1.
European Graduate School
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Founded in Switzerland, the School operates on two locations, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Valletta, Malta. The EGS is a privately funded international graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies, EGS is not recognized by the Swiss University Conference, the main regulatory body for universities in Switzerland. The European Graduate School was founded in 1994 in Saas-Fee, Switzerland by the Swiss scientist, artist, the school initially offered programs in Expressive Arts Therapy, as a part of a broader initiative to develop a network of training institutes in Expressive Arts Therapy. A division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought was subsequently established by Wolfgang Schirmacher, three to six-day courses on socio-political, philosophical, and artistic inquiry are offered during the summer on campus. Chantal Akerman Pierre Alféri Sandy Stone
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Reims
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Reims, a city in the Grand Est region of France, lies 129 km east-northeast of Paris. The 2013 census recorded 182,592 inhabitants in the city of Reims proper and its river, the Vesle, is a tributary of the Aisne. Founded by the Gauls, it became a city during the period of the Roman Empire. Reims played a prominent ceremonial role in French monarchical history as the site of the crowning of the kings of France. The Cathedral of Reims housed the Holy Ampulla containing the Saint Chrême and it was used for the anointing, the most important part of the coronation of French kings. Reims functions as a subprefecture of the department of Marne, in the region of Grand Est. Although Reims is by far the largest commune in both its region and department, Châlons-en-Champagne is the capital and prefecture of both. Before the Roman conquest of northern Gaul, Reims, founded circa 80 BC as *Durocorteron, at its height in Roman times the city had a population in the range of 30,000 -50,000 or perhaps up to 100,000. Christianity had become established in the city by 260, at which period Saint Sixtus of Reims founded the bishopric of Reims, for centuries the events at the crowning of Clovis I became a symbol used by the monarchy to claim the divine right to rule. Meetings of Pope Stephen II with Pepin the Short, and of Pope Leo III with Charlemagne, took place at Reims, Louis IV gave the city and countship of Reims to the archbishop Artaldus in 940. Louis VII gave the title of duke and peer to William of Champagne, archbishop from 1176 to 1202, by the 10th century Reims had become a centre of intellectual culture. Archbishop Adalberon, seconded by the monk Gerbert, founded schools which taught the liberal arts. Louis XI cruelly suppressed a revolt at Reims, caused in 1461 by the salt tax, during the French Wars of Religion the city sided with the Catholic League, but submitted to Henri IV after the battle of Ivry. In August 1909 Reims hosted the first international meet, the Grande Semaine dAviation de la Champagne. Major aviation personages such as Glenn Curtiss, Louis Blériot and Louis Paulhan participated, hostilities in World War I greatly damaged the city. German bombardment and a subsequent fire in 1914 did severe damage to the cathedral, from the end of World War I to the present day an international effort to restore the cathedral from the ruins has continued. The Palace of Tau, St Jacques Church and the Abbey of St Remi also were protected and restored, the collection of preserved buildings and Roman ruins remains monumentally impressive. During World War II the city suffered additional damage, but in Reims, at 2,41 on the morning of 7 May 1945, General Eisenhower and the Allies received the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht
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University of Paris
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The University of Paris, metonymically known as the Sorbonne, was a university in Paris, France. Emerging around 1150 as an associated with the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris. Vast numbers of popes, royalties, scientists and intellectuals were educated at the University of Paris, following the turbulence of the French Revolution, education was suspended in 1793 whereafter its faculties were partly reorganised by Napoleon as the University of France. In 1896, it was renamed again to the University of Paris, in 1970, following the May 1968 events, the university was divided into 13 autonomous universities. Others, like Panthéon-Sorbonne University, chose to be multidisciplinary, in 1150, the future University of Paris was a student-teacher corporation operating as an annex of the Notre-Dame cathedral school. The university had four faculties, Arts, Medicine, Law, the Faculty of Arts was the lowest in rank, but also the largest, as students had to graduate there in order to be admitted to one of the higher faculties. The students were divided into four nationes according to language or regional origin, France, Normandy, Picardy, the last came to be known as the Alemannian nation. Recruitment to each nation was wider than the names might imply, the faculty and nation system of the University of Paris became the model for all later medieval universities. Under the governance of the Church, students wore robes and shaved the tops of their heads in tonsure, students followed the rules and laws of the Church and were not subject to the kings laws or courts. This presented problems for the city of Paris, as students ran wild, students were often very young, entering the school at age 13 or 14 and staying for 6 to 12 years. Three schools were especially famous in Paris, the palatine or palace school, the school of Notre-Dame, the decline of royalty brought about the decline of the first. The other two were ancient but did not have much visibility in the early centuries, the glory of the palatine school doubtless eclipsed theirs, until it completely gave way to them. These two centres were much frequented and many of their masters were esteemed for their learning, the first renowned professor at the school of Ste-Geneviève was Hubold, who lived in the tenth century. Not content with the courses at Liège, he continued his studies at Paris, entered or allied himself with the chapter of Ste-Geneviève, and attracted many pupils via his teaching. Distinguished professors from the school of Notre-Dame in the century include Lambert, disciple of Fulbert of Chartres, Drogo of Paris, Manegold of Germany. Three other men who added prestige to the schools of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève were William of Champeaux, Abélard, humanistic instruction comprised grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. To the higher instruction belonged dogmatic and moral theology, whose source was the Scriptures and it was completed by the study of Canon law. The School of Saint-Victor arose to rival those of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève and it was founded by William of Champeaux when he withdrew to the Abbey of Saint-Victor
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20th-century philosophy
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20th-century philosophy saw the development of a number of new philosophical schools— including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism. In terms of the eras of philosophy, it is labelled as contemporary philosophy. However, there have been disputes regarding both the terminology and the reasons behind the divide, as well as philosophers who see themselves as bridging the divide, in addition, philosophy in the twentieth century became increasingly technical and harder for lay people to read. Analytic philosophy is a term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, epistemology in the Anglo-American tradition was radically shaken up by the publication of Edmund Gettiers 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge. This paper provided counter-examples to the formulation of knowledge going back to Plato. Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism is a recent philosophical term for philosophy that reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. V. O and it repudiates the notion of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and the notion of epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist approach that denies that natural kinds and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications and this approach typically involves eschewing philosophical theories in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, ordinary language. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein is ordinary language philosophys most celebrated proponent outside the Oxford circle, second generation figures include Stanley Cavell and John Searle. Continental philosophy, in usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. Existentialism is generally considered a philosophical and cultural movement that holds that the point of philosophical thinking must be the individual. Common themes are the primacy of experience, Angst, the absurd, while György Lukácss History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korschs Marxism and Philosophy, first published in 1923, are often seen as the works that inaugurated this current. Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the phrase Western Marxism much later, phenomenology is the study of the phenomena of experience. It is a philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, in Husserls conception, is concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness. This phenomenological ontology can be differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis, which sees the world as objects, sets of objects. Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s
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Contemporary philosophy
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The phrase contemporary philosophy is a piece of technical terminology in philosophy that refers to a specific period in the history of Western philosophy. However, the phrase is often confused with philosophy, postmodern philosophy. No longer will researches usually be embodied in books addressed to anyone who might be interested in the matter of the field. Philosophy underwent this process toward the end of the 19th century, Germany was the first country to professionalize philosophy. At the end of 1817, Hegel was the first philosopher to be appointed professor by the State, namely by the Prussian Minister of Education, in the United States, the professionalisation grew out of reforms to the American higher-education system largely based on the German model. James Campbell describes the professionalisation of philosophy in America as follows, philosopher Michael Sandels book Justice, Whats the Right Thing to Do. Both works became New York Times best sellers, the Association has three divisions - Pacific, Central and Eastern. Each division organises an annual conference. The biggest of these is the Eastern Division Meeting, which attracts around 2,000 philosophers. The Eastern Division Meeting is also the USAs largest recruitment event for philosophy jobs, among its many other tasks, the association is responsible for administering many of the professions top honors. The largest academic organization devoted to furthering the study of continental philosophy is the Society for Phenomenology. Concerning professional journals today, a 2009 survey of professional philosophers asked them to rank the highest quality general philosophy journals in English. The directory is published two years, alternating with its companion volume, the International Directory of Philosophy and Philosophers. Since the start of the 21st century, philosophers have seen the growing utilization of blogs as a means of professional exchange. In bringing attention to the experience of women in the profession, as a result, most of the serious philosophical work on Rand has appeared in non-academic, non-peer-reviewed journals, or in books, and the bibliography reflects this fact. Also working from outside the profession were philosophers such as Gerd B, achenbach and Michel Weber who have proposed since the 1980s various forms of philosophical counseling claiming to bring Socratic dialogues back to life in a quasi-psychotherapeutic framework. Contemporary continental philosophy began with the work of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Martin Heidegger and this development was roughly contemporaneous with work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell inaugurating a new philosophical method based on the analysis of language via modern logic. Analytic philosophy dominates in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Continental philosophy prevails in France, Italy, Spain, and parts of the United States
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Western philosophy
