bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Authors: DeFrantz Thomas
Published: February 2019

Born on 5 January 1931 in Rogers, Texas, the only child of parents who separated when he was two, choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931–d. 1989) moved to Los Angeles with his mother in 1942. Shy from an itinerant Texas life, Ailey turned to dance when a high-school classmate introduced him to Lester Horton’s studio in 1949. He immersed himself in study and developed a weighty, smoldering performance style that suited his athletic body. Ailey moved to New York in 1954 to dance with Carmen DeLavallade in the Broadway production of House of Flowers. Performing success led him to found Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958. The company began as a repertory company devoted to both modern dance classics and new works created by Ailey and other young artists. The critically acclaimed first concerts in 1958 and 1960 marked the beginning of a new era of dance performance devoted to African American themes. His dance Blues Suite (1958), set in and around a barrelhouse, depicts the desperation and joys of life on the edge of poverty in the South. Highly theatrical and immediately accessible, the dance contains sections of early-20th-century social dances, Horton dance technique, Jack Cole–inspired jazz dance, and ballet partnering. Early performances of Revelations (1960) established Ailey’s company as the foremost dance interpreter of African American experience. The dance quickly became the company’s signature ballet, eclipsing previous concert attempts at dancing to sacred Black music. Set to a series of spirituals and gospel selections, Revelations depicts a spectrum of Black religious worship, including richly sculpted group prayer (“I’ve Been Buked”), a ceremony of ritual baptism (“Wade in the Water”), a moment of introverted, private communion (“I Wanna Be Ready”), a duet of trust and support for a minister and devotee (“Fix Me, Jesus”), and a final, celebratory gospel exclamation, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” Ailey’s ballet Feast of Ashes (1962), created for the Harkness Ballet, is acknowledged as the first successful pointe ballet choreographed by a modern dancer. Major distinctions and honors followed Ailey throughout his choreographic career, which spanned the creation of more than fifty dances for his own company and others. The Ailey company continues as a highly successful operation after Ailey’s death, and is affiliated with a large dance complex in New York City that offers comprehensive courses in dance study as well as venues for performance.
Scottsboro Trials
Authors: Yellin Eric S.
Published: February 2019

In 1931, nine young African-American men were accused of raping two white women in northern Alabama while traveling on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee. The young men—Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, and Roy Wright—were innocent. Saved from a mob lynching, they nonetheless endured a series of unfair trials over seven years; eight received death sentences. (Roy Wright, just turned thirteen, was held in limbo until 1937 because of his youth.) Embraced by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as well as a broad collection of left-wing organizations and artists, the fight for the young men’s lives became an international movement. Their defense was eventually paid for by the CPUSA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and taken on by Samuel Liebowitz, a celebrated criminal attorney whose Judaism invited vicious anti-Semitism from white southerners. Their case led to two landmark Supreme Court case rulings regarding due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment: Powell v. Alabama (1932) reversed the defendants’ convictions based on inadequate counsel, while Norris v. Alabama (1935) established that officials in Alabama had violated the defendants’ constitutional rights by excluding black Alabamans from juries. Over the course of the trials, the two accusers—Ruby Bates and Victoria Price—were celebrated as the epitome of southern white womanhood and then maligned as lying “white trash” harlots. That Bates later recanted and campaigned for the defendants’ freedom did little to earn her full personhood in the received history. The “Scottsboro Boys” spent years, some more than a decade, in America’s worst prisons and suffered physical and psychological damage that would prove irreparable. Five of the defendants were released when the prosecution chose not to proceed with their cases in 1937, though this nolle prosequi decision was not an acquittal, exoneration, or apology. The last to remain in jail, Andy Wright, was released in 1950. Alabama Governor George Wallace pardoned the last living Scottsboro defendant, Clarence Norris, in 1976. Finally, in April 2013, Alabama changed its law to allow posthumous pardons, and the remaining three defendants were officially pardoned that November. The Scottsboro case is a crucial part of the histories of African Americans, the US South, race and gender in the 20th-century United States, the transnational modern civil rights and labor movements, the Great Depression, and the US justice system.
Agriculture and Agricultural Labor
Authors: Hurt R. Douglas
Published: February 2019

