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231 books match the query 'Society' and 37 start with t

cover of Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840

Territorial Ambition

Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840

S. Charles Bolton

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Both modern historians and early nineteenth-century observers have emphasized the wild and picturesque aspects of the Arkansas Territory, suggesting that the settlers here were more preoccupied with indolence or brawling than with economic progress. This study, first published in 1993, demonstrates that despite all its frontier roughness, Arkansas was characterized by a restless ambition that transformed the area from frontier and subsistence living to a highly productive agricultural society. This ambition – with its brutal Indian removal and expansion of slave labor – rendered Arkansas more similar to its southern neighbors than contemporary and modern portrayals would make it seem.
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cover of The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420

The Age of the Cathedrals

Art and Society, 980-1420

Georges Duby

University of Chicago Press, 1981

Recognizing that a work of art is the product of a particular time and place as much as it is the creation of an individual, Duby provides a sweeping survey of the changing mentalities of the Middle Ages as reflected in the art and architecture of the period.

"If Age of the Cathedrals has a fault, it is that Professor Duby knows too much, has too many new ideas and takes such a delight in setting them out. . . insights whiz to and fro like meteorites."—John Russell, New York Times Book Review
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cover of The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art

The Cham of Vietnam

History, Society and Art

Edited by Bruce Lockhart and Tran Ky Phuong

National University of Singapore Press, 2011

The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. The Indianized civilization of this Austronesian-speaking group flourished between roughly the third and fifteenth centuries, and they competed with the Vietnamese and Khmers for influence in mainland Southeast Asia, but the Cham territories eventually became part of modern Vietnam. Written by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics, the essays in The Cham of Vietnam contribute to a revisionist overview of Cham history by re-assessing the ways the Cham have been studied by different generations of scholars of what "Champa" has represented over the centuries of its history. Several chapters focus on archaeological work in central Vietnam and position recent discoveries within the broader framework of Cham history, but there are also discussions of Cham economy, society and culture. Through this study of a people that did not become a nation-state, the book provides penetrating insights into the history of Vietnam and on the broader dynamic of Southeast Asian history.
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cover of The Constitution of Society

The Constitution of Society

Edward Shils

University of Chicago Press, 1982

Edward Shils's attempt to work out a macrosociological theory which does justice both to the spiritual and intellectual dispositions and powers of the mind and to the reality of the larger society is an enterprise that has spanned several decades. In his steps toward the development of this theory he has not proceeded deductively; rather he has worked from his own concrete observations of Western, Asian, and African societies. Thus, despite the inevitable abstractness of marcrosociological theory, the papers in this volume—which have been published separately since the Second World War—have a quality of vivid substantiality that makes the theoretical statements they present easier to comprehend.

Professor Shils has attempted to develop a theory that has a place for more than those parts of society that are generated from the biological nature of human beings and those parts that are engendered by the desires of individuals, acting for themselves or for groups and categories of individuals, to maintain and increase their power over other human beings and to secure material goods and services for themselves. He has argued that there are constituents of society in which human beings seek and cultivate connections with objects that transcend those needed to satisfy biological necessity and the desire for material objects and power over others. This third stratum of social existence, he concludes, cannot be reduced to the other two and cannot be disregarded in any serious attempt to understand the function of any society. Thus Edward Shils, without disregarding its many valuable achievements, has nevertheless parted ways with much of modern sociology.

For this collection of papers the author has written an introductory intellectual autobiography that places each essay in the setting of the development of his thought and that connects it with his other writings.
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cover of The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Culture of Sensibility

Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain

G. J. Barker-Benfield

University of Chicago Press, 1992

G. J. Barker-Benfield documents the emergence of the culture of sensibility that transformed British society of the eighteenth century. His account focuses on the rise of new moral and spiritual values and the struggle to redefine the group identities of men and women. Drawing on the full spectrum of eighteenth-century thought from Adam Smith to John Locke, from the Earl of Shaftesberry to Dr. George Cheyne, and especially Mary Wollstonecraft, Barker-Benfield offers an innovative and compelling way to understand how Britain entered the modern age.
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cover of The End of Nomadism?: Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia

The End of Nomadism?

Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia

Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath

Duke University Press, 1999

Those who herd in the vast grassland region of Inner Asia face a precarious situation as they struggle to respond to the momentous political and economic changes of recent years. In The End of Nomadism? Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath confront the romantic, ahistorical myth of the wandering nomad by revealing the complex lives and the significant impact on Asian culture of these modern “mobile pastoralists.” In their examination of the present and future of pastoralism, the authors recount the extensive and quite sudden social, political, environmental, and economic changes of recent years that have forced these peoples to respond and evolve in order to maintain their centuries-old way of life.
Using extensive and detailed case studies comparing pastoralism in Siberian Russia, Mongolia, and Northwest China, Humphrey and Sneath explore the different paths taken by nomads in these countries in reaction to a changing world. In examining how each culture is facing not only different prospects for sustainability but also different environmental problems, the authors come to the surprising conclusion that mobility can, in fact, be compatible with a modern and urbanized world. While placing emphasis on the social and cultural traditions of Inner Asia and their fate in the post-Socialist economies of the present, The End of Nomadism? investigates the changing nature of pastoralism by focusing on key areas under environmental threat and relating the ongoing problems to distinctive socioeconomic policies and practices in Russia and China. It also provides lively contemporary commentary on current economic dilemmas by revealing in telling detail, for instance, the struggle of one extended family to make a living.
This book will interest Central Asian, Russian, and Chinese specialists, as well as those studying the environment, anthropology, sociology, peasant studies, and ecology.


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cover of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela

The Enduring Legacy

Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela

Miguel Tinker Salas

Duke University Press, 2009

Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state.

North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

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cover of The Existential Self in Society

The Existential Self in Society

Edited by Joseph A. Kotarba and Andrea Fontana

University of Chicago Press, 1984

The Existential Self in Society explores the ways in which we experience and shape our individuality in a rapidly changing social world. Kotarba and Fontana have gathered eleven original essays that form an exciting contribution and an ideal introduction to the emerging field of existential sociology.
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cover of The Individual, Society, and Education: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL IDEAS

The Individual, Society, and Education

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL IDEAS

Clarence J. Karier

University of Illinois Press, 1986

  This is an updated version of Karier's highly regarded Man, Society,
        and Education, which focuses on the concepts of human nature and community
        throughout American educational history. For the new edition, Karier has
        added chapters on the major movements in American education from World
        War II to the present and on the major Supreme Court cases involving educational
        policy during the same period.
      "This classic volume remains a remarkable study in the history of
        ideas into which the implications for American schooling have been deftly
        woven. It is balanced, thorough, and intelligently challenging."
        --- Ann M. Keppel, College of Education, University of Hawaii at
        Manoa
      "This new edition should have great use as a primary text at the
        graduate and advanced undergraduate levels."
        --- Peter A. Sola, School of Education, Howard University
 
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cover of The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society

The Inner Conflict of Tradition

Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society

J. C. Heesterman

University of Chicago Press, 1985

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cover of The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, Volume 1: Society and the State

The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, Volume 1

Society and the State

Roland Mousnier

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Political and administrative institutions cannot be understood unless one knows who is operating them and for whose benefit they function. In the first volume of this history, Mousnier analyzes such institutions in light of the prevailing social, economic, and ideological structures and shows how they shaped life in 17th- and 18th-century France. He traces the changing role of monarchical government, showing how it emerged over two centuries and why it failed.

In a society divided by hierarchical social groups, conflicts among lineages, communities, and districts became inevitable. Aristocratic disdain, ancestral attachment to privileges, and autonomous powers looked upon as rights, made civil unrest, dislocation, and anarchy endemic. Mousnier examines this contention between classes as they faced each other across the institutional barriers of education, religion, economic resources, technology, means of defense and communication, and territorial and family ties. He shows why a monarchical state was necessary to preserve order within this fragmented society.

