The Righting of Passage
Subtitle: Perceptions of Change After Modernity (Contemporary Ethnography)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: March 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780812237764
Subjects: Sociology, Social Studies; Social Psychology; General; Archaeology / Anthropology; Philosophy; Social change; Anthropology - Cultural; Psychology & Psychiatry / Social Psychology; Ethnology; Rites and ceremonies
First sentence: Not long ago, on an expedition to a video store with my then-twelve-year-old son, I was taken aback by a frightening display of a new interactive game that invites one to engage in cellular warfare as an embodied microorganism.
Description: "In this book, David Napier offers a novel argument that accounts for diffuse and flexible notions of the self while also illustrating how a coherent, communicating self persists amid such apparent instability. This he does by arguing something entirely counterintuitive to both modernist and postmodernist positions - namely, that modernity's increasing separation of embodiment from meaning not only slows down human transformation but attenuates human growth by encouraging us to perceive risk as largely pathological. Today the combined forces of stress management, depth psychology, therapeutic writing, dislocated meaning, and institutional conformity work together to produce a reduction - not a proliferation - of change in human life."--Jacket.