"This is a very strong, thought-provoking [volume] . . . " —George Marcus As home photographs shift from the print format to digital technology and as video moves from the television screen to multimedia, it is crucial to develop new strategies of interpreting and analyzing these images. Visit the author's World Wide Web site: (2/19/03: Link is no longer active) http://www.facl.mcgill.ca/burnett/englishhome.html

Believing that the intellectual enterprise called philosophy is essentially a part of the cultural as well as historical experience of a people, that the concepts and problems that occupy the attention of philosophers placed in different cultural spaces or historical times generally derive directly from those spaces and times, and that philosophy, in turn, has been most relevant to the development of human cultures, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye gives reflective attention in this book to some of the concepts and problems that in his view feature most prominently in the contemporary African cultural, social, political, and moral experience. Such concepts and problems include the following: political legitimacy, development, culture and the pursuit of science and technology, political corruption, democracy, representation and the politics of inclusion, the status of cultural values in national orientation, understanding globalization, and others. It is these topics that are covered in the essays collected in this book. The unrelenting pursuit of the speculative activity by the philosopher in most cases eventuates in normative proposals; these normative proposals often embody a vision-a vision of an ideal human society in terms of its values, politics, and culture. Vision, understood here, has human-not supernatural or divine-origination and involvement and requires action by human beings in order for it to come into reality. A vision may derive from sustained critical evaluation of a culture or some elements of it. Gyekye attempts an articulation of the visions of the essays contained in the book. Even though philosophical ideas and concerns are originally inspired by and worked out in a cultural milieu, it does not necessarily follow, Gyekye strongly believes, that the relevance of those ideas and insights is to be tetheed to the cultures that produced them. For, more often than not, the relevance of those ideas, or at least some of them, transcends the confines of their own times and cultures and can be appreciated by other societies, or cultures, or generational epochs. This trans-cultural or trans-epochal or meta-contextual appeal or attraction of philosophical ideas and insights spawned by a particular culture or cluster of cultures or in specific historical times is to be put down to our common human nature-including our basic human desires and aspirations. Thus, most of the essays published here should be of interest to the global community-i.e., to cultures and societies beyond the African.

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together original writings from leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, it presents the latest material on the interpretation of the visual in modern culture. Among topics covered are: * the visual rhetoric of modernity * the drawings of Bonnard * recent feminist art * practices and perception in arts and ethics.

For hundreds of millennia, thousands of tribal cultures have thrived throughout the planet, each possessing a unique Vision, derived from thousands of years of evolution. With their deep ties to the world around them they experienced a communion with life, which offered a spiritual sense of overwhelming interconnectedness with the land, the plants, the animals, and each other. But one culture evolved to dominate all others, and linear history was created. Now a new reality has been built over the former surface of the planet, not only altering the biosphere, but also what is available for us to interact with and relate to. We struggle with the meaningless daily rote duties of our jobs. We live sequestered lives in houses and apartments, cut off from our neighbors, woefully uninformed in a sea of trivial information. Unprecedented resource extraction and energy consumption is heralding the greatest mass extinction of plant and animal life, the likes of which has not been seen in the last 65 million years. Cultural Vision exposes the ancient roots of these challenges as it reveals a new direction for the future of humanity based upon cooperation, true human values, and cultural diversity.

This book provides a review and synthesis of contemporary theory and research on organizational culture. Chapters focus on a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to culture, identifying types of organizational cultures, tracing phases in cultural evolution. In addition, several chapters are devoted to dealing with practical applications, such as the processes of socialization and identification, as well as the management of culture in organizations.

Into the Image examines visual technology sociologically and, in so doing, rejects the fashionable idea that the new visual technologies are displacing the real.

This collection of original and exciting essays explores the 'visual' character of contemporary culture. Examining film, painting, propaganda, photography and television, this is an indispensible guide to this field.