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Author: Susan Hegeman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400823226 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
In recent decades, historians and social theorists have given much thought to the concept of "culture," its origins in Western thought, and its usefulness for social analysis. In this book, Susan Hegeman focuses on the term's history in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. She shows how, during this period, the term "culture" changed from being a technical term associated primarily with anthropology into a term of popular usage. She shows the connections between this movement of "culture" into the mainstream and the emergence of a distinctive "American culture," with its own patterns, values, and beliefs. Hegeman points to the significant similarities between the conceptions of culture produced by anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and a diversity of other intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Dwight Macdonald. Hegeman reveals how relativist anthropological ideas of human culture--which stressed the distance between modern centers and "primitive" peripheries--came into alliance with the evaluating judgments of artists and critics. This anthropological conception provided a spatial awareness that helped develop the notion of a specifically American "culture." She also shows the connections between this new view of "culture" and the artistic work of the period by, among others, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Thomas Hart Benton, Nathanael West, and James Agee and depicts in a new way the richness and complexity of the modernist milieu in the United States.
Author: Susan Hegeman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400823226 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
In recent decades, historians and social theorists have given much thought to the concept of "culture," its origins in Western thought, and its usefulness for social analysis. In this book, Susan Hegeman focuses on the term's history in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. She shows how, during this period, the term "culture" changed from being a technical term associated primarily with anthropology into a term of popular usage. She shows the connections between this movement of "culture" into the mainstream and the emergence of a distinctive "American culture," with its own patterns, values, and beliefs. Hegeman points to the significant similarities between the conceptions of culture produced by anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and a diversity of other intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Dwight Macdonald. Hegeman reveals how relativist anthropological ideas of human culture--which stressed the distance between modern centers and "primitive" peripheries--came into alliance with the evaluating judgments of artists and critics. This anthropological conception provided a spatial awareness that helped develop the notion of a specifically American "culture." She also shows the connections between this new view of "culture" and the artistic work of the period by, among others, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Thomas Hart Benton, Nathanael West, and James Agee and depicts in a new way the richness and complexity of the modernist milieu in the United States.
Author: Dan Rose Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 1512809624 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
Dan Rose has explored the American status system for decades. His ethnographic research into black South Philadelphia, the business community of Hazleton Pennsylvania, and the large horse farms of Chester County Pennsylvania is drawn together here to examine the cultural forms that shape American life at every level. In Patterns of American Culture, Rose draws on the fact and metaphor of colonization to demonstrate that the central motive in the contemporary United States has been and continues to be the corporate form. He begins by considering our origins as a collection of colonies, each of which was constructed as a private corporation whose purpose was to make money for its investors by providing new goods and different markets for England. Rose contends that the structure underlying American life are still corporate and that their purpose is to create new resources, new products, new landscapes, new ideas, and new markets. Today, most Americans have multiple corporate memberships—in city and state governments, in the businesses that employ them, in professional organizations or unions, and in various civic and political associations. Further, through written rules and unwritten customs, these corporations determine who we are and what we can do. Patterns of American Culture is a scholarly and poetic pursuit of the concealed energies within this vast incorporation and an analysis of how it shapes society and the lives of individuals. Rose draws from poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and brings ideas from such sources as performance art and cultural theory to critique this pervasive institutional order. The book closes with a fable of life in a fictitious capitalist society that both comments on ethnographic practice and reveals the disturbing estrangement inherent in any study of this type of culture. This narrative ethnography will interest scholars and students of American studies, anthropology, English, folklore, and sociology, and members of the design professions, such as architecture, landscape, and urban design.
Author: William H. Chafe Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Duke University Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 019972878X Category : Equality Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
Chafe's analysis of changing social patterns is both solid and imaginative in the best sense ... His book will certainly increase our understanding of where we are going--and why."--Elizabeth Janeway "Adopted as required reading - tremendously popular with students - provokes lively debates."--John Rhinehart, Riverside Community College "A trenchant analysis of the underlying social and economic changes of the past century ... Particularly insightful in analyzing the ways in which racial and sexual inequality are both similar and fundamentally different."--Alice S. Rossi, University of Massachus.
Author: Claude S. Fischer Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226251454 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 523
Book Description
Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American” —yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character. Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart—yet challenging many of their conclusions—Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.
Author: Colin Woodard Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143122029 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.
Author: William Henry Chafe Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 019502365X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
Chafe's analysis of changing social patterns is both solid and imaginative in the best sense....His book will certainly increase our understanding of where we are going--and why.""--Elizabeth Janeway ""Adopted as required reading - tremendously popular with students - provokes lively debates.""--John Rhinehart, Riverside Community College ""A trenchant analysis of the underlying social and economic changes of the past century....Particularly insightful in analyzing the ways in which racial and sexual inequality are both similar and fundamentally different.""--Alice S. Rossi, University of Ma.
Author: Wayne H. Brekhus Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0745698220 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 173
Book Description
How does culture shape our thinking? In what ways do our social and cultural worlds enter into our mental worlds? How do the communities we belong to influence what we notice and what we ignore? What cultural variation do we see in cognition? What general patterns do we see across this diversity and variation? In this lively and engaging book, Wayne H. Brekhus shows us the many ways that culture influences our cognitive thought processes. Drawing on a wide range of fascinating examples, such as how members of different subcultures perceive danger and safety, how cultures variably classify and perceptually weight race, how social actors use and present identity as a strategic resource, and how people across different organizational settings experience time, Brekhus takes us on a creative, diverse, and insightful tour of the sociocultural character of cognition. Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality offers an invaluable survey of a wide-ranging body of research in the sociology of culture and cognition that will be an inviting resource for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and established research scholars alike.
Author: Susan Hegeman
Author: Susan Hegeman
Author: Dan Rose
Author: David Chidester
Author: Henry Glassie
Author: William H. Chafe Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Duke University
Author: Claude S. Fischer
Author: Colin Woodard
Author: William Henry Chafe
Author: Ruth Benedict
Author: Wayne H. Brekhus