bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How the West Was Fun
Authors: Miller Cynthia J.
Published: June 2023

In the mid-1960s, F Troop utilized self-conscious humor, along with the physical comedy of vaudeville, to spin a comic tale of life in a frontier cavalry fort. The series’ cast of misfits and shady characters poked fun at canonical US history, authority, social class, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and normative gender roles, all pivoting around issues of masculinity and patriarchy. This chapter situates the series in the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and examines the ways in which F Troop and its characters both mirrored and grappled with the era’s shifts in American idealized masculinity, from rugged archetypes to “softer” models that privilege intellect. This chapter also illustrates how, as part of this shifting constellation of ideologies, the series engaged with long-held notions about the gendering of the wilderness and Anglo–Indigenous relationships and, in so doing, both mocked and reinforced notions of Manifest Destiny and the Myth of the Frontier.
Can TV Music Be Camp?
Authors: Wissner Reba A.
Published: June 2023

Susan Sontag writes, “Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. . . . Concert music . . . is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form.” She further notes though that while the operas of Richard Strauss and musical genres such as Tin Pan Alley and some popular music can be camp, the music dramas of Richard Wagner and genres like jazz cannot. Where, then, does television music fall? A close examination of the musical scores of several 1960s programs reveals that they have certain affinities with camp aesthetics—exaggerated style, unique instrumentation, and outlandish musical vocabularies—and the music is thus crucial to the experience of these camp texts. This chapter will survey 1960s TV episodes to investigate how the camp style in 1960s television music was constructed and examine its contribution to these programs’ overall camp aesthetic.
Flipper’s (1964–67) Dark Camp
Authors: Morgan Nicholas C.
Published: June 2023

Flipper (1964–67) differentiated itself from its self-consciously camp contemporaries via its emphasis on authenticity and commitment to nature over culture. Nonetheless, it was then and still remains—especially in the context of the larger 1960s television landscape—legible to viewers as camp. This chapter identifies Flipper’s camp as “dark camp,” in the sense that it retains ambivalence, the painful, and the repellent alongside other, lighter affects more frequently associated with camp and especially Camp TV. In Flipper, queerly coded antagonists are linked with both the illicit and the campy; at the same time, its attempts to vilify camp and queer figures conflict with its homosocial structure, pervading aestheticism, and homoerotic visual content. Responses from fans and visual artists working since the early 1990s demonstrate a cult-like following for Flipper attuned to this dark camp, understood as a dialectical process in which stigma is recognized but also destabilized.
Afterword
Authors: Hills Matt
Published: June 2023

The Afterword positions this study of Camp TV in relation to other scholarly considerations of subcultural forms and audiences. It invokes Susan Sontag and Pierre Bourdieu to discuss the cultural and subcultural capital of Camp TV. This discussion expands broadly into issues of cult, kitsch, paracinema, trash, and other admixtures of textual content and contextual/audience activations which have helped to determine the theoretical approaches found throughout this collection. Rather than analyzing and contextualizing Camp TV itself, which is the work of the individual chapters and the objective of the collection as a whole, the Afterword contextualizes the scholarship on Camp TV by placing the essays assembled here within the broader scope of subcultural analyses both inside and outside of television studies.
Language, Science, and Structure
Authors: Nefdt Ryan M.
Published: June 2023

This book explores the philosophy of linguistics from the perspective of the philosophy of science. It adapts and develops a version of structural realism in order to address issues of linguistic structure, ontology, and scientific progress. The chief insight of the book is that languages are real patterns found in special kinds of biological systems. Importantly, many of the theories and achievements of Chomskyan generative grammar and biolinguistics can be retained within this new understanding of the field. Nevertheless, aspects of inferentialism, sociolinguistics and 4E cognition now deserve renewed attention within a theory of language. Methodologically, this makes linguistics a complexity science and opens up a world of resources and scientific approaches to the study of natural language. The philosophical account offered draws from theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, the philosophies of science, mathematics, language, and cognitive science to bring forth a unified picture of a previously disparate discipline. This work will be especially useful to scholars interested in one of the most unique aspects of human nature, our ability to produce and understand language, and the science that studies it.
Introduction
Authors: Nefdt Ryan M.
Published: June 2023

This chapter sets out the main objectives of the book. It describes the philosophy of linguistics generally, specifically characterises core tenets of generative linguistics and how other frameworks depart from it, and discusses the various concepts of structuralism within philosophy and beyond. It ends with a chapter guide to the rest of the book.
Language and Structure
Authors: Nefdt Ryan M.
Published: June 2023

