bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Between Revolutions
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Nicholas II's manifesto, which promised to create an elected legislature, the State Duma, and to expand the civil liberties of Russian citizens. With the October Manifesto, Russian politics entered a new era, although it did not immediately eliminate the threat of revolution. The chapter explores how the strains of war caused serious problems for the Russian economy, causing basic supplies to ran short in major cities. As the economic situation worsened, and as casualties mounted at the front, the political atmosphere became increasingly tense. The chapter details the huge protests that erupted in the capital Petrograd in early 1917 and the removal of Nicholas II from power, which provided liberals the opportunity to establish a better political and social order.
Jaume Caresmar’s Life and Personality
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents an overview of Jaume Caresmar’s life and personality. Caresmar entered Bellpuig de les Avellanes in 1742 at the age of twenty-five, and after mandatory probationary periods as postulant and novice, he received his permanent vocation in November of 1743. He was absent from Bellpuig during much of his nearly fifty-year service as he spent his time traveling throughout Catalonia to explore, organize, and transcribe archival material. Whether in sickness or in relatively good health, Caresmar was impatient and irascible, focused as he was on history, archives, historical documents, and above all preserving the records of the past by transcribing them. Like many people who live alone in a large city, he disliked being bothered by neighbors or colleagues but at the same time valued the animated comings and goings of the urban atmosphere. The chapter looks at Caresmar’s efforts to catalog and copy the Bellpuig archive, as well as his experience with the Barcelona Academy, which shows some of the petty as well as the serious conflicts Caresmar attracted. It also discusses ecclesiastical history, considering Catalan history writing and the Baroque tradition.
Disamortization, War, and Neglect
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with the experience of Bellpuig de les Avellanes and the damage to its collections in the nineteenth century. Having been temporarily abandoned during the Succession War, Bellpuig experienced three other emergencies that caused it to be evacuated: in 1810 because of the French conquests of Balaguer and Lleida; in 1820 when the Liberal regime issued its disamortization orders; and in 1835 just before the official acts closing the monasteries of Spain and seizing their properties. The last confiscation was, of course, permanent, at least as regards the Premonstratensians. The fact that the canons were able to reconstitute their community twice in the early nineteenth century explains the hope that the disamortization in 1835 might also have been succeeded by a future return, hence the effort to hide away the historical records of the foundation. The chapter places this disaster in the context of the wars, riots, confiscations, and general neglect of cultural patrimony that characterized the period from 1808 until 1939, between the French occupation of Spain and the end of the Spanish Civil War. It considers absolutism, liberalism, anticlericalism, Carlism, as well as the Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of 1909 in Barcelona.
Wanderings and Destruction of Libraries and Archives
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the fate of records, manuscripts, and books that were lost, destroyed, or moved about in the wake of the upheavals discussed in the previous chapter. Many items were considered of little value, devoted as they were to religious subjects. The confiscations also put into circulation hundreds of thousands of books of no great individual value, but not so devoid of worth as to be discarded or converted to frivolous or industrial use. The 1835 disamortization was followed by reiterated plans to salvage the cultural patrimony of monasteries, but the absence of state funding, disorganization, preoccupation with other crises, and lack of interest prevented these plans from being effectively implemented. One result of the Liberal triumph immediately following the disamortization was the reestablishment of the University of Barcelona in 1837. Ninety percent of the rare-books collection of its restored university library, now called the CRAI Biblioteca de Reserva, come from disamortized monasteries. In 1856, the task of guarding and transferring objects of cultural value was placed under the direction of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The chapter then focuses on the Bellpuig library, looking at the dispersion and disappearance of Jaume Caresmar’s works.
Introduction
Authors: Johnson Daniel
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the online media culture in Japan. It details the protest against Fuji TV and its perceived alliance with South Korean media, which then triggered anti-Korean discourse. The tendency toward political disengagement and disavowing identity plays a significant part in online culture. The chapter considers the analysis of language as a kind of shared energy or effect that users can participate in through opaque forms of writing in an anonymous sphere of communication. It also considers how language figures affected the visual culture of online media and how asynchronicity allows for different types of anonymity to simultaneously possess qualities of spectacle and invisibility.
