bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What Is Stimulus without Debt?
Authors: Seidman Laurence
Published: May 2018

Stimulus without debt is a policy that would increase aggregate demand for goods and services in a recession without increasing government debt. Stimulus without debt consists of a transfer (not loan) from the central bank to the national treasury (or to national treasuries in the case of the eurozone) so that the treasury does not have to borrow to finance fiscal stimulus enacted by the legislature. In the United States, Congress would enact a fiscal stimulus package that consists mainly of cash tax rebates to households but also other temporary expenditures and temporary tax cuts; the fiscal stimulus would raise aggregate demand. The Federal Reserve would use new money to give a large transfer (not loan) to the Treasury equal to the fiscal stimulus package so that the Treasury does not have to borrow to pay for the package. Hence, there would be no increase in government debt.
Do Tax Rebates Work in a Recession?
Authors: Seidman Laurence
Published: May 2018

The most recent uses of tax rebates to households in the United States to combat a recession were in the summer of 2001 and the summer of 2008. Several studies published in the year following each rebate claimed that the rebates did not work. But the study using the best methodology and the best data to analyze the impact of the 2001 tax rebate estimated that consumers spent about one-third of the tax rebate within three months and spent about two-thirds within six months; and the study using the best methodology and the best data to analyze the impact of the 2008 tax rebate estimated a slightly larger and faster response. Another study of the 2008 tax rebate using good methodology and data estimated roughly the same response as the other two studies. I summarize the estimates of these three studies this way: consumers spent about one-third of the rebate within three months and about two-thirds within six months. This chapter reviews the major studies of the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates.
Would Stimulus without Debt Undermine the Fed’s Independence?
Authors: Seidman Laurence
Published: May 2018

Would stimulus without debt undermine the current degree of independence of the Federal Reserve from Congress and the president? The answer is no for two reasons: (1) The Fed would decide when and whether to transfer funds to the Treasury for fiscal stimulus, and if so, how much; (2) the Fed would decide whether and how much to adjust its monetary policy instruments, taking into account its transfer (if any) to the Treasury, the fiscal stimulus enacted by Congress, and its mandate from Congress to pursue high employment, low inflation, and financial stability. Thus, stimulus without debt does not require the Fed to make the transfer to the Treasury for fiscal stimulus in a severe recession, or specify how large the transfer must be; nor does it tell the Fed how much to adjust its monetary policy instruments.
Would Stimulus without Debt Work in a Plausible Model?
Authors: Seidman Laurence
Published: May 2018

Laurence Seidman and Kenneth Lewis (2015) studied the impact of stimulus without debt in a plausible macroeconomic model. In this model, stimulus without debt definitely works in a severe recession. The large fiscal stimulus promptly eliminates a large output gap. Because the large fiscal stimulus is financed by a large transfer (not loan) from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury so that the Treasury doesn’t have to borrow to finance it, the large fiscal stimulus doesn’t increase the deficit or debt beyond the increase caused by the recession shock itself. By contrast, without the Fed transfer to the Treasury, the same large fiscal stimulus would cause the deficit and debt to rise significantly more than with the recession shock alone. Moreover, stimulus without debt is not inflationary: the inflation rate never rises above its low target value.
The Return of Biology
Authors: Brubaker Rogers
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyzes the complex and ambivalent implications of the post-Human Genome Project “return of biology” for the theory and practice of race and ethnicity. Genetically informed accounts of difference risk reinforcing essentialist understandings of identity; yet they can also serve to undermine notions of racial or ethnic purity, highlighting instead the inextricable mixedness of all human populations and the genetic uniqueness of every individual. The chapter traces developments in biomedical research, forensics, genetic genealogy, and identity politics, and it concludes by outlining a constructivist response to the new objectivist and naturalist accounts of race and ethnicity.
Nature versus Nurture in the Explanations for Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities
Authors: Kaufman Jay S. , Rushani Dinela , Cooper Richard S.
Published: May 2018

This chapter points out that some researchers explain the higher mortality rates among blacks in the United States as “nature”, blaming such rates primarily on blacks' genetic makeup. Others explain the phenomenon as “nurture”, blaming social status differences stemming from systemic discrimination. For a genetic difference to be used to explain an observed health disparity, the identified causal variant would have to have a large effect on the disease phenotype risk and would have to have a substantially different prevalence in the two racial populations, and the disease would have to be a significant contributor to mortality in the racial population. Genetic studies were done on cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, homicide, and more. In evaluating results from these studies and previous knowledge, 3% of the entire racial disparity in mortality can be accounted for, which leaves 97% of disparities to social origin.
Dance-in-Advertising, Affect, and Contagious Movement
Authors: Dunagan Colleen T.
Published: May 2018

