bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Detecting Disorder
Authors: Caimari Lila
Published: September 2017

Keeping order in the city is the oldest of police duties. In the 1820s, the Policía de Buenos Aires adopted the image of a watchful eye as their emblem, placing the symbol on their medallions, badges, and letterhead. This institution “never slept.” Watching the city by day, watching it by night, the police attempted to give the appearance of being the ubiquitous eyes of authority. This chapter focuses on the crisis and subsequent resurrection of this ideal during the first decades of the twentieth century. It traces this history into the 1930s, when the police began using the new technologies—radios and patrol cars—that fundamentally altered methods of perceiving and collecting information on urban life.
While the City Sleeps
Authors: Caimari Lila
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the public opinion strategies adopted by Buenos Aires police in the context of a deep crisis of consensus in the 1920s and 1930s regarding their right to use force. In so doing, it tackles a question transcending this case: how can police forces act as the guardians of a social order they themselves might perceive as unjust, and still earn the respect of those who suffer from its injustice? The answer lies within the process of the symbolic construction of an idealized police officer, one able to remain connected with those he claims to protect. In this case, the connection between the police and the people was woven using fiction, mass media, and other key elements of popular culture.
Conclusion
Authors: Markarian Vania
Published: September 2017

After proceeding through different sets of historical sources and layers of interpretation, the conclusion places the Uruguayan student movement of 1968 and its cultural and political effects (including increasing state repression and authoritarism) in dialog with the existing literature on other national cases, particularly the United States.
Internet Firms Become Global Regulators
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

Having set the backdrop to the private agreements, this chapter discusses how the non-binding agreements emerged from distinct historical and political circumstances. It provides a brief historical overview that traces the growing influence of multinational rights holders on the U.S. government’s intellectual property policymaking processes from the late 1970s to 2012. The chapter then examines in detail four U.S. intellectual property bills, including the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, which proposed to reshape fundamentally the online regulation of intellectual property rights infringement. In doing so, the chapter documents a significant shift in enforcement strategy from a focus on removing problematic content (e.g., advertisements for counterfeit goods) to disabling entire websites for allegedly trafficking in counterfeit goods. The chapter argues that Internet firms have become global regulators (known as macro-intermediaries) attractive to governments and corporations for policing a wide range of social problems, including counterfeit goods. The chapter concludes that government officials from the U.S., U.K., and European Commission played a central role in pressuring Internet firms to adopt the non-binding agreements. These agreements serve strategic state interests as well as the financial interests of rights holders.
Access Chokepoints
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains how the transnational regime uses search engines (especially Google) and domain name registrars (specifically GoDaddy) to throttle access to infringing sites. It traces efforts by the U.S. and U.K. governments, along with rights holders, to pressure Google and GoDaddy into adopting the non-binding agreements. It then presents two case studies. The first discusses search engines’ regulation of search results linking to infringing sites and a non-binding agreement struck among search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) at the behest of the U.K. government. The second case study examines GoDaddy’s efforts to disable so-called illegal online pharmacies that operate in violation of U.S. federal and state laws. The chapter concludes that Internet firms’ practice of using chokepoints to dissuade access to targeted websites is highly problematic as legitimate websites are mistakenly targeted and sanctioned. Automated enforcement programs exacerbate this problem as they significantly increase the scale and speed of rights holders’ enforcement efforts without a corresponding increase in oversight.
Marketplace Chokepoints
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

eBay and Taobao represent a different dimension of the private transnational anti-counterfeiting regime. These marketplaces are legally operating marketplaces in which some individuals illegally sell counterfeit goods, which differ from infringing sites that may have few, if any, legitimate activities. eBay and the China-based Taobao marketplace have been subject to considerable government and industry pressure to strengthen those enforcement efforts outside legislation and judicial orders. This chapter examines two little-known informal agreements. In the first, eBay agreed, at the behest of the European Commission, to work with rights holders throughout the European Economic Area to crack down on the online sale of counterfeit goods. In the second case, Taobao, China’s largest online marketplace, has worked at the direction of the U.S. government and U.S. rights holders to overhaul its enforcement policies. The marketplaces’ strategies of policing their platforms using automated enforcement programs raise challenges similar to those identified in chapters 4 and 5. Rights holders often employ brand-protection companies, part of the larger private security industry, to identify and remove sales listings for counterfeit goods.
A Future for Digital Rights
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

