'Culture' is often seen as somehow elevated above daily life (set in a rarefied realm) or set apart from it (e.g. the anthropological study of cultures other than our own). But for contemporary sociologists and media theorists, culture is better seen as the matter-of-fact practice and taken-for-granted nature of everyday life. Culture is inherent in how the world is made to mean something, how knowledge is produced, and how society functions. As a result, we need to interrogate what we take as 'given.' Ruling Passions contains essays by Nick Perry, one of Australasia's leading media and social science intellectuals. Perry is well placed to interrogate the stuff of daily life.

In Ruling Passions, his lucid, enjoyable, and probing essays - on shopping, talking on the phone, watching TV, playing sport, gambling, and travel - show us how we can 'read' our own environments and, in so doing, interpret the world around us and our place within it.