ISI Library

Other title information: A Semiotic Perspective

Annotation: This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism. It reveals how semiotics provides fresh and valuable insights into multiculturalism: in contrast to the binary logic of dualistic philosophy, semiotic logic does not understand the value of truth in rigid terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ only. The value of truth resides in meaning, which is a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon, rooted, nevertheless, in factuality. Drawing on recent developments in biosemiotics, the book presents a theoretical approach to multiculturalism, regarding the lives of people living in multicultural environments. Rather than analyzing political or economic phenomena, it offers a semiotic analysis of multiculturalism and discusses its educational implications. It also invites readers to regard learning as a phenomenon of ecological sign growth and to understand multiculturalism along the same lines. As such, it brings together the life and social sciences and the humanities in a unified perspective, in an approach fitting postmodernism.

Identifier: 9783030178826

Status: Available

Other title information: Cultural History of Meat: 1900-The Present

Annotation: This book explores our changing relationship with meat as food. Half storytelling and half historic work, it analyzes the way in which humans have dealt with the idea of eating animals in the Western world, from 1900 to the present.

Identifier: 9783319720852

Status: Available

Notes: edited with foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman. Printed version in two notebooks

Annotation: Julia Kristeva is a true polymath, an intellectual of astonishingly wide range whose erudition and insight have been brought to bear on psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique. Passions of Our Time showcases recent essays of Kristeva’s that demonstrate the scope of her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present. The collection begins with а vivid recollection of celebrating, as a child in Bulgaria, Alphabet Day, the holiday honoring the Cyrillic letters, which proceeds outward into a contemplation of the writer as translator. Kristeva considers literature with Barthes, freedom through Rousseau, Teresa of Avila and mystical experience, Simone de Beauvoir’s dream life, and Antigone and the psychic life of women. A group of essays drawing on her psychoanalytic work delve into Freud, Lacan, maternal eroticism, and the continued importance of psychoanalysis today. In a series of striking investigations, she thinks through disability and normativity, monotheism and secularization, the need to believe and the desire to know. Calling for the courage to renew and reinvent humanism, she outlines the principles of a stance founded on the importance of respecting human life. Finally, Kristeva discusses French culture and diversity, rethinking universalism and interrogating the potential for Islam and psychoanalysis to meet, and pays homage to Beauvoir by rephrasing her dictum into the provocative “One is born woman, but I become one.”

Identifier: 9780231171441

Status: Available

Other title information: The Contribution of Fethullah Gülen

Annotation: This book explores the development of the influential worldwide Hizmet movement inspired by the Turkish scholar Fethullah Gülen, known for his moderate Islamic emphasis on peaceful relations among diverse people. It provides a detailed study of Gülen’s account of the virtues and argues that they provide the key to understanding this thinker and the movement he inspired, from its initial establishment of hospitality houses through the growth of worldwide schools, hospitals, media outlets, charitable associations and dialogue centers. The book analyzes the distinctive virtues that shaped the Hizmet movement’s ethos as well as continue to sustain its expansive energy, from the core virtues of tolerance, hospitality, compassion and charity to a host of related virtues, including wisdom, humility, mildness, patience, mercy, integrity and hope. It also examines the Islamic and Sufi roots of Gülen’s understanding of the virtues as well as presents a comparative study of Gülen’s account of the virtues in dialogue with prominent thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition and the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.

