Product Description: Understand Thailand’s important symbols, icons, and social practicesThailand’s culture is unlike any other. Travelers attempting to fully immerse themselves in all that this tourist destination has to offer find it essential to become culturally sensitive...read more

Seeing Is Believing uses semiological and psychological concepts to help readers gain an understanding of the way we find meaning in visual phenomena and the way our minds process images. These concepts are presented in a readable, fun style; numerous illustrations are offered to show how the principles discussed have been applied.

Product Description: The Humor of Humor is much more than a pleasurable experience to read. By turns hilarious and illuminating, it is a revolutionary contribution, for beneath its endless fun and wit lays a new approach to comedy. The author compresses the vast panorama of the subject into a few basic building blocks of humor...read more

Product Description: The Genius of the Jewish Joke focuses on what is distinctive and unusual about Jewish jokes and Jewish humor. Jewish humor is humor by Jews and about Jews, in whatever medium this humor is found. Jokes are defined as short stories, meant to amuse, with a punch line, though Jewish humor exists in many other forms—riddles, comic definitions, parodies—as well...read more

Al Capp's cartoon of Dogpatch's favorite son revealed as satiric culture of the common man

Product Description: Is consciousness like an iceberg? Does advertising lead to the commodification of humans? What is the hidden meaning of fairy tales? In 50 Ways to Understand Communication, Arthur Asa Berger familiarizes readers with important concepts written by leading communication and cultural theorists, such as Saussure, LZvi-Strauss, de Certeau, Lasswell, McLuhan, Postman, and many others...read more

Product Description: A murder, just four hours before the Royal Duchess is scheduled to sail for Alaska, and inspector Solomon Hunter and his assistant, Talcott Weems, are summoned to investigate this latest mystery. This delightful whodunit textbook by Arthur Asa Berger is the perfect tool to introduce students to cultural studies theories, in particular the complexities of identity, and also to the foibles of academic life...read more

Explore the travel/tourism possibilities of this exotic yet tourist-friendly countryVietnam Tourism presents a unique ethnographic-semiotic analysis of some of the most important touristic icons in Vietnamese culture. In addition, it offers a firsthand analysis of many aspects of daily life in Vietnam and a semiotic analysis of Vietnam’s dominant cultural symbols. A twelve-page photo section brings vibrant images of this unique country to life.Vietnam Tourism also presents an essential overview of what Vietnam has to offer tourists, looking at the exciting possibilities—and the potential pitfalls—of visiting this extraordinary country. Although Vietnam is a Third World country, it has excellent tourism companies and many wonderful sites—from Halong Bay and Hue to extraordinary temples and beautiful beaches. The book paints a vivid portrait of this country’s hidden gems and popular tourist destinations, exploring the problems and possibilities Vietnam faces in developing its tourism industry.In Vietnam Tourism, you’ll find information that is essential for anyone who needs to be “in the know” about this increasingly popular tourist destination. This reader-friendly book will leave you better informed about: the rapid construction of hotels in important tourist sites: there are now hotels of all kinds—from super luxurious ones to middle-range, three-star hotels, down to very primitive hotels—in most of the country’s important tourist venues daily life in Vietnam’s teeming cities, in its religious enclaves, and in its unique rural areas the meaning and relevance (semiotics) of commonplace objects in Vietnam, including Pho (a traditional soup that is often eaten for breakfast and is found everywhere in the country), conical straw hats, spring rolls, pith helmets, dong (Vietnamese currency), water puppetry, etc. important sites that tourists often visit, including the Ho Chi Minh museum, Ha Noi, the Cu Chi Tunnels, the unforgettable Cao Dai Cathedral at Tay Ninh, the Mekong Delta, and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) images of Vietnam created by travel writers—what the tourist guidebooks have to say, and how they relate to the reality of the author’s personal experience in VietnamAfter reading Vietnam Tourism, you (and your students) will have a wealth of knowledge to draw upon. This is an ideal book to read before visiting Vietnam yourself—or recommending/planning a trip for others. The fresh insights it presents will help make any trip to the region more rewarding for the traveler.

Product Description: Azriel Moshe, the head of an inter-disciplinary team of scholars investigating the Kabbalah, has been murdered. The only clue found is a strange mark Moshe left on the floor, written in his own blood. Which of Moshe's colleagues is the murderer? Was it his spurned lover Svetlana Pagetsky, the beautiful Russian historian? The vivacious Krista Scelba, a brilliant sociologist with a secret obsession? Or perhaps it was Leon Gerhard, Moshe's jealous archrival? To solve the mystery, Solomon Hunter must first understand the Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah...read more

Product Description: Making Sense of Media is a lively and accessible text that helps readers understand mass media and the texts they carry. Designed expressly for those interested in gaining a solid understanding of the media and how they work, it is an indispensable book...read more

