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The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.
This analysis of campaign messaging and image-making is “a fascinating read and an illuminating look into the complex realm of political rhetoric” (Publishers Weekly). It’s a common complaint that a presidential candidate’s style matters more than substance and that the issues have been eclipsed by mass-media-fueled obsession with a candidate’s every slip, gaffe, and peccadillo. This book explores political communication in American presidential politics, focusing on what insiders call “message.” Message, Michael Lempert and Michael Silverstein argue, is not simply an individual’s positions on the issues but the craft used to fashion the creature the public sees as the candid...
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global,micro and macroevents to name a few. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scalar distinctions help actors and analysts alike make s...
A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction. In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some ...
"Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a therapeutic practice that employs a "conversational style" to effect change in clients or, more precisely, to encourage ambivalent clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat problem drinkers, MI has spread dramatically across a wide variety of professional fields including psychology, dentistry, education, nutrition, and corrections. In Working the Difference, E. Summerson Carr uses MI to explore how cultural forms, particularly forms of expertise, are constituted and circulated. The result is a compelling analysis of the profoundly American preoccupations at the heart of this practice--from democratic ideals of autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethical commitments and the core principles of American Pragmatism."--
Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice. Taking Émile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkh...
Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.
This book reflects on the myriad ways in which forms of exclusion and inclusion play out in narratives of migration, focusing on the case of Northern Italian narratives in today’s superdiverse Italy. Drawing on over a decade of the author’s fieldwork in the region, the volume examines the emergence of racialized language in conversations about migrants or migration issues in light of increasing recent migratory flows in the European Union, couched in the broader context of changing socio-political forces such as anti-immigration policies and nativist discourse in political communication in Italy. The book highlights case studies from everyday discourse in both villages and cities and at ...
Written by a wide range of highly regarded scholars and exciting junior ones, this book critiques and operationalizes contemporary thinking in the rapidly expanding field of linguistic anthropology. It does so using case studies of actual everyday language practices from an extremely understudied yet incredibly important area of the Global South: Indonesia. In doing so, it provides a rich set of studies that model and explain complex linguistic anthropological analysis in engaging and easily understood ways. As a book that is both accessible for undergraduate students and enlightening for graduate students through to senior professors, this book problematizes a wide range of assumptions. The diversity of settings and methodologies used in this book surpass many recent collections that attempt to address issues surrounding contemporary processes of diversification given rapid ongoing social change. In focusing on the trees, so to speak, the collection as a whole also enables readers to see the forest. This approach provides a rare insight into relationships between everyday language practices, social change, and the ever-present and ongoing processes of nation-building.