ISI Library

Other title information: Living in the Here and Now

Annotation: This book examines “New Localism' – exploring how communities have turned towards more local concerns: my street, my town, my state, as an expression of dissatisfaction with globalization. It details the ideas that have created a political force that academics have often misunderstood and provides a template for further investigation with a strong focus on how to harness the motivations behind such changes for the benefit of individuals, communities and the more-than-human environment.

Identifier: 9783030215781

Status: Available

Other title information: A Cultural Semiotic Approach

Annotation: My dissertation focuses on the study of myths and their semiotic mechanisms that appear in contemporary mass culture texts. Although myths and mass culture as a whole have been widely discussed from the perspectives of various disciplines, there are no studies that deal with the systematization of mass culture mythology and the semiotic definition of mythic markers. The topic of this dissertation is interesting not only from a general theoretical, philosophical, anthropological and semiotic perspective, but also for practical reasons. I believe that I can convincingly show in my work that the study and identification of semiotic mechanisms of mass culture myths is applicable in the field of marketing semiotics and social communication. In my dissertation, I first compare mass culture mythology from a sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspective. This allows me to combine the two main epistemological approaches to myth research and treat myth as a holistic meta-concept on the one hand, and approach myth as a cultural text on the other. Based on the framework I have created, I will analyze various texts of mass culture in my work and focus on identifying the most common and enduring structural units of mass culture mythology. How do I define a smaller unit of myth? In defining it, I will rely on two structural principles of myth: the emic unit, which I denote by the concept of mythologeme, and the hybrid unit, which I denote by the concept of mytheme. In the course of the analysis, I will highlight the following mythologemes: Fate, Journey, Universality, Catastrophe, Golden Age and Mother Nature, and the mythemes: Transformation and Return. In addition to distinguishing the aforementioned mythologemes and mythemes, I will highlight their value and function in mythological discourse. Fate and Journey help to integrate the life of the individual into the whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature is associated with the existential need of a person to search for authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of the Universe, Catastrophe and Golden Age constitute the human time-spatial past-present-future triad. The latter are related to human questions about the origin of the world, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mythologeme of Transformation points to the idea of ​​miracle and the mythologeme of Return to the time-spatial axis of the human semiosphere, to orderliness. The last chapter of the work applies the theoretical framework developed in the dissertation to specific case studies. The first of them is dedicated to the analysis of the TV political marketing of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader, and there I show how archetypal mythological meanings were included in the structure of the political narrative. The second case study focuses on the development of a specific brand, which I did in collaboration with the well-known Russian pop artist Manizha, and where I apply the mythologeme of Mother Nature.Further research into mythologemes and mythemes could open up new semiotic markers and thereby expand the field of application of semiotics, as well as help to better understand the mythological basis of culture. This dissertation presents a semiotic study of myth revealing in contemporary mass cultural texts and exploration of its inner semiotic machinery. Although a variety of studies have been devoted to myth, and quite a few studies have tackled mass culture issues, less attention has been given to the systematic articulation of mass cultural mythology and its markers, which reveal its inner semiotic machinery. Those issues are relevant not only from a general theoretical philosophical, anthropological, and semiotic point of view, but also have concrete applicability in marketing semiotics and social communications. Firstly, I discuss mass culture under an emancipatory umbrella approach and explore mass culture mythology from the sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspectives. Secondly, I combine two main epistemological attitudes of myth and integrate a holistic object of research – which appears as a meta-concept – from one side, and a text of culture – mass cultural narratives around brands conveying their main values ​​– from the other side . Thirdly, I discuss the smallest units of mass culture mythology and explore its most widespread structural units. I classify the smallest units of myth by their structural principles: the emic units (mythologemes) and the hybrid ones (mythemes). There are the mythologemes of Fate, Course, Universe, Catastrophe, Golden Age, and Mother Nature, and the mythemes of Transformation and Backtracking considered in detail. The main existential values ​​of those smallest mythological units are discussed. The mythologemes of Fate and Course help to understand individual life as a part of an integral whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature relates to the existential search for inner authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of Universe, Catastrophe, and Golden Age constitute an integral triadic idea about time and space (past-present-future) and reflect the human existential quest for an explanation of the world origin, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mytheme of Transformation represents the idea of ​​mythological miracle, and the mytheme of Backtracking appeals to the idea of ​​a mastered time and space. Fourthly, I extend the process to find more minimal units of myth in cultural texts of different genres. The first case is dedicated to close analysis of the television communication of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader. This case demonstrates the combination of archaic meanings and contemporary forms of myth within a narrative, producing new powerful connotations. The second case applies the Mother Nature mythologeme as a branding tool for building a coherent image of a musical artist. The further exploration of the mythologemes and mythemes and articulation of other semiotic markers of myth systematically enriches a profound understanding of human mind and culture.

