NowHere: Space, Time, and Modernity

by Roger Friedland, Deirdre Boden

The fall of the Berlin wall, the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the war in the Persian Gulf, the conflict in Bosnia—such events have been fundamentally affected by modern technology. As we become instant spectators of war, famine, and revolution, time and space assume new global meanings. This provocative volume presents an eclectic group of contributors who attempt to make sense of the "now" and the "here" that define the modern age.

The essays, by anthropologists, religionists, geographers, linguists, sociologists, and historians, explore the temporal and spatial facets of social life. Their range is remarkable and includes English landscape painting, talk in corporations, agoraphobic women, the ecological structure of Los Angeles, the cosmology of the Holocaust, and the ritual spaces of Buddhist Japan and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The editors' introduction addresses the diversity of these empirical concerns and positions them within a rapidly expanding theoretical landscape.

David Hockney's striking painting on the book jacket captures the tension between somewhere and everywhere, between space and place, now and just a moment ago—hence "nowhere" or "now/here."

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
The fall of the Berlin wall, the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the war in the Persian Gulf, the conflict in Bosnia—such events have been fundamentally affected by modern technology. As we become instant spectators of war, famine, and revolution, time and

454 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2023

About the author

Roger Friedland is a cultural and religious sociologist who writes on love, sex and God, as well as the intersections of religion and politics around the world. Friedland works on institutional logics, on the ways in which ordinary domains of human activity depend on belief in goods which are beyond sense and reason. He is working with John Mohr and Henk Roose on the logics of love among American university students and with Janet Afary on the relationship of religion, gender and intimate life in seven Muslim-majority countries Friedland teaches in the departments of Religious Studies and Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently visiting professor at NYU Media, Culture and Communication.