Worldview Flux: Perplexed Values for Postmodern Peoples

by Jim Norwine, Jonathan M. Smith, Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov University of Texas at Austin, Bella Bychkova Jordan, Michael Bruner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739101384
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	06/28/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Jim Norwine is Regents Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Texas A&M University at Kingsville. Jonathan M. Smith is Associate Professor of Geography at Texas A&M University at College Station. Both editors have published widely on cultural and physical geography.

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Argument
Chapter 2 When the Landscape Seems to Break Up, Vacillate, and Quake
Chapter 3 "I Love You, Man": Values in Flux
Part 4 Postmodern Peoples
Chapter 5 White Ethnics and the Romance of Place
Chapter 6 Postmodernity and the Borderlands: Symbolic Democracy and Ethnic Disparities
Chapter 7 "You Might Be a Cajun If. . .": The Tenacity of Place in a Changing World
Chapter 8 Afrikaner Identity in Late Twentieth-Century South Africa: Struggle, Trek, and Rootedness
Chapter 9 The Hunt for Identity: On the Contested Targets of Makah Whaling
Chapter 10 Asian Indian Americans in South Florida: Values and Identity
Chapter 11 Environmental Perspectives: Lost or Found in Postmodernity
Part 12 Dissenters
Chapter 13 The Moral Imperative of Late Capitalism
Chapter 14 Hubcap Commitment and Madcap Morality: Encouraging Signs Along Postmodern Paths of Uncertainty