Checklist of Civilizations and Culture

Checklist of Civilizations and Culture PDF Author: A. Kroeber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351529234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Checklist of Civilizations and Culture contains all known principal civilizations and cultures of the world, with such definition as is possible of their area and time, their subdivisions and periods, and a brief indication of their character. The terms civilization and culture are used inclusively as essential synonyms of varying emphasis. There is no special difference between how the two words are used. They denote somewhat distinguishable grades of degree of the same large scale processes.Civilization currently carries an overtone of high development of a society; culture has become a customary term of universal denotation, applicable alike to high or low products and heritages of societies. This component or segment of culture or civilization is denoted here as ""value culture"" by A. L. Kroeber. It includes all purely aesthetic and intellectual activity as well as an element in every religion, and includes some part of morals, though morality is directed also to personal conduct and action.Every human society has its culture, complex or simple. The word culture should denote all possible ideals, but for the larger and richer cultures the term civilization may be more appropriate. Kroeber argues that the problem of recognizing the world's cultures is essentially one of natural history and involves dealing with all phenomena and then building up their patterns or classes step by step. This classic volume is now available in paperback. No better teacher of general anthropology can be imagined than A. L. Kroeber.

Checklist of Civilizations and Culture

Checklist of Civilizations and Culture PDF Author: A. Kroeber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351529234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book

Book Description
Checklist of Civilizations and Culture contains all known principal civilizations and cultures of the world, with such definition as is possible of their area and time, their subdivisions and periods, and a brief indication of their character. The terms civilization and culture are used inclusively as essential synonyms of varying emphasis. There is no special difference between how the two words are used. They denote somewhat distinguishable grades of degree of the same large scale processes.Civilization currently carries an overtone of high development of a society; culture has become a customary term of universal denotation, applicable alike to high or low products and heritages of societies. This component or segment of culture or civilization is denoted here as ""value culture"" by A. L. Kroeber. It includes all purely aesthetic and intellectual activity as well as an element in every religion, and includes some part of morals, though morality is directed also to personal conduct and action.Every human society has its culture, complex or simple. The word culture should denote all possible ideals, but for the larger and richer cultures the term civilization may be more appropriate. Kroeber argues that the problem of recognizing the world's cultures is essentially one of natural history and involves dealing with all phenomena and then building up their patterns or classes step by step. This classic volume is now available in paperback. No better teacher of general anthropology can be imagined than A. L. Kroeber.

Checklist of Civilizations and Culture

Checklist of Civilizations and Culture PDF Author: Alfred Louis Kroeber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315081489
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages :

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Civilizations

Civilizations PDF Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743216504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto once again proves himself a brilliantly original historian, capable of large-minded and comprehensive works; here he redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization. To Fernández-Armesto, a civilization is "civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment"...by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2,000-mile-long mountain range in South America have created the mold from which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures. In a grand tradition that is certain to evoke comparisons to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a panorama of cultural history. In Civilizations, the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the thousand-year-long deforestation of the trees that once covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian Ocean has served as the world's greatest trading highway for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives, but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in the summer and the other in the winter. In the words of the author, "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations, it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period, or society by society." Thus, seventeen distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations built on woodlands. Here, of course, are the familiar riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and the Nile; but also highland civilizations from the Inca to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea...even the Bushmen of Southern Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations of Chaco Canyon. More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly told -- of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod's tract on maritime trade in the early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops. Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a remarkable achievement...a tour de force by a brilliant scholar.

The Genius Checklist

The Genius Checklist PDF Author: Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537958
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients. What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory. Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks. Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!

Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965

Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 PDF Author: John S. Gilkeson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139491180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.

A Roster of Civilizations and Culture

A Roster of Civilizations and Culture PDF Author: Alfred Louis Kroeber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Water and Power in Past Societies

Water and Power in Past Societies PDF Author: Emily Holt
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846875X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Examines the many ways water has contributed to power structures in the past, with insights for contemporary water management. Water, an essential resource in all cultures, is at the heart of human power structures. Utilizing a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to Water and Power in Past Societies provide a broad introduction to the archaeology of water-related power structures. The studies herein explore the long history of water politics in human society, offering new insights into the power structures and inequalities surrounding irrigation systems, the collection of rainwater as a component of ancient industrial production, and sea water as a facilitator of communication, trade, and aggression. In addition to examining the role of different types of water in creating power relationships, the volume presents case studies from a variety of climatic regions, ranging from the very dry to the tropical. This geographical breadth facilitates cross-cultural comparison, making Water and Power in Past Societies an essential resource for instructors and students of the archaeology of water. Finally, in addition to reaching conclusions with significant implications for archaeologists and anthropologists, the volume has real contemporary relevance, often drawing explicit parallels with issues of current and future water management.

World Civilizations, Their History and Their Culture

World Civilizations, Their History and Their Culture PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages :

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Style and Civilizations

Style and Civilizations PDF Author: Alfred Louis Kroeber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis

Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis PDF Author: Johann P. Arnason
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846939X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Brings social and cultural anthropologists into dialogue with historical sociology and illustrates the continued potential of the concept of civilization for all participants. The concept of civilization has a long but checkered history in anthropology, and anthropological materials have been of great importance for the development of civilizational analysis in historical sociology. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis brings these diverse fields together and explores a wide range of topics pertaining to civilization, from classical theories to contemporary rhetorical discourses, including detailed case studies of concrete practices documented through archival and ethnographic research. While many scholars and the wider public still think of civilization in simplistic terms, viewing it in terms of Enlightenment notions of progress and evolution to higher stages, others have pluralized the term only to create essentialized units which are only tenuously linked to historical processes. In this book contributors use dynamic approaches, including those rooted in the seminal writings of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, opening up the dimension of civilization as an important complement to other key terms such as society and culture in social science and historical analysis.