Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992.

Why are Americans being forced to consider homosexual acts as morally acceptable? Why has the US Supreme Court accepted the validity of same-sex "marriage", which, until a decade ago, was unheard of in the history of Western or any other civilization? Where has the "gay rights" movement come from, and how has it so easily conquered America? The answers are in the dynamics of the rationalization of sexual misbehavior. The power of rationalization-the means by which one mentally transforms wrong into right-drives the gay rights movement, gives it its revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest because the security of its rationalization requires universal acceptance. In other words, we all must say that the bad is good. At stake in the rationalization of homosexual behavior is the notion that human beings are ordered to a purpose that is given by their Nature. The understanding that things have an in-built purpose is being replaced by the idea that everything is subject to man's will and power, which is considered to be without limits. This is what the debate over homosexuality is really about-the Nature of reality itself. The outcome of this dispute will have consequences that reach far beyond the issue at hand. Already America's major institutions have been transformed-its courts, its schools, its military, its civic institutions, and even its diplomacy. The further institutionalization of homosexuality will mean the triumph of force over reason, thus undermining the very foundations of the American Republic.

In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and support these efforts through a strong welfare state.

Ever since their arrival in North America, European colonists and their descendants have struggled to explain the epidemics that decimated native populations. Century after century, they tried to understand the causes of epidemics, the vulnerability of American Indians, and the persistence of health disparities. They confronted their own responsibility for the epidemics, accepted the obligation to intervene, and imposed social and medical reforms to improve conditions. In Rationalizing Epidemics, David Jones examines crucial episodes in this history: Puritan responses to Indian depopulation in the seventeenth century; attempts to spread or prevent smallpox on the Western frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tuberculosis campaigns on the Sioux reservations from 1870 until 1910; and programs to test new antibiotics and implement modern medicine on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s. These encounters were always complex. Colonists, traders, physicians, and bureaucrats often saw epidemics as markers of social injustice and worked to improve Indians' health. At the same time, they exploited epidemics to obtain land, fur, and research subjects, and used health disparities as grounds for "civilizing" American Indians. Revealing the economic and political patterns that link these cases, Jones provides insight into the dilemmas of modern health policy in which desire and action stand alongside indifference and inaction. Table of Contents: List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Expecting Providence 2. Meanings of Depopulation 3. Frontiers of Smallpox 4. Using Smallpox 5. Race to Extinction 6. Impossible Responsibilities 7. Pursuit of Efficacy 8. Experiments at Many Farms Epilogue and Conclusions Notes Index Rationalizing Epidemics is a superb work of scholarship. By contextualizing his deep and thorough research in original documents within the larger literature on the history and nature of epidemics, Jones has produced a profound account of how epidemics are social and cultural phenomena, not just biological. This book will be of great interest to scholars of American Indian history and the history of medicine, and with its engaging and accessible writing style, it promises to be a book that students and the general public will appreciate as well. --Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut An imaginative and insightful approach to health and disease among American Indians, Rationalizing Epidemics represents a remarkable accomplishment. The breadth of reading and depth of research, the subtlety used in explaining each case, and the original approach to the material are altogether impressive. Jones's book undoubtedly will be a major contribution to American history. --Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Vanderbilt University

From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.

This book looks at the historic and contemporary links between music's connection to emotions and men's supposed discomfort with their own emotional experience. Looking at music tastes and distaste, it demonstrates how a sociological analysis of music and gender can actually lead us to think about emotions and gender inequalities in different ways.

Consider the vast array of things around you, from the building you are in, the lights illuminating the interior, the computational devices mediating your life, the music in the background, even the crockery, furniture and glassware you are in the presence of. Common to all these objects is that their concrete, visual and technological forms were invariably conceived, modelled, finished and tested in sites characterised as studios. Remarkably, the studio remains a peculiar lacuna in our understanding of how cultural artefacts are brought into being and how ‘creativity’ operates as a located practice. Studio Studies is an agenda setting volume that presents a set of empirical case studies that explore and examine the studio as a key setting for aesthetic and material production. As such, Studio Studies responds to three contemporary concerns in social and cultural thought: first, how to account for the situated nature of creative and cultural production; second, the challenge of reimagining creativity as a socio-materially distributed practice rather than the cognitive privilege of the individual; and finally, to unravel the parallels, contrasts and interconnections between studios and other sites of cultural-aesthetic and technoscientific production, notably laboratories. By enquiring into the operations, topologies and displacements that shape and format studios, this volume aims to demarcate a novel and important object of analysis for empirical social and cultural research as well to develop new conceptual repertoires to unpack the multiple ways studio processes shape our everyday lives.

The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music offers the first collection of source readings and new essays on the latest thinking in the sociology of music. Interest in music sociology has increased dramatically over the past decade, yet there is no anthology of essential and introductory readings. The volume includes a comprehensive survey of the field’s history, current state and future research directions. It offers six source readings, thirteen popular contemporary essays, and sixteen fresh, new contributions, along with an extended Introduction by the editors. The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music represents a broad reference work that will be a resource for the current generation of sociologically inclined musicologists and musically inclined sociologists, whether researchers, teachers or students.

This book analyzes the history of contemporary or 'new' music in the twentieth-century through the lens of the sociology of modern culture, linking the paradoxical aspects of twentieth-century music to the central processes in modern culture that are analyzed by sociology and social theory.