Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity: Critical Cases engages the paradox of cultural difference and social solidarity within contemporary contexts. Several of the essays in this book focus on individuals negotiating with perceptions of their personal, social, and political identity. Other contributions frame the political perceptions of the individuals and the cultural communities those perceptions construct. In this collection are essays concerning immigrants and the negotiation of sacred, political, and cultural spaces in the United Arab Emirates, the UK, Germany, and Australia as well...

Creative. Philosophical. Funny. Melancholic. Irreverent. Historical. An unnamed narrator, living in Istanbul, Turkey, is asked by his friend, Thomas, to write an introduction to his manuscript. After Thomas leaves the narrator with a stack of unorganized papers, he realizes too late that he will be doing more than writing an introduction. Over the course of several years, and usually after drinking, the narrator organizes fragments of Thomas's writings into a book. Usually ironic and irreverent, he comments and describes pieces of his own life as he sloppily stitches Thomas's literary...

Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity: Solidarities and Social Function explores solidarity as a social function bringing to the fore the critical value of the concept of solidarity in understanding contemporary societies. The first part of the book (Solidarities) provides different theoretical approaches to the conception and exploration of solidarity that depart from the traditional and dominant perspectives within which debates about solidarity take place. This part includes chapters on the origins of the concept of solidarity in French social thought in the nineteenth century; a...