Comfort in Contemporary Culture

Comfort in Contemporary Culture PDF

Author: Dorothee Birke

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2020-10-31

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 3839449022

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Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.

COMFORT AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

COMFORT AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE PDF

Author: Andrew T. Hickey

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781003412984

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To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live the good life'. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence. Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort's enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort's current excesses demonstrative of this need. This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.

Comfort and Contemporary Culture

Comfort and Contemporary Culture PDF

Author: Andrew Hickey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-08

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1003801358

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To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live ‘the good life’. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence. Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort’s enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort’s current excesses demonstrative of this need. This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.

Comfort and Contemporary Culture

Comfort and Contemporary Culture PDF

Author: ANDREW. HICKEY

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2023-11-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781032536538

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Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort's enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now.

The Comfort of Things

The Comfort of Things PDF

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-24

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 074565536X

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What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends. If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It’s not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn’t dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn’t any of these things, then what is it? This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.

Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture

Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture PDF

Author: Mathew Guest

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1556358067

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Building on an ethnographic study of St. Michael-le-Belfrey Church in York, a recognized leader in charismatic renewal, mission, and evangelical innovation since the 1960s, this book explores how a persistent tradition of cultural engagement may generate growth, while at the same time bringing about significant changes in the structure and function of the evangelical congregation, and in the social construction of Christian identity itself. This is the first sociological study of St. Michael-le-Belfrey and the first to take seriously the question of how blazing the trail in terms of mission, worship, and fellowship influences the way in which congregations exist as Christian communities within the contemporary British context.

Approaches to Language and Culture

Approaches to Language and Culture PDF

Author: Svenja Völkel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-08-22

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 3110727153

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This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 9004453822

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Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.

Air Conditioning

Air Conditioning PDF

Author: Hsuan L. Hsu

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 1501377833

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or the sensory perception of temperature-is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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