This chapter starts by exploring the naturalistic core of contemporary linguistics. It rejects the type-token distinction in the ontology of language and favours a more scientific approach to the relationship between the tools of study and the target of those tools. It argues that languages are real patterns, in the sense of Dennett (1991), while detailing a new way of understanding formal grammars as models of these patterns. The central argument is that grammars are formal compression algorithms and that many of the insights into real pattern analysis based on algorithmic information theory can be safely translated into formal linguistics.
Structural Realism and the Science of Linguistics
Authors: Nefdt Ryan M.
Published: June 2023

This chapter develops an ontic structural realist approach to the science of linguistics. It starts by claiming that radical theory change and multiple competing grammar frameworks threaten the success and realism of the field of linguistics. It then offers a structural realist framework by focusing on specific examples from the history of generative linguistics and the nature of competing frameworks such as dependency grammar and model-theoretic syntax. It concludes by offering a multiple models picture of linguistics.
The Company’s Two Bodies
Authors: Cross Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

This chapter discusses the turbulent histories of the Compagnies des Indes that existed between 1664 and 1769. The two early incarnations of the Company were wracked by war debt from abroad and speculative investment at home, and the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, in which France lost virtually all of its territorial claims in India, saw the final bankruptcy of the second, or “Law” Company. While the monarchy’s revocation of its monopoly in 1769 is often presented as a triumph of early economic liberalism, this chapter shows that the debate over the Indies trade was frequently marked by the defensive assertion of commercial reason of state. As a result, while the corporate “body” of the Compagnie des Indes was dissolved by its liquidation, demands to revive the Company’s legal privilege continued, as French thinkers and officials faced the prospect of trade in an arena where conflict or accommodation with France’s imperial rival, Britain, was inevitable.
Revolutionary Regeneration
Authors: Cross Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

The abolition of privilege in August 1789 opened a new, revolutionary chapter in the debate over the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes. As the National Assembly took up the problem of the New Company’s monopoly in 1790, the deputies grappled with questions about the resurgence of French power in India, the purpose of the Indies trade in the French economy, and the Revolution’s changed fiscal realities. While they disagreed vehemently about the uses and legitimacy of privilege, the deputies largely condemned the Company and its commercial mandate for failing to secure French imperial interests in South Asia. In turn, the revocation of the New Company’s monopoly led to a revolutionary experiment by its shareholders, as they sought to chart a new course for the Company as an entirely private and apolitical commercial actor. Their pursuit of this design reveals a vision of the French Revolution as a period of not only major economic transformation, but also opportunity.
Conclusion
Authors: Cross Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

The conclusion explores the liquidation of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes and its legacies for nineteenth-century French imperialism. The Company’s liquidation lasted for decades, as the French Revolutionary wars deferred the settlement of financial claims between the Company and its creditors. Its shareholders continued to demand the restitution of both their property and their former privileges, indicating that their revolutionary optimism had given way to a resurgence of rentier behavior that informed their new institutional undertakings. At the same time, while French visions of Indian empire receded in the face of British consolidation, new French imperial projects emerged. Although colonial officials insisted on the primacy of territorial conquest over trade, when their visions faced financial limitations, the French state turned to public-private partnerships as a method of outsourcing the costs of empire-building onto small, private companies. As a result, the book concludes by arguing that the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes represented a harbinger of later projects of nineteenth-century French informal empire.
Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science
Authors: Emery Nina
Published: June 2023

Philosophers and scientists both ask questions about what the world is like. How do these fields connect with one another? How should they? Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science investigates methodological naturalism––the idea that when coming up with theories about what the world is like, philosophers should, whenever possible, make use of the methodology of science. Although many contemporary philosophers have implicit commitments that lead straightforwardly to methodological naturalism, few have a clear understanding of how widespread and disruptive this approach promises to be for the field. By way of a series of case studies involving laws of nature, composition, time, and modality, and drawing on historical and contemporary scientific developments, this book demonstrates the potential impacts of methodological naturalism. Along the way, this investigation illuminates the complex relationship between philosophy and science, and makes the case that philosophers and scientists alike would benefit from a greater understanding of the connections between the two fields.
Repetition in the Qur’ānic Story of Mūsā
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: June 2023

