bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Recognition, Reduction, and Redistribution of Unpaid Work in India
Authors: Hirway Indira , Ghosh Anindita
Published: March 2024

This paper examines the conceptual and empirical feasibility of the 3wR strategy (i.e. Recognition, Reduction, and Redistribution of unpaid work) to promote gender-equal economy in the context of India. Though the government has implemented some programmes to alleviate the burden of unpaid work, it is not committed to this strategy in a comprehensive manner. The author also argues that the 3R strategy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality, as gender equality requires structural steps like equal distribution of assets, and institutions that give equal voice to women, as well as a suitable institutional environment. Examining empirically the implementation of the strategy, the author concludes that there is little awareness on the part of the government about the need to reduce or redistribute unpaid work and hence there is no clear policy on redistribution of unpaid work.
Macroeconomic Policies and Unpaid Work
Authors: Hirway Indira
Published: March 2024

Focusing on unpaid work within the production boundary, this paper dwiscusses the conceptual framework to explore the gendered impact of trade liberalization policy on the labour market as well as on the macroeconomy. Analysing the garment industry in particular, this paper finds that although the macroeconomic trade policies have enhanced the growth of the industry, the women and children who perform unpaid work within the production boundary have become the worst victims of growth. This has resulted in multiple losses at the macro level causing loss of well-being, depletion of their human capital or productivity, and denial of equal opportunities to women in the labour market and in the economy. No doubt it has led to sub-optimal use of the available labour force in the economy. The author laments that their situation is unaddressed owing to lack of data on these losses in our statistical system and concludes the paper by suggesting some measures to remedy this situation.
Social Development Index 2022
Authors: Deb Surajit
Published: March 2024

Aggregate development indices are regularly used to assess the progresses in development. This chapter utilizes recent data to construct social development indices (SDI) for thirty-two major state/union territories of India. The aggregate index covers twenty-eight indicators within six dimensions of social development, viz., demographic, health, education, basic amenities, social, and economic. While the dimensional indices allow us to rank states according to the progresses made in a specific development dimension, the composite index provides the summary measure for a particular state by aggregating all the dimensional scores into a single number. We provide social development indices separately for the rural and urban areas besides the aggregate index for each state. We also construct separate indices disaggregated over social groups as well as the gender classes. The ranking of states according to their Aggregate-SDI-2022 scores suggests that the states of Kerala, Sikkim, Mizoram, Chandigarh, and Goa belonged to the top five ranks, while Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh occupied the lowest five ranks. The results also advocate the hypothesis that states that are economically progressive in India are also the ones with top ranks in social developments, as the statistical correlation between the SDI and per capita net state domestic product yielded a value of 0.70.
The Death of Rhythm
Authors: Schoenberger Casey
Published: March 2024

This chapter introduces the rhythms of Chinese poetry and vocal arts, from the Canon of Poetry to late imperial Kun opera. It introduces musical concepts of grouping and meter, along with an “information theory” of linguistic stress proposed by San Duanmu, to analyze formal developments in line length, grammatical organization, and invention of special characters and notations. While arguing against radical disjuncture between ancient and early-medieval collections, this chapter proposes a shift from an early “iambic” metrical standard to a medieval and later “trochaic” standard. It further argues against importation of foreign rhythms as a primary motivating factor for the unequal lines of the song-lyric (ci) genre and describes how late imperial developments in rhythmic notation allowed for a “flowing” aesthetic that diminished the structural importance of the poetic line.
Emerging Technical Frontiers in Image-Based Evidence
Authors: Hak Jonathan W.
Published: March 2024

This chapter explores emerging frontiers in the use of image-based evidence as methods of proof and didactic tools in international criminal prosecutions. It focuses on the role that advanced visual representations such as virtual reality, immersive virtual environments, and augmented reality can have in teaching scene and event details to the court. These methods can immerse viewers into a digitally created world such that sensory information is more psychologically prominent than the real world. They provide safe access to a scene that might not otherwise be possible or with less visual detail. The viability of these representations is dependent upon the accuracy of the measurements and other data incorporated into the environment. As with most technologies, these advanced methods have advantages, disadvantages, and legal considerations and these are discussed in detail. This chapter also looks at the use of interactive 360º visual representations. Case examples are discussed.
Introduction: French Literature and the Unquestioned White Writer
Authors: Achille Étienne , PanaÏtÉ Oana
Published: March 2024

