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This volume addresses the dynamics of materiality over time and space. In cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary studies the authors examine how things gain meaning and status, generate a multitude of emotions, and feed into the propagation of myths, narratives and discourses. The book is divided according to four themes: soft objects, stoic stories, consuming and the collectable, and waste and technologies. The first section discusses the meanings of the lived environment on the individual and national levels. The second section provides specific examples on the role of things in identity construction. The third section focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of consumption and collecting. The phenomena under scrutiny in the fourth section are moral dilemmas associated with and representations of dirt/waste and advancements in science and technology. Presenting diverse case studies of material culture, the volume points to rich interdisciplinary approaches in cultural theory.

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von Almond, G. A.: The civic culture : political attitudes and democracy in five nations / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1963. + Almond, G. A.: The civic culture revisited / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - London : Sage, 1989

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- A note to the reader -- 1. Introduction -- 'Culture' at The Department for Culture, Media and Sport -- Culture as a Perspective -- The Dangers of Culture -- 2. Landscape -- Culture into Nature -- Nature into Culture -- Cultural Explanation and Its Limits -- 3. A whole way of life -- Patterns of Life -- Dirt as a Cultural System -- The Value and Limits of Cosmology -- 4. Politics -- From Politics to Culture and Back Again -- Religion, Culture, and Women-Who-Cover -- Culture and Capitalism and The Anthropocene -- 5. Experience -- An Argument for Reimagining Culture -- Experiential Maps -- Cultural Aesthetics and Cultural Analysis -- 6. Death -- From My Diary -- In the Kingdom of the Sick -- Teaching Death -- 7. Two cheers for culture? -- Guarding Against Cultural Reductionism -- Embracing Collective Intimacies -- Finding Productive Distance -- Engaging With Culture that Matters -- Bibliography -- Index.

Culture is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. Defining culture and pinpointing its role in our lives is not, however, so straightforward. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics, is uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In this keenly analytical and acerbically funny book, he explores how culture and our conceptualisations of it have evolved over the last two centuries--from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Ranging over art and literature as well as philosophy and anthropology, and major but somewhat 'unfashionable' thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Edmund Burke as well as T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Raymond Williams and Oscar Wilde, Eagleton provides a cogent overview of culture set firmly in its historical and theoretical contexts, illuminating its collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, and the rise of and rule of the 'uncultured' masses. Eagleton also examines culture today, lambasting the commodification and co-option of a force that, properly understood, is a vital means for us to cultivate and enrich our social lives, and can even provide the impetus to transform civil society. -- Inside jacket flap.

Explored are the issues relating to interdisciplinary studies as they arise specifically in the study of culture. It is argued that as "disciplines themselves are unstable & shifting in character, so also is the notion of interdisciplinarity." The central issue that arises is whether the concepts, categories & methods of investigation employed in the understanding of new types of entities that have been brought into being by the activity of men are the same or radically different from those that are used effectively in the understanding of phenomena subsumed under the term "Nature." The world of culture of course presupposes the world of nature, as without it there would be no embodiment of meaning or its transmission from one being to another. But besides nature it also presupposes a creative being who comprehends meanings & values & tries to objectify them outside himself so that he can apprehend them in an objective manner & also communicate to other human beings through such embodied objectivation. The importance of culture in a particular tradition may therefore itself be a function of the importance that objectivation & embodiment enjoy in that culture. The relationship between man & culture is thus as diverse as the ways in which man himself may be conceived. Culture may thus be understood as arising from the dialectic between what one has created & the demand to understand what one has created -- a dialectic that may be said to arise from the very nature of self-consciousness itself. Beyond this, however, is the dialectic between knowledge & action combined with the situation that actions determined by knowledge do not distinguish between falsity & truth of the knowledge concerned, but rather depend more on the degrees to which the belief in their truth is entertained. There is in fact no clear-cut dichotomy between belief about reality & reality itself in the social sciences at least to the extent that it does seem to obtain in the natural sciences. Further, as belief relates to imagination & plays an integral role in the creation of sociocultural reality it follows that imagination is much more central to culture than most people have thought it to be. The central issues about cultural reality therefore seem always to cluster around self-consciousness which not only is enmeshed in the awareness of value but always expresses itself in alternative ways because it is reflexive in character. The understanding of culture therefore is a perpetual challenge to all those who believe in only one way of understanding the world, whether it be the empiricist or the idealist way of of understanding it. Modified AA.

Culture and civilisation -- Postmodern prejudices -- The social unconscious -- An apostle of culture -- From Herder to Hollywood -- Conclusion: the hubris of culture