Though it was intent on ensuring the survival of French society and the public good, the Absolute Monarchy was unable to maintain security, equilibrium, and cooperation among rival social groups. Discussing the feeble technology at its disposal and its weak means of governing, Mousnier points to the causes that brought the state to the limits of its resources. His comprehensive analysis will greatly interest students of the ancien régime and comparativists in political science and sociology as well.
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cover of The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, Volume 2: The Origins of State and Society

The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, Volume 2

The Origins of State and Society

Roland Mousnier

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Mousnier continues his massive and masterly history of France's transition from the Old Regime to the New. Mousnier's subject is the organization of the state, from the Council at the summit to the most humble clerks, guards, and attendants. He traces the gradual transformation of France from a judiciary state to a financial and executive bureaucracy, from a state and society based on hereditary statuses to one based on talents, personal capacities, and achievements, from the might of the sword to the power of the pen.
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cover of The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China

The Invention of Madness

State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China

Emily Baum

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.”
​
Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.
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cover of The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840

The Kin Who Count

Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840

By Margaret L. Meriwether

University of Texas Press, 1999

The history of the Middle Eastern family presents as many questions as there are currently answers. Who lived together in the household? Who married whom and for how long? Who got a piece of the patrimonial pie? These are the questions that Margaret Meriwether investigates in this groundbreaking study of family life among the upper classes of the Ottoman Empire in the pre-modern and early modern period.

Meriwether recreates Aleppo family life over time from records kept by the Islamic religious courts that held jurisdiction over all matters of family law and property transactions. From this research, she asserts that the stereotype of the large, patriarchal patrilineal family rarely existed in reality. Instead, Aleppo's notables organized their families in a great diversity of ways, despite the fact that they were all members of the same social class with widely shared cultural values, acting under the same system of family law. She concludes that this had important implications for gender relations and demonstrates that it gave women more authority and greater autonomy than is usually acknowledged.

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cover of The Logic of Society: A Philosophical Study

The Logic of Society

A Philosophical Study

Laird Addis

University of Minnesota Press, 1975

The Logic of Society was first published in 1975.In recent years challenges have arisen from various quarters, even within analytic philosophy itself, to the positivist conception of science, especially in its application to history and other social sciences. From a neo-positivist viewpoint Professor Addis attempts to meet some of these challenges. Underlying his work are the beliefs that every even that occurs, including human choices and actions, is capable of being given an explanation of the hypothetico-deductive sort, that the task of all the sciences therefore is the search for knowledge of a lawful kind, and that this knowledge is to be had only by methods which are similar throughout the sciences.The author’s neo-positivism is qualified in various ways: among others by an insistence on the necessity of a metaphysical basis for the philosophy of history and other social sciences and the contention that none of the social sciences, at least as their limits of investigation are usually conceived, can expect ever to have theories of the scope and reliability of the most highly developed sciences.The chapters deal with several traditional and contemporary issues in the philosophy of history and social sciences. Among them are the nature of social reality, the possibility of reducing sociological explanations to psychological explanations, the limits and possibilities of social theory, historical explanation, and historicism and the laws of historical development. Thinker whose ideas are given substantial treatment are Durkheim, Marx, Ortega y Gasset, Popper, Plamenatz, and MacIntyre. Other theorists who are discussed critically include Sartre, Lenin, Hook, Brodbeck, and Donagan.
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cover of The Lumberman's Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests

The Lumberman's Frontier

Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests

Thomas R. Cox

Oregon State University Press, 2010

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cover of The Making of a Socialist Night: Society, Imagination and Everyday Life in Czechoslovakia 1945-1960

The Making of a Socialist Night

Society, Imagination and Everyday Life in Czechoslovakia 1945-1960

Lucie Dusková

Central European University Press, 2026

Is there such a thing as a socialist night? And if so, what characterises it? What does it look like, what meanings are attached to it, who inhabits it, and what activities take place within it? In answering these questions, this book takes the reader on a journey through the mental world of post-war Czechoslovak society, the glamour and misery of Czechoslovak cities at night, and the lives and activities of various social groups for whom the night formed a natural environment. This is the first book to apply the insights of the field of night studies to the study of state socialism, uncovering often unexpected connections that emerge when the night is placed at the centre of analysis. At the same time, it raises the important question of what was actually “socialist” about the socialist night?
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cover of The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848-1910

The Making of the Mexican Border

The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848-1910

By Juan Mora-Torres

University of Texas Press, 2001

The issues that dominate U.S.-Mexico border relations today—integration of economies, policing of boundaries, and the flow of workers from south to north and of capital from north to south—are not recent developments. In this insightful history of the state of Nuevo León, Juan Mora-Torres explores how these processes transformed northern Mexico into a region with distinct economic, political, social, and cultural features that set it apart from the interior of Mexico.

