Signs and Society
Signs and Society

Author: Richard J. Parmentier

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0253025141

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A major voice in contemporary semiotic theory offers a new perspective on potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology. In Signs and Society, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier demonstrates how an appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational work of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research. Parmentier’s concepts of “transactional value,” “metapragmatic interpretant,” and “circle of semiosis,” for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar’s Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity. Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology’s future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

Space Is the Place
Space Is the Place

Author: John Szwed

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1478012056

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Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.

Artificial Intelligence in Society
Artificial Intelligence in Society

Author: OECD

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9264545190

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The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has evolved significantly from 1950 when Alan Turing first posed the question of whether machines can think. Today, AI is transforming societies and economies. It promises to generate productivity gains, improve well-being and help address global challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity and health crises.

The American Yawp
The American Yawp

Author: Joseph L. Locke

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 670

ISBN-13: 1503608131

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"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.