This chapter analyzes repetition in the Qur’ān, with a focus on the story of Mūsā. It begins by working from Robert Alter’s and Sandra Naddaff’s explanations of types of repetition and discusses examples of them from the Qur’ān. Here, the focus is on types of repetition, on a scale from small to large: root word, motif, theme, sequence of actions, and type-scene. Then the chapter discusses and gives examples of what can be done with repetition, inspired again by Robert Alter. Repetition may be deployed, “aborted,” or suppressed. We find different manifestations of suppressed repetition when there is focalization, characterization, and reversals. Then looked at is repetition and selective giving and withholding of information. Finally, the chapter discusses repeated elements within varying length iterations of the story of Mūsā and Fir‘awn in the Qur’ān. The chapter also analyzes repeated elements in introductions and conclusions to the various iterations of this story.
Echoing Phrases, Words, and Actions in Qur’ānic Stories
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: June 2023

This chapter analyzes Qur’ānic stories on fasting and feasting by focusing on echoing phrases, words, and actions, in order to explore how Qur’ānic stories interact with each other. The basic form of an exchange encounter can be seen in the stories of Zakariyyā and Maryam, in which they are to fast (to make a sacrifice) in exchange for a child. From there, the stories have variations, through which the chapter argues that asking for things from God is not a problem; the issue is how one asks, which is a reflection of one’s belief. All of this, the chapter shows, is connected to the metanarrative verse 2:186. The chapter demonstrates that the various exchange encounters in the Qur’ān unite the Qur’ānic stories on fasting and feasting, and they are united both thematically and stylistically.
Conclusion
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: June 2023

This chapter looks at conclusions and themes found throughout the book, as well as directions for further research. These themes include families; slavery; time; history; relationships between people, messengers, and power; and the Qur’ān. These bring one to an understanding of structure, the power of focalization, authority, and truth. The book shows how Qur’ānic narratives are woven together through echoing phrases and actions, with metanarrative and legal verses, to reinforce theological beliefs. This demonstrates that a narratological analysis that focuses comprehensively on repetition in Qur’ānic portrayals and semantic echoes is fundamental in establishing an understanding of Qur’ānic stories. We also see here how narratives and legal verses are connected in the Qur’ān—the Qur’ānic verses are not disjointed, even if previous analyses of them were. In terms of how to read and analyze the Qur’ān, we see connections between legal and narrative verses and between theology and narrative.
“New Vistas of Opportunity”
Authors: Dunmire Patricia L.
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines how the temporal identity of America manifested and functioned within the social scientific theory underlying its approach to Cold War policy in the 1950s and 1960s, modernization theory. It examines the space-time contrasts embedded within the theory’s development scheme, how those space-times created Self/Other contrasts, and how those contrasts, in turn, positioned America in a privileged position vis-à-vis the global future. It demonstrates the discursive means through which the future of the newly decolonized societies was aligned with American interests and how a historically specific vision of the future was transformed into a universal, inevitable future. This chapter demonstrates that American efforts to secure and wield power drew upon contrasting projections of the global future that pitted an American future against a Soviet future and appropriated the future of the newly decolonized societies as part of its Cold War strategy.
The Future of American Exceptionalism
Authors: Dunmire Patricia L.
Published: June 2023

The concluding chapter summarizes the findings presented in the analytic chapters and considers the ideological implications of the American claim on the global future. It argues that this claim represents a “chronological imperialism” whereby politicians and pundits sought to colonize the global future by universalizing a particular geopolitical vision that denies alternative futures. The chapter also demonstrates that the analytic lens and precepts employed herein can be used to examine contemporary discourses of national self-reflection and that this reflexive discourse reveals the important role futurity plays in American exceptionalist ideology. Specifically, it considers the discourse generated within the context of Donald Trump’s presidency, his contest of the 2020 election results, and the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It argues that the rise of Trumpism has been viewed as a moment of crisis and reflection regarding America’s identity and that these concerns have focused on the status of America as the “great nation of futurity.”
The Introduction
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

We should start, so it seems, with what we already know, but to do that, it seems we first need a criterion for distinguishing what we already know from our not-knowing what it is we claim to know. Perhaps knowledge (Erkenntnis, cognition) is an instrument, perhaps it is a medium. Does it make sense to speak of subtracting whatever it is the instrument changes or that the medium distorts so that we end up with the thing itself? If we do, what are we left with? Nothing. In seeking such a criterion, we find that each of our proposals involves breakdowns and failures about what it is trying to do. In fact, it looks as if this type of inquiry that at first only seems to be leading us to a path of skeptical doubt ends up putting us on a path of despair. However, this kind of radical doubt is self-consummating, and its developmental path will eventuate in a science of the experience of consciousness as it discovers why it had to take the path of despair until it reaches its nondespairing culmination.
Self-Alienated Spirit
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