Chapter One introduces the concept of affect and its production through dance in advertising. Affect plays a key role in advertising’s ability to engage consumers in the production of cultural meaning. To this end, I argue that the marketing value of dance lies in the ability of the dancing body to produce affect through kinesthetic empathy and correspondingly to create the appearance of relational meaning and agency. By placing affect theory into dialogue with theories of cognition and kinesthetic empathy, I articulate how and why the moving body in advertising requires its own analysis. In these ads, choreographed movement holds the key to fully understanding the production of affect, affect’s contagion, and its role in the production of social relations and cultural meaning.
Methodological Approaches to Studying Relational Aggression
Authors: Underwood Marion K. , Ehrenreich Samuel E. , Meter Diana J.
Published: May 2018

Relational aggression hurts because it damages friendships and social status (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995). The subtlety of behaviors such as malicious gossip, social exclusion, and relationship manipulation poses serious challenges for researchers seeking to measure relational aggression in reliable and valid ways. This chapter will review the methods used to measure relational aggression: self-reports, parent reports, teacher reports, peer nominations and ratings, diary and experience-sampling methods, observational approaches, and innovative experimental methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each method will be discussed, and evidence for validity will be presented. The chapter will also highlight why choices about methods of measuring relational aggression matter by noting key research questions that are answered in different ways, depending on the method used. The chapter will conclude with a summary of where we stand in terms of evidence for validity and inter-rater agreement and will also offer suggestions for future research.
Theoretical Perspectives to Studying the Development of Relational Aggression
Authors: Godleski Stephanie A.
Published: May 2018

Theoretical models for the development of relational aggression are reviewed, and the evidence in support of these models is briefly discussed. The central goal is to provide an overview of theoretical perspectives on the development and maintenance of relational aggression. Theories reviewed include the social information processing (SIP) model of children’s social adjustment (Crick & Dodge, 1994) as well as other important theories, such as an evolutionary explanation of relational aggression, attachment theory, and peer influences. The limitations of our theoretical understanding of relational aggression as well as the ways in which these models may inform future research in the field are discussed.
The Future of Relational Aggression, and Final Remarks
Authors: Ostrov Jamie M. , Coyne Sarah M.
Published: May 2018

The rapid escalation of research on the development of relational aggression and related constructs has been truly remarkable. Our volume is designed to fill a void in the literature and focus on the development of relational aggression. We conclude this volume by first reviewing some of the key points and implications from the prior chapters. Next, we discuss five future directions for the field: (1) conducting long-term longitudinal studies and adopting a lifespan perspective, (2) striving for advances in methods and technology, (3) using advanced statistics to address collinearity and co-occurrence among aggression subtypes, (4) exploring the role of other forms of aggression, and (5) embracing replication. Finally, we provide some concluding thoughts.
Psychological Hedonism, Hedonic Motivation, and Health Behavior
Authors: Williams David M.
Published: May 2018

Why is it so hard to choose the fruit salad instead of the chocolate cake? Why do we dread our daily workout? And why do some of us find it so difficult to quit smoking, quit drinking too much, or stop using drugs? This chapter argues that these unhealthy behaviors are largely a function of hedonic motivation: an automatically triggered motivational state that manifests in a felt desire to perform behaviors that have previously brought immediate pleasure, or dread of performing behaviors that have previously brought immediate displeasure. The concept of hedonic motivation is based on recent developments in the fields of affective neuroscience (i.e., incentive salience theory) and psychology (i.e., dual-processing theory) and is positioned herein as the central mechanism of the ancient and intuitive theory of psychological hedonism. Greater attention to hedonic motivation is critical for understanding behaviors that account for a significant proportion of worldwide death and disease.
Affective Determinants of Health Behavior
Authors: Rhodes Ryan E. , Williams David M. , Conner Mark T.
Published: May 2018