Mora-Torres argues that the years between the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary in 1848 and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 constitute a critical period in Mexican history. The processes of state-building, emergent capitalism, and growing linkages to the United States transformed localities and identities and shaped class formations and struggles in Nuevo León. Monterrey emerged as the leading industrial center and home of the most powerful business elite, while the countryside deteriorated economically, politically, and demographically. By 1910, Mora-Torres concludes, the border states had already assumed much of their modern character: an advanced capitalist economy, some of Mexico's most powerful business groups, and a labor market dependent on massive migrations from central Mexico.

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cover of The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming

The Mangle in Practice

Science, Society, and Becoming

Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik, eds.

Duke University Press, 2008

In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, this collection aims to extend the mangle’s reach by exploring its application across a wide range of fields including history, philosophy, sociology, geography, environmental studies, literary theory, biophysics, and software engineering.

The Mangle in Practice opens with a fresh introduction to the mangle by Pickering. Several contributors then present empirical studies that demonstrate the mangle’s applicability to topics as diverse as pig farming, Chinese medicine, economic theory, and domestic-violence policing. Other contributors offer examples of the mangle in action: real-world practices that implement a self-consciously “mangle-ish” stance in environmental management and software development. Further essays discuss the mangle as philosophy and social theory. As Pickering argues in the preface, the mangle points to a shift in interpretive sensibilities that makes visible a world of de-centered becoming. This volume demonstrates the viability, coherence, and promise of such a shift, not only in science and technology studies, but in the social sciences and humanities more generally.

Contributors: Lisa Asplen, Dawn Coppin, Adrian Franklin, Keith Guzik, Casper Bruun Jensen,Yiannis Koutalos, Brian Marick, Randi Markussen, Andrew Pickering, Volker Scheid, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Carol Steiner, Maxim Waldstein

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cover of The Mind of the Slave: The Limits of Ownership in Roman Law and Society

The Mind of the Slave

The Limits of Ownership in Roman Law and Society

Nicole J. Giannella

University of Michigan Press, 2026

The Mind of the Slave untangles the double nature of slaves as property and as human beings under the law in the Roman world. As human beings, slaves had free will and legally recognized autonomy while acting for their owner. Although their autonomy was fundamental to the Roman economy, it had the potential to lead to insecurity in the day-to-day experiences of the owner and enslaved person. Will an enslaved agent decide to act in the best interest of their owner? To sell their secrets? To run away? These moments of insecurity are the subject of this book; they reveal an owner’s struggle to know the mind of the slave and to reconcile ownership over a reasoning, emotional, and purposive human being. Nicole J. Giannella argues that this reliance on the mind of the slave reveals fault lines in the ownership of the enslaved. This is where we can glimpse beyond the trappings of law and see the need for negotiation, incentives, and ultimately, the trust that the owner puts in their slave. 

In order to place Roman jurists in conversation with both technical and literary sources, Giannella grounds this study in philology and argues that conceptions of the mind of the slave were at the heart of legal and cultural debates about the nature of slavery and ownership. It also contributes to a wider debate about selfhood and autonomy, since philosophers often used the figure of the slave as a representation of humanity as its limits.
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cover of The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War

The New Praetorians

American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War

Michael D. Gambone

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

Contemporary veterans belong to an exclusive American group. Celebrated by most of the country, they are nevertheless often poorly understood by the same people who applaud their service. Following the introduction of an all-volunteer force after the war in Vietnam, only a tiny fraction of Americans now join the armed services, making the contemporary soldier, and the veteran by extension, increasingly less representative of mainstream society. Veterans have come to comprise their own distinct tribe—modern praetorians, permanently set apart from society by what they have seen and experienced.

In an engrossing narrative that considers the military, economic, political, and social developments affecting military service after Vietnam, Michael D. Gambone investigates how successive generations have intentionally shaped their identity as veterans. The New Praetorians also highlights the impact of their homecoming, the range of educational opportunities open to veterans, the health care challenges they face, and the unique experiences of minority and women veterans. This groundbreaking study illustrates an important and often neglected group that is key to our understanding of American social history and civil-military affairs.
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cover of The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice

The Other Jonathan Edwards

Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice

Gerald McDermott

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Widely regarded as perhaps America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards still suffers the stereotype of hellfire preacher obsessed with God's wrath. In this anthology, Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story seek to correct that common view by showing that Edwards was also a compassionate, socially conscious minister of the first order. 

