Cultural Icons series – serie

'An extremely accessible, well structured and imaginative reading of market and social theory in terms of the myth of the Wild West frontier'

New Formations

This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff).

Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time. It is a unique discussion of market and social theory using cultural myth. Will Wright fully explores how issues of individualism, freedom and inequality in the myth of the Wild West connect up with questions of white, male superiority and environmental degradation.

This book uses one of the most popular accessories of childhood, the Barbie doll, to explain key aspects of cultural meaning.

Some readings would see Barbie as reproducing ethnicity and gender in a particularly coarse and damaging way - a cultural icon of racism and sexism. Rogers develops a broader, more challenging picture. She shows how the cultural meaning of Barbie is more ambiguous than the narrow, appearance-dominated model that is attributed to the doll. For a start, Barbie's sexual identity is not clear-cut. Similarly her class situation is ambiguous. But all interpretations agree that, with her enormous range of lifestyle `accessories', Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, standardized and oozing fake sincerity.

This book is one of the first to take an in-depth look at how an advertising image works. It situates the Nike swoosh logo in terms of political economy, sociology, culture and semiotics.

Nike Culture describes and deconstructs the themes and structures of Nike's advertising, outlines the contradictions between image and practice, and explores the logic of the sign economy. In addition, by focusing on issues revolving around representations of race, class and gender, the desire for both community and recognition, and the construction of sport as a spiritual enterprise, the book offers insights into the cultural contradictions embedded in sports culture.