Culture

Culture is essential to everything we do and is going to play a very significant role in the world of the future. In spite of this, most of us have only a hazy understanding of culture and do not realize how it will affect individual, institutional, community, national, and international affairs. This volume delves into the domain of culture—both as a concept and as a reality—and proposes a formulation of the world system of the future according to culture's highest and most enduring principles. The author draws on many disciplines—anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cosmology, history, economics, and the arts—to make his case that culture and cultures should be accorded a central position in global development and human affairs in the future.

"This volume by D. Paul Schafer expands the decade-long academic attention given to the problem of culture, and sheds much additional light on this subject. It is a valuable contribution in this regard, and specifically in offering an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the idea of culture itself, stressing its heuristic and normative potentialities towards the construction of a new world order....[T]his work...has merits that transcend the purely technical aspect. It can stimulate and enrich discussion in sociology, anthropology, and social philosophy courses that examine the nature and role of culture in the modern world, and its utility for global welfare and salvation in the future."-The Great Plains Sociologist, ?[T]he implications of what Schafer argues are powerful....this is one level and approach that anthropologists must engage if we are to draw what we know into public discourse shaping futures.?-American Anthropologist, ?This volume by D. Paul Schafer expands the decade-long academic attention given to the problem of culture, and sheds much additional light on this subject. It is a valuable contribution in this regard, and specifically in offering an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the idea of culture itself, stressing its heuristic and normative potentialities towards the construction of a new world order....[T]his work...has merits that transcend the purely technical aspect. It can stimulate and enrich discussion in sociology, anthropology, and social philosophy courses that examine the nature and role of culture in the modern world, and its utility for global welfare and salvation in the future.?-The Great Plains Sociologist, "ÝT¨he implications of what Schafer argues are powerful....this is one level and approach that anthropologists must engage if we are to draw what we know into public discourse shaping futures."-American Anthropologist, "[T]he implications of what Schafer argues are powerful....this is one level and approach that anthropologists must engage if we are to draw what we know into public discourse shaping futures."-American Anthropologist

D. PAUL SCHAFER is Director of the World Culture Project, based in Markham, Canada./e He has taught Cultural Policy at York University and Arts Administration and Policy at the University of Toronto.