Bøker av John Clammer

Examines the relevance of some major aspects and assumptions of contemporary social and cultural theory to Japanese society - which has a very different history and conception of its self-identity from the Western ones in which the modern social sciences have almost exclusively arisen.

This book provides an innovative contribution to the emerging field of culture and development through the lens of cultural rights, arguing in favour of a fruitful dialogue between human rights, development studies, critical cultural studies, and concerns about the protection and preservation of cultural diversity.

First Published in 1995. The question of ''postmodernity'' that has swept Western academic and intellectual circles raises critical comparative questions. Do societies that have not experienced the same historical development as the West pass inevitably through modernity into postmodernity, or can they skip such stages altogether? Japan, the only non-Western society to develop independently a fully-fledged capitalist-industrialist economy, poses such fundamental questions to social theory. Is Japan in fact ''unique'' and as such is it a society which escapes the net of conventional sociological abstractions? The book questions how special Japanese society really is, the limitations of Western social theory in grasping the fullness of this dynamic and a complex Asian society, and inquires as to how Japan in turn may speak to social theory and deepen and broaden the principles on which social theory attempts to explore and categorize the social and cultural worlds.

Contending that culture lies at the root of our current planetary and civilizational crisis, this book uniquely explores the nature of the specifically cultural dimensions of that crisis and how culture relates to the areas of politics, policy, economics, ecology and the whole discourse of sustainability.

The author expertly argues that in the current world crisis it is necessary to recover a more holistic vision of development that creates a vocabulary linking more technical (and predominantly economic) aspects of development with more humanistic and ecological goals.