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"Culture diffusion."
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Adventure diffusion : from meandering molecules to the spreading of plants, humans, and ideas
This easy-to read book looks at the many ways in which diffusion bears on processes that involve dispersion, starting from the Brownian motion of molecules, covering the invasion of exotic plants, migration of populations, epidemics, and extending to the spreading of languages and ideas. Recently, there has been a growing interest in understanding migrations, diffusion and spreading outside the \"hard\" natural sciences of physics and chemistry, for example the spreading of plants introduced as a result of globalization. Another fascinating story is that of human migration in the distant past, i.e. the immigration of our ancestors who brought agriculture from the Near East, or the fast spread of the Palaeo-Indians into the Americas after the end of the Ice Age. Likewise, the spread of languages in the past, and even more so the current spread and retreat of languages will be described here in terms of diffusion. By understanding these principles, there is hope that some of the less common languages that are threatened by globalization can be saved. Another important implication discussed by the author concerns the outbreak of epidemics; these may be mitigated if we understand their spreading mechanism. Last but not least the spreading of ideas and innovations, a process which changes the world sometimes faster than we wish, can also be usefully described in this picture.
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Transmissions and Translations in Medieval Literary and Material Culture
This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.
eBook
Memes in Digital Culture
In December 2012, the exuberant video \"Gangnam Style\" became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video--\"Mitt Romney Style,\" \"NASA Johnson Style,\" \"Egyptian Style,\" and many others. \"Gangnam Style\" (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes -- including \"Leave Britney Alone,\" the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's \"We Are the 99 Percent.\" She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.
eBook
Cultures in motion
\"In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary.\" Publisher's website.
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Transfer of Buddhism Across Central Asian Networks (7th to 13th Centuries)
Transfer of Buddhism across Central Asian Networks (7th to 13th Centuries), ed. Carmen Meinert, offers a transregional and transcultural vision for religious transfer processes in Central Asian history. It explores Buddhist localisations in the Tarim basin, the Transhimalaya and Tibet.; Readership: All interested in an interdisciplinary approach towards understanding religious transfer processes across a Central Asian Buddhist network, best known as the Silk Road(s).
eBook
Three ancient colonies : Caribbean themes and variations
Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. 50 years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him.
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Bound together : how traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors shaped globalization
Since humans migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with each other. In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and reshaped the world. For Chanda, globalization is a process of ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began thousands of years ago and continues to this day with increasing speed and ease. In the end, globalization-from the lone adventurer carving out a new trade route to the expanding ambitions of great empires-is the product of myriad aspirations and apprehensions that define just about every aspect of our lives: what we eat, wear, ride, or possess is the product of thousands of years of human endeavor and suffering across the globe. Chanda reviews and illustrates the economic and technological forces at play in globalization today and concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of how we can and should embrace an inevitably global world.
eBook
The world made meme : public conversations and participatory media
Internet memes - digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection - are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In 'The World Made Meme', Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts.
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Coexistence and Cultural Transmission in East Asia
This is the first volume to introduce the data, theory and methodology of contemporary archaeological work in Japan and other parts of East Asia archaeology in English to western audiences. It also introduces a new theoretical concept to archaeologists interested in the relationship between ancient cultures—coexistence. Archaeologists traditionally examine the boundaries between different cultural groups in terms conflict and dominance rather than long-term, harmonious adaptive responses. Chapters in this book cover evidence from burials, faunal and botanical analysis, as well as traditional trade goods. It is of interest to archaeologists conducting research in East Asia or studying intercultural interaction anywhere around the globe.
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