This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical and historical rationale of the book by defining the central yet silent figure of the ‘White writer’, which emerged in the French literary field in 1921 when René Maran won the Goncourt Prize. The ‘Maran moment’ sparked an unprecedented controversy around his Blackness and status as consecrated author, setting in motion the racial partitioning of the field around its hegemonic centre: the White writer. A definition of this figure as well as an overview of late twentieth-early twenty-first-century literature in French are provided from a perspective that combines historical contextualization, sociological analysis, and theoretical discussion, exploring long-standing practices, institutional reflexes, and behaviours that undergird the separation between writers hailing from the former colonial empire and their Hexagonal peers. The presentation of the primary corpus, which includes Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, Pierre Lemaitre, Nicolas Mathieu, and Nicolas Fargues, is followed by a summarizing conclusion.
Colonial Detail and Textual (Dys)Function
Authors: Achille Étienne , PanaÏtÉ Oana
Published: March 2024

The chapter examines Pierre Lemaitre’s novel Au revoir là-haut (winner of the Goncourt Prize 2013), focusing on the use of the ‘colonial detail’ as a narrative strategy. Lemaitre’s use of racial and colonial references to enhance the sense of historical authenticity is undermined by narratorial inattentiveness to references which are never explored in depth in the commentary or fully deployed in the diegesis. This functionalist approach stands in contrast to the writer’s expressed interest in historical accuracy, social critique, and contemporary relevance of his fictional works, in this case, the social atmosphere of France after the First World War, characterized by profiteering, government corruption, socio-economic inequality, social exclusion of disabled veterans, and marginalized sexualities. The narrative exploitation of colonial characters exposes the racial and colonial subject matter as the blind spot of the novel’s poetics and raises broader ethical questions regarding the modalities chosen by contemporary authors to infuse their texts with colonial references.
The Postcolonial as Vanishing Point
Authors: Achille Étienne , PanaÏtÉ Oana
Published: March 2024

This chapter argues that in Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (2008), the (post)colonial, although frequently interwoven in the subject’s personal story and the historical narrative it projects, represents a vanishing point, being as much seen, heard, and named as it is overlooked, muted, and miscalled. The (post)colonial brings together parallel narrative lines that seem completely disparate even as they recede or advance towards remote or proximal points of juncture. Yet, in contrast with the subject’s keen awareness of the colonial phenomena during the decades of decolonization, her espousal of a growing societal discourse around immigration and racism largely conceals or overlooks the colonial roots of these phenomena. In Ernaux’s ‘roman total’, the experience of silence and the state of non-belonging enhance the sense of tonal disconnection and temporal dislocation, shedding new light on the concept of ‘colonial aphasia’ and providing insight into the ways the colonial remains peripheral in social discourse.
Chaos and Convergence
Authors: Achille Étienne , PanaÏtÉ Oana
Published: March 2024

Virginie Despentes’ trilogy, Vernon Subutex (2015–2017), received both public attention and critical acclaim, yet few critics have examined the connections between the more obvious topics of nation, class, gender, and sex, on the one hand, and the postcolonial subject matter, on the other. A close examination of the novel’s racialized characters and situations reveals their key functions in the plot and their roles in the construction of the fictional ethos of a novel where the intersecting lines of colonial memory and postcolonial legacy are woven through the fabric of the narrative. Postcolonial characters seem to foreground relationality and convergence at the expense of specific differences, as they end up coming together around a common object or concern with their counterparts who hold antithetical world-views. The chapter discusses the (post)colonial’s rhematic value vs. thematic significance in the novel and identifies in its indecisive conclusion a major facet of the poetics of French White writing.
Postcolonial Otobiography
Authors: Achille Étienne , PanaÏtÉ Oana
Published: March 2024

The chapter examines Édouard Louis’ second novel, Histoire de la violence (2016) against the backdrop of the writer’s declarations about the anxiety he experienced while writing the book, illuminating the implicit and explicit risks that French White writers face when engaging with race and colonial history. Reading the text through the concept of otobiography (Jacques Derrida), a literary form predicated on the cleaving of the narrating subject in which telling oneself is inextricably linked to a listening process itself resulting in a breach of interiority, the analysis retraces the appropriation of the Kabyle character’s story into Louis’ self-reflection. While challenging the universalist expectations of a predominantly White French readership, the text fails to deconstruct Whiteness, thus becoming symptomatic of White-authored autobiographical or autofictional explorations which are ultimately reluctant to delve into their intimate experience and genuinely engage with the unacknowledged ethno-racial hierarchy at the core of French society.
Diversity becomes a problem
Authors: Volckart Oliver
Published: March 2024