Identifier: 9789949032150

Status: Available

Other title information: Batesonian legacy continued

Annotation: This new editorial series in the humanities, established under the title Batesoniana Polonica, is open to all international contributors asa potential platfrom for respective exhanges of ideas and a tool for the further deepending of analyses that may be developed in various sectors of scientific explorations where the influence of Gregory Bateson is felt for years and years and much before his death in 1980. The following volume no 1, is a very special kind of collective exertion for editors, and, hopefully, it will be well received so by its prospective readers. Its project is connected with preparations for a truly international initiative, namely the Second Bateson Symposium in Poland, to be located at the Silesian Botanic Garden in Mikolow, June 1-4 2017, which should constitute a preliminary stage to a world congress on the ecology of mind to be held at Katowice, Poland, in July of 2018.

Identifier: 9788365621252

Status: Available

Other title information: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education IV

Annotation: This book examines the concept of meaning and our general understanding of reality in a legal and philosophical context. Starting from the premise that meaning is a matter of linguistic and other forms of articulation, it considers the inherent philosophical consequences. Part I presents Klages’, Derrida’s, Von Hofmannsthal’s and Wittgenstein’s explorations of silence as a source of articulation and meaning. Debates about 20th century psychologism gave the attitude concept a pivotal role; it illustrates the importance of the discovery that a word is globally qualified as ‘the basic unit of language’. This is mirrored in the fact that we understand reality as a matter of particles and thus interpret the real as a component of an all-embracing ‘particle story’. Each chapter of the book focuses on an aspect of legal semiotics related to the chapter’s theme: for instance on the meaning of a Judge’s ‘Saying for Law’, on law students training in varying attitudes or on the ties between law and language. Part II of the book illustrates our general understanding of reality as a matter of particles and partitioning, and examines texts that prove that particle thinking is basic for our meaning concept. It shows that physics, quantum theory, holism, and modern brain research focusing on human linguistic capabilities, confirm their ties to the particle story. In contrast, the book concludes that partitions and particles are neither a fact in the history of the cosmos nor a determinant of knowledge and the sciences, and that meaning is a process: a constellation rather than a fixation. This is manifest once one understands meaning as the result of continuously changing attitudes, which create our narratives on cosmos and creation. The book proposes a new key for meaning: a linguistic occurrence anchored in dimensions of human narrativity.

Identifier: 9783319281742

Status: Available

Other title information: The Case of Red Army Faction In West Germany During 1970-1977

Notes: MA thesis

Annotation: -

Status: Available

Other title information: požiūriai ir patirtys

Annotation: This is a handbook of human rights in European Union, the experiences and opinions

Identifier: 9786090211427

Status: Available

Annotation: This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems across the globe today? How can we account for the significant change in moral values in one place in less than 100 years’ time? Using examples from classical civilizations, the book demonstrates how increasing diversity compromises a moral system’s ability to account for and integrate larger populations into a single social unit. This environmental stress is not relieved until a broader, more abstract moral system is adopted by a social system. This new system provides a sense of belonging and purpose for more people, motivating them to engage in prosocial (or moral) acts and refrain from socially disruptive selfish acts. The current human rights paradigm is the world’s first universal, indigenous moral system. Because moral systems can be expected to continue to evolve, this book points to current boundaries of the human rights paradigm and where the next major moral revolution might emerge. ​

