Fodors Australia New Zealand And The South Pacific 1986

Author : Gaile McGregor
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN 13 : 088920229X
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (892 download)

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Download or read book Eccentric Visions written by Gaile McGregor and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 1994-05-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What this book represents is, quite literally, a “slice” of (white) Australian life. By noting the patterns and parallels that emerge in a random sampling of social phenomena of widely varying types, from soap operas to political behaviour, Gaile McGregor has constructed a model that, in its challenge to uniformitarianism, is a test case in ethnographic theory. Using methods ranging from the hermeneutic through the structuralist to the psychoanalytic, McGregor deploys the self-evidence of communal life and language to establish not only that all cultural phenomena are “patterned,” but that this patterning is unique to and consistent across the entire system. Further, it not only influences but constrains the way the Australian conceptualizes, codifies and expresses his/her existential position. Hence the Australian predilection for icons of intermediacy: the verandah in architecture, the bush in literature, the beach in folk culture, the middle ground in landscape painting, the pub in everyday life. This identification with buffer zones between inside and outside not only mimics the Australian’s real bracketing between desert and ocean, but embodies his/her sense of disablement vis-à-vis both culture and nature, art and techne, super-ego and id, all of which are coded as feminine.