far-reaching psychoanalytical model of a "melancholy subjectivity" that is not pathological nor individualized but fully socialized, situated in US race relations, and at best productive of left-leaning historical and political transformations. The push from Lacan to Benjamin suggests Engýs will to achieve an historical materialism with range, impact, and care. This is work on "feeling" but with politics and vision, unlike a few others I might mention here "but prefer not to" this Sunday morning in Santa Cruz.
says it like no one else.......2002-02-24
I agree largely and almost wholly with the previous and first independent reviewer of this book: Eng's 'Racial Castration' is at times, hyperacademic and perhaps even overly into the realm of philosophy and not social studies. Still, it is a unique, overdue work on the perception of-- and the creation of the perception of-- asian american males in mainstream American society.
I believe that Eng brings up some extremely insightful and heretofore overlooked aspects that are central to 'Asian-american male masculinity' in America. First and foremost is the concept that, as 'queerness' or the 'feminization' of the asian american male is a direct result of the white-male-as-heterosexual-masculine-hegemony. Too often, asian american masculinity and the perception of asian american men in this country deems the denunciation of homosexuality-- 'queerness'-- as essential to acceptance as part of masculine America as a whole. I don't think that any authors to this point have pointed out the inherently intimate relation and intertwining of sexuality and race in this case. To throw out acceptance of gay Asian-America as masculine merely to seek acceptance of "masculine Asian-America" as a whole is a big mistake.
I think that Eng has rightfully pointed out how 'queer' Asian-American males are often left holding the bag as their own Asian-American culture, blind to how 'American culture' as emasculated their own heterosexual men, turns around and rejects the masculinity of their own 'queer' men. And I believe that it is true: Asian American men, queer or straight, face largely the same problems of how their masculinity is perceived in America, and both groups are basically in the same boat in this regard.
Eng's deep delving-- almost reaching?-- into areas that would seemingly be a stretch to relate to his topic (mainly deep psychoanalytical and philosophical theories of the perception/acceptance/rejection of self) are somewhat difficult to grasp, but I believe that they are germane because they do largely reinforce the elusive depth at which stereotypes of asian-american masculinity are adopted, inculcated, and reinforced from outside.
I believe that Eng has quite aptly addressed his stated mission of exploring the 'Racial Castration' of Asian American men in America, and I laud 'Racial Castration' as a theoretically seminal work. It is also aptly named. The only shame is that it will almost certainly be marginalized as 'academia', as it is written to be almost completely inaccesible to the general public, i.e., the average American. And while it does attack the theoretical/philosophical problems of the perception of asian-american masculinity in America, it probably won't do very much in the way of practically addressing what IS inherently an everyday, concrete social and political issue. *Real* social change won't occur in the ivory towers of academia, but with average Americans! Still, if it raises the awareness of even a few individuals who read it, it will have gratifyingly served its purpose.
It has raised mine; and for this reason, this book is a keeper in my collection!
Book Description
While other histories of the British empire have focused on administration, politics and policy, this collection of essays examines the cultural impact of empire on British and colonial people's sense of self, as well as on their social relations in the eighteenth century. The contributions by leading scholars analyze the ways in which theater, sociability, artistic and literary production, history, slavery and identity were affected by Britain's contacts with America, India, Africa and the South Pacific.
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Japan's Underclass: Day Laborers And the Homeless (Modernity and Identity in Asia)
Hideo Aoki
Manufacturer: Trans Pacific Press
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Book Description
The emergence of an Islamist movement and the startling buoyancy of Islamic political parties in Turkey--a model of secular modernization, a cosmopolitan frontier, and NATO ally--has puzzled Western observers. As the appeal of the Islamist Welfare Party spread through Turkish society, including the middle class, in the 1990s, the party won numerous local elections and became one of the largest parties represented in parliament, even holding the prime ministership in 1996 and 1997. Welfare was formally banned and closed in 1998, and its successor, Virtue, was banned in 2001, for allegedly posing a threat to the state, but the Islamist movement continues to grow in popularity.
