Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach
Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1000325105

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach
Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1000323315

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach
Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 1994-04-19

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Carribean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study, given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture, and the subsequent development of creolisation, the transnational family and economic dependency.

The Modern Anthropology of India
The Modern Anthropology of India

Author: Peter Berger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1134061188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Modern Anthropology of India is an accessible textbook providing a critical overview of the ethnographic work done in India since 1947. It assesses the history of research in each region and serves as a practical and comprehensive guide to the main themes dealt with by ethnographers. It highlights key analytical concepts and paradigms that came to be of relevance in particular regions in the recent history of research in India, and which possibly gained a pan-Indian or even trans-Indian significance. Structured according to the states of the Indian union, contributors raise several key questions, including: What themes were ethnographers interested in? What are the significant ethnographic contributions? How are peoples, communities and cultural areas represented? How has the ethnographic research in the area developed? Filling a significant gap in the literature, the book is an invaluable resource to students and researchers in the field of Indian anthropology/ethnography, regional anthropology and postcolonial studies. It is also of interest to students of South Asian studies in general as it provides an extensive and critical overview of regionally based ethnographic activity undertaken in India.

Modernity's Ear
Modernity's Ear

Author: Roshanak Kheshti

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1479867012

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

Dilemmas of Modernity
Dilemmas of Modernity

Author: Mark Goodale

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008-10-29

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0804769885

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dilemmas of Modernity provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. Mark Goodale presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial role in the emergence of postcolonial states. The book contends that the contemporary Bolivian experience is best understood by examining historical patterns of intention as they emerge from everyday practices. It provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level, and gives key insights into this important South American country.

Modernity and Malaysia
Modernity and Malaysia

Author: Alberto Gomes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-16

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1134100760

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bringing together over thirty years of detailed ethnographic research on the Menraq of Malaysia, this fascinating book analyzes and documents the experience of development and modernization in tribal communities. Descendents of hunter-gatherers who have inhabited Southeast Asia for about 40,000 years, the Menraq (also known as Semang or Negritos) were nomadic foragers until they were resettled in a Malaysian government-mandated settlement in 1972. Modernity and Malaysia begins with the ‘Jeli Incident’ in which several Menraq were alleged to have killed three Malays, members of the dominant ethnic group in the country. Alberto Gomes links this uncharacteristic violence to Menraq experiences of Malaysian-style modernity that have left them displaced, depressed, discontented, and disillusioned. Tracing the transformation of the lives of Menraq resulting from resettlement, development, and various ‘civilizing projects’, this book examines how the encounter with modernity has led the subsistence-oriented, relatively autonomous Menraq into a life of dependence on the state and the market. Challenging conventional social scientific understanding of concepts such as modernity and marginalization, and providing empirical material for comparison with the experience of modernity for indigenous peoples around the world, Modernity and Malaysia is a valuable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, development studies and indigenous studies, as well as those with a more general interest in asian studies.

Tourism, Magic and Modernity
Tourism, Magic and Modernity

Author: David Picard

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0857452029

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

Modernity and Exclusion
Modernity and Exclusion

Author: Joel S Kahn

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2001-06-15

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1849202516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This penetrating book re-examines `the project of modernity′. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative `ethnographic′ understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of `popular modernism′ in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion.

Hybrids of Modernity
Hybrids of Modernity

Author: Penelope Harvey

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0415130441

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hybrids of Modernity considers the relationship between three Western modernist institutions: anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition, in particular examining the emergence of culture as a commodity.