The Roadmap
Authors: Winn Lawrence “Torry”
Published: May 2024

This chapter tells the story of the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) and its desire to build bright futures for Black children. It uses a humanizing and transformative framework that highlighted BCLC's successful practices and programs and analyzes its efforts that were not working. It also illustrates why history matters to understanding the current conditions and state of Black communities and how history can be used as a tool to transform the future for Black children. The chapter reviews research-based theories and reflection essays about the experiences of community members. It highlights the need to acknowledge racism and oppression and their impact on health and wellness.
Transformative Justice Framework
Authors: Winn Maisha T. , Winn Lawrence “Torry”
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a summary of the social, historical, and political contexts of the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) and the events that led to the launch of this citywide effort. It describes the framework of five pedagogical stances: history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter. It also reviews the research methods used to evaluate BCLC. The chapter outlines the history of racist policies in real estate and housing that contributed to current problems in the Black community. It looks at protests led by local activists, leaders, youth, and organizations that oppose unfair justice systems and racial policies in the region.
Black in School
Authors: Chouteau Quadir
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the youth poet, Quadir Chouteau, who shares his experience of being Black in high school and the impact that gun violence has on learning. It explores how problem solving was second nature for kids in South Sacramento because they could be in a life-threatening situation. It also emphasizes how seeing violence, hearing police sirens, smelling marijuana while walking down the street, and carrying caskets are phenomena that shouldn't be part of everyday lives. The chapter focuses on the elective class called Project HEAL, that stands for Health, Education, Activism, and Leadership and was sponsored by the UC Davis SAYS program. It explores street violence and how to make “school my hustle” discussed in Project HEAL.
The Past Meets the Present
Authors: Montgomery-Block Kindra F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Build. Black., which is an extension of the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) that focuses on economic mobility and stability within the African American community. Build. Black. aims to build economic opportunities in Sacramento County for Black communities through health, entrepreneurship, youth voice, and jobs. The chapter explains that Build. Black. is rooted in the tragic police killing of Stephon Clark in March 2018 in his grandmother's backyard in Meadowview, a South Sacramento neighborhood. Sacramento police and sheriffs had mistakenly identified Stephon as a threat and a property vandal. The chapter points out how Stephon's death began a slew of protestation and riots that forced the closing of Sacramento's Golden 1 Center Arena, where the NBA Kings play their home games.
A Unique Opportunity, A Unique Responsibility
Authors: Winn Maisha T.
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the building that houses the Sierra Health Foundation, where Chet Hewitt serves as president and CEO, as a study of light. It highlights the Sierra Health Foundation's vision of a healthful life for Northern Californians and mission to invest in and serve as a catalyst for ideas, partnerships and programs that improve health and quality of life in Northern California. Through the Sierra Health Foundation, community members meet to strengthen and create legacies for Black families. The chapter details how Chet and his team provide space and structure for engaging deeply in public health issues that affect Northern Californians. It mentions the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC), which seeks to reduce the incidence of infant sleep-related death, child abuse, and third-party homicide in Black families.
Wellness Works
Authors: Noguera-Mujica Amaya
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the Community Responsive Wellness Program for the African American/Black communities of Sacramento, which was launched in 2021. It emphasizes the growing recognition of the need for mental health services specifically designed to address the needs of Black communities. Since 2015, BCLC has uncovered numerous factors that contribute to the mental health crises in the Black community and has played a leading role in devising a layered response to the oppressive dynamics that directly affect the health and well-being of Black people. The chapter provides details of the Cultural Competence Committee Ad Hoc Workgroup, which was charged with designing community listening sessions to give African American/Black community members an opportunity to reflect on how trauma has affected their community. It covers the development of a new prevention and early intervention program that would address the mental health and wellness needs of the African American/Black community.
Introduction
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter looks into the extent of famine in France's colonies. It provides an overview of the changing conceptions of and responses to starvation through Algeria, Indochina, West Africa, and Equatorial Africa. The French imperial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for managing famines, but they both ultimately failed. Integrating French colonial famine into the history of modern humanitarianism helps complete the story by emphasizing the importance of political values and technical knowledge. The chapter also cites the account of Britain's way of famine capturing the critical connection between colonialism and humanitarianism.
Losing Control in Vietnam, 1945
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter overviews the famine of 1945 that took millions of Vietnamese lives. It starts with author Tran Van Nai's argument that the famine was staged by the French to sabotage the nationalist movement. The conflict over sovereignty and famine was a key juncture in a historical process wherein the French Empire took, and subsequently failed, the increasing responsibility for subsistence. Moreover, the association of sovereignty and famine control intensified during the jockeying for power as World War II was winding down. The chapter explains how Vietnamese revolutionaries seized on famine relief as a way to legitimize their right to govern both internally and externally.