Identifier: 9789401795500

Status: Available

Other title information: Conceptualizing Stories and Statistics

Annotation: This briefs on human suffering adds to human understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, this chapters show how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering. ​

Identifier: 9789400776685

Status: Available

Notes: Articles included: Charles Sanders Peirce, A Mastermind of (Legal) Arguments (2012), On relationships between the logic of law, legal positivism and semiotics of law (2011), The Semiotic Model of Legal Reasoning (2012), The Case of Lauris Kaplinski: A Guide to a Semiotic Reading of Incitement of Hatred in Modern Criminal Justice (2013), The Splendors and MIseries of Constitutional Reasoning in Times of Global Crisis: A Critical look from the Realist Perspectives of Semiotics (2013)

Annotation: The present doctoral dissertation is an exercise in exposition, comparison, criticism and construction, and this is the result of a project conceived ten years ago. We have taken different traditions of legal reasoning, and by juxtaposing them have sought to clarify and assess semiotic presuppositions, in order to outline a theoretical framework of legal semiotics that would help to lay the foundations for semiotic theory of legal argumentation. These semiotic presuppositions have been the object of our study at the University of Tartu since our bachelor's thesis (defended in 2001) and master's thesis (defended in 2006). Our interest in legal semiotics was motivated by a very strong sense of dissatisfaction with the traditional methods and paradigms of contemporary jurisprudence, especially with those ones of legal argumentation. Traditional jurisprudence committed to a model of legal unity, does not for the most part seeks to describe how the views of legal actors interact with the views of other legal actors/participants of legal discourse in real situations of legal communication. Thus, it was the consideration of legal communication as a semiotic activity that caused us to doubt that law could be conceived in terms of traditional legal concepts. Legal semiotics can be regarded as a major advance because it debunks the prevailing assumptions about the nature of legal reasoning and replaces them with what seems a far superior explanation. The main scientific objectives of this dissertation can be briefly formulated as follows: 1) to develop a conceptual framework for practical handling of complex problems of legal argumentation as they occur in the stages of legal communication; 2) to assess issues of compatibility/conflict between existing methods of legal reasoning and our semiotic model of legal reasoning; 3) to bridge the compatible aspects of different theories/models of legal argumentation to establish a generalizable model of legal argumentation.

Identifier: 9789949325016

Status: Available

Other title information: Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society

Annotation: This book presents Ulrich Beck, one of the world’s leading sociologists and social thinkers, as a Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society. His world risk society theory has been confirmed by recent disasters – events that have shaken modern society to the core, signaling the end of an era in which comprehensive insurance could keep us safe. Due to its own successes, modern society now faces failure: while in the past experiments were conducted in a lab, now the whole world is a test bed. Whether nuclear plants, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology – if any of these experiments went wrong, the consequences would have a global impact and would be irreversible. Beck recommends ignoring the mathematical morality of expert opinions, which seek to identify the level of a given risk by calculating the probability of its occurrence. Instead, man’s fear of collapse should offer an opportunity for international cooperation and a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences.

Identifier: 9783319049892

Status: Available

Other title information: Reunification Pathways and Outcomes for Foster Children

Annotation: Reunification is a primary goal of foster care systems and the most common permanency planning decision. It is defined as the return of children placed in protective care to the home of their birth family and used to describe the act of restoring a child in out-of-home care back to the biological family. Yet reunification decision-making and the process of reintegrating children into birth families remains under researched. This Brief takes a look at family reunification knowledge and research in Australia where there is evidence that most children placed in protective care are eventually reunited with their birth parents. It explores how a knowledge of reunification decision making and outcomes can contribute to strengthening practice and informing policy formulation and program planning in Child Welfare.​

Identifier: 9789400750913

Status: Available

Other title information: Intercontextual Dynamics Between Family and School

Notes: editor of the series Jaan Valsiner

Annotation: Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology. Emphasizing social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book try to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practicies regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems.