Chapter 1 sets the scene for the rest of the book by introducing the main problem monetary policymakers in early sixteenth-century Germany were facing, and by explaining how this problem came about, that is, why the country was far more decentralized than its neighbours and how its monetary economy functioned. Taking instances of monetary crime in Augsburg, Mecklenburg, and elsewhere as the starting point, the chapter analyses how Gresham’s Law undermined the currencies used in the Holy Roman Empire of the early sixteenth century. It also examines how the decentralized political structure of the Empire emerged, paying particular attention to Germany’s specific brand of feudalism and to how high costs of information and of governance in general shaped the constitution of the country. The last section of the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of how Germany’s decentralized late medieval constitution gave rise to a chaotic monetary environment. This section also introduces some early regional currency unions and other attempts to overcome what contemporaries regularly called monetary ‘disorder and confusion’.
Making politics in the Empire
Authors: Volckart Oliver
Published: March 2024

The chapter analyses political decision-making structures and procedures at the level of the Empire. It describes how the emperor and the highest-ranking princes chose the location where the imperial diet was to meet and explains why making the right choice was important. The chapter finds that next to distance, the most important factors that influenced attendance at diets were the wealth and economic prosperity of the imperial estates. The chapter also examines how communications affected political decision-making, explaining how the Empire set up Europe’s first modern public mail service in the early years of the sixteenth century and how the network of postal routes that spread across the country cut the costs of transmitting information (with the consequence that for example the personal presence of princes at the imperial diet became less relevant). The last passages of the chapter use the dispatches sent by the Saxon delegation at an Empire-wide currency conference in 1549 to explain decision-making procedures. The focus is on how the ranking of the members of the Empire—from large princes down to barons and the abbots of imperial abbeys—structured discussions, helping the participants to reach agreements—agreements that often turned out to be superficial and to fall apart once the attendants had left the meeting.
The Indian Navy
Authors: Bhardwaj Atul
Published: March 2024

This chapter traces the evolution of the Indian Navy’s roles and missions through the prism of its experiences interacting with three major sea powers: Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The chapter then examines debates within the navy over what strategies will best prepare it for the present security scenario, as well as reviewing the navy’s attempts at indigenization. The final section examines personnel, promotion policies, organizational structure, and how the Indian Navy has upgraded its training and recruitment structures to keep pace with technological changes. It concludes that unless India reforms its naval force structure, the country’s dreams of being a maritime power and a domestic producer of naval armaments will remain elusive.
The Research and Analysis Wing
Authors: Shende Shreyas , Chaudhuri Rudra
Published: March 2024

The Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, has been in operation for over five decades, yet the organization has no constitutional status in India. There is no official history of R&AW, and the little that is known about this organization can be gleaned from a handful of memoirs authored by former serving officers focused largely on covert operations. This chapter focuses primarily on the organizational aspects of the R&AW and aims to provide a clearer institutional account of one of India’s principal security institutions. This chapter is based on a careful survey of media reports on and analyses of the organization, government reports, and interviews with former officers and experts. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first outlines the history and the core objectives of the R&AW. The second shines a light on its governance, including its organizational structure, recruitment policies, external oversight, and human and financial capital. In the concluding section, the authors analyse the agency’s need for change and reform.
The Intelligence Bureau
Authors: Swami Praveen
Published: March 2024

This chapter reviews one of the most enigmatic institutions in India’s security arena—the Intelligence Bureau (IB). The IB’s functions span an extraordinary range of issues, from counterterrorism to counterintelligence to serving as a liaison with and between various police forces. However, more than a century after its creation, fundamental asymmetries of ends and means have led the IB to something on a road to nowhere, with little success in innovation and developing a clarity of purpose. This chapter argues that several of the IB’s core functions have been met with intense competition from state and private-sector organizations, often with capabilities exceeding those of the Bureau itself. This chapter also finds that the IB remains severely understaffed and under-resourced. The implications for intelligence-gathering are significant. This anaemia has been further compounded by a long-standing inability to engage in the thoroughgoing capacity-development and reform many in India’s intelligence community have called on it to undertake.
India’s Central Paramilitaries
Authors: Staniland Paul
Published: March 2024

This chapter explores the armed paramilitary forces under the aegis of MHA, which are used to maintain internal security and guard international borders. It reviews seven paramilitary organs: the Assam Rifles (AR), Border Security Force (BSF), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Security Guard (NSG), and Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB). This chapter provides an overview of each of these forces, briefly exploring their origins and historical evolution and then focusing on their functions in recent decades (especially since 1990). Wherever possible, it also draws on recent research into their personnel composition and fatalities. This chapter advances the broader argument that the political importance of these central paramilitaries is one of several reasons to more intensively study India’s home ministry.
Oscillations
Authors: Kotkin G. L. , Serbo V. G. , Chernykh A. I.
Published: March 2024

The small free oscillations for particle moving near the minimum of potential energy. An oscillator with friction. The free oscillations of systems with degenerate frequencies. Oscillations of linear chains. Orthogonality of eigen oscillations. The eigen oscillations of the simple molecules. The non-linear and parametric resonances.
Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Global Context
Authors: Akhtar Sahar
Published: March 2024

