bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Women's Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice
Authors: McLaren Margaret A.
Published: August 2019

Informed by practices of women’s activism in India, this book proposes a feminist social justice framework to address the wide range of issues women face globally, including economic exploitation; sexist oppression; racial, ethnic, and caste oppression; and cultural imperialism. The feminist social justice framework provides an alternative to mainstream philosophical frameworks that analyze and promote gender justice globally: universal human rights, economic projects such as microfinance, and cosmopolitanism. These frameworks share a commitment to individualism and abstract universalism that underlie certain liberal and neoliberal approaches to justice. Arguing that these frameworks emphasize individualism over interdependence, similarity over diversity, and individual success over collective capacity, McLaren draws on the work of Rabindranath Tagore to develop the concept of relational cosmopolitanism. Relational cosmopolitanism prioritizes our connections, while acknowledging power differences. Extending Iris Young’s theory of political responsibility, McLaren shows how Fair Trade connects to the economic solidarity movement. The Self-Employed Women’s Association and MarketPlace India empower women through access to livelihoods as well as fostering leadership capabilities that allow them to challenge structural injustice through political and social activism. Their struggles to resist economic exploitation and gender oppression through collective action show the importance of challenging individualist approaches to achieving gender justice. The book concludes with a call for a shift in our thinking and practice toward reimagining the possibilities for justice from a relational framework, from independence to interdependence, from identity to intersectionality, and from interest to sociopolitical imagination.
Globalization and Women’s Empowerment
Authors: McLaren Margaret A.
Published: August 2019

This chapter argues that cooperatives, because of their focus on both overcoming social oppression and economic exploitation, foster both economic and feminist empowerment for women. First, the chapter discusses the neoliberal economic policies of globalization, which have a disproportionately negative impact on women. Because economic and gender inequality often coincide, projects to enhance women’s empowerment have focused on economic empowerment. This narrow definition of women’s empowerment does not address gender inequality and sexist oppression; nor does it take into account structural and social change. Development strategies to redress women’s economic vulnerability include access to microfinance institutions. However, an increase in material goods alone does not challenge the social, economic, and political structures that create poverty and social marginalization. Cooperatives explicitly promote social equality and challenge the individualism underlying other social institutions. Cooperatives intentionally develop leadership, challenge inequality, and foster the collective capacities needed to challenge structural oppression and systemic exploitation.
Responsibility for Global Justice and Transnational Feminist Solidarity Projects
Authors: McLaren Margaret A.
Published: August 2019

This chapter argues that Iris Marion Young’s approach to unjust social systems and her acknowledgment that each of us is placed differently in those systems provides an important resource for engaging with questions of sexist oppression globally, while being attentive to intersectionality and power relations. After an explication of Young’s theory of political responsibility, criticisms of her theory are addressed. Because Young’s theory of political responsibility draws on feminist concepts such as social location, power, and privilege, it provides a more nuanced way to understand global justice than abstract universal frameworks such as human rights or cosmopolitanism. Extending Young’s theory, the chapter argues that global cross-border alliances can positively promote not only changes in unjust institutions and structures at the transnational level but also foster new local institutions, organizations, and practices that are fairer and more just, such as Fair Trade.
Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully fledged catalog of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them with a bottom-up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed to animals, and the comparative advantages of applying constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law across the border. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic, cultural, or any other minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by studies on posthumanism and postcolonialism. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help us move toward a just global interspecies community.
Introduction: Protecting Animals in an Age of Globalization
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

