Provides a communication theory of identity. Shows how listening to communication in cultural scenes can help reveal how deeply identity is situated in various communicative practices.

Theories of identity have been built largely upon biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological grounds. Missing from each of these, yet of potential relevance to them all, is a community theory of identity such as the one developed here. Situating Selves presents studies of five American scenes, focusing on the ways social identities are communicatively crafted. Based on 15 years of fieldwork, the book presents fine-grained analyses of the playful self during sporting events (with special attention given to crowd activities at college basketball games), the working self in a television company, the marital self in weddings and marriages, the gendered self in television "talk shows," and conflicted selves during a community's hotly contested land-use controversy. Carbaugh shows how listening to communication in cultural scenes like these can help reveal how deeply identity is situated in various communicative practices. These include a ritual of play, symbolic allusions to different classes of people, a diversity in the forms of names used upon marriage, the play between genders and gender-neutral language, and the relationship between language, nature, community, and politics. Concluding commentary links the studies to the contemporary American scene, and shows how the focus on communication can integrate into community living both shared and separate identities. Emerging from these studies is a view of communication as not only a situated expression of selves in American scenes, but also an active contributor in constituting those very identities and scenes.

This book is an attempt to defend the tradition of universalism in the face of a triple-pronged critique by engaging with the claims of feminism, communitarianism, and postmodernism and by learning from them. It situates reason and the moral self more decisively in contexts of gender and community.

How did the West’s countercultural notions widen their zeal and zest onto the Himalayas? How did Nepal turn out to be a safe haven for Western women who made their travels to different Asian countries? With no direct traces of colonialism, the opening of Nepal to foreigners after 1951 offered travelers a new destination for imbibing Eastern spiritual traditions. The post-War condition was fertile for several radical movements. Many people found solace in traveling to escape from the brutal after-effects of the Second World War. The socio-political and economic conditions of Europe and America post-World War II necessitated the need to travel to overcome the trauma of the war. For women, travel became the means of empowerment and at the same time a spiritual endeavour. The knowledge and understanding of theology and other spiritual knowledge led many travelers to be part of the ‘hippie trail’, in which Nepal is the final destination. This book offers a fresh outlook to women’s perceptions of a second home in a foreign land.

Theopoetics is a plea for a more fully human way of speaking about God in the twenty-first century, a way that offers new life to dry and dying platitudes. Drawing deeply from linguistics, theology, philosophy, and even quantum mechanics, theopoetics attempts to reimagine the relationship between human language and speech about God through poetic phrasing and metaphor--thereby proposing a new God-talk. Interacting with selective works from within the discipline, Silas Krabbe offers a guide that not only maps the diversity of thought but also charts what is going on in the depths of the field. Using the metaphor of a river, Krabbe attempts to baptize the reader into theopoetics by leading an immersive exploration: sounding its waters, hearing resonances and echoes, feeling its flow, and becoming entangled in the braiding of its streams. Plunging ever more deeply into the differences that exist within the discourse of theopoetics, Krabbe is able to identify common aims, currents, and even hints of where this theopoetic river may lead. Not only a text about theopoetics, A Beautiful Bricolage is a work of theopoetics itself. It thereby draws the reader into a mode of inquiry that repudiates those who attempt to grasp it.

Cultures in Conversation introduces readers to the ethnographic study of intercultural and social interactions through the analysis of conversations in which various cultural orientations are operating. Author Donal Carbaugh presents his original research on conversation practices in England, Finland, Russia, Blackfeet County, and the United States, demonstrating how each is distinctive in its communication codes--particularly in its use of symbolic meanings, forms of interaction, norms, and motivational themes. Examining conversation in this way demonstrates how cultural lives are active in conversations and shows how conversation is a principal medium for the coding of selves, social relationships, and societies. Representing 20 years of research, this volume offers unique insights into the ways social interactions not only gain shape from, but also are formative of cultures. It makes a significant contribution to communication scholarship, and will be illuminating reading in courses focusing on cultural communication, language and social interaction, intercultural pragmatics, and linguistics.