The author explores the cognitive basis of symbolization, and symbolization as a social practice. from the London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, this book is intended for students of anthropology and development studies.
Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory. Instead of proposing yet another theory of ritual, the bibliography is a comprehensive monument documenting four decades of theorizing rituals.
Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre. The Disaster Film as Social Practice examines environmental science, history, film and literature in its interdisciplinary analysis of the disaster film genre. It explores the interplay, and the dichotomy, of “restorative” and “reflective” disaster narratives. An analysis of cinema's role in symbolizing and managing collective anxiety around disaster and death narratives examines how disaster films, through their narrative structures and symbolic elements, contribute to the public's understanding and emotional processing of real-world threats, and how cinematic narratives shape and are shaped by public and private ideological discourses, reflecting deeper psychological and environmental truths. Finally, the book offers an overview of how the transformation of the disaster film genre over time tells a history through imagining the worst. Providing a nuanced understanding of the disaster film genre and its significance in contemporary culture and thought, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies, media studies, and environmental studies.
The expression 'the criminal question' does not at present have much currency in English-language criminology. The term was carried across from Italian debates about the orientation of criminology, and in particular debates about what came to be called critical criminology. One definition offered early in the debate described it as 'an area constituted by actions, institutions, policies and discourses whose boundaries shift'. According to this writer, crime, and the cultural and symbolic significance carried by law and criminal justice, is an integral aspect of the criminal question. 'The criminal question' draws attention to the specific location and constitution of a given field of forces, and the themes, issues, dilemmas and debates that compose it. At the same time it enables connections to be made between these embedded realities and the wider, conceivably global, contours of influence and flows of power with which it connects. This in turn raises many questions. How far do the responses to crime and punishment internationally flow from and owe their contemporary shape to the cultural and economic transformations now widely known as 'globalisation'? How can something that is in significant ways embedded, situated, and locally produced also travel? What is not in doubt is that it does travel - and travel with serious consequences. The international circulation of discourses and practices has become a pressing issue for scholars who try to understand their operation in their own particular cultural contexts. This collection of essays seeks a constructive comparative view of these tendencies to convergence and divergence.
Kevin C. Dunn and Iver B. Neumann offer a concise, accessible introduction to discourse analysis in the social sciences. A vital resource for students and scholars alike, Undertaking Discourse Analysis for Social Research combines a theoretical and conceptual review with a “how-to” guide for using the method. In the first part of the book, the authors discuss the development of discourse analysis as a research method and identify the main theoretical elements and epistemological assumptions that have led to its emergence as one of the primary qualitative methods of analysis in contemporary scholarship. Then, drawing from a wide-range of examples of social science scholarship, Dunn and Neumann provide an indispensable guide to the variety of ways discourse analysis has been used. They delve into what is gained by using this approach and demonstrate how one actually applies it. They cover such important issues as research prerequisites, how one conceives of a research question, what “counts” as evidence, how one “reads” the data, and some common obstacles and pitfalls. The result is a clear and accessible manual for successfully implementing discourse analysis in social research.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-based Simulation, MABS 2008, held in Estoril, Portugal, in May 2008. The 16 revised full papers presented have gone through two rounds of reviewing, selection, and improvement and were selected from 44 submissions; they present state-of-the-art research results in agent-based simulation and modeling. The papers are organized in topical sections on simulation of economic behaviour; modelling and simulation of social behaviou; applications; techniques, infrastructure and technologies as well as methods and methodologies.
"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology
Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media productio and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists. A former Washington D.C. journalist, Mark Allan Peterson is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He has published numerous articles on American, South Asian and Middle Eastern media, and has taught courses on anthropological approaches to media t at he American University in Cairo, the University of Hamburg, and Georgetown University.
Researchers of reading comprehension, literacy, educational psychology, psychology, and neuroscience are brought together for this handbook, to document and summarize the current body of research on theory, methods, instruction and assessment in reading comprehension.