The agricultural and farm labor history of African Americans extends across more than four centuries, from slavery beginning in the early 17th century to freedom resulting from the Civil War to a small number of independent farm owners by the early 21st century. Prior to the Civil War, slavery primarily served as an agricultural labor system. During the colonial period, only a few free African Americans owned land and farmed independently, but most worked in some fashion as slaves, producing tobacco and rice, tending livestock, and processing food. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the first efficient cotton gin for processing short-staple cotton. With this invention, much of the South became a major cotton-producing region with a great need for cheap labor, which African Americans unwillingly provided. The Civil War ended slavery as an agricultural labor force, but the landless African Americans remained tied to large-scale farmers and planters as sharecroppers. In this agricultural system, sharecroppers essentially rented the land and paid the landlord with a portion of the crop, usually 50 percent, and the landlord told them how to conduct their farm work. They lived in a netherworld bound by degradation, poverty, and hopelessness. By the turn of the 20th century, more than 707,000 African American farmers remained impoverished by the crop lien and furnishing merchant system and usually farmed no more than fifty acres. They were free but their lives remained constrained by racism, which limited their access to capital for the purchase of land, machinery, livestock, seed, and fertilizer. Beginning with World War I, many African American farmers left the land for better opportunities elsewhere. By the mid-20th century, African American farmers remained impoverished because the agricultural lending programs of the federal government, particularly those of the Department of Agriculture, discriminated against them. African American farmers frequently met rejection when they applied for loans and other government assistance that would enable them to improve their agricultural activities. Most African American farmers, in the North and the South, owned too-little land to produce sufficient crops and livestock to earn a satisfactory living. The 21st century brought little change. Those who remained often held off-the-farm employment to keep their farms viable. Racism continued to color social and economic relationships with whites, credit institutions, and the federal government. Moreover, African American farmers often produced for local and specialty markets, and they chose agriculture as a lifestyle rather than as a commercial, moneymaking endeavor.
Nonnus
Authors: Agosti Gianfranco
Published: February 2019

Nonnus of Panopolis (approximately 400–460/470 ce) is the undisputed protagonist of the flourishing of Greek poetry in Late Antiquity. He composed the Dionysiaca, the longest extant Greek epic poem on the life of Dionysus, his war and triumph over the Indians, his progress from the Near East to Thebes, and his eventual apotheosis (more than twenty-one thousand verses, in forty-eight books, the sum of the Iliad and the Odyssey). The poem begins with the abduction of Europa and a long section about Cadmus, and then describes the birth and youth of Dionysus (Books 1–12). Books 13–24 are devoted to the first part of the war against Indians, with the catalogues of the troops and the first battles. After a second prologue, the conclusion of the war against Indians is narrated, with the final battle and the death of the Indian king Deriades (Books 25–40). This section “rewrites” the Iliad in a very innovative way. In Books 40–48 the poet deals with Dionysus’ return to Phrygia, his visits to Tyre and Beirut, and also Thebes, Naxos, and Phrygia again, and his apotheosis. Nonnus is also the author of a long metrical Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel, where he displays a deep theological knowledge (around 3,700 hexameters). Recent research demonstrated that the coexistence of a mythological and a Christian poem was perfectly acceptable. Nonnus was a Christian, addressing the cultivated mixed elites of Alexandria. He introduced into the tradition of epic poetry a new style, based on manneristic exuberance and imaginative language, as well as a reform of the hexameter based on regularity and stress accents. Nonnus was very popular in Late Antiquity. His style was followed by several poets of the 5th and 6th century ce, who recognized in him a new classic to imitate. Among these followers, there are Pamprepius of Panopolis, Musaeus, Colluthus of Lycopolis, Christodorus of Coptos, John of Gaza, Agathias, Paul the Silentiary and the “minor” epigrammatists of Agathias’s Cycle, as well as several metrical inscriptions and fragmentary poems transmitted by papyri. In the subsequent centuries, some Byzantine literates found it appealing and profited from its exuberant vocabulary. From the Renaissance onward Nonnus had his admirers (especially during the Baroque age). After a period of classicizing prejudice, in scholarship there is now a growing interest for his works.
Violence against the Police
Authors: Rabe-Hemp Cara
Published: February 2019

Violence against police is a statistically rare event, usually resulting in minor injuries for officers. However, based on the frequency with which police interact with the public, even those statistically small events can result in hundreds of police deaths and tens of thousands of assaults on police each year. The topic of violence against the police has been studied extensively starting in the 1970s, following public concern about the rising levels of violence leveled at police. This concern hastened the creation of the annual publication of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) annual publication, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, commonly referred to as LEOKA. The creation of the LEOKA report prompted the empirical study of violence against police, but research using varied data sources, including the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Officer Down Memorial Page has also expanded our knowledge of the predictors of police assaults, injuries, and deaths. What we know today is that there is a variety of community, organizational, and situational/incident level correlates that impact police officer assaults and deaths. Over time, studying these factors has led to policies and practices that have contributed to the eventual reduction of officer injury and death associated with violence against the police. However, amidst several high-profile violent encounters between police and the public, scholars are exploring the claims of a war against police, testing the hypothesis that violence against the police may be on the rise.
Francesco Sforza
Authors: Shaw Christine
Published: February 2019

