The Social Life of Books

Author: Abigail Williams
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

The Social Life of Water

Author: John R. Wagner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857459678
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.

The Social Life of Standards

Author: Janice E. Graham
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774865245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Standards. We apply them, uphold them, or fail to meet them. But how do they get made? Through twelve ethnographic case studies, The Social Life of Standards reveals how standards – political and technical tools for organizing society – are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with norms often created by others. Contributors explore standards at work across different countries and contexts, such as Ebola biomedical safety precautions in Senegal, Colombian farmers contesting politicized seed regulations, and the application of Indigenous standards to Canadian environmental assessments. They emphasize the uncomfortable fit between the inconsistent implementation of standards in the real world and the non-negotiable criteria presupposed by external forces. The Social Life of Standards provides support for a reflexive process that involves local engagement. Ultimately, the goal should be to reach a balance between evidence-based science and the social contexts that can inform more useful and appropriate standards.

The Social Life of Money

Author: Nigel Dodd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400880866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
A reevaluation of what money is—and what it might be Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.

On the Social Life of Postsocialism

Author: Daphne Berdahl
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253221706
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. This volume brings together her essays, from an early study of memory at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., to research on consumption and citizenship undertaken in Leipzig in the years before her untimely death. It serves as a superb introduction to the development of the field of postsocialist cultural studies.

Structures of Social Life

Author: Alan page Fiske
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0029066875
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Book Description
Alan Page Fiske shares insight on the basic models of social relations in this “important book that will be of value to all psychologists with an interest in organization, culture, economic behavior, and decision making” (Richard E. Nisbett, University of Michigan). Structures of Social Life examines the relational models of social relationships, including how they are implicit in earlier social theories, how they have emerged into diverse domains of social action and though, and how they produce diverse and complex social forms. Aiming to create conversations and debate about social relationships and the models that structure them, Alan Page Fiske provides insight on the four elementary forms of human relations.

The Social Life of Achievement

Author: Nicholas J. Long
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

The Social Life of Things

Author: Arjun Appadurai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107392977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.

The Social Life of Spirits

Author: Ruy Blanes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608180X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.

Connecting sounds

Author: Nick Crossley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526126044
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Crossley argues that music is a form of social interaction, interwoven in the fabric of society and in constant interplay with its other threads. Musical interactions are often also economic interactions, for example, and sometimes political interactions. They can be forms of identity work, for both individuals and collectives, contributing to the reproduction or bridging of social divisions. Successive chapters of the book track and explore these interplays, in each case combining a critical consideration of existing literature with the development of an original, ‘relational’ approach to music sociology. The result is a grand sociological vision of music which captures not only music’s context but ‘the music itself’. The book will appeal to social scientists, musicologists and cultural scholars more widely.