Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.
A classroom resource for instructors that includes full syllabi and teaching modules, Feminist Practices will be of interest to anyone who teaches in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Feminist Practices is intended for use in classrooms and to spark creative ideas for teaching a diverse array of topics.
What makes a practice feminist? What is at stake in claiming the feminist label? Whether within a university context or in larger national and global ones, feminist projects involve challenging established relations of power (critique), envisioning alternative possibilities (theory), and employing activism to change social relations. By taking diverse forms of feminist practice as its focal point, this course reader investigates how to study the complexity of women’s and men’s lives in ways that take race, gender-power, ethnicity, class, and nationality seriously. Feminist Practices also shows how the production of such feminist knowledge challenges long-established beliefs about the world.
Topics covered include
• Gendered labor,
• Commercialization of sexuality and reproduction,
• Love and marriage in the twenty-first century,
• Violence against women,
• Varieties of feminist activism, and
• Women’s leadership and governance.
Feminist Practices draws upon articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to explore the nature of feminist practices in the twenty-first century and the range of issues these practices address. Organized thematically the collection captures the complexity of a global movement that emerges in the context of local struggles over diverse modes of injustice.
In The Insubordination of Signs Richard theorizes the cultural reactions—particularly within the realms of visual arts, literature, and the social sciences—to the oppression of the Chilean dictatorship. She reflects on the role of memory in the historical shadow of the military regime and on the strategies offered by marginal discourses for critiquing institutional systems of power. She considers the importance of Walter Benjamin for the theoretical self-understanding of the Latin American intellectual left, and she offers revisionary interpretations of the Chilean neo-avantgarde in terms of its relationships with the traditional left and postmodernism. Exploring the gap between Chile’s new left social sciences and its “new scene” aesthetic and critical practices, Richard discusses how, with the return of democracy, the energies that had set in motion the democratizing process seemed to exhaust themselves as cultural debate was attenuated in order to reduce any risk of a return to authoritarianism.
True religious faith cannot be confirmed by any external proofs. Rather, it is founded on a basic act of trust—and the common root of that trust, for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, is a belief in the divine creation of the universe. But with Learning to Trust in Freedom, David B. Burrell asks the provocative question: How do we reach that belief, and what is it about the universe that could possibly testify to its divine origins? Even St. Augustine, he points out, could only find faith after a harrowing journey through the lures of desire—and it is that very desire that Burrell seizes on as a tool with which to explore the origin and purpose of the world. Delving deep into the intertwinings of desire and faith, and drawing on St. John of the Cross, Edith Stein, and Charles Taylor, Burrell offers a new understanding of free will, trust, and perception.
Readers of Herodotus’s Histories are familiar with its reports of bizarre portents, riddling oracles, and striking dreams. But Herodotus draws our attention to other types of signs too, beginning with human speech itself as a coded system that can manipulate and be manipulated. Objects, gifts, artifacts, markings, even the human body, are all capable of being invested with meaning in the Histories and Herodotus shows that conventionally and culturally determined actions, gestures, and ritual all need decoding.
This book represents an unprecedented examination of signs and their interpreters, as well as the terminology Herodotus uses to describe sign transmission, reception, and decoding. Through his control and involvement in this process he emerges as a veritable “master of signs.”
Planted by the Signs brings us the contemporary Appalachian poetry—cultivated in the dirt of Elliott County, Kentucky—of Misty Skaggs. With an eye for details that exquisitely balance personal and social observation to communicate volumes, she tells the stories of generations of women who have learned to navigate a harsh world with a little help from the Farmers’ Almanac and the stars. The collection is separated into three sections that reference the best times to grow and harvest. Knowing and following these guidelines—planting by the signs—could mean the difference between prosperity and tragedy in the lives of Appalachian families.
Personal, political, and passionate, Planted by the Signs also explores what it means for Skaggs to care for her great-grandmother at the end of her life. Color photos by the poet further showcase her sidelong and fierce outlook. The images and poems together deliver an intimate look into the day-to-day reality of a backwoods woman embracing barefooted radicalism in the only place she could call home.
Police Burnout is the synthesis of Dr. Fishkin’s sixteen years experience as a police psychologist, and is a must read for all police officers, family members, police and public safety administrators, as well as mental health specialists who work in the area of law enforcement. It is a modern classic in the field of police psychology.
Winner of the 2013 Sonya Rudikoff Award for best first book in Victorian Studies
Short-listed for the 2013 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize.
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain.
The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents.
Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.