Francesco Sforza was a pivotal figure in the state system of Italy in the 15th century. The son of a prominent condottiere, Muzio Attendolo Sforza, he inherited his father’s company of soldiers in 1424 and became one of the foremost condottieri of his time in his own right. In 1434 he took over much of the province of the Marche in the Papal States and held on as lord there until he was finally driven out in 1447, shortly before the death of his father-in-law, Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. Although his relations with Visconti, before and after he married Visconti’s daughter, Bianca Maria, had often been bad, when Visconti died without legitimate heirs, Sforza claimed the dukedom. He had to conquer the duchy before he was accepted in Milan as duke in 1450. Despite the legitimacy of his rule continuing to be under question, Sforza became the most influential statesman in Italy, through the use of the impressive diplomatic network he built up rather than through military interventions. The records created and preserved by his efficient chancery constitute a major source for the history of Italy in the mid-15th century. References to him abound in the historiography of Renaissance Italy, but there are not a great many works focused on him, and only a few in English.
Moderata Fonte
Authors: Magnanini Suzanne
Published: February 2019

Moderata Fonte was the pseudonym of Modesta Pozzo (b. 1555–d. 1592), a gifted poet and proto-feminist who championed equal access to education for women. Her pen name (Moderate Fountain or Spring) suggests flowing water, an image often associated with eloquence, and it functions as a clever recasting of the still, unassuming waters suggested by her given name (Modest Well). Celebrated by her contemporaries for her poetic skill, today Fonte stands alongside other Venetian women writers, including Veronica Franco, Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti, as a seminal voice of European feminism. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles in Renaissance and Reformation “Lucrezia Marinella” and “Arcangela Tarabotti.”) Orphaned at a young age, Fonte received her earliest education at the Venetian convent of Santa Marta and then through her maternal grandmother’s second husband, Prospero Saraceni, who granted her access to books and encouraged her literary endeavors. Sometime after 1576, Fonte joined the household of her step-grandfather’s daughter Saracena Saraceni and her husband Niccolò Doglioni, an active member in Venetian literary circles who promoted Fonte’s career. In 1581, Fonte published I Tredici canti di Floridoro (The Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro), a chivalric romance in the Ariostan tradition. Projected to be fifty cantos but never finished, Fonte’s poem foregrounds the actions and adventures of the female protagonists, whose depictions challenge both literary and gender norms. The same year her banquet play, Le feste (The Feast Days), was published and performed before the Doge Niccolò da Ponte, testifying to her status in Venice’s literary culture. Fonte’s most productive literary period coincided with the years she spent in Doglioni’s household before marrying the lawyer Filippo Zorzi in 1583, though she continued to write and publish throughout her life, including two religious poems, La passione di Christo (The passion of Christ) (1582) and La resurrettione di Giesu Christo nostro Signore (The resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord) (1592). Today, Fonte is best known as the author of the witty dialogue Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women), which she completed in 1592 shortly before dying from complications of the birth of her fourth child. The controversy sparked by Giuseppe Passi’s virulently misogynist treatise I difetti donneschi (The defects of women) (1599) provided Doglioni and Fonte’s children the perfect opportunity to publish her dialogue in 1600, which features seven women engaged in a dialogic game in which one group denounces all the vices and evil of men, while the other side seeks to defend them. During the second day of the dialogue, the discussion broadens to cover a vast array of subjects, as the women instruct each other in topics typically excluded from female education. Since the 1980s, interest in Fonte’s life and writings on the part of artists and scholars of literature, history, and philosophy has grown.
The Sack of Rome (1527)
Authors: Goethals Jessica
Published: February 2019

