In this book Jorge Larrain discusses three of the most important concepts in the social sciences: ideology, reason and cultural identity.

The search for identity is a continuous challenge in the global world: from personal identity to social, national, European or professional identities, each person experiences nowadays a multi-dimensional self-representation. Placing the topic against an intercultural background, with a focus on communication, this book addresses the complicated relationship between self, identity, and society, from an academic perspective. The authors of the chapters in this book offer a complex landscape of professional and scholar approaches and research, in various parts of the world, including Canada, China, Estonia, France, Greece, Israel, Romania, and the United States of America.

Despite profound disagreement on whether identities are essential or existential, primordial or constructed, singular or multiple, there is little dispute over whether identities exist or not. In this provocative study, Sinisa Malesevic interrogates the unproblematic use of concepts of identity, and in particular national or ethnic identity.

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between transnational cinema and ideology. The book focuses in particular on the complex ways in which religion, identity and cultural myths interact in specific cinematic representations of ideology. Author Milja Radovic approaches the selected films as national, regional products, and then moves on to comparative analysis and discussion of their transnational aspects. This book also addresses the question of whether transnationalism reinforces the nation or not; one of the possible answers to this question may be given through the exploration of the cinema of national states and its transnational aspects. Radovic illustrates the ways in which these issues, represented and framed by films, are transmitted beyond their nation-state borders and local ideologies in which they originated – and questions whether therefore one can have an understanding of transnational cinema as a platform for political dialogue.

Indian party politics, commonly viewed as chaotic, clientelistic, and corrupt, is nevertheless a model for deepening democracy and accommodating diversity. Historically, though, observers have argued that Indian politics is non-ideological in nature. In contrast, Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma contend that the Western European paradigm of "ideology" is not applicable to many contemporary multiethnic countries. In these more diverse states, the most important ideological debates center on statism-the extent to which the state should dominate and regulate society-and recognition-whether and how the state should accommodate various marginalized groups and protect minority rights from majorities. Using survey data from the Indian National Election Studies and evidence from the Constituent Assembly debates, they show how education, the media, and religious practice transmit the competing ideas that lie at the heart of ideological debates in India.

This book critically examines the main features of intercultural communication. It addresses how ideology permeates intercultural processes and develops an alternative 'grammar' of culture. It explores intercultural communication within the context of global politics, seeks to address the specific problems that derive from Western ideology, and sets out an agenda for research.

Essays looking at heritage practices and the construction of the past, along with how they can be used to build a national identity. The preservation of architectural monuments has played a key role in the formation of national identities from the nineteenth century to the present. The task of maintaining the collective memories and ideas of a shared heritage often focused on the historic built environment as the most visible sign of a link with the past. The meaning of such monuments and sites has, however, often been the subject of keen dispute: whose heritage is being commemorated, by whom and for whom? The answers to such questions are not always straightforward, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, the recent history of which has been characterized by territorial disputes, the large-scale movement of peoples, and cultural dispossession. This volume considers the dilemmas presented by the recent and complex histories of European states such as Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Examining the effect ofthe destruction of buildings by war, the loss of territories, or the "unwanted" built heritage of the Communist and Nazi regimes, the contributors examine how architectural and urban sites have been created, destroyed, or transformed, in the attempt to make visible a national heritage. Matthew Rampley is Professor of History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Contributors: Matthew Rampley, Juliet Kinchin, Paul Stirton, SusanneJaeger, Arnold Bartetzky, Jacek Friedrich, Tania Vladova, George Karatzas, Riitta Oittinen