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Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. The word philosophy itself originated from the Hellenic, philosophia, literally, the scope of philosophy in the ancient understanding, and the writings of the ancient philosophers, were all intellectual endeavors. Western Philosophy is generally said to begin in the Greek cities of western Asia Minor with Thales of Miletus and his most noted students were respectively Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus. Pythagoras, from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, pythagoreans hold that all is number, giving formal accounts in contrast to the previous material of the Ionians. They also believe in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation, Socrates The key figure in Greek philosophy is Socrates. Socrates studied under several Sophists but transformed Greek philosophy into a unified, Socrates used a critical approach called the elenchus or Socratic method to examine peoples views. He aimed to study human things, the life, justice, beauty. Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, some of his many disciples wrote down his conversations and he was tried for corrupting the youth and impiety by the Greek democracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, he chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisting in drinking the poison hemlock and he died in 399 B. C, Plato Socrates most important student was Plato. Plato founded the Academy of Athens and wrote a number of dialogues, some central ideas of Platos dialogues are the immortality of the soul, the benefits of being just, that evil is ignorance, and the Theory of Forms. Forms are universal properties that constitute reality and contrast with the changeable material things he called becoming. Aristotle Platos most outstanding student was Aristotle, Aristotle was perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher and scientist. He wrote books on physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on almost all western philosophers, including Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, the Neoplatonic and Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity. Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the likes of Stoicism, neo-Platonism, but, above all, the prominent figure of this period was St. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. The foundations of many northern European universities were built in the Middle Ages by waves of Irish, Scottish & English monks from the Celtic Church begun by Columba, see Celtic Christianity. Erigena is said to have been stabbed to death by his students with their pens and his theology would today be called pantheistic, in keeping with Celtic resolutions of pagan and Christian philosophy
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Continental philosophy
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Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements, the term continental philosophy, like analytic philosophy, lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition, but is central in existentialism and post-structuralism. A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy, in the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases, this manifests as a renovation of the view that philosophy is the first, foundational. In other cases, it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical, and some continental philosophers doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as analytic philosophy, became dominant in Britain, russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati. Continental philosophy is defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions. The history of philosophy is usually thought to begin with German idealism. As the institutional roots of continental philosophy in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology, nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition. J. G. Merquior wrote, the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path, one might say it all began with Henri Bergson. Carnaps paper argues that Heideggers lecture What Is Metaphysics, violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements. Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning
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Post-structuralism
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Existential phenomenology is a significant influence, Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, Structuralism rejected the phenomenological idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experience itself, in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the structures that make possible, concepts. By contrast, post-structuralism argues that founding knowledge either on experience or systematic structures is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, a major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, the only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results, post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that history and culture condition the study of underlying structures. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object, it is necessary to both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object. Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify structuralism as descriptive and this terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between the views of historical and descriptive reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts, by studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucaults Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness, the uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that The spread of poststructuralist literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly, similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy. Has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale, one can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism, merquior a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. In a 1966 lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life, Derrida interpreted this event as a decentering of the former intellectual cosmos
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Paris Nanterre University
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Paris Nanterre University, formerly called Paris X Nanterre and more recently Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, is a French university in the Academy of Versailles. It is one of the most prestigious French universities, mainly in the areas of law, humanities, political science, social sciences and it is one of the thirteen successor universities of the University of Paris. It is located in the suburb of Nanterre, in the La Défense area. The university is referred to as Nanterre. Nanterre was built in the 1960s on the outskirts of Paris as an extension of the Sorbonne and it was set up as an independent university in December 1970. Based on the American model, it was created as a campus, Nanterre became famous shortly after its opening by being at the center of the May 68 student rebellion. The campus was nicknamed Nanterre, la folle or Nanterre la rouge, Nanterre is the second largest campus in France after Nantes, with its own Olympic-sized swimming pool and a stadium. The university is renowned in the fields of Law and Economics, the Rene Ginouves Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology is another important institution on campus, merging the departments of the CNRS, Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne and Paris X-Nanterre. As in most Parisian universities, there is a minority of foreign exchange students. These programs have inspired many universities and grandes écoles throughout the country and are now renowned on a national level, Law The university’s undergraduate law program is ranked 9th of France by Eduniversal, with 2 stars. La Chinoise, by Jean-Luc Godard,1967 My Sex Life
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Karl Marx
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Karl Marx was a Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a family, he later studied political economy. His work has influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. These economic critiques were set out in works such as the three volumes, published between 1867 and 1894, that comprise Das Kapital. According to Marx, states are run in the interests of the class but are nonetheless represented as being in favor of the common interest of all. He predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and his work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marxs work, Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology and social science. Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and he was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussias Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ancestrally Jewish, his grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Triers rabbis since 1723. Marx was also a cousin once removed of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland. Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, a classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a property near the Porta Nigra. Her sister Sophie Pressburg, was Marxs aunt and was married to Lion Philips Marxs uncle through this marriage, Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London. Little is known of Karl Marxs childhood, the third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Young Karl was baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 along with his siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie. Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, by employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and he lived his remaining years in the care of his mother, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900. Nietzsches body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner. His writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism, born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned forty-nine on the day of Nietzsches birth, Nietzsches parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler, married in 1843, the year before their sons birth. They had two children, a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsches father died from an ailment in 1849, Ludwig Joseph died six months later. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsches maternal grandmother, after the death of Nietzsches grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre. Nietzsche attended a school and then, later, a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug, Rudolf Wagner. In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg, because his father had worked for the state the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta. He transferred and studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and he also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led Germania, a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German, a 2a in Greek and Latin, a 2b in French, History, and Physics, while at Pforta, Nietzsche had a penchant for pursuing subjects that were considered unbecoming. The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid. After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology, for a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester, he stopped his studies and lost his faith. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith
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Marcel Mauss
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Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology, Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous book is The Gift, Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges, to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his maternal uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time. He passed the agrégation in 1893 and he was also first cousin of the much younger Claudette Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who has become a noted anthropologist. Instead of taking the route of teaching at a lycée following college, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion. His first publication in 1896 marked the beginning of a career that would produce several landmarks in the sociological literature. Like many members of Année Sociologique, Mauss was attracted to socialism and he was particularly active in the events of the Dreyfus affair. Towards the end of the century, he helped edit such left-wing papers as Le Populaire, LHumanité and Le Mouvement socialiste, the last in collaboration with Georges Sorel. In 1901 Mauss took up a chair in the history of religion and uncivilized peoples at the École pratique des hautes études and it was at this time that he began drawing more on ethnography, and his work began to develop characteristics now associated with formal anthropology. The years of World War I were absolutely devastating for Mauss, many of his friends and colleagues died in the war, and his uncle Durkheim died shortly before its end. Politically, the years were also difficult for Mauss. Durkheim had made changes to school curricula across France, and after his death a backlash against his students began, like many other followers of Durkheim, Mauss took refuge in administration. He secured Durkheims legacy by founding institutions to carry out directions of research, such as lInstitut Français de Sociologie, among students he influenced was George Devereux, later an influential anthropologist who combined ethnology with psychoanalysis. In 1931 Mauss took up the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France and he actively fought against anti-semitism and racial politics both before and after World War II. In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never truly free, rather, human history is full of examples of gifts bringing about reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was, the answer is simple, the gift is a total prestation, imbued with spiritual mechanisms, engaging the honour of both giver and receiver. Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Mauss, is almost magical. The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is tied to the giver
