Fragments of the Present

Fragments of the Present PDF

Author: Philip Taylor

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780824824174

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This book explores in anthropological terms the cultural identity of the people of the Vietnamese South since the Vietnam War ended. The author describes southern Vietnam's postwar history, the impact of political and economic changes, policies towards music and popular culture, shifts in state ideology, and the contrasting fortunes of urban and rural communities. Philip Taylor spent a considerable time in a Mekong delta village undertaking ethnographic research into rural cultural identity. He describes the villagers' view of history and their sense of present decline, contrasting this with state and urban interpretations of the southern region's "modernity" over the same period.

The Search for Modern China

The Search for Modern China PDF

Author: Jonathan D. Spence

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 1054

ISBN-13: 9780393307801

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In this widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency. The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.

China's Search for Modernity

China's Search for Modernity PDF

Author: He Ping

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-06-18

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0230288561

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Twenty years after a return from fundamentalism to economic reality, China has become the world's tenth largest economy and an increasingly important global power. Despite the rise of fundamentalism and post-modernism, the pursuit of modernity was an ongoing historical movement in late twentieth century China. He Ping focuses on China's quest for and experience of modernity. Implicitly comparative, the author discusses broad aspects of both Chinese and western civilizations, including their scientific traditions and socio-economic structures, with reference to modernization. He seeks to enhance our understanding of the cultural changes behind China's phenomenal rise and provides a fresh case study for the global cultural discourse.

Shanghai Reflections

Shanghai Reflections PDF

Author: Mario Gandelsonas

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781568983264

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Student projects sponsored by Princeton, Hong Kong, and Tongji universities and reviewed by critics.

Revolt Against Modernity

Revolt Against Modernity PDF

Author: Ted V. McAllister

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 1996-01-22

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0700608737

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Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are two of the most provocative and durable political philosophers of this century. Ted McAllister's superbly written study provides the first comprehensive comparison of their thought and its profound influence on contemporary American conservatism. Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss's Natural Right and History and Voegelin's Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset. Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity' amorality-personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche-and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. While both disdained the reductionist "conservative" label, conservatives nevertheless appropriated their philosophy, in part because it restored theology and classical tradition to the moral core of civil society. For both men, modernity's debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity's insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself. McAllister's thorough reevaluation of Strauss and Voegelin expands our understanding of their thought and restores balance to a literature that has been dominated by political theorists and disciples of Strauss and Voegelin. Neither reverential nor dismissive, he reveals the social, historical, political, and philosophical foundations of their work and effectively decodes their frequently opaque or esoteric thinking. Well written and persuasively argued, McAllister's study will appeal to anyone engaged in the volatile debates over liberalism's demise and conservatism's rise.

Seeking Modernity in China’s Name

Seeking Modernity in China’s Name PDF

Author: Weili Ye

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002-04-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0804780412

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The students who came to the United States in the early twentieth century to become modern Chinese by studying at American universities played pivotal roles in Chinese intellectual, economic, and diplomatic life upon their return to China. These former students exemplified key aspects of Chinese "modernity," introducing new social customs, new kinds of interpersonal relationships, new ways of associating in groups, and a new way of life in general. Although there have been books about a few especially well-known persons among them, this is the first book in either English or Chinese to study the group as a whole. The collapse of the traditional examination system and the need to earn a living outside the bureaucracy meant that although this was not the first generation of Chinese to break with traditional ways of thinking, these students were the first generation of Chinese to live differently. Based on student publications, memoirs, and other writings found in this country and in China, the author describes their multifaceted experience of life in a foreign, modern environment, involving student associations, professional activities, racial discrimination, new forms of recreation and cultural expression, and, in the case of women students, the unique challenges they faced as females in two changing societies.

Expectations of Modernity

Expectations of Modernity PDF

Author: James Ferguson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-10-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 052092228X

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Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.

In Search of Modernity

In Search of Modernity PDF

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Publisher: Africa World Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 9781592211128

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Having grappled with the question of modernisation for a long time, Africa now faces an issue that, with an increasingly knowledge-based global economy, has only become more urgent in this new millennium. This volume examines Africa's scientific and technological literacy, production and consumption, focusing in detail on the constraints and challenges, opportunities and developments, and the strategies required to promote the advancement of IT and biotechnology in Africa, to help advance our understanding of science and technology developments in Africa.

Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm

Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm PDF

Author: Kai-wing Chow

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2008-04-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 146163301X

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When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered themselves representatives of such an iconoclastic movement. Having thus explicitly or implicitly 'decentered' the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and (certainly no less importantly) without the May Fourth camp.

Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

Modernity and the Unmaking of Men PDF

Author: Violeta Schubert

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-08-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1789208637

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Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender. It argues that as a critical consequence of demographic rupture, changing values and societal shifts, aging bachelorhood illuminates and challenges conceptualizations of performativity and social presence.