Muslims and Politics in the Southern Philippines
Authors: Abinales Patricio N.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the 2017 war of Marawi in the Southern Philippines. It highlights the interplay of Muslims and politics in the Islamic city of Marawi. The conflict in Muslim Mindanao was mainly due to endemic interclan revenge killings called rido, when everyone was expected to join and defend the clan's interest when a feud broke out. Essentially, the Marawi siege was a product of a combination of Muslim separatist aspirations, religious zealotry, opioid racketeering, political rivalries, and clan feuds. The chapter cites that the national government would have to compromise with the datu politicos to ensure stability in the Mindanao war zone.
Transliminal Comparisons in the Tombstone Inscriptions of Muslim and Christian Rulers in the Maghrib and Iberia
Authors: Lázaro Fabio López
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the transliminal comparisons in the tombstone inscriptions of Muslim and Christian rulers in the Maghrib and Iberia. Practitioners inevitably realized that there were stylistic inconsistencies between rulers' titles in the various language versions of treaties and tombstone epitaphs. Historical comparison is inextricably intertwined with cognition of difference. The chapter introduces the notion of convivencia and disvivencia of rulers. In Iberia and North Africa, epitaphs inscribed on royal tombstones were rhetorically inscribed within a much larger context of enduring and deep-seated, if disjointed, convivencia within and across Christian and Muslim jurisdictional and territorial boundaries.
Confucianism, Marriage, and Sexuality
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces how reformers constructed a modern creole Chinese patriliny through their dialogic encounters with the Christian God, marriage, and sexuality. Indeed, the modern creole Chinese subject was discursively born in Java with the announcement by Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan (THHK, or the Chinese Association) of a moral reform project addressed to “all Chinese” within the reach of their publishing network. The THHK movement quickly spread across the rest of Java not only in terms of religious reform and education but in an explosion of publications, newspapers, and penny novels in the creole Malay vernacular. The moral subject was modeled in important ways on the Christian and Enlightenment split between reason and affect, the latter element of which was to be disciplined by both religion and scientific knowledge about sexuality. Marriage, with its rites modernized toward equality between the two genders, and sex within marriage, with its social meaning tethered to one's duty to God and reproducing the male lineage, were two basic ways a new morally “Chinese” subject was reinterpreted at the turn of the twentieth century.
Love, Desire, and Race
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses how Chinese male writers internalized and popularized the new discourse of love and love marriage. Toggling between the social and the fictional, the chapter traces the formation of a desiring Chinese moral subject to three moments in the late colonial period. First, in a “racializing” moment of birth (1903–17), writers experimented with the Western binary approach to sexual love in a series of lust caution stories. Safely pursued outside the context of Confucian marriage, the stories centered on Chinese men's attraction to native women, at the same time as they turned native concubinage into a moral problem. Second, in a “spiritual” turn, authors appropriated the Christian concept of redemptive love in the 1910s by secularizing their translations and adaptations of Alexandre Dumas fils's Camille with a modern Confucian spiritual twist. Third, in a “bourgeois cultural” moment of closure, “love” and love marriages became the ideal not only for the super-wealthy Chinese but also for the rising middle classes between the 1910s and 1930s. This closure normalized for the male bourgeois imagination Western romantic practices while retaining women's “purity” at the core of what defined Chineseness.
Species Intimacies
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that two popular eighteenth-century subgenres—one depicting lapdogs and the other generating protagonists from banknotes, sedan chairs, and overcoats—create corollary counterhuman experiments in multiplicity and immeasurability. It juxtaposes the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative in order to explore imaginative scenarios that focus on affective substitution and “love.” Both the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative place the human being into surprising, direct, intimate contact with the other-than-human. The circulation narrative uses that contact to represent the affective merging of the human with the material thing in the form of a thing-protagonist; that thing-protagonist exhibits a suffusion with human emotion in a way that ultimately makes the thing into a human equivalent. In the case of the lapdog lyric, the poetry celebrating the “love” between the lady and the lapdog consistently represents a corporeal cross-species intimacy that challenges human-centered conventions of affinity. Both of these subgenres reach toward a counterhuman imagining of affect based on an unconventional or immeasurable experience of cross-species movement.
