Markets and movements -- Escaping asceticism: the birth of the health food industry -- Living and working on the margins: a countercultural industry develops -- Feeding the talent: the path to legitimacy -- Questioning authority: the state and medicine strike back -- Style: identifying the audience for natural foods -- Drawing the line: boundary disputes in the natural foods field -- Cultural change and economic growth: assessing the impact of a business-led movement.

Whether they were utopian communitarians, sun-seeking gurus, or Protestant health reformers, Southern California's spiritual seekers drew on the United States' deepening global encounters and consumer cultures to pair religious and personal reinvention with cultural and spiritual revitalization. Through a rereading of the region's cultural landscape, Golden States provides an alternative history of California religion and spirituality, showing that seekers developed a number of paths to fulfillment that enhanced the region's lifestyle brand. Drawing on case studies as varied as surfing and yoga practices, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, and the only designated "Blue Zone" in the United States, this work explores the long-term impact of alternative beliefs on the region. In doing so, it highlights the ongoing tensions between privileging personal choice and pursuing social good as communities navigated whether the commitment to the emotional and therapeutic needs and desires of individual believers should be pursued at the expense of broader efforts to achieve collective well-being.

A comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States that presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American policy and law from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine, Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.

We face two global threats: the climate crisis and a crisis of democracy. Located at the crux of these crises, sustainable cities build on the foundations and resources of democracy to make our increasingly urban world more resilient and just. Sustainable Cities in American Democracy focuses on this effort as it emerged and developed over the past decades in the institutional field of sustainable cities—a vital response to environmental degradation and climate change that is shaped by civic and democratic action. Carmen Sirianni shows how various kinds of civic associations and grassroots mobilizing figure in this story, especially as they began to explicitly link conservation to the future of our democracy and then develop sustainable cities as a democratic project. These organizations are national, local, or multitiered, from the League of Women Voters to the Natural Resources Defense Council to bicycle and watershed associations. Some challenge city government agencies contentiously, while others seek collaboration; many do both at some point. Sirianni uses a range of analytic approaches—from scholarly disciplines, policy design, urban governance, social movements, democratic theory, public administration, and planning—to understand how such diverse civic and professional associations have come to be both an ecology of organizations and a systemic and coherent project. The institutional field of sustainable cities has emerged with some core democratic norms and civic practices but also with many tensions and trade-offs that must be crafted and revised strategically in the face of new opportunities and persistent shortfalls. Sirianni’s account draws ambitious yet pragmatic and hopeful lessons for a “Civic Green New Deal”—a policy design for building sustainable and resilient cities on much more robust foundations in the decades ahead while also addressing democratic deficits in our polarized political culture.

Globalizing Organic focuses on the globalization of a culture of "eating for change" and the ways in which local meanings attached to the production of foods embed ecological and social values. Rafi Grosglik examines how organic agriculture was integrated in Israel—a state in which agriculture was a key mechanism in promoting Jewish nationalism and in time has become highly mechanized and technologically sophisticated. He explores how organic food, which signifies environmental protection and social equity, has been realized in a country where environmental issues are perceived as less pressing compared to inner political conflicts, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and recurrent wars. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and analysis of historical documents and media, Grosglik traces how alternative food movements are affected by global and local trends. He covers a wide range of topics, including the ethos of halutzim ("pioneers," Zionist ideological farmers and workers), the utopian visions of the Israeli kibbutz, indigeneity that is claimed both by Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, biblical meanings that have been ascribed to environmental and countercultural ideas, the Americanization of Israeli society, and its neoliberalized economy.

The new, updated edition of the authoritative and comprehensive survey of modern sociology The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition is an authoritative survey of the major topics, current and emerging trends, and contemporary issues in the study of human social relationships and institutions. A collection of contributions from globally-recognized scholars and experts explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of sociology, new and established debates, and the most current research in the field. Broad in scope, this book covers a multitude of topics ranging from crime, urbanization, sexuality, and education to new questions surrounding big data, authoritarian capitalism, and the rise of nationalism. Since the first edition of the Companion was published, new developments have emerged and new problems have been created such as the omnipresence of social media, political and institutional upheaval, and the global refugee and immigration crises. This revised and updated second edition describes and explains social changes that have occurred in the past several years, both within the field of sociology and society as a whole. Previous material has been updated to reflect current research, while eleven new chapters address topics including feminist theory, debt and social change, and armed conflict and war. This comprehensive volume: Offers an engaging and accessible guide to the field of sociology, revised and updated for the second edition Presents wide-ranging, comprehensive coverage of the discipline Explores issues of contemporary relevance such as digital media and consumption Reflects state-of-the-art scholarship and contemporary debates New chapters for the second edition cover essential topics including feminist theory, armed conflict, big data, authoritarian capitalism, debt and social change, and the rise of nationalism The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition is an invaluable resource for academics and graduate students, researchers, scholars, and educators in the discipline of sociology and allied fields such as anthropology, human geography, political science, and psychology.

We make our life with things, surrounded by technical artefacts and technologies. They are fundamental in the way we see and act, but only sometimes we are plenty aware of this. Where do these things come from? How were they produced? How do they define our possibilities and our identities? How do they determine the way we remember and project our future? This book explores these and other related questions analysing the relationships between technology, material memory, and forms of life, emphasizing the active and constitutive role that technologies play in our remembering with things. It argues that our common understanding of memory and its technological mediation is determined by a static view of technology, memory, and culture, and that this view is burdened by a dualism between the material and the immaterial, that overlooks the active role of memory and technology in our present forms of life and in the shaping of our future. To overcome this static view and its dualism, this book proposes a dynamic view of memory, technology, and culture, emphasising the active and constitute role of technologies in the shaping of our forms of life and including themes unusual in memory studies, such as the production of technology and the concept of nature. The approach of this book is theoretical and philosophical, but interdisciplinary, incorporating ideas and concepts from various disciplines, particularly the arts, humanities and social sciences.