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Henri Lefebvre
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In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France and he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, graduating in 1920. By 1924 he was working with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman, Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer and this brought them into contact with the Surrealists, Dadaists, and other groups, before they moved towards the French Communist Party. Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and became one of the most prominent French Marxist Intellectuals during the quarter of the 20th century. From 1944 to 1949, he was the director of Radiodiffusion Française, among his works was a highly influential, anti-Stalinist, text on dialectics called Dialectical Materialism. Seven years later, Lefebvre published his first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life and his early work on method was applauded and borrowed centrally by Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Ironically, he went from serving as a primary intellectual for the PCF to becoming one of France’s most important critics of the PCF’s politics. In 1961, Lefebvre became professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and he was one of the most respected professors, and he had influenced and analysed the May 1968 student revolt. Lefebvre introduced the concept of the right to the city in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville, by the 1970s, Lefebvre had also published some of the first critical statements on the work of post-structuralists, especially Foucault. One of Lefebvres most important contributions to social thought is the idea of the critique of everyday life, the everyday was in short, the space in which all life occurred, and between which all fragmented activities took place. While the theme presented itself in works, it was most notably outlined in his eponymous 3 volume study, which came out in individual installments, decades apart, in 1947,1961. This was essential to Lefebvre because everyday life was where he saw capitalism surviving and reproducing itself, without revolutionizing everyday life, capitalism would continue to diminish the quality of everyday life, and inhibit real self-expression. Lefebvres work on life was heavily influential in French theory, particularly for the Situationists. Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his writings to understanding the importance of space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is the argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism. Lefebvre contends that there are different modes of production of space from natural space to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced, Lefebvre analyses each historical mode as a three-part dialectic between everyday practices and perceptions, representations or theories of space and the spatial imaginary of the time. Lefebvres argument in The Production of Space is that space is a product, or a complex social construction which affects spatial practices. As a Marxist theorist, Lefebvre argues that this production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society
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Roland Barthes
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Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy and his father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea before Barthes first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt, when Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life. Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne and he was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his career, affecting his studies. They also exempted him from service during World War II. His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study and he received a diplôme détudes supérieures from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy. In 1948, he returned to academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work, in 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City. Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself and he traveled to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the literary magazine Tel Quel. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism, he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva, in 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85 and they had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a blow to Barthes
15.
Georges Bataille
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Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, philosophy, anthropology, economics, sociology and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism and his work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism. Georges Bataille was the son of Joseph-Aristide Bataille, a tax collector, born in Billom in the region of Auvergne, his family moved to Reims in 1898, where he was baptized. He went to school in Reims and then Épernay, although brought up without religious observance, he converted to Catholicism in 1914, and became a devout Catholic for about nine years. He considered entering the priesthood and attended a Catholic seminary briefly, however, he quit, apparently in part in order to pursue an occupation where he could eventually support his mother. He eventually renounced Christianity in the early 1920s, Bataille attended the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris, graduating in February 1922. Though he is referred to as an archivist and a librarian because of his employment at the Bibliothèque Nationale. After graduating he moved to the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid, as a young man, he befriended, and was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist, Lev Shestov. Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille is the author of a large and diverse body of work, readings, poems and he sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some of his publications were banned. Initially attracted to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton, although Bataille, Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology which included several other renegade surrealists. Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a society, Acéphale. According to legend, Bataille and the members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war, the group also published an eponymous review of Nietzsches philosophy which attempted to postulate what Derrida has called an anti-sovereignty. Collaborators in these projects included André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, Jean Rollin, Bataille drew from diverse influences and used various modes of discourse to create his work. The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work, the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle. During World War II Bataille produced Summa Atheologica which comprises his works Inner Experience, Guilty, after the war he composed The Accursed Share, which he said represented thirty years work. The singular conception of sovereignty expounded there would become an important topic of discussion for Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bataille also founded the influential journal Critique. Batailles first marriage was to actress Silvia Maklès, in 1928, they divorced in 1934, Bataille also had an affair with Colette Peignot, who died in 1938
16.
Marshall McLuhan
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Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising. McLuhan is known for coining the expression the medium is the message and the global village. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, in the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, interest has renewed in his work, Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta to Elsie Naomi and Herbert Ernest McLuhan, both born in Canada. His brother Maurice was born two years later, Marshall was his maternal grandmothers surname. His mother was a Baptist schoolteacher who became an actress. That business failed when World War I broke out, and McLuhans father enlisted in the Canadian army, after a year of service, he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front. At Manitoba, McLuhan explored his relationship with religion and turned to literature to gratify his souls hunger for truth and beauty. After studying for one year as a student, he changed majors and earned a BA, winning a University Gold Medal in Arts. He took an MA in English from the University of Manitoba in 1934 and he had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and he was accepted to the University of Cambridge, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge in the autumn of 1934 and these studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms. He received the bachelors degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program. Later, he returned from England to take a job as an assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that he held for the 1936–37 academic year. While studying the trivium at Cambridge, he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1937, in 1935, he wrote to his mother, ad I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. At the end of March 1937, McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, after consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable, McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter. He had a lifelong interest in the three and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him
17.
Michel Foucault
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Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and his thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist groups, especially those working within contemporary sociology, cultural studies, and critical theory. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book and these first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called archaeology. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained until his death and he also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, in these books he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role which power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France and he had been named after his father, Dr. His father was a local surgeon, having been born in Fontainebleau before moving to Poitiers. She was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-laws medical practice, while his wife took charge of their large mid-19th-century house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou. Together the couple had three children, a girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel and Denys, all of whom shared the same hair and bright blue eyes. The children were raised to be nominal Roman Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, in later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood. Describing himself as a delinquent, he claimed his father was a bully who would sternly punish him. In 1930, Foucault began his two years early at the local Lycée Henry-IV. Here he undertook two years of education before entering the main lycée, where he stayed until 1936. He then undertook his first four years of education at the same establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin and history but doing poorly at arithmetic. In 1939, the Second World War broke out and France was occupied by Nazi Germany until 1945, his parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, in 1940, Foucaults mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Lonely, he described his years there as the ordeal, but excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history, in 1942, he entered his final year, the terminale, where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his baccalauréat in 1943. Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal tutor and these ideas influenced Foucault, who adopted Hyppolites conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history
18.