Coda
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This coda begins by reviewing how the relationship between human creativity and the possibility of an other-than-human vitality—between the cultural imaginary and the counterhuman imaginary—has taken a range of shapes across the texts that this book explores. The common result in each instance is the projection of a counterhuman realm just outside the region of human creative purpose, just beyond explicit acknowledgment, and just out of the reach of the human cultural imaginary. This realm of just beyond calls for a new understanding of symptomatic reading. The chapter then considers two recent positions on the relevance of symptomatic reading to the explication of this just beyond: Tobias Menely's “geohistorical contradiction” and Edna Duffy's “cosmological criticism.” In reading beyond the “alien” and even beyond the cosmological to wider forms of the unimaginable, the counterhuman imaginary sees the scope projected by “geohistorical contradiction” and “cosmological criticism” and seeks to give it a theory and a method.
The Legislature
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the powers that the legislature and individual legislators hold vis-à-vis the president. These powers have been a source of considerable irritation to presidents, especially in the area of budgeting. The chapter then looks at the president's set of specific authorities in dealing with the People's Representative Council (DPR)—which give the executive much leverage in enticing MPs to cooperate. It also explains how executive-legislative coalitions and negotiations work in practice, both at the institutional and individual level. Key to these negotiations are brokers in the DPR's various leadership bodies and caucuses, who promise the president cooperation but gain strong concessions in return—for themselves and for the institution. Finally, the chapter uses a case study of Setya Novanto to show how presidents have used legislative brokers to secure the DPR's integration into the broader structures and practices of coalitional presidentialism. Novanto, the DPR Speaker between 2014 and 2015 and again between 2016 and 2017, was the epitome of the dilemmatic challenges presidents face when picking their legislative allies, and the price they have to pay for their choice.
Constructivism, Mathematics, and the Space of History
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter tackles the interplay between constructivism, mathematics, and the space of history. It explains how space highlighted by non-Euclidean geometries motivated constructivist movements in the visual arts and the theory of historiography. Constructivist movements in the visual arts were central to the re-envisioning of space in modernism. Adapting insights from the curved spaces of non-Euclidean geometry, they present images of the curvature of time. The chapter also considers the theory of historiography presented by Karl Mannheim, Karl Heussi, Ernst Troeltsch, and Oswald Spengler.
“Brought Up by Hand”
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates how a crucial and guiding idiomatic dimension to Great Expectations (1860–61) emerges out of Charles Dickens's formal and economic requirements to move the novel so quickly from its imaginative beginnings to its weekly publication. Dickens organizes the novel—especially in its early stages—around a probing exploration of the relationship between nature and nurture, which reaches its crystallization in the idiomatic phrase of being “brought up by hand.” This idiom not only establishes the parameters of the novel's narrative and thematic development but also reflects its very specific sociohistoric moment. The chapter then considers how the “socioverbal intelligibility” of the idiom in Dickens's first post-Darwinian novel is of a piece with the cultural moment of evolutionary anxiety that riled up so many readers in the 1850s and 1860s. This allows one to reassess not only how Britons perceived the anxious relationship of nature to nurture via newly popularized evolutionary theories, but also how Dickens's own views about such a fundamental relationship informed his changing ideas about religion, class, gender, labor, and race over the course of his career.
Letter Twelve
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter outlines Plato's letter addressed to Archytas the Tarentine. It notes that Plato indicated his perception of Archytas and his ruling, which is worthy of his ancient ancestors. The reminders are said to be coming from Myrians, who were part of the people expelled from Troy during the reign of Laomedon. Additionally, Plato reminds Archytas that the letter he received from him was not in sufficient condition, so he dispatched the missive in the same condition back to Archytas. The chapter also mentions the notion of guarding with which Plato was in agreement, so there was no need for encouragement.
Introduction
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the selected essays from the author. Many of these essays continue to attract attention, whether regarding literary genres or explorations of relations between human and divine as well as cultic formations, mythic scenarios, and above all, gendered approaches, in which the author was an early pioneer. The author believes in the heuristic value of addressing large topics or texts to which she has consistently returned in one way or another on different occasions, in different venues, as a source of conversation and a stimulus to others for further exploration and response. Indeed, looking at the rubrics and contents of the selected essays, all are still topics of current interest, while reception studies are now claiming greater attention in their own right. These topics include myth, religion, gender, sexuality, tragic and comic formations, and romance.