Jenny White has produced an ethnography of contemporary Istanbul that charts the success of Islamist mobilization through the eyes of ordinary people. Drawing on neighborhood interviews gathered over twenty years of fieldwork, she focuses intently on the genesis and continuing appeal of Islamic politics in the fabric of Turkish society and among mobilizing and mobilized elites, women, and educated populations.
White shows how everyday concerns and interpersonal relations, rather than Islamic dogma, helped Welfare gain access to community networks, building on continuing face-to-face relationships by way of interactions with constituents through trusted neighbors. She argues that Islamic political networks are based on cultural understandings of relationships, duties, and trust. She also illustrates how Islamic activists have sustained cohesion despite contradictory agendas and beliefs, and how civic organizations, through local relationships, have ensured the autonomy of these networks from the national political organizations in whose service they appear to act.
To illuminate the local culture of Istanbul, White has interviewed residents, activists, party officials, and municipal administrators and participated in their activities. She draws on rich experiences and research made possible by years of firsthand observation in the streets and homes of Umraniye, a large neighborhood that grew in tandem with Turkey's modernization in the late 20th century. This book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and analysts of Islamic and Middle Eastern politics.
Book Description
In this rapidly globalizing world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of regionalism. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, architectural regionalism remains a fluid concept, its historical development and current influence largely undocumented. This comprehensive reader brings together over forty key essays illustrating the full range of ideas embodied by the term. Authored by important critics, historians, and architects such as Kenneth Frampton, Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Alan Colquhoun, Architectural Regionalism represents the history of regionalist thinking in architecture from the early twentieth century to today.
Customer Reviews:
Building a Discourse.......2007-02-28
The intent of this volume was to construct a coherent history of the idea of regionalism from its many many supporting texts and ideas. It is an important collection of writing that covers the entire 20th Century intellectual history of Regionalism in Architecture and includes such authors as: Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, David Williams, Mary Colter, Pietro Belluschi, Christopher Alexander, Wendell Berry, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Richard Ingersoll, Benton MacKaye, John Gaw Meem, Richard Neutra, Paul Ricouer, Alan Colquhoun, Juhani Pallasmaa, among others (44 in all). Further, it considers Regionalism in an international context, particularly the developing world through the writings of Suha Ozkan (Middle East), Balkrishna Doshi (India), and Kenza Boussora (Algeria). In it are provided contextual introductions to each text and an introduction that attempts to place the discourse, as a whole in reasonable framework. The topics include: Regionalist theory, Referential Regionalism (1920s & 30s), Regional Modernism (1930s-1960s), Regional Planning, Bioregionalism, Critical Regionalism, and a set of essays that update and extend the discourse into the future via performativity theory, sustainability, and the socially-critical work of the Rural Studio.
Customer Reviews:
Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey........2001-08-01
"About time" was this reviewer's response to a collection of essays reconsidering the Atatürk experiment in secularism and Western orientation some sixty years on. Essays, almost all by Turks, offer high-quality though overly jargon-laden discussions of such topics as architecture, women, and scholarship.
The book's highlight is undoubtedly an unassuming 12-page essay, "The Quest for the Islamic Self within the Context of Modernity," by Nilüfer Göle, an associate professor of sociology at Boðaziçi University in Istanbul. Göle establishes the enormous cultural chasm between the Atatürkists' Westernizing ideals and what had come before, then shows how today's Islamists are trying "to maintain an identity separate from that of the dominant West." In other words, rather than see Islamists as products of failed economies, she shows the acutely important cultural dimension of their effort. To illustrate these points, she looks in more depth at the question of the body, especially the female body, and contrasts the Western notions of care and exposure with the thoroughly different Islamic concepts. Göle concludes by noting the paradox of Islamic pop music and fashion shows-two signs indicating the ubiquity of Western modernity.
All this should be self-evident, but it is not; most analysts of Islam pay too little attention to culture in their fascination with material well-being. Göle has succinctly shown why they are wrong.