In this introduction to Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders, readers are introduced to the topic of extraterritorial animal law and given a roadmap for the book. The chapter explains how animals are bred in one country, slaughtered in another, processed in another, then exported, and that highly mobile multinational corporations systematically exploit weaker animal laws to decrease production costs. Evidence is offered to show that states, policymakers, lawyers, and the public all seek to determine whether and how animals can be protected across borders. The chapter describes the arc of subsequent chapters and their interrelation, making the case that these complex problems can only be solved if they are analyzed from multiple perspectives, including trade, public international, and animal law. The final section outlines the author’s methodology to solve the problems the text raises.
Mapping the Territory of Animal Law
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 1 cuts through the tangle of scholarly arguments that obscure the law of jurisdiction, and offers a robust conceptual framework in which jurisdiction and extraterritoriality can be situated. It first describes the historical and conceptual factors that have redistributed jurisdictional space and corrects the most common misapprehensions voiced about jurisdiction by legislators and scholars. To elucidate the terms and concepts behind territoriality and extraterritoriality, the author develops a comprehensive extraterritoriality framework that categorizes jurisdictional norms by their anchor point, their regulated content, and their ancillary effects. The framework, which draws on established principles of the law of jurisdiction, can be used to determine whether a matter is territorial, indirect extraterritorial, or direct extraterritorial. The author introduces four case groups to illustrate the challenges animal law poses to the modi operandi of the law of jurisdiction and uses them to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework.
Shifting Spatial Dimensions of Animal Law
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 2 lays the groundwork for protecting animals in international law by presenting a series of arguments that justify applying domestic animal law across borders. It first describes the most pressing challenges raised by the globalization of animal production and asks if concluding a treaty is the most rational approach to solving them. It provides evidence for the assumption that treaty-making is both unlikely and undesirable, and that extraterritorial jurisdiction offers considerable comparative benefits by creating a dense jurisdictional net of overlapping laws. Chapter 2 then demonstrates in detail that animal law is highly entangled in economic terms (which serves as a justification for extraterritorial jurisdiction in economic law) and subject to a common consensus about the proper treatment of animals (which serves as a justification for extraterritorial jurisdiction in criminal law). Together, these arguments prove that states have a shared interest in protecting animals more effectively across the border.
The Unanswered: Indirect Protection through the GATT
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

This chapter explores the breadth and scope of options available to states that want to indirectly protect animals across the border, in particular under the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The flurry of academic discussion at the intersection of animal and trade law was sparked by the Appellate Body’s Seals report in 2014, but it failed to cut deep enough to link to the doctrine of jurisdiction under general international law, and efforts to enter negotiations to more thoroughly protect animals in trade never materialized. The author advances the discussion and fills a gap in scholarship by examining whether and how states can use trade law to indirectly protect animals abroad through import prohibitions, taxes and tariffs, as well as labels. An analysis of the legality of trade-restrictive measures that indirectly protect animals under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) precedes a discussion of justifications for violating the agreement.
Extended Jurisdiction through Foreign Policy, Soft Law, and Self-Regulation
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

