Suchergebnisse

At the end of the Second World War, the countries of Western Europe found themselves in a state of economic and physical ruin and, in the cases of Germany, Italy and France, in a position of, at best, moral and political ambiguity and, at worst, outright bankrupcy. Only Britain emerged from the war with its political regime intact and its moral purpose vindicated, although paradoxically its economy was to prove the most severely wounded. Perhaps because of the very scale of the disaster, however, Western Europe embarked upon a process of reconstruction, aided financially by the Marshall Plan, which embodied grandiose ambitions for a radical rebirth. The Italian Communist Party's weekly magazine, for example, was called Rinascita, whilst the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises celebrated a 'new French "renaissance", encompassing political life, urban redevelopment and a whole range of cultural development, which was seen, in the early days of the Liberation, as the legitimate reward and goal of the Resistance'. In Germany, the recognition of 1945 as constituting a Nullpunkt or Stunde Null, made possible the Kahlschlag, or clean sweep which would propel the new Republic towards democracy and prosperity. Even in Britain, there was the sense of the dawning of a new era, and if the Festival of Britain, in 1951, looked back to the Great Exhibition a century earlier and celebrated traditional British qualities, whilst also flexing the nation's industrial and military muscles, with the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter, the country embarked, quite literally and self-consciously, on a 'New Elizabethan' age.

Although controversial, science studies has emerged in the 1990s as a significant culture area within anthropology. Various histories inform the cultural analysis of science, both outside and within anthropology. A shift from the study of gender to the study of science, the influence of postcolonial critiques of the discipline, and the impact of cultural studies are discussed in terms of their influence upon the cultural analysis of science. New ethnographic methods, the question of "ethnosciences" and multiculturalism, and the implosion of informatics and biomedicine all comprise fields of recent scholarship in the anthropology of science. Debates over modernism and postmodernism, globalization and environment, and the status of the natural inform many of these discussions. The work of Escobar, Hess, Haraway, Martin, Rabinow, Rapp, and Strathern are used to highlight new directions within anthropology concerning both cultures of science and science as culture.

The study of popular culture has a long and intimate relationship to the field of cultural sociology, being both a subcategory of the field and a separate arena of inquiry taken up by other disciplines. This article examines the intellectual traditions that have shaped the sociology of popular culture, traces the points of connection and difference between sociologists and other scholars studying popular culture, and argues for the continued relevance of cultural sociology for addressing key issues and concerns within the realm of 'the popular,' broadly conceived. These developments include the rise of new media/communication technologies and the increasing interdependence between popular culture and other arenas of social life. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]