Roger Friedland - Böcker

Part memoir, part cultural exploration, Amore follows an American father as he and his teenage daughters journey into the heart of Rome, into the way Romans love and what they have to teach about its erosion in America. As his twin daughters approached adolescence, sociologist Roger Friedland was worried. The thing that most bothered him was not the erotic heat of its youth culture, but the lovelessness of its sex. Offered the chance to live and teach in Rome, Roger and his wife, Debra, seized the opportunity to take their family to live in a city where love is alive, family bonds hold, divorce and rape are rare, and "ciao, bella" is a constant refrain. In Amore, Friedland shares the stories of his family's enchanted and unnerving passage into the heart of Rome and considers its lessons for America where love is at risk. Amore is a love story, a family's voyage between two states of feeling.

For at least a half-century, there has been active debate on the nature of the economy between classical and neoclassical economists and advocates of a more -substantivist- approach (most recently, cultural anthropologists)... The essays are uniformly well written and excellently documented.

The fall of the Berlin wall, the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the war in the Persian Gulf, the conflict in Bosnia--such events have been fundamentally affected by modern technology. As we become instant spectators of war, famine, and revolution, time and space assume new global meanings. This provocative volume presents an eclectic group of contributors who attempt to make sense of the "now" and the "here" that define the modern age. The essays, by anthropologists, religionists, geographers, linguists, sociologists, and historians, explore the temporal and spatial facets of social life. Their range is remarkable and includes English landscape painting, talk in corporations, agoraphobic women, the ecological structure of Los Angeles, the cosmology of the Holocaust, and the ritual spaces of Buddhist Japan and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The editors' introduction addresses the diversity of these empirical concerns and positions them within a rapidly expanding theoretical landscape.David Hockney's striking painting on the book jacket captures the tension between somewhere and everywhere, between space and place, now and just a moment ago--hence "nowhere" or "now/here."

Twentieth-century Jerusalem is doubly divided. As well as being a holy site for both Judaism and Islam, the city contains secular Israelis and Palestinians who ground their respective national identities within its borders. "To Rule Jerusalem" provides a historical and ethnographic account of how Jerusalem has become the battleground for conflicts both within and between the Israeli and Palestinian communities. Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht examine the relation between Zionism and Judaism and between Palestinian nationalism and Islam. Based on hundreds of interviews with powerful players and ordinary citizens over the course of a decade, this book evokes the ways in which these conflicts are experienced and managed in the life of the city. "To Rule Jerusalem" is a compelling study of the intertwining of religion and politics, exploring the city simultaneously as an ordinary place and an extraordinary symbol.

Existing theories of the nature of the state in Western capitalist democracies have been mostly propounded from one of three major theoretical perspectives, each emphasising a particular aspect of the state: the 'pluralist', which emphasises its democratic aspect: the 'managerial', which emphasises its bureaucratic elements: and the 'class', which focuses on its capitalistic aspect. Each of these theoretical perspectives has contributed something to our understanding of the state, but each also has its limitations. In this book, Alford and Friedland evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and present a new, synthetic framework for a more comprehensive theory of the state. Impartially reviewing the major historical and empirical works within each theoretical tradition, they reveal how empirical study has been shaped by theoretical assumptions. They agree that each perspective has a distinctive 'power' to understand part of the reality of the modern state, although it is powerless to explain other parts. In each case, the part that can be explained is the perspective's 'home domain', or the aspect of the state that it emphasises, while other aspects are either rejected or reinterpreted. The authors argue that the state cannot be adequately understood unless full account is taken of each of these home domains, and they suggest how the contributions of each perspective to the explanation of its own domain can be integrated into a new, and more powerful, theory.

Compelling historical and ethnographic account of the twentieth-century struggle for Jerusalem. The volume examines how Jerusalem is doubly divided, on the one hand between Israelis and Palestinians, each of whom ground their national identities in the city, as well as within each nation between those who put primacy in the democratic decisions of their nations and those who would yield to a higher divine law. Professors Friedland and Hecht explore how Jerusalem has figured as a battleground in conflicts over the relation between Zionism and Judaism and between Palestinian nationalism and Islam. Based on hundreds of interviews with powerful players and ordinary citizens over the course of a decade, this book evokes the ways in which these conflicts are experienced and managed in the life of the city.

American sociology is in the midst of a cultural turn. Where sociologists once spurned culture, today they embrace and explore it, seeking to understand the construction of social forms and the way culture matters. Problems of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality, form and narrativity, topics traditionally within the humanists' purview, have come to the fore as sociologists increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames and cognitive schema in their theorizations of social process and institution. Matters of Culture, first published in 2004, is an introduction to some of the best theorizing in cultural sociology, focusing in particular on questions of power, the sacred and cultural production. With a major theoretical introduction that lays out the internal structure of the field and its relation to cultural studies and contributions from leading academics Matters of Culture offers students and professors alike a representative range of the types of cultural sociological analysis available.

American sociology is in the midst of a cultural turn. Where sociologists once spurned culture, today they embrace and explore it, seeking to understand the construction of social forms and the way culture matters. Problems of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality, form and narrativity, topics traditionally within the humanists' purview, have come to the fore as sociologists increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames and cognitive schema in their theorizations of social process and institution. Matters of Culture, first published in 2004, is an introduction to some of the best theorizing in cultural sociology, focusing in particular on questions of power, the sacred and cultural production. With a major theoretical introduction that lays out the internal structure of the field and its relation to cultural studies and contributions from leading academics Matters of Culture offers students and professors alike a representative range of the types of cultural sociological analysis available.