This chapter focuses on whether states can use extended forms of extraterritorial jurisdiction to protect animals abroad, including foreign policy rules, investment agreements, jurisdiction assigned to international bodies, and self-regulation by private actors. These subtler forms of extraterritorial regulation are fully established and widely used in human rights law. When applied to animal law, they yield substantial benefits for states that want to protect animals abroad by reaching beyond traditional command-and-control structures and tapping the expertise of non-state actors. The focus of this chapter is on investment rules, export credit standards, bilateral investment treaties, bilateral free trade agreements, impact assessments, reporting, corporate social responsibility, codes of conduct, and the Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, issued by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Parameters of Substantive Law
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 8 shows ways to meaningfully connect the various jurisdictional tools to protect animals abroad to substantive law, and determines whether substantive law puts constraints on them. A central question at this intersection is whether states can use extraterritorial jurisdiction to lower standards abroad, for example, as a side effect to lucrative trade deals. Insights from general international, trade, and animal law will help illuminate this question. The author then determines the level of consistency animal laws must maintain to survive the scrutiny of international law. The author creates a hierarchy of presumptions to guide public authorities in their decisions about which animal laws, at a minimum, meet the requirements of beneficence and consistency. The chapter concludes with an argument that states should have a duty to protect animals abroad, and that corporations should have a duty to respect animals abroad, akin to the obligations set up under the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” framework.
Comparative Vantage Points of Extraterritorial Animal Law
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 9 provides legislators with a full description of the comparative advantages of applying animal law across the border. It first clarifies the scope of extraterritorial jurisdiction by examining what kinds of administrative, criminal, and civil animal laws can be used extraterritorially. Using a functional comparative approach, the author describes the benefits of extraterritorial applying animal law extraterritorially, including constitutionally enshrined state objectives, rights and prohibitions, and duties of compassion. Criminal animal law (including advanced rules on corporate liability) and administrative animal law (including advanced standards on keeping, transporting, and slaughter) can also create significant advantages for animals when used to protect them across borders. The author describes these in detail and concludes that there are good reasons to believe that only a few of the existing animal laws can operate as exemplary models. For animal law to yield substantial benefits in extraterritorial application, it first must emancipate itself from the dominant animal use paradigm.
Legality of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction under International Law
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 10 examines the legal risks of protecting animals abroad by offering a full analysis into the legality of extraterritorial jurisdiction under international law, and is intended to guide states that wish to use it. The reader is introduced to the types of jurisdictional conflicts that can emerge in animal law and shown how states can unilaterally prevent, manage, or mitigate them (such as through the principle of reasonableness, the rule of law, and the prohibition of double jeopardy). The chapter describes avenues for conflict resolution, including resorting to the principle of comity, or entering bilateral and multilateral treaty negotiations. It then elucidates the circumstances under which exercise of jurisdiction violates international law, in particular, the principles of sovereign equality, nonintervention, territorial integrity, and self-determination of peoples. The chapter concludes with an examination of the consequences a breach entails under international law, which is as useful for animal law as much as for other fields of law grappling with extraterritoriality.
Convergence and the Rhetoric of Scientifilm
Authors: Telotte J. P.
Published: August 2019

Abstract: Film, Francesco Casetti argues, provided a common “field of convergence for different dimensions” of the popular imagination in the early twentieth century. We can see evidence of the extent of that “convergence” in the sort of discourse that unfolded in various other internal features of the pulps. Editorials, readers’ letters, and film reviews converge to demonstrate a sense of enthusiasm about the ability of films to supplement the work of SF by visualizing or realizing the genre’s ideas for reshaping the world and the self. That enthusiasm would bring repeated calls for the film industry to produce more SF-themed films, even to adapt favorite stories from the pulps. But as reviews of SF films began to proliferate in the pulps, particularly in the late 1930s, they would increasingly attest to a frustration or dissatisfaction with the sense of reality that was being achieved by the SF film and point to a rift beginning between the films and the world of SF literature.
Introduction
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

For over a thousand years the banya has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. The argument is based on thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays. Inevitably, some aspects of Russia’s past come through stronger than others in these sources. But, taken together, they provide a brand new portrait of the institution of the banya and of the history of Russia.
Older Even Than the Tsar
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

Banyas have been in the Russian region since before there were Russians. They appear in the first written records of Russian history and continued to remain relevant to belief and behavior though the Muscovite period and into the reign of Peter the Great. As bathing fell out of favor in Western Europe, the persistency of the banya struck outsiders as barbaric, titillating, and licentious. This chapter discusses the origins of the bania in Kievan Rus’, with an emphasis on everyday life, the law, and belief. The bania’s ambiguity as a place of healing and danger, rebirth and illicit behavior was evident from the beginning.
The Great Healer
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

As elites in Russia became more integrated into Western culture, going to the banya became more associated with the unreformed peasantry and lower classes. Most outsiders, like the astronomer Chappe D’Auteroche, who was in Russia to observe the transit of Venus, saw the banya as further indication of Russia’s backwardness and barbarity. Catherine the Great wrote a pamphlet, her famous “antidote,” to rebut his views in general and on the banya specifically. Meanwhile, the prominent medical doctor, Antonio Sanches, used his connections with Catherine and members of her court to systematically defend the banya not as a popular custom, but as a valuable tool of modern medicine. He used his connections with Western European intellectuals to promote the use of the banya there as well.
Here Nobody Is Naked, There Is No Need for Shame
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