Gerald Vizenor
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Gerald Robert Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for years at the University of California, Berkeley. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, Gerald Vizenor was born to a mother who was Danish American and a father who was Anishinaabe. When he was less than two years old, his father was murdered in a homicide that was never solved and he was raised by his mother and paternal Anishinaabe grandmother, along with a succession of paternal uncles, in Minneapolis and on the White Earth Reservation. His mothers partner acted as his stepfather and primary caregiver. Following that mans death in 1950, Vizenor lied about his age, honorably discharged before his unit went to Korea, Vizenor joined the army two years later. He served with occupation forces in Japan, as that nation was struggling to recover from the vast destruction of the nuclear attacks that ended World War II. During this period, he began to learn about the Japanese poetic form of haiku, later he wrote Hiroshima Bugi, what he called his kabuki novel. Returning to the United States in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G. I, bill funding to complete his undergraduate degree at New York University. He followed this with postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota, after returning to Minnesota, he married and had a son. After teaching at the university, between 1964 and 1968, Vizenor worked as a community advocate, many found it difficult to live in the city, and struggled against white racism and cheap alcohol. This period is the subject of his short-story collection Wordarrows, Whites and Indians in the New Fur Trade, Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor. He investigated the case of Thomas James White Hawk, convicted of murder, Vizenors perspective allowed him to raise difficult questions about the nature of justice in a society dealing with colonized peoples. His work was credited with enabling White Hawk have his sentence on White Hawk being commuted. During this period Vizenor coined the phrase “cultural schizophrenia” to describe the state of mind of many Natives and his investigative journalism into American Indian activists revealed drug dealing, personal failings, and failures of leadership among some of the movement’s leaders. As a consequence of his articles, he was personally threatened, beginning teaching full-time at Lake Forest College, Illinois, Vizenor was appointed to set up and run the Native American Studies program at Bemidji State University. Later he became professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and he later satirized the academic world in some of his fiction. During this time he served as a visiting professor at Tianjin University
19.
The Wachowskis
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Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski are American film directors, screenwriters, and producers. They are siblings, and are both trans women and they wrote and directed its two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, and were deeply involved in the writing and production of other works in the franchise. Their next film, Cloud Atlas, based on the novel of the name by David Mitchell and co-written. Their film Jupiter Ascending and the Netflix series Sense8 both debuted in 2015, the siblings have worked as a writing and directing unit throughout their professional film careers from Bound through the first season of Sense8. Following her gender transition, Lilly Wachowski took a break from writing and directing. Lana was born Laurence Wachowski in Chicago in 1965, Lilly was born Andrew Paul Wachowski two and a years later, in 1967. Their mother Lynne was a nurse and painter and their father Ron Wachowski was a businessman of Polish descent. Their uncle is the actor and Primetime Emmy Award-winning producer Laurence Luckinbill and they have two additional sisters, Julie and Laura. Julie was credited as assistant coordinator in the Wachowskis film Bound, she is a novelist, former classmates recall them playing Dungeons & Dragons and working in the school’s theater and TV program. Lana went to Bard College in New York and Lilly attended Emerson College in Boston, after dropping out of college, the Wachowskis ran a house painting and construction business in Chicago while writing for Marvel Comics Razorline imprint, namely Ectokid in 1993. They also wrote the series Clive Barkers Hellraiser and Clive Barkers Nightbreed for Epic Comics, in the mid-1990s they branched out into film writing, including the script for Assassins in 1994, which was directed by Richard Donner and released in 1995. Warner Bros. bought the script and included two pictures in the contract. Donner had their script totally rewritten by Brian Helgeland and the Wachowskis tried unsuccessfully to remove their names from the film and they say the experience gave them the perspective that they should become directors or never survive as writers in this town. Their next project was the 1996 neo-noir thriller Bound, for which wrote the script. The film was received for its style and craft, and was noted as one of the first mainstream films to feature a gay relationship without it being central to the plot. Taking advantage of the buzz, the Wachowskis asked to direct their next picture. J. Straczynski contributed to the magazine from 1981 to 1991, in the same interview, they expressed being flattered, after their first film, by comparisons to the Coen brothers, who had made five, maybe six great movies… at that time. Mark Miller, writing in Wired in 2003, also listed Homer, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Akira Kurosawa and Mamoru Oshii are influences, as is Ken Wilber
20.
Anti-consumerism
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Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. The criticism of materialism as a dehumanizing behaviour that is destructive of the Earth, as human habitat, comes from religion. From the secular perspective, social activism indicates that from consumerist materialism derive crime, industrial pollution and the consequent environmental degradation, and war as a business. The term consumerism also denotes economic policies associated with Keynesian economics, many anti-corporate activists believe the rise of large-business corporations poses a threat to the legitimate authority of nation states and the public sphere. They feel corporations are invading peoples privacy, manipulating politics and governments, anti-consumerism protesters point out that the main responsibility of a corporation is to answer only to shareholders, giving human rights and other issues almost no consideration. The management does have a responsibility to their shareholders, since any philanthropic activities that do not directly serve the business could be deemed to be a breach of trust. This sort of financial responsibility means that multi-national corporations will pursue strategies to intensify labor, for example, they will attempt to find low wage economies with laws which are conveniently lenient on human rights, the natural environment, trade union organization and so on. It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly, trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combating drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction. It is a term which most people deny, having some more specific excuse or rationalization for consumption other than the idea that they are compelled to consume. A culture that has an amount of consumerism is referred to as a consumer culture. The older term conspicuous consumption described the United States in the 1960s, but was linked to larger debates about media influence, culture jamming. The term and concept of conspicuous consumption originated at the turn of the 20th century in the writing of economist Thorstein Veblen, the term describes an apparently irrational and confounding form of economic behaviour. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate, according to archaeologists, evidence of conspicuous consumption up to several millennia ago has been found, suggesting that such behavior is inherent to humans. Anti-consumerists believe advertising plays a role in human life by informing values and assumptions of the cultural system, deeming what is acceptable. They declare that ads create a world where commodities appear as the key to securing happiness. Anti-consumerists cite studies that find that individuals believe their quality of life improves in relation to values that lie outside the capability of the market place. Therefore, advertising attempts to equate the social with the material by utilizing images and slogans to link commodities with the sources of human happiness. The underlying message is that owning these products will enhance our image, anti-consumerists claim that in a consumerist society, advertisement images disempower and objectify the consumer
21.
Alternative culture
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Alternative culture is a type of culture that exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more subcultures. Compare with the politically charged term, counterculture. The concept of culture is rooted in the development of new views of adolescence during the 1950s in Western Europe. The reasons for rejection of traditional social codes and attitudes were usually personal. This disenchantment is in reference to a range of things. The result is an evolution of an externally displayed attitude. The factors that necessitate the creation of a subculture often forge the elements that make it unique, during the point that these subcultures enjoy their peak, they are simultaneously the subject of much negative attention from the media. However, it is this publicity which often drew young people into each subculture, usually. Due to subcultures of this nature being in a constant change and they often develop an old school crowd who tend to resist polluting elements and carry on as before until inevitably evolving themselves. South Africa has a tradition of alternative culture. From the Creole fusion experience of the 17th and 18th centuries, to recent experiments in alternative living
22.