The conclusion argues that Internet firms and the U.S. government have common interests in expanding the surveillance economy, which refers to the massive online accumulation of information. It also considers measures to address the considerable challenges raised by the state-endorsed non-binding enforcement agreements. It explores ways in which states and corporations can use technology to regulate in ways that are fair, proportionate, and accountable. The chapter offers several recommendations. First is the need to cultivate greater public awareness of corporate regulation on the Internet. One way to do so is through industry transparency reports, in which corporate actors participating in the regulation disclose their involvement in regulation, a practice that has become more common following Edward Snowden’s disclosure of Internet firms’ involvement in the U.S. government’s Internet surveillance programs. The book ends with a call to establish digital rights and looks for inspiration to Brazil’s 2014 law, Marco Civil da Internet, which codified a set of digital rights.
Monstrous Muslims
Authors: Arjana Sophia Rose
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines representations of Islam in American popular culture, focusing on movies, television, and comic books. Islam is typically represented as a problem originating from the Middle East that poses danger to the homeland. Over the past decade, however, Muslims have appeared in ever more diverse ways in popular culture, a trend that is due to several factors—the visibility of Islam since 9/11, the growing presence of Muslims in various industries, and the popularity of social media, which provides alternative outlets for the production of imagery about Muslims. Although some of the old symbols remain, they are complemented by images of Muslims that challenge the imperial narrative. Contemporary portrayals of Muslims in pop culture range from the sheiks, terrorists, and sultans of Hollywood film to the superheroes, heroines, and social revolutionaries found in comic books.
Christmas Is Like a Snowball
Authors: Forbes Bruce David
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the way that Christmas has gathered material from centuries of popular culture into itself. Especially as seen through the interpretive lens of two analogies (a three-layer cake and a snowball), it should become obvious that the religious celebration of Christmas has been profoundly shaped by cultural influences from many directions. Rather than suggesting that there is a single “right” understanding of Christmas, the chapter argues that it serves different purposes for different people. The discussion of Christmas invites us to return to issues raised in the introduction to this volume. Does popular culture shape or reflect society? Have people's Christmas celebrations changed because of the stories that popular culture tells about the holiday, or does popular culture express our anxieties and desires about what Christmas might be? The chapter argues that both claims are true.
The “Godding Up” of American Sports
Authors: Price Joseph L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the religious impact of sports. It argues that sports go beyond mere game playing. Whether we participate or watch sports, they function as a center of unity and identity much in the way that religion does. Sports exercise a power for shaping and engaging the world for millions of devoted fans; they enable participants to explore levels of selfhood that otherwise remain inaccessible; they establish means for bonding in communal relations with other devotees; they model ways to deal with contingencies and fate while playing by the rules; and they provide the prospect for experiencing victory and thus sampling, at least in an anticipatory way, “abundant life.” In America, quite simply, sports constitute a form of popular religion.
Can Watching a Movie Be a Spiritual Experience?
Authors: Johnston Robert K.
Published: September 2017