During and after the Second World War, the older idea of the banya as a center of communal identity and a place to restore vitality re-emerged in parallel to the state’s continued emphasis on the utilitarian purpose of banyas. The state still built and maintained banyas to clean people and keep people healthy. And it still fell far short of its goals. But soldiers in battle and citizens in war-torn communities spoke of the banya, especially the rural banya, as a special place, conducive to close personal contact and Russian communal identities. Older notions of the banya as a place of transgressions and defilement re-emerged in the middle of the twentieth century as well, particularly in depictions of the Gulag banya.
Epilogue
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

The epilogue indulges the conceit that various aspects of the banya’s history remain present in the banya today. For centuries, the basic contours of the steam room have remained fundamentally unchanged, meaning that it is possible to imagine men and women from vastly different times and places sharing a banya at once.
The random walk: Universality and continuum limit
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

The first chapter discusses the asymptotic properties at large time and space of the familiar example of the random walk. The universality of a large scale behaviour and, correspondingly, the existence of a macroscopic continuum limit emerge as collective properties of systems involving a large number of random variables whose individual distribution is sufficiently localized. These properties, as well as the appearance of an asymptotic Gaussian distribution when the random variables are statistically independent, are illustrated with the simple example of the random walk with discrete time steps. The emphasis here is on locality, universality, continuum limit, path integral, Brownian motion, Gaussian distribution and scaling. These properties are first derived from an exact solution and then recovered by renormalization group (RG) methods. This makes it possible to introduce all the RG terminology.
Critical phenomena: The field theory approach
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 6 describes how the perturbative renormalization group (RG) of quantum field theory has made it possible to derive universal properties of continuous macroscopic phase transitions. The RG initially emerged as a consequence of the necessity to cancel infinities that appear in the perturbative expansion (the renormalization procedure) and the possibility of defining the parameters of the renormalized theory at different momentum scales. Although the field theory RG is now understood to be an asymptotic form, it has made it possible to confirm the Wilson–Fisher fixed point and led to an understanding of universality for a large class of critical phenomena. In the framework of dimensional continuation, zeros of RG beta functions, which correspond to Wilson–Fisher’s fixed points, have made it possible to recover Wilson–Fisher’s epsilon expansion, proving scaling relations and calculating critical exponents. Series summation methods have then been used to generate precise values of exponents.
The Higgs boson: A major discovery and a problem
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 12 describes the main steps in the construction of the electroweak component of the Standard Model of particle physics. The classical Abelian Landau–Ginzburg–Higgs mechanism is recalled, first introduced in the macroscopic description of a superconductor in a magnetic field. It is based on a combination of spontaneous symmetry breaking and gauge invariance. It can be generalized to non–Abelian gauge theories, quantized and renormalized. The recent discovery of the predicted Higgs boson has been the last confirmation of the validity of the model. Some aspects of the Higgs model and its renormalization group (RG) properties are illustrated by simplified models, a self–interacting Higgs model with the triviality issue, and the Gross–Neveu–Yukawa model with discrete chiral symmetry, which illustrates spontaneous fermion mass generation and possible RG flows.
Quantum chromodynamics: A non-Abelian gauge theory
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 13 is devoted to some aspects of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the part of the Standard Model of particle physics responsible for strong interactions and based on an SU(3) gauge symmetry (the colour group) and gluon gauge fields. First, the geometry of non–Abelian gauge theories, based on parallel transport, is recalled. This leads naturally to the construction of lattice gauge theories with link variables and a plaquette action. The lattice model gives a hint of confinement. QCD is quantized in the temporal of Weyl gauge. Its renormalization involves the BRST symmetry. Its renormalization group properties with asymptotic freedom are emphasized. The infinite degeneracy of the semi–classical ground state can be associated to a winding number. Barrier penetration effects, related to the existence of instantons, lead to the existence of theta vacua and the problem of strong CP violation. Other issues considered are chiral symmetry and axial anomaly.
From BRST symmetry to the Zinn-Justin equation
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 14 contains a general discussion of the quantization and renormalization of non–Abelian gauge theories. The quantization necessitates gauge fixing and introduces the Faddeev–Popov determinant. Slavnov–Taylor identities for vertex (one–particle–irreducible (1PI)) functions, the basis of a first proof of renormalizability, follow. The Faddeev–Popov determinant leads to a non–local action. A local form is generated by introducing Faddeev–Popov ghost fields. The new local action has an important new symmetry, the BRST symmetry. However, the explicit realization of the symmetry is not stable under renormalization. By contrast, a quadratic equation that is satisfied by the action and generating functional of 1PI functions, the Zinn–Justin equation, is stable and at the basis of a general proof of the renormalizability of non–Abelian gauge theories. The proof involves some simple elements of BRST cohomology. The renormalized form of BRST symmetry then makes it possible to prove gauge independence and unitarity.