Autonomous building
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Advocates of autonomous building describe advantages that include reduced environmental impacts, increased security, and lower costs of ownership. Some cited advantages satisfy tenets of green building, not independence per se, Off-grid buildings often rely very little on civil services and are therefore safer and more comfortable during civil disaster or military attacks. Most of the research and published articles concerning autonomous building focus on residential homes. These houses can be built now and it is possible to build a house with no bills for the same price as a conventional house, but it would be smaller. In the 1970s, a group of activists and engineers calling themselves the New Alchemists believed the warnings of imminent resource depletion and starvation, the New Alchemists were famous for the depth of research effort placed in their projects. Using conventional construction techniques, they designed a series of bioshelter projects and they published the plans for all of these, with detailed design calculations and blueprints. The Ark used wind based water pumping and electricity, and was self-contained in food production, as of January 2010, the successor organization to the New Alchemists has a web page up as the New Alchemy Institute. The PEI Ark has been abandoned and partially renovated several times, the 1990s saw the development of Earthships, similar in intent to the Ark project, but organized as a for-profit venture, with construction details published in a series of 3 books by Mike Reynolds. The building material is filled with earth. This makes a wall that has large amounts of thermal mass, berms are placed on exposed surfaces to further increase the houses temperature stability. The water system starts with water, processed for drinking, then washing, then plant watering, then toilet flushing. The cisterns are placed and used as thermal masses, Power, including electricity, heat and water heating, is from solar power. One major bank building in the Netherlands was constructed to be autonomous, as an architect or engineer becomes more concerned with the disadvantages of transportation networks, and dependence on distant resources, their designs tend to include more autonomous elements. The historic path to autonomy was a concern for secure sources of heat, power, water, a nearly parallel path toward autonomy has been to start with a concern for environmental impacts, which cause disadvantages. Autonomous buildings can increase security and reduce environmental impacts by using resources that would otherwise be wasted. Autonomy often dramatically reduces the costs and impacts of networks that serve the building, other impacted resources, such as oil reserves and the retention of the local watershed, can often be cheaply conserved by thoughtful designs. Autonomous buildings are usually energy-efficient in operation, and therefore cost-efficient, but they may substitute energy production or other techniques to avoid diminishing returns in extreme conservation. An autonomous structure is not always environmentally friendly, the goal of independence from support systems is associated with, but not identical to, other goals of environmentally responsible green building. First and fundamentally, independence is a matter of degree, living within an autonomous shelter may also require that party to make sacrifices with lifestyle choices, personal behavior, and social expectations to name a few
23.
Buy Nothing Day
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Buy Nothing Day is an international day of protest against consumerism. Buy Nothing Day was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave and subsequently promoted by Adbusters magazine, the first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Canada in September 1992 as a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption. In 1997, it was moved to the Friday after American Thanksgiving, also called Black Friday, in 2000, some advertisements by Adbusters promoting Buy Nothing Day were denied advertising time by almost all major television networks except for CNN. Soon, campaigns started appearing in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, participation now includes more than 65 nations. Namely, by destroying their credit card by cutting it with the scissors, free, non-commercial street parties Sit-in Zombie walk, Participant zombies wander around shopping malls or other consumer havens with a blank stare. When asked what they are doing participants describe Buy Nothing Day, whirl-mart, Participants silently steer their shopping carts around a shopping mall or store in a long, baffling conga line without putting anything in the carts or actually making any purchases. Buy Nothing Day hike, Rather than celebrating consumerism by shopping, participants celebrate The Earth, Buy Nothing Critical Mass, As the monthly Critical Mass bicycle ride often falls on this day or near, rides in some cities acknowledge and celebrate Buy Nothing Day. Buy Nothing Day paddle along the San Francisco waterfront and this event is promoted by the Bay Area Sea Kayakers to kayak along the notoriously consumptive San Francisco waterfront. The Buy Nothing Coat Exchange began in Rhode Island and became part of the Buy Nothing Day some twenty years ago, coupling the two events was the brainchild of Greg Gerritt, an expert in environmental studies and long term activist in consumerism and global warming. Similar Winter Coat Exchanges take place on Buy Nothing Day in Kentucky, Utah, coats are collected throughout the month of November from anyone who wants to donate and brought to various locations within each state. On the day after Thanksgiving, many opt out of the Black Friday madness to donate and/or volunteer, on that day, anyone who needs a winter coat is welcome to exchange one or just take one. The lines in Providence RI form early and are long which punctuates the need that is prevalent in many cities, the combination of the two events has become a welcomed tradition in RI. Adbusters in 2011 renamed the event Occupy Xmas, a reference to the Occupy Movement, Buy Nothing Day was first joined with Adbusters Buy Nothing Christmas campaign. The union of these calls for a Buy Nothing Day to kick off a season of supporting local economy. The Buy Nothing Day site through the Adbusters Media Foundation BND UK information and support for UK campaigners
24.
Commodity fetishism
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As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value. Therefore, the exchange of commodities obscures the true economic character of the human relations of production. It is nothing but the social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, so it is in the world of commodities with the products of mens hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, marx borrowed the concept of fetishism from The Cult of Fetish Gods by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of religion. Marxs first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to an article by Karl Heinrich Hermes. Hermes agreed with the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form of religion, marx dismissed that argument, and Hermess definition of religion as that which elevates man above sensuous appetites. Therefore, the appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service. Because their social co-existence, and its meaning, is expressed through market exchange, therefore, social relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects. In a capitalist society, the perception that the market is an independent, sentient entity, is how buyers, sellers. The work contract is the mask that obscures the economic exploitation of the difference between the paid for the labour of the worker, and the new value created by the labour of the worker. The buyers and the sellers determine and establish the economic and financial relationships, and afterwards compare the prices in, in History and Class Consciousness, György Lukács started from the theory of commodity fetishism for his development of reification as the principal obstacle to class consciousness. The economist Michael Perelman critically examined the systems from which arose intellectual property rights. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis critically reviewed the belief systems of the theory of human capital, knowledge, as the philosophic means to a better life, is contrasted with capitalist knowledge, produced to generate income and profit. Such commodification detaches knowledge and information from the person, because, as property, they are independent. The sociologists Frank Furedi and Ulrich Beck studied the development of commodified types of knowledge in the culture of risk prevention in the management of money. Hence, the fetishization of financial risk as a sum of money is a reification that distorts the perception of the true nature of financial risk
25.
Commune
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In addition to the communal economy, consensus decision-making, non-hierarchical structures and ecological living have become important core principles for many communes. There are many contemporary intentional communities all over the world, a list of which can be found at the Fellowship for Intentional Community, for the usually larger-scale, political entities in communist political theory, see socialist communes, which are similar but distinct social organizations. Some communes, such as the ashrams of the Vedanta Society or the Theosophical commune Lomaland, formed around spiritual leaders, for others, the glue is simply the desire for a more shared, sociable lifestyle. Moreover, some find it is more economical to live communally. The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have expressed in various forms over the years. At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a category of Utopias. Roberts three listed items were, first, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order. Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was organised as being too industrialized. And third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic, twenty five years later, Dr. Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of primary group. Commune members have emotional bonds to the group rather than to any sub-group. With the simple definition of a commune as a community with 100% income sharing. Some of these are institutions such as abbeys and monasteries. Many communes are part of the New Age movement, in Germany, a large number of the intentional communities define themselves as communes and there is a network of political communes called Kommuja with about 30 member groups. Germany has a tradition of intentional communities going back to the groups inspired by the principles of Lebensreform in the 19th century. Later, about 100 intentional communities were started in the Weimar Republic after World War I, in the 1960s, there was a resurgence of communities calling themselves communes, starting with the Kommune 1 in Berlin, followed by Kommune 2 and Kommune 3 in Wolfsburg. Today, there are dozens of urban communes growing in the cities of Israel, the urban kibbutzim are smaller and more anarchist. Most of the communes in Israel emphasize social change, education. Some of the communes have members who are graduates of zionist-socialist youth movements, like HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed, HaMahanot HaOlim
26.