This chapter summarizes common themes and some ongoing controversies addressed in this volume. Common themes include the growing agreement regarding distinctions between affect proper and cognition about affect, between incidental and integral affect, between implicit and explicit affective attitudes, and between instrumental and affective outcome expectancies/attitudes. The need for a common taxonomy of affect constructs is clear, and this chapter provides preliminary distinctions as a starting point for further refinement. It overviews aspects that require more in-depth theorizing such as behavior-specificity in affect–behavior relationships, and the relationship among affect, social processes, and behavior. Finally, it highlights how the impact of affective determinants on health behavior may be intervened on via three separate routes (independent, direct, moderated), using examples across various chapters within the volume.
Choreographies of the Living
Authors: Rohman Carrie
Published: May 2018

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.
Woolf’s Floating Monkeys and Whirling Women
Authors: Rohman Carrie
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers two of Virginia Woolf’s most experimental texts, her Nurse Lugton story for children and her novel The Waves. The first catalogues an awareness of the way that a writer’s aesthetic powers are profoundly linked to animality. Moreover, the curtain in Woolf’s story should be read as creative materiality itself, its folds participating in the self-varying dynamism of the virtual and actual. In the wake of such recognitions, I outline an affirmative biopoetics at the heart of Woolf’s aesthetic project. In discussing The Waves, I argue that Jinny, contrary to most scholarly views, may be the most creative character in the text, if we understand creativity in a posthumanist sense. Jinny, who often is dismissed as shallow or overly sexualized in Woolf criticism, is better theorized as a dancer figure who harnesses vibrational forces and engages in the becoming-artistic of life itself.
Afterword
Authors: Rohman Carrie
Published: May 2018

The afterword reiterates it is time to risk a border-crossing in our view of art and see it as part of our shared affective becoming-excessive, as a fundamentally non-cognitive zone of self-othering that all animals engage, not just human animals. Art connects us profoundly to other creatures. The aesthetic capacity is animal; it doesn’t just approach animals or hold them in its purview. And if this is the case, then we can anticipate wholly new ways of viewing, inhabiting, and understanding artistic practices. The transporting power of art, the becoming-intense of aesthetics, the felt vibrations of aesthetic forces, and the taste for certain affect-circulating performances all have their “ancestral” lineage in animals’ aesthetic engagements. Bioaesthetics thus reminds us that the world of art includes hordes of other creatural actors and living assemblages—and that these beings have always been artistic.
Introduction
Authors: Lehman Frank
Published: May 2018

Hollywood Harmony revolves around three primary arguments: (1) tonal practices of the nineteenth century continue to flourish and evolve in film music; (2) chromaticism using consonant triads is a key ingredient of the “Hollywood Sound”; and (3) this chromatic style is associated with representations and evocations of wonderment in cinema. The book’s Introduction broaches these three claims with a brief initial analysis of studio logo music, before offering a survey of the scholarly landscape of film music theory, including treatments of chromaticism and so-called pantriadic music, especially transformation theory, the triadic guise of which has come to be called “neo-Riemannian theory.” Finally, the Introduction lays out the scope, approach, and organization of the chapters to follow.
More Money, More Crime
Authors: Bergman Marcelo
Published: May 2018

This book reviews the rapid rise of crime and violence in Latin America over the last few decades and offers an explanation to a striking paradox: In the midst of decreasing poverty, economic growth, and democratization crime has risen throughout the region. Drawing from large data sets, I argue that this is because crime has become a profitable industry in weak states with outdated criminal justice systems unable to withstand the challenge posed by new criminal enterprises. Prosperity has enhanced consumer demand for illicit goods, fueling the growth of secondary and illegal markets, including markets for stolen goods and narcotics that can provide an income for millions of youngsters willing to take the risk of arrest and loss of life. While some countries have experienced moderate increases in criminality others have experienced catastrophic rates of violence, resulting in two types of stable equilibria: Low- and high-crime countries. I explain why different equilibria, between the profit opportunities provided by criminality and a weak criminal justice system, have triggered a rapid upward spiral of crime and a sharp increase in the intensity of violence in some states but a moderate upward trend in others, and why certain countries have transitioned from low- to high-crime environments with vicious cycles of high criminality that are very difficult to reverse. The resulting severe, undesired outcomes are studied in this book: serious predatory crime diversification, consolidation of organized crime, ineffective justice reforms, weak policing, and overcrowded prisons.
Organized Crime and High Crime Equilibrium
Authors: Bergman Marcelo
Published: May 2018

