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From a renowned American anthropologist comes a proud celebration of human capacities. For too long, people have taken their own ways of life for granted, ignoring the vast, international cultural community that srrounds them. Humankind must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, to the discovery of a lost self a sense of perspective. By holding up a mirror, Hall permits us to see the awesome grip of unconscious culture. With concrete examples ranging from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the mating habits of the bowerbird of New Guinea, Hall shows us ourselves. Beyond Culture is a book about self-discovery; it is a voyage we all must embark on if mankind is to survive. "Fascinat...
The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.
Sonka is the story of an old woman, lonely, forgotten, and shunned by her community, until one day a theater director's car breaks down near her house, and an unexpected guest supplies her with the chance to tell her story. And so unfolds her tale of love between an SS officer and a local girl against the backdrop of the Second World War. Everyday chores are threaded with executions, stolen moments in between episodes of abuse, lies are thoughtlessly uttered only to change the worlds and lives of two families forever.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his "Diary" with one of literature's most memorable openings: "Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me." Gombrowicz's "Diary" grew to become a vast collection of essays, short notes, polemics, and confessions on myriad subjects ranging from political events to literature to the certainty of death. Not a traditional journal, "Diary" is instead the commentary of a brilliant and restless mind. Widely regarded as a masterpiece, this brilliant work compelled Gombrowicz's attention for a decade and a half until he penned his final entry in France, shortly before his death in 1969. Long out of print in English, "Diary" is now presented in a convenient single volume featuring a new preface by Rita Gombrowicz, the author's widow and literary executor. This edition also includes ten previously unpublished pages from the 1969 portion of the diary.
A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private--familial and religious--lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and social service. It analyzes the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agents of class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.
The Abolition of War explores the ideas that inform Krzysztof Wodiczko's project The World Institute for the Abolition of War and is a manifesto for the dismantling of what Wodiczko sees as the ubiquitous, unconscious, and ultimately perilous ?Culture of War”, which is embedded within and constantly reaffirmed by our monuments and our historical narratives. In this volume Wodiczko, winner of the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998, offers a detailed examination of his proposal for The World Institute for the Abolition of War, a projected ?Un-War Memorial” constructed as a structure encapsulating the existing Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Wodiczko is joined by anthropologist Douglas Fry to shed light on the silent but deeply rooted ideologies of war, which permeate our contemporary societies, fuelling current acts of aggression and threatening to erupt into further warfare. Fry's essay ?Abolition of War: An Agenda for Survival” contradicts the generally held assumption that war is an inevitable aspect of human life, and posits new models of global interdependency as the necessary step towards viable peace.
A study of national identity in Royal Prussia - the 'other Prussia', part of the Polish state from 1454 to 1793.
This is a single-volume history of Christianity in Poland, a subject at the core of religious history and European secular history alike. The book covers the development of Polish Christianity from the tenth century to the year 2000, placing it in the broader context of East-Central European political, social, religious and cultural history. Jewish-Christian relations, and the problematic religious history of the Jews in the region, play an important part in the story, and there are pervasive references to countries historically linked to Poland, such as Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine. Jerzy Kloczowski shows how the history of Poland, and Polish Christianity, are embedded in the complex systems of relations with other countries and religious denominations. A History of Polish Christianity should be read by anyone interested in the confrontation between Christianity and the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, and in the interplay between Eastern and Western Christianity.
A forty-year-old man, burying himself in work and avoiding close emotional bonds with people, pays a visit to his mother in the country and is forced to extend it upon discovering her illness. While there, he reevaluates past familial and romantic relationships and finally attempts to build new ones. Gestures is "a psychologically precise and moving autopsy of a 'man in the wake of ordeals.'"