bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ahad Haʼam: The Politics of Sublimation
Authors: Shapira Anita
Published: October 2011

This chapter discusses the biographies on Ahad Haʼam, along with an in-depth philosophical portrait of the Zionist thinker. The first to appear was Yosef Goldstein's Ahad Haʼam. Yehiel Alfred Gottschalk soon followed suit, and a year later, Steven Zipperstein. Ahad Haʼam is not credited with any breakthroughs or sensational innovations, and he was more adept at negation than at construction. One of the elements missing in all three volumes is an analysis of Ahad Haʼam's attitude toward non-Jews. Throughout his writings, he conveys a sense of estrangement from the gentile world. For Ahad Haʼam, the Arab in Palestine functions as a yardstick for assaying the ethical tenor of the Zionist enterprise—a litmus test of how Jews behave when they are in power. All three authors deal (though not at great length) with the question of Ahad Haʼam's relevance today.
Magic Explained Away
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

Westerners who arrive in Banaras, a city in India, to conduct research, study music, or just live among Indians, waste no time in shedding the outer signs of their Western identity in favor of kurtas and pajamas. During the past century, the phenomenon of magic, which is dispersed more widely than even religion, has been attacked from various quarters. On the one side have been the detractors who deny the very experience that practitioners claim to undergo. On the other side are the sympathizers who accept some magical claims but have found scientific reasons to make magic unexceptional. The experience of magical events rests first and foremost on the sensory perception that all elements in the world are interrelated, not in a mystical union, but in a tapestry of natural interactions. The subjective attitude is the only valid way of considering magic; it is called the “magical experience,” or “consciousness.” Magic should be thought of as the nonverbal power of sound or as the eloquence of touch.
New Science, Old Magic
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

Sociological and symbolical interpreters of magic singlemindedly ignore the occult questions that magic raises. The social sciences simply have no methods for inspecting extraordinary causal claims, which they regard as superfluous to the real purpose of magic. Any effort to verify or falsify occult claims would simply sidetrack the researcher from the proper manner of understanding magical phenomena. Hard scientists, who like to tinker with ideas, are more likely to take the boasts of magicians literally, if only for the sake of exposing their fakery. Recently, a new trend in medical and physical research has begun to regard magic both literally and sympathetically as an area worthy of serious study. This chapter looks at a few representative ideas and asks whether such new science projects explain magic, or explain it away. It examines the relatively new field of medical anthropology, and more specifically medical ecology, magical healing and folk healing, and psychoneuroimmunology.
The Magical Experience
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

Magical experience results from the way the participants—not just primitive hunters—are “linked” to their world. If no direct wiring (physiological link) can be found, then magic must be purely mental: a language or belief. But if the participants are “hooked up” through a natural equivalent to the fiber-optic wiring of a virtual reality machine, then magic is far more than a cultural artifact—perhaps a bridge between physiology and psychology. Metaphorically speaking, humans are still “wired” to their physical environment in a variety of ways. One may speak of “hard wiring”—the physical dependence on an environment—and “soft wiring”—the perceptual orientation. One side of the debate goes by the name “computationalism,” or the top-down theory of perception. The second position, called ecological or bottom-up theory, lends itself to the more adventuresome position espoused here: that the biological function of the senses determines the nature of magic to a large extent. Magical experience—the perception of interrelatedness evoked by magical rites—seems to transcend the distinction between culture and nature, mind and body.
The Insider's View
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

Freed and Freed recently published an immense study of ghosts in Northern India. Their work, and similar projects in other areas of the world, draws on ethnography, medical anthropology, historical and textual analyses, psychology, and ecology to explain ghosts and exorcism. But these formidable scholarly efforts are no longer interested in one simple question that interests many lay readers: Where is the magic? Hinduism in India developed into a rich tapestry of distinct cultures embodying a few central themes. Numerous cults and traditions existed side by side, permeating each other on some levels and coexisting peacefully or antagonistically on other levels. The healing procedure practiced by exorcists varies from patient to patient and takes on the form of a simple pūjā at several junctures. The term tantra, which literally means “loom” or doctrine in the sense of woven ideas, is as old as India's earliest recorded history.
Ghosts and People with No Boundaries
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