This chapter studies the high crime equilibrium and provides an explanation for how crime for profit has evolved in most countries into very violent criminality. An overview of the organizations that specialize in different types of crimes is offered, with special attention drawn to the important spillover effect this has in producing crimes such as extortions, kidnapping for ransom, and human trafficking and on the increasing levels of violence. By tracking the trajectory of offenders, as reported in inmate surveys, this chapter documents individual transitions from initial engagement in low crime and progression into predatory, high-rent criminality. An in-depth study of Mexico, which fell to HCE in a five-year span exemplifies the devastating effects of criminal diversification coupled with weak states.
Sources of the Law of Immunity of International Organizations
Authors: Okeke Edward Chukwuemeke
Published: May 2018

Because international law is central to the determination of the jurisdictional immunity of international organizations, this chapter examines the sources of the immunity of international organizations, which is mainly treaty law. The basic text or constituent instrument by which member States establish international organizations usually provides for the organizations’ privileges and immunities. Provisions on privileges and immunities are also found in national legislation, and bilateral agreements, such as headquarters agreements or establishment agreements. The chapter also examines whether the immunity of international organizations is governed by customary international law in addition to treaty law. It further examines the interrelationship between treaty and customary international law, and the relationship between international law and national law with respect to jurisdictional immunity.
Determination and Scope of Immunity of International Organizations
Authors: Okeke Edward Chukwuemeke
Published: May 2018

This chapter deals with the most contentious aspects of the immunity of international organizations: its determination and scope. It is well-settled, under international law, that international organizations require those immunities that are necessary for them to fulfill their functions, but the determination could be contentious, as was evident in the Cumaraswamy case that was decided by the International Court of Justice. The actual scope of the jurisdictional immunity of an international organization depends upon the interpretation of the applicable legal instrument. The chapter deals with the beneficiaries of the immunity of international organizations, as well as with what are the functions of international organizations, and official activities or acts of their officials. It also examines what may constitute waiver of or exception to immunity, and distinguishes them. The chapter further examines whether human rights concepts of access to court and denial of justice place any limitation on the jurisdictional immunity of international organizations. A denial of justice is inherent in a grant of immunity.
Cutting the Ground
Authors: Bailey Doug
Published: May 2018

This chapter presents a detailed description, discussion, and reinterpretation of the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Etton in southern Britain. Discussion focuses on the sequences of digging-filling-resurfacing-redigging at the site, and examines the differences between the ditches and the interior filled-pits, as well as the eastern and the western segments of the site, and the distribution of different categories and conditions of artifacts. One result is a rethinking of the existing understanding of the site as connected to structured deposition, ground stone artifacts, and human lives. The proposal is that the reader interprets the site as a textured surface that was cut, resurfaced, and then cut again. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevance of this rereading of Etton for our understanding of the pit-houses at Măgura and at similar sites.
Church Music and the Rise of the Public Concert, 1743–1785
Authors: Sposato Jeffrey S.
Published: May 2018

This chapter is the first of three chapters to look at the relationship between a Thomaskantor, who oversaw the church music, and a Kapellmeister (music director) of the public concerts. Thomaskantor Johann Friedrich Doles and Kapellmeister Johann Adam Hiller are highlighted. The chapter examines developments in church music repertoire under Johann Sebastian Bach; his immediate successor, Gottlob Harrer; and Doles. Hiller began his career in Leipzig as director of the public Grosse Concert in 1743. After directing the Musikübende Gesellschaft and the Gewandhaus orchestra, he became Thomaskantor in 1789. Public concert music under Hiller continued to be heavily influenced by trends in church music. Hiller replaced Doles as Thomaskantor in 1789.
The Correlates of Cyber Strategy
Authors: Valeriano Brandon
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the effects of cyber strategy and coercion through an empirical lens. It addresses this empirical gap and conducts a series of quantitative tests to answer key questions based on data collected covering the years 2000–2014. The results of the data analyses suggest cyber operations rarely produce concessions. The digital domain demonstrates minimal coercive utility to date. A state’s latent cyber capacity, as a proxy measure of potential cyber power in a state, is not a significant predictor of coercive potential. The analysis demonstrates more traditional arbiters of strategic competition such as military or economic power are likely better predictors for explaining rival behavior. Finally, it examines escalation in cyber incidents, which lead to some form of escalation 53.65% of the time. When the Russia-Georgia and Russia-Ukraine dyads are removed, all military escalation involved only threats and displays of force. Escalation observed after cyber incidents tends to be limited and consistent with rivalry dynamics.
Commissars and Crooks
Authors: Valeriano Brandon
Published: May 2018

