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The Village and Its Discontents: Meaning and Criticism in Late Modernity is a hopeful collection of essays about villages in Southeast Asia and across the world. The'village'is an idea, a construct, and a way of organising society. Villages constitute the basic unit of analyses in the arts, humanities and the social sciences, and these issues are presented through the collection of essays featured in this book. The contributors hope to generate interest in studying villages, to understand the meanings that attach themselves to the concept of the village, and to gain greater insights into multidisciplinary knowledge and analyses in today's highly developed global society.

Filling a gap in the literature on communities, this innovative and critical volume proposes the concept of Cocoon Communities. Cocoon communities are highly significant for its members and yet not binding. Membership is voluntary and informal. Weaving together interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors offer theoretical perspectives and research findings on communities of international students, online mourners, farmworkers, expatriates, and ‘Westerners'in India. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in anthropology, education, social psychology and sociology.

The community concept has a long history and a prominent place in sociological thinking, yet remains a contentious concept. This e-book explores the diversity of current research on community and consumption, investigating, for example, imagined communities, consumption as community action and, conversely, the limitations of the notion of community.

Miranda Joseph explores sites where the ideal of community relentlessly recurs, from debates over art and culture in the popular media, to the discourses and practices of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. She shows how community legitimates the social hierarchies of gender, race, nation, and sexuality that capitalism implicitly requires. Exposing the complicity of social practices, identities, and communities with capitalism, this truly constructive critique opens the possibility of genuine alliances across such differences.

Despite the frequency with which the term'community'is used, it is hard to find any comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of community. This book tries to remedy this omission whilst taking seriously the idea that community can be of different kinds and can exist at different levels, and that these levels and kinds may come into conflict with one another. It focuses on the question of what kind of community is valuable at the level of the state. It then explores the limits that ideals of political community place upon cultural diversity within the state, and the limits that, in turn, ideals of global community place upon the self-determination of political communities. This book will be of interest to students of political theory, philosophy and international relations.

Although contemporary society seems to promote the values of individualism and mobility, this engrossing book is dedicated to the notion that human lives are enriched by participation in a social community that is integrated into the natural landscape of a particular place. The 34 contributors—who include David Ehrenfeld, Lynn R. Miller, Wendell Berry, Deborah Tall, David W. Orr, Robert Swann, and Susan Witt, as well as other philosophers, scientists, activists, economists, historians, farmers and ranchers, sociologists, theologians, and political scientists—offer an array of social and ecological perspectives on the nature of'community.'The editors, William Vitek and Wes Jackson, contend that a deeper understanding of communities is critical for the health of the planet and the human spirit. They offer a compelling collection of new and classic writings—many in the form of personal narrative—that extend E. F. Schumacher's ideas about the importance of human scale and Aldo Leopold's concept of biotic citizenship. Proposing eloquent defenses of community life and practical suggestions for becoming connected to others and native to a place, the writers explore the loss of community, the philosophical foundations of communities, and the current renewal of community life.

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