How Modernity Forgets

Author : Paul Connerton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139480197
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Modernity Forgets written by Paul Connerton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they are unmemorable; consumerism has become disconnected from the labour process; urban architecture has a short life-span; and social relationships are less clearly defined - all of which has eroded the foundations on which we build and share our memories. Providing a profound insight into the effects of modern society, this book is a must-read for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers, as well as anyone interested in social theory and the contemporary western world.

Author : Paul Connerton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107392845
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Societies Remember written by Paul Connerton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-11-02 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.

Author : James Ferguson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 052092228X
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Expectations of Modernity written by James Ferguson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.

Author : Paul Connerton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139503367
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spirit of Mourning written by Paul Connerton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is the memory of traumatic events, such as genocide and torture, inscribed within human bodies? In this book, Paul Connerton discusses social and cultural memory by looking at the role of mourning in the production of histories and the reticence of silence across many different cultures. In particular he looks at how memory is conveyed in gesture, bodily posture, speech and the senses – and how bodily memory, in turn, becomes manifested in cultural objects such as tattoos, letters, buildings and public spaces. It is argued that memory is more cultural and collective than it is individual. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology, social psychology and philosophy.

Author : Thomas C. Oden
Publisher : Zondervan
ISBN 13 : 0310753910
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After Modernity-- What? written by Thomas C. Oden and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 1992 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vigorous and incisive critique of modernity lights the path to recovering the revitalizing heritage of classical Christianity.

Author : Milan Kundera
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0063290693
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

Author : Bruno Latour
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674076753
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book We Have Never Been Modern written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Author : Uilleam Blacker
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317428382
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe written by Uilleam Blacker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

Author : Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004502505
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Before Humanity written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Author : W. Nester
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230117384
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Globalization written by W. Nester and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-11-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did globalization come to dominate our lives? What have been, are, and most likely will be globalization's potential benefits and costs? This book explores the world's most powerful force for good and evil from the Renaissance through today and beyond.