"Land of the kami" : the basics of Shintō and its ancient roots -- "Eight million kami" : Shintō mythology -- Shintō in Japanese history -- History and legends of famous shrines and their kami -- The material culture of Shintō -- Rituals and events in the lives of contemporary Japanese -- Contemporary Shintō and the future.
In this paper, I explore the emergence of happiness and well-being as keystones of contemporary EuroAmerican culture. Drawing on the relationship between disciplinary enterprises and forms of governance, as well as on cross-cultural comparison with fa'asamoa (the Samoan Way), I work to situate the current EuroAmerican obsession with happiness and well-being as a cultural formation – that is, as an artifact of a historically and culturally unique set of patterns and forces – thus problematizing its taken-for-granted status, in academic and policy-making circles, as a self-evident and universal goal with universal characteristics. I pay particular attention to the forms of governance that the contemporary orientation to happiness inaugurates and instantiates.
Actuality. Management as a phenomenon of culture and an exclusively unique object of scientific knowledge occupies a special place in the life of society. As historical development of mankind is complicated as organizational structures, as well as the culture of management and a set of theories that describe them. However, modern science does not take into account that radical changes in organizational reality occur not continuously, but during the bifurcation of civilization. A specific culture that arose precisely in such conditions is mechanistic management, the study of which is devoted to this article. Purpose and methods. The purpose of the article is a theoretical and historical analysis of the culture of mechanistic management, the identification of the basic determinants of the genesis of this management culture and the formation of the main directions of its development in conditions of industrialism. The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical principle of cognition, systemic, civilization, historical approaches to the study of social phenomena and processes, and the fundamental provisions of the theory of management. Results. The objective preconditions of the formation of a culture of mechanistic management are determined: European science and mechanism arising from the Newtonian picture of the world – the presentation of organizational reality as a machine, as well as atomism, rationalism and social Darwinism as a "natural law" about inter-species struggle; Protestant ethics as a justification of profit; political economy, which introduced the economy in the form of a machine operating under the laws of Newtonian mechanics; great scientific and technical discoveries, demanding new forms of organization of production. The essence of the article is given, comparative characteristics are given and prospects of further application of the main directions of culture of mechanistic management: scientific organization of labor and management are outlined; administrative management; the ...
In: George Thadathil, "History, Culture, Environment and Development: Kerala and Darjeeling A Study in Contrast" in Anjan Chakrabarti et al, Interrogating Development: Perspectives on Economy, Enviornment, Ethnicity and Gender, Delhi: Setu Prakashani, 2017, pp. 174-185
Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History provides a wide-ranging examination of war in human history, from the beginning of the species until the current rise of the so-called Islamic State. Although it covers many societies throughout time, the book does not attempt to tell all stories from all places, nor does it try to narrate "important" conflicts. Instead, author Wayne E. Lee describes the emergence of military innovations and systems, examining how they were created and then how they moved or affected other societies. These innovations are central to most historical narratives, including the development of social complexity, the rise of the state, the role of the steppe horseman, the spread of gunpowder, the rise of the west, the bureaucratization of military institutions, the industrial revolution and the rise of firepower, strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, and the creation of "people's war."
This book provides a practical introduction for researchers who wish to use objects and material culture as primary sources for the study of the past. The book focuses primarily on the period 1500 to the present day, but the principles put forward are equally applicable to studies of earlier historical eras. Histories of the last five centuries have been driven to a remarkable extent by textual records and it is with this in mind that Researching Objects & Material Culture offers researchers a step-by-step guide to approaching the material evidence that survives from this period. Anticipating that many researchers will feel under-skilled or lacking in confidence in tackling artefacts of the past, the book traces the process of research from the framing of research questions through to the writing up of findings giving particular attention to the ways in which objects can be located, accessed and understood. This practical guidance is augmented by the use of examples of seminal and contemporary scholarship in this interdisciplinary field, so that readers can see how particular approaches to sources have been used to develop historical narratives and arguments. It will be written in accessible and jargon-free language with clear explanations of more complex discourses. In this way, the book intends to demystify both the process of researching objects and the way research practice relates to published scholarship