http://www.egs.edu/ Jean Baudrillard, French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer talking about cultural identity, politics, changing and becoming. The work of Jean Baudrillard is frequently ociated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Seminar for the students at the European Graduate School, EGS Media and Communication Program Studies Department, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, in 2002.
Jean Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analysis of the modes of mediation and of technological communication. His writing, although consistently interested in the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects – from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the (first) Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interested in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school. In common with many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or ’signs’ interrelate. Jean Baudrillard thought, as many post-structuralists did, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning is based upon an absence (so ‘dog’ means ‘dog’ not because of what the word says, as such, but because of what it does not say: ‘cat’, ‘goat’, ‘tree’ et cetera). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object’s meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects. One thing’s prestigiousness relates to another’s quotidianity.
From this starting point Jean Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning — or a ‘total’ understanding of the world — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the search for knowledge always created a relationship of power and dominance, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitability to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard’s view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a simulated version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of hyperreality This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picure, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, dies out.
Jean Baudrillard argued that in late Twentieth Century ‘global’ society the excess of signs and of meaning had caused a (quite paradoxical) effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal or Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a ‘global village,’ to use Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the ‘global’ world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard’s work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropolical work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the ‘global’ society as without this ’symbolic’ element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenceless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military establishment.
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Soon after Wendy Ferrogrant started her nursing degree at University of Phoenix, her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. She was unable to complete the nursing program and finish her degree because Wendy wanted to care for her daughter during her sickness. Wendy spoke with the nursing faculty and University of Phoenix was able to put her on a flexible nursing degree program so that she could return to school when her daughter felt better. Discover University of Phoenix’s nursing degree options at http://www.phoenix.edu/information/degree-nursing.aspx
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The Distance Education Network (DEN) at the University of Southern California enables full-time working professionals to earn their master of science degree from one of the top-ten ranked graduate engineering schools in the nation. DEN currently offers more than 30 master of science degrees entirely online.
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Or is there someplace I can find this information. Some rankings or something. Religious Studies is a relatively obscure program so I havent been able to find too much info, but Id definitely like to start looking at some of the better schools. Obviously I already know about Yale and Stanford.
Glad to know my field of specialization is obscure. 
Anyway, it really depends on your particular field of specialization. For example, if you will be studying contemporary American neopaganisms, Yale would not be suitable at all. Likewise, if you're interested in Critical Theory or postmodern methodologies, Syracuse would rise much higher on your list. Perhaps the most important factor in PhD admissions is called "fit," and it focuses on the match between the applicant's intended area of study, and faculty specializations.
Given that disclaimer, the top-ranked PhD programs in Religious Studies in the US, in approximate order, are:
University of Chicago
Princeton
Harvard
Brown
Duke
University of Virginia
Columbia
Vanderbilt
Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Stanford
University of California at Santa Barbara
Brandeis
Indiana University
UNC Chapel Hill
NYU
Yale
UC Berkeley
Northwestern
University of Iowa
Rice
USC
Syracuse
Catholic U
Drew
U Wisconsin, Madison
Florida State U
Temple
Pitt
Fordham
The top Masters programs are:
University of Missouri, Columbia
Miami University in Ohio
University of Colorado
University of Kansas
University of Arizona
Feel free to email me through my Y!A profile with more details about your field, and I'll be happy to provide a bit of guidance.
I am 32 and I want to return to graduate school for cultural anthropology. It was my undergraduate major but I ended up working in journalism after college. What I want to do is return to grad school for cultural anthropolgy and study resource use, preservation and tourism in South East Asia. Is knowing that enough or do I need to better refine my research interests? Also, I am having a terrible time researching instructors and programs that compliment my research goals. Some programs focus on the region but with different interests. I have found somewhat related natural resources programs but i want an anthropological approach. The internet has been letting me down on this one for a while. I've looked at the American Anthropological Association web site and at many specific schools and don't seem to be getting anywhere. I need a new search strategy. Or maybe it just doesn't exist. Please help! Thanks.
Your interests are definately focused enough. Granted, you'll fine tune them in grad school–but that 's normal–everyone does (in fact, you have a better than average idea of what you want to do).
But you are searching in the wrong way for a program. You do not need to be looking for a "program" in the first place–except generally. What you need is a program that is flexible–that allows and encourages you to be innovative and pursue your own interests. Here's how to go about it:
Go to the literature in anthropology and look for (recent) articles related to your interests. Then look at the author's web pages at their home universities. That will give you a list of people who have interests more or less similar to yours. DON'T try to find an exact match–that's rare.
Then e-mail these scholars. Tell them briefly what you are doing and wht your interests are–and that you are looking for a program that will work for you. Believe it or not, professors LOVE to get e-mails like this–every department is always looking for good graduate students. They can advise you on what their programs are like and what others might be out there that will also be good options.
BTW–if you go ahead and read the articles of the people you e-mail, and include a comment to that effect, it helps! Just let them know you read it and found their ideas interesting. 