Quantum field theory: Asymptotic safety
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 15 examines the conditions under which it is possible to define renormalized quantum field theories (QFTs) consistent on all scales (a property not necessary for effective QFTs and not shared by ‘trivial’ theories like quantum electrodynamics (the triviality issue)). It has been conjectured that a necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition is the existence of ultraviolet fixed points, a property called asymptotic safety. Examples are “asymptotically free” theories like non–Abelian gauge theories (quantum chromodynamics, or QCD) in four dimensions or the non–linear sigma model in two dimensions. These theories are characterized by a crossover scale between universal infrared and large momentum behaviour behaviours. The non–linear sigma and Gross–Neveu models in dimensions greater than 2 are examined in detail. For example, the non–linear sigma model exhibits, below the critical temperature, a crossover between an infrared behaviour dominated by Goldstone modes and a universal, large momentum, critical behaviour.
Quantum anomalies: A few physics applications
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 17 exhibits various examples where classical symmetries cannot be transferred to quantum theories. The obstructions are characterized by anomalies. The examples involve chiral symmetries combined with currents or gauge symmetries, leading to chiral anomalies. In particular, anomalies lead to obstruction in the construction of theories. In particular, the structure of the Standard Model of particle physics is constrained by the requirement of anomaly cancellation. Other applications, like the relation between electromagnetic pi0 decay and the axial anomaly, are described. Anomalies are related to the Dirac operator index, leading to relations between anomaly and topology. To prove anomaly cancellation beyond perturbation theory, one can use lattice regularization. However, the definition of lattice chiral transformations is non–trivial. It is based on solutions of the Ginsparg–Wilson relation.
Field theory in a finite geometry: Finite size scaling
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Computer simulations of critical statistical systems or quantum field theory models are performed with systems where sizes are finite. In transfer matrix calculations, all sizes but one are also finite. In systems where the correlation length is large, it is thus important to understand how the infinite size limit is reached. This problem is investigated in Chapter 19. RG equations allow proving the properties of universality and of finite size scaling. When the correlation length is larger than the linear system size, a phenomenon of dimensional reduction is observed. With periodic boundary conditions, fields have a zero mode. A local expansion generates an effective field theory for the zero mode.
The weakly interacting Bose gas at the critical temperature
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 20 examines effects of weak repulsive interactions in a Bose–Einstein condensate and the transition from Bose–Einstein condensate to superfluid phase transition. Renormalization group methods are used and a universal amplitude is calculated by non–perturbative methods. After the discovery of the predicted Bose–Einstein condensation, which is a property of free bosons, an interesting issue was the effects of weak repulsive interactions. In this chapter, it is shown that, near the transition temperature, the initial non–relativistic field theory can be replaced by a relativistic effective Euclidean field theory known to describe a superfluid phase transition (a dimensional reduction). These theoretical considerations are illustrated by an evaluation of the universal variation of the transition temperature at weak coupling. For this purpose, the O(2) symmetry of the model is generalized to O(N) symmetry, and large N techniques are used.
From random walk to critical dynamics
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 22 studies stochastic dynamical equations, consistent with the detailed balance condition, which are generalized Langevin equations which describe a wide range of phenomena from Brownian motion to critical dynamics in continuous phase transitions. In the latter case, a dynamic action can be associated to the Langevin equation, which can be renormalized with the help of BRST symmetry. Dynamic renormalization group equations, describing critical dynamics, are then derived. Dynamic scaling follows, with a correlation time that exhibits critical slowing down governed by a dynamic exponent. In addition, Jarzinsky’s relation is derived in the case of a time–dependent driving force.
Renormalization group approach to matrix models
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 25 discusses how, in the mid–1980s, it was realized that some ensembles of random matrices in the large size and double scaling limit could be used as toy models for two–dimensional quantum gravity coupled to conformal matter and string theory, or as examples of critical statistical models (like the critical Ising model) on continuum random surfaces. The method is based on a perturbative expansion in terms of fat Feynman diagrams associated with tessalated surfaces, organized as a topological expansion. A tremendous development of random matrix theory followed, and a number of matrix models have been solved exactly. The solutions exhibit a universal behaviour with respect to changes of the matrix potential. Therefore, it is tempting to use renormalization group (RG) ideas to determine universal properties, without solving models explicitly. Approximate RG equations have been derived, yielding interesting results, but a strategy for systematic improvement is lacking.
Introduction
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

