The most salient feature of the postmodern world, believe geographers Jim Norwine and Jonathan M. Smith, is a new set of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that are not yet well developed or widely diffused, so that few if any postmodern people are entirely of the new world or the old. People are "perplexed," their values inchoate. Worldview Flux defines and describes the nature of perplexity and documents the shifts and changes of the postmodern world that lead to it, attending especially to the ways changes are experienced in particular places and human communities. In theoretical chapters contributors explain the reasons for our disoriented and disorienting world; empirical chapters describe strategies developed by individuals and communities to preserve, recover, or reinvent lost values, meaning, and identity. This volume is an accessible, engaging, and thought-provoking exploration of cultural geography in our time.

Confucianism, Chinese History and Society is a collection of essays authored by world renowned scholars on Chinese studies, including Professor Ho Peng Yoke (Needham Research Institute), Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee (Harvard University), Professor Philip Y S Leung (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Professor Liu Ts'un-Yan (Australian National University), Professor Tu Wei-Ming (Harvard University), Professor Wang Gungwu (National University of Singapore) and Professor Yue Daiyun (Peking University). The volume covers many important themes and topics in Chinese Studies, including the Confucian perspective on human rights, Nationalism and Confucianism, Confucianism and the development of Science in China, crisis and innovation in contemporary Chinese cultures, plurality of cultures in the context of globalization, and comparative study of the city cultures in modern China. These essays were originally delivered at the Professor Wu Teh Yao Memorial Lectures. Wu Teh Yao (1917–1994) was an educator, political scientist, specialist in Confucianism and original drafter of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Very few studies have examined the worldview of the Anishinaabeg from within the culture itself and none have explored the Anishinaabe worldview in relation to their efforts to maintain their culture in the present-day world. This book fills that gap. Focusing mainly on the Minnesota Anishinaabeg, Lawrence Gross explores how their worldview works to create a holistic way of living. However, as Gross also argues, the Anishinaabeg saw the end of their world early in the 20th century and experienced what he calls 'postapocalypse stress syndrome.' As such, the book further explores how the values engendered by the worldview of the Anishinaabeg are finding expression in the modern world as they seek to rebuild their society.

In this book, an international team of environmental and social scientists explain two powerful current change-engines and how their effects, and our responses to them, will transform Earth and humankind into the 22nd-century (c.2100). This book begins by detailing the current state of knowledge about these two ongoing, accelerating and potentially world-transforming changes: climate change, in the form of global warming, and a profound emerging shift of normative cultural condition toward the assumptions and values often associated with so-called postmodernity, such as tolerance, diversity, self-referentiality, and dubiety replaced with certainty. Next, the contributors imagine, explain and debate the most likely consequent transformations of human and natural ecologies and economies that will take place by the end of the 21st-century. In 16 compellingly original, provocative and readable chapters, A World after Climate Change and Culture-Shift presents a one-of-a-kind vision of our current age as a “hinge” or axial century, one driven by the most radical combined change of nature and culture since the rise of agriculture at the end of the last Ice Age some 10 millennia ago. This book is highly recommended to scholars and students of the environmental and social sciences, as well as to all readers interested in how changes in nature and culture will work together to reshape our world and ourselves. "I cannot think of a book more geared to advancing the art and science of geography." - Yi-Fu Tuan, J. K. Wright and Vilas Professor Emeritus of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Outstanding," "unique," and "exceptional timeliness of topic and ambition ofvision". - Richard Marston, University Distinguished Professor, Kansas State University; past president, Association of American Geographers

Marching through a series of case studies from a wide range of fields, Leitch (English, Purdue U.) argues that disorganization and disaggregation characterizes postmodern times. He compares the phenomena to imploded geological formations with historical strata in kaleidoscopic disarray that engulfs economics, politics, and culture. Includes four color reproductions of paintings. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

The present volume is part of the ‘Worldviews, Science and Us’ series of proceedings. It contains selected contributions on the subject of bridging knowledge and its implications for our perspectives of the world. This volume also represents the proceedings of the interdisciplinary stream of the international workshop (Part 1) Times of Entanglement, 21-22 September 2010 at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, People's Republic of China in the context of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and, related cutting-edge investigations in the quantum paradigm from discussion panels organized by the Leo Apostel Center for Interdisciplinary studies within the framework of the ‘Research on the Construction of Integrating Worldviews’ research community set up by the Flanders Fund for Scientific Research. Further information about this research community and a full list of the associated international research centers can be found at www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/res/worldviews/.

Americanness: Inquiries into the Thought and Culture of the United States analyzes several core themes that connect Americans because of, and despite, their pronounced diversity. The book investigates shared ideas and ideals, such as individualism, mobility, materialism, and future-orientation, that drive an overarching American worldview. Simon J. Bronner begins with ideas of space and time as they formed and changed through the history of the United States, before moving to the emergence of modern American culture. He examines reasons America is characterized as having a "victory culture" that extends to the American legal, military, and business complexes. This victory culture is further analyzed by looking at the country’s relationship with the game of football—a sport that thrives in America but has not caught on in other countries. Finally, the volume probes American consumerism driven by a desire for individual prosperity in a supposedly egalitarian society. Using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from psychology, sociology, ethnology, and history, Bronner seeks explanations for people invoking, and evoking, ideas that they perceive as American. This book would be an invaluable addition to courses on American history, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.

The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an International Summer Institute held in 1996 on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples. The contributors, primarily Indigenous, unravel the processes of colonization that enfolded modern society and resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

Carolyn Merchant’s foundational 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution established her as a pioneering researcher of human-nature relations. Her subsequent groundbreaking writing in a dozen books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles have only fortified her position as one of the most influential scholars of the environment. This book examines and builds upon her decades-long legacy of innovative environmental thought and her critical responses to modern mechanistic and patriarchal conceptions of nature and women as well as her systematic taxonomies of environmental thought and action. Seventeen scholars and activists assess, praise, criticize, and extend Merchant’s work to arrive at a better and more complete understanding of the human place in nature today and the potential for healthier and more just relations with nature and among people in the future. Their contributions offer personal observations of Merchant’s influence on the teaching, research, and careers of other environmentalists.

Scientific, technological, and cultural changes have always had an impact upon philosophy. They can force a change in the way we perceive the world, reveal new kinds of phenomena to be understood, and provide new ways of understanding phenomena. Complexity science, immersed in a culture of information, is having a diverse but particularly significant impact upon philosophy. Previous ideas do not necessarily sit comfortably with the new paradigm, resulting in new ideas or new interpretations of old ideas. In this unprecedented interdisciplinary volume, researchers from different backgrounds join efforts to update thinking upon philosophical questions with developments in the scientific study of complex systems. The contributions focus on a wide range of topics, but share the common goal of increasing our understanding and improving our descriptions of our complex world. This revolutionary debate includes contributions from leading experts, as well as young researchers proposing fresh ideas.