Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching...
Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and ...
Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.
Metaphysical...
Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in di...
It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same physical shape-where, for example, a song is sung or a story retold. It is another thing altogether, as Greg Urban demonstrates, to think about cultural motion when something new is created-a new song or a new story. And this, the creating of new culture, is the overarching value of the contemporary world, as well as the guiding principle of the capitalist entrepreneur.
From the Declaration of Independence to the movie Babe, from the Amazon...
It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same physical sha...
President Theodore Roosevelt once proclaimed, "Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions, and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions." But while corporations are ostensibly regulated by citizens through their governments, the firms in turn regulate many aspects of social and political life for individuals beyond their own employees and the communities that support them. Corporations are endowed with many of the same rights as citizens, such as freedom of speech, but are not themselves...
President Theodore Roosevelt once proclaimed, "Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions, and it i...