Alienated from the true spirit of Sittlichkeit, the successors to Rome create a world in which they bend themselves to a self-imposed law that seems nonetheless alien to them and not self-imposed at all. This becomes manifested in the concern with Bildung, for which there is no good single English one word translation. It included a conception of self-formation, a measure of taste that provided agents with the capacity to make good judgments, and so on. However, in early modern formations of spirit, these standards of self-formation were taken to be external to the self. The early modern formations of noble versus commoner leads to a world in which there are antagonistic groups who believe they are forming themselves into agents living up to a standard of the best person to be. Both continue to distinguish themselves from the other as nobles, who claim to be “higher” in the scale of living a good life, themselves become more and more committed to the pursuit of wealth. Ultimately, this thins out this particular kind of alienated self into something like an agent more and more disembedded from his social world. It culminates in a negative judgment that all is vanity, including itself as making the judgment.
Faith, the Enlightenment, and the Truth of the Enlightenment
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

Reduced to disembedded individuals, the shapes from the previous chapter find that they rely on a kind of pure insight into what really matters. For those who respond to this with an emotionalist faith, they take themselves to be guided by the divine light. Those who still understand themselves as avatars of Reason takes themselves to be guided by the natural light. Each takes the other to be completely wrong. However, the Enlightenment as guided by the light of reason wins the day by getting “faith” to play a game in which the rules are stacked against it. This does not show that the Enlightenment is any more enlightened about itself.
Religion
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

“Absolute spirit” has to do with the reciprocal recognition obtained in reconciliation and forgiveness. Spirit thinking about what it means to be spirit (to be self-conscious life) is absolute in that it is mediating itself. Religion is one of the basic forms of such reflexive thinking. (Another is philosophy.) Religion begins in ancient pantheism, differentiates itself, and develops in Greece into an art-religion, where the basic truths about spirit are expressed in terms of beauty. Odes, hymns, cults, epics, and finally the theatrical forms of tragedy and comedy bring this kind of art-religion to its end. In the laughter of the comedy, the Greek gods gradually disappear.
Revealed Religion
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

With the collapse of the Greek art-religion in which truth was beauty, Christianity stepped into the logical space that was opened up. Jesus is not imaginary, as is Apollo or Zeus. He is real, he preaches, and he is condemned to death. In his presence and teachings, God is disclosed to us. However, this is originally taken by the newly formed Christian community in the form of Vorstellung (representational thinking) as being a relation between two independent individuals which can be pictured as standing in relations such as father and son. The myth of the Fall illustrates this, since Adam and Eve are pictured as living in complete innocence until they eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That they immediately clothe themselves shows that the transition being mythically portrayed is from that of animal life to self-conscious life.
Absolute Knowing
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: June 2023

The activity of religious self-consciousness runs up squarely to the threat of nihilism—that nothing whatsoever ultimately matters—and tries to meet it with a doctrine of hope, reconciliation, and forgiveness. We the readers must simply gather up all the shapes of self-conscious life and what they have been through that we have seen so far in the book. In doing so, we change contingent history of Geist into a concept-ized history (begriffne Geschichte) to see that although events do not necessarily follow a strict logic in their occurrences, the retrospective look at the gallery of pictures nonetheless shows the logic of self-conscious life emerging as having a determinate trajectory even though few if any of the historical individuals have been aiming at it. The stage is set for the next move in the systematic philosophy of Geist.
Heraclitus, Self-Knowledge, and the Greatest Virtue
Authors: Moore Christopher
Published: June 2023

In fragment B112, Heraclitus vaunts sôphrosunê as the “greatest virtue”; in B116, he pairs it with self-knowledge as core human desiderata. These brief sentences, both known from Stobaeus, have largely been denied authenticity until recently. This chapter defends their authenticity and reconstructs their meaning. This requires investigating Heraclitus’ view of self-knowledge. I argue that Heraclitus treats sôphrosunê as a virtue of epistemic agency—what lets us count as knowers and to live responsive to the way the world really is. Heraclitus’ perspective on sôphrosunê and its centrality for human excellence sets up terms of the debates about the virtue in the decades to come.
Tragic Sôphrosunê in Two Plays of Euripides
Authors: Moore Christopher
Published: June 2023

In addition to Medea, two other plays of Euripides make sôphrosunê thematic. In Hippolytus, the main characters treat sôphrosunê as the greatest virtue, and each believes he or she embodies it, but their conceptions of the virtue as it applies to themselves differ, with tragic consequences. The characters’ downfalls appear to come from their not appreciating what sôphrosunê overall might demand and thus what human maturity properly entails, including a more inclusive piety, a less austere attitude toward one’s feelings, and a reasonableness that takes into account the range of phenomena outside human power. In Bacchae, the question is: Can sôphrosunê be manifest through mania? Pentheus thinks not, contra Dionysus, and his supercilious confidence is akin to Hippolytus’. Euripides thus presents to his audience another character callow about the details of human maturity and the complexities of ethical agency.
The Figure of Socrates
Authors: Moore Christopher
Published: June 2023