Imagine you are in a group of ten people. In a minute, you will all be randomly paired with a partner. At the count of three, without a chance to talk or communicate in any way, you must dance the tango. If you both step forward, you’ll collide. If you both step back, you’ll look stupid. If one of you steps forward, and the other back, you’ll do the dance successfully. This is an example of a coordination problem—a situation where actors have similar interests but nonetheless face difficulties in coordinating their action. Presumably neither you nor your partner really cares which one of you steps forward and which back, at least not as much as you care about executing complementary actions. In other words, what you really care about is coordination....
Gender, Coordination Problems, and Coordination Games
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

The chapter opens with a brief discussion of gender and gendered division of labor. A general discussion follows of what coordination problems are and the models used to represent them–coordination games—are introduced. It is argued that not all coordination games are equal. While some can be solved by conventions and norms that are identical for everyone in a society, others, those that require people to take different, complementary actions, pose a special problem. Coordinating behavior in these sorts of games requires extra information to break symmetry between those who are interacting. Gendered division of labor is just such a scenario.
Cultural Evolution with Social Categories
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

This chapter looks at evolutionary models capable of representing the emergence of conventions between actors in different social groups. From a starting point of uncoordinated behavior, groups move toward states where everyone follows unified patterns in a way that tends to lead to successful outcomes. This cultural evolution is driven by social learning. Once groups have arrived at these coordinated behaviors they tend to remain there, so that the patterns of behavior persist over time. As the chapter shows, the addition of social categories radically changes the cultural evolutionary process. In particular, groups with categories reach the inequitable, but efficient, outcomes described in the last chapter.
Power and the Evolution of Inequity
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

The chapter starts with an introduction of the primary paradigm used in this half of the book—the bargaining game. It uses this model to show why in groups with social categories fairness in bargaining is not the expected outcome of cultural evolution. Instead, social categories act as a symmetry breaker that stabilizes inequitable bargaining conventions. The chapter then turns to the role power plays in the evolution of bargaining. Powerful groups often gain an advantage with respect to the emergence of conventions of resource division. This can lead to compounding processes that profoundly disadvantage some social groups. These models make especially clear how irrelevant markers like race and gender can come to be more important in determining resource division than relevant factors, such as individual status.
Discrimination and Homophily
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

