Thought-provoking analysis of the cultural landscape

books:


	• Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture Grant McCracken Indiana University Press, 2008 - 428 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Thought-provoking analysis of the cultural landscape

I'm a big fan of Grant McCracken's blog, so I was eagerly anticipating his new book, which postulates that, as he titles his preface, "Entertainment is dead, long live Transformation". Instead of passively watching entertainment, people have become active consumers of the world around them, using ideas from all cultures to drive change within themselves. McCracken traces transformation possibilities throughout history, starting with tribal ritualistic transformations of rites of passage, passing through the industrial conception of working to improve one's social status by imitating the upper class, on to the 50s warring transformations of beatnik dropout culture vs. technophilic "brightwork" culture, and then to the postmodern transformations available to us today. We have moved from a world where one's birth determined one's destiny (sons of tailors became tailors) to one where we reinvent ourselves on an ongoing basis. McCracken takes the reader on a tour of several categories of postmodern transformations, including the capitalistic swift self and the Eastern-philosophy leaning radiant self. I highly recommend this book - it's so dense with new ideas and incisive observations that every few pages I would have to put it down and think for a while.

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Self reinvention has become a preoccupation of contemporary culture. In the last decade, Hollywood made a 500-million-dollar bet on this idea with movies such as Multiplicity, Fight Club, eXistenZ, and Catch Me If You Can. Self reinvention marks the careers of Madonna, Ani DiFranco, Martha Stewart, and Robin Williams. The Nike ads of LeBron James, the experiments of New Age spirituality, the mores of contemporary teen culture, and the obsession with "extreme makeovers" are all examples of our culture's fixation with change. In a time marked by plenitude, transformation is one of the few things these parties have in common.

Although transformation is widely acknowledged as a defining characteristic of our culture, we have almost no studies on what it is or how it works. Transformations offers the first comprehensive and systematic view. It is an ethnography of the contemporary world.

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