Through a selection of sermons and primary writings, McDermott and Story reveal an Edwards who preached love toward all humanity regardless of belief or appearance; who demanded private and public charity to the poor; who criticized hard-hearted business dealings as impious and socially destructive; and who condemned envy and status-seeking as anti-Christian and anti-community. This “other” Jonathan Edwards preached about grace and the love of God but also about responsive constitutional government, the iniquities of hypocrisy and corruption, and the nature of wise leadership. He acknowledged the need for national defense but left room for popular revolt from tyranny. He anticipated a millennial age of peace and prosperity and believed that people should live in the world as they would live through grace in heaven. 

Jonathan Edwards was, in sum, a worldly as well as spiritual reformer who resisted the materialistic, acquisitive, and individualistic currents of American culture. For these reasons, McDermott and Story think he may have lessons to teach us today.

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cover of The Performer-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society

The Performer-Audience Connection

Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society

By Judith Lynne Hanna

University of Texas Press, 1983

The Performer-Audience Connection is a pioneering foray into one of the major puzzles of human communication: the communication of emotion in dance. It is the first attempt of its kind systematically to investigate what performers wish to convey and what audiences perceive in the performance of dance.

The centerpiece of this provocative book is an examination of performer intentions and audience response at eight dance performances in Washington, D.C. Part of the Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts Dance Series, these concerts featured a variety of dance genres and cultures: American tap dance, Kathakali dance-drama from Kerala, India, Japanese Kabuki, contemporary avant-garde dance, Philippine folk dance, the Indian classical tradition of Kuchipudi, and modern dance to an AfroAmerican spiritual.

How did dancer and audience interact at the emotional level on these eight occasions? What affected performer-audience rapport? Through interviews of both spectators and dancers, Judith Lynne Hanna explores the performers' ways of imparting emotion through movement and audience members' expectations and responses. In doing so she casts new light on important issues of cultural identity, sex role, historic attitudes toward dance, and even marketing the arts today.

A landmark work not only for performers who wish to reach their audiences more effectively but also for choreographers, anthropologists, specialists in nonverbal communication, behavioral scientists, educators, and all who are fascinated by the arts and the special magic of the "performer-audience connection."

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cover of The School and Society

The School and Society

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Introduction by Joe R. Burnett

Southern Illinois University Press, 1980

First published in 1899,The School and Society describes John Dewey’s experiences with his own famous Laboratory School, started in 1896.

Dewey’s experiments at the Labora­tory School reflected his original social and educational philosophy based on American experience and concepts of democracy, not on European education models then in vogue. This forerunner of the major works shows Dewey’s per­vasive concern with the need for a rich, dynamic, and viable society.

In his introduction to this volume, Joe R. Burnett states Dewey’s theme. Industrialization, urbanization, science, and technology have created a revolution the schools cannot ignore. Dewey carries this theme through eight chapters: The School and Social Progress; The School and the Life of the Child; Waste in Education; Three Years of the University Elementary School; The Psychology of Elementary Education; Froebel’s Educa­tional Principles; The Psychology of Occupations; and the Development of Attention.

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cover of The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

The Society of the Selfie

Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita

University of Westminster Press, 2021

This book explores how the Internet is connected to the global crisis of liberal democracy. Today, self-promotion is at the heart of many human relationships. The selfie is not just a social media gesture people love to hate. It is also a symbol of social reality in the age of the Internet. Through social media people have new ways of rating and judging themselves and one another, via metrics such as likes, shares, followers and friends. There are new thirsts for authenticity, outlets for verbal aggression, and social problems. Social media culture and neoliberalism dovetail and amplify one another, feeding social estrangement. With neoliberalism, psychosocial wounds are agitated and authoritarianism is provoked. Yet this new sociality also inspires resistance and political mobilisation. Illustrating ideas and trends with examples from news and popular culture, the book outlines and applies theories from Debord, Foucault, Fromm, Goffman, and Giddens, among others. Topics covered include the global history of communication technologies, personal branding, echo chamber effects, alienation and fear of abnormality. Information technologies provide channels for public engagement where extreme ideas reach farther and faster than ever before, and political differences are widened and inflamed. They also provide new opportunities for protest and resistance.
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cover of The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History

