Author: Lucinda Byatt File Type: pdf What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or voluntary death have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time? In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives. This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.**ReviewAn encyclopedic but immensely readable account of the social norms that surround, and individual motives that propel, such fateful choices a deeply insightful book that will interest suicide-prevention counselors and others who are curious about this complex topic. Foreword Reviews Barbaglis study is a brilliant synthesis of the history and sociology of suicide, covering both the West and the East, from ancient martyrs to contemporary suicide bombers. He eloquently and persuasively argues for the importance of cultural factors behind huge variations in the propensity to take ones own life from one society to another. **Jeffrey Watt, University of Mississippi This work is the most important on the sociology of suicide in 100 years. Barbagli lays out the grand picture of changes and variations in time and space, and gives the basis for a theory that is simultaneously cultural, structural and dynamic. Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania**About the Author Marzio Barbagli is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna. What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or voluntary death have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time? In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives. This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come. **
Author: Timothy Scott Barker
File Type: pdf
Eschewing the traditional focus on objectviewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barkers Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity. Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.
Author: Carli Coetzee
File Type: pdf
p Segoe UI, serif 13pxspan orphans 2 widows 2bThe author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change.bspan p Segoe UI, serif 13pxIn this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories and using this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms.p Segoe UI, serif 13pxThe emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category in thinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood Mandelas prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison Ruth Firsts concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage white identity the #Fallist moment Abantu book festival and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity. p Segoe UI, serif 13pxfont face=Segoe UI, serif size=2bCarli Coetzeeb is Editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Her publications include Accented Futures Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2013) and the edited collection Afropolitanism Reboot (Routledge, 2017). She co-edited The Handbook of African Literature (Routledge, 2019) with Moradewun Adejunmobi and Negotiating the Past The Making of Memory in South Africa(Oxford University Press, 1998) with Sarah Nuttall. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland) Wits University Pressfont
Author: Kenneth P. Vogel
File Type: epub
Mark Hannathe turn-of-the-century iron-and-coal-magnate-turned-operative who leveraged massive contributions from the robber baronswas famously quoted as saying There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I cant remember what the second one is. To an extent that would have made Hanna blush, a series of developments capped by the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision effectively crowned a bunch of billionaires and their operatives the new kings of politics. Big Money is a rollicking tour of a new political world dramatically reordered by ever-larger flows of cash. Ken Vogel has breezed into secret gatherings of big-spending Republicans and Democrats alikefrom California poolsides to DC hotel barsto brilliantly expose the way the mega-money men (and rather fewer women) are dominating the new political landscape. Great wealth seems to attach itself to outsize characters. From the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to the bubbling nouveau cowboy Foster Friess from the Texas trial lawyer couple, Amber and Steve Mostyn, to the micromanaging Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenbergthe multimillionaires and billionaires are swaggering up to the tables for the hottest new game in politics. The prize is American democracy, and the players checks keep getting bigger.**
Author: Ronald E. Riggio
File Type: pdf
Nonverbal communication is part of virtually every human endeavor. It is used to convey power, love, establish rapport, and even regulate the flow of communication. Although nonverbal communication has been studied for over 125 years, we are still quite limited in our ability to apply the research to important real world settings.The goal of this edited volume is to provide a much needed bridge between the research on nonverbal communication and the application of those findings. The book features contributions from some of the leading researchers in the field. These distinguished scholars apply their understanding of nonverbal communication processes to a variety of settings including hospitals and clinics, courtrooms and police stations, the workplace and government, the classroom, and everyday life. It explores nonverbal communication in public settings, in intimate relationships, and across cultures and general lessons such as the importance of context, individual differences, and how expectations affect interpretation.Applications of Nonverbal Communication appeals to a diverse group of practitioners, researchers, and students from a variety of disciplines including psychology, health care, law enforcement, political science, sociology, communication, business and management. It may also serve as a supplement in upper level courses on nonverbal communication.
Author: Luisa Del Giudice
File Type: pdf
In these dynamic essays, thirteen wise women review their lives for meaning and purpose, striving to integrate both head and heart. They consider how their spiritual paradigms have shaped their vocations as teachers, scholars, guides, mentors, and advocates and how these roles have been integral to their lifes work, not merely to their work life. With courageous and insightful testimonies they narrate the intersecting relationships of work, family, students, patients,and colleagues, weaving them together rather thancompartmentalizing them. Challenges inside and outside the academy and other professional settings are revealed, to tell of suffering and transformation, to tally hard-earned lifelessons and to share wisdom achieved. Lives and words are gathered and generously shared, allowing these women to make sense of their own lives while mentoring a wider circle of younger and older readers alike. These travel tales of journeys through knowledge and self-knowledge will inform, challenge, surprise, entertain, and inspire. **Review These women bring both experience and an ability to see the overarching picture as they examine the paths that have led to their current positions. Not since Mary Catherine Batesons Composing a Life have I seen something similar. Kerry Noonan, Associate Professor, Core Division, Champlain College Very well written and engaging. Reading this collection was an enriching and significant experience. These are women who dont mess around! Cristina Bacchilega, author of Fairy Tales Transformed? 21st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder This book is a visionary collection of essays examining the cultural and spiritual wellsprings that have sustained the contributors scholarship and shaped their purpose as women of learning. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, author of Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman About the Author Luisa Del Giudice, Ph.D., has taught at UCLA, was founder-director of the Italian Oral History Institute. In 2008 she was named honorary fellow of the American Folklore Society and Cavaliere (knight) of the Republic of Italy.