This chapter demonstrates that there is a meaningful sense of social status that extends beyond the boundaries of a particular state—“global status.” Global status refers to a group’s (dis)advantages in material, political, way-of-life, and/or self-respect terms under a broad range of international relations and institutions, compared with those of other groups outside the social context of a particular state. In fact, a group’s global status can often differ from its domestic status within a state. Like domestic status, global status is a continuum notion, as there is no hard line between a globally secure and a globally vulnerable group (though clear cases of each can often be identified). This chapter then advances two further goals. First, through exploring the significance of global status, it demonstrates that there are important social, political, and economic relations at the global level and that all of this seems to matter to the moral assessment of a variety of immigration cases. Second, by illustrating global status’s role in explaining the moral status of a variety of immigration cases, it begins to demonstrate that the antidiscrimination approach provides a more compelling understanding of when and why states’ admission decisions might be wrong than the anticlassification approach. The focus of this chapter is on exploring how global status matters for determining when immigration criteria wrong a state’s members; this general explanation will then be applied in subsequent chapters to examine when such criteria wrong excluded nonmembers.
Global Antidiscrimination Duties
Authors: Akhtar Sahar
Published: March 2024

This chapter explains how states are, in general, relevantly like the domestic associations, organizations, and communities to which antidiscrimination duties apply. The main consideration in determining whether an association has these duties is whether it occupies a position of power over access to important opportunities; states, especially wealthy states, control access to a significant range of life options. In combination with the findings of the previous chapter, the analysis based in the normative similarity to the relevant domestic associations demonstrates that states are subject to at least global antidiscrimination’s primary duties—duties owed to any person, member or nonmember, not to exclude on the basis of identity when it contributes to a group’s global vulnerability in ways that treat the group’s members as morally inferior—or, more simply, when it degrades them. This chapter then responds to the major ways of pushing back at the analogy between domestic associations and states, including different challenges suggested in recent books by Ryan Pevnick and Michael Blake, and explains how each of these challenges can easily be dealt with. Finally, it shows why the implicit acceptance of the moral importance of global status in prominent immigration discussions, especially concerning Israel’s Law of Return, already suggests that states are morally bound by antidiscrimination duties.
Walking with the Gods: Re-Making Ooru in a Global City
Authors: Rao Usha
Published: March 2024

This chapter is based on ethnographic research in Ulsoor, one of Bangalore’s oldest neighbourhoods, which continues to be inhabited by ‘halabru’ (old timers): families who trace their connection to Ulsoor (their ‘ooru’ or hometown) for over four generations. The Car festival, or ‘ooru teru’ is a momentous event for residents. The massive ornate teak teru (Car) bearing Ulsoor’s reigning deity Lord Someshwara and his consort is pushed and pulled through the main streets by residents, past and present, around and under the metro line that now traverses its archaic path. The teru brings people to Ulsoor as a ‘super locality’ bound by shared connections to the place. The chapter traces the social and material processes that produce and are produced by this ‘ritual’ practice. This story of the teru demonstrates how the ‘religious’ practice is linked to the mortal lives of the neighbourhood and urban histories of the city at large. It unsettles categories such as ‘secular’/‘mundane’/‘religious’, which are often intertwined in deeply material ways.
‘Like a Sackcloth Patch on Muslin’: The Anti-Caste Pasmanda Narration of the Muslim Social
Authors: Ansari Khalid Anis
Published: March 2024

Islam is often represented as an egalitarian faith tradition and the Indian Muslim minority as a monolithic and unified community. Emphasis on the external religious Other at the expense of internal others like caste, gender, and sexualities has severe epistemological and political consequences. Since the 1990s, the lowered-caste Pasmanda Muslims, comprising the Dalit, Backward, and Adivasi Muslims and constituting about 85 per cent of Indian Muslims, have contested the main elements of the hegemonic Muslim-minority discourse. The Pasmanda counter-discourse has challenged the monolithic representation of Muslims, the hegemony of the high-caste Ashraf elite, and the role of Hindu–Muslim, majority–minority, and secular–communal dyads in invisibilizing the experience of lowered-caste Muslims. The chapter argues that the construction of the unhyphenated ‘Muslim’ is yoked to the repression of the internal caste other. The recovery of the Pasmanda ‘voice’ is essential to enable a more textured understanding of the community. Building on the Pasmanda narratives on coordinates like dignity, theology, and identity, the chapter reflects on the reproduction and interruption of Muslim identity through the everyday hierarchical experiences of the Muslim sociality.
Devi or Art History? Reading Entangled Narratives on the Lineage of Artisanal Skill from Telangana
Authors: Bose Chandan
Published: March 2024

