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Title: The social edges of psychoanalysis
Author: Smelser, Neil J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | Psychology
Publisher's Description: For several decades the writings of sociologist Neil J. Smelser have won him a vast and admiring audience across several disciplines. Best known for his work on social movements, economic sociology, and British social history, Smelser's psychoanalytic writings are less familiar to his readers. In fact, many people are completely unaware of Smelser's formal psychoanalytic training and ongoing counseling practice. With the publication of The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis , Smelser's thought-provoking essays on psychoanalytic concepts are finally brought together in one book.Psychoanalytic theory has had an ambivalent relationship with sociology, and these essays explore that ambivalence, providing arguments about how and why psychoanalytic approaches can deepen the sociological perspective. One of Smelser's main tenets is that human social behavior always contains both social-structural and social-psychological elements, and that psychoanalytic theory can bridge these two dimensions of human social life. Many of the issues Smelser addresses - including interdisciplinarity, the macro-micro link in research, masculinity and violence, and affirmative action - have generated considerable scholarly interest.This collection paves the way for further articulation of the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis at a time when many sociologists are looking for interdisciplinary links in their work. Presented with clarity and grace, and free of the murkiness often found in both sociological and psychoanalytic writing, Smelser's new book will excite reflection and research on the less visible dynamics of social existence.   [brief]
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Title: The Social importance of self-esteem 
Author: Mecca, Andrew
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: Is the well-being of a society dependent on the well-being of its citizenry? Does individual self-esteem play a causal role in chronic social problems such as child abuse, school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, welfare dependency?In an attempt to answer these questions, the State of California established a task force on self-esteem and social responsibility in 1987. The aim of this body was to determine what connections might exist between these two factors and to suggest policy guidelines relating to the welfare of Californians and to the expenditure of public resources. The ten essays in this volume, prepared by faculty members of the University of California, draw on research in the social and behavioral sciences to explore these issues. They assess the substantive assertions and research findings in the field and make careful evaluations of their reliability and validity. In many cases strong connections between self-esteem and problematic behavior are established, in others the connections are weak, and in some the causal relationship is, as yet, imperfectly understood.One of the conclusions of the book is that research on these issues needs to be improved, particularly in the areas of comparative and longitudinal studies. Guidelines for future research are suggested, and some points of policy direction are elaborated. These essays may indeed promote additional research, for the premise that social stability and welfare are largely dependent on the psychological state of a people poses a challenging and provocative counter-emphasis to the assumption that social institutions are the primary determinants of individual welfare.   [brief]
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Title: Social order/mental disorder: Anglo-American psychiatry in historical perspective 
Author: Scull, Andrew T
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Psychiatry | United States History | European History | Psychology
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Title: Social paralysis and social change: British working-class education in the nineteenth century
Author: Smelser, Neil J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History | European History | Education
Publisher's Description: Neil Smelser's Social Paralysis and Social Change is one of the most comprehensive histories of mass education ever written. It tells the story of how working-class education in nineteenth-century Britain - often paralyzed by class, religious, and economic conflict - struggled forward toward change.This book is ambitious in scope. It is both a detailed history of educational development and a theoretical study of social change, at once a case study of Britain and a comparative study of variations within Britain. Smelser simultaneously meets the scholarly standards of historians and critically addresses accepted theories of educational change - "progress," conflict, and functional theories. He also sheds new light on the process of secularization, the relations between industrialization and education, structural differentiation, and the role of the state in social change.This work marks a return for the author to the same historical arena - Victorian Britain - that inspired his classic work Social Change in the Industrial Revolution thirty-five years ago. Smelser's research has again been exhaustive. He has achieved a remarkable synthesis of the huge body of available materials, both primary and secondary.Smelser's latest book will be most controversial in its treatment of class as a primordial social grouping, beyond its economic significance. Indeed, his demonstration that class, ethnic, and religious groupings were decisive in determining the course of British working-class education has broad-ranging implications. These groupings remain at the heart of educational conflict, debate, and change in most societies - including our own - and prompt us to pose again and again the chronic question: who controls the educational terrain?   [brief]
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Title: Socialization as cultural communication: development of a theme in the work of Margaret Mead 
Author: Schwartz, Theodore
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
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Title: Society and individual in Renaissance Florence
Author: Connell, William J
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | European History