Individuality, as the distinguished French sociologist Louis Dumont has shown, is a modern Western notion we must avoid tagging onto Indians. Relationship and bonding are the basic facts of social and psychological life, and they find expression in whom one can marry, touch, or share food with. Even the religious ideas about the destiny of the individual—karma—is permeated by the reality of interrelationships. Karma demonstrates, on a philosophical level, that human actions can dissolve as the separation between people disappears. This is precisely what makes Banaras fertile soil for the magical experience. But the traditional situation is rapidly changing in urban India, and the same bonds of karma (and purity) that tie people to their relatives can also set them completely apart from strangers. The interrelationships between individuals in traditional societies such as Banaras manifest themselves in a variety of phenomena such as the “open person” and the ever present danger of ghosts of departed relatives. Elderly men and women come from all over India to await their death in Banaras.
The Tools of Magic
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: October 2011

The voices of magicians are rich with sacred power that is renowned as mantra. Magicians accept the fact that mantra encompasses manifest and hidden divine forces and holds recoiled magical efficacies that are released by experts. Magical sounds are hardly limited to India, of course. “Abracadabra” and “hocus pocus” have become synonymous with magic itself. Just as the mantra is ubiquitous in India, spells, charms, and incantations are everywhere else around the world. The act of reciting or chanting—word meanings aside—must be explained by reference to a general theory. A reductive explanation, like James Frazer's imitative principle, must be applied to this strange, though universal, human behavior. The majority of those who practice magical healing in Banaras regard mantra as the most powerful tool in their bag. Objects used in magical rites in Banaras range from water and stones to clay and metal pots, hammers, string, amulets made of numerous types of objects, and paper.
The Mothers of the Believers in the Qur'an
Authors: Stowasser Barbara Freyer
Published: October 2011

The Qur'an particularly addresses the Prophet's wives on a number of occasions; many other revelations are connected with members of their group in the Hadith literature. The honorific epithet “Mothers of the Believers” was revealed in a late Medinan verse. Muhammad's consorts play a significant role in the Qur'an-as-process. Their reception of specific divine guidance endows them with special dignity. In this manner, the Prophet's wives emerge within the Qur'anic context as examples of the principle of ethical individualism. The women's obedience to censure became the basis of their noble status.
Composition in Black and White
Authors: Talalay Kathryn
Published: October 2011

George Schuyler, a black journalist, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 1940s she graced the pages of Time magazine and The New Yorker. Philippa soon became the inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she dropped out of sight. Philippa had been rejected by the American classical music elite and was forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a performer and composer. She traveled widely, performing for kings, queens, and presidents and took on a second career as an author and foreign correspondent. But behind the glamour Philippa was an outcast, “I am a beauty—but I'm half colored … so I'm always destined to be an outsider,” she wrote in her diary. In a last attempt to reclaim an identity, she began to “pass” as Caucasian. At the age of thirty five Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis but, on 9 May 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, she died in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam. This book is the first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler and it draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries.
Miscegenation
Authors: Talalay Kathryn
Published: October 2011

This chapter takes up the story on January 6, 1928, the day of the wedding of George and Josephine. George came home at two o'clock in the afternoon on that day since the bureau closed at four, but Josephine was not ready and she had to hurry. George and Josephine went to the subway station and took an express down to the Municipal Building. Then they went in to be married by the justice of the peace, and they were the last couple to be married that day.
George Schuyler, Investigative Reporter
Authors: Talalay Kathryn
Published: October 2011

In 1930, when Philippa was conceived by Josephine, George Putnam, the publisher of the New York Evening Post, asked George Schuyler to go to Liberia for a secret mission. At that time, there were some reports that a new form of slavery had sprung up in Africa. In Liberia, boys were being sold to work on Spanish plantations and there were some allegations that the president and highest Liberian officers were involved. George spent weeks in the forest gathering information and by early April of that year, George caught malaria at the mountain town of Sublima. He had been totally out of touch with Josephine, who was pregnant with Philippa. He was again called for another secret mission, NACCP's journal, resulting his absence on the first or second birthday of her daughter.
Rumpelstiltskin
Authors: Talalay Kathryn
Published: October 2011

In the year 1946 Philippa made a debut in the bizarre double role of composer and performer and competed in several national composition contests, and she performed throughout America. All of this helped her to cope with the aftermath of reading the scrapbooks and superficially recover from her depression. Her double debut happened at Lewisohn Stadium and many music critics, like Robert Hague, were amazed with her performance. She performed “Rumplestiltskin” twice, first at Carnegie Hall and second during the annual Festival of Music and Art at Fisk University. Philippa was also invited to become a junior advisory editor for Calling All Girls, having herself a social life. Yet, the Schuylers during this time were experiencing financial difficulties as a result of the rising cost of Philippa's training. In addition her mother was also living beyond her means with a new gaudy lifestyle.
What Is Africa to Me?
Authors: Talalay Kathryn
Published: October 2011