Conspicuous consumption
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Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power—of the income or of the accumulated wealth of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, such a display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status. That among such people, displays of wealth are used to combat the impression of poverty. Conspicuous compassion, the practice of publicly donating great sums of money to charity to enhance the prestige of the donor, is sometimes described as a type of conspicuous consumption. Supporting interpretations and explanations of contemporary conspicuous consumption are presented in Consumer Culture, lury, Consumer Culture and Modernity, by D. Slater, Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Jean Baudrillard, and Spent, Sex, Evolution, and the Secrets of Consumerism, by Geoffrey Miller. In the article Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption, A. Self-worth – In the book Income, Saving, shelter and transport – In the U. S. Prestige – In the article Status Consumption in Consumer Behaviour, Scale Development and Validation, moreover, in the article Status Brands, Examining the Effects of Non-product-related Brand Associations on Status and Conspicuous Consumption, A. OCass and H. Frost said that sociologists often incorrectly used the terms status consumption and conspicuous consumption as interchangeable, in a later study, OCass and Frost determined that, as sociologic constructs, the terms status consumption and conspicuous consumption denote different sociologic behaviours. One downside of this search for status is that purchases of positional goods may at a social level be self-defeating due to external effects. In the case of conspicuous consumption, taxes upon luxury goods diminish societal expenditures on high-status goods, when utility is derived directly from accumulation of assets, this lowers the dead weight loss associated with inheritance taxes and raises the optimal rate of inheritance taxation. In place of luxury taxes, the economist Robert H, another option is the redistribution of wealth, either by means of an incomes policy or by progressive taxation
27.
Consumerism
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Consumerism is a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. In economics, consumerism may refer to policies which emphasise consumption. In this sense, consumerism expresses the idea not of one man, one voice, but of one dollar, one voice, the term consumerism has several definitions. These definitions may not be related to other and confusingly. One sense of the term relates to efforts to support consumers interests, by the early 1970s it had become the accepted term for the field and began to be used in these ways, Consumerism is the concept that consumers should be informed decision makers in the marketplace. Practices such as product testing make consumers informed, Consumerism is the concept that the marketplace itself is responsible for ensuring social justice through fair economic practices. Consumer protection policies and laws compel manufacturers to make products safe, Consumerism refers to the field of studying, regulating, or interacting with the marketplace. The consumer movement is the movement which refers to all actions. While the above definitions were becoming established, other people using the term consumerism to mean high levels of consumption. This definition has gained popularity since the 1970s and began to be used in ways, Consumerism is the selfish and frivolous collecting of products. In protest against this, some people promote anti-consumerism and advocate simple living, Consumerism is a force from the marketplace which destroys individuality and harms society. It is related to globalization and in protest against this some people promote the anti-globalization movement, vance Packard worked to change the meaning of the term consumerism from a positive word about consumer practices to a negative word meaning excessive materialism and waste. The ads for his 1960 book The Waste Makers prominently featured the word consumerism in a negative way, the consumer society emerged in the late seventeenth century and intensified throughout the eighteenth century. This included sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee, these were grown on vast plantations in the Caribbean as demand steadily rose. In particular, sugar consumption in Britain during the course of the 18th century increased by a factor of 20, critics argue that colonialism was indeed a driver of consumerism, but they would place the emphasis on the supply rather than the demand as the motivating factor. An increasing mass of exotic imports as well as domestic manufactures had to be consumed by the number of people who had been consuming far less than was becoming necessary. That idea was produced later, more or less strategically in order to intensify consumption domestically, marketplaces expanded as shopping centres, such as the New Exchange, opened in 1609 by Robert Cecil in the Strand. Shops started to become important as places for Londoners to meet and socialise, restoration London also saw the growth of luxury buildings as advertisements for social position with speculative architects like Nicholas Barbon and Lionel Cranfield
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Criticism of advertising
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Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase products, ideals or services. While advertising can be seen as necessary for growth, it is not without social costs. Advertising increasingly invades public spaces, such as schools, which critics argue is a form of child exploitation. Advertising frequently uses psychological pressure on the consumer, which may be harmful. Criticism of advertising is closely linked with criticism of media and often interchangeable, Advertising occupies public space and more and more invades the private sphere of people. According to Georg Franck, It is becoming harder to escape from advertising, public space is increasingly turning into a gigantic billboard for products of all kind. The aesthetical and political consequences cannot yet be foreseen, hanno Rauterberg in the German newspaper Die Zeit calls advertising a new kind of dictatorship that cannot be escaped. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls, with the introduction of the shorter 15-second-spot the total amount of ads increased even more. Ads are not only placed in breaks but also into sports telecasts during the game itself and they flood the Internet, a growing market. Advertising precedes the showing of films at cinemas including lavish ‘film shorts’ produced by such as Microsoft or DaimlerChrysler. The largest advertising agencies have begun working to co-produce programming in conjunction with the largest media firms, opponents equate the growing amount of advertising with a tidal wave and restrictions with damming the flood. Kalle Lasn, one of the most outspoken critics of advertising, considers advertising the most prevalent, every day an estimated 12 billion display ads,3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious. In the course of their life, the average American watches three years of advertising on television, video games incorporate products into their content. Special commercial patient channels in hospitals and public figures sporting temporary tattoos, a method unrecognisable as advertising is so-called ‘’guerrilla marketing’’ which is spreading ‘buzz’ about a new product in target audiences. Cash-strapped U. S. cities offer police cars for advertising, companies buy the names of sports stadiums for advertising. The Hamburg soccer Volkspark stadium first became the AOL Arena and then the HSH Nordbank Arena, the Stuttgart Neckarstadion became the Mercedes-Benz Arena, the Dortmund Westfalenstadion is the Signal Iduna Park. The former SkyDome in Toronto was renamed Rogers Centre, whole subway stations in Berlin are redesigned into product halls and exclusively leased to a company. Düsseldorf has multi-sensorial adventure transit stops equipped with loudspeakers and systems that spread the smell of a detergent, swatch used beamers to project messages on the Berlin TV-tower and Victory column, which was fined because it was done without a permit
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Culture jamming
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Culture jamming is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to expose the methods of domination of a society to foster progressive change. Culture jamming is a form of subvertising, many culture jams are intended to expose questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture. Tactics include re-figuring logos, fashion statements, and product images as a means to challenge the idea of whats cool, Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using the original mediums communication method. Culture jamming is employed as a reaction against social conformity, prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front, and contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may involve street parties and protests, the term was coined in 1984 by Don Joyce of the sound collage band Negativland, with the release of their album JamCon 84. The phrase culture jamming comes from the idea of radio jamming, in one of the tracks of the album, they stated, According to Vince Carducci, although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord, the SI asserted that in the past humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new modern way of life. Through playful activity, individuals could create situations, the opposite of spectacles, the SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed to expose discrimination and corruption in the artworld, for example, T-Mobile utilized the Liverpool street underground station to host a flashmob to sell their mobile services. Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders, Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on the strings of people. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change, there are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change, the basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins, but later used by critics such as Douglas Rushkoff. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet, Culture jammers will often use common symbols such as the McDonalds golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense
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Degrowth