This chapter focuses on the biographical narratives of a community of artisans in Telangana state and the plural worlds within which practitioners locate their histories—caste mythology and the nation state. It examines the processes through which the sacred and the worldly constitute different ‘thresholds of legitimacy’ that, instead of being viewed as essentially opposed to one another, in fact compete and negotiate with one another in order for the self to occupy the world in meaningful ways. The chapter demonstrates how artisans construct the relationship between their identity and craft by entwining two otherwise competing sovereignties and archives—one upheld by collective and shared memory about belonging to a community and kinship with a goddess and the other advocated by disciplinary and secular knowledge of Art History. The former is a reiteration of the self by asserting a sacred identity; the latter is a ‘modern’ experience of the self by citing a disciplinary source. Both these thresholds mobilize artisans’ desire to imagine, not just different, but better histories.
Taleem, Hunar, Tarbiyat: Meanings of Education and Vocation for Muslim Women in Old Delhi
Authors: Sonkar Madhulika
Published: March 2024

This chapter locates the complexities of Muslim women’s educational journeys and aspirations as part of intricate arrangements involving the household, community, and neighbourhood. Based on the ethnographic study of the educational journeys of Muslim women in Old Delhi, the chapter examines the meanings that young women denote to education and skill as they envision pathways to mobility in the complex setting of the neighbourhood. In tracing the young women’s transition from schooling to paid work, the chapter explores the everyday forms of entanglements of religion and vocation at the intersections of neighbourhood, gender, and community. It argues for understanding the distinctive character of vocational spaces as sites where women make sense of ethics, morality, and work in their everyday lives. In the multiple and overlapping notions of skill and education in the everyday life of Muslim women, this chapter outlines the moral economy of specific forms of work in an urban neighbourhood.
Religion, Religious, and Beliefs: The Life of Religion in an Indian Scientific Research Institute
Authors: Thomas Renny
Published: March 2024

In order to understand religion and the everyday practices of religion, it is necessary to study the life of religion in institutions that are considered antithetical to religion, such as scientific laboratories and scientific institutions. Studying religion at non-religious sites provides new insights into understanding the life of religion in these times and the many forms that it takes to survive and adapt. This chapter analyses the life of religion in an Indian scientific research institution based on ethnographic fieldwork. By studying the intermingling of science and religion in India, this chapter looks at the complexity, plurality, and ambiguity of the sciences and faith in everyday life. Studying religion and religious practices in scientific institutions and laboratories equips sociologists and social anthropologists to ask and understand multiple questions regarding the everyday religious life; work culture; existing and emerging cultural nationalisms; and caste practices. By looking at non-sites of religion to understand religion and religious practices, this chapter invites scholars to ask fresh methodological questions in studying religion and the everyday at such sites.
Crafty Devis of the Thar: Refashioning Charani Sagatis in the Indo-Pak Borderlands
Authors: Kothiyal Tanuja
Published: March 2024

The Thar Desert is home to innumerable shrines dedicated to Charani goddesses, believed to be manifestations of the goddess Yogmaya during their lives. Narratives portray them as protectors during distress and displacement and against tyrants, famines, and diseases. Their shrines are often located in harsh geographies and on older travel routes through the desert. This chapter explores three Charani shrines situated across the Indo-Pak border: Hinglaj in Baluchistan, Pakistan, Tanot Rai in Jaisalmer, and Karni in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, to contextualize the histories of roles played by the Charans in facilitating and navigating traffic through the harsh desert terrain. Charani shrines emerge as sources of both spiritual and material protection to desert travellers. Furthermore, the chapter explores the shifting dynamics of veneration around the shrines, brought about by the politics of the border, rendering some shrines like Hinglaj inaccessible and others like Karni integral to cycles of life and death of the devotees. On the contrary, Tanot Rai, appropriated by the growing rhetoric of border, has been reimagined as the protector of the border rather than the passage.
Sounds of Religion or Sonic Disorders: Everyday Religiosity in the Borderland District of Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir
Authors: Sharma Malvika
Published: March 2024