On 6 May 1527 the Spanish, German, and Italian troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, sacked Renaissance Rome. The Sack was a climactic event in the War of the League of Cognac, begun in 1526, and in the broader Italian Wars waged between Spain, France, the Papal States and various Italian city-states between 1494 and 1559. Rome was poorly defended by Pope Clement VII, who shortly beforehand had agreed to a truce with the imperialists against the wishes of his allies and had subsequently dismissed his mercenaries. With official blessing, however, the imperial commander Charles de Bourbon did not honor this truce, instead moving south down the Italian Peninsula, threatening Florence and then advancing on Rome. Although Bourbon was fatally wounded during the sack, his troops quickly took the city. The pope fled to safety in Castel Sant’Angelo, where he remained trapped until he escaped to Orvieto in December; he would return to Rome only the following fall. The invading army moved largely unimpeded through the city, assaulting and slaughtering its citizens, pillaging, and violating sacred spaces and objects. The levels of violence reported in eyewitness accounts shocked the rest of Italy and Europe, even after decades of regular warfare. The Roman population waited in vain for salvation by the French army or the troops of the League under the command of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. The imperial army remained in Rome for nine months, all the while kidnapping and torturing the local population so as to unearth hidden money and valuables. While it is difficult to measure with precision the impact of the sack, Hook 2004 estimates that by the end of 1527 nearly half of the city’s population had been killed, died of famine or disease, or had fled the city. Other notable consequences included the torment and, in some cases, the death of artists and intellectuals, the destruction of humanist libraries, and the diaspora of artists, writers, and others previously connected to the city’s cultural activity. A lasting truce was struck only in June 1529, when Clement and Charles signed the Treaty of Barcelona. A symbolic enactment of peace occurred at the Congress (or Peace) of Bologna in late 1529 and early 1530, when the pope officially crowned Charles emperor and the cultural elite of Europe converged on the city; Rome, meanwhile, remained in shambles and was left to slowly beginn the process of rebuilding.
Children and Childhood in Hinduism
Authors: Kumar Nita
Published: February 2019

The importance of the child in Hinduism cannot be emphasized enough and must be addressed at several levels. First, Hinduism recognizes, from as far back as the Vedas, that birth and childhood somehow best exemplify the philosophical conundrum that is life. Reproduction is power, and a child is power. Second, in the mundane world, the child is an essential connecting link between human generations, one that can guarantee continuity, reproduction, and purity if so desired. This link is the male child, and the desire for purity belongs to the upper classes, whose fears relate to miscegenation, leading to control of the child’s sexuality and frequently to early marriage. The resulting patterns of kinship and location in Hindu communities include relationships that figuratively reproduce childhood, where one member of a dyad is seen as childlike, that is, weaker. Several beliefs and practices bear witness to the importance of the child. While infants and toddlers of both sexes are adored as close to gods, the male child has importance at every phase of childhood, particularly after the yagnopavita (sacred thread) ceremony when a crucial phase of learning and formation begins. A male child is necessary to complete rituals that would close the circle for a dead ancestor, permitting them to finally leave their departed bodies. The female child is loved and cherished in a different way; however, in a scale of importance, she ranks lower than the male. Both genders stand, in different ways, for the name, status, and stability of the family and the larger kin group or community. When gods are worshiped as children, it is typically the male gods. Goddesses are spoken of as daughters, too, but more often as mothers, with worshipers assuming the role of child accordingly, though sometimes the worshiper assumes the role of mother vis-à-vis the god-child. While all this gives discursive importance to the child, individual children in history have been treated as community property and not necessarily nurtured for themselves. At the same time, the constructed nature of Hinduism—until the colonial period, Hindus did not use the singular term for the wide array of beliefs and practices that they practiced—makes it impossible to discuss one perspective on the child. In a similar way, “childhood” and “the child” are themselves historical constructs, datable from modernity. However, some scholars point out that even without a common name, a recognizable unity can be discerned in the beliefs and practices of those now labeled “Hindus.” Similarly, even if people did not talk of childhood or the child as separate, distinguishable entities before a certain time, the experience of the phase of life, and the relations of that particular age to others, did, of course, exist. In treating the attitudes of the religion presently called Hinduism toward the stage of life presently understood as childhood, this article addresses Hindu theogony and mythology, history, sociology, and literature.
Indigenous Rights
Authors: Sargent Sarah
Published: February 2019