The moviegoing experience can transport viewers into another place or the presence of another—perhaps even an Other. In the process, they explore life's possibilities and contradictions, testing out solutions and even finding themselves surprised by joy or sorrow, by love and pain, by life itself. Given such experiences, it should not be surprising that commentators have since film's early days explored the spiritual dimensions of this experience. This chapter shows that evangelical responses to popular culture are hardly monolithic. It suggests that faith and culture are always in dialogue. It explores the way conversation with movies, even seemingly secular ones, can be a spiritual experience.
Introduction
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the interplay of land reform and migratory labor in the making of borderlands between the years of 1850 and 1954, focusing on Baja California. It argues that the Mexican borderlands emerged from efforts to keep labor moving across borders while fixing national communities in place. This intricate interplay shows how governments, foreign investors, and local communities engaged in the making of the Baja California borderlands that led to the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalía. At the heart of the book is the story of how ethnically and racially diverse communities of laborers changed the social landscape of Baja California.
Conflict, Land Reform, and Repatriation in the Mexicali Valley
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses Mexico's agrarian reform policy, one of the earliest land reform programs of its kind in Latin America. The labor unions that had formed in the 1920s became crucial to the movement for land reform in the 1930s. Under the two waves of agrarian reform, most land was distributed to single men and male heads of household. However, some women seized the limited opportunities they had to gain farmland. Anti-Chinese sentiment and President Lázaro Cárdenas' expropriation of U.S.-owned land in the Mexicali Valley ended the flow of Asian migration to the Valley's rural areas. Most Asian workers were excluded from obtaining communal farmland. Nevertheless, some Asian farmers purchased property and continued their commercial relationship with U.S.-owned companies on a smaller scale.
Mexicali’s Exceptionalism
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the impact of Mexican migration to the United States during the era of the Bracero Program (1942–64). It addresses the question of why migration to border towns increased during the 1940s in spite of U.S. immigration restrictions. Existing oral histories collected by the Bracero History Archive of migrant and local Baja families enriched the author's understanding of the ways in which families migrated and looked for work and performed gender roles in Mexico and in the United States. The memories of braceros provided a window into the daily lives and struggles experienced by millions of Mexican workers who migrated to the United States, stories often suppressed in official records.
Introduction
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.
Against Sovereign Violence
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

Chapter 7, Against Sovereign Violence reveals that the collusion between feminism and sovereign violence is contested even when it seemingly wins the day, and that NGO workers and civil servants themselves turn “against the state” (Clastres 1989) in form of what I refer to as “governmentality against itself.” By way of an ethnography of the arrest, trial, imprisonment, and pardon of two circumcisers, I show that civil servants and NGO workers’ participation in law enforcement eventually brings the fetishization of law into crisis and leads to a disidentification, not only from sovereign violence but also from the imperial order of things.
Epilogue
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

The Epilogue returns to the politics of knowledge about cutting that disavows its endings – not only in Ghana, but across the African continent and in the global North. Having shown that debates about knowledge have practical consequences, I point to the scholarly and political work that lies ahead.
Forging a Diasporic Nigerian Ethnicity in the United States and Britain
Authors: Imoagene Onoso
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 examines why the Nigerian second generation in both the United States and Britain did not forge a reactive black ethnicity as predicted by segmented assimilation theory. It describes how blackness can be constructed to be ethnically diverse. The chapter details how the Nigerian second generation are forging a diasporic Nigerian ethnicity in the United States and Britain via two simultaneous processes required in identity formation: signaling difference from members of other groups and establishing similarity to determine the boundaries of group membership. I thoroughly discuss the cultural, moral and socioeconomic boundaries established by the Nigerian second generation to delineate ethnic parameters between themselves and their proximal host. I also explain why the second generation in Britain does not draw as sharp of a boundary between themselves and their proximal hosts compared to their U.S. counterparts.
Feeling American in America, Not Feeling British in Britain
Authors: Imoagene Onoso
Published: September 2017

In chapter 6, I show how the specific history an immigrant group has with the receiving country is an important aspect of the context of reception which does not receive sufficient attention in segmented assimilation theory’s discussion of the black second generation. I show how national contexts—specifically how national identity and legacies of the past, from slavery, to colonialism, to color segregation—influence identificational assimilation among the second generation. The chapter analyzes respondents’ responses to two questions: What does being British or American mean to you, and do you feel British or American? It explains why, in the American case, most of the second generation articulate shared national myths and sentiments, but in the British case the second generation had narratives that, though widely shared, were not the national myths. Engaging the multiculturalism literature, the chapter discusses how legacies of the past and national identity are two rarely-considered factors affecting immigrants’ integration over time. Given the increased linkages between immigration and national security in discourse and policy, these findings add to our knowledge of the factors impacting the degree of national identification among immigrants.
America Defines Latinos
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

From the Gold Rush to World War II, Latinos have considered themselves to be American by virtue of their belief in and support of the universalistic ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy. During that same period, nativists have refused to consider Latinos as Americans because they were not members of the core national ethnic group: white, English-speaking Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These two competing definitions of American—universalistic versus nativist—have clashed repeatedly in the political arena.
Latinos Reject America’s Definition
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