In the year 1959, clashes over race and politics surfaced in the Schuyler family. For George and Josephine, having a highly gifted and interracial child fulfilled their goal in life. However, though Philippa enjoyed her status as role model for many African Americans, she was unhappy and frustrated over the racial barriers she experienced in her career. While all of members of her family were conservative, significant differences existed between Philippa and her father in their attitudes toward events in Africa. Philippa had a love-hate relationship with Africa as she had been brought up to appreciate the contributions of the Negro race. But most important for her was the discovery of what she thought of her roots and she wrote to her mother that she felt that she was not African at all, she said, rather, that she felt Malay-American-Indian and European.
Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism
Authors: Klawans Jonathan
Published: October 2011

Much has been written about ritual impurity in ancient Judaism, but the question of how the ancient Jews understood the relationship between defilement and sin has largely been ignored. This book offers a systematic exploration of the topic. The book takes the results of current research on the Hebrew Bible and applies them to early Jewish and Christian groups. The Bible, it shows, considers the moral impurity generated by sin to be entirely distinct from (but no less real than) the ritual impurity generated by bodily function such as menstruation. The book then traces the relationship between ritual and moral impurity from early Jewish sects through the New Testament and the theology of Saint Paul, and shows how Christian theology arrived at the point where the need for ritual purity was entirely rejected.
Moral Impurity in the Second Temple Period
Authors: Klawans Jonathan
Published: October 2011

This chapter shows that the biblical idea of moral defilement persists into the second temple period. It studies selected passages from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the book of Jubilees, the Tempe Scroll, the Damascus Document, and other sundry texts. The analyzed passages have been understood to be concerned with ritual impurity. However, it is argued that they are best understood as articulations of the concept of moral impurity. It has been indicated that the idea of moral defilement was very much alive in the second temple period. Moreover, it examines a few Jewish texts from 1 Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Psalms of Solomon. These texts should suffice to make the point that sexual sins were perceived to defile the sanctuary, morally.
The Rise of Neo-Gricean Pragmatics
Authors: Atlas Jay David
Published: October 2011

The parallel between saying something and articulating a more informative statement and saying something and articulating the more informative implies that such can apply for both positive and negative statements. Examining the parallelism of the implications brought about by scalar items and negation proves to be, however, somewhat deceptive since such examination may seem more informative than merely looking into the logical consequences of “what is said.” This chapter also looks into the “Horn Scale” which involves a condition in sentence construction that concerns the ordering of the words. Also, the chapter provides examples of sentences that exemplify the use of Grice's First Maxim of Quantity and the other Maxims of Quality.
Practice
Authors: Lehmann Andreas C. , Sloboda John A. , Woody Robert H.
Published: October 2011

This chapter studies the concept of practice as it applies to music. Practice is revealed to be a complex behavior influenced by a variety of factors, and it is studied in terms of its macro and micro perspectives. The chapter discusses several related points regarding the activity of practice. First is that the scientific notion of practice does not differentiate between its formal and informal types. Second, the ultimate objective and benefit of practice is the development of long-term skill-building in music rather than the learning of a single piece. Third, the continuous application of practice is critical to the success of a musician's performance and there are rarely any shortcuts to the acquisition of musical skill. Last, excluding the individual differences among musicians, several common “good practice” behaviors or activities are identified from the practices of experts in the field, which promote good habits.
The Heritage of the Church
Authors: Atkinson Charles M.
Published: October 2011

This chapter examines the traditions and practices of the Christian church and some of the early attempts to develop a rational system of classification for its music. A great irony in the series of developments that led ultimately to a medieval theory of mode and tone-system is that one of the most important of those developments had nothing to do with either ancient or medieval conceptions of tonus, tropus, or modus—or, for that matter, with anything else that has been discussed thus far in this study. The development in question is the translation of the Roman liturgy into Francia and the concomitant suppression of the Gallican rite. That suppression began in 754 with the Masses said by Pope Stephen II (752–57) at the court of Pepin III (751–68) and at other Frankish churches. It was, for the most part, brought to completion under Charlemagne (768–814).
Alia musica
Authors: Atkinson Charles M.
Published: October 2011

This chapter focuses on the Alia musica, one of the most complex and perplexing of all medieval writings on music. Alia musica is actually a core treatise with succeeding layers of commentary on it, the commentators themselves drawing their material from various sources. Among the many questions that still surround the Alia musica are those of authorship and date. It is argued that there are five different conceptual “layers” of the treatise, and that there were at least four authors or commentators involved in the creation of the work.
Pseudo-Bernelinus, Bern of Reichenau, Pseudo-Odo, and Guido dʼArezzo
Authors: Atkinson Charles M.
Published: October 2011