The attention given to indigenous rights has increased since the approval of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007. Although it is a soft law declaration and technically not binding, it serves as the cornerstone of much of the contemporary research on indigenous rights. Four states that initially voted in opposition to the UNDRIP—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—have now endorsed it. Despite the attention it garners, the UNDRIP is not the only international instrument that has been utilized to establish and protect indigenous rights and interests. The regional inter-American human rights system has also been key in the development and protection of indigenous rights. Another important facet of the UNDRIP is that it took twenty-two years of drafting effort before it was approved by the United Nations General Assembly. During those twenty-two years, many discussions, debates, and analyses were undertaken over the meaning of rights and principles included in the drafts of the declaration. Research and scholarship from the era before passage of the declaration is helpful in understanding the content of the document. But the approval of the declaration did not end the controversies over indigenous rights. Debate and examination of the evolving body of indigenous rights continues during the period after passage of the declaration. As well, indigenous rights are not simply “human rights”; rather, they are a complex set of rights that can impact a broad swath of other legal doctrines. Intersections of indigenous rights with laws regarding economic development, the environment, and land claims can give rise to new interpretations and understandings of the impact of indigenous rights. While the four “no states” might be what most readily comes to mind when thinking about where many indigenous peoples live, indigenous peoples are, in fact, scattered throughout the world, including Europe. Research on indigenous rights is not carried out only from a legal perspective. Indigenous rights cover many different kinds of rights. Some have an emphasis in international law doctrines, such as the right to self-determination and issues about indigenous and tribal sovereignty. Other rights emphasize the importance of culture and heritage, and it can be useful to consider research in other disciplines, including history, political science, and anthropology. This article includes research and resources in related disciplines as well as legal research and law-based resources. (A note about language: American references to indigenous peoples are inclusive of the words “American Indian” or “Indian.” “Indian” is a legal term of art used in federal and state statutes. Indigenous peoples in the United States refer to themselves as “Indians” rather than Native Americans. For these reasons, where appropriate, the article makes use of the terms American Indian and Indian in preference to Native American. This usage may be confusing to non-American readers and so a clarification is offered).
Gender and Politics in South Asia
Authors: Sabur Seuty
Published: February 2019

The very construction of “South Asia” is intertwined both with its colonial past and with its intersecting politics shaped by ideologies and conflict over territory. Most of the SAARC countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Afghanistan) have been occupied by at least one colonizer or had treaties between monarchs that ended in massive uprisings, marking the birth of these independent nation-states. In the postcolonial nation-states of South Asia, gender has been used as a frame of reference and as an analytical tool to understand the collective effort in nationalist movements and nation-building as well as in articulating various forms of discrimination. Women forged an alliance on the question of subordination, both locally and regionally. Individuals outside the heteronormative world raised their voices and reclaimed their spaces within the heteropatriarchy. Heterogeneity in race, ethnicity, language, class, caste, age, and nationalities offer multiple narratives of diverse political possibilities in South Asia. As such, the political field in South Asia is essentially intersectional and fraught with contentious debates and strategies. Gender is one of the many components of such a political field, contouring habitus of the agent, that structures and is structured by various social and historical forces. Hence, it is crucial to document the discourses within the movements or any interventions against the heteropatriarchy to make sense of gender and politics in South Asia. A large body of literature has been produced over the past decades on gender and politics by activists and academics from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. This articles aims to provide a genealogy of these efforts in presenting a rich, textured repository of feminist scholarship. However, the chronological (based on the year of independence) organization of the article based on individual nations may give rise to misleading perceptions of an old area studies model. On the contrary, the intention is frame the article around emergent critical feminist-queer voices who are constantly negotiating with regional and transnational forces and, in so doing, redefining the field in the postcolonial nation-states of South Asia.
Disability and Music
Authors: Lerner Neil , Howe Blake
Published: February 2019

In the final decades of the 20th century, as disability rights activists protested ableist prejudice and discrimination, scholars began to group themselves around the topic of disability. In 1982 the Society for Disability Studies was founded; 1990 saw the passage of the US Americans with Disabilities Act, a piece of landmark legislation that sought to address systemic discrimination on the basis of physical and mental disabilities; and conferences and journals devoted to Disability Studies began to flourish in the 1990s. The relatively young interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies approaches disability beyond the traditional epistemologies of medical science and instead considers bodily and mental differences as both embodied experiences and constructs of particular cultures and societies. Following earlier work done on gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, Disability Studies explores the social, cultural, and historical meanings of disability as a manifestation of human variety, celebrating disability as a difference while acknowledging the lived experience of possessing a bodily or mental impairment. While music scholars have long been aware of the possibility of composers and performers with impairments—Beethoven’s deafness is central to the narrative of Western music history—they only began to engage with ideas from Disability Studies in the first decade of the 21st century. The year 2006 was notable for both an article in a major music journal (Straus 2006, cited under Music and Disability Studies) and the first book-length study on disability in music (Lerner and Straus 2006, also under Music and Disability Studies). A large body of music scholarship quickly followed, including dissertations, conferences papers, journal articles, and monographs, and the scope and approaches to music and disability have been as varied and distinct as the human bodies and minds under study.
Race
Authors: Jobson Ryan Cecil
Published: February 2019