Russia is the second most active state going on the offense in cyberspace. From early disruptive actions against Estonia and Georgia to degrading attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine and, finally, complex espionage actions seeking to bring down the democratic processes, Russia has been one of the most aggressive and destructive actors in cyberspace. Yet, its efforts focus on breaking norms and disrupting the system rather than cyber violence. Evaluating the efficacy of Russia hacking activities, this chapter questions the conclusion that Moscow achieves its ends in cyberspace. More often than not, Russia fails, doubles down, and fails again. Rather, Moscow uses low-cost, deniable cyber actions to amplify broader propaganda efforts, sowing discontent within the governments and populations of the targeted state. This case demonstrates the mixed results of cyber strategies. Moscow has not achieved much, but its actions have put the world on notice that Russia is capable and dangerous.
Introduction
Authors: Schweitzer Stuart O. , Lu Z. John
Published: May 2018

As the biopharmaceutical industry has had an outsized claim to both fame and controversy, a thorough and unbiased understanding of its complexities is very much needed. The analytical tools of economics are well suited to explore the conflicting priorities and aims of the industry. This introductory chapter lays out the road map for a systematic evaluation and identifies the broad topics or issues to be covered in the book, including supply of and demand for pharmaceuticals in the United States and emerging markets, the evolving reimbursement landscape, price determination and competition in the branded as well as generic markets, various promotional channels and their effectiveness, and landmark legislation on drug approval and intellectual property.
Pricing Pharmaceuticals in a World Environment
Authors: Schweitzer Stuart O. , Lu Z. John
Published: May 2018

How should one comprehensively examine and compare drug prices in different countries? What are the reasons for the differences, large or small? Can we draw policy conclusions concerning the most appropriate regulatory response? These are the fundamental questions that should be considered regarding pricing pharmaceuticals in an international perspective. This chapter addresses these questions in three parts. First it examines the economic and institutional bases for international price variation. Next it reviews the literature on international drug price variation to see how accurately the literature demonstrates price differences between the United States and other countries. This is followed by suggestions on how improvements in the methodology for measuring international price differences can be made. The chapter concludes by asking the important question of whether uniform prices of pharmaceuticals worldwide would benefit all consumers.
Patent Protection
Authors: Schweitzer Stuart O. , Lu Z. John
Published: May 2018

Patent protection, innovation, and profitability are all intimately connected in the pharmaceutical industry. Without patent protection there would be no marketing exclusivity, and competitors would immediately enter any market where there was a new successful drug, eventually driving price down to the marginal production cost. Future R&D would never take place because there would be no way for firms to earn a yield on those investments in developing new pharmaceuticals. Patents, however, entail societal cost, because they raise the diffusion cost of knowledge and makes some innovative drugs prohibitively expensive in the short run. This chapter examines key patent laws applicable to the pharmaceutical industry, including category, duration, scope, infringement, and ground for challenge, both in the United States and in other advanced economies. Examples of strategic behavior by branded and generic firms are discussed. The chapter also provides a review of recent literature critical of the patent system.
Pharmaceutical Regulation in the European Union
Authors: Schweitzer Stuart O. , Lu Z. John
Published: May 2018

The main scientific and technical aspects of new drug registration, including pathways to marketing authorization approval, clinical study design and method, and requirement of and specifications for Good Clinical Practice, Good Laboratory Practice, and Good Manufacturing Practice, are all quite similar between Europe and the United States. Differences do exist, however. This chapter provides a closer examination of the drug regulatory regime in the European Union. After providing a brief history of the European Medicines Agency, the chapter examines the agency’s organizational structure and role in ensuring the safety and efficacy of pharmaceutical products for Europe, and discusses the regulatory pathways for generics and biosimilars in the EU. The chapter also looks at recent trends in international drug approval lags.
The Language of Ruins
Authors: Rosenmeyer Patricia A.
Published: May 2018