The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History

Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton

Temple University Press, 2018

In the twenty-first century, as in centuries past, stories of the supernatural thrill and terrify us. But despite their popularity, scholars often dismiss such beliefs in the uncanny as inconsequential, or even embarrassing. The editors and contributors to The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History have made a concerted effort to understand encounters with ghosts and the supernatural that have remain present and flourished. Featuring folkloric researchers examining the cultural value of such beliefs and practices, sociologists who acknowledge the social and historical value of the supernatural, and enthusiasts of the mystical and uncanny, this volume includes a variety of experts and interested observers using first-hand ethnographic experiences and historical records.

The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History seeks to understand the socio-cultural and socio-historical contexts of the supernatural. This volume takes the supernatural as real because belief in it has fundamentally shaped human history. It continues to inform people’s interpretations, actions, and identities on a daily basis. The supernatural is an indelible part of our social world that deserves sincere scholarly attention. 

Contributors include: Janet Baldwin, I'Nasah Crockett, William Ryan Force, Rachael Ironside, Tea Krulos, Joseph Laycock, Stephen L. Muzzatti, Scott Scribner, Emma Smith, Jeannie Banks Thomas, and the editors

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cover of The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages

The Theater of Devotion

East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages

Gail McMurray Gibson

University of Chicago Press, 1989

In this interdisciplinary study of drama, arts, and spirituality, Gail Gibson provides a provocative reappraisal of fifteenth-century English theater through a detailed portrait of the flourishing cultures of Suffolk and Norfolk. By emphasizing the importance of the Incarnation of Christ as a model and justification for late medieval drama and art, Gibson challenges currently held views of the secularization of late medieval culture.
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cover of The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II

The War in American Culture

Society and Consciousness during World War II

Edited by Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch

University of Chicago Press, 1996

The War in American Culture explores the role of World War II in the transformation of American social, cultural, and political life.

World War II posed a crisis for American culture: to defeat the enemy, Americans had to unite across the class, racial and ethnic boundaries that had long divided them. Exploring government censorship of war photography, the revision of immigration laws, Hollywood moviemaking, swing music, and popular magazines, these essays reveal the creation of a new national identity that was pluralistic, but also controlled and sanitized. Concentrating on the home front and the impact of the war on the lives of ordinary Americans, the contributors give us a rich portrayal of family life, sexuality, cultural images, and working-class life in addition to detailed consideration of African Americans, Latinos, and women who lived through the unsettling and rapidly altered circumstances of wartime America.
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cover of The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society

The White Plague

Tuberculosis, Man and Society

Dubos, Jean

Rutgers University Press, 1987

In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and—a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago—that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.

The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped René Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society’s approach to the conquest of disease.

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cover of Theater and Society in the Classical World

Theater and Society in the Classical World

Ruth Scodel, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Powerful and evocative, persuasive, frightening, and inspiring—the comedies and tragedies written in classical antiquity are all of these. In recent years the study of ancient drama has become ever more exciting and controversial. The social context of Greek drama especially has drawn attention, and a new understanding of Roman comedy has arisen.Theater and Society in the Classical World draws together the work of numerous international scholars. Both collectively and individually these works illustrate the continuing power and voice of ancient drama, and they help reveal some of the reasons why these plays still speak to us today.Among the essays are several that investigate the important relations between Greek drama and ritual. A second group examines the value of dramatic texts as sources for social history, while a third looks at the ways in which Roman authors creatively transformed their sources.This volume presents papers delivered at a conference at the University of Michigan, held under the joint auspices of the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Classical Studies.
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cover of Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens

Theater of the People

Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens

By David Kawalko Roselli

University of Texas Press, 2011

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselves—a model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Women's theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnicity of the spectators. Whose theater was it?

Producing the first book-length work on the subject, David Kawalko Roselli draws on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, economic and social history, performance studies, and ancient stories about the theater to offer a wide-ranging study that addresses the contested authority of audiences and their historical constitution. Space, money, the rise of the theater industry, and broader social forces emerge as key factors in this analysis. In repopulating audiences with foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor, this book challenges the basis of orthodox interpretations of Greek drama and places the politically and socially marginal at the heart of the theater. Featuring an analysis of the audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, Theater of the People brings to life perhaps the most powerful influence on the most prominent dramatic poets of their day.