This chapter discusses the relevant contributions of Pseudo-Bernelinus, Bern of Reichenau, Pseudo-Odo, and Guido dʼArezzo. As explained in chapter 5, Author δ of the Alia musica made a significant contribution to the theory of the church modes in distinguishing authentic from plagal modes via differences in their octave species. He made a further contribution to this theory in describing plainchant by means of species of fourths and fifths. Given the potency of this approach as an analytical tool, it should come as no surprise that the church modes themselves would soon be defined as a concatenation of species of fourths and fifths. The chapter begins by tracing this development from a small treatise that first appears among works attributed to Hucbald (d. 930) through the interpolated version of the Prologus in tonarium of Bern of Reichenau (d. 1048).
Adaptive Thinking
Authors: Gigerenzer Gerd
Published: October 2011

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social. The author proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. This book is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and animal behavior. It also teaches a practical audience, such as physicians, AIDS counselors, and experts in criminal law, how to understand and communicate uncertainties and risks.
AIDS Counseling for Low-Risk Clients
Authors: Gigerenzer Gerd
Published: October 2011

The discrepancy between what clients believe a positive HIV test means and what it actually does mean seems to have cost human lives in addition to the toll the disease itself has taken. One of the goals of AIDS counseling is to explain the actual risk to the client. This chapter deals with pretest HIV counseling of low-risk clients about the meaning of a positive HIV test in German public AIDS counseling centers. This study shows, for a sample of public AIDS counseling centers in Germany, that counselors were not prepared to explain to a man with low-risk behavior what it would mean if he tested positive for HIV. When it came to explaining to the client the risk of being infected if he tests positive, there was a lack of information as well as a lack of knowledge of how to communicate risks.
Probabilistic Mental Models
Authors: Gigerenzer Gerd
Published: October 2011

The cognitive bias research claims that people are naturally prone to making mistakes in reasoning and memory, including the mistake of over-estimating their knowledge. This chapter proposes a new theoretical model for confidence in knowledge based on the more charitable assumption that people are good judges of the reliability of their knowledge, provided that the knowledge is representatively sampled from a specified reference class. It claims that this model both predicts new experimental results and explains a wide range of extant experimental findings on confidence, including some perplexing inconsistencies. It consists of three parts: an exposition of the proposed theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM theory); a report of experimental tests confirming these predictions; and an explanation of apparent anomalies in previous experimental results by means of PMMs.
The Tenth Muse
Authors: La Cruz Sor Juana Inés De
Published: October 2011

This chapter surveys the autobiographical writings of Spanish America's most famous nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In a series of letters to New Spanish clergy from 1682 to 1691, Sor Juana used the epistolary genre, the letter, to define her role and beliefs about religious vocation. In the most famous of these letters, the Respuesta to the bishop of Puebla, Sor Juana combined the rhetorical possibilities of the letter with those of the confessional vida. She redefined the model nun to be one who used God's gifts, which in the case of the intellectually gifted meant following a life of study. Because the path to salvation required using one's gifts, the perfecta religiosa for Sor Juana became the religiosa letrada, a learned nun. This rewriting of the traditional ideology for nuns provoked a crisis.
The Lieutenant Nun
Authors: Erauso Catalina De
Published: October 2011

Catalina de Erauso deliberately rejected the religious life: she escaped the convent, dressed as a man, became a soldier, and a murderer. Yet when her true identity was discovered by a bishop, she somehow avoided both religious and civil censure. Catalina's petitions to the Crown and pope, the autobiographical vida attributed to her, and several posthumous accounts serve as the sources for studying her seemingly paradoxical case. The autobiographical account attributed to her combines a portrait of the highly prized virginal women with that of a valiant soldier. She weaved into her identity the negative image of a rogue. She slipped through the cracks of Spanish society's roles for women and reemerged as a cultural phenomenon, due to her successful negotiation of institutionalized codes for behavior and the remoteness of the American frontier.
Statistical Physics and Economic Fluctuations
Authors: Stanley H. Eugene , Gabaix Xavier , Gopikrishnan Parameswaran , Plerou Vasiliki
Published: October 2011

