This book explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory--a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Ron Eyerman offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, and provides a new and compelling account of the birth of African-American identity.

This is a comparative study of the interaction between monasticism and society in Theravada Buddhism and medieval Catholicism. Building on Weber's classical analysis of religious virtuosity on one hand, and opposing recent comparative historical sociology's neglect of structures of meaning on the other, the author demonstrates the combined impact of religious orientations, macrosocietal structures, and virtuoso radicalism in shaping the ideological power of religious elites in the historical framework of the Great Traditions.

This study explores the interaction of the Confé dé ration Gé né rale du Travail (CGT) with the French public sphere, between 1900 and 1920. The CGT supported federalist worker control of industry, and, by World War I, had developed a distinctively productivist discourse, emphasizing increased material output through direction of the economy. Kenneth Tucker examines the triumph of this productivism in contrast with other visions of society and the future, while giving a Habermasian twist to the recent linguistic turn in labor history.

This book considers the cultural and religious sources of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self, and demonstrates that they are distinctively Western cultural constructions that tell a story in terms of a narrative pattern derived from biblical and Neoplatonic sources. Thus, religious themes and values still influence how modern psychologists make sense of the human condition, and Dr. Kirschner raises provocative questions about the status of psychoanalytic theories as knowledge and as science.

Social Postmodernism offers a transformative political vision and addresses the live questions in identity politics. The postmodern focus on race, sexuality and gender is sharpened by integrating the micro-social concerns of the social movements associated with these issues and macro-institutional and cultural analysis. Social Postmodernism brings together leading theorists to explore further the implications for the discourses of feminism, post-Marxian cultural studies, African-American, Gay, Latino/a and postcolonial studies.

Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between postcolonial and feminist criticism, via the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. Linking representations of cultural and sexual difference, she shows the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity. Her original and compelling argument calls into question dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East, masculinist assumptions of Orientalism, and Western feminist discourses that seek to "liberate" the veiled woman.

This book challenges the myth that individualism necessarily weakens commitments to the common good. It examines environmental and other activist groups in which individualism sometimes enhances political commitment. Rather than criticize individualism and favor a return to "traditional" values, Paul Lichterman examines the untraditional, personalized politics of many recent social movements and invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.

Professional specialists have come to dominate public communication, and the modern public of the Enlightenment has been replaced by a "New Public," subject to mass persuasion through systematic advertising, lobbying, and other forms of media manipulation. Leon Mayhew examines this sociological development in terms of discourse and social influence, offering an original theory that bridges Talcott Parsons and JUrgen Habermas. He concludes that the present social order is unstable because good-faith, two-way discourse has been undermined.

This book considers the cultural and religious sources of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self, and demonstrates that they are distinctively Western cultural constructions that tell a story in terms of a narrative pattern derived from biblical and Neoplatonic sources. Thus, religious themes and values still influence how modern psychologists make sense of the human condition, and Dr. Kirschner raises provocative questions about the status of psychoanalytic theories as knowledge and as science.

In this groundbreaking book, influential cultural sociologist Alberto Melucci delves deeper into questions about the self as both a psychological and sociocultural entity, particularly in the context of a global society for which information has become a basic resource. He accounts for the self as a site of highly subjective and intimate experiences, such as crying, laughing and loving, and in relation to social structural dynamics, through more impersonal experiences, such as the experience of time, and links of the self to politics.