The Chicano Generation, largely the grandchildren of refugees who fled the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1930, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and rejected the nativist definition of Latinos by consciously embracing their Mexican and Latin American cultural heritage. When they traveled to Mexico, however, they discovered they were considered to be American rather than Mexican, and they often wound up feeling that they did not truly belong to either identity. New immigrants from Mexico and Latin America arrived and settled in without placing much attention on their cultural heritage.
Creating a Regional American Identity
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

For over 150 years, Latinos have not assimilated and disappeared the way European immigrant groups have, but they have not remained isolated and untouched by Atlantic-American society around them. Instead, Latinos have been quietly creating a regional variant of American society and identity, one that is in the process of becoming as distinctive a way of being American as is the Texan regional identity.
Latino Post-Millennials Create America’s Future
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has been based on an overtly anti–Mexican immigrant nativist message, another round in the universalistic versus nativist conflict over the definition of American. Nationally, Latinos exhibit the strong work ethic, avoidance of welfare, positive health outcomes, and long life expectancy of Latinos in California. In the post-millennial generation in the top eleven Latino market areas, Latino presence ranges from being a large majority to being the largest plurality. Latino post-millennials will be instrumental in creating the twenty-first-century definition of American.
Beyond Reason
Authors: Berger Karol
Published: September 2017

The book centers on the four music dramas (Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal) Wagner created in the second half of his career. Two aims are pursued here: first, to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas, the secret the very existence of which was called into question by the composer’s critics, including the most perceptive of those, Nietzsche; second, to see the ideological import of Wagner’s dramas against the background of the worldviews that were current in his lifetime and, in particular, to confront his works with Nietzsche’s critique. What connects the two aims is my conviction that a grasp of Wagner’s large forms affords insights into the dramatic and philosophical implications of his works. The music dramas of Wagner’s later years registered and reacted to every major component in the complex ideological landscape that emerged during his century. Like a number of artists of his time, in his later years Wagner understood himself to be something more than just an artist; rather, he saw himself as a cultural prophet announcing and preparing better, more desirable forms of life for humanity. The specific content of his message never ceased to evolve, but his self-understanding as someone with a message to deliver remained constant. The confrontation with Nietzsche, a rival cultural prophet, takes a particular urgency in this context, since what was at stake in the philosopher’s objections to the artist was precisely the ideological import of Wagner’s works.
Parsifal
Authors: Berger Karol
Published: September 2017

Parsifal (1877-81), Wagner’s testament, offers a vision of ethics that might be viable in the wake of Tristan, a vision derived from Schopenhauerian, Buddhist, and Christian inspirations that suggested a turning away from the nihilistic self-obsessed Eros toward the other-directed Agape.
Epilogue
Authors: Berger Karol
Published: September 2017

The Epilogue returns to the philosophical issues raised in the Prologue, but narrows the focus to a single relationship, that of Richard Wagner with his most important critic, Friedrich Nietzsche. The chapter describes the history of the relationship between the two, analyzes the philosopher’s essential objections against the composer, evaluates their validity, and suggests how Wagner’s works might defend themselves against Nietzsche’s strictures.
Introduction
Authors: Armstrong Melanie
Published: September 2017

Bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear of the modern age, alongside revolutions in biological science and changing practices of warfare. Bioterrorism is also an important, and often overlooked, site for studying the cultural politics of nature. Nature is at the center of contemporary concerns as never before, but its forms are no longer recognizable in a traditional sense. Massive expenditures on disease control over the last century have been a central site for the production of nature. Institutions of health, war, and science built around modern natures, are setting new terms for biological citizenship and environmental futures for the 21st century. The introduction overviews key histories of bioterrorism and theoretical underpinnings for a critical study of biosecurity.
Agents of Care
Authors: Armstrong Melanie
Published: September 2017

Following 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the U.S. government enlisted the public health industry in homeland security and defense, bringing weapons like disease surveillance and life science research to the war against terrorism. As Congress poured out funding for bioterrorism preparedness, agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rearranged themselves around new logics of biosecurity. In the decade after 9/11, CDC brought its surveillance, science, and communication practices to bear on questions of national security, and became a federal organizing agency for emergency response and pharmaceutical stockpile stewardship. The political transformations at the CDC exemplify how bioterrorism changed the role of government in disease management, along with the specific work of the nation’s largest public health agency.
Mombasa Marginalized
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

