Социология
Различные книги в жанре СоциологияNature's Perfect Food
For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as «nature's perfect food,» as «indispensable» and «the most complete food.» These milk «boosters» have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate? Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, «Milk: The Deadly Poison,» and «Don't Drink Your Milk» have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them. In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.
Legalizing Prostitution
While sex work has long been controversial, it has become even more contested over the past decade as laws, policies, and enforcement practices have become more repressive in many nations, partly as a result of the ascendancy of interest groups committed to the total abolition of the sex industry. At the same time, however, several other nations have recently decriminalized prostitution. Legalizing Prostitution maps out the current terrain. Using America as a backdrop, Weitzer draws on extensive field research in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to illustrate alternatives to American-style criminalization of sex workers. These cases are then used to develop a roster of “best practices” that can serve as a model for other nations considering legalization. Legalizing Prostitution provides a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of political dynamics, policy outcomes, and red-light landscapes in nations where prostitution has been legalized and regulated by the government, presenting a rich and novel portrait of the multifaceted world of legal sex for sale.
Getting Wasted
Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go out drinking together. In Getting Wasted, Thomas Vander Ven provides a unique answer to the perennial question of why college students drink. Vander Ven argues that college students rely on “drunk support:” contrary to most accounts of alcohol abuse as being a solitary problem of one person drinking to excess, the college drinking scene is very much a social one where students support one another through nights of drinking games, rituals and rites of passage. Drawing on over 400 student accounts, 25 intensive interviews, and one hundred hours of field research, Vander Ven sheds light on the extremely social nature of college drinking. Giving voice to college drinkers as they speak in graphic and revealing terms about the complexity of the drinking scene, Vander Ven argues that college students continue to drink heavily, even after experiencing repeated bad experiences, because of the social support that they give to one another and due to the creative ways in which they reframe and recast violent, embarrassing, and regretful drunken behaviors. Provocatively, Getting Wasted shows that college itself, closed and seemingly secure, encourages these drinking patterns and is one more example of the dark side of campus life.
Fast Cars, Cool Rides
Bass booms from custom speakers, pick-up trucks boast lowered suspensions, chrome rims reflect stoplights, and bare arms dangle from open windows. Welcome to Santa Clara Street in San Jose, California, where every weekend kids come to cruise late at night, riding their cars slow and low. On the surrounding, less-traveled streets you can also find young men racing customized cars to see who has the «go,» not just the «show.» And, in the daylight hours, in a nearby suburb, you might find a brand new SUV parked in the driveway, a parents' Sweet 16 present.In Fast Cars, Cool Rides Amy Best provides a fascinating account of kids and car culture. Encompassing everything from learning to drive to getting one’s license, from cruising to customizing, from racing to buying one's first car, Best shows that never before have cars played such an important role in the lives of America's youth as they do today. Drawing on interviews with over 100 young men and women, aged 15-24, and five years of research—cruising hot spots, sitting in on auto shop class, attending car shows—Best explores the fast-paced world of kids and their cars. She reveals a world where cars have incredible significance for kids today, as a means of transportation and thereby freedom to come and go, as status symbols and as a means to express their identities. But while having a fast car or a cool ride can carry tremendous importance for these kids, Best shows that the price, especially when it can cost $30,000, can be steep as working-class kids work jobs to make car payments and as college kids forgo moving out of Mom and Dad's house because they can't pay for rent, car payments, and car insurance. Fast Cars, Cool Rides offers a rare and rich portrait of the complex and surprising roles cars can play in the lives of young Americans. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a cool ride.
A Watched Pot
Time, it has been said, is the enemy. In an era of harried lives, time seems increasingly precious as hours and days telescope and our lives often seem to be flitting past. And yet, at other times, the minutes drag on, each tick of the clock excruciatingly drawn out. What explains this seeming paradox? Based upon a full decade's empirical research, Michael G. Flaherty's new book offers remarkable insights on this most universal human experience. Flaherty surveys hundreds of individuals of all ages in an attempt to ascertain how such phenomena as suffering, violence, danger, boredom, exhilaration, concentration, shock, and novelty influence our perception of time. Their stories make for intriguing reading, by turns familiar and exotic, mundane and dramatic, horrific and funny. A qualitative and quantitative tour de force, A Watched Pot presents what may well be the first fully integrated theory of time and will be of interest to scientists, humanists, social scientists and the educated public alike. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.
Transnational Women's Activism
Following landmark trade agreements between Japan and the United States in the 1850s, Tokyo began importing a unique American commodity: Western social activism. As Japan sought to secure its future as a commercial power and American women pursued avenues of political expression, Protestant church-women and, later, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) traveled to the Asian coast to promote Christian teachings and women's social activism. Rumi Yasutake reveals in Transnational Women's Activism that the resulting American, Japanese, and first generation Japanese-American women's movements came to affect more than alcohol or even religion. While the WCTU employed the language of evangelism and Victorian family values, its members were tactfully expedient in accommodating their traditional causes to suffrage and other feminist goals, in addition to the various political currents flowing through Japan and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploring such issues as gender struggles in the American Protestant church and bourgeois Japanese women's attitudes towards the «pleasure class» of geishas and prostitutes, Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese protégés. The diverse machinations of WCTU activism offer a compelling lesson in the complexities of cultural imperialism.