Socrates wrote nothing but, as the subsequent chapters on Xenophon and Plato show, had a perspective on sôphrosunê—and may have been thought distinctively to have embodied it. This chapter deals with other sources that speak to a Socratic perspective on sôphrosunê. We begin with the Old Comedy evidence, which links him to debates about sôphrosunê and characterizes him as dubiously sôphrôn. Then we turn to the small evidence from Antisthenes, the oldest of the Socratics, and to the sayings on sôphrosunê attributed to Socrates by Stobaeus, who may even be drawing from lost works of Antisthenes. Finally we look at the Alcibiades found in the Platonic corpus, which has Socrates identify sôphrosunê with self-knowledge, a plausibly Socratic equation.
Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa
Authors: Agawu Kofi
Published: June 2023

This chapter argues that tonality, the single most influential system of pitch organization in European music, has functioned as a colonizing force in Africa. A system of manifestly foreign origins, tonality has gained increasing visibility in Africa since it was introduced in the nineteenth century by Christian missionaries. What forms of tonality were exported to Africa, and what sorts of traces have they left on the African soundscape? What was that soundscape like before tonality arrived? If tonality is akin to a language, how has it been “spoken” in Africa, and how has it shaped the musical consciousness of producers and consumers of African music? This chapter addresses these questions through commentary on carefully chosen music examples from Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. It emphasizes the modal ambience of pre-European music and underlines the potential of language as a basis for pitch organization. It concludes that while tonality, a symbolically freighted musical resource and an ideological package, has enabled forms of creativity throughout Africa, it has at the same time inhibited the pursuit of many potential avenues to creativity beholden to indigenous expression.
How Journalists Engage
Authors: Robinson Sue
Published: June 2023

How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identity, and Care explores the ways journalists of different identities enact trusting relationships with their audiences according to divergent sets of principles. Drawing from case studies, community work, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, this book documents the now established “built environment” powered with engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press’s core values in more than a century. A proliferation of media-trust programs, grants, foundations, companies, collaborations, networks, and money demands that journalists take on four new roles—relationship builder, content collaborator, community conversation facilitator, and professional network builder—and be fluent in eight skill sets: radical transparency, power dynamic accounting, mediation, reciprocity, media literacies, community offline work, needs/assets/solution analyses, and collaborative production. These are in addition to the normative skills related to being a watchdog and storyteller. This trust-building theory demands journalism be enacted with an identity-aware care through listening and learning. This identity-aware ethic of care—a theory that comes from developmental psychology and is nurtured in gender and women’s studies—prioritizes communities over the propping up of problematic institutions that news media have traditionally protected in the name of objectivity. Instead, this theory asks journalists to acknowledge and incorporate their own identities—especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them—and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional moral voice focused on justice and equity so that all news participants can feel cared for within information exchange about public affairs.
Controlling the Bon Priests
Authors: Tashi Kelzang T.
Published: June 2023

This chapter foregrounds the tensions between local practice and missionizing Buddhism complicated by the state interventions in Bon practice, especially state authorizations of official Bonpos in the villages of Zhemgang district. In doing so, it centers on Bonpo practitioners, their recruitment and training, their ritual dancing and trances, whether in appeasing the untamed supernatural beings or retrieving abducted souls. It then engages the political contexts and consequences of the anti-Bonpo sentiments of the state and key court cases that revolve around village resistance to state intrusion. The chapter concludes that the ways in which powerful Bonpos are being controlled by the district office reveal the realization of Buddhists that they have to make concessions to Bonpos and Bon beliefs.
The Persistence and Transformation of Golengpa Religiosity
Authors: Tashi Kelzang T.
Published: June 2023

This chapter reflects on the relationship between Buddhism and Shamanic Bon, and Buddhism and Clerical Bon, and discusses religious syncretism in the context of the great and little traditions by relating the findings to the wider anthropological literature. It takes the relationship between great and little traditions as its starting point for the interplay of Buddhism and Bon underpinned by the local conception of two forms of religion, mundane or worldly god’s religion, and supramundane or Buddha’s religion. The chapter discusses the mutual accommodation and syncretism between Buddhism and Bon, and offers fresh perspectives on the central distinguishing features of great and little traditions.
Conclusion
Authors: Tashi Kelzang T.
Published: June 2023