The history of social inequality and the conflicting discourses of marginality in Mombasa have shaped the identities and economic strategies of the city’s small-business class. One view shared by many struggling migrants holds that they have been denied their rights as Kenyan citizens. Another represents various coastal communities that have been actively disenfranchised and manipulated by both the colonial and post-colonial governments of Kenya. Both groups make claims to land and political representation in Mombasa—one from a national perspective and one from a regional perspective. This comparison frames a decade of individual stories of ethnic insecurity and the struggle to access co-operatives and municipal markets, local and international economic networks, tourist hotels and beaches, and ethnic neighborhoods and communities. This chapter is important for providing background on ethnic tensions as well as the increasing importance of claims of marginality that are important to NGO aesthetics discussed in later chapters.
Negotiating Informality in Mombasa
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

Traders in Kenya’s handicrafts industry, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s with significant government support, often viewed themselves as members of Kenya’s “informal” or jua kali sector. How traders understood their rights and economic opportunities affected their strategies as they negotiated the economic instability and haphazard regulation of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly following the kiosk demolitions. Detailed ethnographic examples and economic histories demonstrate the effects of government attempts to license and tax coastal handicrafts traders and tourism operators. Stories from Mombasa’s North Coast demonstrate the dangers that can accompany making international connections, including the potential for human trafficking. While largely immobile Kenyans were finding new ways to use digital technologies to conduct business and communicate over long distances, they also recognized that new forms of mobility and new connections came with a host of new risks.
New Mobilities, New Risks
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

While cell phones and other new digital technologies can help struggling businesspeople overcome their immobility and lack of access to urban economic space, new forms of connection come with a host of new risks. Despite the importance of new technologies like M-PESA, risk and insecurity are central to shaping lived experiences of mobility and the digital-power divide in much of the world today. The stories in this chapter illustrate that privatization and deregulation of the economy—especially telecommunications—does not necessarily lead to widespread socio-economic development, poverty alleviation, or business creation. Rather than a story of new global motion and mobility, the lived reality of global interconnection today is characterized by discontinuity, immobility, and awkwardness. The types of risk shape their strategies for jumping scales or staying local and balancing the precarious and often fuzzy boundary between economic formality and informality in Mombasa.
From Ethnic Brands to Fair Trade Labels
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses how the strategies and aspirations of Kenyan traders and the realities of connecting to the global economy have shaped the aesthetics and meanings of Kenyan arts and crafts. These changes demonstrate the ability of connected and savvy Kenyan traders to adapt to an ever-changing and diverse tourist demographic, including Afropolitans. This chapter explores how Kenyan tourist art and handicrafts have been marketed in new and creative ways—as Fair Trade, of a particular tree species, or as representing modern global interconnectedness. Facing ethnic tensions and insecurities that bring instability to their lives and businesses, traders regularly downplay ethnicity in their branding and often de-ethnicize their products. The art of connection motif and its artistic representation are successful on the market because they portray an ideal of egalitarian, transparent, and even Afropolitan-style of human interconnection acceptable to both tourists and Kenyan artisans and traders.
Time Series Analysis in the Social Sciences
Authors: Shin Youseop
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains how time series analysis has been applied in the social sciences.
Modeling
Authors: Shin Youseop
Published: September 2017

Chapter Two defines important concepts and explains the structure of time series data. Then, it explains the univariate time series modeling procedure, such as how to visually inspect a time series; how to transform an original time series when its variance is not constant; how to estimate seasonal patterns and trends; how to obtain residuals; how to estimate the systematic pattern of residuals; and how to test the randomness of residuals.
One Nation, Divisible
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