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cover of Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah

Traces of Fremont

Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah

Steven R. Simms, Photography by François Gohier

University of Utah Press, 2010

Fremont is a culture (ca. 300–1300 A.D.) first defined by archaeologist Noel Morss in 1928 based on characteristics unique to the area. Initially thought to be a simple socio-political system, recent reassessments of the Fremont assume a more complex society. This volume places Fremont rock art studies in this contemporary context. Author Steven Simms offers an innovative model of Fremont society, politics, and worldview using the principles of analogy and current archaeological evidence. Simms takes readers on a trip back in time by describing what a typical Fremont hamlet or residential area might have looked like a thousand years ago, including the inhabitants' daily activities. François Gohier's captivating photographs of Fremont art and artifacts offer an engaging complement to Simms's text, aiding us in our understanding of the lives of these ancient people.

Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for Public Audience. 

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cover of Transcending the Game: Debate, Education, and Society

Transcending the Game

Debate, Education, and Society

Edited by Shawn F. Briscoe

Southern Illinois University Press, 2024

A pathway to community, growth, and change 

This collection of inclusive essays explores the role of debate in understanding and critiquing injustice and inequality. Edited by Shawn F. Briscoe, these essays closely examine multiple approaches to debate, considering their respective merits and controversies. This detailed compilation analyzes how debate methodologies are useful in everyday life and whether certain approaches have any value at all.  

Briscoe provides an in-depth look into the varying styles of debate and contributes to a greater understanding of argument theory by discussing three stylistic approaches: audience-centered, technical/progressive, and nontraditional/performative. The book demonstrates that all three approaches offer students opportunity to engage in a socioemotional learning space, a discipline that prepares students for undergraduate and graduate work, a study that prepares participants for future careers, and a field that investigates current controversies and how to tackle them. Briscoe offers compelling narratives from BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and women authors that explore the personal impact of debate on social equality within this academic discipline, our educational system, and society. 

The diversity in gender and race of the contributing authors allows for a multitude of perspectives on the complex styles, benefits, and issues discussed in Transcending the Game. Briscoe peels back the mystery that shrouds the benefits of academic, competitive debate from outsiders and insiders alike. A myriad of personal narratives tell stories about the role of debate in their lives; challenge the unproductive discourse in debate, education, and society; and offer diverse insight into why we debate. 

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Trincheras Sites in Time, Space, and Society

Edited by Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish, and M. Elisa Villalpando

University of Arizona Press, 2008

The intriguing hilltop archaeological sites known as cerros de trincheras span almost three millennia, from 1250 BC to AD 1450. Archaeologists have long viewed them as a unitary phenomenon because they all have masonry architecture and occur mostly on low volcanic peaks. Scattered across the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, these sites received little comprehensive research until the 1980s. This first volume in the Amerind Studies in Archaeology series from the Amerind Foundation documents considerable variability among trincheras sites with respect to age, geographic location, and cultural affiliation.

This multi-author volume integrates a remarkable body of new data representing a textbook-like array of current research issues and methodologies in the archaeology of the region. Scholars from the United States and Mexico offer original research on trincheras sites in Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico. Scales of focus range from intensive intrasite sampling to the largest contiguous survey in the region. Authors incorporate spatial analyses, artifact studies, environmental and subsistence data, ethnographic analogs, ethnohistorical records, cross-cultural comparisons, archaeology, and archival resources.

The volume’s discussions contribute innovative approaches to worldwide interpretations of landscapes marked by hilltop sites. Contributors present meticulous research arguing that many trincheras sites were primarily used for habitation and ceremonial rites, in addition to previously predominant views of them as defensive refuges. Because trincheras occupations date from the late preceramic era to shortly before Spanish contact, authors relate them to early forms of agriculture, the emergence of village life, the appearance of differentiated settlement systems, and tendencies toward political and ritual centralization.

Detailed maps and figures illustrate the text, and close-up aerial photographs capture the visual essence of the sites, highlighted by a section that includes color photographs and an essay by renowned photographer Adriel Heisey.

