This is a multi-disciplinary collection which reconsiders primitivism and modernism, emphasizing an earlier chronology than has been conventionally accepted and showing how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low cultural discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Among the topics considered are: the primitivism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; the discourse of Victorian sexuality; Emile Durkheim and primitive ritual observance; the manipulation of colonial photographs; the...

Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars. Representing a variety of fields - history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship - the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history...

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the last fifteen years, the human need to amend immoral wrongs has been expressed in political discourse as a propensity to apologize for acts of past injustice. Can apology, by bringing closure to conflicts and by opening new possibilities for communication and mutual understanding, cultivate reconciliation and ameliorate the present? Taking Wrongs Seriously examines the increasingly potent role of apology as a social force. Contributors explore in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework the role and function--as well as the...

This book is about the social history of the Arab Jews-Jews living in Arab countries-against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism.

Composed of three sections, this book presents the training algorithm for neural networks: backpropagation. The first presents the theory and principles; the second a number of network architectures; and the third shows how these can be applied to a number of different fields.

Trauma and Memory explores different dimensions of trauma, both its relationship to the social sphere and to group identity, in order to open up new approaches to trauma from a healing perspective. The book's specific focus is doubly unique: first, because of its interest in the tension between collective and individual trauma (in trauma as socially constructed and related to identities of ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class); and second, because of its interest in the legal and medical professions (in their construction of trauma, their ways of treating it, their failures, and...