The study of race has defined anthropology since its formalization as an academic discipline in the 19th century. The early history of academic anthropology and the wider human sciences is pervaded by efforts to draw a causal link between race and behavior, psychology, culture, or social organization. Enforcing a racial taxonomy in accordance with the system of classification developed by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, anthropologists assigned scientific value to arbitrary racial types. Since the genesis of the discipline, however, the concept of race has been challenged by an expansive roster of scholars in anthropology and the social sciences. To this end, scholars have assembled a vast archive of empirical data in the four traditional subfields of anthropology—sociocultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeological—to disprove biologically deterministic theories of race. Nonetheless, an investment in racial essentialism endures among select professional and popular anthropologists who have revived race as an explanatory mechanism for intelligence, ability, or genetic and biomedical outcomes. In turn, debates continue over the salience of race as an object of anthropological inquiry and analysis. While some harken to earlier anthropological critiques in order to passively dismiss race as a social construction with limited analytical purchase, others have deployed anthropological methods to document and critique the consequences of race as a social construction forged through histories of colonization, racial slavery, and genocide. The anthropology of race, in this respect, remains inextricable from attendant anthropological approaches to racism and the history of racial capitalism.
Bureaucracy
Authors: Hoag Colin
Published: February 2019

The term "bureaucracy" refers broadly to administration and official procedure in states, corporations, and other complex organizations. However, the term has a much more complicated set of connotations related to delays and overwrought procedural protocols, emanating from critiques of socialism, the state, and modernity. The figure of the bureaucrat stands at the center of discourse about bureaucracy: at once listless and nefarious, the bureaucrat embodies the inscrutability and absurdity of modern institutional power: impersonal, ubiquitous, and charged with executing law and regulation dispassionately. Bureaucracy represents an ideal of state-enforced equality before the law that is in endless deferral. Anthropologists are well placed to sort through these contradictions and how they manifest in the everyday life of clients, bureaucrats, and others who engage with bureaucracy. The study of bureaucracy has a shallow scholarly history in the discipline of anthropology relative to sociology and political science. For much of the 20th century, bureaucracy was seen as strictly a “Western” phenomenon and therefore outside the purview of anthropologists, who tended to focus on “non-Western” phenomena in other parts of the world. This disciplinary territoriality began to shift in the mid-1990s, and anthropologists increasingly turned an eye toward the everyday life of organizations, including the documents, protocols, and forms of sociality that configure it. This shift was a result of several intellectual currents, notably anthropologists’ interest in understanding how the lives of the subaltern peoples they study are shaped by political institutions and projects. These include the state—a crucial site for the development of the anthropology of bureaucracy—but also humanitarian aid organizations and environmental conservation programs. As anthropologists began asking questions about bureaucrats as ethnographic subjects rather than merely executors of official policy, a greater sensibility for the signs and affective qualities of bureaucratic life opened up new insights into the diversity of positions within bureaucratic institutions, as well as the many kinds of bureaucratic work subsumed under the category of “bureaucracy.” Anthropologists of bureaucracy today train their focus on research funding committees, meetings in corporate board rooms, the aesthetic form of paperwork stamped by civil servants at municipal planning offices, the protocols of environmental impact assessments, interactions between asylum applicants and immigration officials, and beyond.
Mexican Nationalism
Authors: Rubenstein Anne , Chrisman Kevin
Published: February 2019

Mexican nationalist thought, as articulated by Mexico’s most powerful politicians, scholars, and writers, was never intended to describe the nation as it was or as it is. Instead, it has always expressed aspirations: it has contained multiple and often-conflicting visions of the nation as it could be, should be, or might have been. Such nationalist thinking has followed two broad tracks. One is historical. It argues that the Mexican national character—lo mexicano, mexicanidad, the essence of what it is to be Mexican—was formed through the experience of a national history that was a series of painful and unfair losses overcome by heroism and persistence. This historical narrative begins with the conquest, culminates in the loss of almost half the national territory to the United States in 1848, and is brought to a happy conclusion by the Mexican Revolution. The other track that Mexican nationalist thought has followed has to do with race. Intellectuals and politicians have changed their conceptions of the relationship between Mexico’s indigenous people and other Mexicans over the years, with the most radical shift taking place in the transition from the Porfiriato to the Revolutionary government. But across the modern era in Mexico, the presence of indigenous people, the influence of indigenous cultures, and the memory of indigenous civilizations have shaped how Mexicans understand themselves and their nation. Both of these narratives have changed over time, being rewritten and reconstructed to serve the needs of a national state that was almost constantly in the process of remaking itself from independence through the first half of the 20th century. Both of these nationalist narratives, moreover, have been subject to intense scrutiny from revisionist historians, feminists, indigenous people, and other critics since at least the mid-1960s. Neither of these nationalist narratives has ever been fully accepted by the majority of Mexicans: alternative narratives emerged from—among others—peasant and indigenous communities, urban underclasses, and Catholic groups, and these narratives gave strength and shape to multiple forms of political and cultural resistance. Nonetheless, these twin discourses of Mexican nationalism persist in Mexico because they are embedded in so many aspects of daily life: textbooks, public policies, classic films, monuments, maps, and cookbooks.
Edith Wharton
Authors: Totten Gary
Published: February 2019

