"An important and quite beautiful book". ("Library Journal"). "[Eliade] throws a searching and humbling light on our modern fragmented existence". ([London] "Times Literary Supplement"). "Treatment of such subjects as the meaning of the sacred, sun and moon worship, water symbolism, sacred stones, fertility cults, the earth mother, symbols of regeneration and the myth of eternal renewal, will interest the general reader as well as the scholar". ("New York Times"). "It is doubtful that one could encounter a more impressive work of scholarship and insight...All serious students of religion would derive enormous profit from the reading of this work". ("Kirkus"). In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and other specialists because they do not study it as religious. According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element in religious phenomena - the element of the sacred. Eliade abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows how humanity's effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times; how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with interesting variations, persisted. Mircea Eliade's works include the multivolume "History of Religious Ideas". John C. Holt is a professor of religion at Bowdoin College and the author of "The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics of Late Medieval Sri Lanka".

In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them.
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Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling.
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For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives"
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Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.
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Annotation
Focault interprets his writtings about sexuality, politics and punishment.

《印度古典美学》系教育部“九五”规划社会科学研究基金项目“印度美学研究”的最终成果，是国内第一部运用跨学科、多视角的研究方法全面论述印度古典美学与艺术的学术著作。本书立足于印度广阔的文化背景来展开印度美学特点的论述，揭示了印度哲学思想、宗教、文学与美学和艺术理论的内在联系，阐明了印度思想对印度民族审美观念和艺术创造的影响。本书注重史论结合，既突显了印度美学思想发展的基本轨迹，分析了印度美学思想在不同历史日寸期的特征及变化的状况，又具体展示了戏剧、建筑、雕刻、绘画、音乐、舞蹈等印度艺术的美学魅力。