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Radio Fields
Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists.Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.
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Feel free : essays
It is the latest collection of essays from Zadie Smith, applying her razor-sharp intellect to the issues shaping the present. From the sinister side of social media, the closing of public libraries and impending environmental disasters, with the changing face of hip-hop; no topic is too fringe or too mainstream for this literary powerhouse as she takes on the tricky ambiguities of the modern world in sentences that pulsate with vision, energy, humour, and humanity -- Source other than Library of Congress.
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Tiny Publics
If all politics is local, then so is almost everything else, argues sociologist Gary Alan Fine. We organize our lives by relying on those closest to us—family members, friends, work colleagues, team mates, and other intimates—to create meaning and order. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging new book, Fine argues that the basic building blocks of society itself are forged within the boundaries of such small groups, the “tiny publics” necessary for a robust, functioning social order at all levels. Action, meaning, authority, inequality, organization, and institutions all have their roots in small groups. Yet for the past twenty-five years social scientists have tended to ignore the power of groups in favor of an emphasis on organizations, societies, or individuals. Based on over thirty-five years of Fine’s own ethnographic research across an array of small groups, Tiny Publics presents a compelling new theory of the pivotal role of small groups in organizing social life. No social system can thrive without flourishing small groups. They provide havens in an impersonal world, where faceless organizations become humanized. Taking examples from such diverse worlds as Little League baseball teams, restaurant workers, high school debate teams, weather forecasters, and political volunteers, Fine demonstrates how each group has its own unique culture, or idioculture—the system of knowledge, beliefs, behavior, and customs that define and hold a group together. With their dense network of relationships, groups serve as important sources of social and cultural capital for their members. The apparently innocuous jokes, rituals, and nicknames prevalent within Little League baseball teams help establish how teams function internally and how they compete with other teams. Small groups also provide a platform for their members to engage in broader social discourse and a supportive environment to begin effecting change in larger institutions. In his studies of mushroom collectors and high school debate teams, Fine demonstrates the importance of stories that group members tell each other about their successes and frustrations in fostering a strong sense of social cohesion. And Fine shows how the personal commitment political volunteers bring to their efforts is reinforced by the close-knit nature of their work, which in turn has the power to change larger groups and institutions. In this way, the actions and debates begun in small groups can eventually radiate outward to affect every level of society. Fine convincingly demonstrates how small groups provide fertile ground for the seeds of civic engagement. Outcomes often attributed to large-scale social forces originate within such small-scale domains. Employing rich insights from both sociology and social psychology, as well as vivid examples from a revealing array of real-world groups, Tiny Publics provides a compelling examination of the importance of small groups and of the rich vitality they bring to social life.
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Global Pentecostalism in the 21st Century
This state-of-the-field overview of Pentecostalism around the world focuses on cultural developments among second- and third-generation adherents in regions with large Pentecostal communities, considering the impact of these developments on political participation, citizenship, gender relations, and economic morality. Leading scholars from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and history present useful introductions to global issues and country-specific studies drawn from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the former USSR.
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Filipinos Represent
The \"Hip-hop Nation\" has been scouted, staked out, and settled by journalists and scholars alike. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. steps into this well-mapped territory with questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualized within the context of hip-hop. What happens, Tiongson asks, to notions of authenticity based on hip-hop's apparent blackness when Filipino youth make hip-hop their own? Tiongson draws on interviews with Bay Area-based Filipino American DJs to explore the authenticating strategies they rely on to carve out a niche within DJ culture. He shows how Filipino American youth involvement in DJing reconfigures the normal boundaries of Filipinoness predicated on nostalgia and cultural links with an idealized homeland. Filipinos Represent makes the case that while the engagement of Filipino youth with DJ culture speaks to the broadening racial scope of hip-hop-and of what it means to be Filipino-such involvement is also problematic in that it upholds deracialized accounts of hip-hop and renders difference benign. Looking at the ways in which Filipino DJs legitimize their place in an expressive form historically associated with African Americans, Tiongson examines what these complex forms of identification reveal about the contours and trajectory of contemporary U.S. racial formations and discourses in the post-civil rights era.
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The Turn to Transcendence
Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, Glenn W. Olsen sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. Though ancient and medieval western writers used various metaphors to express the idea that humans are aligned to the universe, they also believed that humans are oriented toward something \"\"above\"\" or transcending themselves. In recent centuries, however, the sense that humans, while living in nature and history, are oriented to transcendence has seemingly diminished. For many, God or the gods have all but disappeared from secular life. In this important and timely book, Olsen demonstrates with powerful insight that there are alternatives, and that religion can and should play a role in restoring a cultural openness to transcendence. He considers such questions as how we should understand God's presence in the universe, what form religion should take in the public square, what role liturgy plays in orienting us toward God in the universe, and what it means for religion to be in but not of the world. Olsen examines proposals for recovering an adequate sense of transcendence for the future. These range from an appreciation of certain forms of contemporary art and music specifically concerned with transcendence, through discussion of the forms of Christian life and worship most likely to prosper in and shape the modern world. He proposes a contemporary way of expressing the ideas that God is to be found in all things and that all is to be done to the Glory of God. Glenn W. Olsen is professor of medieval history at the University of Utah, with a Ph.D. in the history of the Middle Ages. He is a frequent contributor to journals such as Communio, Logos, and Faith and Reason, and is the author of the book Christian Marriage: A Historical Study.
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