Kulturstudier

A bite-size guide to help aspiring Dungeon Masters get up to speed on the Forgotten Realms, filled with advice and tips on where to go, what to see, and ways to avoid a horrible death in the dazzling and deadly world of Dungeons & Dragons.The Forgotten Realms are dangerous. Well, actually, that's an understatement. The Forgotten Realms are a death trap... But they're also very exciting, packed with amazing sights, captivating characters and fun locations to explore. And that's where this book comes in. From the point of view of Falgriss, a newly invented character from D&D's lore, this book will answer your burning questions in chapters covering deadly fauna, magical mishaps, urban perils, merciless monsters, and much more.Survive your early Dungeons & Dragons adventures with this informative and entertaining travel guide:An introduction for new Dungeons & Dragons players who want an overview of this stunning, magical world - or the perfect gift for a fan who wants to refresh their knowledge.Specially commissioned artwork that casts the Forgotten Realms in enticing detail, from deadly ogres' lairs to the finest tavern in Baldur's Gate.Topics include magical mishaps, weapons and gear, social survival, navigation, allies and companions, crime and punishment, location breakdowns, and how-to guides for fighting iconic monsters.With this handy and humorous guide at your fingertips, your adventures throughout the Forgotten Realms will end in fame and fortune - rather than in something else's stomach...(c) and (TM) 2024 Wizards of the Coast

"A true celebration of food in all its forms, The Food Book follows the human quest for sustenance through the stories of individual ingredients. It examines our millennia-long relationship with nearly 200 foods--from nuts and seeds to noodles and meat-- with the help of ... illustrations and tales from all over the world. Food is the cornerstone of daily life, culture, and even religion. Staples like bread, beans, and cereal crops are part of our culinary history and are used in many different ways around the world"--

This book summarizes work being undertaken within the School Activates Resources-stitching the lost heritage of the suburbs (ScAR) project, which addressed cultural heritage in a broad sense, as a system of values identified by the populations and in constant evolution. This tangible and intangible heritage fuels the promotion of intergenerational and intercultural dialogue and represents an opportunity for resilient social and territorial development. The book ponders the experience gained and the points of view of the different disciplines involved, examines issues such as children and youth participation in civil life or education in cultural heritage and landscape, and presents real-world experiences of heritage education in everyday landscape in difficult contexts and/or concerning poorly recognized and valued cultural heritage.

The chapters in the Women¿s Football in Latin America two volumes will look at the social and historical means of the embodied representation of gender differences that has been deeply embedded in the history of Latin American women and football. The authors identify and analyse how, in a range of ways, Latin American women have found in-between spaces, amid severe macho structures, to establish and play their football. As a result, the book will be of interest to researchers and students of sport sociology, football studies, gender studies, comparative sports studies, sports history, and Latin American sporting culture.The first volume of this edited collection brings together a variety of high-quality research investigating women¿s football in Brazil to an international, English readership. The complex issues surrounding women and sport have attracted the attention of Brazilian academics since the early 1980s, and this book seeks to update that scholarship to themodern day, with chapters on sports media, 2019 FIFA Women¿s World Cup, grassroots women¿s football, women¿s football fans. The book also indicates the forthcoming research and political challenges for gender equity in Brazilian football.

This book examines how Italian Americans have been represented in cinema, from the depiction of Italian migration in New Orleans in the 1890s (Vendetta) to the transition from first- to second-generation immigrants (Ask the Dust), and from the establishment of the stereotype of the Italian American gangster (Little Caesar, Scarface) to its re-definition (Mean Streets), along with a peculiar depiction of Italian American masculinity (Marty, Raging Bull). For many years, Italian migration studies in the United States have commented on the way cinema contributed to the creation of an identifiable Italian American identity. More recently, scholars have recognized the existence of a more nuanced plurality of Italian American identities that reflects social and historical elements, class backgrounds, and the relationship with other ethnic minorities. The second part of the book challenges the most common stereotypes of Italian Americanness: food (BigNight) and Mafia, deconstructing the criminal tropes that have contributed to shaping the perception of Italian-American mafiosi in The Funeral, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco, and the first two chapters of the Godfather trilogy. At the crossroads of the fields of Italian Culture, Italian American Culture, Film Studies, and Migration Studies, Italian Americans in Film is written not only for undergraduate and graduate students but also for scholars who teach courses on Italian American Cinema and Visual Culture.

