Carjacked The Culture Of The Automobile And Its Effect On Our Lives

Carjacked is an in-depth look at our obsession with cars. While the automobile's contribution to global warming and the effects of volatile gas prices are is widely known, the problems we face every day because of our cars are much more widespread and yet much less known -- from the surprising $14,000 per year that the average family pays each year for the vehicles it owns, to the increase in rates of obesity and asthma to which cars contribute, to the 40,000 deaths and 2.5 million crash injuries each and every year. Carjacked details the complex impact of the automobile on modern society and shows us how to develop a healthier, cheaper, and greener relationship with cars.

Now with SAGE Publishing! In a first-of-its-kind format, Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach is organized by problems and questions rather than topics, creating a natural discussion of traditional anthropological concerns such as kinship, caste, gender roles, and religion. This brief text promotes critical thinking through meaningful exercises, case studies, and simulations. Students will learn how to analyze their own culture and gain the tools to understand the cultures of other societies. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly updated and reorganized to emphasize contemporary issues around social and economic inequality, gender identity, and more. Included with this title: The password-protected Instructor Resource Site (formally known as SAGE Edge) offers access to all text-specific resources, including a test bank and editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides.

This book, the first full-length text on the subject, explores the everyday use of music listening while driving a car. It presents the relationship between cars and music in an effort to understand how music behaviour in the car can either enhance driver safety or place the driver at increased risk of accidents. A great deal of work has been done to investigate and reduce driver distraction and inattention, but this book is the first to focus on in-cabin aural backgrounds of music as a contributing factor to human error and traffic violations. Driving With Music begins by outlining the automobile, its relationship to society, and the juxtaposition of music with the automobile as a complete package. It then highlights concepts from the fields of music perception and cognition, and, within this framework, looks at the functional use of background music in our everyday lives. Driver music behaviours - both adaptive and maladaptive - are explored, with the focus on contradictions and ill-effects of in-car music listening. To conclude, implications, applications and countermeasures are suggested.

Using the influential and field-changing Writing Culture as a point of departure, the thirteen essays in Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology address anthropology's past, present, and future. The contributors, all leading figures in anthropology today, reflect back on the "writing culture" movement of the 1980s, consider its influences on ethnographic research and writing, and debate what counts as ethnography in a post-Writing Culture era. They address questions of ethnographic method, new forms the presentation of research might take, and the anthropologist's role. Exploring themes such as late industrialism, precarity, violence, science and technology, globalization, and the non-human world, this book is essential reading for those looking to understand the current state of anthropology and its possibilities going forward. Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran

The car - once everybody's dream and a key status symbol in most countries and cultures - has been extensively questioned in the last decades and in the last few years particularly. Urbanisation, traffic congestion, pollution problems, heavy reliance on scarce oil supplies, safety issues and ever-growing competition, have all provided significant business challenges for the automotive industry. Many car manufacturers have had to fundamentally rethink their design, brand and marketing strategies to thrive in a savvy, consumer-led culture, and markets that are becoming increasingly restrictive in size and opportunity. Auto Brand provides a roadmap to branding and marketing success in the automotive industry from a leading industry expert, featuring case studies from major car brands including Audi, BMW, Holden, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, Porsche, Saab, Seat, Skoda, Vauxhall, Volkswagen, and Volvo. It includes findings from 100 interviews conducted with CEOs, marketing managers, sales managers and sales people, from manufacturer level to small rural dealers, as well as industry experts, policy makers, free-stranding repair shops and professional organizations. Auto Brand is essential reading for marketing managers, sales managers, CEOs, development managers and dealers in all types of companies in the car industry including: manufacturers, national sales companies/importers, dealers, finance companies, insurance companies, free-standing repair shop channels and more. It is the first book to specifically address how to deal with the challenges facing the automotive industry and illustrates how companies can take advantage of new technologies, adapt to emerging trends in consumer behaviour, improve profitability and build even more successful brands in the future.

Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context explains key ways of understanding and interpreting the graphic designs we see all around us, in advertising, branding, packaging and fashion. It situates these designs in their cultural and social contexts. Drawing examples from a range of design genres, leading design historians Grace Lees-Maffei and Nicolas P. Maffei explain theories of semiotics, postmodernism and globalisation, and consider issues and debates within visual communication theory such as legibility, the relationship of word and image, gender and identity, and the impact of digital forms on design. Their discussion takes in well-known brands like Alessi, Nike, Unilever and Tate, and everyday designed things including slogan t-shirts, car advertising, ebooks, corporate logos, posters and music packaging.

Presents essays on all phases of the American automobile industry and the effect of its product on individual lives and the culture of the society.

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.

A Companion to Urban Anthropology BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY A Companion to Urban Anthropology “The city is becoming the basic currency of human – and non-human – life: a pile of interconnections which makes a series of difficult wholes. This volume navigates the anthropology of this medium with the greatest aplomb.” Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick A Companion to Urban Anthropology presents original essays on central concepts in urban anthropology and ethnography. Featuring contributions from more than 25 leading international scholars in urban studies, the readings cover a wide variety of topics. Each essay explores a key phenomenon and is grounded in the author’s original research along with findings of other urbanists. Classic issues such as built structures and urban planning, community, markets, and race lead to emergent areas of study including borders, sexualities, nature, extralegality, and resilience and sustainability. A Companion to Urban Anthropology offers revealing insights into the complex forces that continue to shape the urban experience.