Identifier: 9783319078328

Status: Available

Other title information: A Second Revolution Might Save America From Herself

Annotation: In the most dynamic and prosperous country on Earth-the USA-stupidity overshadows the intellectual and technical accomplishments that other nations envy. If Americans continue to delude themselves about their country, the USA will end up like the USSR: imploding from within. This work analyzes the systemic aspects of America's current condition: across-the-board-dumbing down through media and in education; growing dependence on and demand for entitlements; corruption in the private and political domains; chronic cronyism; the opportunistic engineering of reality. Consequently, individual and collective stupidity not only leads to crises, it renders the USA impotent in dealing with the challenges of the fast dynamics characteristic of our time of post-industrial capitalism oriented towards consumption. The causes for this state of stupidity are examined: the people's willful ignorance of the nation's true history and development; an economic system that does not foster a sense of citizenry; cultivated mediocrity in education and entertainment; corruption of justice; rampant consumerism; a state of prosperity that lulls the people into complacency. Taking the rewards of change for granted, Americans no longer understand what change entails. Gazing into the rear-view mirror of history in search of answers, they forget that the USA was founded in a world more similar to the 1st century than the 21st. Americans will have to start fighting their own stupidity instead of further exhausting the country's (and the world's) resources in wars and entitlement measures. America has to "reset" herself, within an authentic democratic process, on a foundation appropriate to the integrated world of the global information age.

Identifier: 9781490525655

Status: Available

Other title information: International Perspectives on the Risorgimento

Annotation: A collection of studies on Italian Risorgimento performed by international scholars. It offers a view "form another angle," within a context - the 150th anniversary of Italian unification - that has generally been arranged "by Italians for Italians," lacking that particular resourcefulness and often impartiality that international scholarship was able to contribute to the Risorgimento's historiography.

Identifier: 9789525576108

Status: Available

Notes: Originally published in 1962

Annotation: Discusses the significance of totemism among primitive peoples and its interpretation by anthropologists and philosophies

Identifier: 0297995235

Status: Available

Other title information: Coffee, Comforters and the Secret Meaning of Everyday Life

Annotation: In a series of short vignettes illustrated by the author, Berger performs a semiotic analysis of typical morning rituals.

Identifier: 0595167500

Status: Available

Other title information: An introduction and handbook

Annotation: Analyzing Cultures is a comprehensive introduction to the field of cultural semiotics. It is designed for classroom use for courses in a number of disciplines, including introductory courses in semiotics, courses in cultural studies, anthropology courses on culture, social science courses on human nature.

Identifier: 0253335671

Status: Available

Other title information: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler decision

Annotation: Bad Attitude/s pierces through the thick veil of hypocrisy surrounding the pornography debates in a lively and well-documented examination of the clashes between bodies and state power, detailing the vicissitudes of the pornography issue in a specifically national context.

Identifier: 0802076432

Status: Available

Parallel title: Parallel title: An Archetype of Chinese Ethics and Academic Ideology

Other title information: A Hermeneutico-Semiotic Study

Annotation: Intercultural philosophy does not take its starting point from the comparison of different cultures from a neutral point of view, it instead arises through the confrontation with certain features of another culture which distance the philosopher from his or her own tradition, compelling it to be regarded in a new way. In dealing with the origins of Confucian ethics, You-Zheng Li does exactly this. His extensive training in Western Hermeneutics and semiotics enables him to reformulate the set of ethical customs, rituals, rules and strategies formulated 2500 years ago in ancient China. In contrast to Western ethics, which are thoroughly penetrated by the divine commands of the Judeo-Christian tradition and mainly characterized by the search for the practical good and one's own happiness begun in Greek and Roman philosophy, Chinese ethics originated and developed largely outside the domains of religion and philosophy. In attempting to elaborate on the specific nature of these ethics, the author navigates between Scylla and Charybdis. He seeks to avoid the one extreme of merely repeating from the inside what has already been said, with its effective reduction of ethical theory to certain reflexes of practical life. Just as well, however, he tries to avoid the other extreme of measuring ancient traditions by external standards and therewith exchanging old prejudices for new ones. He much rather tries to elucidate the foundation of Chinese ethics by using a certain language and a certain method which, as only one language and one method among others, does not aver to exhaust the inherent sense and the efficacious demand of what has been or is still being lived out and practised.