The chapter explores everyday religiosity in a partitioned borderland town, situated along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, through the ‘sounds of religion’—the amplified/unamplified intangible soundscapes that invoke religiosity, emanating from places of worship and religious gatherings (e.g., Azaan, Gurbani, Hanuman Chalisa). The work is shaped around the pertinent question: should soundscapes only be understood as conflict-causing sonic disorders in multi-religious neighbourhoods? Through ethnographic explorations, the chapter refutes the categorizing of religions into conflicting binaries, instead highlighting convergence and consensus in the ways that lives are organized and lived around different soundscapes in this multi-religious town. Such a consensus is achieved when religion is lived in continuity as shared faith, with religious soundscapes generating affect, perceived as a collective auditory experience instead of a competing–conflicting one. The plurality here is thus read by understanding religion not through a tangible materiality with sharp boundaries but as affectual, intangible, collective faith, rooted as an everyday lived practice in the socio-cultural history of a community that has survived Partition and continues to live through it in a hostile borderland.
The Way In
Authors: Menon Nandagopal R.
Published: March 2024

Divided thematically—polemics, intimacies, and secularism—each section in this introduction engages with the literature of the field and contextualizes the arguments of the book. The necessity of seeing polemics as a medium of mass publicity rather than rejecting it as unethical is underscored. Polemics, while noting its links to a venerated genre like critique, is treated as both a linguistic and an affective genre. Rather than radical differences, various kinds of intimacies trigger polemics among Islamic groups. Muslims lay claim to the shared ‘proper name’ of Islam, even as the latter lays its claims on Muslims. Polemics produce Islam as a public religion and fulfil the secular task of marking the space of religion, though it also exceeds this in articulating asecular imaginaries. But this public religion is relatively empty of theology and does not lead to the creation of pious subjects.
Techniques of Authentication
Authors: Menon Nandagopal R.
Published: March 2024

What assumptions do polemicists have about their publics? This chapter explores two types of exposés to show how polemics mediate, and are mediated by, processes of authentication. The first exposé attempted to reveal an allegedly fake relic of the Prophet, and another tried to disclose the manipulation of a video clipping, short excerpts edited out of audio-visual recordings (usually mass-produced VCDs) of polemical events and used as evidence to discredit and attack Islamic rivals. Derived from principles of hadith evaluation, the moral integrity of the transmitters of the relic and makers of video clippings are analysed. But this traditional method is mediated by the language of property and ownership, and everyday state practices like document authentication. Circulation of fakes is interpreted as an encroachment on originals. The forgers defrauded their publics by passing off inferior goods as genuine. At the heart of the exposés lie contradictory conceptions of their publics as sadharanakkar (commoners) who are not highly trained Islamic theologians or scholars—debunking is necessary because commoner Muslims can be moulded into informed, religiously aware subjects, but can also be easily corrupted and misled. The potential to reform and what can undermine it coexist in the commoners.
Phatic Sociality
Authors: Menon Nandagopal R.
Published: March 2024

Polemics create socialities that live and die in ‘phatic traces’, with no lasting communion. This chapter focuses on the production and circulation of audio clippings, excerpts from technologically mediated audio conversations between an alim and a commoner from opposing Islamic affiliations. They offer a perspective on who the publics of polemics are and how they engage with and participate in polemics: commoners are both polemics’ publics and take on the role of polemicists, though not in the same way as ulama polemicists. Audio clippings were widely disseminated not primarily for their content, but for the fact that a connection was established with a famous alim polemicist by a relatively unknown commoner call-maker from a rival Islamic group. The call-receiver alim is also strategically invested in the audio clipping to prove that he successfully resisted the commoner call-maker’s efforts to establish contact. In drawing attention to themselves in the phatic mode, they instantiate a mutual becoming and necessity that is also the cause of anxiety: the alim and the commoner are both made and unmade in the audio clipping; it simultaneously realizes and undermines the hierarchy in Islamic authority between the alim and the commoner. There is no special theological valence to this encounter; it does not produce piety, but entertains the publics by highlighting how the parties in conversation outsmarted each other.
Subordinate legislation
Authors: Baker John
Published: March 2024

Proclamations of government policy, or announcing executive decisions, were commonplace from the earlier sixteenth century, but there was debate about the supposed prerogative power to legislate by proclamation. Henry VIII’s Statute of Proclamations 1539 (repealed in 1547) encouraged their use but contained an important proviso that they could not affect lives or property or subvert the common law. Although legal opinion was against the possibility of changing the law by proclamation, repeated attempts to legislate without recourse to parliament brought the matter to a head under James I. It was finally settled in the Case of Proclamations (1610) that the king could not create new offences or alter the law by proclamation. There are, however, several examples of powers to make or change law, including even the repeal of statutes, being delegated to the king by parliament. Bye-laws could be made by local authorities either under the common law (or local custom) or by virtue of a royal charter, as in the case of newly founded corporations. They were subject to review by the courts, and several challenges were made to exorbitant bye-laws, especially those enforceable by imprisonment, as infringing Magna Carta.
The central courts of common law
Authors: Baker John
Published: March 2024