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Degrowth is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas. It is also considered an economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring or a decrease in well-being, there is a fixed supply of non-renewable resources, such as petroleum, and these resources will inevitably be depleted. Renewable resources can also be depleted if extracted at unsustainable rates over extended periods, for example, this has occurred with caviar production in the Caspian Sea. There is much concern as to how growing demand for these resources will be met as supplies decrease, many organizations and governments look to energy technologies such as biofuels, solar cells, and wind turbines to meet the demand gap after peak oil. Others have argued that none of the alternatives could effectively replace versatility and portability of oil, authors of the book Techno-Fix criticize technological optimists for overlooking the limitations of technology in solving agricultural and social challenges arising from growth. Proponents of degrowth argue that demand is the only way of permanently closing the demand gap. For renewable resources, demand, and therefore production, must also be brought down to levels that prevent depletion and are environmentally healthy, moving toward a society that is not dependent on oil is seen as essential to avoiding societal collapse when non-renewable resources are depleted. The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earths ecosystems and it compares human demand with planet Earths ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb. According to a 2005 Global Footprint Network report, inhabitants of high-income countries live off of 6.4 global hectares, for example, while each inhabitant of Bangladesh lives off of what they produce from 0.56 gHa, a North American requires 12.5 gHa. Each inhabitant of North America uses 22.3 times as much land as a Bangladeshi, according to the same report, the average number of global hectares per person was 2.1, while current consumption levels have reached 2.7 hectares per person. In order for the population to attain the living standards typical of European countries. In order for economic equality to be achieved with the current available resources. The eventual reduction of all available resources would lead to a reduction in consumption. Controlled reduction of consumption would reduce the trauma of this change assuming no technological changes increase the carrying capacity. Degrowth thought is in opposition to all forms of productivism and it is, thus, opposed to the current form of sustainable development. While the concern for sustainability does not contradict degrowth, sustainable development is rooted in mainstream development ideas that aim to increase capitalist growth and consumption
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Do it yourself
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Do it yourself is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things without the direct aid of experts or professionals. DIY behavior can be triggered by various motivations previously categorized as marketplace motivations, the term do-it-yourself has been associated with consumers since at least 1912 primarily in the domain of home improvement and maintenance activities. Subsequently, the term DIY has taken on a meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. DIY is associated with the alternative rock, punk rock, and indie rock music scenes, indymedia networks, pirate radio stations. In this context, DIY is related to the Arts and Crafts movement, italian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a 6th-century BC Greek structure in southern Italy that came with detailed assembly instructions and is being called an ancient IKEA building. Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome and it looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way. Much like the instruction booklets, various sections of the building were inscribed with coded symbols showing how the pieces slotted together. The characteristics of these inscriptions indicate they date back to around the 6th century BC, the building was built by Greek artisans coming from the Spartan colony of Taranto in Apulia. The philosopher Alan Watts reflected a sentiment, In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college-. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes, but it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The first Catalog, and its successors, used a definition of the term tools. There were informational tools, such as books, professional journals, courses, classes, there were specialized, designed items, such as carpenters and masons tools, garden tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials and so on, even early personal computers. The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor to include such items, the Catalogs publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence, for decades, magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated offered a way for readers to keep current on useful practical skills and techniques. DIY home improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s, first created as collections of magazine articles, an early, extensive line of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon previously published articles from their magazine, Sunset, based in California. Time-Life, Better Homes and Gardens, and other publishers soon followed suit, in the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest bulletin-board style site where users could share information, homeTips. com, established in early 1995, was among the first Web-based sites to deliver free extensive DIY home-improvement content created by expert authors. Since the late 1990s, DIY has exploded on the Web through thousands of sites, in the 1970s, when home video came along, DIY instructors quickly grasped its potential for demonstrating processes by audio-visual means
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DIY ethic
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DIY ethic refers to the ethic of self-sufficiency through completing tasks without the aid of a paid expert. Literally meaning do it yourself, the DIY ethic promotes the idea that anyone is capable of performing a variety of rather than relying on paid specialists. The DIY ethic requires that the adherent seeks out the required to complete a given task. The term can refer to a variety of disciplines, including home improvement, rather than belittling or showing disdain for those who engage in manual labor or skilled crafts, DIY champions the average individual seeking such knowledge and expertise. In the punk subculture, the DIY ethic is tied to punk ideology and it espouses the rejection of consumer culture, using existing systems or existing processes that would foster dependence on established societal structures. According to the aesthetic, one can express oneself and produce moving. Arguably the earliest example of this attitude was the music scene of the 1970s. Since many venues tend to shy away from experimental music, houses. Riot Grrrl, associated with feminism, also adopted the core values of the DIY punk ethic by leveraging creative ways of communication through zines. Adherents of the DIY punk ethic can also work collectively, for example, punk impresario David Fergusons CD Presents was a DIY concert production, recording studio, and record label network. The German punk band Mono für Alle, perfected the mass production of the self-made DIY album. Their album included a wooden cover and sold over 6000 units from their website. The DIY punk ethic also applies to simple living, such as. Sewing, repairing, or modifying clothing rather than buying new clothes, reclaiming recyclable products by dumpster diving. Some educators also engage in DIY teaching techniques, sometimes referred to as Edupunk, DIY music has its origins in the mid 1970s punk rock scene. It developed as a way to circumnavigate the mainstream music industry, in 2014, speaking about the 80s and 90s, Steve Albini told of the difficulties of getting record and played on the radio, saying So these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines, DIY music bands do everything themselves or with independent collaborators, from album production to marketing and communication. This choice primarily reflects a need to emphasize its independence in relation to big record labels, advances in technology and lowering costs have progressively made it easier for bands to be independent
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Ecovillage
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Ecovillages are traditional or intentional communities whose goal is to become more socially, culturally, economically and ecologically sustainable. Ecovillages are consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes to regenerate, most range from a population of 50 to 150 individuals, although some are smaller, and traditional ecovillages are often much larger. Larger ecovillages often exist as networks of smaller subcommunities, ecovillagers are united by shared ecological, social-economic and cultural-spiritual values. Ecovillages offer small-scale communities with ecological impact or regenerative impacts as an alternative. However, such communities often cooperate with peer villages in networks of their own and this model of collective action is similar to that of Ten Thousand Villages, which supports the fair trade of goods worldwide. In 1991, Robert Gilman set out a definition of an ecovillage that became standard for many years and this is clearly a tall order. In fact, using a strict interpretation of this definition, especially with regards to “harmlessly integrated”, Ecovillages are therefore better thought of as communities striving towards these ideals rather than actualised utopias. In this view, ecovillages are seen as an ongoing process and they often start off with a focus on one of the four dimensions of sustainability, e. g. ecology, but evolve into holistic models for restoration. Ecovillages have developed in recent years as technology has improved so they have more sophisticated structures as noted by Baydoun, the ecovillage movement began to coalesce at the annual autumn conference of Findhorn, in Scotland, in 1995. The conference was called, Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities, and conference organizers turned away hundreds of applicants, according to Ross Jackson, somehow they had struck a chord that resonated far and wide. Thus became part of the language of the Cultural Creatives, after that conference, many intentional communities, including Findhorn, began calling themselves ecovillages, giving birth to a new movement. Gaia Trust, Denmark, agreed to fund the network for its first five years, today, there are self-identified ecovillages in over 70 countries on six continents. The principles on which ecovillages rely can be applied to urban and rural settings, as well as to developing, advocates seek a sustainable lifestyle for inhabitants with a minimum of trade outside the local area, or ecoregion. Many advocates also seek independence from existing infrastructures, although others, particularly in urban settings. Rural ecovillages are usually based on farming, permaculture and other approaches which promote ecosystem function. Ecovillages, whether urban or rural, tend to integrate community and ecological values within a principle-based approach to sustainability and their residents value and practice community living. Their residents are not overly dependent on government, corporate or other centralized sources for water, food, rather, they attempt to provide these resources themselves. Their residents have a sense of shared values, often characterized in spiritual terms
