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This volume approaches the issue of ambient sound through the ethnographic exploration of different cultural contexts including Italy, India, Egypt, France, Ethiopia, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and Japan. It examines social, religious, and aesthetic conceptions of sound environments, what types of action or agency are attributed to them, and what bodies of knowledge exist concerning them. Contributors shed new light on these sensory environments by focusing not only on their form and internal dynamics, but also on their wider social and cultural environment. The multimedia documents of this volume may be consulted at the address: milson.fr/routledge_media.
The Multi-Skilled Designer presents and analyzes different approaches to contemporary architectural design and interprets them through the theory of multiple intelligences. The book establishes a systematic framework that uses the lens of cognitive psychology and developments in psychometric and brain research to analyze the unique cognitive thought processes of architectural designers and compiles design projects that could serve as a pedagogical companion for the reader. The book is aimed at design practitioners and students interested in examining their own thinking styles as well as those involved in design cognition research.
This volume is intended as a critique of anthropology’s epistemological and ontological assumptions and a demonstration of the value added by an expanded set of parameters for the field. The book’s core argument is that whilst ethnographers have allowed their own perspectives to be positively influenced by the perspectives of their informants, until recently anthropology has done little in the way of adopting these other viewpoints as critical tools for analysis. The book is essential reading for scholars of the anthropology of religion as well as other philosophically-oriented social scientists and theologians.
This book provides an anthropological exploration of the ways in which crime is perceived and defined, focusing on notions of truth, intentionality, and evidence. The chapters contain rich ethnographic case studies drawn from work in the Middle East, Africa, India, Mexico and Europe. A variety of instances are discussed, from court proceedings, police reports and newspapers to moments of conflict resolution and reconciliation. Through analysis of this material, the authors reflect on how perception of an act as a crime can differ and how the definition of crime may not be shared by all societies. The approach takes into consideration local standards as well as social, legal and contextual constraints.
With the continued growth of PhD programs in architecture and the simultaneous broadening of approaches, InterVIEWS: Insights and Introspection on Doctoral Research in Architecture begins a timely survey into contemporary research at academic institutions internationally, in the context of the expanding landscape of architectural inquiry. The eighteen interviews with scholars who direct or contributed to doctoral research programs in areas of architecture history and theory, theory and criticism, design research, urban studies, cross-disciplinary research, and practice-based research expose a plurality of positions articulating a range of research tactics. Renowned scholars narrated the stor...
The city of Manado and province of North Sulawesi have built a public identity based on religious harmony, claiming to successfully model tolerance and inter-religious relations for the rest of Indonesia. Yet, in discourses and practices relevant to everyday interactions in schools and political debates in the public sphere, two primary contested frames for belonging emerge in tension with one another. On the one hand, “aspirational coexistence” recognizes a common goal of working toward religious harmony and inclusive belonging. On the other hand, “majoritarian coexistence,” in which the legitimacy of religious minorities is understood as guaranteed exclusively by the goodwill of th...
A particular culture is associated with a particular community, and thus has a social dimension. But how does culture operate and how is it to be defined? Is it to be taken as the behavioral repertoire of members of that community, as the products of their behavior, or as the shared mental content that produces the behavior? Is it to be viewed as a coherent whole or only a collection of disparate parts? Culture is shared, but how totally? How is culture learned and maintained over time, and how does it change? In Meaning and Significance in Human Engagement, Kronenfeld adopts a cognitive approach to culture to offer answers to these questions. Combining insights from cognitive psychology and linguistic anthropology with research on collective knowledge systems, he offers an understanding of culture as a phenomenon produced and shaped by a combination of conditions, constraints and logic. Engagingly written, it is essential reading for scholars and graduate students of cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology of culture, philosophy, and computational cognitive science.
Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal explores the historical, religious, cultural and economic contexts of Islam in Senegal through the narrative first-hand accounts of people’s everyday lives. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author over a period of seven years, the result is a critical look at Senegal’s religious diversity within Islamic beliefs and practices. Containing interviews from men and women in both rural and urban locations, this book is an important contribution to the literature on Islamic practices, providing a much-needed perspective from ordinary practitioners of the faith. It is essential reading for scholars of the anthropology of religion, Islamic studies, mysticism, African studies, and development studies.
What if sounds everywhere lavish divine generosity? Merging insights from Jean-Luc Marion with musical ingenuity from Pierre Boulez and John Cage’s 4’33”, Gerald C. Liu blends the phenomenological, theological, and musical to formulate a hypothesis that in all places, soundscapes instantiate divine giving without boundary. He aims to widen apprehension of holiness in the world, and privileges the ubiquity of sound as a limitless and easily accessible portal for discovering the inexhaustible magnitude of divine giving.
Distortion occurs between the intentions of actions and their outcomes. It can also occur between thoughts and actions; between words and how they are interpreted; between a statement of law and its enactment; between a vision and its artistic representation; and between a cultural tradition or habitus and its animation in contemporary contexts. Escaping the bounds of relationality, of structuration and of systemics, distortion is a form of complex connectedness that has seldom been addressed in the social sciences as a phenomenon in its own right. This volume argues for the key importance of distortion as a concept in the social sciences, and attempts to refine it as a concept. Each chapter...