This chapter highlights the findings of the study on why and how Bon has survived over a millennium of impatience from a dominant Buddhist religious structure. It summarizes the multilayered, manifold, and complex reasons for the persistence of Bon practices and beliefs amid censures by Buddhist priests. Despite the opposition to Bon by Buddhist priests for centuries, it shows that villagers see no fundamental opposition between Buddhism and Bon because of Bon’s efficacy in their everyday lives. The chapter concludes that one obvious reason why Bon has persisted in Goleng is not just the recency of Buddhism but the fact that Goleng has a scant Buddhist presence with only a handful of lay Buddhist priest today.
Introduction
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter introduces the argument of the book and the concept of back-channel policymaking: Members of Congress regularly communicate with federal agencies about public policy through discreet, informal channels. This chapter offers examples of legislators using agency policymaking as a substitute for legislative action by pressuring agencies (1) to make changes that would not pass Congress or (2) to represent contentious interests. This argument departs from previous accounts that focus on the traditional legislative process and formal means of congressional oversight. Previous scholarship has assumed informal, inter-branch interactions are primarily constituency service and requests for grants and has neglected systematic study of informal policy interactions between individual legislators and agencies. This chapter briefly describes the data used in the bookâ€™s analyses and offers a roadmap for the subsequent chapters.
The Freedom of Information Act and the War against Transparency
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter describes the records and data used in the book. The chapter explains how the records were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It offers a brief background on FOIA and the challenges of the FOIA process. The records, referred to as congressional correspondence logs, are described. The logs include records of communication from members of the US Senate and House of Representatives to ten federal agencies between 2005 and 2012 (109thâ€“112th Congresses). The chapter explains how records from three of these agencies, the US Departments of Labor, Homeland Security, and Energy, were used to construct the dataset used in the quantitative analyses in the book.
The Nature of Inter-Branch Policy Communication
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter offers a typology of inter-branch policy communication and qualitative accounts from the records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as well as other sources. This chapter describes how agencies influence policy through rulemaking or regulations, guidance documents, and prosecutorial discretion. Agencies have three tools that legislatorsâ€™ exploit: agency policymaking, information, and enforcement. The chapter includes examples of lawmakersâ€™ policy appeals to agencies: Members of Congress coordinate with agencies to delay implementation of a policy until new legislation could be passed. Legislators request agencies intervene with other political actors (e.g., state governments). Lawmakers ask agencies to draft legislative language and work with them on the laws that define agenciesâ€™ discretion. In sum, agencies have broad discretion over policy implementation, which legislators try to exploit to advance their own objectives.
Misconceptions about Inter-Branch Relations
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter uses quantitative analysis to validate the measure of policy appeals used in subsequent chapters and to assess common misconceptions about the relationship between members of Congress and the bureaucracy. The results show that nearly all members of Congress contact agencies about policy. Legislatorsâ€™ policy contacts with agencies reflect their policy agendas and priorities and are associated with their drive to advance policy in the legislative process. Contrary to popular belief, the results do not show a positive relationship between legislatorsâ€™ policy contacts and measures of electoral incentives. Finally, the chapter uses a placebo test to show that policy contacts are distinct from casework (or constituency service) and grant requests.
The Bureaucracy: Congress’s Backdoor to Policy Influence
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter tests the first hypotheses of the book and offers support for the bookâ€™s central argument: Members of Congress use informal channels of communication with agencies when they confront obstacles in the legislative process. The results from quantitative analyses show that senators contact agencies more frequently when they are in their chamberâ€™s minority and share party affiliation with the White House. House members contact agencies about policy most frequently when they are in the minority and White House out-partisans—when they are completely shut out of the lawmaking process and formal institutions of oversight. The chapter also explains and tests the role of legislatorsâ€™ capacity for policymaking, whether in Congress or in the bureaucracy, and considers which legislators are most capable of exploiting agency discretion. The results suggest that backdoor policymaking reinforces the existing power dynamics on Capitol Hill.
Back-Channel Representation
Authors: Ritchie Melinda N.
Published: June 2023

This chapter tests the second central argument of the book: Members of Congress use informal channels of communication with the bureaucracy to represent controversial interests that would be costly for them to represent publicly. The chapterâ€™s quantitative analyses test this argument across three issue areas (i.e., labor, homeland security, energy) using lawmakersâ€™ records of communication with the US Departments of Labor, Homeland Security, and Energy. The results show that legislators contact agencies about policy more frequently when they face cross-pressures, a conflict between their party and constituency, on an issue. Critically, the results show that this pattern is particular to back-channel communication; the results are different when bill sponsorship is substituted for policy contact. These results suggest that members of Congress choose to represent contentious issues in the bureaucratic venue because it is less visible than the legislative process.
Hélène Smith
Authors: Massicotte Claudie
Published: June 2023

