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 Describing, Interpreting, and Explaining Spirit Possession

Emma Cohen

in The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition

Chapters 4 and 5 introduce more comprehensively the scientific approach to be adopted, incorporating a review of past and present approaches to possession cults and spirit phenomena. The first of ... More

Chapters 4 and 5 introduce more comprehensively the scientific approach to be adopted, incorporating a review of past and present approaches to possession cults and spirit phenomena. The first of these chapters looks at ethnographic description and anthropological interpretation of spirit possession phenomena, considering the roles of both rich description and faithful representation of cultural meaning for the generation of scientific theories.Less

The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children’s Insurance in the United States

Viviana A. Zelizer

in Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy

This chapter considers the development of children's insurance. It argues that the removal of children from the “cash nexus” at the turn of the past century was part of a cultural process of ... More

This chapter considers the development of children's insurance. It argues that the removal of children from the “cash nexus” at the turn of the past century was part of a cultural process of sacralization of children's lives. It uses the term “sacralization” in the sense of objects being invested with moral and religious meaning. While in the nineteenth century the market value of children was culturally acceptable, the new normative ideal of the child as an exclusively emotional and moral asset precluded instrumental or fiscal considerations. The primacy of children's qualitative, intrinsic value was affirmed by forsaking any immediate quantitative money value. The chapter analyzes historical data on the controversial development of children's insurance between 1875 and the early decades of the twentieth century as a specific measure of the radical transformation in the cultural meaning of childhood.Less

Biotechnology as Cultural Meaning: Reflections on the Moral Reception of Synthetic Biology

Bruce Jennings

in Synthetic Biology and Morality: Artificial Life and the Bounds of Nature

This chapter focuses on the moral and ethical reception of biotechnology in society and the contested cultural and social meanings of synthetic biology as well as concerns about it. As this chapter ... More

This chapter focuses on the moral and ethical reception of biotechnology in society and the contested cultural and social meanings of synthetic biology as well as concerns about it. As this chapter highlights, these factors play a key role in shaping science policy, as governance in a democracy is based not only on expert knowledge and opinion, but on broader public perception and legitimacy.Less

Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History

Moshe Rosman

in How Jewish is Jewish History?

This chapter analyses the Jewish spirit. It approaches the cultural history of a traditional society, as Jewish society was everywhere until the onset of modernity, by examining the history of the ... More

This chapter analyses the Jewish spirit. It approaches the cultural history of a traditional society, as Jewish society was everywhere until the onset of modernity, by examining the history of the interaction of a society and its members with their collective history. Nationalist-inspired scholarship produced a Jewish political history. The Jewish historiography created in the decades after the Shoah and the establishment of Israel has turned in significant measure to social history. The postmodern age that has been so occupied with the deconstruction of symbols and meanings that were previously self-evident would seem to have prepared the ground for a new synthesis of cultural meaning. The chapter thus returns to the study of the spirit; not what it produced, but what it was.Less

Brassieres

Jill Fields

in An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality

This chapter talks about the twentieth century brassiere, which was used as a companion garment of longer corsets. It reveals that the cultural meaning of the brassiere deepened as female breasts ... More

This chapter talks about the twentieth century brassiere, which was used as a companion garment of longer corsets. It reveals that the cultural meaning of the brassiere deepened as female breasts became the most important bodily design of gender distinction in modern United States. Brassiere design and marketing profitability used twentieth-century mechanisms that objectified female embodiment. Cup sizes were invented in 1935, and these increased the objectification of the female body. The discussion also shows that cup sizes provided a classification of women's bodies. The chapter concludes that the glamorous and transformative power attributed to large, firm, and uplifted breasts explains their constant popularity among women from the late 1930s to the present.Less

The Politics of Meaning: From Frames to Design Conflicts

David J. Hess

in Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions

The chapter reviews the literature on frame analysis and narratives in social movement studies and the parallel literature in science and technology studies on technological frames, boundary objects, ... More

The chapter reviews the literature on frame analysis and narratives in social movement studies and the parallel literature in science and technology studies on technological frames, boundary objects, and other cultural dimensions of science and expertise. It suggests the value of materializing the analysis of cultural meaning in the study of social movements and industry by developing the analysis of design conflicts. Three main types of design conflicts are reviewed: those based on social structural conflicts of race, class, and gender; those based on field-level industrial conflicts between incumbent firms and challengers; and those based on the environmental conflict between sustainability and resilience. This chapter uses examples from work on feminism, race, and design; on the solar energy and organic food movements; and on trade-offs between resilience and sustainability at the household and regional levels.Less

Perspective: Scholar Louise Spence on Comparing the Soap Opera to Other Forms

Abigail De Kosnik

in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era

This chapter presents Spence’s views about comparisons of soap operas with other texts and forms. Spence believes that the notion of “soap opera” still has cultural meaning. Whether we are referring ... More