The goal of this chapter is to use the framework developed thus far in the book to address the question: how do discriminatory conventions and norms influence patterns of interaction? In particular, the models presented will highlight causal processes that can lead to homophily, or disproportionate in-group interaction, as a result of discrimination. The chapter uses academic communities as a case study throughout. Actors are modeled on interactive networks, where they prefer to link with partners who yield higher payoffs. The suggestion is that when women get less academic credit, they learn to avoid collaborating with men as a result. However, when certain groups have advantages that lead to more significant production of credit, this trend can reverse. In these cases, a disadvantaged group may be willing to share credit inequitably to have access to a collaborator who generates more credit.
The Evolution of Household Bargaining
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

This chapter first presents an explicitly evolutionary model of the emergence of coordination in modern households. The chapter shows why certain conditions might favor market labor for one gender and home labor for the other. The goal is to provide a proof of concept for the usefulness of evolutionary models in this domain, as opposed to traditional game theoretic models. The chapter also argues that once these patterns have emerged, they should be relatively stable in the face of changing social conditions. Using these patterns of coordination as a starting point, the chapter then shows why emerging patterns of household bargaining, i.e., over who does more total work, and has more total leisure time, should favor whichever gender tends to be employed in market work.
Evolution and Revolution
Authors: O'Connor Cailin
Published: August 2019

This chapter looks at a cluster of topics centered on the question: what can be done about inequitable conventions of resource division between social categories? First, the chapter outlines which social preconditions that must be in place in order for inequitable type-based conventions to arise at all. These include the recognition of social categories, and conditioning of behavior based on these categories. There is then a discussion of the possibility of eliminating these preconditions. The chapter moves on to consider how one might go about moving from inequitable to equitable norms for division of resources. Ultimately, the picture is one in which social justice is an endless battle. The forces of cultural evolution pull populations toward inequity, and combating these forces requires constant vigilance.
Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī and ISKCON
Authors: Sardella Ferdinando
Published: August 2019

The Hindu and Bengali renaissance of the nineteenth century revolved in many respects around a recovery of early texts of Hinduism such as the Upanishads and a revival of Advaita Vedānta. It also entailed a general rejection of iconic bhakti and the Puranic literature, regarded as expressions of primitive religion. The religious current represented by Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (1874–1936) and the institution that he founded in 1918, which later became known as the Gaudiya Math and Mission, generated a renewed interest for bhakti religiosity and went beyond the mainstream tenets of the renaissance. The chapter provides an overview of the life of Bhaktisiddhānta and a brief history of his movement, which includes one of its most prominent international offshoots—that is, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement.
Mūrti, Idol, Art, and Commodity
Authors: Ramachandran Tanisha
Published: August 2019

This chapter investigates the production, deployment, and interpretation of Hindu images, beginning in the nineteenth century, involving the interaction of non-Hindus and Hindus with the image in the Indian context and its eventual travel to the United States and the United Kingdom. Through processes of sacralization, politicization, display, appropriation, commoditization, and protest at various points in history, the Hindu image has been signified and resignified by Hindus and non-Hindus alike. Hindu images serve a multitude of purposes—functioning simultaneously, interdependently, and independently in the religious, social, political, artistic, and commercial realms. While the image of the god/goddess plays numerous roles, this chapter focuses on the image as mūrti, idol (in a pejorative sense), political symbol, art, and commodity.
Hindu Pilgrimage and Modern Tourism
Authors: Aukland Knut
Published: August 2019

Tourism as we know it is a product of modernity, but what happens when tourism meets the ancient Hindu tradition of pilgrimage? This chapter shows how Indian modernity has stimulated Hindu pilgrimage in multiple ways and how modern tourism has helped it grow in popularity. The tourism industry has introduced travel agencies, hotels, tourist guides, and guidebooks to the pilgrimage sites and routes, and these have to some extent caused a decrease in the demand for traditional ritual services. Pilgrims spend less time at one particular site and often expect to combine pilgrimage with other types of travel, such as sightseeing or visiting theme parks. In the face of these changes, some priests have adapted by collaborating with tourist agencies and drivers, joining the tourism trade and catering to foreign tourists. A modern literary genre has emerged combining elements of the traditional pilgrimage texts with modern tourist information. The Indian state is a major player in shaping the operation of Hindu pilgrimage under the banner of tourism development.
Online Hinduism
Authors: Scheifinger Heinz
Published: August 2019