Identifier: 9781623963941

Status: Available

Other title information: Essays on the Art-Science of Tarot

Notes: a printed version

Annotation: Semetsky’s new book offers a bracing account of Tarot semiotics in view of its deep significance for educational experience. Analyzing the symbolic language of Tarot images that express the intimations of the unconscious, she invites readers to explore novel ways of learning about the nature of ourselves and the world we are situated in. Combining thorough research with an accessible style, this groundbreaking book is essential reading for present and future generations of practitioners, academics and students across disciplines. Pia Brînzeu, Professor of English Literature and Vice-Rector of the Universityof Timis¸oara, Romania; author of Corridors of Mirrors. A sequel to the author’s Re-Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic and Semiotics Education Experience, Semetsky’s new book presents the Tarot sign-system as a school of ethical living. Bringing the philosophies of Peirce, Deleuze, Dewey, Whitehead and Gebser in a dialogue with the cutting-edge science of coordination dynamics, she grounds the art of Tarot in the logic of signs acting across nature, culture and human mind. Building on Noddings’ “maternal factor”, Semetsky demonstrates how the lessons embodied in Tarot symbolism recover the feminine value of relations and contribute to Self~Other integration. Such is the message of Tarot images. The Image is the Message. Igor Klyukanov, Professor of Communication, Eastern Washington University, USA; editor, Russian Journal of Communication; author of A Communication Universe: Manifestations of Meaning, Stagings of Significance. Semetsky’s amalgamation of the techniques of visual communication with the emerging field of edusemiotics is an absolute masterpiece in transdisciplinarity. By forging diverse strands of inquiry into an overall model of how images enhance learning, Semetsky’s new book provokes us to take a fresh look at iconic information and is a required reading for everyone who is engaged with the artand science of visual semiotics at the intersection of nature and culture. Marcel Danesi, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada; editor-in-chief, Semiotica; author of The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice. Finally. An in-depth look at Tarot from within the field of semiotics, a perspective that had been inexplicably overlooked until now. As a language of exile from language, Tarot cards are silent words that became images. Here is a book that turns our thirst for symbols into a learning tool. The sign sings in Inna Semetsky’s work.

Identifier: 9789462090538

Status: Available

Other title information: Perspectives on intersubjectivity

Annotation: The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed social cognition through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional theory of mind approach, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective, conative, intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared, intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication, imitation, gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and evolution, and language and linguistic theory.

Identifier: 9789027239068

Status: Available

Annotation: This brief book is dedicated to analyze the relations between quality of life and construction of citizenship of young people in Argentina, considering two specific social scenarios: the community and the university. In the case of community it is important to note that it not imply uniformity, as community means the inclusion of diversity and the achievement of sharing within it, and in the case of university it will be necessary to recognize that as an educational institution the university has expanded his traditional role of production of knowledge, to be an institution of social reference and social support for students. To do this the author will show some of the results of a decade of research in quality of life and young people, using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Identifier: 9789400729957

Status: Available

Annotation: This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 – 2011 at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as “sign”, “symbol” or “legal language,” demonstrate how a lawyer’s professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can “say the law,” or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.

Identifier: 9789400713406

Status: Available

Annotation: This book examines the progress to date in the many facets – conceptual, epistemological and methodological - of the field of legal semiotics. It reflects the fulfilment of the promise of legal semiotics when used to explore the law, its processes and interpretation. This study in Legal Semiotics brings together the theory, structure and practise of legal semiotics in an accessible style. The book introduces the concepts of legal semiotics and offers an insight in contemporary and future directions which the semiotics of law is going to take. A theoretical and practical oriented synthesis of the historical, contemporary and most recent ideas pertaining to legal semiotics, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and social sciences , as well as those who are interested in the interdisciplinary dynamics of law and semiotics.

Identifier: 9789048193424

Status: Available

Other title information: Adorno or The Persistence of the Dialectic

Annotation: A lively and lucid introduction to one of the greatest Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century

Identifier: 9781844675753

Status: Available

Other title information: a radically different worldview is possible

Annotation: Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.

