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Multiculturalism—the belief that no culture is better or worse than any other; it is merely different—has come to dominate Western intellectual thought and to serve as a guide to domestic and foreign policy and development aid. But what if multiculturalism itself is flawed? What if some cultures are more prone to progress than others and more successful at creating the cultural capital that encourages democratic governance, social justice for all, and the elimination of poverty? In Jews, Confucians, and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism, Lawrence E. Harrison takes the politically incorrect stand that all cultures are not created equal. Analyzing the performance of 117 countries, grouped by predominant religion, Harrison argues for the superiority of those cultures that emphasize Jewish, Confucian, and Protestant values. A concluding chapter outlines ways in which cultural change may substantially transform societies within a generation.

The book Our Bodies, Ourselves is a feminist success story. Selling more than four million copies since its debut in 1970, it has challenged medical dogmas about women's bodies and sexuality, shaped health care policies, energized the reproductive rights movement, and stimulated medical research on women's health. The book has influenced how generations of U.S. women feel about their bodies and health. Our Bodies, Ourselves has also had a whole life outside the United States. It has been taken up, translated, and adapted by women across the globe, inspiring more than thirty foreign language editions. Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book's global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women's health. It was precisely the book's distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

Participatory democracy calls for the creation and proliferation of practices and institutions that enable individuals and groups to better determine the conditions in which they act and relate to others. Michael Menser's timely book We Decide! is arguably the most comprehensive treatment of participatory democracy. He explains the three waves of participatory democracy theory to show that this movement is attentive to the mechanics of contemporary political practices. Menser also outlines \"maximal democracy,\" his own view of participatory democracy that expands people's abilities to shape their own lives, reduce inequality, and promote solidarity. We Decide! draws on liberal, feminist, anarchist, and environmental justice philosophies as well as in-depth case studies of Spanish factory workers, Japanese housewives, and Brazilian socialists to show that participatory democracy actually works. Menser concludes his study by presenting a reconstructed version of the state that is shaped not by corporations but by inclusive communities driven by municipal workers, elected officials, and ordinary citizens working together. In this era of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, the participatory democracy proposed in We Decide! is more significant than ever.

Education policy and practice has historically been developed within the national/regional context. However, globalization has prompted educationalists to review their practice in the light of international influences. World issues such as global warming, conflict and the depletion of earth resources have also contributed to an increased awareness of the role that education can play in resolving these problems. The contributors focus on how education can bring about social change while connecting with theory at the level of cultural impact and policy implications. They investigate the potential for creating a transnational value system in education, focusing on some key human rights issues both at home and overseas. Truly international in scope, this text lays the groundwork for future research by exposing the commonalities and differences in approaches to knowledge production and its dissemination, drawing together contributions from a variety of cross cultural contexts.

Critically Modern makes a critical intervention in one of the great debates of the moment. It offers a variety of rich and fascinating empirical analyses of 'modern' phenomena from diverse societies, and contributes a powerful (and largely missing) voice to the growing literature on globalization and modernity outside anthropology. -- Charles Piot In these essays theory and ethnography are presented in ways that make them mutually enriching. The volume should appeal to scholars across the entire range of disciplines that deal with modernity and/or globalization. -- Edward LiPuma Are there multiple ways of being modern in the world today? How do people in various parts of the world become modern in their own distinct ways? Does the current focus on modernity in the social sciences resurrect a series of dichotomies (traditional and modern, the West and the Rest, developed and undeveloped) that social theorists have sought to move beyond in recent years? Or do inflections of modernity capture key features of ideology and influence in the contemporary world? Combining rich ethnographic analysis with incisive theoretical critiques, this timely volume is certain to make an important mark in anthropology and in all related fields in which modernity is a central problematic. Contributors: Donald L. Donham, Robert J. Foster, Jonathan Friedman, Ivan Karp, John D. Kelly, Bruce M. Knauft, Lisa B. Rofel, Debra A. Spitulnik, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Holly Wardlow.

This volume makes available a wide variety of cultural perspectives on education and on economic and social progress. Contributors focus on three main questions, the answers to which are vital for understanding the needs of both national policy and personal fulfilment in widely differing cultures. The contributors examine the concept of the self that underlies the idea of virtue which facilitates learning in Japan, the Confucian-style bonding between generations in Chinese society and the authority of the traditional teacher with the modern Quaranic School. They study phenomena as diverse as the effect of Christian and Islamic influence on the native cultures of Africa, and the life strategies of Japanese business women, spanning a geographical range from Morocco to Fiji. Part 1: Psychologies of the Person and Cultural Context for Personal Change 1. Psychotherapy and culture: healing in the Indian tradition Sudhir Kakar 2. Source and Influence: A Comparative Approach to African Religion and Culture Lamin Sanneh 3. Healing and Transformation: Perspectives on Development, Education and Community Richard Katz 4. Social Change and Personal Crisis: A View from an Indian Practice B. K. Ramanujam Part 2: Social Organization and Environments for Learning 5. The Making of a Fqih: the Transformation of Traditional Islamic Teachers in Modern Cultural Adaptation Jennifer E. Spratt and Daniel A. Wagner 6. Cultural Continuity in an Educational Institution: A Case Study of the Suzuki Method of Music Instruction Lois Taniuchi 7. Learning Elementary School Mathematics as a Culturally Conditioned Process Carlos E. Vasco Part 3: Cultural Perspectives on the Life Course 8. The Work of Mourning: Death in a Punjabi Family Veena Das 9. \"Heart\" and Self in Old Age: a Chinese Model\" Julia Shiang 10. Skills and Life Strategies of Japanese Business Women Sumiko Iwao 11. Selfhood in Context: Some Indian Solutions Prakash Desai and Alfred Collins

The book Our Bodies, Ourselves is a feminist success story. Selling more than four million copies since its debut in 1970, it has challenged medical dogmas about women’s bodies and sexuality, shaped health care policies, energized the reproductive rights movement, and stimulated medical research on women’s health. The book has influenced how generations of U.S. women feel about their bodies and health. Our Bodies, Ourselves has also had a whole life outside the United States. It has been taken up, translated, and adapted by women across the globe, inspiring more than thirty foreign language editions.Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women’s health. It was precisely the book’s distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people. Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world. “This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’” Hon. Fred Chaney AO.

Based upon the data collected by values surveys since 1981, this volume presents detailed analyses of cultural change and stability in a number of key countries around the globe. Democratization, individualization, modernization and secularization are some of the key concepts that the authors trace in their respective countries.