Middle East Quarterly, December 1997
Rethinking through an edited volume.......2001-04-10
This book overall is a strong edited volume. Especially the pieces concerning identity and identity formation have new and interesting vantage points. It is a new perspective that helps the reader to understand and rethink their "image" about Turkey. For those interested in Middle East, in Turkey and generally in modernity this book will be of great value.
Book Description
In a stunningly original work about the impact of cultural perceptions in international relations, Simei Qing offers a new perspective on relations between the United States and China after World War II.
From debates over Taiwan in the Truman administration to military confrontation in Korea to relations with the Soviet Union, Qing explores how policies on both sides became persistently counterproductive. Implicit moral and cultural values became woven into policy rationales for both China and the United States. Cultural visions of modernity and understandings of identity played a critical role in each nation's evaluation of the other's intentions and in defining interests and principles in their diplomatic relationship.
Based on American, Russian, and newly declassified Chinese sources, this book reveals rarely examined assumptions that were entrenched in mainstream policy debates on both sides, and sheds light on the origins and development of U.S.-China confrontations that continue to resonate today. Simei Qing also provides a compelling look at the vital role of deeply anchored visions in the origins of human military conflicts.
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- Learn about Korean society
- interesting case study in sociology, not Korean culture
- the most boring book i read in a really interesting class
- Getting Married in Korea
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Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity
Laurel Kendall
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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ASIN: 0520202007 |
Book Description
This work explores what it means to be modern and what it means to be Korean in a culture where courtship and marriage are often the crucible in which notions of gender and class are cast and recast. Touching on a number of important issues--identity, romantic love, women's work, marriage negotiations, and wedding ceremonies--Laurel Kendall gives us a new appreciation for how Koreans have adapted this pivotal social practice to the astounding changes of the past century.
Kendall attended her first Korean wedding in 1970, soon after she arrived in the country with the Peace Corps. Years later, as a seasoned anthropologist, she began interviewing both working-class and middle-class couples, matchmakers, purveyors of dowry goods, and proprietors of wedding halls. She consulted etiquette handbooks and women's magazines and analyzed cartoons, photographs, and weddings themselves. The result is an engaging account of how marriage matches are made, how families proceed through the rites, how they finance ceremonies and elaborate exchanges of ritual goods, and how these practices are integral to the construction of adult identities and notions of ideal women and men. The book is also a reflection on what it means to write "Korea" in a complex and ever changing social milieu.
Customer Reviews:
Learn about Korean society.......2004-07-04
An at times funny read of the intersection of two cultures. One is the modern consumerist culture, that has taken firm hold in South Korea since the 1980s. The other is a traditional Confucian morality steeped in centuries of lore.
Kendall studies this through the ingenious choice of marriages. Here, the Confucian traditions often appear in the form of arranged marriages. Yet she shows how young couples persistently try to sidestep this format.
Along the way, a non-Korean reader is also rewarded by many insights into Korean society. Things that an outsider who does not speak the language would simply miss.
interesting case study in sociology, not Korean culture.......2001-11-09
this book is not for someone who would be interested into a systematic and quick introduction to Korean wedding customs.
The elements presented are of the case study type, showing the evolutions over time of a Korean family sampled for a PhD thesis. interesting for another scholarly work, it isn't so much for someone interested in understanding Korean marriage customs. Bits and pieces can be collected and summarised by oneself. This book is about "sociology", not "culture" per se.
the most boring book i read in a really interesting class.......2001-06-09
Getting Married in Korea was one of the 3 books my Cultural Antro professor mandated us to read. The book is excruciatingly boring. Unlike his other reading assignments, I couldnt see myself pass the first chapter (or even the first page!). Fortunately, I finished the book in a month. (woohooo). The content was in detail and the book with only few graphics. i thought it could have been better if the author stuck more pictures in their to at least entertain the reader while reading!
Getting Married in Korea.......2001-05-12
This is a wonderful book for anyone who wants to learn more about Korean culture in general or is looking for info spacifically on weddings. It is easy to read and understand the concepts. Despite being packed with information, the book does not overwhelm.
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