Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity

Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity

Author: Sandra C. Bamford

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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This collection of original essays critically examines the relationship between ritual, embodiment, and social change in the South Pacific. Over the past few decades, the societies of Melanesia have undergone profound and revolutionary social change. Encounters with colonialism, postcolonialism, and the forces of globalization have put indigenous peoples in touch with processes of state formation, late capitalist culture, and the emergence of a complex network of transnational identities. In addition to shaping the contours of the nation state, these developments are having a profound impact on the nature of embodied experience. In recent years, many Melanesian societies have witnessed the rise of charismatic Christianity, changing gender configurations, and the growing use of consumerism as a means of defining new social and political hierarchies. Embodying Modernity and Post-Modernity provides detailed analyses of those social changes that are becoming part of contemporary Melanesia. Written by experts with first-hand fieldwork experience, this volume furnishes novel insights concerning the social implications of modernity and postmodernity. More specifically, it addresses two interrelated themes: how the rise of new social and economic forms has influenced the ways in which Melanesians think about, experience and act upon their bodies, and the ways in which these new forms of bodily experience contribute to the emergence of new social and cultural identities. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "While this volume will be of particular interest for regional specialists and theorists of the body, it also makes important contributions to historical analysis of colonial and post-colonial interpretations of modernity and ritual studies. The editor also deserves credit for bringing together a cohesive text, one in which the articles usefully speak to and complement one another." -- Anthropological Forum "This book is a must read for scholars of Melanesia and all scholars of the Anthropology of the Body. There is much to be gleaned theoretically from these ethnographically rich essays." -- Oceania


Disability/postmodernity

Disability/postmodernity

Author: Mairian Corker

Publisher: Burns & Oates

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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This text looks at the study of disablity within the context of the "postmodern" world of the 21st century. The authors aim to demystify the concept of postmodernity and to suggest ways in which it fosters a holistic approach to the study of disability.


Jesus in Our Wombs

Jesus in Our Wombs

Author: Rebecca J. Lester

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780520938205

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In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants--young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written, finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an "authentic" femininity--one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of "the Call"--and their choices in answering it--as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds, friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves, Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's "technology of embodiment" on multiple levels--from the phenomenological to the political.


Embodied Modernities

Embodied Modernities

Author: Fran Martin

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2006-07-31

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0824829638

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From feminist philosophy to genetic science, scholarship in recent years has succeeded in challenging many entrenched assumptions about the material and biological status of human bodies. Likewise in the study of Chinese cultures, accelerating globalization and the resultant hybridity have called into question previous assumptions about the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic identity. The problem of identifying a single or definitive referent for the "Chinese body" is thornier than ever. By facilitating fresh dialogue between fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and contemporary Chinese film and cultural studies, Embodied Modernities addresses contemporary Chinese embodiments as they are represented textually and as part of everyday life practices. The book is divided into two sections, each with a dedicated introduction by the editors. The first examines "Thresholds of Modernity" in chapters on Chinese body cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period of intensive cultural, political, and social modernization that led to a series of radical transformations in how bodies were understood and represented.The second section on "Contemporary Embodiments" explores body representations across the People’s Republic of China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong today. Contributors: Chris Berry, Louise Edwards, Maram Epstein, Larissa Heinrich, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Jami Proctor-Xu, Tze-lan D. Sang, Teri Silvio, Mark Stevenson, Cuncun Wu, Angela Zito, John Zou.


New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues

New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues

Author: Stephen H. Cutcliffe

Publisher: Lehigh University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780934223249

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In this volume, fifteen scholars from the United States, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Colombia discuss the social implications of new technologies. Their essays address the cultural worlds that crystallize around technologies, the challenges to democracy that they pose, and the responsibility of modern technology for forcing a public response to new social and moral issues. Three themes define the three sections into which the volume is divided: "New Worlds," "New Technologies," and "New Issues." The essays in the section "New Worlds" range from optimism that new technologies will produce a better world than that of 1992, through a nonjudgmental discussion of the transformation of our "lifeworld" that new technologies are effecting, to deep concern for the viability of the world that modern technology has already created. In "New Technologies," the focus is on political responses to modern technologies. The authors in this section see the challenge to understanding and controlling our technological world in reshaping existing relations of social power and authority, and in creating new institutions more adequate to the sociopolitical realities of the process of technological innovation. While the contributors in the first two sections of the volume argue that broad changes in values and institutions are preconditions of a more beneficent relationship among people, nature, and technology, those in the section "New Issues" adopt narrower, more specific, viewpoints. Their essays address the political values underlying the Deep Ecology movement, the ethics of military technologies, the capacity of democratic institutions for a public role in setting technology policies, and science and technology literacy mechanisms. Collectively, these essays reflect the growing international concern with the role played by technological innovation in a rapidly changing world, and they point toward the formulation of concrete political platforms for informed social responses to the innovation process.


Race, Modernity, Postmodernity

Race, Modernity, Postmodernity

Author: W. Lawrence Hogue

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780791430958

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Reads and interprets eight works of literature by people of color, foregrounding the philosophical debate about modernity vs. postmodernity rather than solely issues of race.


Liturgy as a Way of Life

Liturgy as a Way of Life

Author: Bruce Ellis Benson

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781441257857

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A distinguished philosopher examines the nature of liturgy and explores God's call to Christians to improvise as living works of art.


Northrop Frye and American Fiction

Northrop Frye and American Fiction

Author: Claude Le Fustec

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1442647698

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Northrop Frye and American Fiction challenges recent interpretations of American fiction as a secular pursuit that long ago abandoned religious faith and the idea of transcendent experiences. Inspired by recent philosophical thinking on post-secularism and by Northrop Frye's theorizing on the connections between the Bible and the development of Western literature, Claude Le Fustec presents insightful readings of the presence of transcendence and biblical imagination in canonical novels by American writers ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison. Examining these novels through the lens of Frye's ambitious account of literature's transcendent, or kerygmatic power, Le Fustec argues that American fiction has always contained the seeds of a rejection of radical skepticism and a return to spiritual experience. Beyond an insightful analysis of Frye's ideas, Northrop Frye and American Fiction is powerful testimony of their continued interpretive potential.


The Postmodern Condition

The Postmodern Condition

Author: Jean-François Lyotard

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 9780816611737

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In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.