Mike Featherstone

• Goldsmiths University of London

This article explores the formation of values on individual, cultural, societal, civilizational and epochal levels and discusses the carriers of values, symbolic hierarchies and future prospects. It demonstrates the continued conceptual and time-diagnostic usefulness of Georg Simmel’s sociological approach to values and argues that his Lebensphilos...

This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a...

This article introduces the special section on the contribution of Jack Goody, which focuses on The Theft of History (2006). Goody attacks the notion of a radical division between Europe and Asia, which has become built into the commonsense academic wisdom and categorical apparatus of the social sciences and humanities. Eurocentrism is a constant t...

Post-Modern City CulturesCultural Capital, Gentrification and the Stylization of LifeConclusion References

The Introduction situates the set of 'Problematizing Global Knowledge: Critical Commentaries' in the context of the Theory, Culture & Society New Encyclopaedia Project (TCS special issue 23[2-3], 2006). various commentaries that follow interrogate the non-Eurocentric and non-Occidentalist commitment of the project.

The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ‘consumer culture’ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most noteworthy areas discussed are the effec...

The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhan's reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various p...

Whilst presenting a number of features that have been put forward to characterize modernity as a way of life and a social system, this entry suggests a dissident genealogy that reveals a hidden history of continuities and alternatives. It thereby problematizes the norms about periodization and the assumptions about the elaboration of a logos that u...

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the worl...

ABSTRACT This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the particularity and singularity of the event...

In response to the question of fundamental values Western modernity has offered a confident response, linking it to the application of rational knowledge which it is assumed will lead to progress. In the Enlightenment vision the structures of the natural and social worlds could be discovered by reason and science. This would yield technologically u...