A Good Life

This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also abou...

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Kaituhi matua: Edmunds, Mary
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I whakaputaina: ANU Press 2023
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Urunga tuihono:ONIX_20231005_9781922144676_2067
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author Edmunds, Mary
author_browse Edmunds, Mary
author_facet Edmunds, Mary
author_sort Edmunds, Mary
collection Directory of Open Access Books
description This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people. Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world. “This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’” Hon. Fred Chaney AO.
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spelling doab-20.500.12854ir-1163562024-04-08T20:11:01Z A Good Life Edmunds, Mary Philosophy Anthropology bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPQ Ethics & moral philosophy bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTQ Ethics and moral philosophy thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people. Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world. “This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’” Hon. Fred Chaney AO. 2023-10-05T11:02:47Z 2023-10-05T11:02:47Z 2013 book ONIX_20231005_9781922144676_2067 9781922144676 9781922144669 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/116356 eng image/jpeg Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt31ngt2 ANU Press 10.2307/j.ctt31ngt2 10.2307/j.ctt31ngt2 975ba519-3ce2-4517-95bf-b847729fbcf1 9781922144676 9781922144669 open access
spellingShingle Philosophy
Anthropology
bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPQ Ethics & moral philosophy
bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTQ Ethics and moral philosophy
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology
Edmunds, Mary
A Good Life
title A Good Life
title_full A Good Life
title_fullStr A Good Life
title_full_unstemmed A Good Life
title_short A Good Life
title_sort good life
topic Philosophy
Anthropology
bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPQ Ethics & moral philosophy
bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTQ Ethics and moral philosophy
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology
topic_facet Philosophy
Anthropology
bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPQ Ethics & moral philosophy
bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTQ Ethics and moral philosophy
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology
url ONIX_20231005_9781922144676_2067
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