Identifier: 9780973670974

Status: Available

Annotation: Exploring specific points of relevance to contemporary semiotics found in Jakobson’s work is the aim of this volume, and each of the 13 essays approaches the intersection differently.

Identifier: 085199606X

Status: Available

Other title information: a socio-semiotic study of Soviet censorship practices in Estonian radio in the 1980s

Annotation: This study analyses the production of Soviet journalistic text. It focuses on editorial-censorship transformation in texts made during the final stage of textual preparation in journalistic institutions of Soviet Estonia at the beginning of the 1980s.

Identifier: 9512920719

Status: Available

Annotation: Representing a new trend in European Anthropology, this book examines how people adjust to their different experiences of the new Europe. The role of culture, religion, and ideology, as well as insiders' social and professional practices, are all shown to shed light on the cultural logic sustaining the institutions and policies of the European Union

Identifier: 1859733247

Status: Available

Other title information: Publicidad, marcas y semiocapitalismo

Annotation: deSignis once again places the problem of branding and advertising on the stratospheric stage within the framework of global strategies in post-industrial societies. Many authors have deeply appreciated the importance of objects and value systems that come into play in consumer society. As has been repeatedly pointed out, the commodity has a semiotic component since the exchange of goods has numerous concomitances with the exchange of messages, an idea that was present in Marx, also in Saussire and explicitly raised in the classic texts of Baudrillard and Rossi-Landi. (translated with google translate)

Identifier: 9789876011396

Status: Available

Annotation: This book addresses the old but controversial question about the extent of uniformity in world communism. Traditional themes like the general party line and the role of prominent personalities are examined from post Cold War perspectives. From political and organisational questions the approach is extended to ideological, cultural and social aspects.

Identifier: 9517100795

Status: Available

Annotation: This comprehensive introduction to social cognition is the first succesfully to integrate the distinct traditions that have grown up on different sides of the Atlantic over the past twenty years. It guides the reader through the bewildering and sometimes contradictory array of theories, methodologies and applications, demonstrating how fruitfully the contrasting styles can cross-fertilize.

Identifier: 080398989X

Status: Available

Other title information: Signification Ablaze

Annotation: This book relates Baudrillard's work to contemporary social r4248y. The author traces the connections between Baudrillard's work and Marx and Marxism; Lefebvre and structuralist method; the works of Saussure, Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, Mauss, Peirce, McLuhan and the Prague School. The result is an authoritative and stimulating account of Baudrillard and modern social theory.

Identifier: 0415112567

Status: Available

Other title information: studies in semiotic anthropology

Annotation: How semiotic theory can illuminate highly complex social and cultural practices..

Identifier: 0253327571

Status: Available

Annotation: The general topic of this book, miscarried justice, is suggested by the title's allusion to the sightlessness of th proverbial representation of justice. Viewpoints from several academic disciplines, e.g. philosophy, sociology, linguistics, criminal justice, literary criticisms, and religious studies, are brought together with theories of law. This collection is not only interdisciplinary, but cross-cultural as well. The common language is 'legal semiotics', in both a Peircean and non_peircean idiolect. This collection is a rich cross-referential research tool for investigators of law and semiotics in all its aspects. -cover

Identifier: 0820422614

Status: Available

Other title information: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects

Notes: This book is based on the proceedings of an international conference which took place at the University of Toronto in 1990.

Annotation: The term "socialness" is a neologism that is used in this volume to call attention to the integration of objects in the social fabric of everyday life. Specialists in material culture studies have understood for some time, that societies consist of both people and artifacts. It is not only with people and animals that we interact but also with objects. The chapters in the first part of the volume deal with artefacts such as furniture, mementoes, and knickknacks, which can be manipulated as social "others" – entities with which one can socialize or make a part in socialisation processes such as establishing a bond, conveying a message, etc. The second section of articles concerns artefacts whose dimensions take such proportions that humans become dwarfed with respect to them, such as tourists travelling to visit them or shoppers being herded through their artificial geography as if flowing within an oversized organism. In the concluding section, the artefacts examined are by contrast so adjusted to the proportion of the human body, so close to it that they become an indissociable part of the social persona sticking to the skin, expressing better than any other means of the socialness - fashion.