The misconception that “exceptionalism” means American superiority stems from how Republicans turned this longstanding concept into a rhetorical weapon against Obama by accusing him of unpatriotically lacking faith in “American exceptionalism” given his “socialist” and “un-American” agenda. These accusations paralleled conspiracy theories claiming that Obama is not really American due to his fake U.S. birth certificate and Islamism.
Meanwhile, intense polarization became a major dimension of American exceptionalism’s true meaning. The huge rift between conservatives and liberals under George W. Bush worsened under Obama. It may grow worse following the Clinton-Trump presidential election.
Intriguingly, America and other Western nations are moving apart and closer at the same time. While liberal America is mainly evolving in the same direction as the rest of the West, conservative America is an outlier in light of its peculiar ideology, including profound anti-intellectualism, anti-governmentalism, and Christian fundamentalism. Liberal America’s worldview is not simply different from the worldview in conservative America, but also closer to the dominant worldview elsewhere in the West: Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Tellingly, universal health care is broadly supported by both liberals and conservatives in all Western nations except America, where Republicans relentlessly denounce the evils of “socialized medicine.”
From the American Enlightenment to Anti-Intellectualism
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

Millions of Americans are extraordinarily uninformed. This problem is often blamed on the poor quality of public schools, yet it largely stems from a peculiar conception of education rooted in America’s exceptional history. The birth of modern democracy in America fostered a populist mindset equating education with elitism. Although the Founding Fathers were learned men of the American Enlightenment, many 18th and 19th century Americans became convinced that common sense and folk wisdom were sufficient to succeed. Anti-intellectualism became particularly influential in the South, the nation’s poorest region. Conversely, education has been less associated with elitism in France and other European countries. This helps explain why modern America is sharply polarized, as the U.S. political debate reached astonishing levels of demagogy, propaganda, and disinformation well before Trump’s rise. Spurred by the Tea Party, Republicans routinely made ludicrous claims about Obama’s fake birth certificate and Islamism, “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” the “hoax” of climate change, the federal government’s “tyranny,” and other conspiracy theories. Such political extremism thrives on the ignorance, irrationality, and gullibility promoted by anti-intellectualism. Extremism in contemporary Europe is far less mainstream and more focused on immigration, the main concern of nativist far-right European parties.
Between Democracy and Plutocracy
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

Wealth inequality is much sharper in America than all other industrialized countries. The income of the richest 1% Americans has soared while the income of ordinary people either decreased or stagnated in recent decades. However, America used to be a rather middle-class society. It was not before the 1980s that the G.O.P.’s far-right branch grew more influential in challenging the oppression of “big government.” New Deal era policies were gradually abandoned and wealth inequality soared. Ronald Reagan claimed that “fascism was really the basis for the New Deal,” and his heirs followed suit in denouncing the federal government’s “tyranny.”
Overall, the center of the U.S. political debate on economic issues is drastically more to the right than in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Democratic Party is far less devoted to the interests of the poor, the working-class, and the middle-class than other left-wing parties in the West. The G.O.P. tends to cater only to the richest of the rich, unlike virtually no other major conservative party in the modern Western world.
Job Application
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the author's experience of applying for jobs at and below his educational qualifications, but still failing to get invited for interviews.
English
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

The author reflects on his feelings of insult when one of his colleagues told him to learn to speak English. He explains how he thrived by speaking English in India and his confusion about how the same language could hurt his performance in the United States.
Camera King
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at how the author began to connect with customers on a personal level. He started talking to people who came into the store to buy something and developed rapport by telling them stories about India. His sales begin to climb as the people return to buy from him.
Don’t Buy It
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, the author talks a customer out of buying something he wanted. He did that not because he didn’t want the customer to buy, but because he didn’t know how to sell. The customer returned a few days later to buy something else from the author, because he thought that he would get an honest assessment of the product.
Cameron
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter is about another young colleague who had had a very different life before he became a salesman at the electronics store. He drives the author in his flashy Cadillac and tells him his story about the car.
Post-Christmas Blues
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, the author finds himself in the middle of an awkward situation when a colleague sells a cellphone plan to a customer without telling him the complete truth. When the customer asked the author whether his colleague was telling him the truth, he couldn’t come with a convincing answer. The colleague ended up getting fired, and the customer got his money back.
Divine Deliverance
Authors: Cobb L. Stephanie
Published: September 2017