This work follows the story of an exceptional medium whose performances of possession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced some of the most renowned scientists and artists of her time. Hélène Smith’s creation of languages, performances of celestial scenes, and paintings of spiritual visions came to embody the extreme possibilities of a new form of subjectivity. Among many other scholars, psychologist Théodore Flournoy, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and surrealist artist André Breton spent years interpreting her marvelous experiences in secular terms, highlighting the complex facets of a deeply creative unconscious. In retracing their encounters, this book sheds new light on the role of women in the history of depth psychology, demonstrating that studies of spiritual mediums forged an unconscious different from the now well-known studies of hysterics. In illuminating Smith’s contributions to evolving understandings of the subject during a period understood by many as one of secularization, the book also demonstrates how female embodiment became a crucial locus for the conceptualization of disenchantment in the modern world.
Introduction
Authors: Massicotte Claudie
Published: June 2023

In the very last days of the nineteenth century, two major works were published that effectively transformed the future of depth psychology. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud first went relatively unnoticed, reaching only a few interested specialists. Yet it is today widely read and recognized as a cornerstone in the development of psychology. From India to the Planet by Théodore Flournoy, on the other hand, initially created a stir in both the popular and the scientific press, bringing much attention to its author’s claims. Today, it has largely fallen into oblivion, as did its author’s understanding of unconscious creativity. This chapter examines the reasons for Flournoy’s obscurity in the canon of dynamic psychiatry while presenting the work’s argument for its rediscovery. It also introduces From India’s protagonist, the medium Hélène Smith, and the many questions she raised about authorship, gender, and creativity.
Bodies
Authors: Massicotte Claudie
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the parallel developments of spiritualism and depth psychology in modern Europe, as well as the roles played by women in both discourses. In order to set the stage for the analysis of Smith’s experiences, the chapter turns to Paris and Jean Martin Charcot’s understanding of hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital, then the largest medical institution in Europe, in order to retrace the construction of the female body in the late nineteenth century. This chapter suggests that medical and spiritualist authorities shared similar conceptions of the entranced female body as a passive recipient for the voice of the other. Both discourses also framed the otherness of the female body as a bridge between the marvelous and the scientific: while Charcot and colleagues secularized medicine by displacing the enchanted within female embodiment, spiritualists saw in this mysterious embodiment a gateway to the scientific exploration of celestial worlds.
Creativity
Authors: Massicotte Claudie
Published: June 2023

Chapter 4 explores the artistic aspects of Smith’s séances, which ranged from theatrical performances and musical compositions to poetry and painting. Through her trance imagination, Smith challenged contemporaneous notions of unconscious acts (or automatisms) as purely symptomatic, monotonous, and echolalic. This, at least, appears to be what the surrealist artist and poet André Breton recognized in Smith’s séances. Well aware of the scientific discourses on the medium, Breton indeed drew on her trance performances as a model to unveil the limits and risks of a radical form of creativity as he conducted with his group a series of experiments in “psychic automatism.” After discussing Smith’s artistic corpus, this chapter retraces the surrealists’ experiments in trance writing to demonstrate how the loss of conscious control during séances was a simultaneously dangerous and powerful tool that dramatically transformed the meaning of artistic and authorial agency.
Good Things to Do
Authors: Bittner Rüdiger
Published: June 2023

Good Things to Do is designed to show that the aim of thinking about what to do, of practical reason, is to find not what we ought to do, but what is a good thing to do for us under the circumstances. So it argues, first, that neither under prudence nor under morality are there things we ought to do. There is no warrant for the idea of our being required, by natural law perhaps or by our rationality, to do either what helps us attain our ends or what is right for moral reasons. While common moral understanding is committed to there being things we ought to do and to our being guilty and deserving blame if we fail to do them, we can lay aside these notions without loss, indeed with benefit. Second, it explains what it is for something to be good for somebody to do under the circumstances and argues for understanding practical reason in these terms. What is good for somebody to do we find by experience: from what we go through we learn what helps and what hinders and figure out on this basis both what is prudentially useful and what is morally right to do—although in the end this difference itself gives way, and morality turns out to be a part of prudence.
Practical reason and what we ought to do
Authors: Bittner Rüdiger
Published: June 2023

