How does one capture, in words, the life he has lived? Though I have spent much of my adult life narrowing my mind and distracting myself from writing this story, I knew the time would come that I would have enough courage to sift through my memories and endure the feelings that would become passengers on this journey. As the years pass with fewer things to command my time and attention, it becomes harder to avoid this moment. Alone in my study, I hear the steady ticking of the clock on the wall. I realize that the time is at hand for my story to begin. "Spellbindingly measured narrative that entertains and enthralls...A unique and captivating story of a young mind torn between science and art...engrossing debut novel by Kleiger." --Kirkus Reviews
How can we hold both public and personal worlds in the eye of a unified theory of meaning? What ethnographic and theoretical possibilities do we create in the balance? Anthropology Through a Double Lens offers a theoretical framework encompassing both of these domains—a "double lens." Daniel Touro Linger argues that the literary turn in anthropology, which treats culture as text, has been a wrong turn. Cultural analysis of the interpretive or discursive variety, which focuses on public symbols, has difficulty seeing—much less dealing convincingly with—actual persons. While emphasizing the importance of social environments, Linger insists on equal sensitivity to the experiential immediacies of human lives. He develops a sustained critique of interpretive and discursive trends in contemporary anthropology, which have too strongly emphasized social determinism and public symbols while too readily dismissing psychological and biographical realities. Anthropology Through a Double Lens demonstrates the power of an alternative dual perspective through a blend of critical essays and ethnographic studies drawn from the author's field research in São Luís, a northeastern Brazilian state capital, and Toyota City, a Japanese factory town. To span the gap between the public and the personal, Linger provides a set of analytical tools that include the ideas of an arena of meaning, systems of systems, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness. The tools open theoretical and ethnographic horizons for exploring the process of meaning-making, the force of symbolism and rhetoric, the politics of representation, and the propagation and formation of identities. Linger uses these tools to focus on key issues in current theoretical and philosophical debates across a host of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, history, and the other human sciences.
SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR': 'the book develops into a bigger biography of the strange set of images [Rorschach] bequeathed, taking in everything from the origins of abstract art to the invention of the idea of empathy' – James McConnachie, Sunday Times IRISH INDEPENDENT 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR' The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test, which has shaped our view of human personality and become a fixture in popular culture. In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind. He had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. Rorschach himself was a talented illustrator, and his test, a set of ten carefully designed inkblots, quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own. Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, Rorschach’s test was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a cliché in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z. The test was also taken by millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness – or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today. Damion Searls draws on untranslated letters and diaries, and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach’s family, friends and colleagues, to tell the unlikely story of the test’s creation, its controversial reinvention and its remarkable endurance. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century’s most visionary synthesis of art and science.
Trash has been blowing across the rock'n'roll landscape since the first amplified guitar riff tore through American mass culture. Throwaway tunes, wasted fans, crappy reviews, junk bins of remaindered albums: much of rock's quintessence is handily conveyed in terms of disposability and impermanence. Steven L. Hamelman sums up these rubbishy affinities as rock's "trash trope." Trash is an obvious physical presence on the rock scene -- think of Woodstock's littered pastures or the many hotel rooms redecorated by the Who. More intriguingly, Hamelman says, trash is the catalyst for a powerful mode of rock composition and criticism. It is, for instance, both cause and effect when performers like the Ramones or Beck at once critique junk culture and revel in it. But Is It Garbage? spills over with challenging insights into how rock's creators, critics, and consumers transform, and are transformed by, trash as a fact and a concept. In the music's preoccupation with its own trashiness readers will perceive a wellspring of rock innovation and inspiration -- one largely overlooked and little understood until now.
The Handbook of Personality Assessment provides comprehensive guidance on the administration, scoring, and interpretation of the most widely-used instruments. Written by two of the field's foremost authorities, this well-balanced guide blends theory and application to provide a foundational reference for both graduate students and professionals. Updated to reflect the most current advances, this second edition includes new chapters on the Minnesota Personality Inventory-Restructured Form and the Rorschach Performance Assessment System, along with in-depth coverage of the MMPI-2, MMPI-2-A, MCMI-IV, PAI, NEO-PI-R, Rorschach Comprehensive System, TAT, and Figure Drawing and Sentence Completion Methods. Each instrument is discussed in terms of its history, administration, scoring, validity, assessment, interpretation, applications, and psychometric foundations, and other chapters address ethical considerations and provide general guidelines in the assessment process. Personality assessments guide recommendations in a broad range of clinical, health care, forensic, educational, and organizational settings. This book delves deeply into the nature and appropriate use of the major assessment instruments, with authoritative insight and practical guidance. Review the latest concepts, research, and practices Administer, score, and interpret the most widely-used instruments Understand the psychometric foundations of personality assessment Access downloadable sample reports that illustrate software interpretation An individual's nature and disposition can be assessed in several ways. This book focuses on standardized psychological tests that assess personality characteristics and indicate how a person is likely to think, feel, and act. The results can only be as accurate as the process, from assessment selection and administration, to scoring, interpretation, and beyond. The Handbook of Personality Assessment is an invaluable resource for every stage of the process, with a practical focus and advice from two leading experts.
Employees who possess problem-solving skills are highly valued in today?s competitive business environment. The question is how can employees learn to deal in innovative ways with new data, methods, people, and technologies? In this groundbreaking book, Arthur VanGundy -- a pioneer in the field of idea generation and problem solving -- has compiled 101 group activities that combine to make a unique resource for trainers, facilitators, and human resource professionals. The book is filled with idea-generation activities that simultaneously teach the underlying problem-solving and creativity techniques involved. Each of the book?s 101 engaging and thought-provoking activities includes facilitator notes and advice on when and how to use the activity. Using 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving will give you the information and tools you need to: Generate creative ideas to solve problems. Avoid patterned and negative thinking. Engage in activities that are guaranteed to spark ideas. Use proven techniques for brainstorming with groups. Order your copy today.
Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
Schachtel shared with his great contemporary David Rapaport the goal of scientifically reframing the psychoanalytic understanding of personality. Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test, first published in 1966, is in one sense Schachtel's extended dialogue with Rapaport (in the guise of Schachtel's interlocutor) about this ambitious task. In the course of his brilliant and lucid meditation on this topic, Schachtel attempted far more than the simple explication of particular test responses. His book contains, and should be read as, an entire theory of personality considered in terms of the ways in which one person may meaningfully and detectably differ from another.