Identifier: 3110141337

Status: Available

Annotation: By identifying the swastika as a bounary or liminal image, Malcolm Quinn allies visual analysis to issues of material culture and history.

Identifier: 041510095X

Status: Available

Other title information: A Macrosociological Perspective on Law

Annotation: Based on sophisticated demographic analysis, Legal Concept, Social Concept argues that legal doctrine on social issues is shaped by the needs and values of society rather than by individuals and interest groups, and that it evolves in response to social change but has little impact on that change.

Identifier: 0202304795

Status: Available

Annotation: A detailed overview of different concepts in social psychology

Identifier: 0534103987

Status: Available

Annotation: The attention of this work can be attributed to a particular system of ideology that must be understood as the result of a larger project, meant to study the neo-realist Portuguese novel of the forties and fifties. This study can also, at the same time, be understood as an examination of a larger question, namely that of articulation among literary systems (especially periods and literary genres) and ideological systems. It is by keeping in mind the terms in which such articulation is possible that the recourse to semiotic theory as a foundation of this study is justified. Understood as code, ideology will be treated here as an autonomous system of signs that exists along with the literary polisystem.

Identifier: 3110118297

Status: Available

Annotation: The first versions of some of the articles in this book were originally presented at the Workshop of Semiotics of the Colloquium on Language and Politics, University of Helsinki, December 12-15, 1988, but most of the articles were begun only after the workshop. The articles are intended to be representative of the current multiplicity of perspectives in the field of language and politics in general and of the boundaries of semiotic studies on language and politics in particular. Here, both "semiotics" and "politics" are used in their broadest sense.

Identifier: 3110135337

Status: Available

Other title information: Reflections on Today's Europe

Annotation: Prompted by the unification of Europe in 1992 and by recent events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida begins this compelling essay on contemporary world politics with the issue of European identity. What, he asks, is Europe? How has Europe traditionally been defined and how is the current world situation changing that definition? Might the prospects of a New Europe demand not only a new definition of European identity but also a new way of thinking identity itself?

Identifier: 0253316936

Status: Available

Other title information: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction

Notes: Based on a conference held Dec. 1987 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India.

Annotation: This book is a collection of original articles which endeavours to expand the scope of the theoretical views and empirical research Erving Goffman contributed to the social sciences. Most chapters take a critical stand toward his ideas while still recognizing his fundamental contribution to the field. Hence, the title Beyond Goffman. The book is divided into two parts. The first concentrates upon theory and explores Goffman's intellectual heritage (symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, the notion of social situation, the relation between micro and macro levels of analysis) and also examines the way his work relates to contemporary theoretical movements (semiotics, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and feminism). The second part of the book probes the insights found in his diverse empirical studies and expands the domain of their applications.

Identifier: 3110122081

Status: Available

Annotation: In this major work, informed by materials from several disciplines and theoretical orientations, the author develops a distinctive new account of the theory of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern societies.In the two centuries since is first appeared in France, the concept of ideology has undergone many transformations. It has been twisted, reformulated, recast, and finally filtered back into the everyday language of social and political life. Although there is much that is misleading and erroneous in the traditions of ideology, the author shows that it still defines a terrain of analysis that remains central to contemporary social sciences and continues to be the site of lively theoretical debate.The key to his analysis is what he terms the "mediazation" of the culture—the general process by which the transmission of symbolic forms becomes increasingly reliant on the technical and institutional apparatuses of the media industries. Building on the work of Geertz and others, the author asserts that symbolic forms are embedded in such structured social contexts as power relations, forms of conflict, and inequalities in the distribution of resources, and that any discussion of mass communication must embrace its political as well as epistemological content.

Identifier: 0745600816

Status: Available

Other title information: The Image, the Conflict, and the Law

Annotation: "In this book I try to show a continuity of thought, centering on the ideterminancy of law: on conflicts, contradiction, and paradox represented in and by law. I assume that this continuous growth of modern semiotics orginates with Peirce, branches into Legal Realism, and branches further into Legal Semiotics on the one hand and Critical Legal Theory on the other."