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands in Egyptian Thebes. Damaged by an earthquake, and re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to “speak” regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, the colossus had become a popular site for sacred tourism; visitors flocked to hear the miraculous sound, leaving behind over one hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions. These inscriptions are varied and diverse: brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon’s voice; longer lists by Roman administrators including details of personal accomplishments; and elaborate elegiac poems by both amateurs and professionals. The inscribed names reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. This study is the first complete assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past for a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and Homer’s cultural legacy in the imperial era. Visitors sought a “close encounter” with this ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present. Their inscriptions idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. While Memnon’s voice falls silent by the end of the second century CE, the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic poets in nineteenth-century Europe.
Theorizing Phone Use Contexts and Mediation
Authors: Tenhunen Sirpa
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework to understand the appropriation of mobile telephony in Janta as myriad fluctuating contexts, networks, and spheres of life extending outside the village. This chapter presents the book’s theoretical contribution to debates on social change and new media use, drawing from the following paradigms and concepts: domestication, polymedia, remediation, and mediatization/mediation. The book and the domestication paradigm share an interest in exploring how technology is adapted to everyday life and how it contributes to changes in everyday life through negotiation and social interaction. Different from the domestication approach, mobile phone use is explored in various contexts and in relation to face-to-face communicative contexts. Unlike studies utilizing the polymedia concept and mediatization scholarship, the book explores an environment where media use remains tangential because of economic and social barriers. The analytical framework highlights the relationships between mobile phone–mediated conversations and other speech contexts and media.
Mobile telephony, economy, and social logistics
Authors: Tenhunen Sirpa
Published: May 2018

This Chapter 4 gives a nuanced picture of the role of mobile phones in economic activities in rural West Bengal. Rather than juxtaposing economic and social uses, it explores them in tandem. How are phones used instrumentally and socially, and how do these different uses mesh and interrelate? The chapter also looks at how phone use influences social relationships, including their use for health care. Furthermore, the chapter assesses how the enhancement of logistical efficiency with the help of phones relates to development as economic growth and increased well-being. It highlights that not all people received equal economic benefits from phones. Phones have been most beneficial for the wealthiest entrepreneurs and large farmers. Those entrepreneurs whose markets extend outside the village have benefitted more than those who mainly market their products and services in the village.
Eight Old Syriac Modes
Authors: Jarjour Tala
Published: May 2018

This chapter scrutinizes conceptions of modality in relation to emotionality and aesthetics by addressing written forms of knowledge on the eight ecclesiastical modes in Syriac chant. It begins by presenting basic terms in existing discourses on the subject, then it examines a number of written sources (touching on issues relevant to orientalism and European musicology). The chapter develops a critical narrative on the concept of mode in three ways. First, it extracts from written tracts on the subject information that corresponds with the author’s ethnographic observation of living practice. Second, it dissects the concept of mode in Syriac music scholarship by tracking its sources and employment. Third, it brings to light the significance of perception and experience as they coincide in inherited knowledge in this aural tradition. In showing at once the presence and the absence of physical and metaphysical thinking in these writings, the chapter brings the notion of spirituality to the study of emotion and the aesthetic.
Chant as Local Knowledge
Authors: Jarjour Tala
Published: May 2018

This chapter is the second of two that focus on local forms of music knowledge. After the previous chapter dealt with written sources on Syriac chant, this one pursues analytical tools for understanding local conceptions of modality through ethnographic observation of the process of oral chant practice. It tackles the problematic questions of whether Syriac chant submits to an eightfold system, and whether its eight groups have a modal nature. By addressing contested issues, such as music theory and transcription, the chapter argues that understanding music involves understanding overlapping forms of knowledge, not only in how music is organized but also in experience and judgment. Perceptual and analytical modes of knowledge intersect with experiential knowledge in various ways. Localized nuances of the aesthetic reside in such intersections, and they arbitrate between how sounds are organized and used, and how modality is felt and explained.
Linguistics and the Scientific Study of Religion
Authors: Downes William
Published: May 2018

Registers of language are cultural templates, normatively constituting the situation types that make up a culture, and yet reciprocally determined by the situation’s linguistic requirements. This chapter proposes that a register such as prayer has typical psychological effects within the mind/brain of its users. These make it also a cognitive register, a linguistically enabled and shaped way of thinking and feeling. This process is analysed using cognitive pragmatics, more specifically relevance theory. Processing petitionary prayer can produce specific psychological effects. It is proposed that the petitions are not directive speech acts, but tools for learning. Petitionary prayer also shapes affectivity and motivation. This is explored using Panksepp’s concept of the SEEKING system. The mind-brain of one who prays is trained into habits of understanding and feeling otherwise unavailable. By bringing together these two approaches, the sociological and the psychological, the essay investigates how a cultural linguistic practice shapes religious cognition.
God, Metaphor, and the Language of the Hemispheres
Authors: McGilchrist Iain
Published: May 2018