Introduction
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter explores the status of women in the Middle East, particularly in Algeria. It starts with Abou-Ezzohra arguing that Muslim women in Algeria needed better access to education so that they could certainly and tangibly contribute to the rebuilding of the Muslim world. Conditions established by settler colonialism rendered interwar Algeria so different from other Middle Eastern spaces. However, Middle Eastern upheaval and advancement were inextricably linked to women’s possibilities. The chapter explains that interwar Algeria’s feminist possibility requires the key concepts of colonial divide and social divides. It also cites that French- and Arabic-language Muslim press illuminates the social concern about women only peripherally present in state archives in France and Algeria.
The Rise of the Woman Question in Interwar Algeria
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the rise of the woman question, a shorthand for concerns about women’s status and rights, in interwar Algeria. It explains that Muslim presses in Algeria grew after World War I, so its proliferating debates about social changes both abroad and at home advanced different, often conflicting, visions for Algeria’s future and women’s role. Essentially, the press simultaneously reflected and produced community, and publications rendered local events accessible to readers across Algeria. Muslim reformist newspaper La Défense revolves around the women question while being committed to Muslim women’s education. The chapter also considers the woman question in Muslim public life.
French Feminists and the New Imperial Feminism
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains French women’s feminism being critically shaped by their ability to claim the currency of local Muslim support and their engagement with Middle Eastern developments. Interwar French feminists were profoundly impacted by the internationalism of their moment shaped equally by settler colonialism and interwar internationalism. Additionally, French women’s work capitalized on the public thirst for insider information about Muslims and the subject of Muslim private lives. The chapter explains how ethnographies functioned as political weapons within colonial Algeria. It cites that French feminists were increasingly willing to break with the state and openly critique its failures to educate Muslim women.
Sex with Slaves and the Business of Governance
Authors: Ben-Ur Aviva
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the sexual liaisons carried out within the framework of physical force, economic exploitation, or pragmatism. It shows that some Jews, notably the indigent synagogue functionaries involved in such relationships, incurred public condemnation by defying existing Jewish norms. The wealthier Jew coreligionists also engaged in extramarital sexual encounters, especially with women of African descent, but successfully shielded themselves from exposure until a communal rift forcefully exposed double standards within the Jewish community. The chapter considers the sexual lives of Barbados' underclass and the integration of Jews into the heart of slave society. It explores the emotional reaction of servile non-Jewish women and the affective relations between the samas and the enslaved women who reportedly competed for his attention.
Connecting Jewish Community
Authors: Eckstein Laura Newman
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the readership of The Occident, a thriving Anglo-Jewish journal in the period before the American Civil War. The chapter argues that by using local agents, the journal's editor, Isaac Leeser, who immigrated in 1824, helped construct a communication network that connected Jews across the Atlantic world. Leeser's adoption of the Portuguese Jewish rite indicates his immersion in the Atlantic Jewish world and stands in striking contrast to the national orientation of his younger rival, Isaac Mayer Wise. The chapter explains that the purpose of The Occident was to endeavor to give circulation to everything which can be interesting to the Jewish inhabitants in the western hemisphere. The Occident, with its curated articles and news, allowed Leeser to have some cultural control over the Jewish community in a diasporic framework.
The Tea Party That Wasn’t
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the Charleston Tea Party, which was also known as the tea party that wasn't. It mentions how Charleston was one of four tea shipments the East India Company sent to North America in 1773. Patriots collected tea and burned it in the town center before a crowd, but many colonists were outraged by the destruction. The chapter mentions how the dominance of the Boston Tea Party in historical memory obscured the various ways Patriots approached tea in other cities. However, colonists destroyed 90,000 pounds of Company tea in Boston Harbor, but between Boston and Charleston, they drank nearly as much so colonists, Patriot and Tory were united in consumerism, and merchants were the men who best spoke to that consumption.
Propaganda
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the propaganda surrounding tea. It starts with how the Patriots deemed tea as a medical danger, referencing how the timely distillation and distribution of these concerns was political. Moreover, Patriots blamed the King or parliament for introducing or forcing tea upon the colonies in an effort to reframe tea drinking as a political choice and virtue. However, the statements were unlikely to hoodwink too many colonists since it would be difficult to convince someone of something they know to be false. Thus, Patriot propagandists gave tea propaganda an emotional truth that many colonists must have felt as they considered the crisis of 1774.
