This volume presents a wide ranging survey of cultural and sociological thought, bringing together key published essays from thinkers from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century.

A comprehensive anthology of the classical historians--from the early Greeks through the late Romans, right up to the beginnings of the Christian era.

Classic and Contemporary Readings in Sociology introduces the reader to sociological issues, theories and debates, providing extracts of primary source material, from both classical and contemporary theorists. Theorists are examined within their historical and sociological framework and the text provides an analysis of developments in sociological thought and research. The text is divided into four main sections: Part One, Origins and Concepts, surveys the history of the discipline of sociology and examines key themes which have influenced sociological theorising and investigation, in particular, social control, culture and socialisation. Parts Two and Four, Sociological Theories and Sociological Research, include a number of readings from the founding theorists and investigators, including Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Charles Booth, and also include more recent theoretical writing and research approaches. The focus on theory and research is extended by a selection of readings centred around the theme of Differences and Inequalities (Part Three); these readings provide students with examples of work from an area where sociological theorising and research has been widely applied.

Culture, Civilization and Human Society theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Culture, Civilization and Human Society deals, in two volumes and cover five main topics, with a myriad of issues of great relevance to our world such as: Theory and History of Culture; Cultural Heritage; Mass Culture, Popular Culture and Cultural Identity; Cultural Interaction; Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Culture which are then expanded into multiple subtopics, each as a chapter These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.

Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society. Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization theory. Reconsideration of these debates will enrich contemporary thinking regarding the history of American anthropology and international development

In recent times, especially under the influence of postmodernism, culture has often been construed as a critique of modernity. This wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of readings shows that such issues have always been at the centre of thought about the relationship between culture and civilization The readings are divided into three sections, linking the civilization debate to political theory, to the cultural debate and to the sociology and anthropology. The substantial extracts included give students a rare chance to engage at length with classic texts to appreciate the nature of the battle between the Enlightenment and its critics which has shaped current thought. Classical Readings on Culture and Civilisation presents essays from Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Nietzche, Georg Simmel, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Febvre, Alfred Weber, Robert E. Park and Norbert Elias.

Although the concept of 'civilization' has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to re-think it for contemporary times. Rethinking Civilizational Analysis points to an exhaustion in using 'the nation state' and 'world system' as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the 'soft power' variable of cultural factors involved in global aspects of development.

What are the aims of sociology? What are its objects of study? How relevant is the classical tradition to the practice of sociology today? This volume brings together internationally renowned and new scholars to consider the changing relationship between contemporary and classical sociology. Arguing that recent historical and theoretical developments make reconsideration timely, it suggests that whilst the classical tradition has a continuing pertinence, it is inevitably subject to ongoing reconfiguration. Assessing the explanatory value of classical and contemporary forms of sociology, interrogating social theory as both a form of explanation and a mode of practice, and considering the possible consequences for the discipline of questions about its subject matter, Sociological Objects steers a course between assertions about radical epistemological breaks on the one hand, and reverence for the classical tradition on the other. Rather, it emphasizes the value of reworking, reconsidering and reconfiguring sociological thought.

Fuyuki Kurasawa unearths what he terms "the ethnological imagination," a substantial countercurrent of thought that interprets and contests Western modernity's existing social order through comparison and contrast to a non-Western other. Kurasawa traces and critiques the writings of some of the key architects of this way of thinking: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault. In the work of these thinkers, Kurasawa finds little justification for two of the most prevalent claims about social theory: the wholesale "postmodern" dismissal of the social-theoretical enterprise because of its supposedly intractable ethnocentrism and imperialism, or, on the other hand, the traditionalist and historicist revival of a canon stripped of its intercultural foundations. Kurasawa's book defends a cultural perspective that eschews both the false universalism of "end of history" scenarios and the radical particularism embodied in the vision of "the clash of civilizations." It contends that the ethnological imagination can invigorate critical social theory by informing its response to an increasingly multicultural world--a response that calls for a reconsideration of the identity and boundaries of the West.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines--nationalist, Marxist, and religious--and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions and various Arab concerns.