This book develops a new concept—“martial culture”—with which to problematize and reframe thinking surrounding the lifeways of US servicemembers, by exploring the values, beliefs, norms, and rituals they are exposed to and practice during military service. By reuniting the two concepts of servicemember and veteran into one overarching cultural model, the author shows how the concept of martial culture can be used to acknowledge the unbroken, holistic, multidimensional life cycle of an individual. Adopting a comparative mythological approach and drawing upon Roman, Navajo, Hindu, Norse, and Japanese myths that speak to the lived experiences of servicemembers, veterans, and their families, it weaves together ancient voices and contemporary servicemember experiential existences to offer new insight into the psychological experience of servicemembers. It will be of strong interest to psychologists who seek to develop their treatment of veterans by understanding the unique lifeway of service without judgement and offering a balanced, integrated spiritual connection, while pushing back against both inaccurate assumptions of martial lifeways and the influences of industrialized secular approaches to service. It will also appeal to those within the fields of military sociology and psychology.

"This book develops a new concept--'martial culture'--with which to problematize and reframe thinking surrounding the lifeways of U.S. servicemembers, following the values, beliefs, norms, and rituals they are exposed to upon entering military service. By reuniting the two concepts of servicemember and veteran into one overarching cultural model, the author shows how the concept of martial culture can be used to acknowledge the unbroken, holistic, multidimensional life cycle of an individual. Adopting a comparative mythological approach and drawing upon Roman, Navajo, Hindu, Norse, and Japanese myths that speak to the lived experiences of servicemembers, veterans, and their families, it weaves together ancient voices and contemporary servicemember experiential existences to offer new insight into the psychological experience of servicemembers. It will be of strong interest to psychologists who seek to develop their treatment of veterans by understanding the unique lifeway of service without judgement and offering a balanced, integrated spiritual connection, while pushing back against both inaccurate assumptions of martial lifeways and the influences of industrialized secular approaches to service. It will also appeal to those within the fields of military sociology and psychology"--

Embracing dramatic similarities, glaring disjunctions, and striking innovations, this book explores the history and context of dance on the land we know today as the United States of America. Designed for weekly use in dance history courses, it traces dance in the USA as it broke traditional forms, crossed genres, provoked social and political change, and drove cultural exchange and collision. The authors put a particular focus on those whose voices have been silenced, unacknowledged, and/or uncredited – exploring racial prejudice and injustice, intersectional feminism, protest movements, and economic conditions, as well as demonstrating how socio-political issues and movements affect and are affected by dance. In looking at concert dance, vernacular dance, ritual dance, and the convergence of these forms, the chapters acknowledge the richness of dance in today’s USA and the strong foundations on which it stands. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas. This book is ideal for undergraduate courses that embrace culturally responsive pedagogy and seek to shift the direction of the lens from western theatrical dance towards the wealth of dance forms in the United States.

This book explores the process through which service members transition from military to civilian life, and the implications of that transition on their mental and physical well-being and functioning. The authors present a theoretical framework that helps conceptualize the process of military transition. The theory is broken into three overlapping components: approaching military transition, which outlines the personal, cultural and transitional factors that create the base of the transition trajectory; managing the transition, which explores the factors impacting the transition's trajectory; and assessing the transition, which describes the outcome of the transition in the realms of work, family, health, and general well-being. The authors then demonstrate how this framework can be applied to practice, providing an opportunity to redefine how we help veterans.

War has had a powerful impact on the film industry, while at the same time motion pictures can influence wartime behaviour & shape our perception of the historical record. This book collects essays that use a variety of critical approaches to explore this film genre.

A primer designed for pre-service civilian counselors who might encounter veterans having difficulty readjusting to civilian life.

Globalization discourse now presumes that the “world space” is entirely at the mercy of market norms and forms promulgated by reactionary U.S. policies. An academic but accessible set of studies, this wide range of essays by noted scholars challenges this paradigm with diverse and strong arguments. Taking on topics that range from the medieval Mediterranean to contemporary Jamaican music, from Hong Kong martial arts cinema to Taiwanese politics, writers such as David Palumbo-Liu, Meaghan Morris, James Clifford, and others use innovative cultural studies to challenge the globalization narrative with a new and trenchant tactic called “worlding.” The book posits that world literature, cultural studies, and disciplinary practices must be “worlded” into expressions from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, and field practices as yet emerging or unidentified. This opens up a major rethinking of historical “givens” from Rob Wilson’s reinvention of “The White Surfer Dude” to Sharon Kinoshita’s “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.” Building on the work of cultural critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Kenneth Burke, The Worlding Project is an important manifesto that aims to redefine the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial globalization withalternative forms and frames of global becoming.