Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of 'doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering. The book reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law; uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in...

This title offers a revision of the centrality of belonging in contemporary culture. Contributors examine belonging as an achievement involving several levels of production, performance and embodiment.

This book is accessible, as a beginner's guide should be, but without an over-simplification of the arguments. It should prove an immensely durable text for generations of students to come' - John Hughes, Lancaster University

At last, a book that makes social theory for undergraduates a pleasure to teach and study. The book offers a comprehensive overview of social theory from classical sociology to the present day. Students are guided through the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber, functionalism, action perspectives, feminism, postmodernism and contemporary...

This book situates sociology in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts and examines how the founders of the discipline developed competing analyses of the processes elementary to social and moral life through their distinctive sociological contributions. Surveying a range of sociological analyses from Comte to feminism, postmodernism and rational choice theory, this book examines the various attempts that have been made to reconstruct the discipline over the last century, and the challenges facing it today. Individual chapters examine Human Sociology', Sacred Sociology',...

Divided into two parts, this book examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the 'organization of modernity', in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the 'rationalistic revolution' of the 'golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. Part two examines key concepts in the social sciences. It begins with some of the broadest concepts used by social scientists: choice, decision, action and institution and moves on to examine the 'collectivist alternative': the concepts of society, culture and polity, which are often dismissed as untenable by...

This penetrating book re-examines 'the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative 'ethnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of 'popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion.

This fascinating collection explores the growing range of body modification practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants, which have sprung up recently in the West. It asks whether this implies that we are returning to traditional tribal practices of inscribing identities onto bodies on the part of 'modern primitives', or is body modification better understood as purely cosmetic and decorative with body markings merely temporary signs of transferable loyalties?

Contributors address the question of the permanence of body transformation through fitness...

No national tradition of social theory has been more seductive to Anglo-American readers than the French.There has been a long-standing fascination with French ideas and debates.

This extraordinarily accomplished book, written by one of Britain's leading commentators on social theory, provides a peerless account of the French tradition.The book: provides a systematic account of French social theory from the aftermath of the French Revolution (St Simon, Bazard and Comte) to the contemporary scene dominated by Kristeva, Deleuze, Bourdieu and Baudrillard; divides French social...

Using the interview form, the author tells about a vast assortment of cultural and theoretical topics, including architecture and 'speed-space', 'chronopolitics', art and technoculture, modernism, postmodernism and 'hypermodernism', the time of the trajectory and the 'information bomb'.

'The book is an important read for persons who practice or study within the field. Anyone with experience or interest in the topic will come away with a deepened understanding of debates within cultural studies and with an array of nfew questions and ideas to pursue. The book would make a fine text for graduate level classes dealing with culture and media; the question/debate-orientated structure especially could provide the launching pad for a whole range of discussions, profjects, and papter topics'

The Southern Communication Journal

In this sequel to the...