A01=Susan Hegeman
Americans
Anthropologist
Author_Susan Hegeman
Bourgeoisie
Career
Category=JBCC9
Category=JHM
Civilization
Clement Greenberg
Clifford Geertz
Criticism
Cultural lag
Cultural relativism
Culturalism
Culture and Anarchy
Culture and Society
Culture industry
Culture of the United States
D. H. Lawrence
Dichotomy
Disenchantment
Edward Sapir
Elitism
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethnography
Ezra Pound
Franz Boas
Fredric Jameson
Hart Crane
High culture
Highbrow
Highbrow (Transformers)
Ideology
James Agee
Jean Toomer
Kenneth Burke
Kitsch
Literary modernism
Literature
Malcolm Cowley
Margaret Mead
Melting pot
Middle class
Middlebrow
Modernism
Modernity
Moral relativism
Narrative
Philosophy
Postmodernism
Psychoanalysis
Puritans
Racism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Randolph Bourne
Relativism
Religion
Rhetoric
Ruth Benedict
Scientific racism
Sherwood Anderson
Social science
Society of the United States
Superiority (short story)
Tenant farmer
The Other Hand
The Two Cultures
Theodore Dreiser
Totalitarianism
Transnationalism
Waldo Frank
Walker Evans
World War II
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691001340
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jun 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In recent decades, historians and social theorists have given much thought to the concept of "culture," its origins in Western thought, and its usefulness for social analysis. In this book, Susan Hegeman focuses on the term's history in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. She shows how, during this period, the term "culture" changed from being a technical term associated primarily with anthropology into a term of popular usage. She shows the connections between this movement of "culture" into the mainstream and the emergence of a distinctive "American culture," with its own patterns, values, and beliefs. Hegeman points to the significant similarities between the conceptions of culture produced by anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and a diversity of other intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Dwight Macdonald. Hegeman reveals how relativist anthropological ideas of human culture--which stressed the distance between modern centers and "primitive" peripheries--came into alliance with the evaluating judgments of artists and critics.
This anthropological conception provided a spatial awareness that helped develop the notion of a specifically American "culture." She also shows the connections between this new view of "culture" and the artistic work of the period by, among others, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Thomas Hart Benton, Nathanael West, and James Agee and depicts in a new way the richness and complexity of the modernist milieu in the United States.
Susan Hegeman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida. She has published a variety of articles in the areas of cultural studies, American studies, and Native-American studies.