Edith Wharton (b. 1862– d. 1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander in New York City. Her upper-class family background and the wealthy New York world in which she was raised would influence the themes of her fiction, in which she both celebrated and critiqued the cultural norms of her society. As a child, Wharton traveled through Europe with her parents. This experience instilled in her a lifelong interest in travel and her great interest and expertise in art. She eventually moved to France and lived the latter half of her life abroad. She married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton in 1885, but the marriage was unhappy, and she had an affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton. Wharton and Teddy Wharton divorced in 1913. Wharton’s first book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), was coauthored with Ogden Codman Jr., and in 1902, she designed and built a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, known as the Mount. Her first major novel, The House of Mirth (1905), was a best seller exploring the exacting social codes of the upper classes and their effects on the young unmarried protagonist, Lily Bart. However, Wharton would also explore rural life in New England tales such as Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917). She organized relief efforts for child refugees in France during World War I, and her experience of the war influenced her nonfiction and fiction. Many of her serialized novels and short stories appeared in major literary and popular magazines. Indeed, she became a skilled advocate for her work as she interacted with book and magazine editors, and she was heavily involved in the production and marketing of her writing. In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920), and she received an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923. In her 1920s and 1930s fiction, she explored issues of modern life, particularly as they affect her female characters. In addition to the novel, Wharton wrote in other genres, including the short story, drama, poetry, travel writing, and nonfiction. She is an incisive critic of her class and of American culture more generally, and although she was reluctant to be categorized as a feminist, her work often critiques patriarchal structures and norms while operating within them. Ongoing scholarship on and interest in her life and writing attests to the significance of her work.
Minority Literatures in Israel
Authors: Mendelson-Maoz Adia
Published: February 2019

The term “minority” usually refers to individuals or groups that are disadvantaged in comparison to those who belong to the dominant group. This type of exclusion is commonly based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, social and cultural background, and sexual orientation. While in reality boundaries between cultural groups are unclear, defining and relating to minorities always hinges on a definition of the majority or hegemony, thus creating an often misleading concept of binarism. The heterogeneous social and cultural fabric of the Israeli context, and its evolution over the years, problematizes any clear dichotomy between hegemonial and marginal groups. Nevertheless, general distinctions can be made based on what is perceived as the common narrative of Israeli culture. From its inception, the Zionist leadership, while integrating people from different places, cultures, and languages, pursued a melting-pot policy by promoting a monocultural community for the “ingathering of the exiles,” supported by national “standards” such as the “National Poet,” the “National Theater,” the “National Museum” and the “National Library,” where Hebrew was the cultural kernel. These cultural pillars adhered to the Ashkenazi Western secular culture, with certain concepts of masculinity and militarism, to the detriment of other national ethnic and religious groups. Changes in the political arena, and the growing waves of immigration from the 1950s to the 1980s, led to fissures in efforts to structure a homogeneous Jewish-Israeli culture. Alternative narratives and cultures began shaping a multicultural sphere with differing national, ethnic, religious and cultural groups. In the last few decades, this evolution has been mirrored in Hebrew literature and in the field of Hebrew literary criticism. Numerous volumes of prose and poetry have been published and studies have dealt with the Israeli minority literature of specific literary groups or significant authors. This entry clearly cannot cover all these minority groups, but rather focuses on the national minority in Israel in the writing of Palestinian-Israelis, the literatures of ethnic minorities such as Mizrahim who immigrated from North Africa and the Middle East, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and Ethiopia, the literature of religious and ultra-orthodox Israelis, and the literature of the LGBT community in Israel. It does not discuss women’s writing, a broad category that deserves separate attention; the literature of the disabled community, which has still not emerged as a literary group; or authors who write and publish in Israel in different languages such as English, Yiddish, or German. Some of these groups are discussed in Shai Ginsburg’s comprehensive article on Israeli literature in this bibliographic collection.
Islamic Law
Authors: Christelow Allan
Published: February 2019

