Douglas Holmes develops the concept of peasant-worker society to analyze a kind of social formation that has until now gone largely unrecognized and unstudied. His book portrays the dissonant crosscurrents created at the interface of urban industrial and rural peasant spheres. Examining the region of Friuli in northeast Italy, it shows how wage labor was adopted by country folk who maintained ties to small-scale cultivation and indigenous traditions. Holmes draws on the Weberian notion of the "disenchantment of the world" to examine the cultural issues that animate peasant-worker life. What emerges is a vivid picture of the economic, political, religious, and ethnic struggles that infuse the peasant-worker milieu, as traditional representations of reality are pitted against bureaucratic definitions and formulas emanating from Church, state, and market institutions. In addition to providing a general theoretical framework for the analysis of peasant-worker society and culture, Cultural Disenchantments is the first anthropological study of Friuli to be published in English. As such, it elaborates on the historical insights developed by Carlo Ginzburg in his famous study of sixteenthcentury agrarian cults and folk traditions in Friuli.

Douglas Holmes develops the concept of peasant-worker society to analyze a kind of social formation that has until now gone largely unrecognized and unstudied. His book portrays the dissonant crosscurrents created at the interface of urban industrial and rural peasant spheres. Examining the region of Friuli in northeast Italy, it shows how wage labor was adopted by country folk who maintained ties to small-scale cultivation and indigenous traditions. Holmes draws on the Weberian notion of the "disenchantment of the world" to examine the cultural issues that animate peasant-worker life. What emerges is a vivid picture of the economic, political, religious, and ethnic struggles that infuse the peasant-worker milieu, as traditional representations of reality are pitted against bureaucratic definitions and formulas emanating from Church, state, and market institutions. In addition to providing a general theoretical framework for the analysis of peasant-worker society and culture, Cultural Disenchantments is the first anthropological study of Friuli to be published in English. As such, it elaborates on the historical insights developed by Carlo Ginzburg in his famous study of sixteenthcentury agrarian cults and folk traditions in Friuli.

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

New Mexico's Española Valley is situated in the northern part of the state between the fabled Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. Many of the Valley’s communities have roots in the Spanish and Mexican periods of colonization, while the Native American Pueblos of Ohkay Owingeh and Santa Clara are far older. The Valley's residents include a large Native American population, an influential "Anglo" or "non-Hispanic white" minority, and a growing Mexican immigrant community. In spite of the varied populace, native New Mexican Latinos, or Nuevomexicanos, remain the majority and retain control of area politics. In this experimental ethnography, Michael Trujillo presents a vision of Española that addresses its denigration by neighbors--and some of its residents--because it represents the antithesis of the positive narrative of New Mexico. Contradicting the popular notion of New Mexico as the "Land of Enchantment," a fusion of race, landscape, architecture, and food into a romanticized commodity, Trujillo probes beneath the surface to reveal the causes of social dysfunction brought about by colonization and te transition from a pastoral to an urban economy.

This experimental study of cultural dysfunction in New Mexico's Española Valley tells the stories of several of its Nuevomexicano residents, both famous and notorious.

Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the "disenchantment of the world." Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of "magic" and "enchantment" in people's everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.

“An intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction, and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War.” —Amanda Vaill, The New York Times Book Review In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño. Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them. “A valuable primer on the ways literature intertwined with politics during Franco’s reign.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Times “In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War . . . Prodigiously researched and beautifully written.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Renewing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination so that we can become compelling witnesses of the Gospel in today's culture. Christianity has an image problem. While the culture we inhabit presents us with an increasingly anti-Christian and disenchanted position, the church in the West has not helped its case by becoming anti-intellectual, fragmented, and out of touch with the relevancy of Jesus to all aspects of contemporary life. The muting of the Christian voice, its imagination, and its collective conscience have diminished the prospect of having a genuine missionary encounter with others today. Cultural apologetics attempts to demonstrate not only the truth of the Gospel but also its desirability by reestablishing Christianity as the answer that satisfies our three universal human longings—truth, goodness, and beauty. In Cultural Apologetics, philosopher and professor Paul Gould sets forth a fresh and uplifting model for cultural engagement—rooted in the biblical account of Paul's speech in Athens—which details practical steps for establishing Christianity as both true and beautiful, reasonable and satisfying. You'll be introduced to: The idea of cultural apologetics as distinct from traditional apologetics. The path from disenchantment with how we understand reality to re-enchantment with the reality of the spiritual nature of things. The practical tools of good cultural engagement: conscience, reason, and imagination. Equip yourself to see, and help others see, the world as it is through the lens of the Spirit—deeply beautiful, mysterious, and sacred. With creative insights, Cultural Apologetics prepares readers to share a vision of the Christian faith that is both plausible and desirable, offering clarity for those who have become disoriented in the haze of modern Western culture.

A historical narrative of how Israeli expertise in Arab affairs has contributed to the creation of cultural separatism between Jews and Arabs, a separatism that exacerbates the conflict between the two peoples.

The Language of Disenchantment explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions.