Cultural analysis is devoted to understanding the past as part of the present, as what we have around us. The essays gathered here represent the current state of an emerging field of enquiry.

Bringing together an immense range of presentations -museum displays, stories, paintings, postcards, and philosophyMieke Bal offers fresh insights into showing and telling, analyzing the effects of display and of the different sorts of looking they encourage. What is the difference between looking at art and looking at animals in a museum of natural history ? What is involved in looking at paintings and at postcardswhat about paintings and stories of the Rape of Lucrece, or colonial postcards and books ...

Presenting students with a how-to guide to doing research in cultural studies, The Practice of Cultural Studies is an original introduction to the field.The book combines clear introductions to the core concepts of cultural studies with a very practical sense of how research in the field actually gets done.

How is culture 'lived'? What are the best ways of investigating cultural life? This book offers practical guidance for researching cultural studies.

What is the point of bringing reflexive discourse called theory to bear on such diverse subjects as the Statue of Liberty, the dTcor of Freud's study, a fifteenth-century triptych and contemporary science, on Kant and postmodern literature, Indian traditions and the voice of a soprano? The Point of Theory works to reintegrate theory and theorizing into a culture disturbed by "anti-theorism" and political "in-correctness." In this book, twenty-two cultural theorists seek to make the workings of culture understandable.

In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider rocked the anthropological world with his announcement that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This volume provides a critical assessment of Schneider's ideas, focusing particularly on his contributions to kinship studies and the implications of his work for cultural relativism. Schneider's deconstruction of kinship as a cultural system sounded the death knell for a certain kind of kinship study. At the same time, it laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of kinship studies as a centerpiece of anthropological theory and practice. Now a mainstay of cultural studies, Schneider's conception of cultural relativism revolutionized thinking about kinship, family, gender, and culture. For feminist anthropologists, his ideas freed kinship from the limitations of biology, providing a context for establishing gender as a cultural construct. Today, his work bears on high-profile issues such as gay and lesbian partners and parents, surrogate motherhood, and new reproductive technologies. Contributors to The Cultural Analysis of Kinship appraise Schneider's contributions and his place in anthropological history, particularly in the development of anthropological theory. Situating Schneider's work and influence in relation to major controversies in the history of anthropology and of kinship studies, they examine his important insights and their limitations, consider where his approach might lead, and offer alternative paradigms. Inspiring many with his keenly critical mind and willingness to flout convention, discomfiting others with his mercurial temperament, David Schneider left an ineradicable mark on his field. These frank observations on the man and his ideas offer a revealing glimpse of one of modern anthropology's most complex and paradoxical figures.

The first comprehensive and statistically significant analysis of the predictive powers of each cross-cultural model, based on nation-level variables from a range of large-scale database sources such as the World Values Survey, the Pew Research Center, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the UN Statistics Division, UNDP, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, TIMSS, OECD PISA. Tables with scores for all culture-level dimensions in all major cross-cultural analyses (involving 20 countries or more) that have been published so far in academic journals or books. The book will be an invaluable resource to masters and PhD students taking advanced courses in cross-cultural research and analysis in Management, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and related programs. It will also be a must-have reference for academics studying cross-cultural dimensions and differences across the social and behavioral sciences.