Cochlear implants, mainstreaming, genetic engineering, and other ethical dilemmas confronting deaf people mandated a new, wide-ranging examination of these issues, fulfilled by Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts. This collection, carefully chosen from the 2004 Signs and Voices Conference, the Presidential Forum on American Sign Language at the Modern Language Association Convention, and other sources, addresses all of the factors now changing the cultural landscape for deaf people. To ensure quality and breadth of knowledge, editors Kristin A. Lingren, Doreen DeLuca, and Donna Jo Napoli selected the work of renowned scholars and performers Shannon Allen, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Adrian Blue, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Peter Cook, David P. Corina, Michael Davidson, Kristen Harmon, Tom Humphries, Sotaro Kita, Heather Knapp, Robert G. Lee, Irene W. Leigh, Kenny Lerner, Carole Neidle, Peter Novak, AslI Özyürek, David M. Perlmutter, Anne Senghas, and Ronnie Wilbur.
Signs and Voices is divided into three sections—Culture and Identity, Language and Literacy, and American Sign Language in the Arts—each of which focuses on a particular set of theoretical and practical concerns. Also, the included DVD presents many of the performances from the Arts section. Taken together, these essays and DVD point to new directions in a broad range of fields, including cognitive science, deaf studies, disability studies, education, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. This extraordinary showcase of innovative and rigorous cross-disciplinary study will prove invaluable to everyone interested in the current state of the Deaf community.
The persecution of Old World German Protestants and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century-following debilitating wars, the Reformation, and the Inquisition-brought about significant immigration to America. Many of the immigrants, and their progeny, settled in the Appalachian frontier. Here they established a particularly old set of religious beliefs and traditions based on a strong sense of folk spirituality. They practiced astrology, numerology, and other aspects of esoteric thinking and left a legacy that may still be found in Appalachian folklore today.
Based in part on the author's extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore
describes these various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world.
By concentrating on these inheritances, Gerald C. Milnes draws a larger picture of the German influence on Appalachia. Much has been written about the Anglo-Celtic, Scots-Irish, and English folkways of the Appalachian people, but few studies have addressed their German cultural attributes and sensibilities. Signs, Cures, and Witchery sheds startling light on folk influences from Germany, making it a volume of tremendous value to Appalachian scholars, folklorists, and readers with an interest in Appalachian folklife and German American studies.
Roland Barthes's critical writings promoted postwar movements ranging from the New Novel to the Parisian version of structural analysis. As a theorist, he was inspired in large part by semiology, the general science of signs set forth in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. This volume presents a challenging variety of essays that elaborate and comment on specific elements in the evolution of Barthes's study of signs, from the revolutionary semiology of his 1957 Mythologies to the semioclasm and semiotrophy of such post-1960s' books as S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, and A Lover's Discourse.
The nine essays of Signs in Culture have been organized to express the striking interplay of language and writing as the ethics of form Barthes first described in his 1953 Writing Degree Zero. Each essay serves as a pivotal critical exercise beginning with or departing from Barthes's writing. Each essayist thus engages an expanded semiology which inscribes the life of signs within the institutions and practices that literary critics, philosophers, and historians alike have seen as constituting the elements of a cultural study and critique.
Questions the literal burying of the nuclear threat and how it relates to expectations for our future
A rising ocean. A falling building. A toxic river. Species extinguished. A nuclear landscape. In a world so configured, the state of contemporary ecological thought and practice is woefully—and perilously—inadequate. Focusing on the government’s nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, Signs of Danger begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad began receiving shipments in 1999. With a proposed closing date of 2030, this repository for nuclear waste must be secured with a sign, the purpose of which will be to keep people away for three hundred generations. In the official documents uncovered by Peter van Wyck, we encounter a government bureaucracy approaching the issue of nuclear waste as a technical problem only to find itself confronting a host of intractable philosophical issues concerning language, culture, and history. Signs of Danger plumbs these depths as it shows us how the problem raised in the desert of New Mexico is actually the problem of a culture grappling with ecological threats and with questions of the limits of meaning and representation in the deep future.
The reflections at the center of this book—on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual—are aimed at defining the uniquely modern status of environmental and nuclear threats. They offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins, and how such a juncture is closely linked with questions of risk, concepts of history, and the cultural experience of time.
Winner of the 2005 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize of the Canadian Communication Association
A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages.
Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, defines, and creates a field for working out social relations. Because this field of study in sociolinguistics historically has focused on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on references to the addressee—for example, the choice between tu and vous when addressing someone in French. This book uses the study of Southeast Asian languages to theorize interlocutor reference more broadly, significantly deepening our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. As the authors explain, Southeast Asian systems exceed in complexity and nuance the well-described cases of Europe in two basic ways. First, in many languages of Southeast Asia, a speaker must select an appropriate reference form not only for other/addressee but also for self/speaker. Second, in these languages, in addition to pronouns, speakers draw upon a range of common and proper nouns including names, kin terms, and titles, in referring to themselves and the addressee. Acts of interlocutor reference, therefore, inevitably do more than simply identify the speaker and addressee; they also convey information about the proposed relation between interlocutors. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanized communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this is an important contribution to the regional linguistic and anthropological literature.
Traces the sources of power and large-scale organization of prehistoric peoples among Archaic societies.
