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Undoing Culture
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Undoing Culture
Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity



August 1996 | 192 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
"This is a worthwhile discussion of postmodernity and modernity that overlaps theoretically with Chris Rojek's Decentring Leisure. Excellent Bibliography and Index." --Choice What is the relationship between culture and postmodernism? How has globalization influenced our understanding of culture? This shrewd book, written by one of the most accomplished and authoritative writers in the field, is a major contribution to rethinking culture. Mike Featherstone examines how culture is produced, reproduced, challenged, and transformed under current social conditions. Undoing Culture provides a guide to the dramatic changes that everyday life is currently witnessing and also suggests ways of analyzing these changes in theoretically meaningful ways. It explores the meaning of ordered life, the heroic life, revolutionary myth, symbolic power, and forms of consumer culture. What emerges is a highly original and significant attempt to ground culture in the context of globalization and postmodernism. Written with the customary clarity and judicious style that readers have come to expect from this author, Undoing Culture will be essential reading for students in the sociology of culture and cultural studies.

 
Introduction
Globalizing Cultural Complexity

 
 
The Autonomization of the Cultural Sphere
 
Personality, Unity and the Ordered Life
 
The Heroic Life and Everyday Life
 
Globalizing the Postmodern
 
Global and Local Cultures
 
Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity
 
Travel, Migration and Images of Social Life

`What David Chaney has called the "cultural turn" in recent sociology is more than ably reflected and pursued in this thoroughly admirable text by Mike Featherstone. Of course, this should cause little surprise; Theory, Culture & Society, with which Featherstone is so involved... has provided much of the space and encouragement for the sociological examination of the cultural. Yet Undoing Culture demonstrates that Featherstone's importance to the cultural turn goes far beyond his institutional position as an enabler.... There can be little doubt that sociologists of culture and their students will find much of merit and stimulation in Featherstone's work' - The Sociological Review

`Featherstone argues that globalization and modernization each hold two contradictory aspects: one toward increasing order and the other toward change and chaos. In this interesting and important book, he focuses primarily on a neglected aspect of modernization as a world culture of competing differences, power struggles, and cultural prestige.... Featherstone's analyses of prominent social theorists from Baudrillard to Bauman is impressive. This is a worthwhile discussion of postmodernity and modernity' - Choice

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