This book traces changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and explores the cultural origins of ideas surrounding government transparency. The idea of keeping secrets, both on the part of individuals and on the part of governments, came to be viewed with more suspicion as the century progressed. By the eve of the French Revolution, writers voicing concerns about corruption saw secrecy as part and parcel of despotism, and this shift went hand in hand with the rise of the idea of transparency. The author argues that the emphasis placed on government transparency, especially the mania for transparency that dominated the French Revolution, resulted from the surprising connections and confluence of changing attitudes towards honour, religious movements, rising nationalism, literature, and police practices. Exploring religious ideas that associated secrecy with darkness and wickedness, and proto-nationalist discourse that equated foreignness with secrecy, this book demonstrates how cultural shifts in eighteenth-century France influenced its politics. Covering the period of intense fear during the French Revolution and the paranoia of the Reign of Terror, the book highlights the complex interplay of culture and politics and provides insights into our attitudes towards secrecy today. 

The book explores the liminal aesthetics of U.S. cultural and literary practice. Interrogating the notion of a presumptive unity of the American experience, Moveable Designs argues that inner conflict, divisiveness, and contradiction are integral to the nation's cultural designs, themes, and motifs. The study suggests that U.S. literary and cultural practice is permeated by 'moveable designs'-flexible, yet constant features of hegemonial practice that constitute an integral element of American national self-fashioning. The naturally pervasive liminality of U.S. cultural production is the key to understanding the resilience of American culture. Moveable Designs looks at artistic expressions across various media types (literature, paintings, film, television), seeking to illuminate critical phases of U.S. American literature and culture-from the revolutionary years to the movements of romanticism, realism, and modernism, up to the postmodern era. It combines a wide array of approaches, from cultural history and social anthropology to phenomenology. Connecting an analysis of literary and cultural texts with approaches from design theory, the book proposes a new way of understanding American culture as design. It is one of the unique characteristics of American culture that it creates-or, rather, designs-potency out of its inner conflicts and apparent disunities. That which we describe as an identifiable 'American identity' is actually the product of highly vulnerable, alternating processes of dissolution and self-affirmation. 

This book explores the improbable rise of medical hypnotism in Victorian Britain and its subsequent assimilation and neglect. It follows the careers of the ¿New Hypnotists¿: Charles Lloyd Tuckey, John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin. This loosely knit group all trained with the Suggestion School of Nancy and published books on hypnotism. They had to confront the many public and medical prejudices against the trance state which had persisted after the scandalous disgrace of John Elliotson and medical mesmerism, fifty years before. Hypnotism was a highly contested technology and in the 1890s the debates about safety and utility were fought in the national newspapers as well as the medical journals. The new hypnotists took on the might of the medical institutions personified by Ernest Hart, Editor of the British Medical Journal. However their timing was propitious, as the rise of faith-healing forced the medical profession to confront the non-physical therapeutic aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. The hypnotic discourse was shaped by these developments, but also by the fascination of the general public, novelists, occultists, psychic investigators, educationalists and spiritualists in the myriad possibilities of the trance state. Despite growing interest in the prehistory of British psychology and talking therapies, and the recent challenges to the primacy of Freudian histories, there are few accounts of the development of British ¿eclectic therapy¿. This book uses the New Hypnotists as a lens to examine Victorian medicine and society, exploring their role in establishing the term ¿psychotherapy,¿ and legitimising medical hypnotism, a precursor of psychological therapies.