Author: Richard Caddel
File Type: epub
When most Americans think of contemporary British poetry, they think of such mainstream poets as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Yet there is a vibrant, diverse alternative poetry movement in the UK, inspired in large measure by the work of such significant mentors as Basil Bunting and J. H. Prynne. There is growing interest in this work in the United States - as alternative American poetries express increasingly transnational concerns - and yet almost none of it is available here.OTHER is a highly focused anthology bringing together several important strands of English-language poetry that are not otherwise so readily accessible. It includes work by 55 poets, among them Cris Cheek, Brian Coffey, Fred dAguiar, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer, Randolph Healy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Wendy Mulford, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Catherine Walsh a critical introduction addressing such topics as the interaction of British and American poetic traditions and brief biographical and bibliographical notes on each poet.
Author: Valdimir Nalivkin
File Type: pdf
Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley is the first English translation of an important 19th-century Russian text describing everyday life in Uzbek communities. Vladimir and Maria Nalivkin were Russians who settled in a Sart village in 1878, in a territory newly conquered by the Russian Empire. During their six years in Nanay, Maria Nalivkina learned the local language, befriended her neighbors, and wrote observations about their lives from birth to death. Together, Maria and Vladimir published this account, which met with great acclaim from Russias Imperial Geographic Society and among Orientalists internationally. While they recognized that Islam shaped social attitudes, the Nalivkins never relied on common stereotypes about the plight of Muslim women. The Fergana Valley women of their ethnographic portrait emerge as lively, hard-working, clever, and able to navigate the cultural challenges of early Russian colonialism. Rich with social and cultural detail of a sort not available in other kinds of historical sources, this work offers rare insight into life in rural Central Asia and serves as an instructive example of the genre of ethnographic writing that was emerging at the time. Annotations by the translators and an editors introduction by Marianne Kamp help contemporary readers understand the Nalivkins work in context. **Review Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley is a must-read for students specializing in the history of Russia and Central Asia, womens studies, and anthropology. (H-SAE) Markova and Kamps translation makes available to English-language readers a resource valuable on two levels. Kamps comprehensive introduction emphasizes the importance of this work for scholars considering the development of ethnographic method, Russian feminism, and nineteenth-century Russian scholarship more generally. (Religious Studies Review) A uniquely intimate portrait of life in an Uzbek village, by turns fascinating and frustrating. Marianne Kamp and Mariana Markova are to be thanked for their fine job of translating and editing this text. (The Russian Review) This work provides us with an enduring portrait of a moment after the Kokand Khanate was defeated, when its forms of Islamic rule were officially gone but before Russian imperial law, administration, and culture had come to dominate rural Central Asian communities. (Acta Via Serica) Review A superb example of Russian Orientalism. Kamps introduction and annotation contextualize this 19th-century work very well. . . . This book is fundamental to the studies of Central Asian history, history of anthropology, gender and womens studies, studies of religion, and post-colonial studies. (Svetlana Peshkova University of New Hampshire) I am delighted to see an English translation of this work. It is wonderful and rich ethnography of a type that existed before there were any standard conventionsthroughout the western worldfor conducting and writing up such cross-cultural studies. . . . Gives us Central Asian perspectives and the observation of Central Asian peoples and their lifeways from the perspective of people who actually lived among them. (Russell Zanca Northeastern Illinois University)
Author: Noam Chomsky
File Type: pdf
With a detailed critique of Irangate, Culture of Terrorism demonstrates how Americas ruling elite perpetrates a particularly vile form of cultural imperialism - accusing Americas enemies of precisely those terrorist attributes that might more accurately describe the actions of America itself.From Library JournalChomsky, linguist and political essayist, continues his critique of President Reagans Central American policy begun in Turning the Tide ( LJ 4186), in which he argued that the United States has opposed human rights and democratization in the region to advance our economic interests. Here the thesis is extended to the Iran-contra scandal. Chomskys documentation neatly supports his logic. Leftist adherents will applaud, while the majoritydepicted as perpetrators or dupes of military-based state capitalismwill ignore the book or dismiss it as rhetoric. But Chomsky has a point of view not frequently encountered in the press. For larger public and academic libraries. Kenneth F. Kister, Pinellas Park P.L., Fla. 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewInfused with the anger of a truly moral man. ... powerful, always provocative stuff. -- Guardian