A one-of-a-kind analysis of ocean cruising! In Ocean Travel and Cruising: A Cultural Analysis, noted author Arthur Asa Berger turns his critical eye to the phenomenon of ocean cruising. This academically solid yet reader-friendly book brings a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach to the subject, examining ocean cruising from economic, semiotic, sociological, psychoanalytic, and marketing perspectives, and offering insights not provided by the more traditional sociological approaches to the subject. You'll explore cruise demographics, the relationship between cruising and gender, the sociology of dining on cruise ships, hedonism and pleasure seeking, the “compulsion to cruise,” consolidation in the industry, the exploitation of workers on cruise ships, and a great deal more. Here's a section-by-section rundown of what's in store for you and your students in this one-of-a-kind new text: “The Economics of Cruising” examines cruise categories, industry consolidation, worker exploitation, and ways that cruise lines make money aside from ticket sales. This section also compares the costs of cruises vs. land-based vacations and fills you in on the typical weekly food and beverage consumption of the Carnival line's complement of ships, which sheds light on how a cruise line can, for a mere $10, provide a food array that would cost a restaurant or hotel $33 to $40. “Signs at Sea—The Semiotics of Cruising” provides you with a quick primer on semiotics and then discusses the cruise ship as a sign system and then breaks the system down to its component parts, discussing dining rooms, cabins/staterooms, dress codes, spatiality, luxury signifiers, the perceived elitism of the cruise experience, the role of photography, and more. “A Sociological Analysis of Cruising” explores cruise demographics and their meaning, time budgeting on cruises, the sociology of dining, new trends in cruising, and the meaning of gender in relation to ocean cruising. A particularly intriguing chapter is “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Cruising.” Beginning with a look at the compulsion to cruise, this section explores cruising's relationship with the unconscious, the paradise myth, hedonism and pleasure seeking, the desire for unconditional love, psychological regression, and more. In “Selling Smooth Sailing: Advertising and Marketing Cruises,” you'll examine print advertisements from eight major cruise lines, look at what they have in common and what the differences are between the messages each cruise line hopes to convey via the style and content of their ads and brochures. “Cruising (on) the Internet” looks at the intersection of the information superhighway with the world of cruising. You'll learn about the cruise lines' own Web sites, travel agency sites, Internet sites designed to rate and review cruises and cruise ships, and more. “Notes from a Cruise Journal” shares the author’s on-site reflections and impressions of a weeklong cruise from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and back. Written in accessible, jargon-free language that will appeal to students at all levels, Ocean Travel and Cruising: A Cultural Analysis is the most recent of a very small selection of scholarly studies of ocean cruising available in English. Make it a part of your cultural studies, leisure studies, sociology, travel/tourism/hospitality, popular culture, or American studies course this semester! (view table of contents)

Product Description: Based on class activities and assignments used by the author over nearly forty years of teaching, Games and Activities for Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Students is a natural accompaniment for texts in media or cultural studies and communication courses...read more

Product Description: Supergrow is a collection of fifteen essays that appeared between 1966 and 1969 in publications such as the American Scholar, the New York Times, Antioch Review, Esquire, and the Saturday Review. Author Benjamin DeMott discusses everything under the sun--music, improving one's sex life, violence in Mississippi, theater, student revolts--but a single theme unifies the material: people ought to use their imaginations more...read more

Product Description: In this sociology textbook/mystery novel, students can join Sherlock Holmes and Watson as they discover a new area ripe for acrimony and intrigue: social theory. In 1910, the most prominent social theorists in the world gather in London for a conference on the new science of sociology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In The Portable Postmodernist, Arthur Asa Berger introduces key concepts written by postmodernism's leading theorists including Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson. This collage of influential writing is followed by Berger's concise, accessible comments...read more

Product Description: This is a book about popular culture and the role it plays in people's lives and in American society. The first section of the book, on theoretical concerns, deals with the meanings of the terms "popular" and "culture," with how cultures vary, and with the impact popular culture has on our personalities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From their inception, video games quickly became a major new arena of popular entertainment. Beginning with very primitive games, they quickly evolved into interactive animated works, many of which now approach film in terms of their visual excitement...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Mass Comm Murders is a novel way (both literally and figuratively) to introduce students to mass communication theory. Berger's latest comic murder mystery again features Inspector Solomon Hunter and his sidekick, Sergeant Talcott Weams, in the search for who is snuffing out a group of media theorists―though only after each, in turn, explains his or her theory of mass communications...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Postmodern Pedagogue offers suggestions about teaching based on forty years of experience. It contains many ideas that can be adapted by professors to suit their own particular needs.

Product Description: This text deals with ten important Jewish American comedians from an historical perspective and in a systematic manner. The focus is on the impact of Judaism on these humourists and on their relations to American culture and character...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)