To try to understand better puzzles regarding economic fluctuations, this chapter presents an overview of collaborative research between economists and physicists, which is focused on applying ideas of statistical physics. Describing outliers is one of the inquiries conducted to determine its existence. Outliers are phenomena that lie outside of patterns of statistical regularity. Evidence consistent with the possibility that such outliers may not exist is reviewed. This possibility is supported by the extensive numerical analysis of a huge database, containing every trade, which results in power-law descriptions of a number of quantities whose fluctuations are of interest. It is also supported by recent analysis of Plerou et al. of a database containing the bid, the ask, and the sale price of each trade of every stock. Further, the Plerou et al. analysis is consistent with a possible theoretical framework for understanding economic fluctuations.
Heterogeneity and Uniqueness in Interaction Games
Authors: Morris Stephen , Shin Hyun Song
Published: October 2011

This chapter observes that models of social interaction are a special case of a more general game-theoretic model wherein players respond to the distribution of their opponents' actions. This general class includes local interaction games, random matching games, and games of incomplete information. The chapter uses this analogy to explore important analytical issues common to all three frameworks, including the uniqueness of Nash equilibrium and multiplier effects in the presence of strategic complementarities.
Introduction
Authors: Stackhouse John G.
Published: October 2011

This introductory chapter explains the objective of this book, which is to answer American theologian H. Reinhold Niebuhr's question about the role of people for Jesus Christ in society. This book was inspired by the fact that many modern societies typically encounter one or both of only two models of serious Christian engagement with the world. It provides basic categories in which to consider the matters related to being Christian in the world today and examines the thoughts of C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the issue.
Method in Ethics
Authors: Stackhouse John G.
Published: October 2011

This chapter examines in what ways Christians should think about what it means to be Christian. It suggests that discipleship is a fundamental concept in the Christian ethos because it is the concept at the heart of the Great Commission. It explains the two axioms of Christian discipleship which include the importance of the primary calling of Christians to increase the knowledge and love of God and to do what he wants us to do, and the role of God in providing Christians with all that is needed to fulfill that calling.
Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women
Authors: Barnett Louise
Published: October 2011

Building upon recent research on the history of women, this book examines Swift, both as man and writer, in terms of women: women as intimates, acquaintances, subjects of satire, and those who wrote about Swift. The book considers women as mothers and nurses in Swift's personal life and his fictions, and it explores the issue that has persisted from the eighteenth century into our own time: the subject of misogyny in Swift's writings.
The Question of Misogyny
Authors: Barnett Louise
Published: October 2011

The first case of misogyny given in the OED is from a dictionary called Glossographia, published in 1656. Here, it is defined as “the hatred or contempt of women,” a concise and reasonable definition, only it is necessary to ask what comprises hatred or contempt of women. The issue of misogyny can be more productively framed in terms of Swift's cultural and personal heritage to determine where we can accurately draw the line between the principle of female inferiority that almost everyone of his generation permitted and the hatred of women that values the misogyny label. If we were to create our own conventions retroactively, everything believed about women in Swift's time was misogynistic, starting with what John Essex characterizes as “a Fundamental Law between Man and Wife, that is very near as ancient as the World itself.”
Two Bands, Two Interactive Musical Networks
Authors: Brinner Benjamin
Published: October 2011

In this chapter, Alei Hazayit and Bustan Abraham serve as contrasting instances of small networks that formed and functioned within a particular set of circumstances. But first, three caveats regarding omniscience, representativeness, and balance. To document completely the microdynamics of these two bands, their members, and their interactions over a period of twelve years would be a gargantuan task, demanding omnipresence and omniscience, positions that are unattainable. Each band was a unique entity with a distinctive character, yet from a macroscopic viewpoint they represented different positions within a single field of cultural production and consumption that draws on local musical resources, and more geographically and culturally distant ones, to synthesize new means of musical expression. Taken together, these bands present a pair of contrasting possibilities for collaborations involving musicians coming from disparate social and musical backgrounds in the convoluted intersections of various Israeli and Palestinian worlds.
Representations of Place and Time
Authors: Brinner Benjamin
Published: October 2011

With music, words, and images, the musicians in Israel's ethnic music scene map the past, present, and future of their cultural terrain. They refer to places, times, and heritages through their choices of titles for compositions, albums, and ensembles. The images in their publicity and CD covers are tools for evoking particular historical, geographical, and cultural associations, while the texts of publicity materials and liner notes convey more explicit messages that reiterate or augment these images. Compared to Alei Hazayit and Bustan Abraham, Yair Dalal has deployed the richest array of symbols with his lushly illustrated, multipage CD booklets, his numerous referential composition titles, and the press materials that adorn his Web site. Members of Bustan Abraham were strikingly wary of political interpretations. Their Live Concerts, issued two years after the group's demise, bears the trace of that sociopolitical reality on the band's oeuvre.
The Servant Son of Man
Authors: Collins John N.
Published: October 2011