Does martyrdom hurt? For a wide variety of reasons, the answer to this question may seem to be an obvious “yes.” Divine Deliverance, however, demonstrates that early Christian martyr texts answer this question with an emphatic “No!” Indeed, ancient discussions of Christian martyrdom reveal an abiding interest in the insensitivity of the Christian body during torture and martyrdom. These claims to painlessness work to (re-)define Christianity in the ancient world: while Christians could not deny the reality that they were subject to state violence, they could argue that they were not ultimately vulnerable to its painful effects. The claims to painlessness in martyrdom reflect the theological—rather than historical—concerns of the martyr texts: Christians are not alone when they are tortured. Rather, God is with them, miraculously protecting their bodies from the pain of martyrdom.
Bodies in Pain
Authors: Cobb L. Stephanie
Published: September 2017

Chapter One examines the cultural and social experiences of modern audiences that inevitably shape their understandings of martyr texts. These modern experiences must be recognized as foreign to the ancient world. Even when categories or experiences are shared, the meaning attached to them may differ; this is, I suggest, the case for the categories “pain” and “suffering.” Thus, we must not only understand the different ways modern and ancient audiences receive the texts and the different cultural information available to each group, but also recognize that the two audiences had different understandings of the experience and significance of pain and suffering.
Whose Pain?
Authors: Cobb L. Stephanie
Published: September 2017

Chapter Four examines stories in which pain does function as a marker of meaning. In some texts, martyrs experience bodily pain apart from persecution; severing worldly ties, for instance, may be painful, but the texts do not associate this pain with persecution for the faith. In other texts, confessing Christians are insensitive to the pain of torture, but apostates are not: in these cases, the experience of pain is a marker of faithlessness. In still other texts, injury is transferred from the martyr to the persecutor. Suffering, therefore, is directly related to torture, but it is surprisingly located: the persecutor rather than the martyr experiences the physical trauma.
Introduction
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

Contemporary multiculturalist anthropology overlooks huge disparities in population size as well as ethnographic actors’ own scaling of their practices and imaginations. Arguing that scale-blindness limits our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorts the insights these societies offer us, the introduction develops a theoretical framework for integrating scaling into their analysis. Drawing from studies of kinship, animism, multiscalar anthropology, imagined communities, and notions of being-with, it develops the idea of pluripresence. This theoretical approach is applied in the volume to the ethnography of a South Asian foraging people known as Nayaka, whom the author has studied since the late 1970s. They are introduced as an exemplar of hunter-gatherer peoples, who are among the tiniest communities studied by ethnographers, and as one of many indigenous peoples who have no ethnonyms for themselves and, instead, use terms of kinship and shared humanity as their we-designations. Their plural modes especially are eclipsed by the scale-blind regime, which, in fact, is large-scale inflected since the ethnonyms and other representational conventions (e.g., maps) that are indispensable in anthropology’s large-scale project embody modern imaginations of communities. The introduction explains the volume’s strategy for studying this tiny community.
Living Plurally
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

Hunter-gatherers’ mobility, nomadism, and travel are often discussed with emphasis on spatiality. This chapter, instead, dwells on locals’ notions and praxis of visiting, training attention on the interpersonal vector and the achievement of pluripresence. Scale-sensitive ethnography is provided of everyday visiting and of full attendance of everyone in the multisited community at births and deaths. The ethnography shows locals’ ideas of birthing a “relative” rather than a “new individual” and of the dead joining invisible members of the local community. It shows their project and ideal: a community subsisting in each member’s participation in the life of everyone else.
Family and Ethnonym
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

The problem of naming forager-cultivator peoples is well-known. They call themselves by terms of kinship and shared humanity, but other people give them a variety of confusing and often derogatory names. Yet ethnonyms underpin ethnographic writing and cross-cultural comparison. This interlude relates the author’s experience of choosing an ethnonym for her study group, whose members call themselves sonta (us, relatives). It shows the appellatory confusion arising in areas with a rich colonial history, like the Nilgiris, where generations of travelers, administrators, and scholars have tried to ethnically map scattered forest groups, ignoring local population sizes and locals’ imaginations of their communities.
A Continuum of Relatives
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