The Study of Children in Religions
Research in religious studies has traditionally focused on adult subjects since working with children presents significantly more challenges to the researcher, such as getting the research protocol passed by the Internal Review Board, obtaining permission from parents and schools, and figuring out how to make sense of young worldviews. The Study of Children in Religions provides scholars with a comprehensive source to assist them in addressing many of the issues that often stop researchers from pursuing projects involving children. This handbook offers a broad range of methodological and conceptual models for scholars interested in conducting work with children. It not only illuminates some of the legal and ethical issues involved in working with youth and provides guidance in getting IRB approval, but also presents specific case studies from scholars who have engaged in child-centered research and here offer the fruits of their experience. Cases include those that use interviews and drawings to work with children in contemporary settings, as well as more historically focused endeavors to use material culture—such as Sunday school projects or religious board games—to study children’s religious lives in past eras. The Study of Children in Religions offers concrete help to those who wish to conduct research on children and religion but are unsure of how to get started or how to frame their research.Research in religious studies has traditionally focused on adult subjects since working with children presents significantly more challenges to the researcher, such as getting the research protocol passed by the Internal Review Board, obtaining permission from parents and schools, and figuring out how to make sense of young worldviews. The Study of Children in Religions provides scholars with a comprehensive source to assist them in addressing many of the issues that often stop researchers from pursuing projects involving children. This handbook offers a broad range of methodological and conceptual models for scholars interested in conducting work with children. It not only illuminates some of the legal and ethical issues involved in working with youth and provides guidance in getting IRB approval, but also presents specific case studies from scholars who have engaged in child-centered research and here offer the fruits of their experience. Cases include those that use interviews and drawings to work with children in contemporary settings, as well as more historically focused endeavors to use material culture—such as Sunday school projects or religious board games—to study children’s religious lives in past eras. The Study of Children in Religions offers concrete help to those who wish to conduct research on children and religion but are unsure of how to get started or how to frame their research.
Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts
Since World War II Americans’ attitudes towards shyness have changed. The women’s movement and the sexual revolution raised questions about communication, self-expression, intimacy, and personality, leading to new concerns about shyness. At the same time, the growth of psychotherapy and the mental health industry brought shyness to the attention of professionals who began to regard it as an illness in need of a cure. But what is shyness? How is it related to gender, race, and class identities? And what does its stigmatization say about our culture? In Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts , Patricia McDaniel tells the story of shyness. Using popular self-help books and magazine articles she shows how prevailing attitudes toward shyness frequently work to disempower women. She draws on evidence as diverse as 1950s views of shyness as a womanly virtue to contemporary views of shyness as a barrier to intimacy to highlight how cultural standards governing shyness reproduce and maintain power differences between and among women and men.
Our Monica, Ourselves
Alongside the O.J. Simpson trial, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90s. Alternatively transfixed and repelled by this sexual scandal, confusion still reigns over its meanings and implications. How are we to make sense of a tale that is often wild and bizarre, yet replete with serious political and cultural implications? Our Monica, Ourselves provides a forum for thinking through the cultural, political, and public policy issues raised by the investigation, publicity, and Congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the affair. It pulls this spectacle out of the framework provided by the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what constitutes a newsworthy event. Drawing from a broad range of scholars, Our Monica, Ourselves considers Monica Lewinsky's Jewishness, Linda Tripp's face, the President's penis, the role of shame in public discourse, and what it's like to have sex as the president, as well as specific legal and historical issues at stake in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Thoughtful but accessible, immediate yet far reaching, Our Monica, Ourselves will change the way we think about the Clinton affair, while helping us reimagine culture and politics writ large. Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Eric O. Clarke, Ann Cvetkovich, Simone Weil Davis, Lisa Duggan, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Janet R. Jakobsen, James R. Kincaid, Laura Kipnis, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Joe Lockard, Catharine Lumby, Toby Miller, Dana D. Nelson, Anna Marie Smith, Ellen Willis, and Eli Zaretsky.
Money at Work
Financial advisors, poker players, hedge fund traders, fund-raisers, sports agents, credit counselors and commissioned salespeople all deal with one central concern in their jobs: money. In Money at Work, Kevin Delaney explores how we think about money and, particularly, how our jobs influence that thinking. By spotlighting people for whom money is the focus of their work, Delaney illuminates how the daily practices experienced in different jobs create distinct ways of thinking and talking about money and how occupations and their work cultures carry important symbolic, material, and practical messages about money.Delaney takes us deep inside the cultures of these ‘moneyed’ workers, using both interviews and first-hand observations of many of these occupations. From hedge fund trading rooms in New York, to poker players at work in Las Vegas casinos, to a “Christian money retreat” in a monastery in rural Pennsylvania, Delaney illustrates how the underlying economic conditions of various occupations and careers produce what he calls “money cultures,” or ways of understanding the meaning of money, which in turn shape one’s economic outlook. Key to this is how some professionals, such as debt counselors, think very differently than say poker players in their regard to money—Delaney argues that it is the structure of these professions themselves that in turn influences monetary attitudes. Fundamentally, Money at Work shows that what people do for a living has a profound effect on how people conceive of money both at work and in their home lives, making clear the connections between the economic and the social, shedding light on some of our most basic values. At a time when conversations about money are increasingly important, Delaney shows that we do not merely learn our attitudes toward money in childhood, but we also learn important money lessons from the work that we do.