Identifier: 0899256414

Status: Available

Other title information: After Marx and Freud

Notes: This volume contains selection from Jean-Joseph Groux, Freud, Marx: Economie et symbolique (1973) and Les iciniclastes (1978)

Annotation: Goux combines the marxist notion of materialism and Freud's psychoanalysis to provide an analysis of the socio-economic problems.

Identifier: 0801496128

Status: Available

Notes: Originally published as Systeme de la mode (1983)

Annotation: In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine—the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion—Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."

Identifier: 0520071778

Status: Available

Annotation: These essays are concerned with the philosophical "category of person", viewed from anthropological and semiotic perspectives. In one sense the essays continue the Annee Sociologique tradition and the work of Marcel Mauss (1985 [1938]), whose classic study charted a comparative approach to the cultural construction of the self-concept. And in this same sense they continue also the work of Irving Hallowell (1955a,b) and his students (see Fogelson 1982), who have probed empirically the problem of how different cultures differentially encode understandings of what it means to be a self, with relative boundedness with respect to other-selves and with respect to the world of non-selves.

Identifier: 0899255604

Status: Available

Annotation: Semiotics and Legal Theory is an exercise in exposition, comparison, criticism, and construction. Jackson takes two very different intellectual traditions - structuralist semiotics as represented by A.J. Greimas and modern (mainly positivist) legal theory as represented by Hart, MacCormick, Dworkin, and Kelsen and by juxtaposing them seeks to clarify and assess their respective semiotic presuppositions, in order to lay some foundations for a semiotically sensitive theory of law. This book is designed for both jurists and semioticians. To facilitate access across the disciplinary divide, Jackson provides an abstract at the head of each chapter, which serves as both a summary and a conclusion to each section.

Identifier: 0952893819

Status: Available

Other title information: hegemony and diversity in international theory

Annotation: The purpose of this book is to delineate the main strands of contemporary theoretical work in the field of international relations and to speculate about the posibilities of reintegrating the field and bringing some order to it.

Identifier: 0044450001

Status: Available

Annotation: The eighteen essays collected in this volume have been selected and ordered to give what Levi-Strauss terms "a bird's-eye view of the problems of modern ethnology." As representative examples, these essays introduce readers to the methods of structural anthropology while affording a glimpse into the mind of one of the foremost anthropologists of our time.

Identifier: 9782266139311

Status: Available

Annotation: In the social and political conflicts that take place in any society, control of the weak by the strong is justified by the rhetoric appropriate to the prevailing ideology. The 20th century’s credo is Mental Health; and in its name those who deviate from accepted social norms are often victimized and dehumanized. The author of these fourteen essays is a psychoanalyst and teacher. Here, Dr. Thomas Szasz shows how, by encouraging us to wage war on the false front of mental illness, psychiatry too often serves as a convenient way of avoiding confrontations with moral conflicts and societal problems. And, he warns us, if we persist in defining the vicissitudes of life as mental illnesses, and psychiatric interventions as medical treatments, we court the hazards of political tyranny disguised as psychiatric therapy.

Identifier: 0140218262

Status: Available

Notes: Vol. 1

Annotation: This book is one of the results of the team work done in the Centre for the Computerised and Semantic Analysis of Myth at the University of British Columbia. Our activity is threefold: (1) investigation, development, and test of theoretical and analytic models (2) elaboration of computer programs for the semantic analysis of myth; and (3) actual analyses of Northwest Pacific Indian and of Melanesian myths. Our search for operational models and testable hypotheses led us to the recent publications of some prominent Soviet colleagues. We found these contributions valuable enough to deserve translation. A subgroup – T. Popoff, S. Reid, G. Quijano, M. Layton, W. Jilek Aall and M. Calcowski – studied articles published in German, French, or Russian, translated them and tested the approaches. We are happy to make the results available to our fellow anthropologists, folklorists and semioticians in the hope that better and ever more rigorous approaches will continue to heighten the quality of the procedures in our related fields. - from the introduction

Status: Available