Both too strict an adherence to current models of understanding and too great a willingness to dispense with them are potential paths to error. Explicit, rationalising thought processes cannot avoid dependence on intuitive and embodied knowledge. Furthermore some areas of experience are clearly distorted by the process of making them explicit at all. Each hemisphere attends to the world differently, and therefore inevitably produces an experiential world with different qualities. The left hemisphere uses those aspects of language that aid focus on what is explicit and measurable; the right uses aspects of language, such as metaphor, that are capable of expressing, as does music, what by its nature remains resistant to such a process. This chapter examines theories about laterality and metaphor, as well as the relationship between metaphor, music and other aspects of principally right hemisphere function, relating them to the capacity for understanding religious meaning.
A Composite Countenance
Authors: Haskell Ellen
Published: May 2018

The thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar is known for its elaborate divine imagery. This chapter explains how the Zohar invests the traditional anthropomorphic metaphor of the divine countenance with new meaning in order to define both divine and human faces as sites of spiritual revelation and transformation. The Zoharic authors’ goals are twofold. First, the mystics’ own human faces are divinized, becoming vehicles of mutual revelation accessed through spiritual fellowship. Second, the divine face is defined as an abstraction beyond human understanding, since human features are but one fragment of a transcendent whole that inspires contemplation through unusual image juxtapositions. This dual usage mirrors the Zohar’s broader mystical theology, which understands God as both revealed to and concealed from human beings. Further, reworking an ancient divine metaphor from within by manipulating its metonymic associations allows the mystics to transform their religious culture without overtly defying traditional scriptural authority.
The Televisualization of Ritual
Authors: Kopytowska Monika
Published: May 2018

This chapter demonstrates how contemporary ‘media culture’ has altered the way we experience and communicate religion and explains the role which language and other semiotic resources play in mediating religious experience and transforming the notion of sacred space, sacred time and a sense of communion based on collective emotion. The underlying assumption is that media together with religious institutions proximize the spiritual reality to believers and create a community of the faithful by reducing various dimensions of distance and providing the audience with a sense of participation and interaction. The chapter focuses on mediated rituals and demonstrates how both TV and radio, with their semiotic properties enabling liveness and immediacy, blur time-space boundaries, change the nature of individual and collective experience, and enhance the emotional and axiological potential of religious messages. It discusses the role of metaphor and metonymy as well as other cognitive operations within discourse space (involving both verbal and visual strategies) in these processes.
Introduction
Authors: Woodruff Paul
Published: May 2018

Philanthropy and charitable giving support the lives of both people and institutions. Individuals express their values by where they give and how much. Yet recent philosophers have written little about the subject, aside from Peter Singer and other advocates of effective altruism, who are mostly (but not universally) consequentialist utilitarians. We have a need, therefore, to examine theories of the ethics of giving from a wider range of theories, including theories based on Kant, intuitionism, virtue theory, integrity, and justice. The ethical theory that individuals hold makes a significant difference to their practices in giving. This volume contains essays by philosophers who are, in most cases, publishing on the topic for the first time.
Introduction
Authors: Bronstein Michaela
Published: May 2018

We often think of literary canons as representing the hegemony of the past over the present. The introduction asks us to think instead of the way the present reshapes the past to serve its needs. The literary past, in other words, becomes a set of tools for producing new work and thought in the present. Rather than see the literature of the past as a means for us today to critique its historical context, we can see older works as providing a whole host of later readers with modes of engaging with political questions in their own times. Modernist authors, in this view, cultivate forms of commitment and belief rather than critique and skepticism. Modernist literary innovation teaches us, in other words, not the hermeneutics of suspicion but its alternatives.
Rescue Work
Authors: Bronstein Michaela
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes the “rescue work” (Conrad) practiced by the three exemplars of recuperative modernism: James, Conrad, and Faulkner. Each asserts the continuing power of past ideals as a strategy for claiming continuity with a future readership. The thematic parallels and historical connections that unite these authors show that they consistently evoke the possibility of a disordered, meaningless existence in order to license the artistic task of attempting to make sense of the world. Rather than reflecting the slow victory of modernist skepticism over Victorian ideals, these authors become more experimental precisely in order to seek out what seems enduring through the onslaught of historical change. The narrative forms of these writers provide not training in suspicious reading, but an invitation to commitment and belief.
Modernism Today, or The Author Becomes a Character
Authors: Bronstein Michaela
Published: May 2018

The final chapter examines the recent appearance of biographical fiction about the recuperative modernists from four continents—Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation, Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Secret History of Costaguana. These works go beyond influence or allusion: they simultaneously trade on the continuing appeal of their subject writers (and on the style of their subjects), and examine them from the perspective of a future to which they are already a little bit out of date. It is this dichotomy—between a persisting readership and a specific, time-bound context—that animates modern fiction, its political significance, and the persisting critical debates about it today.
Martyrdom and its Contestations in the Formative Period of Islam
Authors: Afsaruddin Asma
Published: May 2018