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Ethical consumerism
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Ethical consumerism is a type of consumer activism that is based on the concept of dollar voting. It is practiced through positive buying in that products are favoured, or moral boycott. The term ethical consumer, now used generically, was first popularised by the UK magazine Ethical Consumer, Ethical Consumer magazines key innovation was to produce ratings tables, inspired by the criteria-based approach of the then emerging ethical investment movement. Today, Bloomberg and Reuters provide environmental, social and governance ratings direct to the financial data screens of hundreds of thousands of stock market traders, the not-for-profit Ethical Consumer Research Association continues to publish Ethical Consumer and its associated website, which provides free access to ethical ratings tables. Some trust criteria, e. g. creditworthiness or implied warranty, are considered to be part of any purchasing or sourcing decision. Paul Hawken, a proponent of Natural Capitalism, refers to comprehensive outcomes of production services as opposed to the outcomes of using the product of such services. Some theorists believe that it is the clearest way that we express our actual moral choices, for example, McDonalds started to sell salads and has a corporate social responsibility blog. Ethical Consumerism can be seen as a movement in marketing, which may or may not reflect changes in the practices of businesses. Particular areas of interest for large businesses are environmental impact and the treatment of workers at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy and this change reflects an increasing awareness of ethical issues and corporate identity amongst mainstream consumers. This practice has extended in some developing nations, e. g. where every item carries the name, phone number. And, more importantly, to prove that the item was not made by prison labor, such labels have also been used for boycotts, as when the merchandise mark Made in Germany was introduced in 1887. These labels serve as tokens of some reliable validation process, some instructional capital and they also signal some social capital, or trust, in some community of auditors that must follow those instructions to validate those labels. In 2009, Atlantas Virginia-Highland neighborhood became the first Carbon-Neutral Zone in the United States, seventeen merchants in Virginia-Highland allowed their carbon footprint to be audited. Now, they are partnered with the Valley Wood Carbon Sequestration Project—thousands of acres of forest in rural Georgia—through the Chicago Climate Exchange, the businesses involved in the partnership display the Verus Carbon Neutral seal in each store front and posted a sign prominently declaring the areas Carbon Neutral status. Over time, some theorists suggest, the amount of capital or trust invested in nation-states will continue to decrease. This can only be offset by retrenched national sovereignty to reinforce shared national standards in tax, trade, and tariff laws and these arguments have been a major focus of the anti-globalization movement, which includes many broader arguments against the amoral nature of markets as such. GfK NOP, the research group, has made a five-country study of consumer beliefs about the ethics of large companies. com. The countries surveyed were Germany, the United States, Britain, France, more than half of respondents in Germany and the US believed there is a serious deterioration in standards of corporate practice
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Freeganism
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Freeganism is a practice and ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food. The word freegan is a derived from free and vegan. The pamphlet Why Freegan. —written by former Against Me, the first organized group of self-described freegans formed in 2003 as an offshoot of the Wetlands Preserve nightclub and associated Activism Center in New York City. We came to realize that the problem isn’t just a few bad corporations, from 2005, freegan. info organized regular events including sewing and bicycle workshops, wild food foraging expeditions, and trash tours—public dumpster dives open to the public and to media. S. The majority of groups are now inactive, however, and many people. Studies usually find that most people that participate in practices associated with freeganism, dumpster diving for food, Freegan practices in theory reject the commoditization of basic necessities, the imperative of economic growth, and an economy based on money exchange rather than free gifting or sharing. Freegan organizations also often use consensus-based decision-making, popularized by the anti-globalization movement, the word freegan originated as a play on the label veganism and research on freegan. info in New York found that most participants were vegetarian or vegan prior to becoming freegan. In many cases, though, freegans critique vegans by arguing that vegans ignore the environmental and labor impacts of the products they buy, in some instances, one-time vegans return to eating animal products if found from the dumpster, sometimes referred to as meaganism. Freegans rejection of veganism is often tied to their discovery of food waste, estimated as up to 40% of the supply in the United States. Some freegans associate themselves with back-to-the-landers or anarcho-primitivism, the latter of which asserts that human beings should not only capitalism. With some exceptions, though, freeganism is an urban or suburban phenomenon. However, dumpster diving is not limited to rummaging for food, freegans report recovering clothing, books, appliances, bicycles and these events attracted significant media coverage, particularly between 2005 and 2009, from outlets such as The New York Times, Oprah, and MSNBC. Instead of buying conventionally grown foods, wild foragers find and harvest food, some freegans participate in guerrilla or community gardens, with the stated aim of rebuilding community and reclaiming the capacity to grow ones own food. Sharing is also presented as a common practice, associated with the anarchist idea of a gift economy. For example, Food Not Bombs recovers food that would go to waste to serve warm meals on the street to anyone who wants them. Really, Really Free Markets are free social events in which freegans can share goods instead of discarding them, share skills, give presents, a free store is a temporary market where people exchange goods and services outside of a money-based economy. In New York City, freegan. info often distributes recovered food items for free in an ad-hoc manner after trash tours, freegans also advocate sharing travel resources. Internet-based ridesharing or hitchhiking reduces but does not eliminate use of cars and all the resources needed to maintain
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Gift economy
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A gift economy, gift culture, or gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. This contrasts with an economy or a market economy, where goods. Social norms and custom govern gift exchange, Gifts are not given in an explicit exchange of goods or services for money or some other commodity. The nature of gift economies forms the subject of a debate in anthropology. Anthropological research into gift economies began with Bronisław Malinowskis description of the Kula ring in the Trobriand Islands during World War I. The Kula trade appeared to be gift-like since Trobrianders would travel great distances over dangerous seas to give what were considered valuable objects without any guarantee of a return. According to anthropologists Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, it is the relationship between market and non-market exchange that attracts the most attention. Gift economies are said, by some, to communities. Gift ideology in highly commercialized societies differs from the typical of non-market societies. Gift economies must also be differentiated from several closely related phenomena, such as common property regimes, however, he claims that anthropologists, through analysis of a variety of cultural and historical forms of exchange, have established that no universal practice exists. Gift exchange is frequently embedded in political, kin, or religious institutions, gift-giving is a form of transfer of property rights over particular objects. The nature of property rights varies from society to society, from culture to culture. The nature of gift-giving is thus altered by the type of property regime in place, property is not a thing, but a relationship amongst people about things. According to Chris Hann, property is a relationship that governs the conduct of people with respect to the use. Anthropologists analyze these relationships in terms of a variety of actors bundle of rights over objects, an example is the current debates around intellectual property rights. Hann and Strangelove both give the example of a book, over which the author retains a copyright. The gifts given in Kula exchange still remain, in some respects, in the example used above, copyright is one of those bundled rights that regulate the use and disposition of a book. Gift-giving in many societies is complicated because private property owned by an individual may be limited in scope