How confident can we be that the modern notion called “diakonia” corresponds to a notion entertained by early Christians? The best way to approach this question is to go to the only point in the early tradition where they have written expressly of Jesus as “serving”. At this point expert opinion should crystallize, and we can hope to arrive at an authentically Christian view of the service of Jesus. This chapter examines the various approaches to the interpretation of Mark 10:45 and its mention of the phrae “to serve”. The majority of writers work on the assumption that Mark's verb means in a quite general way “to serve” and that this service is directed either to one's fellow (the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh sections) or to God (the tenth section). Given the lack of consensus among commentators as to what the service of the Son of man consists in, we have reason enough to doubt that his service is the kind comprehended under the modern notion of “diakonia”.
Conclusion to Part I
Authors: Collins John N.
Published: October 2011

In the second book of the Republic, Plato writes a few paragraphs on the place of trade and merchandising in society. His use of “diakonia” and its cognate words there is examined here in itself and then in association with usage in two other passages from the Politicus and Gorgias. Although the three passages discuss social functions, they use our words in quite different ways. Thus, in the first the word group provides a colorless term in the definition of a non-political function, in the second it denotes a function that is highly compatible with political activity, and in the third a function that exemplifies political ineptitude. If despite the differences of meaning that these uses imply, an aspect of meaning is nonetheless observable that is common to all three, a valuable insight will have been gained. This chapter discusses the functions of the subordinate and the go-between, the Greek god Hermes, and Greek slaves.
Deacons
Authors: Collins John N.
Published: October 2011

In the gospels, the cognates for the word “diakonia” under discussion mainly designate menial attendance of one kind or another. The parable of the royal marriage feast includes “table attendants”—like those at the village marriage feast—who are distinguished from the “slaves” sent to bring the guests. The parable of the judgment of the peoples uses the verb in the wider sense of personal attendance on a master, again a royal person. In parables in Luke, the verb occurs in the sense of table attendance on the part of a slave in regard to his master and on the part of a master returning from a marriage feast in regard to his slaves. In regard to Jesus, the verb occurs in the same sense when angels ministered to him, when Peter's mother-in-law ministered to him, and when the women ministered to him; in Martha's ministering to Jesus, the verb is used absolutely, the latter passage including also the statement that she was preoccupied with much “waiting”.
Wilde and Gide in Algiers
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

André Gide first met Oscar Wilde in Blidah, Algeria in January 1895. In a letter to his mother, Gide describes Wilde as a terrifying man, a ‘most dangerous product of modern civilisation’. A few days later Gide met him again in Algiers, a city which Wilde says he meant to demoralise. It is here that there happened the event which was to change Gide's life and radically influence his subsequent work. He was taken by Wilde to a cafe: ‘there suddenly appeared a marvellous youth. He stood there for a time, leaning with his raised elbow against the door-jamb, and outlined on the dark background of the night’. The youth joined them; his name was Mohammed. This instance confirms Gide's sexual nature. The very categories of identity which, through transgression, Wilde subjected to inversion and displacement, Gide reconstituted for a different transgressive aesthetic, or as it might now more suitably be called, in contra-distinction to Wilde, a transgressive ethic, which remained central to the unorthodoxy which characterised his life's work.
Wilde's Transgressive Aesthetic and Contemporary Cultural Politics
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

Oscar Wilde's transgressive aesthetic relates to contemporary theoretical debates in at least three respects: first, the dispute about whether the inversion of binary opposites subverts, or, on the contrary, reinforces the order which those binaries uphold; second, the political importance — or irrelevance — of decentring the subject; third, post-modernism and one of its more controversial features: the so-called disappearance of the depth model, especially the model of a deep human subjectivity, and the cultural and political ramifications of this. It is said that Wildean inversion disturbs nothing; by merely reversing the terms of the binary, inversion remains within its limiting framework: an inverted world can only be righted, not changed. There are two responses to this, one theoretical, the other historical. This chapter takes the theoretical first, since it is necessarily both a general question about deconstruction, and a specific question about the binary and its inversion.
Tragedy and Containment
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

Magnus Hirschfeld was one of those in the late 19th and early 20th centuries conducting a ‘scientific’ study of homosexuality, and arguing against its association with evil. Sigmund Freud moved in a different direction to Hirschfeld, emphasising not so much the homosexual as different from, but rather as similar to, the heterosexual. This produced the terrible irony, and a supreme instance of the recasting of victim as aggressor: when homosexuals were being murdered by the fascists, it could be said: ‘eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear’. No less important than the containment which involves the demonising of minority groups, and the turning of progress into reaction, is the containment which destroys difference through a coerced conformity masquerading as voluntary submission.
Augustine: Perversion and Privation
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

