Books by Alumni: Social science

Paul R. Diesing, AM'48, PhD'52, Hegel's Dialectical Political Economy: A Contemporary Application (Westview Press). Diesing describes Hegel's dialectical method and sociopolitical theory as they appear in Philosophy of Right, showing how they can be used in contemporary social research.

Herbert J. Gans, PhB'47, AM'50, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Basic Books). Gans studies the relation of cultural choices and social class, critiquing views that consider people who choose popular culture as culturally and morally inferior. In particular, he examines the "dumbing down" critique.

Marion Sherman Goldman, AM'70, PhD'77, Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined A Cult (University of Michigan Press). Goldman explores the personal stories of American women who left their careers, families, and past identities to follow Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to his spiritual community in central Oregon. She considers their choices in order to understand more general themes about the ways contemporary women balance love, work, and spirituality.

Anura Goonasekera, AM'76, PhD'83, and Youichi Ito, editors, Mass Media and Cultural Identity: Ethnic Reporting in Asia (Pluto Press). The product of two years of empirical work, this book examines the role of communications media in the management of ethnic relations in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.

Sherry B. Ortner, AM'66, PhD'70, editor, The Fate of "Culture": Geertz and Beyond (University of California Press). Leading scholars from four disciplines take a fresh look at anthropologist Clifford Geertz's work and its continuing implications in contemporary cultural studies.

Thomas A. Sebeok, AB'41, and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (Mouton de Gruyter). Sebeok probes such questions as: "What is the function of modeling in all life forms?" and "How is human modeling similar to and different from modeling in other species?"

Samuel M. Wilson, AM'81, PhD'86, The Emperor's Giraffe and Other Stories of Cultures in Contact (Westview Press). Many of the anthropological essays in this collection involve Europeans and the New World cultures they encountered. The title piece concerns a Ming dynasty explorer who brought a giraffe from Africa to the Chinese court.