Levi-Strauss held that “the real, the symbolic and the imaginary” are three separate orders. Maurice Godelier demonstrates the contrary: the real is not separate from the symbolic and the imaginary. Godelier’s book goes to the strategic heart of the social sciences, for to examine the nature and role of the imaginary and the symbolic is also to attempt to account for the basic components of all societies and ultimately of human existence. And th ...
The Qur'an, we are told, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of twenty-two years, between 610 and 632. Muslims believe that Muhammad was not literate, and so he could not himself have produced the Qur'an. He memorized it, and a few of his followers memorized some parts of it or wrote them down. Now, even though 23% of the global population are Muslims, there is still a huge amount of ignorance on the nature and history o ...
A masterwork of the anthropology of kinship by the heir to Levi-Strauss. With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship , the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the acc ...
Kierkegaard developed a distinctive type of sociology in the 1840s–a theological sociology. Looking at society through the lens of analysis categories such as worship, sin, and faith, Kierkegaard developed a profoundly insightful way of understanding how, for example, the modern mass media works. He gets right inside the urban world of Golden Age Denmark, and its religion, and analyses «the present age» of consumption, comfort, competition, dist ...
The field of anthropology provides rich insights into the world of people and cultures. But it also presents challenges for Christians in the areas of cultural relativism, evolutionary theory, race and ethnicity, forms of the family, governments and war, life in the global economy, the morality of art, and religious pluralism. Most significantly it raises questions regarding the truth and how we can know it. This book provides the opportunity to ...
Ted Studebaker, a true peace hero, worked for peace through nonviolence. By doing so, he left a peacemaking legacy that continues to impact mankind through the ages. He was a volunteer agriculturalist in the highlands of Vietnam during the war. As he began his third year of work, he married the love of his life, Pakdy, a Chinese coworker. One week after their marriage, Vietnamese forces, opposing the Americans, entered their house where they kil ...
What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visu ...