The continent of Africa offers a complex and challenging setting for the study of Islamic law. Today, this continent contains some of the most predominantly Muslim states in the world (in North Africa and the Sahara), some where Muslims are a small minority (in eastern and southern Africa), and some where there are substantial populations of both Muslims and Christians (in West Africa, notably in Nigeria). Over the course of history, since the arrival of Islam in Africa in the 7th century, there have been many changes shaping how Islamic law is applied. Islamic law affected not only relations within Muslim communities, but also the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims—Christians and Jews around the Mediterranean, and people following traditional religions south of the Sahara, and in East Africa. Islamic law has provided a basis for conflict and efforts at subjugation of non-Muslims as slaves or concubines, but it has also offered a framework for negotiation, peaceful interaction, and conflict resolution. While the best-known aspect of Islamic law lies in the area of family matters—marriage, divorce, and inheritance—Islamic legists have played an important role in developing fiqh, or jurisprudence based on Islamic principles but adapted to local situations, dealing with such areas as water rights, commercial relations, medical practice, and cultural expression. The application of Islamic law was in many cases restricted by colonial rule from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century. Starting in the 1980s, there have been some dramatic efforts to restore the authority of Islamic courts over a wider domain of law, notably in Sudan, where such efforts led to the breaking up of the country between the predominantly Islamic north, and South Sudan, which has a religiously diverse population. In northern Nigeria, state governments restored a wide application of Islamic law, but pragmatic approaches by traditional leaders have helped preserve stability in much of the country, except in the northeast.
Trust in Organizational Contexts
Authors: Fulmer Ashley
Published: February 2019

Trust in organizational contexts has received sustained attention from management scholars and practitioners, particularly in light of the growing number of organizational scandals and failures. Since the second half of the 20th century, research on trust has proffered conceptualizations of trust that include multiple bases and relationship stages, differentiated the construct from other related concepts such as trustworthiness and risk taking, and identified the processes that lead to trust and trusting behaviors. As the field continues to mature, research has further distinguished among different referents of trust in organizational contexts, as individuals can trust a coworker, a supervisor, and the upper management in an organization, among others. While some commonalities exist, these different trust referents have been shown to be related to divergent antecedents and outcomes. More recently, the field has turned its attention to the levels-of-analysis issues, understanding that trust can reside not only within individuals but also within teams and organizations, such that members in a team may share their trust in one another or in the leader. At the same time, trust of individuals within a group or a system is likely to be influenced by a common set of factors, ranging from the climate of the group or other broader contexts to mutual third parties who are not directly involved. The momentum of trust research continues, as recent research has examined the notions of trust transfer, trust spiral, and the dark side of trust and being trusted. These advances underscore the need for future research to continue examining the incredibly complex and nuanced reality of trust in the ever-changing organizational landscape.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus
Authors: Jiménez Miriam
Published: February 2019

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) is a Congressional Member Organization, namely a coalition of members of Congress that includes representatives and senators who have Hispanic descent. Originally nonpartisan and today composed of only members of the Democratic Party, this group aims to give voice to and advance the interests of the Hispanic population of the United States in the context of the national legislature. The creation of the caucus as a legislative service organization in 1976, reflected the increasing relevance, enfranchisement, and incorporation of Hispanics into the political life of the United States; it was then celebrated by analysts and activists as an important event in the process of the representation of a demographic group that had been politically marginalized for most of the 20th century. In subsequent years, however, the caucus faced difficulties in striving to take coordinated and noteworthy legislative action and failed to attract much scholarly attention. Analysts who compared the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with the previously created Congressional Black Caucus, for example, often underlined the heterogeneity of the CHC membership, its lower level of cohesion, and its low legislative success record. Nevertheless, this has been changing recently: a new generation of scholars is introducing different perspectives to study the activities of minority congresspersons. The new wave of studies has revealed more complex ways to assess the importance of the work that the caucus and its members do. Beyond the record of modest legislative achievements, it is clear that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has been able to lobby presidents to appoint Hispanics to executive positions and has exerted influence in some immigration debates and bills. Furthermore, it has advanced the institutionalization of initiatives to educate Hispanic leaders (through the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, CHCI) and provided coalitional support to newly elected Hispanic congresspersons. Overall, the caucus has contributed to the fundamental task of advancing legislative agendas that reflect the interests of Hispanics in the Congress.