Delivering Security
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines debates surrounding the creation of the post office-run kan'i seimei hoken, abbreviated as kanpo. Beginning in the 1890s and early 1900s, intellectuals brought attention to the new discourse of shakai mondai, which referred to the problem of worker alienation. It argues that reformers attempted to use insurance to establish a claim to security as social property, which worked to reincorporate the poor into the realm of the social without challenging the regime of private property itself. The chapter highlights the importance of both consumer desire and free choice in modern regimes of governmentality. It reviews the confluence between the constitution of the laborer as an individuated economic agent and the state's attempts to manage the fears of the populace through the community of the insured.
Perfecting the Social Body
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter offers a close reading of various health promotion campaigns run by the life insurance industry. Influenced by the health promotion campaigns enacted by US firms like Metropolitan Life Insurance, kanpo erected health guidance stations where they offered basic health services and health checkups to customers. The chapter describes doctors and officials at the stations that exhorted customers to transform their everyday habits in clothing, dining, household organization, and exercise so that they would ensure both their own health and the health of the entire nation. The chapter outlines the practice of healthy everyday habits of living that became a moral obligation of Japanese citizens as members of the national community. Private and public campaigns reimagined insurance customers as members of responsible, future-oriented communities attuned to health promotion.
Epilogue
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the myriad projects through which both the state and private insurance companies utilized life and community as commodities, examining the simultaneous role played by utopic hope and the fear of uncertainty in inciting consumer desire. Life insurance highlights the important role that statistics and numerical data played in transforming life into an aggregate object. The chapter discusses the creation of the aggregate social body of consumers that facilitated the expropriation of value from consumer lives. It describes the fantastical vision of the predictable future that helped to organize Japanese lives into a governable object while helping to generate consumer desire for a life insurance policy. It highlights the ways in which tensions played out between individual precarity and security within the aggregate of the insurance community.
Science Interrupted
Authors: McLellan Timothy G.
Published: May 2024

This book examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. The book offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracy—work that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated. Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the book takes the experiences of the organization's staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. The book asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice? Extending a mode of anthropological research in which ethnography serves as source of theory as well as source of data, the book thinks with, and not only against, bureaucracy. The book shows that ethnographic engagement with bureaucracy enables us to imagine more democratic and more collaborative modes of scientific practice.
Ethnography with Science, Development, and Bureaucracy
Authors: McLellan Timothy G.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of ethnography under the key concepts of science, development, and bureaucracy. It introduces the Theory of Change as a technique for developing a theory of how to bring about desired change in the world. Generally, the mission of the Institute for Farms and Forests revolves around scientific knowledge that will inform and enhance equitable and sustainable rural development. The chapter then considers the concept of a headache suggesting what is wrong with bureaucracy, while also indexing an ideal of scientific work shorn of nuisance distractions. It mentions the significance of and possibilities for vulnerability in scientific practice.
Humanizing Bureaucrats
Authors: McLellan Timothy G.
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF) staff's sympathy towards the vulnerability of state officials. In addition to precipitating a critical gaze on colleagues, the impossibilities of Chinese bureaucracy can also generate sympathy for government officials. Moreover, bureaucratic workarounds generate remainders in the form of further additional bureaucratic labor. The chapter explains how a director's openness to the contingencies and hazards of pursuing sustainable rubber cultivation suggests openness to vulnerability as an ethical and political act. It highlights how navigating bureaucracy is an art of anticipating and managing the potential future consequences one generates for oneself and others.
Antiracism and the AIDS Crisis, or Homonationalism’s Rocky Start
Authors: Ewing Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter elaborates on the interplay of AIDS work, queer of color activism, internationalization, and sex tourism. It explains the entangled engagement of activists who worked across AIDS work and queer politics establishing groundwork for homonationalist political claims and created new forms of queer, antiracist activism. In the context of AIDS, both the xenophobia and homophobia of West Germany's political right became issues of top priority for many white, queer activists. The chapter cites that the 1980s saw a continuation of international politics that bolstered some activists' investment in European institutions and governments as guarantors of sexual freedoms. It explains how right-wing attacks on queer people threatened growing claims of European sexual exceptionalism.
Skírnir’s Other Journey
Authors: Mitchell Stephen A.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the riddle of Gleipnir. It focuses on the myths in which Skírnir plays a role as the messenger of the gods that moves between the gods and the Otherworld. Norse literature excels in kennings and other forms of poetic obscurity in which equally improbable objects are implicitly compared to create metaphors. The Gleipnir verse resembles alliterative lines of wisdom, but the Gleipnir verse is elliptical and irrational in the way myths often are. The chapter looks into a reconstruction that approximates the sort of riddle that Snorri may have used as a source for the Gleipnir myth.
