Analyzes the role of religion as a global cultural force in the tension between tradition and modernity. Social theories of religion are explored through a comparative and historical analysis of the Abrahamic faiths and theoretical approaches to the social function of religion are assessed.

'Friedman has produced a book of importance... It features many tantalizing insights and observations in the author's attempt to comprehend the global constitution of the world and the positional identities - not least the identities of social scientists - within the global arena' - Theory, Culture & Society

This collection enables the reader to engage with the full range of Georg Simmel's dazzling contributions to the study of culture. It opens with his basic essays on defining culture, its changes and its crisis. These are followed by more specific explorations of culture.

Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society.

The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other's lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Norman K Denzin analyzes...

Explores the meaning of leisure in the context of key social formations of our time. This title brings together the insights of feminism, Marxism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory.

In his exploration of the interaction between religion and worldwide social and cultural change, the author examines the major theories of global change and discusses the ways in which such change impinges on contemporary religious practice, meaning and influence. Beyer explores some of the key issues in understanding the shape of religion today, including religion as culture and as social system, pure and applied religion, privatized and publicly influential religion, and liberal versus conservative religions. He goes on to apply these issues to five contemporary illustrative cases: the...

In this fascinating book, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy, nostalgia - through the works of a number of writers and philosophers, including the social and aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin.

The author examines Baudelaire's haunting image of the city and its profound effect on conceptions of modernity. She goes on to consider how such influential figures as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject...

A look at the strengths and weaknesses of cultural studies, providing a blend of performance and risk theory. It explores the need to erase the separation of high and popular culture studies, starting from the thesis that cultural studies has been too pre-occupied with popular culture.