This chapter is concerned with the king’s three central courts of common law, which all settled in Westminster Hall. The effect of chapter 11 of Magna Carta was to require two royal benches, one notionally following the king (the King’s Bench) and one held in a certain place (the Common Bench or Common Pleas), and to restrain the Exchequer from hearing common pleas. These restrictions were evaded in later centuries by various devices, though not without controversy. Errors in the King’s Bench and Exchequer could be corrected in statutory courts of Exchequer Chamber. Although the King’s Bench was supposedly held before the king in person, it was generally held that he could not take part in its decisions. This was challenged by James I, resulting in a confrontation with Sir Edward Coke. The judges also came into conflict with the crown over the appointment of unsuitable court favourites to clerkships in the courts. The chapter ends with two statutes restricting and then abolishing the use of Latin and French in the courts.
The High Commission
Authors: Baker John
Published: March 2024

The ecclesiastical high commissions were issued under the Act of Supremacy 1559 in order to reform and correct heresies, schisms, and ‘enormities’, originally in relation to bishops and clergy who had adhered to Rome under Mary I, but soon extended to Puritans and Nonconformists. The commissioners also assumed a jurisdiction, parallel to that long exercised by episcopal courts, to deal with routine matters of Church law such as adultery and fornication. The jurisdiction was widely unpopular because of its high-handed methods, the lack of any appeal, and the practice of forcing parties by threat of imprisonment to answer incriminating questions upon the oath ex officio. Many lawyers, including judges, regarded this as contrary to Magna Carta. From the 1560s onwards the courts of common law attempted, by means of habeas corpus and prohibition, to curtail excesses of jurisdiction by the commissioners. Though only partly successful, they established in 1607 that laymen could not be compelled to incriminate themselves upon the oath ex officio. Nicholas Fuller, counsel for some Nonconformists in the 1607 case, was forthwith prosecuted in the High Commission for ‘schism’ in respect of remarks made in argument. He relied on the immemorial custom for learned counsel to say what they could for their clients, but was obliged to submit. Clashes over the jurisdiction continued until abolition in 1641.
The Schwarzschild spacetime
Authors: Choquet-Bruhat Yvonne
Published: March 2024

In 1916, soon after the publication of Einstein’s equations, an exact solution was constructed by Schwarzschild that could model the gravitational field outside a spherically symmetric isolated body such as the Sun. It was shown that, in first approximation, the relativistic planetary trajectories, i.e. timelike geodesics of the Schwarzschild metric, coincide with the Kepler orbits.
General Einsteinian spacetimes. The Cauchy problem
Authors: Choquet-Bruhat Yvonne
Published: March 2024

For elliptic equations, the solution of the Cauchy problem exists in the analytic case, but is not stable: one says that the Cauchy problem is not well posed.Possibly well-posed problems for elliptic equations are global problems, for instance the so-called Dirichlet problem, which is the data of the unknown on the boundary of the domain.
Relativistic fluids
Authors: Choquet-Bruhat Yvonne
Published: March 2024

In this chapter, we will describe general properties of perfect fluids. When appropriate definitions are given, a number of these properties generalize well-known properties of non-relativistic perfect fluids. However, the equivalence of mass and energy in Relativity introduces a number of fundamental differences. The relativistic causality principle, limitation by the speed of light of the speed of any macroscopically transmitted signal, leads also to new considerations.
Probability Matching
Authors: Lo Andrew W. , Zhang Ruixun
Published: March 2024

Chapter 5 describes an experiment in which human subjects are asked to play a computer game with real monetary payoffs for correctly guessing the outcome of a binary lottery. Most subjects’ guesses conform to an irrational behaviour known as probability matching, in which the frequency of their guesses matches the underlying probability of the binary lottery. In addition to probability matching, we find different tendencies towards randomization under different payoff schemes, as predicted by Chapter 2’s evolutionary model of behaviour, and even after controlling for a wide range of demographic and socio-economic variables. We also find several individual differences in the tendency to maximize or randomize, correlated with wealth and other socio-economic factors. Surprisingly, subjects who have taken probability and statistics classes, and those who self-reported finding a pattern in the game, are more likely to act irrationally, underscoring the importance of environment as a driver of behavioural anomalies.
The Madness of Mobs
Authors: Lo Andrew W. , Zhang Ruixun
Published: March 2024

In Chapter 10 we derive collective intelligence as an emergent property of evolution in the binary choice framework. We also specify conditions under which collective intelligence fails, using political polarization and discrimination as examples. Political polarization emerges in stochastic environments with reproductive risks that are correlated across individuals. Bias and discrimination emerge when individuals incorrectly attribute random adverse events to observable features that may have nothing to do with those events. In addition, path dependency and negative feedback in evolution may lead to even stronger biases and greater levels of discrimination, which are locally evolutionarily stable strategies. These results suggest potential policy interventions to prevent such failures by nudging the ‘madness of mobs’ towards the ‘wisdom of crowds’ through shifts in the environment rather than simply prohibiting undesirable behaviours, which could have unintended consequences.
The Psychophysiology of Trading
Authors: Lo Andrew W. , Zhang Ruixun
Published: March 2024