Saint Augustine has been seen to be one of the few great (male) geniuses who changed the direction of civilisation. This book does not share this view of Augustine or his place in history. From the point of view of the book, Augustine was the product of a Christian narrative which he powerfully influenced and within which he has been scripted ever since; the synthesis, development, suppression, and innovation which characterised his own work has been continued with its subsequent transmission. Augustine regarded sin as intrinsic to human nature and always bound up with perversion, transgression, and death: the perversion of free will leads man to transgress, and it is transgression which brings death into the world. However, evil is not a force or entity in its own right, nor was it a part of nature; evil should be understood as privation, a lack of good.
Perversion, Power, and Social Control
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

This book suggests that the most significant recent theory of perversion derives from one of the most influential critics, Michel Foucault. This chapter considers Foucault's account, after a brief look at deviance theories. In important respects Foucault's analysis of sexual deviance would seem to meet some important objections, at least to the extent that he discovers not the rejuvenative or insightful potential of deviance, but the insidious, manipulative complexities of power, and the paradoxical relationship of deviants. He begins from the fundamental proposition that sexuality is not a stubborn drive or a natural force which civilisation seeks to sublimate, hold in check, or otherwise regulate; it is rather ‘a historical construct’ which enables the operation of power relations. The power that controls sexuality does not primarily work through prohibition, law, or taboo, thereby establishing the boundaries of the permissible.
Homophobia (1): Sexual/Political Deviance
Authors: Dollimore Jonathan
Published: October 2011

The charge of homophobia is itself a kind of reverse discourse facilitated by the dynamic of perversion itself. As Ken Plummer observes, whereas once it was the homosexual who was viewed as sick, now it might be the heterosexual who is charged with pathology. Most provocatively, those gender anxieties are found to harbour a repressed homosexuality. The reversal remains inadequate in that it conceives of homophobia in mainly psychosexual terms, and phobic ones at that. The broad sense in which this chapter uses homophobia is loosely descriptive of a manifest phenomenon: the hatred, fear, and persecution of, the raging at, homosexuality and homosexuals. Here the chapter focuses on the genealogy of two aspects of discrimination, namely, displacement between the political deviance and sexual deviance, and the idea of perversion as an inimical absence.
The Political Foreground
Authors: Erskine-Hill Howard
Published: October 2011

This chapter opens with a short consideration of William Camden, England's first major historian. It focuses on the governance of the body politic, and the way in which major poetry between the later years of Elizabeth I and the later years of William III was aware of and intervened in discussion of this governance.
The First Tetralogy and King John
Authors: Erskine-Hill Howard
Published: October 2011

When Shakespeare chose to produce a sequence of plays on the reign of King Henry VI he was choosing material of traditional and orthodox significance, of relatively recent relevance, and of current topical interest. Traditionally, the reign was a terrible example of misrule, political and military failure, and escalating civil war. Like Gorboduc, nearly thirty years earlier, the Henry VI plays made their immediate impact by the kind of telling contrast with the present which carried a grim warning. That the reign displayed features ‘for the which God is often angry with princes’, as Wentworth had recently argued, was clear to all, though opinions might divide as to why these appalling developments had occurred. Despite the obvious theme of order and disorder to which Tillyard most notably drew attention, no clear providential explanation is prominently advanced in the text. The great providential scheme of Hall, showing how England suffered for the deposition of Richard II, is nowhere explicit. Those who comment upon England's woes attribute them firmly to evident short-term causes, for example the unscrupulous ambition of the great nobles and the weakness of the inexperienced young king.
Post-Revolutionary Tragedy
Authors: Erskine-Hill Howard
Published: October 2011

Samson Agonistes and Don Sebastian are tragedies of alien setting, of the Hebrew faith in Philistia, of the Christian faith in Africa. When they were made public their authors were something like internal exiles. The London Milton had praised in Areopagitica, the London Dryden had praised in Annus Mirabilis had been overthrown by the revolutions of 1660 and 1688 respectively. For each poet the good city did not abide: alienation sharpened the metaphor of the wilderness. The post-revolutionary tragedy of Milton and Dryden is discussed here.
Narrativity and its Definitions
Authors: Sturgess Philip J. M.
Published: October 2011

