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Emotions permeate all aspects of protest, just as they do all human action. Most scholars acknowledge this, but have done little to incorporate feelings into their explanations. This book systematically shows how dozens of emotions help, hinder, direct, and generate social movements. They are not simply bad nor simply good; they are normal.

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. This book looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably. As the book discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and the book reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But the book also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, this book ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.

More and more information is pumped into our media-saturated world every day, yet Americans seem to know less and less. In a society where who you are is defined by what you buy, and where we prefer to experience reality by watching it on TV, the book argues that something has clearly gone wrong. The initial diagnosis is bleak: fast food and too much time spent sitting, whether in our cars or on our couches, are ruining our bodies, while our minds are weakened by the proliferation of electronic devices—TVs, computers, cell phones, iPods, video games—and their alienating effects. If we are losing the battle between autonomy and automation, the book asks, how can our culture regain self-sufficiency? The book finds the answer in the inspiring visions—deeply rooted in American culture—of an organic and more spontaneous life at the heart of the work of master craftsman Wharton Esherick, legendary blues singer Muddy Waters, urban critic Lewis Mumford, and artist Maya Lin, among others. A scathing jeremiad against modern materialism, the book is also a series of epiphanies of a simpler but more profound life.

Popular Indian cinema provides entertainment for people from all walks of life but equally importantly, cinema provides collective experience and a common referent in a country of mind-boggling diversities. Drawing on in-depth, multi-year ethnography in the South Indian city of Bangalore and involving participant observation on film sets, watching films in stratified cinema halls, accompanying habituated audiences to the cinema and conversations with moviegoers, exhibitors, distributors, ushers, fans and filmmakers, House Full makes a case for a total perspective on cinema film. It argues that the magic of motion pictures in India cannot be understood without addressing the liveness of cinema, its social existence and cultural ramifications, and most importantly, its audiences. Indeed by exploring the concept of cinema as a participatory and collaborative making that includes audiences and their aesthetic and social practices, the book offers new analytical approaches and new ways to think about cinema film.

Outside of Italy, the country's culture and its food appear to be essentially synonymous. And indeed, as this book makes clear, preparing, cooking, and eating food play a central role in the daily activities of Italians from all walks of life. This book presents a fascinating and colorful look at the Italian table. This book focuses on two dozen families in the city of Bologna, elegantly weaving together an outsider perspective with intimate knowledge of the local customs. The authors of this book interview and observe these families as they go shopping for ingredients, cook together, and argue over who has to wash the dishes. Throughout, the chapters elucidate the guiding principle of the Italian table—a delicate balance between the structure of tradition and the joy of improvisation.

More than any other altruistic gesture, blood and organ donation exemplifies the true spirit of self-sacrifice. Donors literally give of themselves for no reward so that the life of an individual—often anonymous—may be spared. But as the demand for blood and organs has grown, the value of a system that depends solely on gifts has been called into question, and the possibility has surfaced that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers. This book offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma by examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States. Gifts of blood and organs are not given everywhere in the same way or to the same extent—contrasts that allow the book to uncover the pivotal role that institutions play in fashioning the contexts for donations. Procurement organizations, it shows, sustain altruism by providing opportunities to give and by producing public accounts of what giving means. In the end, the book suggests, successful systems rest on the fairness of the exchange, rather than the purity of a donor's altruism or the size of a financial incentive.

At the center of Stefan Bargheer’s account of bird watching, field ornithology, and nature conservation in Britain and Germany stands the question how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments. Using life history data derived from written narratives and oral histories, Moral Entanglements follows the development of conservation from the point in time at which the greatest declines in bird life took place to the current efforts in large-scale biodiversity conservation and environmental policy within the European Union. While often depicted as the outcome of an environmental revolution that took place since the 1960s, Bargheer demonstrates to the contrary that the relevant practices and institutions that shape contemporary conservation evolved gradually since the early nineteenth century. Moral Entanglements further shows that the practices and institutions in which bird conservation is entangled differ between the two countries. In Britain, birds derived their meaning in the context of the game of bird watching as a leisure activity. Here, birds are now, as then, the most popular and best protected taxonomic group of wildlife due to their particularly suitable status as toys in a collecting game, turning nature into a playground. In Germany, by contrast, birds were initially part of the world of work. They were protected as useful economic tools, rendering services of ecological pest control in a system of agricultural production modeled after the factory shop floor. Based on this extensive analysis, Bargheer formulates a sociology of morality informed by a pragmatist theory of value.

People—especially Americans—are by and large optimists. They're much better at imagining best-case scenarios (I could win the lottery!) than worst-case scenarios (A hurricane could destroy my neighborhood!). This is true not just of their approach to imagining the future, but of their memories as well: people are better able to describe the best moments of their lives than they are the worst. Though there are psychological reasons for this phenomenon, this book considers instead the role of society in fostering this attitude. What kinds of communities develop this pattern of thought, which do not, and what does that say about human ability to evaluate possible outcomes of decisions and events? This book travels to diverse realms of experience, including intimate family relationships, key transitions in our lives, the places we work and play, and the boardrooms of organizations and bureaucracies. Using interviews, surveys, artistic and fictional accounts, media reports, historical data, and official records, it illuminates one of the most common, yet least studied, of human traits—a blatant disregard for worst-case scenarios.

In the spring of 1989, more than 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown. This book treats these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, it carries out an analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, the book argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.

