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Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.
What exactly does it mean to be a close friend? With smart phones, social media and the Internet, the technical barriers to making new friends and keeping up with old ones have all but disappeared. What remains are more subtle borders resulting from cultural diversity, and these can be much more perplexing to navigate. These cultural differences in close friendships are the primary focus of Friends Beyond Borders.It turns out that we in the U.S. think quite differently about our friendships compared to people in many other cultures around the globe. Cross-cultural research shows that people from various cultures can have very different, even conflicting, ideas about what it means to be a good friend. One's friendly intentions can be seen as patently unfriendly by someone from another culture—they simply wouldn't fit with how others think about, feel about, and behave toward their close friends. In Friends Beyond Borders, Roger Baumgarte demystifies these differing approaches to friendship. He describes six distinct cultural styles of close friendship, each comparing what might be typical in the U.S. with what would be found in contrasting cultures. Although each culture might have a dominant style of friendship, he makes it clear that all six of these styles can be found within any given culture, especially one as diverse as the U.S. You will come away from this book thinking about your own friendships, whether or not they cross cultural borders, in new and creative ways. You might very well gain a renewed enthusiasm for your closest friends. Beyond cultural issues, there's also a chapter devoted to Facebook, taking primarily a social research perspective, attempting to explain and defend clearly and empirically what social media have to do with close friendships. The results of these studies surprised even the author. There's a chapter entitled “Friends make good medicine” which reviews the empirical research demonstrating the numerous benefits, including health benefits, of cultivating close and satisfying friendships. People who regularly make time for their friends tend to live much longer, have lower levels of stress, and are even less likely to catch a cold. These are but a sampling of those benefits.Friends Beyond Borders will inspire you to invest more in your close friendships, and help you to appreciate more fully these important people in your lives. Written with a touch of humor and genuine affection, Friends Beyond Borders offers both a researcher's perspective and numerous personal anecdotes about the roles that culture and gender play in our experience of close friendship.
People all over the world make art and take pleasure in it, and they have done so for millennia. But acknowledging that art is a universal part of human experience leads us to some big questions: Why does it exist? Why do we enjoy it? And how do the world’s different art traditions relate to art and to each other? Art Without Borders is an extraordinary exploration of those questions, a profound and personal meditation on the human hunger for art and a dazzling synthesis of the whole range of inquiry into its significance. Esteemed thinker Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s encyclopedic erudition is here brought to bear on the full breadth of the world of art. He draws on neuroscience and psychology to understand the way we both perceive and conceive of art, including its resistance to verbal exposition. Through examples of work by Indian, Chinese, European, African, and Australianartists, Art Without Borders probes the distinction between accepting a tradition and defying it through innovation, which leads to a consideration of the notion of artistic genius. Continuing in this comparative vein, Scharfstein examines the mutual influence of European and non-European artists. Then, through a comprehensive evaluation of the world’s major art cultures, he shows how all of these individual traditions are gradually, but haltingly, conjoining into a single current of universal art. Finally, he concludes by looking at the ways empathy and intuition can allow members of one culture to appreciate the art of another. Lucid, learned, and incomparably rich in thought and detail, Art Without Borders is a monumental accomplishment, on par with the artistic achievements Scharfstein writes about so lovingly in its pages.
Often perceived as unbridgeable, the boundaries that divide humanity from itself--whether national, gender, racial, political, or imperial--are rearticulated through friendship. Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose edit a collection of essays that express the different ways women forge hospitality in deference to or defiance of the structures meant to keep them apart. Emerging out of postcolonial theory, the works discuss instances when the authors have negotiated friendship's complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain; offer fresh perspectives on feminists' invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation; reflect on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity; and unpack the details of transnational dissident friendships. Contributors: Lori E. Amy, Azza Basarudin, Himika Bhattacharya, Kabita Chakma, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Laurie R. Cohen, Esha Niyogi De, Eglantina Gjermeni, Glen Hill, Alka Kurian, Meredith Madden, Angie Mejia, Chandra T. Mohanty, A. Wendy Nastasi, Nicole Nguyen, Liz Philipose, Anya Stanger, Shreerekha Subramanian, and Yuanfang Dai.
Globalization is often thought of as an abstract process that happens "out there" in the world. But people are ultimately the driving force of global change, and people have bodies that are absent from current conversations about globalization. The original scholarly research and first-person accounts of embodiment in this volume explore the role of bodies in the flows of people, money, commodities, and ideas across borders. From Zumba fitness classes to martial arts to fashion blogs and the meanings of tattooing, the contributors examine migrating body practices and ideals that stretch across national boundaries.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE WINNER OF THE EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile." As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.
This book asks how we understand the relationship between ethics and power in humanitarian action.
Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.
In an era of rapidly increasing technological advances and international exchange, how did young people come to understand the world beyond their doorsteps? Focusing on Germany through the lens of the history of knowledge, this collection explores various media for children—from textbooks, adventure stories, and other literature to board games, museums, and cultural events—to probe what they aimed to teach young people about different cultures and world regions. These multifaceted contributions from specialists in historical, literary, and cultural studies delve into the ways that children absorbed, combined, and adapted notions of the world.