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E-book Modern Luck: Narratives of Fortune in The Long Twentieth Century

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Penilaian

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Luck is all around us.1 There is a certain school of cultural anthropology that is intent on tracking the structures, categories and beliefs that recur across all human societies, transcending the profound differences in history and culture that separate them. This school of ambitious universalists – which is by no mean uncontroversial, both within the field of anthropology and beyond – seems to be looking for something like the cultural core of what it is to be human, perhaps even for hints of a deep genetic matrix for human consciousness itself. One of the most influential among them, Donald Brown, produced a compendium of these phenomena in a book of 1991, and in among his four hundred or so instances of what he calls these ‘human universals’, we find ‘beliefs about fortune and misfortune’.2 In other words, beliefs about luck.I have little doubt that that every single reader of this book has an instant, intuitive and relatively untroubled sense of knowing what I mean when I talk about luck, a notion so familiar, so pervasive and so usefully loose and plural in its meanings as to constitute no less than the very stuff of (almost) everything that happens to us in our lives.3 Luck can be good or bad, can be mapped onto anything and everything that befalls us (‘falling’ is a motif knottily tangled up with our cultural conceptions and lexicon of luck, as we shall see), without our knowing quite why. Luck is a relatively free hit, too: we can evoke it on any number of occasions and for any number of reasons, as a consolation, as a celebration, as a declaration of (false?) modesty, as an explanation of how things we have not understood have come to pass, and of how we feel about them: ‘just my luck!’, ‘it was a lucky break’, ‘hard luck’, ‘my luck was in’. It designates an event in our lives and an affect attached to the event. It is malleable, meaningful, touching, accessible and, as Brown tells us, ubiquitous.But luck is also nowhere and nothing at all. At some level, just beyond the easy everyday recourse to it and our shared intuitive sense that it shapes everything that happens to us, we know that luck is a shorthand for nothing very much, a nonsense or a fantasy, an empty vessel or at best a placeholder for and a deflection away from more troubling and more complex matters about human lives. If luck comes to mean more or less everything that happens to us, it is hard to say that it means anything at all. Its contours are too loose.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

800 GOR m

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

188 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800083592

Klasifikasi

800

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Literature

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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