Culture Troubles - $29.00 - Chabal, Patrick; Daloz, Jean-Pascal - 9780226100418

Culture Troubles
Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning
Chabal, Patrick
Daloz, Jean-Pascal
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BOOK SUMMARY
Understanding politics in nations other than your own is a perilous exercise. If you were to read two newspaper articles on the same topic but from different countries, you would likely find two very different interpretations of the same event. But how we

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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Understanding politics in nations other than your own is a perilous exercise. If you were to read two newspaper articles on the same topic but from different countries, you would likely find two very different interpretations of the same event. But how we think about what is written in our own country seems somehow less distorted, less wrong. So which side is right? And from what reference point can we begin to compare the two?

Culture Troubles is a systematic reevaluation of the role of culture in political analysis. Here, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz contend that it is unwise to compare different societies without taking into account culture, which in their interpretation is not a system of values, but rather a system of inherited meanings and symbols. This cultural approach, they argue, can attribute meaning to political comparison, and they outline the shape of that approach, one that draws from an eclectic range of sources. Illustrating the sharpness and acuity of their methods, they proceed with a comparative study of the state and political representation in three very different nationsFrance, Nigeria, and Swedento untangle the many ways that culture informs our understanding of political events. As a result, Culture Troubles offers a rational starting point from which we may begin to understand foreign politics.

AUTHOR BIO
Patrick Chabal is University Professor at King's College London. Jean-Pascal Daloz is a senior Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) research fellow at the Bordeaux Institute for Political Studies (CERVL) and associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: The Politics of Culture Why comparative politics cannot handle culture What is culture and how does it matter? Part I. Framework Introduction 1. Critique of Grand Theory The universalist fallacy Red herrings 2. Working Assumptions The implications of diversity Against reductionism 3. Analytical Foundations
Understanding differences Dead ends Part II. Approach
Introduction 4. Culture and Political Identity How who we are matters to what we believe.... ....but do we do what we are? 5. Culture and Political Order What power means in its local context The political uses of culture 6. Culture and Political Change The myth of timelessness The fury of modernity Part III. Method Introduction 7. Thinking Inductively The terrain The analysis 8. Thinking Semiotically Reading the evidence Translation Part IV. Application
Introduction 9. The Meanings of the State Culture and states States in mind 10. The Guises of Political Representation An interpretative approach to representation Ostentation, modesty and legitimacy: representation in context Conclusion: In Defence of Eclecticism The illusions of paradigmatic ecumenism The perennial dilemma of ethnocentrism or the problem of reference On the merit of conceptual and theoretical eclecticism Bibliography Index

MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0226100413
ISBN(13-digit): 9780226100418
Dewey Decimal: 306.2
Library of Congress: 2005052862
Book Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 395

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