Foragers’ relations with others have been explored in terms of boundaries, intergroup relations, and othering, in studies that have paid little or no attention to the tiny-scale context of their plural life and their own imaginations of communities. This chapter explores the “edges” of a forager community and compares their and their nonforager neighbors’ respective concepts of groupness. The ethnography spans the recent entry of the word boundary into local discourse, and intermarriages and close friendships with distant relatives and with migrants (plantation workers who have settled in the foragers’ home). The analysis reveals the foragers’ inclusion of migrants with whom they closely associate as “us, relatives” and the migrants’ collectivization of their forager associates as Naiken people and themselves, contrastively, as non-Naiken.
Introduction
Authors: Dutton George E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.
The Tales of Philiphê Bỉnh
Authors: Dutton George E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter takes a closer look at Binh’s literary output with an emphasis on the lengthy collections of tales he wrote between 1815 and 1830. It uses these volumes to understand new Catholic genealogies and temporalities, to illustrate the shifting worldview and understandings of time being experienced by Vietnamese Catholics. The chapter describes how Binh organized his books using indexes and tables of contents, and the significance of Binh’s use of the Romanized alphabet throughout his writings, suggesting that his literary output marked an important moment in the history of this Vietnamese writing system. The chapter features a lengthy discussion of Binh’s two-volume history of Vietnamese Catholicism, and argues that in these two volumes Binh reconceptualized the histories of Christianity in his homeland. Binh’s histories focused on Vietnamese, rather than Europeans, and made these histories of their own. These volumes were also innovative in the context of Vietnamese history writing, as they represented the first substantial Vietnamese histories that were focused on a minority group, rather than on the actions of political elites. The chapter concludes by looking briefly at Binh’s final writing project, and then his last years, lived against the political chaos of 1820s Portugal.
Holding Government Accountable
Authors: Braunstein Ruth
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 demonstrates that Interfaith and the Patriots developed different ways of enacting active citizenship in the course of their work together, and specifically in their efforts to hold government accountable. Although holding government accountable was a central component of both groups’ efforts, the ways in which they organized their neighbors for collective action, described how accountability should work, became informed about political issues and processes, and interacted with public officials differed in significant ways. Interfaith’s efforts to work alongside public officials to solve shared problems were grounded in a vision of a covenantal relationship between moral communities, political authorities and God. Meanwhile, the Patriots’ confrontational relationship with government reflected a contractual model of citizenship, which framed their individual God-given rights as perpetually threatened by government control. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that the groups’ choices about how to hold government accountable reflected differences in their democratic imaginaries—their ways of understanding how democracy works and the proper role of active citizens in it.
Introduction
Authors: Higgins Richard , Higgins Richard
Published: September 2017

Trees played a major role in Thoreau’s life and work. He responded to them with his eye, his heart, his muse, his mind and his soul. He related to trees emotionally and understood them as a naturalist. They fed his creativity and deepened his thought. He wrote of them as if he could see the sap beneath their bark. In short, he spoke their language. He loved their beauty, wildness, patience and persistence. Trees suggested the “ancient rectitude” of nature.” Nothing stands up more free from blame than a pine tree.” Trees also emerge in his writings as special emblems and images of the divine. On his 200th birthday, Thoreau is still helping us see trees in new ways.
An Eye for Trees
Authors: Higgins Richard , Higgins Richard
Published: September 2017

Thoreau observed the shape, color, texture and stance of trees. His eye took in all—root, trunk, bark, branch and crown, leaf, blossom and cone. He knew them all over Concord—birches, basswoods, hornbeams, pines and hemlocks in pastures and on hills. He loved big trees, like great pasture oaks and pines that rose like spires in the forest. But he loved small or common trees no less. His eye never tired of the details that differentiate one tree from another. “A tree seen against other trees is a mere dark mass, but against the sky it has parts, has symmetry and expression.” Examining those details was more than observation for him. It was an act of contemplation.
A Heart for Trees
Authors: Higgins Richard , Higgins Richard
Published: September 2017

Thoreau did have a stern and prickly side. But trees brought out another side. They stirred a boyish joy in his heart and drew bursts of praise from his pen. Their postures and colors delighted him; leaves and lichen elicited his awe. Thoreau found an “inexpressible happiness” and “barely repressed mirth” in the woods. Autumn exhilarated him. The trees’ riotous fall colors set off in him “an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” He called trees his friends and even “sentient beings” and his “distant relations.” As “stimulants of cheer,” they were his allies in his struggles against despair.