Examines the threats to Latin American cultural identity in a global marketplace - now with a new introduction!

In recent years, archaeologists have used the terms hybrid and hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret forms of material culture. Hybridity is a way of viewing culture and human action that addresses the issue of power differentials between peoples and cultures. This approach suggests that cultures are not discrete pure entities but rather are continuously transforming and recombining. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture discusses this concept and its relationship to archaeological classification and the emergence of new ethnic group identities. This collection of essays provides readers with theoretical and concrete tools for investigating objects and architecture with discernible multiple influences. The twenty-one essays are organized into four parts: ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; ethnicity and material culture in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America; culture contact and transformation in technological style; and materiality and identity. The media examined include ceramics, stone and glass implements, textiles, bone, architecture, and mortuary and bioarchaeological artifacts from North, South, and Central America, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, Europe, and Mesopotamia. Case studies include Bronze Age Britain, Iron Age and Roman Europe, Uruk-era Turkey, African diasporic communities in the Caribbean, pre-Spanish and Pueblo revolt era Southwest, Spanish colonial impacts in the American Southeast, Central America, and the Andes, ethnographic Amazonia, historic-era New England and the Plains, the Classic Maya, nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, and Upper Paleolithic Europe. The volume is carefully detailed with more than forty maps and figures and over twenty tables. The work presented in The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture comes from researchers whose questions and investigations recognized the role of multiple influences on the people and material they study. Case studies include experiments in bone working in middle Missouri; images and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe; technological and material hybridity in colonial Peruvian textiles; ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; and flaked glass tools from the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka‘i. The essays provide examples and approaches that may serve as a guide for other researchers dealing with similar issues.

An exploration of the tensions between East and West and digital and analog in Japanese new-media art. This book grew out of Yvonne Spielmann's 2005–2006 and 2009 visits to Japan, where she explored the technological and aesthetic origins of Japanese new-media art—which was known for pioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann discovered an essential hybridity in Japan's media culture: an internal hybridity, a mixture of digital-analog connections together with a non-Western development of modernity separate from but not immune to Western media aesthetics; and external hybridity, produced by the international, transcultural travel of aesthetic concepts. Spielmann describes the innovative technology context in Japan, in which developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the Japanese fondness for precision and functionality to the poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. She examines work by artists including Masaki Fujihata, whose art is both formally and thematically hybrid; Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, who build special devices for a new sense of human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, who connects traditional media forms with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, who anchors his LED artwork in Buddhist philosophy. Spielmann views hybridity as a positive aesthetic value—perhaps the defining aesthetic of a global culture. Hybridity offers a conceptual approach for considering the ambivalent linkages of contradictory elements; its dynamic and fluid characteristics are neither conclusive nor categorical but are meant to stimulate fusions.

Preliminary Material -- Encounters Over the Border: The Shaping of Colonial Identities in Neighbouring British and German Colonies in Southern Africa /Ulrike Lindner -- The Colonial Order Upside Down?: British and Germans in East African Prisoner-of-War Camps During World War I /Michael Pesek -- Jack, Peter, and the Beast: Postcolonial Perspectives on Sexual Murder and the Construction of White Masculinity in Britain and Germany at the Turn of the Twentieth Century /Eva Bischoff -- Decolonization of the Public Space?: (Post)Colonial Culture of Remembrance in Germany /Joachim Zeller -- “Setting the Record Straight”?: Imperial History in Postcolonial British Public Culture /Elizabeth Buettner -- (Trans)National Consumer Cultures: Coffee as a Colonial Product in the German Empire /Laura Julia Rischbieter -- Transcultural Tea Times: An Overview of Tea in Colonial History /Christine Vogt-William -- Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures /Maren Möhring -- A Cultural Politics of Curry: The Transnational Spaces of Contemporary Commodity Culture /Peter Jackson -- Knowledges of (Un)Belonging: Epistemic Change as a Defining Mode for Black Women's Activism in Germany /Maureen Maisha Eggers -- “I ain't British though / Yes you are. You're as English as I am”: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today /Deirdre Osborne -- Muslims, the Discourse on (Failed) Integration in Britain, and Kenneth Glenaan's Film Yasmin /Silke Stroh -- The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany: Spatiality, Gender, and the Boundaries of the National Gaze /Markus Schmitz -- Works Cited -- Notes on Editors and Contributors -- Index.

Hybrid Renaissance introduces the idea that the Renaissance in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in the world beyond Europe is an example of cultural hybridization. The two key concepts used in this book are “hybridization” and “Renaissance”. Roughly speaking, hybridity refers to something new that emerges from the combination of diverse older elements. (The term “hybridization” is preferable to “hybridity” because it refers to a process rather than to a state, and also because it encourages the writer and the readers alike to think in terms of degree: where there is more or less, rather than presence versus absence.) The book begins with a discussion of the concept of cultural hybridization and a cluster of other concepts related to it. Then comes a geography of cultural hybridization focusing on three locales: courts, major cities (whether ports or capitals) and frontiers. The following seven chapters describe the hybridity of the Renaissance in different fields: architecture, painting and sculpture, languages, literature, music, philosophy and law and finally religion. The essay concludes with a brief account of attempts to resist hybridization or to purify cultures or domains from what was already hybridized.

Hybrid Geographies reconsiders the relationship between human and non-human, the social and the material, showing how they are intimately and variously linked. General arguments, informed by work in critical geography, feminist theory, environmental ethics, and science studies are illustrated throughout with detailed case-study material.

The reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, Lawrence Lessig spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war - a war waged against those who create and consume art. America's copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists' creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions. Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms every intrepid, creative user of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the postwar world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.