Defending Culture

This book concerns the implications and interrelations of key concepts of culture, defending an updated communicative notion of culture as meaning-making against a series of current challenges. The first part of the book distinguishes four main concepts of culture, presenting their histories, uses, limitations and mutual contradictions, which else often tend to be neglected. The second part scrutinizes neomaterialist and posthumanist critics' antihermeneutic efforts to escape the spirals of interpretation and meaning. Learning from such contestations, the third part summarizes the arguments and in five theses reconstructs a contemporary and comprehensive agenda for cultural studies, based on creative imagination and communicative mediation in the dynamic interface between meaning and materiality. This thus provides a survey of fundamental concepts and theories of culture for students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, while simultaneously also serving as an introductory guide to the contemporary debate in this field.

Provides a clear introductory presentation of how the concept of culture has been defined and may be used Combines an overview over the conceptual history of culture and cultural theory with an engaged debate of critical perspectives Utilizes a range of methods and approaches, including materialist and posthumanist theories relevant to students and academics science and technology studies as well as in courses focusing on cultural policy, gender, ethnicity and identity Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Johan Fornäs is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. He founded the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden and the journal Culture Unbound, and is a member of Academia Europaea. His previous books include Cultural Theory and Late Modernity (1995), Consuming Media (2007), Signifying Europe (2012), Capitalism (2013) and Europe Faces Europe (2017).

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction: Which culture?.- Chapter 2. The ontological concept of culture as cultivation.- Chapter 3. The anthropological concept of culture as lifeform.- Chapter 4. The aesthetic concept of culture as art.- Chapter 5. The hermeneutic concept of culture as meaning making.- Chapter 6. Interpretation.- Chapter 7. Things.- Chapter 8. Media.- Chapter 9. Culture returns.- Chapter 10. Further tasks.- Chapter 11. Conclusion: Cultural crosscurrents. <p