A complete guide to the whole range of traditional handmade textiles from all corners of the globe. The history of the world can be read in textiles: the rise of civilizations and the fall of empires are woven into their warp and weft along with the great stories of conquest, religion, and trade. The legacy of textile design, form, and pattern that has resulted from this global endowment can be seen here in all its spectacular richness.
This book explores educational and cultural experiences of "part-time unveilers" during their degree programs in public institutions in Turkey. The term "part-time unveiler" is coined to refer to undergraduate female students who cover their hair in their private lives, but who remove the headscarf while at a Turkish university as a result of the higher education headscarf ban policy. The book is based on a qualitative study that involved one-on-one interviews with thirty participants. The book highlights how part-time unveilers understand and negotiate the policy, the challenges and opportuni.
The papers that comprise this collection examine the so-called 'New Genetics'. They reveal a marked difference between the idealized world of improved human health and higher crop yields and the reality of companies like Monsanto introducing terminator seeds to prevent Third World countries saving seed grain.
In a book full of playful irony and striking insights, the controversial social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky draws on the history of fashion to demonstrate that the modern cult of appearance and superficiality actually serves the common good. Focusing on clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices, and political rhetoric as forms of "fashion," Lipovetsky bounds across two thousand years of history, showing how the evolution of fashion from an upper-class privilege into a vehicle of popular expression closely follows the rise of democratic values. Whereas Tocqueville feared that mass culture would create passive citizens incapable of political reasoning, Lipovetsky argues that today's mass-produced fashion offers many choices, which in turn enable consumers to become complex individuals within a consolidated, democratically educated society. Superficiality fosters tolerance among different groups within a society, claims Lipovetsky. To analyze fashion's role in smoothing over social conflict, he abandons class analysis in favor of an inquiry into the symbolism of everyday life and the creation of ephemeral desire. Lipovetsky examines the malaise experienced by people who, because they can fulfill so many desires, lose their sense of identity. His conclusions raise disturbing questions about personal joy and anguish in modern democracy.
The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor provides new insights into the full corpus of O'Connors fiction by exploring the intersection of O'Connor's artistic intentions and her religions preoccupations. Johansen looks first at how the stories create meaning in order to explain what they mean. Drawing on a variety of critical methods from narratology, anthropology, mythology, and reader response criticism, this study invites us to reconsider O'Connor's complex and enigmatic texts through their structures and actions. By focusing on the interplay of O'Connor's narrative structures, the human psyche, and the institutions and traditions of our collective history - particularly ancient myths and legends - Johansen illuminates the relation between narration, the self, and spiritual transformation. . O'Connor's narratives employ figures, gestures, and actions that work to deceive or disorient the reader. These havoc-wreaking forces in and among the stories most resemble the archetypal trickster. Johansen demonstrates that, through such tricksteresque activity, O'Connor's narratives push the reader to acknowledge the perverse, violent, and often disorderly aspects of human and divine behavior. The religious secret of O'Connor narratives - revealed in shimmering environments where narration and incarnation meet - is that both evil and good, the grotesque and the ideal, violence and peace, Satan and God, the human and the divine exist together in sacred unity. O'Connor's literary secret, through which she discloses the religious one, is to tell stories that return human beings to original mythic events. By recasting these events in contemporary fiction, with the assistance of the trickster, she performs a ritual function that is as necessary in an individualistic, technological age as it is in a communitarian, primitive one. With its emphasis on narrative structures, this investigation of O'Connor's writing holds significance for other literature studies because it enables readers to see what results from the common failure to understand the interdependence of narration and incarnation: a reduction of both literature and religion to barren systems insulating people from mythic truths rather than pulling them toward freedom. This book discloses the double function of language through which spiritual, intellectual, and even social transformations become possible. On the one hand, language erects a cultural canon to secure people against fear of freedom and the threat of chaos. On the other hand, when language playfully subverts the canon by returning it to its wild, forgotten origins for renewal, it challenges human beings to free themselves from dying religious metaphors and decaying social institutions.
World textiles by John Gillow and Bryan Sentance | Literally Just Books
