Cultural studies: customs and traditions Books

Book SynopsisThe Christian Science Monitor''s #1 Best Book of the YearA witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, The Almost Nearly Perfect People offers up the ideal mixture of intriguing and revealing facts (Laura Miller, Salon).Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than ten years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.Why are the Danes so happy, despite having the highest taxes? Do the Finns really have the best education system? Are the Icelanders as feral as they sometimes

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Book SynopsisIn ""Celebrating the Fourth"" Len Travers traces the origins and functions of the quintesssential American holiday from the first festivals in 1777 to the Jubilee of Independence in 1826. Applying anthropological analyses of social rituals, he skillfully explicates the rich symbolic content of such activities as processions, banquets and entertainments. By examining Fourth of July celebrations in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston, he is able to discuss the interplay between local/regional and national identities and interests. Travers's thoughtful and perceptive decipherings of Independence Day celebrations make a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance of ritual in early republican political culture. This work should appeal to historians, social scientists, folklorists and general readers alike.

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Book SynopsisWe’re losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away. Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced.Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.Trade Review“Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.” -- Arjun Appadurai * author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition *"David Berliner stands at the crossroads, observing the natives, the philosophers, the heritage bureaucrats, the tourists, and other anthropologists as well, from all nationalities, when they come to look at – or even live – the past in the present. But what does he become himself? A cultural chameleon? When you have read Losing Culture, perhaps your anthropology will never be the same again." -- Ulf Hannerz * author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios *“By linking the chameleon figure of the anthropologist with the theme of nostalgia, Berliner demonstrates anthropologists’ important role in disabusing the general public of the illusion that “cultures” can be rebuilt in their original form. This subtle departure from conventional studies of heritage places a new and desirable emphasis on the ethical choices facing anthropologists when confronted with the politics of contested pasts. Of particular value is the unusual but well-grounded comparative perspective that Berliner draws from his findings in West Africa and Southeast Asia.” -- Michael Herzfeld * author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok *"What Berliner sets out to do in this concisely insightful little book is to 'refine our understanding of how cultural loss manifests today in different contexts' with a special view to 'the rhetorical forms that lead to this diagnosis.' This ambitious task of addressing such a tremendous, worldwide problematic without losing touch with ethnography is anything but simple....Impressive." * Anthropos *"Losing Culture speaks to us both through its fascinating ethnographic cases and the lucid eye it poses onto ourselves, the plastic and nostalgic anthropologists. Its insight can apply to numerous cultural contexts, as diverse as they may be, by situating participant observers in contradictory and complex globalized cultural networks… Berliner offers a lucid study of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of participants in the accelerated times of a rapidly changing world." -- Francisco Rivera * Anthropologica *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Loss of Culture and the Desire to Transmit It Onward Chapter 1: Transmission Impossible in West Africa Chapter 2: UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss Chapter 3: Toward the End of Societies? Chapter 4: The Plastic Anthropologist Conclusion: For a cultural and patrimonial diplomacy Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWe’re losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away. Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced.Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.Trade Review“Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.” -- Arjun Appadurai * author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition *"David Berliner stands at the crossroads, observing the natives, the philosophers, the heritage bureaucrats, the tourists, and other anthropologists as well, from all nationalities, when they come to look at – or even live – the past in the present. But what does he become himself? A cultural chameleon? When you have read Losing Culture, perhaps your anthropology will never be the same again." -- Ulf Hannerz * author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios *“By linking the chameleon figure of the anthropologist with the theme of nostalgia, Berliner demonstrates anthropologists’ important role in disabusing the general public of the illusion that “cultures” can be rebuilt in their original form. This subtle departure from conventional studies of heritage places a new and desirable emphasis on the ethical choices facing anthropologists when confronted with the politics of contested pasts. Of particular value is the unusual but well-grounded comparative perspective that Berliner draws from his findings in West Africa and Southeast Asia.” -- Michael Herzfeld * author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok *"What Berliner sets out to do in this concisely insightful little book is to 'refine our understanding of how cultural loss manifests today in different contexts' with a special view to 'the rhetorical forms that lead to this diagnosis.' This ambitious task of addressing such a tremendous, worldwide problematic without losing touch with ethnography is anything but simple....Impressive." * Anthropos *“Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.” -- Arjun Appadurai * author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition *"David Berliner stands at the crossroads, observing the natives, the philosophers, the heritage bureaucrats, the tourists, and other anthropologists as well, from all nationalities, when they come to look at – or even live – the past in the present. But what does he become himself? A cultural chameleon? When you have read Losing Culture, perhaps your anthropology will never be the same again." -- Ulf Hannerz * author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios *“By linking the chameleon figure of the anthropologist with the theme of nostalgia, Berliner demonstrates anthropologists’ important role in disabusing the general public of the illusion that “cultures” can be rebuilt in their original form. This subtle departure from conventional studies of heritage places a new and desirable emphasis on the ethical choices facing anthropologists when confronted with the politics of contested pasts. Of particular value is the unusual but well-grounded comparative perspective that Berliner draws from his findings in West Africa and Southeast Asia.” -- Michael Herzfeld * author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok *"What Berliner sets out to do in this concisely insightful little book is to 'refine our understanding of how cultural loss manifests today in different contexts' with a special view to 'the rhetorical forms that lead to this diagnosis.' This ambitious task of addressing such a tremendous, worldwide problematic without losing touch with ethnography is anything but simple....Impressive." * Anthropos *"Losing Culture speaks to us both through its fascinating ethnographic cases and the lucid eye it poses onto ourselves, the plastic and nostalgic anthropologists. Its insight can apply to numerous cultural contexts, as diverse as they may be, by situating participant observers in contradictory and complex globalized cultural networks… Berliner offers a lucid study of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of participants in the accelerated times of a rapidly changing world." -- Francisco Rivera * Anthropologica *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Loss of Culture and the Desire to Transmit It Onward Chapter 1: Transmission Impossible in West Africa Chapter 2: UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss Chapter 3: Toward the End of Societies? Chapter 4: The Plastic Anthropologist Conclusion: For a cultural and patrimonial diplomacy Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index

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