Globalization and the Internet are smothering cultural regionalism, that sense of place that flourished in simpler times. These two villains are also prime suspects in the death of reading. Or so alarming reports about our homogenous and dumbed-down culture would have it, but as this book shows, neither of these claims stands up under scrutiny—quite the contrary. The author of this book draws on cases from Italy, Norway, and the United States to show that fans of books form their own reading class, with a distinctive demographic profile separate from the general public. This reading class is modest in size but intense in its literary practices. Paradoxically these educated and mobile elites work hard to put down local roots by, among other strategies, exploring regional writing. Ultimately, due to the technological, economic, and political advantages they wield, cosmopolitan readers are able to celebrate, perpetuate, and reinvigorate local culture.

This book takes the reader behind the scenes in Hollywood into the unknown world of talent agencies. Based on unprecedented fieldwork (122 interviews, as well as in situ observations at agencies), it explores the day-to-day activity of talent agents and unveils how they contribute to shaping artistic careers and projects. The agencies are central spaces for professional socialization in Hollywood. It’s in this organizational setting that agents learn how to build and maintain strong ties with key counterparts, first and foremost artists and production professionals. The book examines what "having relationships" really means for these professionals. It looks at the ties that the agents create with their clients – in the form of enchanted bonds that are at the same time power relations. It challenges existing approaches to Hollywood networks by analyzing how specialized professional circles form across organizational boundaries and tie together talent representatives, artists, and production professionals over long periods of time. These interconnections are crucial for understanding how movies, and entertainment products in general, are made in Hollywood: it’s in such circles that artistic worth (quality) and economic value (price) are inseparably evaluated and attributed to people and projects. This study explores this intertwining of creative and economic power. It shows how “talent” or “influence” is recognized to Hollywood players. It therefore sheds new light on the production of popular culture, as well as on today’s transformation of Hollywood and the inseparable redefinition of entertainment.

This book explores the distinctly social logic of awakening narratives -- autobiographical stories people tell about having once been contained in a world of darkness and ignorance and subsequently awakening to an enlightened understanding of their experiences and situations. It analyzes a wide variety of stories spanning roughly ten thousand years of history and pertaining to various philosophical, religious, political, scientific, psychological, and sexual subject matters. Despite these otherwise significant variations, and even when different agents express conflicting or oppositional notions of “truth,” individuals tell stories that follow the same pattern or formula. When individuals use these formulaic stories to articulate a newly discovered “truth,” they ally with an autobiographical community to weigh in on a profound cultural and epistemic conflict in a broader autobiographical field. They use the awakening narrative formula to do memory work -- to revise the past and mobilize their autobiographical memories to make claims about morally salient events and issues while plotting a future course of action. They combine conventional tropes and metaphors into formulaic vocabularies of liminality to explain and account for their major transformations of worldview. Engaging in a particular style of identity work, such storytellers divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a temporally divided self, performing a figurative interaction between past and present versions of the self that maps to a social conflict between different autobiographical communities. Advancing a formal cultural and cognitive sociology of autobiography, this book illuminates the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”

This book serves as an overview and introduction to the work of acclaimed sociologist Howard S. Becker. Author Alain Pessin notes Becker’s particular contributions to the field of sociology and delves into the sociologist’s perspective on research and observation. The chapters cover Becker’s view on the sociology of art as well as his ideas about culture and sociology in general. Throughout the book, Pessin explores Becker’s major works as expressions of the freedom of possibility within a world of collaborators. By describing and expanding upon Becker’s ideas, Pessin crafts an intellectual tribute to this remarkable thinker and writer.

Based on two years of intensive observation at three university-based graduate MFA arts programs, Talking Art provides a detailed ethnography of how young artists are trained in the contemporary art world and how creativity has found a place in the modern American university. In contrast to the assumption that the key feature of graduate level art education is the teaching of techniques of art, students must develop a coherent artistic self and justify their intentions. Technique is rarely taught in classes, as it is assumed that young artists have enrolled with the skills necessary or that they will learn skills individually from mentors. Artists must read theory, learn to talk about their creations, and describe them in artist statements. These pose challenges for those young artists who expect to be makers, rather than intellectuals. Central to graduate art education is the critique: a public ceremony held several times a year in which students present their recent artwork to their community. Students describe their intentions and the rest of the session (from 30 minutes to an hour) is consumed by faculty evaluating this work. These public trials can be affirming or brutally critical. Students present their creations and their selves in ways that demonstrate that art truly matters.To be an artist is not simply to be a maker, but to be a reader, a talker, and a writer. As art education has been embraced by the university, it has increasingly become a professionalized discipline, rather than craft or embodied skill.

What is an Event? describes the complex lived experiences of events-in-the making. It analyzes how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life and how they then restlessly move across time and space. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life, as ‘breaking news’ constantly interrupts everyday routines. The book charts fundamental experiences of the events of life that are both inevitable and also, paradoxically, always a surprise: birth, death, love, war. What is an Event? systematically analyzes how events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism, termed political semiosis, for understanding eventful forms and flows. This mechanism distinguishes three critical aspects of event-making: representation, demonstration, and the performative. The analyses move from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks and financial crises. What is an Event? develops its analysis through a close reading of a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live. The book aims to highlight what is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events: identities, loyalties, social relationships, and the very experiences of time and space. The book provides a multi-disciplinary mechanism for identifying and assessing what is at stake in the formations and flows of events.

Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000 people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to be alarmist or even paranoid. But this book shows that such individuals—like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy—are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. This book surveys the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics. Along the way, it explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them ordinary and mundane: very real threats like a killer flu or an American Hiroshima have become so common that they have lost their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, the book argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should.