By focusing on the first instances of mound building, pottery making, fancy polished stone and bone, as well as specialized chipped stone, artifacts, and their widespread exchange, this book explores the sources of power and organization among Archaic societies. It investigates the origins of these technologies and their effects on long-term (evolutionary) and short-term (historical) change.
The characteristics of first origins in social complexity belong to 5,000- to 6,000-year-old Archaic groups who inhabited the southeastern United States. In Signs of Power, regional specialists identify the conditions, causes, and consequences that define organization and social complexity in societies. Often termed "big mound power," these considerations include the role of demography, kinship, and ecology in sociocultural change; the meaning of geometry and design in sacred groupings; the degree of advancement in stone tool technologies; and differentials in shell ring sizes that reflect social inequality.
This work seeks to shed light on one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of twentieth-century thought. At the heart of Eli Friedlander's interpretation is the internal relation between the logical and the ethical in the Tractatus, a relation that emerges in the work of drawing the limits of language.
To show how the Tractatus, far from separating the ethical and the logical into distinct domains, instead brings out their essential affinity, Friedlander focuses on Wittgenstein's use of the term "form," particularly his characterization of the form of objects. In this reading, the concept of form points to a threefold distinction in the text among the problematics of facts, objects, and the world. Most important, it provides a key to understanding how Wittgenstein's work opens a perspective on the world through the recognition of the form of objects rather than through the grasping of facts—thus revealing the dimensions of subjectivity involved in having a world, or in assuming that form of experience apart from systematic logic.
Bearing on the question of the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy, this interpretation views Wittgenstein's work as a possible mediation between these two central philosophical traditions of the modern age. It will interest Wittgenstein scholars as well as anyone concerned with twentieth-century philosophy.
Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community.
•Completely Revised with New Signs and Lessons
•Each Sign Illustration Features Sentences in English and ASL Order
•New Class Activities and New Student Activities for Homework or Quizzes
•New Facts about American Sign Language Grammar and Deaf Culture
Now, the bestselling American Sign Language textbook Signs of the Times has been completely revised and updated. The new, second edition is an excellent beginner’s American Sign Language textbook designed for use in the classroom or at home. Organized into 44 lessons, it presents more than 1,300 signs representing 3,500 English glosses. Each lesson contains clear illustrations of all signs, English equivalent words and synonyms, sample sentences to define vocabulary context, and practice sentences to display and reinforce ASL usage.
Signs of the Times is a complete text that includes new class activities for teachers, plus new student activities that can be done in class, as homework, or as quizzes. The new edition features the Contextual Sign/Word Appendix, which displays groups of sentences using the same English word to show different meanings along with the corresponding ASL signs. It also provides an expanded index, vocabulary lists, and a reading reference list. The new edition offers facts on ASL grammar and Deaf culture and includes mind ticklers that enliven the lessons with hints, tips, and mnemonic devices.
The new Signs of the Times expands the features that made it a standard, easy-to-use ASL textbook. Signs are repeated in sentences throughout the book to provide excellent practice for the students. The clear, easy-to-understand sign illustrations facilitates the learning process, enhancing students’ success while also making ASL fun.
Central Americans are one of the largest Latino population groups in the United States. Yet, Arturo Arias argues, the cultural production of Central Americans remains little known to North Americans.
In Taking Their Word, Arias complicates notions of the cultural production of Central America, from Mexico in the North to Panama in the South. He charts the literature of Central America’s liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, its transformation after peace treaties were signed, the emergence of a new Maya literature that decenters Latin American literature written in Spanish, and the rise and fall of testimonio. Arias demonstrates that Central America and its literature are marked by an indigenousness that has never before been fully theorized or critically grasped. Never one to avoid controversy, Arias proffers his views of how the immigration of Central Americans to North America has changed the cultural topography of both zones.
With this groundbreaking work, Arias establishes the importance of Central American literature and provides a frame for future studies of the region’s culture.
Arturo Arias is director of Latin American studies at the University of Redlands. He is the author of six novels in Spanish and editor of The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minnesota, 2001).
Writing and recording are key cultural activities that allow humans to communicate across time and space. Whereas Old World writing evolved into the alphabetic system that is now employed around the world, the indigenous peoples in the Americas autonomously developed alternative systems that conveyed knowledge in a tangible medium. New World systems range from the hieroglyphic script of the Maya, to the figural and iconic pictographies of the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs in Mexico and the Moche in Peru, to the abstract knotted khipus of the Andes. Like Old World writing, these systems represented a cultural category that was fundamental to the workings of their societies, one that was heavily impregnated with cultural value.
The fifteen contributors to Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America consider substantive and theoretical issues concerning writing and signing systems in the ancient Americas. They present the latest thinking about these graphic and tactile systems of communication. Their variety of perspectives and their advances in decipherment and understanding constitute a major contribution not only to our understanding of Pre-Columbian and indigenous American cultures but also to our comparative and global understanding of writing and literacy.
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