In this article the author explains the social role of Muslim woman in a postmodern society through a public symbol of her identity--the veil. The article's thesis is that the Muslim women's manifestation of their Islamic denomination through veiling and wearing appropriate clothes (in the case of men through growing beards and wearing clothes considered appropriate for them) signifies an expre...

A content analysis of 1387 commercials broadcast in China and Hong Kong in 1993 and 1998 was conducted using Cheng and Schweitzer’s framework of cultural values. The five cultural values that dominated Chinese television advertising were ‘modernity’, ‘family’, ‘tradition’, ‘technology’ and ‘collectivism’. The five dominant cultural values in Hong Kong television advertising were ‘quality’, ‘eff...

In the course of his short literary life, Liu Na'ou travelled across four geographical areas: Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as five cultural domains: Taiwanese, Japanese, French, English and Chinese. The transnational facet of Liu's modernist writing is not merely literary or cultural but political and historical. The earliest modernist writing in China was initiated on the basis...

the challenge to re-think post-modernity opens up if we see modernity in the light ef the phenomenological reduction. 5uspending belief in the central tenets of modern philosopf?y discloses that the so-called post• modernist pbilosopby mere!j extends the earlier projec: the failure o] calculative reason trumpeted by po-mo thinkers need not result in the end of the proiect ef rationality. rather...

The relationship between real and virtual spaces has produced a new urbanity, extending from post modernity, deconstructivism to super modernity. By creating virtual metaphors and mental maps of different spatial layers within post modern cities, public spaces are experienced as sequential images and overlapping layers of events as they emerge. An urban experiment is introduced that proposes a ...

The postmodern discourse on the nature of knowledge is constructed on the authority and reliability which different forms of knowledge claim in various walks of life. This discourse has challenged the major formations of modernity, claiming a sort of objective, authentic and reliable knowledge in comparison with non-evidential forms of knowledge such as arts, literature and revelation. ‘Histori...

The collection of papers in this volume of The Anthropology of East Europe Review comes from a panel that Nancy Ries and I organized at the 98 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in Chicago, Illinois. The title of this double-panel session (which is the title of this special issue) was “Why Post-Socialism is Good to Think: The Anthropology of Transforming States.” We...

Most studies of solitude have focused on the modern individualized sense of solitude, located or originating in urbanized Western cultures where solitude is seen as a companion to urban modernity. In this perspective the larger historical and cultural context goes almost unnoticed together with the fact that the preoccupation with solitude, in various forms and functions, has been around for a ...

A phatic technology’s purpose is to establish, develop and maintain personal and social relationships. The invention and development of phatic technologies, and their influence on human society, have been accelerating rapidly in the past decade, exemplified by the growth of social networking technologies based on the Internet. To understand this acceleration we propose to analyse the phenomenon...

There is no description of modernity without functional differentiation. The distinction of function systems such as economy, science, art, or religion, is a key to modernity. Modern science, however, applies and implies rather than studies functional differentiation without providing exact definitions of function systems or investigating how many of these systems actually exist. The present ar...