This accessible introduction presents the core concepts that political scientists use to study and compare political systems, illustrating these concepts with concrete examples from specific political systems.

    Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

    This study concentrates on incorporated practices and provides an account of how these things are transmitted in and as traditions. The author argues that images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances, and that performative memory is bodily. This is an essential aspect of social memory that until now has been badly neglected.

    Students will receive a grounding in areas that vary from treatment to organizational and community settings. This edition also includes of new case studies, practice examples and guiding principles.

    It is divided by subject area into 4 sections for ease of navigation, and then sub-divided into chapters, each of which has been specifically written for this book.Carefully edited by John Ravenhill, the text reads as an integrated whole and is suitable as an introductory text for undergraduates in both coverage and approach, each chapter making full use of learning aids such as boxes to summarize key terms and debates, chronologies, case studies, web links and further reading, which complement the lively presentation of the subject.

    They chart the course of "true" socialism based on G. W.F. Hegel's dialectic, while criticizing the ideas of Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx expanded his criticism of the latter in his now famous Theses on Feuerbach, found after Marx's death and published by Engels in 1888. Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, also found among the posthumous papers of Marx, is a fragment of an introduction to his main works. Combining these three works, this volume is essential for an understanding of Marxism.

    From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body—weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more—in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape—finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"—Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001)

    Laslett's standard edition of Two Treatises. First published in 1960, and based on an analysis of the whole body of Locke's publications, writings, and papers. The Introduction and text have been revised to incorporate references to recent scholarship since the second edition and the bibliography has been updated.

    Urry develops this analysis through various levels - historical, economic, social, cultural and visual.Mass tourism is charted from its origins in the English seaside resorts to its development as a global industry. The economic impact and complex social relations involved in international tourism are explored. Changing patterns of tourism are shown to be connected to the broader cultural changes of postmodernism and related to the role of the service and middle classes. The author argues that we

    It offers a battery of methods that can be used to help us understand human behavior. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of this exercise is at the center of a heated controversy that has raged for over a century. Many evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists have taken these evolutionary principles and tried using them to explain a wide range of human characteristics, such as homicide, religion and sex differences in behavior. Others, however, are sceptical of these interpretations. Moreover, researchers disagree as to the best ways to use evolution to explore humanity, and a number of schools have emerged. Sense and Nonsense provides an introduction to the ideas, methods, and findings of five such schools, namely, sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics, and gene-culture co-evolution. Carefully guiding the reader through the mire of confusing terminology, claim and counter-claim, and polemical statements, Laland and Brown provide a balanced, rigorous analysis that scrutinizes both the evolutionary arguments and the allegations of the critics. This is a book that will be make fascinating reading for popular science readers, undergraduate and postgraduate students (for example, in psychology, anthropology and zoology), and to experts on one approach who would like to know more about the other perspectives. Having completed this book the reader will feel better placed to assess the legitimacy of claims made about human behavior under the name of evolution, and to make judgements as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

    Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations.The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice.Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

    However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.

    Based on the latest scholarship and richly illustrated, it is the most authoritative and accessible chronicle of the Jewish experience available. Michael Brenner tells a dramatic story of change and migration deeply rooted in tradition, taking readers from the mythic wanderings of Moses to the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust; from the Babylonian exile to the founding of the modern state of Israel; and from the Sephardic communities under medieval Islam to the shtetls of eastern Europe and the Hasidic enclaves of modern-day Brooklyn. The book is full of fascinating personal stories of exodus and return, from that told about Abraham, who brought his newfound faith into Canaan, to that of Holocaust survivor Esther Barkai, who lived on a kibbutz established on a German estate seized from the Nazi Julius Streicher as she awaited resettlement in Israel. Describing the events and people that have shaped Jewish history, and highlighting the important contributions Jews have made to the arts, politics, religion, and science, A Short History of the Jews is a compelling blend of storytelling and scholarship that brings the Jewish past marvelously to life.

    Fully updated and now in two colour, the text is accessible and well structured with numerous real life examples and student learning aids. The text is also accompanied by a fully comprehensive companion web site.

    Strange as it is, while the art of saving time reaches unprecedented heights through the introduction of ever-new technologies of communication and production, it nevertheless feels like we are running out of time. In all western societies alike, time-famine is rising and individuals report the impression that they have to run faster and faster each year - not in order to get somewhere, but just to stay in place! This book presents an analytic framework to identify the causes and effects of the various sped-up-processes which define modernity - and it develops a critical theory of late-modern temporality. Crucial for this is the idea that acceleration in the end leads to monstrous forms of alienation from time and space, from things and actions - and from self and others.