This chapter provides a detailed effort of clarification concerning the idea of narrativity. It begins by considering the relationship which exists, or fails to exist, between this concept and two important critical ideas, that already evoked of a grammar of narrative and that of ‘deep narrative structures’. Narrativity may be thought of as the enabling force of narrative, a force that is present at every point in the narrative and thus always operates syntagmatically.
A Story of Narrativity in Ulysses
Authors: Sturgess Philip J. M.
Published: October 2011

This chapter aims to tell a story, namely the story of narrativity discerned in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The ‘story of narrativity’ means the story of the way in which a narrative unfolds along its syntagmatic course, the story of the causal moves which determine that unfolding at every point. This story will of course incorporate the represented story in some fashion or other.
The Future of an Illusion
Authors: Mcfarland Thomas
Published: October 2011

This chapter speculates on the possible changes or developments in the future conception of freedom. It suggests that the emergence of new and augmenting social process constitutes a continuing constriction even to the illusion of freedom. The most compelling of the many changes in society have a compressing effect on the transcendent dimensions so necessary to human dignity; and the benign changes provide inadequate recompense for a loss so grave.
Indian Dyarchy, 1916–1919
Authors: Lavin Deborah
Published: October 2011

Curtis went to India at the invitation of Sir James Meston, Governor of the United Provinces, advising unofficially on the constitutional changes that were to set India on the path to Dominion status. He had found a new line of approach that neither the Indian nationalists nor the Government of India had thought of applying to internal politics: the consideration of how far India should be adapted for inclusion on a Commonwealth of nations. He altered his plans and decided to stay in India indefinitely to publicise dyarchy and Commonwealth. He worked a practical example of dyarchy as it would apply to the United Provinces, and published in an open letter Letter to Bhupendra Nath Basu. He wanted the dyarchy scheme to be radical yet simple. Curtis had influenced the idea of dualistic dyarchy, its application in practice, and its acceptance in India and in England.
International Relations and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Authors: Lavin Deborah
Published: October 2011

Curtis enunciated a new vision of Commonwealth as the starting-point for a League of Nations in which the English-speaking peoples and their dependencies would have a pioneering role to play. He was helped to this view by a new recruit to the Round Table Alfred Zimmerman, who introduced him to the League of Free Nations Association. To Curtis, with its colonial past and classic federalism, America was an example of international relations. Curtis saw the creation of the British Institute of International Affairs. He also developed a plan for a joint meeting of Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Williamstown Institute of Politics. The relations of the Commonwealth to the international scene posed a problem to Chatham House. Curtis was not successful in persuading the Council to make a permanent commitment to the International of Pacific Relations.
The Lost Causes of Lionel Curtis
Authors: Lavin Deborah
Published: October 2011

Curtis presented three conundrums that need to be stated and resolved. The most fundamental was the problem of how his prophetic and ethical visions related to his interventions in practical politics. The peculiarity of Curtis was that he refused to acknowledge that there was any hiatus between the ideal and the reality. The second was how to account for the fact that although Curtis's central idea — imperial federation or organic union — was out of date by the time of the First World War, he nevertheless continued to propound on it one form or another for the rest of his life. The third: given the implausibility of Curtis's gospel, and the imperviousness of the official mind to his central prophecy, was how the extent of his influence in practical politics should be accounted for.
Introduction
Authors: Gurr Andrew
Published: October 2011

This section of the book gives a detailed history of one or more of the individual playing companies known to have performed in London between about 1560 and 1642. To the end of each history is attached a list of the plays, the players, and other known helpers, the company’s playing-places in London, a record of its appearances in different parts of the country on tour, and its appearances at court. This last item is the factor that largely determines the inclusion of the company in these chapters, since none of the commercial companies is known to have presented a play at court unless it had been performing in London at some point in the preceding autumn, and its play had been approved then by the Master of the Revels. The lists of entries from the provincial records about the companies on their travels that appear at the end of each chapter are given here in the most concise form practicable.
Arnobius and the Age of Diocletian
Authors: Simmons Michael Bland
Published: October 2011

This chapter presents an introduction to Arnobius, his work, and the main issues of the age in which he lived. The first section examines to what extent, based upon Jerome's testimony and the Adversus nationes itself, Arnobius can be described as a representative of the Church. The second section provides a panoramic view of the pagan intellectual background to the Great Persecution. It surveys Porphyry of Tyre and Hierocles as the main leaders of the pagan intelligentsia. Some of the important questions here are: Did the anti-Christian propaganda published before the outbreak of persecution have a causal effect upon the State's official decision to mount its greatest attack upon the Church in its history? What were the main themes in the pagan attack upon Christianity? What specific role, if any, did such Hellenists as Porphyry and Hierocles play? The final section deals with the Great Persecution under Diocletian during the period ad 302–5.