Author: Erich Kolig File Type: pdf Conservative Islam A Cultural Anthropology by Erich Kolig analyzes the salient characteristics of Islam and contemporary Muslim society from the perspective of traditional cultural anthropology. Gender issues, the headscarf and veiling, alcohol and pork prohibition, the taboo on satirizing religious contents, violence and jihad, attitudes toward rationalism and modernity, and other important issues that emanate from Islamic doctrine are discursively highlighted as to their origins, symbolic meanings, and importance in the modern world. By highlighting socio-cultural configurations, the universals they represent, the circumstances of their creation, and their semiotic meaning, Kolig helps the reader gain understanding of Islam in the modern world. **

Author: Cary Howie File Type: pdf If ours is a cultural moment intensely fascinated with enclosed space--the cubicles of our workplaces, the confessionals of our churches, the bedrooms of reality television, and all the various closets we come out of and retreat into--our fascination isnt entirely new. This book argues that the religious literature of the late Middle Ages articulates with great subtlety and vividness the extent to which all being is to some extent enclosed being. In other words, were all in the closet, and that might be a good thing. Through extended readings of English, French, and Italian writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Claustrophilia shows that medieval enclosures actually make room for desires and communities that a poetics of pure openness would exclude. When God holds and confines, revelation is in the boundaries and not beyond them. Accordingly, this book says, love your closet it is only through what holds and defines us that we can know and love the world.ReviewThis philosophical meditation on presence and defense of the delights of enclosure comes closer to the essence of sanctity, to touching, and being touched by, (saintly) bodies than any I have ever read. Bodies at thresholds, emerging through metonymy, from spaces they never leave, and into which they never really fit---this is theoretical magic---unique, queer, and, in every sense, touching. Howie questions the possibility of ever really coming out, of ever owning what one touches, of seeing surfaces as invitations rather than barriers. In his hands, prose becomes poetry and academic prose takes flight.--Bill Burgwinkle, Kings College, University of CambridgeClaustrophilia is about the relation of enclosure and proximity to scholarship, medieval devotional practices, philosophy, literary history, and love. Howie explores the poetics of permeable contiguities--ancient and modern, subject and object, text and touch--with a powerfully lyrical resonance that performs, even as it advocates, an ethics and erotics of literary critical practice.--Carla Freccero, UCSCAbout the AuthorCary Howie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.

Author: Cameron C. Nickels File Type: pdf In Civil War Humor, author Cameron C. Nickels examines the various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadfuls--from and for the Union and the Confederacy--are analyzed at length.Nickels argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the countrys widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a paper war--involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacys positions--as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). Civil War Humor explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans.Civil War Humor reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, it places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humors role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.**

Author: Ofer Bergman File Type: pdf Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. In this book, personal information management (PIM) experts Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how the design of new PIM systems can help us manage our collections more efficiently. Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods search, more flexible than navigating folders tags, which allow multiple categorizations and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering PIM research that these other methods that work best for public information management dont work as well for personal information management. Bergman and Whittaker describe personal information collection as curation we preserve and organize this data to ensure our future access to it. Unlike other information management fields, in PIM the same user organizes and retrieves the information. After explaining the cognitive and psychological reasons that so many prefer folders, Bergman and Whittaker propose the * user-subjective approach *to PIM, which does not replace folder hierarchies but exploits these unique characteristics of PIM. **