Product Description: Critical Regionalism is a notion which gained popularity in architectural debate as a synthesis of universal, 'modern' elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter...read more

Product Description: At first sight, tattoos, nudity, and veils do not seem to have much in common except for the fact that all three have become more frequent, more visible, and more dominant in connection with aesthetic presentations of women over the past thirty years...read more

Product Description: Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has produced? This book attempts to disentangle the common characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality by examining discourses on psychoanalysis, gene-technology, globalization, and contemporary art.

Product Description: The Veil in Kuwait explores the complex reasons behind why women veil and how they are perceived by those that do not veil. Religion, culture, family, tradition, and fashion are all explored to provide insight into this fascinating phenomenon that has received global interest.

Product Description: Centralization and over-professionalization can lead to the disappearance of a critical environment capable of linking the human sciences to the real world. The authors of this volume suggest that the humanities need to operate in a concrete cultural environment able to influence procedures on a hic et nunc basis, and that they should not entirely depend on normative criteria whose function is often to hide ignorance behind a pretentious veil of value-neutral objectivity...read more

Product Description: The impotency remedy Viagra is the fastest selling drug in history. It has grown beyond being simply a medical phenomenon, but has achieved the status of cultural icon, appearing on television as a pretext for jokes or even as a murder weapon...read more

Product Description: At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the African American cool, which, propelled by Hip-Hop music, has become the world's favorite youth culture; and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime industry...read more

Product Description: Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study examines the parallels between Russian and Japanese philosophies and religions by revealing a common concept of space in Russian and Japanese aesthetics and political theories...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays on cognition, which involves continental as much as analytical approaches, attempts to observe cognitive processes in three areas: in culture, in nature, and in an area that can â at least from some point of view â be perceived as an âin-between❠of culture and nature: memes...read more

Product Description: Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein reveals a common structure of 'dreamtense' in the works of major filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, and Wong Kar-wai.

Product Description: Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920 until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labour camp from 1950 to 1956)...read more