Contributors:
 
Christian E. Downum
Paul R. Fish
Suzanne K. Fish
Robert J. Hard
Adriel Heisey
Stephen A. Kowalewski
Randall H. McGuire
Ben A. Nelson
John R. Roney
Judith Taylor
M. Elisa Villalpando
Joseph Vogel
Henry Wallace
David R. Wilcox
J. Scott Wood
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cover of True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society

True Songs of Freedom

Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society

John MacKay

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the nineteenth century's best-selling novel worldwide; only the Bible outsold it. It was known not only as a book but through stage productions, films, music, and commercial advertising as well. But how was Stowe's novel—one of the watershed works of world literature—actually received outside of the American context?
            True Songs of Freedom explores one vital sphere of Stowe's influence: Russia and the Soviet Union, from the 1850s to the present day. Due to Russia's own tradition of rural slavery, the vexed entwining of authoritarianism and political radicalism throughout its history, and (especially after 1945) its prominence as the superpower rival of the United States, Russia developed a special relationship to Stowe's novel during this period of rapid societal change. Uncle Tom's Cabin prompted widespread reflections on the relationship of Russian serfdom to American slavery, on the issue of race in the United States and at home, on the kinds of writing appropriate for children and peasants learning to read, on the political function of writing, and on the values of Russian educated elites who promoted, discussed, and fought over the book for more than a century. By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Stowe's novel was probably better known by Russians than by readers in any other country.
            John MacKay examines many translations and rewritings of Stowe's novel; plays, illustrations, and films based upon it; and a wide range of reactions to it by figures famous (Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Marina Tsvetaeva) and unknown. In tracking the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin across 150 years, he engages with debates over serf emancipation and peasant education, early Soviet efforts to adapt Stowe's deeply religious work of protest to an atheistic revolutionary value system, the novel's exploitation during the years of Stalinist despotism, Cold War anti-Americanism and antiracism, and the postsocialist consumerist ethos.
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cover of Trust in Society

Trust in Society

Karen Cook

Russell Sage Foundation, 2001

Trust plays a pervasive role in social affairs, even sustaining acts of cooperation among strangers who have no control over each other's actions. But the full importance of trust is rarely acknowledged until it begins to break down, threatening the stability of social relationships once taken for granted. Trust in Society uses the tools of experimental psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to shed light on the many functions trust performs in social and political life. The authors discuss different ways of conceptualizing trust and investigate the empirical effects of trust in a variety of social settings, from the local and personal to the national and institutional. Drawing on experimental findings, this book examines how people decide whom to trust, and how a person proves his own trustworthiness to others. Placing trust in a person can be seen as a strategic act, a moral response, or even an expression of social solidarity. People often assume that strangers are trustworthy on the basis of crude social affinities, such as a shared race, religion, or hometown. Likewise, new immigrants are often able to draw heavily upon the trust of prior arrivals—frequently kin—to obtain work and start-up capital. Trust in Society explains how trust is fostered among members of voluntary associations—such as soccer clubs, choirs, and church groups—and asks whether this trust spills over into other civic activities of wider benefit to society. The book also scrutinizes the relationship between trust and formal regulatory institutions, such as the law, that either substitute for trust when it is absent, or protect people from the worst consequences of trust when it is misplaced. Moreover, psychological research reveals how compliance with the law depends more on public trust in the motives of the police and courts than on fear of punishment. The contributors to this volume demonstrate the growing analytical sophistication of trust research and its wide-ranging explanatory power. In the interests of analytical rigor, the social sciences all too often assume that people act as atomistic individuals without regard to the interests of others. Trust in Society demonstrates how we can think rigorously and analytically about the many aspects of social life that cannot be explained in those terms. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
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cover of Twins Talk: What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

Twins Talk

What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

Dona Lee Davis

Ohio University Press, 2015

Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the “who am I” and “who are we” questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.

Dona Lee Davis conducted conversational interviews with twenty-two sets of identical twins attending the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, the largest such gathering in the world. Lively and often opinionated, each twin comes through as a whole person who at the same time maintains a special bond that the vast majority of people will never experience.

The study provides a distinctive and enlightening insider’s challenge to the nature/nurture debates that dominate contemporary research on twins. The author, herself an identical twin, draws on aspects of her own life to inform her analysis of the data throughout the text. Each chapter addresses a different theme from multiple viewpoints, including those of popular science writers, scientific researchers, and singletons, as well as those of the twins themselves.

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