Conceptualizing society

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[edited by] George Spindler

"This volume focuses on and exemplifies how ethnography - a research tool devoted to looking at human interaction as a cultural process rather than individual psychology - can shed light on educational processes framed by the complex, internationalized societies in which we live today. Part I offers theoretical chapters about ethnography and examples of innovative ethnography from particular perspectives. In Part II, the emphasis is on the application of ethnographic approaches to educational settings."--Jacket.

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Fatima Naqvi

This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century?in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Reň Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayṟcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded.

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Giorgio Manfré

Le idee raccolta in questo saggio si muovono nell'ambito di un'area interdisciplinare di indagine, verso cui vengono fatti convergere orientamenti conoscitivi e di ricerca fra loro alquanto eterogenei: costruttivismo e teoria della società, storia sociale, antropologia, psicoanalisi. E la sfida consiste in questo: tornare, attraverso una ricognizione su alcune opere di tre protagonisti della cultura moderna - Niklas Luhmann, Karl Marx e Sigmund Freud - a interrogare le radici stesse della modernità, e ciò chiedendosi, andando in controtendenza, se la crisi della modernità (qui intesa come crisi del rapporto individuo-società) è un fatto irreversibile oppure, al contrario, superabile.

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Dharm Singh ... [et al

Proceedings of All India Seminar on ICT for Rural Development: Access and Applications (ICTRD-2009), held at Institution of Engineers, Udaipur Local Centre.