The Culture and Power of Knowledg.

In this book, Lynne Kelly explores the role of formal knowledge systems in small-scale oral cultures in both historic and archaeological contexts. In the first part, she examines knowledge systems within historically recorded oral cultures, showing how the link between power and the control of knowledge is established. Analyzing the material mnemonic devices used by documented oral cultures, she demonstrates how early societies maintained a vast corpus of pragmatic information concerning animal behavior, plant properties, navigation, astronomy, genealogies, laws and trade agreements, among other matters. In the second part Kelly turns to the archaeological record of three sites, Chaco Canyon, Poverty Point and Stonehenge, offering new insights into the purpose of the monuments and associated decorated objects. This book demonstrates how an understanding of rational intellect, pragmatic knowledge and mnemonic technologies in prehistoric societies offers a new tool for analysis of monumental structures built by non-literate cultures.

This volume brings together theoretical meditations and empirical studies of the intersection of culture, power and history in social life. Contributors bring a diversity of critical sociological perspectives and subject matters to this important edited book.

This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. It refers to religious and secular traditions and to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. It covers Said's heterogeneous corpus--from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction lies behind Said's cultural criticism, and his notion of intellectual responsibility.

Unique in its attention to both cultural and critical perspectives, this book contributes strongly to the advance of developmental psychology beyond the cognitive-developmental paradigm that has defined the field for the past quarter century. It provides insights from critical pedagogy, cultural psychology, feminism, postmodernism, critical theory, and semiotics and offers new perspectives into the lived experiences of children, adolescents, and adults in the contemporary world.