“Culture”and Culture | Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights
Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha examines here the complex meaning—and anthropological implications—of the word “culture” for indigenous peoples. Caneiro da Cunha explores the contradictions inherent in the interface between Western and traditional understandings of knowledge and intellectual property rights.
Distinguishing culture from “culture,” the latter being a reflexive awareness of one’s culture, Carneiro da Cunha then poses questions such as: What are the cognitive and pragmatic consequences when “culture” and culture coexist? She shows how the word “culture,” as used in the anthropological sense, is employed by indigenous people to distinguish the different interpretations and avoid contradictions. “Culture” and Culture offers a concise and innovative anthropological study of a crucial issue faced by indigenous peoples the world over.
Understanding Media | A Popular Philosophy
Why do we understand media the way we do? In their simplest forms, media are means of communication and instruments of human creativity. But on another level, media are powerful technologies that govern how we think and act in the world, and they can even take on a sinister character, with media conglomerates working in opposition to freedom of information. Dominic Boyer grapples with these complexities in Understanding Media, where he questions what our different ways of engaging media actually tell us about media, how we relate to information, and about ourselves.
Understanding Media explores, in a serious yet entertaining way, our common habits of thinking about the presence and significance of media in our lives. Offering analysis of the philosophical and social foundations of contemporary media theory as well as everyday strategies of knowing media, it addresses the advantages and limitations of different ways of understanding media. Finally, Boyer reflects on how we can know media better than we do.
New Consensus for Old | Cultural Studies from Left to Right
Thomas Frank has been sending wake-up calls to just about everyone within reach over the past decade, in venues from The Village Voice to Harper’s. His takes on labor politics, advertising, the virtues of the Midwest, and how un-cool you really are have won him a wide audience, and in this piece, Frank gives us a reading of cultural studies—viewed by some as an important new perspective in the academy, but by others as an unwieldy theoretical fad.