Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include: * customs, values, and traditions * historical, religious, and political background * life at home * leisure, social, and cultural life * eating and drinking * do's, don'ts, and taboos * business practices * communication, spoken and unspoken

Nicknamed "The Warm Heart of Africa," "Land of the Lake," and "The Land of Smiling Faces," this small, landlocked country in southeast Africa offers travelers a true African experience. Within a single day, visitors can go on safari, enjoy sprawling tea gardens, and watch the sun sets over Lake Malawi, the third-largest lake in Africa and home to many rare species of fish. The country has nine unique national parks and wildlife reserves and has been home to many diverse African cultures, from the indigenous hunter-gathers to the incoming iron-working Bantu settlers. Dress, dance, masks, language, and traditional festivals all reflect waves of migrating tribes—those fleeing Shaka Zulu in the south, Swahili Arab slave traders in the east, and Bantu from Central Africa. Other cultural influences came through the slave trade routes, contact with Portuguese and Indian traders, and English missionaries who introduced Victorian-era buildings. This historic blend has produced a people who are strong, good-humored, conservative, traditional, yet adaptable, creative, loyal, and hard-working.

This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. Such prizes and the competitions they crown are almost as old as the arts themselves, but their number and power--and their consequences for society and culture at large--have expanded to an unprecedented degree in our day. In a wide-ranging overview of this phenomenon, James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige. Observing that cultural prizes in their modern form originate at the turn of the twentieth century with the institutional convergence of art and competitive spectator sports, English argues that they have in recent decades undergone an important shift--a more genuine and far-reaching globalization than what has occurred in the economy of material goods. Focusing on the cultural prize in its contemporary form, his book addresses itself broadly to the economic dimensions of culture, to the rules or logic of exchange in the market for what has come to be called "cultural capital." In the wild proliferation of prizes, English finds a key to transformations in the cultural field as a whole. And in the specific workings of prizes, their elaborate mechanics of nomination and election, presentation and acceptance, sponsorship, publicity, and scandal, he uncovers evidence of the new arrangements and relationships that have refigured that field.

Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include: * customs, values, and traditions * historical, religious, and political background * life at home * leisure, social, and cultural life * eating and drinking * do's, don'ts, and taboos * business practices * communication, spoken and unspoken

The Spice Girls, Tank Girl comicbooks, Sailor Moon, Courtney Love, Grrl Power: do such things really constitute a unique "girl culture?" Catherine Driscoll begins by identifying a genealogy of "girlhood" or "feminine adolescence," and then argues that both "girls" and "culture" as ideas are too problematic to fulfill any useful role in theorizing about the emergence of feminine adolescence in popular culture. She relates the increasing public visibility of girls in western and westernized cultures to the evolution and expansion of theories about feminine adolescence in fields such as psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, history, and politics. Presenting her argument as a Foucauldian genealogy, Driscoll discusses the ways in which young women have been involved in the production and consumption of theories and representations of girls, feminine adolescence, and the "girl market."

A nation with eleven official languages, innumerable cultural influences -- from the anakwetha to the Zulu dancer, and nine provinces that cover no less than seven separate vegetation biomes, South Africa boasts a complexity of geology, climate, culture and biodiversity shared by no other country in the world. This remarkable portfolio of images reflects the many extraordinary faces of this land of contrasts: from the Cape's famous landmark of Table Mountain, along the flower routes of the West Coast into the semi-desert reaches of the Kalahari and the Northern Cape to the rich cultural heritage that seems to permeate every corner -- from the traditional homesteads of the Wild Coast and battlefields of the Drakensberg foothills, to the farmland of the Free State and the great cities of Gauteng. The book traces the vast and complicated heritage of indigenous people and settlers, and the places -- flora and fauna, beaches and mountains, deserts and rainforests -- that make up this land of exceptional contrasts.

Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include customs, values, and traditions historical, religious, and political background life at home leisure, social, and cultural life eating and drinking dos, don'ts, and taboos business practices communication, spoken and unspoken "Culture Smart has come to the rescue of hapless travellers." Sunday Times Travel "... the perfect introduction to the weird, wonderful and downright odd quirks and customs of various countries." Global Travel "...full of fascinating-as well as common-sense-tips to help you avoid embarrassing faux pas." Observer "...as useful as they are entertaining." Easyjet Magazine "...offer glimpses into the psyche of a faraway world." New York Times.