Kant’s argument for saying that practical reason, if successful, always tells us that we ought to do something rests on an illicit shift from our being unreliable in acting reasonably to our being required to do so. The shift only appears plausible under a theological assumption. In fact, practical reason, as argued in the text that follows, never tells us that we ought to do things. The point is not that ‘ought’ is difficult to understand or to explicate. It is rather that there is no reason to think that we are ever subject to a requirement that we do this or that.
Prudence and what we ought to do
Authors: Bittner Rüdiger
Published: June 2023

Kant held that we ought to take the means in our power necessary to reach our ends. John Broome claimed that we only ought to make true the conditional that if we have a certain end, we take the means in our power necessary to reach it. Judith Thomson suggested that we ought to do what is good for us, provided that nobody else is adversely affected. None of these views stands scrutiny. The basic objection against them, inspired by David Hume, is that the conditions specified by these authors fail to establish an agent’s being required to do the thing in question. So under prudence, there is nothing that we ought to do.
Conclusion
Authors: Bittner Rüdiger
Published: June 2023

Prudence, being good at finding out and doing what is a good thing for one to do, is the entire virtue of those employing practical reason, a point closely related to Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘phronesis’. Morality thus becomes a part of prudence, for there is no reason to see the prudent as necessarily selfish. Moral education, then, is not to inculcate traditional standards and values in the young, it is to help and encourage them to find what is for them a good path to take. It is true, to incorporate morality into prudence deprives us of a proper notion of evil: people only make mistakes, if at times horrendous ones. Contrary to a conviction widely held, however, we can well understand ourselves without the notion of evil.
Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: June 2023

Based on empirical research of inter- and intrareligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, the book identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing; second, more doing of religion does not necessarily denote deeper or more knowing or critical religious literacy. The book traces the neoliberalization and securitization of religious virtuosity and how interreligious peace governance uses a language of empowerment and peace as intercommunal harmony but, in effect, depoliticizes communities through double closures. Accordingly, communal belonging is defined by religious belonging and vice versa; “being Muslim” or “being Christian” is a communal marker and thus a predetermined script into which all individual narratives must be assimilated. This disenfranchises individuals’ agency and political imagination of peace beyond a segregationist approach to managing plurality. The more there is a programmatic investment in religion as a peace mechanism for managing postcolonial divided societies, the more the capacity of each communal actor to disrupt their ascribed religious and communal scripts diminishes. On the one hand, the book’s decolonial and intersectional prisms expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the Global South. On the other hand, the many stories of transformation and survival that emerged from the fieldwork speak back to decolonial scholarship and theory, exposing their limited traction and, often, their irrelevance to people’s survival struggles.
“What Works?” Is Not A Good Enough Question
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: June 2023

This introduction describes the book’s key findings. First, the more there is a programmatic investment in religion as a peace mechanism for managing divided societies, the more the capacity of each communal actor to disrupt their ascribed religious and communal scripts diminishes. Second, the more religion is integrated into peace and development policymaking, the less politically emancipatory it becomes. Hence, religion’s occasional usefulness in peacebuilding does not necessarily mean justice-oriented outcomes. The praxis of religion and peace does not entail decolonial justice. Still, “unwoke” religiosity can also be agentic and transformational in people’s lived realities for their survival and ability to rescript conflict narratives. Hence, a contrast between woke religiosity and the empirical facts of unwoke but transformative practice is one of the points highlighted in this book. A purist critique of (neo)colonial dynamics often obscures people’s agency in rewriting hate into intercommunal peace and how this rewriting also constitutes a spiritual reclaiming of a religious and communal sense of authenticity.
“Sisyphean” Governance
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: June 2023

This chapter traces the operative logic of neoliberalism and how it shapes Sisyphean peacebuilding agency. Programmatic peace/development practices themselves become sites of spiritual and vocational formation. Sisyphean persistence nourishes religious commitments by spiritualizing peacebuilding practices, which are then incorporated into neoliberal peace governance. The analysis of interreligious peace governance draws on multiple examples from Kenya and Mindanao. In these examples, the “beneficiaries” and leaders of interreligious dialogues of action confirm the need for intrafaith dialogue. They see it as a requirement to ensure shifts toward intergroup cooperation, problem-solving, and, in the case of Mindanao, the cultivation of a tripartite harmony. Here, civil society actors envision Mindanao as a harmonious space for Muslims, Christians, and Indigenous peoples to cohabit. This is precisely the form of harmony that conceals peace’s violent legacy through dependence on double closures, communal and hermeneutical, and their mutual indexing to one another. Despite this legacy, the harmony discourse dominates Mindanaoan discussions about peace and drives investment in intercommunal dialogue and performances of peace.