Rethinking Progress provides a challenging reevaluation of one of the crucial ideas of Western civilization; the notion of progress. Progress often seems to have become self-defeating, producing ecological deserts, overpopulated cities, exhausted resources, decaying cultures, and widespread feelings of alienation. The contributors, from all over the world, present their diversified perspectives on the fate of progress.

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 volume brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relation between culture and society. Part One surveys the range of current analytical debate over culture, focusing on the relationship of culture to social structure and power. While individual contributions differ in defining the nature of culture and its relation to society, they are in agreement in assessing the relative autonomy of culture and the centrality of symbolic analysis. Part Two turns to substantive debates, including those over the role of religion, secular...

The best-known classic works of Emile Durkheim are characterized by a structural approach to the understanding of society, and it is this element of his writings that has been most taken up by modern social science. This volume rejects the dominant structural approach, drawing instead on Durkheim's later work, in which he shifted to a symbolic theory of modern industrial societies that emphasized the importance of ritual to collective behavior. By doing so, the contributors offer not only a radically different interpretation of Durkheim, but also a challenging new way of linking the...

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.