This book examines the archival aesthetic of mourning and memory developed by Latin American artists and photographers between 1997-2016.  Particular attention is paid to how photographs of the assassinated or disappeared political dissident of the 1970s and 1980s, as found in family albums and in official archives, were not only re-imagined as conduits for private mourning, but also became allegories of social trauma and the struggle against socio-political amnesia. Memorials, art installations, photo-essays, street projections, and documentary films are all considered as media for the reframing of these archival images from the era of the Cold War dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay. While the turn of the millennium was supposedly marked by "e;the end of history"e; and, with the advent of digital technologies, by "e;the end of photography,"e; these works served to interrupt and hence, belie the dominant narrative on both counts. Indeed, the book's overarching contention is that the viewer's affective identification with distant suffering when engaging these artworks is equally interrupted: instead, the viewer is invited to apprehend memorial images as emblems of national and international histories of ideological struggle.

This book is a phenomenological approach to film sound and film as a whole, bringing all sensory impressions together within the body as a sense of movement. This includes embodied listening, felt sound and the audiovisual chord as a dynamic knot of visual and auditory movements. From this perspective, auditory spaces in film can be used as a pivot between an inner and an external world.

This is a fashion coloring book about Boho Hippie Girls. There are 45 original illustrations with beautiful models, clothing & accessories.

Drawing on examples from across the continent, this volume examines socially significant aspects of contemporary African popular culture-including music cultures, fandoms, and community, mass, and digital media-to demonstrate how neoliberal politics and market forces shape the cultural landscape and vice versa. Contributors investigate the role that the media, politicians, and corporate interests play in shaping that landscape, highlight the crucial role of the African people in the production and circulation of popular culture more broadly, and, furthermore, demonstrate how popular culture can be used as a tool to resist oppressive regimes and challenge power structures in the African context. Scholars of political communication, cultural studies, and African studies will find this book particularly useful.

The beginning of the 21st century saw the rise of "New" Atheism and a resulting conflict with Theists ¿ at the same time as the resurgence of fantasy in popular culture. This volume analyses the impact of Theist and Atheist thought on the narratology of four highly popular works of contemporary fantastic fiction. In doing so, the work demonstrates how the ideological stances and the associated patterns of thought colour the novels¿ stylistic and narrative devices. The book also presents a new conditional genre metric that not only helps overcome previous impasses within fantastic genre categories but also allows insight into the aforementioned patterns of Atheist and Theist thinking.

During the last three decades, Europe has undergone numerous periods of economic and political instability. The process of European integration, once hailed as a beacon of a peaceful co-operation between many, if not all, European nations appears to be stagnating, giving rise to notoriously more frequent manifestations of xenophobic violence, nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism. This book evaluates the portrayal of the migrant Other in selected examples of contemporary French and German cinema from the period 1989¿2020 in the context of the ongoing debate about European identity and its socio-political significance. It focuses on the films of some of Europe¿s most prolific contemporary filmmakers, such as Michael Haneke, Claire Denis and Fatih Akin. It examines cinemäs importance not only in reference to various theoretical evaluations of the concept of European identity, but also many notable events that have taken place in Europe in the last thirty years, such as the collapse of the ¿Iron Curtain¿ in 1989, the historical expansion of the European Union in 2004, the migration ¿crisis¿ of 2015, ¿Brexit¿ and the war in Ukraine.

Rap Music and the Youth in Malawi is one of the first book-length studies of Malawian hip hop. It studies the language and content of contemporary Malawian hip hop as a window onto the country's youth culture as Malawian young people negotiate what scholar Alcinda Honwana calls 'waithood,' or the condition, common among Malawian youth, of lacking opportunities to advance from a situation of dependence and being stuck in a state of relative childhood. The book argues that rap music made by Malawian youth music speaks of - and represents, through its very agency - their need to break out of this stagnant state. After situating Malawian hip hop with respect to both other musical genres in the country and to the nation's language in culture, Rap Music and the Youth in Malawi shows how Malawian youth use rap music to create a sense of community, which then becomes a foothold from which they can do activities that get them out of waithood and into the adult world, such as getting involved in the music industry, realizing electoral power, or participating in activism about issues such as violence against people with albinism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hip hop has been a crucial tool for Malawian youth to build the skills, identity, and agency necessary to exercise their economic, cultural, and civic independence.