Publisher's Description: Renaissance Florence has often been described as the birthplace of modern individualism, as reflected in the individual genius of its great artists, scholars, and statesmen. The historical research of recent decades has instead shown that Florentines during the Renaissance remained enmeshed in relationships of family, neighborhood, guild, patronage, and religion that, from a twenty-first-century perspective, greatly limited the scope of individual thought and action. The sixteen essays in this volume expand the groundbreaking work of Gene Brucker, the historian in recent decades who has been most responsible for the discovery and exploration of these pre-modern qualities of the Florentine Renaissance. Exploring new approaches to the social world of Florentines during this fascinating era, the essays are arranged in three groups. The first deals with the exceptionally resilient and homogenous Florentine merchant elite, the true protagonist of much of Florentine history. The second considers Florentine religion and Florence's turbulent relations with the Church. The last group of essays looks at criminals, expatriates, and other outsiders to Florentine society.   [brief]
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Title: Society and politics in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla 
Author: Bagge, Sverre 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval History | Medieval Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Heimskringla is the best known and most important book of Old Norse kings' sagas. A medieval masterpiece, the collection was written by Snorri Sturluson in the first half of the thirteenth century. The sagas have been studied primarily as literary sources and chronicles of specific historical events, but Sverre Bagge, a noted historian, finds in Heimskringla something more: a brimming guidebook to the culture and politics of Icelandic society.What kind of observer was Snorri Sturluson, and how did he see the world he lived in? Bagge concentrates on Snorri the historian, viewing him in the context of European history in general and contemporary Icelandic and Norwegian society in particular. But it is Snorri's perception of events that matters, more than the "real" events or the society that produced them. With chapters on themes such as conflicts and the "game of politics" that pervades the sagas, Bagge's analysis of Heimskringla is a model for contemporary historians now probing the relationship between narrative and history.   [brief]
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Title: The Society of Six: California colorists
Author: Boas, Nancy 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six - Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest - created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism.The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.   [brief]
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Title: Solidarity of strangers: feminism after identity politics 
Author: Dean, Jodi 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Women's Studies | Politics | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Solidarity of Strangers is a crucial intervention in feminist, multicultural, and legal debates that will ignite a rethinking of the meaning of difference, community, and participatory democracy. Arguing for a solidarity rooted in a respect for difference, Dean offers a broad vision of the shape of . . . [more]
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Title: Some trouble with cows: making sense of social conflict 
Author: Roy, Beth
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | South Asia | Politics | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community.Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s. She provides a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the participants and their families, while touching on a range of broader issues that are vital to the sociology of communities in conflict: the changing meaning of community ; the impact of the state on local society; the nature of memory ; and the force of neighborly enmity in reshaping power relationships during periods of change.Roy's findings illustrate important theoretical issues in psychology and sociology, and her conclusions will greatly interest students of ethnic/race relations, conflict resolution, the sociology of violence, agrarian society, and South Asia.   [brief]
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Title: Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
Author: Hom, Marlon K
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Asian American Studies | American Literature | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Marlon Hom has selected and translated 220 rhymes from two collections of Chinatown songs published in 1911 and 1915. The songs are outspoken and personal, addressing subjects as diverse as sex, frustrations with the American bureaucracy, poverty and alienation, and the loose morals of the younger g . . . [more]
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Title: Songs to make the dust dance: the Ryōjin hishō of twelfth-century Japan 
Author: Kwon, Yung-Hee K
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Japan | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Breaking through the long-established image of Heian Japan (794-1185) as a culture dominated by ritualized aristocratic values, Yung-Hee Kim presents the picture of a country in transition, filled with a wide variety of common people responding to very ordinary situations. In popular songs called imayo , they expressed their concerns about religion, love, aging, and even current affairs.In 1179 Emperor Go-Shirakawa compiled Ryojin hisho , a twenty-volume collection of this song genre that juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the male with the female, the old with the new. Kim makes these songs the core of her book, in translations that faithfully reflect the sounds and images of the originals and bring them to life within their own literary and cultural context.   [brief]
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Title: Songs without music: aesthetic dimensions of law and justice
Author: Manderson, Desmond