Identifier: 3631313853

Status: Available

Parallel title: Parallel title: An Archetype of Chinese Ethics and Academic Ideology

Other title information: A Hermeneutico-Semiotic Study

Annotation: Intercultural philosophy does not take its starting point from the comparison of different cultures from a neutral point of view, it instead arises through the confrontation with certain features of another culture which distance the philosopher from his or her own tradition, compelling it to be regarded in a new way. In dealing with the origins of Confucian ethics, You-Zheng Li does exactly this. His extensive training in Western Hermeneutics and semiotics enables him to reformulate the set of ethical customs, rituals, rules and strategies formulated 2500 years ago in ancient China. In contrast to Western ethics, which are thoroughly penetrated by the divine commands of the Judeo-Christian tradition and mainly characterized by the search for the practical good and one's own happiness begun in Greek and Roman philosophy, Chinese ethics originated and developed largely outside the domains of religion and philosophy. In attempting to elaborate on the specific nature of these ethics, the author navigates between Scylla and Charybdis. He seeks to avoid the one extreme of merely repeating from the inside what has already been said, with its effective reduction of ethical theory to certain reflexes of practical life. Just as well, however, he tries to avoid the other extreme of measuring ancient traditions by external standards and therewith exchanging old prejudices for new ones. He much rather tries to elucidate the foundation of Chinese ethics by using a certain language and a certain method which, as only one language and one method among others, does not aver to exhaust the inherent sense and the efficacious demand of what has been or is still being lived out and practised.

Identifier: 3631313861

Status: Available

Other title information: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor

Annotation: Jamake Highwater,the best-selling author of Myth and Sexuality and the Primal Mind, continues his voyage into the realms of myth, art and contemporary culture exploring the way society views its art and artists and the way our art and artists gaze back at us. Organized around the twenty-two cards of the Tarot Major Arcana, this book presents a dazzling range of controversial subjects, including the puritan division of art into hight and low and the direct influence of "popular" forms in contemporary artists, the image of the homosexual as outlow, iconography as destiny, imagination as political powe, the reinvetion of the past and thriumph of the dream life.

Identifier: 0802133460

Status: Available

Annotation: A classic study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, and the progress through magic and religion to scientific thought, The Golden Bough has a unique status in modern anthropology and literature.

Identifier: 1853263109

Status: Available

Other title information: Semiotics of Nationalism through Heroic Biography

Annotation: The main focus of this project, when it was undertaken in 1987, was on name as sign and hero as icon. Since the completion of the work in 1988, dramatic changes have occurred in the world, particularly in Eastern Europe. Through them, one may observe the unpredictable power of signs and symbols and their profound impact on the collective psyche. Masses of people are involved in the destruction of the old icons and the formation of new ones. Here our semiotic lenses are focused on the role of symbolic, on the power of the name-sign, and on the display of its semiotic constant.

Identifier: 3110130122

Status: Available

Other title information: Semiotic Essays on Japanese culture

Annotation: Like Roland Barthe's well-known book, 'The Empire of Signs', from which its title is taken, the present volume contains essays dealing with certain aspects of Japanese culture. Also like those contained in Barthes' book, the essays in the present volume are generally characterized by a mildly semioitc orientation, which means that while the authors may or may not be explicitly conscious of semiotic formulation, they are all (at least in the editor's view) interested in, and concerned with signifying (or meaning-generating) activity.

Identifier: 9027232784

Status: Available

Annotation: This book surveys theoretical controversies in anthropology that revolve around reconciling the objective description of culture with the influence of inquirer interests and conceptions. It relates them to the discussions by followers of W.V. Quine who see the problems of anthropological inquiry as indicative of conceptual problems in the basic assumptions operative in the discipline, and in the study of language in general. Feleppa offers a revised view of the nature and function of translation in anthropology that gives a plausible account of the problems that traditional semantics introduces into anthropology, while avoiding the severe methodological import Quine envisions.

Identifier: 0887066739

Status: Available

Annotation: Handbook for teaching religion studies in highschools

Status: Available