The cult of military martyrdom publicly proclaimed and enthusiastically embraced by modern militant groups in Muslim-majority societies in the name of religion conveys the impression that foundational texts in Islam themselves must exhort followers to such acts. If one read only militant literature, with its references to the Qur’an and hadith works, one might be convinced that this were true. A deeper, historical survey of early texts, however, easily disabuses us of such notions. The chapter illustrates how the concept of martyrdom and its purview remained a contested one through most of the formative period of Islam. Early views from the first and second centuries of Islam, in fact, were often dramatically different from those that developed in the later period. A diachronic comparison of such varying perspectives allows us to trace a shifting trajectory of meanings associated with martyrdom that has important consequences for the contemporary period.
Reflections on Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Traditions
Authors: Yu Jimmy
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores self-immolation in the premodern Chinese Buddhist and Daoist historical milieus. It historicizes this ritual within the spectrum of wider Indian Buddhist practices, and explores the Chinese (and by extension, East Asian) imagination of religious sanctity and mastery over death. It argues that self-immolation in China was understood as a way of transforming death’s negative implications into productive power. The Chinese Buddhist and Daoist hagiographical records often depict self-immolation in concrete, visible terms, thus testifying that the ritual transcended the finality of death with outward signs such as meteorological mastery of procuring rain. Performers were often publicly recognized, which testifies to heavenly approval. The accounts examined are not isolated cases, but instead form part of the repertoire of Chinese Buddhist and Daoist miracle tales which created a discourse of “eminent Buddhist monastics” and “Daoist transcendents.” Their self-immolation became socially recognized markers of sanctity.
Value of Democracy
Authors: Kim Sungmoon
Published: May 2018

Presenting pragmatic Confucian democracy as encompassing both Schumpeterian and Deweyan models of democracy, each focused on political institutions and a way of life respectively, this chapter argues that democracy as a social experience has both instrumental and intrinsic values and, to the extent that Confucian democracy is a kind of democracy, it too has and ought to have both instrumental and intrinsic values. Once introduced and justified as a political system on instrumental and consequential grounds, democracy attains its noninstrumental value as it gets consolidated as a way of life, in the course of which democratic institutions, rights, and practices are socially mediated by and negotiated with existing Confucian values, habits, mores, and moral sentiments. It is through such a complex process of social and cultural negotiations that democratic institutions, rights, and practices (i.e., a democratic way of life) can be made intelligent to and further cherished by citizens.
Sufficiency and Equality
Authors: Kim Sungmoon
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores a distributive principle that is integral to pragmatic Confucian democracy—what I call Confucian democratic sufficientarianism. Confucian democratic sufficientarianism critically embraces liberal sufficientarianism’s positive thesis stipulating the threshold of sufficiency but roundly rejects the negative thesis, which allows unlimited desert-based inequalities beyond the threshold of sufficiency. After deriving four propositions from classical Confucianism (namely, equal sufficiency, objectively high threshold standard, deserved inequalities, and constrained inequality) and presenting them as constituting the classical Confucian doctrine of sufficiency, the chapter then reconstructs it into Confucian democratic sufficientarianism by installing public equality as a side constraint that prevents deserved inequalities beyond the threshold of sufficiency from eroding an equal social relationship among citizens. Confucian democratic sufficientarianism is distinguished importantly from liberal democratic sufficientarianism as well because its main currency of distribution is not so much equal public standing as such, but the well-being of the people.
Conclusion
Authors: Kim Sungmoon
Published: May 2018

This final chapter emphasizes the critical importance of Confucian political theory’s acceptability to ordinary men and women actually living in East Asia, many of whom are not ready to accept or even actively reject the self-validating moral authority of Confucianism, while struggling with their public standing as “citizens.” It argues that the future of Confucian political theory hinges critically on its ability to furnish a normative framework by which to make sense of, critically reflect upon, and morally improve the ways in which Confucianism (its culture, philosophical ideas, and ethical beliefs) interacts with modern social, economic, and political norms and institutions. The consequence is a political theory that helps citizens in East Asia to mitigate various forms of contingences arising from the circumstances of modern politics, not by overcoming Confucianism but by means of its cultural resources and philosophical insights.