Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social TheoryNicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, Sherry B. Ortner The intellectual radicalism of the 1960s spawned a new set of questions about the role and nature of "the political" in social life, questions that have since revolutionized nearly every field of thought, from literary criticism through anthropology to the philosophy of science. Michel Foucault in particular made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality. Such insights have led theorists to challenge concepts that have long formed the very underpinnings of their disciplines. By exploring some of the most debated of these concepts--"culture," "power," and "history"--this reader offers an enriching perspective on social theory in the contemporary moment. |
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... value system , are all displaced from the conventional institutional arena for studying them ( that is , the state and public organizations in the narrower sense ) onto a variety of settings pre- viously regarded as " nonpolitical ...
... the resources and resourcefulness of ordi- nary people in the conduct of their everyday lives , and find their values and experiences not easily assimilable to the conventional narratives of political 16 • INTRODUCTION .
... distinctively Black theory itself — the constructive value of the Black vernac- ular , " the language we use to speak to each other when no white people are around . " The difficulties of embodying this claim — 18 INTRODUCTION .
... values , but by the ever more dizzying move- ment between reality and its now - receding referents . Whether the worlds we study are postmodern or not , we are likely aware that the age of cultural innocence has escaped for good . And ...
... values , or from some other overarching principle of order to which we can easily repair . Particular phenomena — events , poli- cies , institutions , ideologies , texts — have particular social contexts in the sense of conditions ...
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Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory Nicholas B. Dirks,Geoff Eley No preview available - 1994 |