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

This book examines various aspects of the business world from the perspective of communication. After all, no business is possible without communication. A statement that ought to be an axiom because communication is central to the interaction of people; hence, also interactions at the workplace, amongst business partners, and with customers. And when the people come from different cultures, then the role of culture assumes an important role as well. But instead of pursuing a typical management perspective, the authors in this book examine various business and work-related contexts from an intercultural, general communication, and linguistic perspective. A perspective that is often not in the focus of classic management literature ¿ probably because it is assumed that everyone can communicate. But what if the communicative efforts are ineffective? And what if the interactors are unaware of this? That is why communication needs to be considered and understood so as to be more effective and more productive. This book follows an interdisciplinary approach to communication and, thus, offers some useful insights to such interactions and contexts. The contributing authors provide literally a global perspective because they come from different parts of the world and from different scientific disciplines. The book is divided into six parts: The first five chapters offer a general introduction to culture and communication. This is followed by four chapters examining various aspects of worldview and perception. Next come six chapters dealing with a selection of topics revolving around the meaning of messages. The next five chapters take a closer look at communication at the workplace. This is followed by three chapters exploring politeness and emotion at work. The book ends with five chapters considering communication competence and cultural adaptation. The book, thus, offers some unique insights to the world of business from the perspective of culture and communication.

"It's safe to say everyone thinks about death--whether they want to or not. But have you ever wondered about what sort of keepsakes you can make with your remains, or given any thought to the most scandalous deathbed confessions throughout history? Well Madison Reyes and Spencer Henry have, and they've spent countless hours scouring the darkest corners of the internet, digging through newspaper archives, devouring documents, and picking the brains of death industry experts to bring you Obitchuary, a darkly funny and deeply poignant exploration of all things death. With chapters like 'Coffin Confessions,' 'Executions to Die For,' 'The Last Word,' and 'If These Dolls Could Speak,' Madison and Spencer guide us through surprisingly colorful history, traditions, and contemporary practices. They also demystify taboo topics with incredible and hilarious details, including FUNerals, as they call them, cremations and themed funerals, famous body snatchers, and so much more. Shocking, macabre, hilarious, and moving, Obitchuary digs deep into the physical aspects of death while also carefully exploring what death says about our humanity and the ways we choose to remember those we've lost. So go ahead, crack open the book--we know you're dying to read it"

In his inimitable style, gifted folklorist Kevin Danaher invites the reader to call on people of a former generation in their homes, to sit around the hearth, to listen to their tales and gossip and sample their food and drink, to marvel at their implements, to meet a water diviner, to join a faction fight, hurry to a wedding and bow down in remembrance of the dead. For over thirty years, this book has charmed, informed and surprised successive generations of readers, in Ireland and abroad.

This book discusses whether democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary, or contradicting ideas. The rediscovery of classic republicanism a few decades ago made it clear how profoundly modern notions of democracy had been shaped by the republican tradition. But defining these two concepts remains difficult, and the views diverge widely. The overarching aim of this book is to discuss the extent to which democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary or mutually contradicting ideals / ideas. Pursuing this open approach to the subject means calling into question a widely used formula according to which modern democracy is composed of liberal principles such as individualism, the rule of law and human rights, on the one hand, and of republican principles such as focusing on the common good and popular sovereignty, on the other. This book will appeal to students, researches, and scholars of political science interested in a better understanding of political theory and political history.

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.

Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline's self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of 'culture' and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.

In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

Answers to dozens of frequently asked questions are delivered in this collection of thoughtful and entertaining short essays by Cleveland native and veteran journalist Jim Sweeney.

"Dark Horse Books and Marvel are proud to announce The Art of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, a beautiful 240-page tome featuring never-before-seen art of our favorite web-slinging heroes! Peter Parker and Miles Morales return when new dangers threaten New York City, though not all of them may be what they seem! When the symbiote invades, the two of them must work together to save friends and family. Swing into the adventure with Peter Parker and Miles Morales for a new adventure as they defeat enemies both new and old as they wreak havoc in The Art of Marvel's Spider-Man 2!"--