Literary History and National Identity
Authors: Hellebust Rolf
Published: May 2024

This chapter investigates the factors—both domestic and foreign, from the culture of medieval Orthodoxy to neoclassicism and German romanticism—involved in the genesis and development of the modern concept of literature in Russia. It particularly looks at the interrelation of belles lettres, national identity, and national history. For Russia, the nineteenth century opens with the 1812 defeat of Napoleon. It is the lack of political avenues of expression for this newly awakened national consciousness that motivates the cultural elite to work out Russia’s destiny indirectly, through literature and literary criticism. Already by the 1840s this trend has reached its apogee, and the foundation has been laid for a literary tradition to embody the ideals of a nation. For Russians in the nineteenth century, the literary process is a source—even substitute—for the national narrative they see their backward land as having failed to produce. The dominant expression of the social function with which the Tradition’s aesthetic value is equated thus becomes the creation of a history for Russia. The chapter then considers the historiogenic role of Russian writers.
Marshal of Emperor Henry
Authors: Evergates Theodore
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Count Henry's arrival at Rodosto after learning of the army's defeat from Greeks who had escaped Adrianople. Geoffroy of Villehardouin and Enrico Dandolo briefed Count Henry about conditions, including the fall of the entire hinterland to Kalojan and the appearance of Cumans at the very gates of the capital. The chapter highlights Geoffrey's regret that Emperor Baldwin failed to wait for reinforcements from the scattered fiefs before proceeding to Adrianople, causing the defeat of the army. The chapter narrates how twenty-eight-year-old Henry assumed the regency of the empire for his captured brother with the doge and the marshal's tacit consent. Henry faced the formidable task of rebuilding a field army and creating a new chain of command from men of modest backgrounds.
The Marshal and His Scribe
Authors: Evergates Theodore
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Geoffroy of Villehardouin's scribe, who first recorded his dictation on a temporary surface and then made a fair copy on parchment. The scribe recorded Geoffrey's words directly in the vernacular, which is a unique feature of the memoirs as it is intended as a personal account of his experiences. If the memoirs can be reasonably dated to the eight months Geoffrey spent in Constantinople, it seems likely that he would have dictated to a cleric from Champagne who spoke his dialect. The chapter highlights Geoffrey's familiarity with the process of recording proceedings at court as he witnessed Countess Marie confirm the resolution of a property dispute involving the leper house in Troyes when he was a marshal. Geoffrey might have also heard Evrat, a canon in the comital chapel, read his fresh translations of Genesis to Countess Marie.
The Memoirs of a Preudomme
Authors: Evergates Theodore
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Jean Longnon, who spent many years studying Geoffroy of Villehardouin and his family and companions. Longon described Geoffrey as a sober and precise speaker, prudent and wise in council, a brave and hardy knight, confident and disciplined in the face of adversity, loyal to his lord, honest, and a man of his word. All Geoffroy's qualities characterized what contemporaries regarded as making a prud'homme. The chapter considers Geoffroy's memoirs as unique as they are spoken by the marshal of the empire, an accomplished diplomat and battlefield commander in his sixties who was a close observer of the character and conduct of his companions. Geoffroy's comments on what he had witnessed during the span of eight years reflect his own values as a preudomme.
Islamic Iconicity, Moral Responsibility, and the Creation of a Sacred Hierarchy
Authors: Khan Arsalan
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the relationship between the ritual ideology of dawat and the hierarchical structure of the congregation. Built on a creed paradigm, dawat functions as a mode of ethical self-cultivation precisely because it is a performance of Prophetic example that draws the gaze of others. The chapter shows that dawat mobilizes iconic signs associated with Prophetic example and creates a sense of moral responsibility in the Tablighi for living up to the ethical entailments of Islamic iconicity. Performance transforms Islamic iconicity, a relationship of similarity with the Prophetic model, into an indexical relationship or a relationship of contiguity with that model. Through the repeated performance of dawat, one creates proximity to God, which is manifest in one's words becoming “heavy” with divine agency, allowing one to affect others and draw them to the congregation. As one's words become heavy with divine agency, one ascends the sacred hierarchy of the Tablighi Jamaat. Ascending the sacred hierarchy transforms one from being primarily a pious listener of the words of others to a pious speaker. Piety, then, can be thought of not only as a means of ethical self-cultivation but also as a sacred hierarchy that structures the Tablighi congregation and movement.