Chapter 12 focuses on gauging the role of emotion in the decision-making process of professional securities traders, where emotion is measured by physiological characteristics (e.g. skin conductance and blood volume pulse) during live trading sessions. In a sample of ten traders, we find statistically significant differences in mean electrodermal responses during transient market events relative to no-event control periods, and statistically significant mean changes in cardiovascular variables during periods of heightened market volatility relative to normal-volatility control periods. We also observe significant differences in these physiological responses across the traders that may be systematically related to the traders’ levels of experience.
What Makes a Good Day Trader?
Authors: Lo Andrew W. , Zhang Ruixun
Published: March 2024

In Chapter 13 we investigate several possible links between psychological factors and trading performance in a sample of eighty anonymous day traders. Using daily emotional state surveys over a five-week period, as well as personality inventory surveys, measures of personality traits and emotional states for each subject are constructed and correlated with daily normalized profits and loss records. Subjects whose emotional reaction to monetary gains and losses were more intense—both positively and negatively—exhibited significantly worse trading performance. Psychological traits derived from a standardized personality inventory survey do not reveal any specific ‘trader personality profile’, raising the possibility that trading skills may not necessarily be innate, and that different personality types may be able to perform trading functions equally well after proper instruction and practice.
The Co-Evolution of Financial Markets and Technology
Authors: Lo Andrew W. , Zhang Ruixun
Published: March 2024

In Chapter 18 we identify eight discrete financial ‘eras’ in which unique combinations of economic need and technological advances gave rise to new products, services, and financial institutions, through the lens of the adaptive markets hypothesis. By understanding the underlying drivers and resulting dynamics of these eras, we can begin to develop a deeper appreciation for the origins of financial innovation and its great promise for our future.
Customizing Culture?
Authors: de Maaker Erik
Published: March 2024

This chapter introduces the thematic of the book, stating the questions it focuses on. Proceeding from events that define the everyday lives of the inhabitants of rural West Garo Hills, the book explores the creation, sustenance, and interpretation of practices deemed traditional. I argue that traditions can provide orientations that allow people to adapt to the changing conditions of their times. I locate the thematic of the book in anthropological theory on culture, modernity, and tradition. For me, doing ethnography involved a focus on events, which I recorded on video. Their analysis created starting points for conversations with interlocutors that have by now extended over more than two decades. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book, summarizing the argument Reworking Culture advances.
Frames, Labels, Locations
Authors: de Maaker Erik
Published: March 2024

In this chapter I introduce the people that this book focuses on. How are Garo located socially, and what has been their trajectory of becoming? In Garo Hills, a rather sharp distinction divides people who earn their livelihood as cultivators from those who live in town and have salaried jobs. Sources of income and land relationships create contrasting realms, which only partially overlap. Structures of governance, and the financial resources linked to these are urban-centric, and rural areas do not have much political leverage at a state level. But rather than the urban simply encapsulating, dominating and transforming the rural, the latter also has assets of its own. In Garo Hills, rural land rights are reasonably well protected, while rural dwellers also constitute the source of the very traditions that define Garo ethnicity as whole.
Sonic Journeys on the Open Sea: Testing the Faithful in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature
Authors: Brooks Britton Elliott
Published: March 2024

This article examines a distinct literary environment in Anglo-Latin and Old English literature: the open sea. It argues that such an environment was formed primarily through sound, where the geophonic actions of water and wind were used to create a literary motif, a location both to test those seeking God and to showcase their faithfulness. Those tested include the pilgrim on their journey, often to Rome, and the saint, often in ascetic seclusion. In Anglo-Latin, the geophony of the open sea was sometimes rendered with the adjective undisonus (‘wave-sounding’), a rare word used consistently in two ways: first, to function as an impediment to the person on their journey; second, to form a miniature open sea to serve as an hagiographical desert. In Old English, the literary motif of the sonic open sea occurs in the poem Andreas, which uses active verbs such as hlynnan (‘to make a loud noise, sound, [or] resound’) to render the acoustic assaults of the sea at storm. Andrew, depicted as a miles Christi, remains faithful, and the open sea calms and silences, in declaration of his victory. By comparing texts in both the Anglo-Latin and Old English traditions, this article highlights in new ways the important role of sound, particularly geophonic productions, in early medieval English literature.