This chapter presents Spence’s views about comparisons of soap operas with other texts and forms. Spence believes that the notion of “soap opera” still has cultural meaning. Whether we are referring to the essential features of the genre or not, we are still able to communicate when using the term. In most cases, what we are communicating is that a film, TV show, story, or telling of an event that is referred to as “a soap opera” is in unsuccessful competition with some other narrative form that is privileged and valued by the comparison. This tendency to contrast other narrative forms with soap operas draws on deeply entrenched dissonances in our discourses on popular culture and asks us to consider the worth we place on originality and realism in telling stories.Less

Efficient Multicultural Teams

Philippe D’Iribarne, Sylvie Chevrier, Alain Henry, Jean-Pierre Segal, and Geneviève Tréguer-Felten

in Cross-Cultural Management Revisited: A Qualitative Approach

The quick training of expatriates prior to departure meant to raise their awareness of cultural habits is insufficient to increase the efficiency of multicultural teams. Such improvement requires ... More

The quick training of expatriates prior to departure meant to raise their awareness of cultural habits is insufficient to increase the efficiency of multicultural teams. Such improvement requires helping each team member to decipher the main cultural references of their counterparts and to organize themselves in a way that is acceptable in all of their universes of meaning. This chapter provides an example of such cross-cultural coaching for a Franco-Malagasy team and details the six-step method implemented by the cultural analyst. It also suggests different leverages for improvement depending on the team’s specific context. Whenever tight intercultural integration is required, organizing complementarity between sub-groups may turn out less costly than striving for complex arrangements.Less

Organizing Community for Holistic Mission: An Urban Monastery in Action

Wes Markofski

in New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism

Chapter 6 explores how the theological and political standpoints are put to work in the Urban Monastery’s social organization and strategies of action. Neo-monasticism’s break with the ... More

Chapter 6 explores how the theological and political standpoints are put to work in the Urban Monastery’s social organization and strategies of action. Neo-monasticism’s break with the individualistic theology of traditional evangelicals finds expression in new ways of organizing community and practicing holistic mission in the world. Chapter 6 examines how Urban Monastery participants explicitly draw on core symbolic elements of their distinctive holistic communitarian meaning system to construct lines of individual and collective action in the world. Urban Monastery participants’ practice of holistic communitarianism demonstrates how the vigilant application of a system of cultural meaning can become a unifying principle of action of remarkable strength and scope. Unlike Weber’s ascetic Protestants, however, the Urban Monastery practices a type of celebratory asceticism that is communitarian rather than individualistic in emphasis.Less

It’s Sacred Ground: The Cultural Meaning of Land

John M. Coggeshall

in Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community

This chapter uses the example of Liberia’s returning population to offer a wider examination of the relationship between Appalachian residents and their family land. Using an anthropological lens, ... More

This chapter uses the example of Liberia’s returning population to offer a wider examination of the relationship between Appalachian residents and their family land. Using an anthropological lens, the chapter outlines the cultural process by which land becomes a member of one’s family. Specifically, the process entails ownership of family land, occupancy of family land, memories of that land, the merging of land and people through time, and finally the anthropomorphizing of land. The chapter ends with an Epilogue linking enslaved ancestors from the Oolenoy Valley with descendants still living in Liberia, and the sweep of history over the same landscape.Less

Hustlers in the House of Literature: Julian Mayfield, Chester Himes, and the Black Literary Ghetto

in Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture

This chapter examines African American literature in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. It analyzes the overlooked works of Julian Mayfield and Chester Himes and provides new insights into the ... More

This chapter examines African American literature in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. It analyzes the overlooked works of Julian Mayfield and Chester Himes and provides new insights into the crises confronting the more canonized members of the black literati during this period. The chapter suggests that popular literary production of African American writers was designed to decenter the dominant understanding of the period and its cultural meaning for black America, and that that anti-institutional character of ghetto-centric writing contradicted efforts toward integration.Less

The Dominion of Bioethics: Nationalism and Canadian Bioethics

Andrea Frolic, Michael D. Coughlin, and Bernard Keating

in Bioethics Around the Globe

This chapter provides a case study of the relationships between bioethics and the project and pitfalls of nation-building, raising crucial questions about the influence of history, culture, and ... More

This chapter provides a case study of the relationships between bioethics and the project and pitfalls of nation-building, raising crucial questions about the influence of history, culture, and politics on the enterprise of bioethics. It focuses on Canadian bioethics, which is preoccupied with questions of national identity and unique cultural meaning. Anxiety over what defines a Canadian and what makes Canada unique as a nation is fueled by perceived external and internal challenges to a coherent national identity, such as American popular culture and political influence, and Quebec nationalism.Less