Pious Sovereignty in Times of Moral Chaos
Authors: Khan Arsalan
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates how Tablighis understand the ethics of hierarchy as a basis for remedying the communal discord and violent ethnic and sectarian fragmentation that characterizes political life in Pakistan. Tablighis understand this political context through the idiom of moral chaos (fitna) and see dawat as the exclusive basis for the moral regeneration of the Islamic community. They mobilize this logic against the politiks of modernist Islamist groups, who they insist conflate religion and the world and therefore fail to spread Islamic virtue and undermine the creation of an Islamic community. The Tablighi rejection of politiks is based on the idea that it represents a worship of the self and thus a source of unruly and surplus agency. The chapter argues that the sharp contrast that Tablighis draw between dawat and politiks must be understood as a reflexive response to the constitutive role of Islamic governmentality in deepening ethnic and sectarian divisions and the intense competition over Islamic authority in a bourgeoning Islamic public sphere. It shows that Tablighis engage in a form of pious mediation that aims to remedy conflicts and regenerate moral relationships among Muslims and thus recreate the conditions for an Islamic life.
The Natural Border
Authors: Raeymaekers Timothy
Published: May 2024

This book tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. The book shows how, in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies. Taking the example of the tomato—a typical ‘Made in Italy’ commodity—the book asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the ‘naturalization’ of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as the book demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.
Conclusion
Authors: Raeymaekers Timothy
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the Mediterranean as a border(ed) space while conjuring the natural racialization to account for racial divisions. It discusses the relation between mobile labor and extractive urbanization in this interconnected border space. Under the radar of Europe's spectacular border politics, a deeply ramified and exploitative mode of production is gaining strength through its embedded roots in Black Mediterranean history. The chapter cites that a permanent state of liminality characterizes Black African subjectivity in the contemporary Mediterranean plantation. It also explains that marginal urbanization is best looked at through the lens of populations and places that are unevenly categorized, constituted, and positioned with respect to the forces of uneven capitalist development.
The Organic Turn
Authors: Vinokour Maya
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces the emergence of Stalinist biocentricity through the links among work, technology, and the body in early Soviet culture. The pervasiveness of liquid metaphors during mass collectivization and through Stalin's First and Second Five-Year plans reveals the regime's increasing emphasis on the individual body rather than on classes, masses, or machines. Three overlapping discourses, all rooted in prerevolutionary thought, would contribute to the Stalinist understanding of labor as (liquid) energy channeling. The first was a biological rhetoric that combined a utopian interest in rejuvenation and immortality with a Lamarckian understanding of evolution, a conceptual marriage that would culminate in the rise of Lysenkoism. The second discourse centered around the possibility of uniting man and machine—less through mechanization of the human than, as Soviet Central Institute of Labor head Alexei Gastev recommended in 1925, through the organic “humanization” of machines. This project, in turn, overlapped with discussions of scientific management, which aimed to systematize workplace practices in the name of greater efficiency. The chapter then looks at the Scientific Organization of Labor and considers the works of Platon Kerzhentsev and Alexander Bogdanov.
“I Am a Stream of Bright Joy”
Authors: Vinokour Maya
Published: May 2024

This chapter situates Daniil Kharms's profusion of liquid metaphors within emerging Stalinist culture, demonstrating the unwitting proximity of his self-conception as a writer to contemporary labor discourse. Although Kharms's artistic values diverged sharply from those promulgated by the stewards of official Soviet aesthetics, the philosophy he developed around his creative production is strikingly similar to Soviet labor ideology. Hardly a reactionary romantic in the vein of Gorky, Kharms nonetheless inscribed himself within a discourse that preferred magical thinking to reason; imagined human energies, especially those available for work, as fluid; and believed in the transformative theurgy of the Word. At the same time, Kharms managed to write in a way that was actively, indeed dangerously, hostile to Soviet literary orthodoxy—demonstrating that, at its margins, the culture of early Stalinism was constantly threatening to flee the Party's centripetal pull. Consigned to the periphery of official Soviet literary life, Kharms nonetheless shared the sexual-hygienic preoccupations of 1930s labor culture.