The antiquity of humans in the New World had been a controversy during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Insight into just how long ago the incursion of people into the Americas occurred came in 1927, when lanceolate projectile points were found with the remains of extinct bison near Folsom, New Mexico. Then, in 1932
For sociologists subscribing to a hierarchical model of culture, sports may be regarded as its antithesis: a bodily practice, of little cultural consequence, gazed on by passive spectators for the enrichment of the leisure and media industries. The neglect of sports as a sociological subject until relatively recently may be attributed to a common resistance
Since at least the nineteenth century, culture has been one of the most difficult, richly connotative concepts to define. While it is widely accepted that its roots are to be found in the Latin verb colere, among whose associated meanings is “to cultivate,” this has been all but forgotten in ordinary language. Being a web
The Aurignacian is an early Upper Paleolithic, or Late Stone Age, culture dating to between 34,000 and 27,000 years before the present (BP). Aurignacian artifacts have long been considered representative of the culture of the first anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) to migrate into continental Europe. This is currently an issue of intense debate
As the social historian Philippe Aries reminds us (1962), “childhood” and “youth” are socially constructed conceptions of age and not biological givens. Indeed, the idea that a transitional period of youth occurs between childhood and adulthood is a relatively recent invention, beginning with Rousseau’s Emile in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, which celebrated childhood and delineated stages of
Philosophers of the European Enlightenment defined science in opposition to culture or humanistic knowledge. Science was truth based on verifiable observation and certain logical procedures, and thus stood opposed to all traditional beliefs. Francis Bacon, who initiated the philosophical tradition of elaborating ”demarcation principles” to distinguish science from non science, differentiated science from all knowledge
“Culture” is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” according to Williams (1976, 87). Originally used to describe the process of tending, culture evolved as metaphor, as noun, and as a reference to a physical object. Today, culture is regarded as a unifying system, a worldview, a civilization, and
While there may be some debate over whether Russia’s or Canada’s version of “Naked News” came first, for many social observers the beginning of serious news delivered by naked women or women in the act of stripping indicates a crisis in the practice of journalism. To say that the boundary between journalism and entertainment has
Consumer culture, the creation and cultivation of self-and social meaning from the marketing, purchase, and display of commodified goods, is a central characteristic of modern and postmodern society. Although related to other forms of culture, such as commercial culture, material culture, and popular culture, it is a theoretically distinct realm that includes the symbolic qualities
The study of the culture industries has become increasingly more complex in the field of communications in light of the ways in which expanding research into their organization, activities, and logics connects with questions and arguments concerning culture, commercialism, and social control. Largely originating in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)