Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance. These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation. The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.

Long description: This study contributes to the question how managers could be qualified to increase their ability to activate resources and develop sense of coherence in challenging transcultural work contexts. Thereby it refers to developing intercultural competence and well-being in transcultural management settings by presenting a salutogenetic-oriented consultancy model: "Mental health in transcultural organisations". This model is based on a systemic and salutogenetic, transcultural and transformative fundament and includes counselling, a managerial training series and a team mentoring approach, as well as facilitator training.

One of a series discussing topics of interest in theatre studies from theoretical, methodological, philosophical and historical perspectives.

Challenging and innovative in its approach this book explores leadership development on many different levels in an era of internationalization when societies and organizations are becoming increasingly multicultural and undergoing many changes. The focus is on the correlation of culture, leadership and organization in transition.

Can rubber trees, silicone dolls, corpses, soil, subatomic particles, designer shoes, and discarded computers become the protagonists of contemporary literature—and what does this tell us about the relationship between humans and objects? In Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations. Discussing contemporary authors including Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Magnus, César Aira, and Blanca Wiethüchter as well as classic writers such as Fernando Ortiz and José Eustasio Rivera, Hoyos considers how Latin American literature has cast things as repositories of history, with an emphasis on the radically transformed circulation of artifacts under globalization. He traces a tradition of thought, transcultural materialism, that draws from the capacity of literary language to defamiliarize our place within the tangible world. Hoyos contrasts new materialisms with historical-materialist approaches, exposing how recent tendencies sometimes sidestep concepts such as primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and conspicuous consumption, which have been central to Latin American history and literature. He contends that an integrative approach informed by both historical and new materialisms can balance seeing things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations with appraisals of things in their autonomy. Things with a History simultaneously offers a sweeping account of the material turn in recent Latin American culture and reinvigorates social theory and cultural critique.

This book presents the narratives and voices of young, mostly male practitioners of hip hop culture in Delhi, India. The author suggests that practitioners understand hip hop as both a thing that can be appropriated and authenticated, made real, in the local and global context and as a way that enables them to transform their lives and futures in the rapidly globalising urban environments of Delhi. The dancers, artists, musicians and cultural theorists that feature in this book construct a multitude of voices in their narratives to formulate their ‘own’ transcultural voices within global hip hop. Through a combination of linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the book addresses issues including gender and sexuality, identity construction and global culture.