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Law | Philosophy | Ethics | Social and Political Thought | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: In this pathbreaking and provocative analysis of the aesthetics of law, the historian, legal theorist, and musician Desmond Manderson argues that by treating a text, legal or otherwise, as if it were merely a sequence of logical propositions, readers miss its formal and symbolic meanings. Creatively using music as a model, he demonstrates that law is not a sterile, rational structure, but a cultural form to be valued and enhanced through rhetoric and metaphors, form, images, and symbols. To further develop this argument, the book is divided into chapters, each of which is based on a different musical form. Law, for Manderson, should strive for neither coherence nor integrity. Rather, it is imperfectly realized, constantly reinterpreted, and always in flux. Songs without Music is written in an original, engaging, and often humorous style, and exhibits a deep knowledge of both law and music. It successfully traverses several disciplines and builds an original and persuasive argument for a legal aesthetic. The book will appeal to a broad readership in law, political theory, literary criticism, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Sonia's daughters: prostitutes and their regulation in imperial Russia 
Author: Bernstein, Laurie
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Prostitution in Imperial Russia was so tenacious that it survived not only the tsarist regime's most tumultuous years but the Bolshevik revolution itself. Laurie Bernstein's comprehensive study is the first to look at how the state and society responded to the issue of prostitution - the attitudes of prostitutes themselves, state regulation, societal reactions, and attempts at reform. She finds that prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics.The first historian from outside the former Soviet Union to be granted access to these archival materials on prostitution, Bernstein takes the reader to the streets of Russia's cities, to the state-licensed brothels, medical clinics, hospital wards, halfway houses for "fallen women," and to the highest circles of the tsarist administration.   [brief]
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Title: The sound of two hands clapping: the education of a Tibetan Buddhist monk
Author: Dreyfus, Georges B. J
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | Buddhism | Tibet | Autobiographies and Biographies | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: A unique insider's account of day-to-day life inside a Tibetan monastery, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping reveals to Western audiences the fascinating details of monastic education. Georges B. J. Dreyfus, the first Westerner to complete the famous Ge-luk curriculum and achieve the distinguished titl . . . [more]
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Title: Sources of Western Zhou history: inscribed bronze vessels
Author: Shaughnessy, Edward L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: The thousands of ritual bronze vessels discovered by China's archaeologists serve as the major documentary source for the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.). These vessels contain long inscriptions full of detail on subjects as diverse as the military history of the period, the bureaucratic structure of the royal court, and lawsuits among the gentry. Moreover, being cast in bronze, the inscriptions preserve exactly the contemporary script and language.Shaughnessy has written a meticulous and detailed work on the historiography and interpretation of these objects. By demonstrating how the inscriptions are read and interpreted, Shaughnessy makes accessible in English some of the most important evidence about life in ancient China.   [brief]
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Title: South Africa, a study in conflict 
Author: Van den Berghe, Pierre L
Published: University of California Press,  1967
Subjects: African Studies
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Title: Soviet perceptions of the United States 
Author: Schwartz, Morton
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Politics
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Title: Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana 
Author: Redfield, Peter 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Geography | French Studies | European Studies | Technology
Publisher's Description: Rockets roar into space - bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites - from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, Redfield connects the myth of Robinson Crusoe, nineteenth-century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, postwar exploration of outer space, satellite technology, development, and ecotourism with a focus on place, and the incorporation of this particular place into greater extended systems. Examining the wider context of the Ariane program, he argues that technology and nature must be understood within a greater ecology of displacement and makes a case for the importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.   [brief]
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Title: Spacefaring: the human dimension
Author: Harrison, Albert A
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Science | Technology and Society | Psychology
Publisher's Description: The stars have always called us, but only for the past forty years or so have we been able to respond by traveling in space. This book explores the human side of spaceflight: why people are willing to brave danger and hardship to go into space; how human culture has shaped past and present missions; and the effects of space travel on health and well-being. A comprehensive and authoritative treatment of its subject, this book combines statistical studies, rich case histories, and gripping anecdotal detail as it investigates the phenomenon of humans in space - from the earliest spaceflights to the missions of tomorrow. Drawing from a strong research base in the behavioral sciences, Harrison covers such topics as habitability, crew selection and training, coping with stress, group dynamics, accidents, and more. In addition to taking a close look at spacefarers themselves, Spacefaring reviews the broad organizational and political contexts that shape human progress toward the heavens. With the ongoing construction of the International Space Station, the human journey to the stars continues, and this book will surely help guide the way.   [brief]
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