Technological change is a fundamental element of modernity, and an exploration of modern Hinduism must take seriously the role of technology in religious transformation. While the nineteenth century saw the introduction of the printing press as a new tool for mass mobilization, the Internet has become the technological platform for religious innovation and transformation since the last decade of the twentieth century. This chapter gives an introduction to the topic of Hinduism online. It starts by giving a brief overview of the short history of Hinduism online, with the first movements and temples establishing a presence on the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s. Focusing on the core concept of pūjā, the chapter argues that online Hinduism and the wider Hindu tradition are so closely linked that it makes little sense to see the online and the offline as separate realms. In fact, online Hinduism is an integral part of contemporary Hinduism, and the Internet has already spurred interesting questions and dilemmas of theology and religious authority in the Hindu tradition and will certainly continue to do so.
Modern Hindu Diaspora(s)
Authors: Sinha Vineeta
Published: August 2019

A key characteristic of modern Hinduism has been its interaction with forces of globalization. This interface has produced creative expressions of the religion globally. This chapter outlines the global movement of Indians (and Hindus) from the colonial period onwards and focuses on their everyday lives to reveal how Hindu religiosities have been reconfigured in new locales. Specifically, devotional Hinduism—seen in the persistence of domestic worship, growth of Hindu temples, and enactment of festivals and processions—has marked the life of overseas Hindu communities. In diasporic spaces, popular Hinduism is defined by religious syncretism and hybridity in a liberal approach to deities, symbols, philosophies, and ritual practices associated with non-Hindu religious traditions. An inclusive and plural notion of ‘Hindu diaspora’ needs to attend to more than ‘Indian’ variations of Hinduism abroad and to focus also, for example, on Sri Lanka and Nepalese diasporic Hindu experiences.
Caste and Contemporary Hindu Society
Authors: Divya Vaid , Ankur Datta
Published: August 2019

This chapter investigates the complex issue of caste and its relationship to modern Hinduism. It starts by drawing up a broad canvas of classical theories about caste from sociology and anthropology, considering caste in relation to the Sanskritic concepts of varna and jati. The authors then move on to the emergence of caste in its modern form in the colonial period and post-colonial period. The chapter’s discussion of the emergence of a modern conception of caste in the colonial period converges with what has been discussed concerning the ‘invention’ or ‘standardization’ of Hinduism. The chapter also discusses caste in relation to post-colonial politics, and to work and occupation, tracing the transformation of caste in the face of contemporary socio-economic and political change. Hence the chapter also considers the relationship of caste with Modern Hinduism and Hindu society with reference to law and the state, Dalit politics, affirmative action, violence, and the economy.
Hindu Law in Modern Times
Authors: Menski Werner
Published: August 2019

Covering the colonial period and modern India, this examination of the complex relationship between law and religion focuses on the impacts of state legal regulation of Hindu law in India. A key question in this chapter is to what extent colonial and postcolonial legal interventions over time have turned ‘Hindu law’ into something far removed from the lived realities of India’s Hindu population. As many Hindus of various kinds in India continue to live by customary norms and ethics, rather than following modern state law, significant discrepancies between the formal law and the ‘living law’ of Hindus are manifest, forcing the law to adjust to society, rather than driving its development. This indicates that ‘the right law’ for India today is a culture-specific, deeply pluralist construct with Hindu elements, a hybrid entity continuously challenged to prove that it is a ‘good law’.
Modern Hindu Dharma and Environmentalism
Authors: Jain Pankaj
Published: August 2019

This chapter explores some important examples of modern Hindu environmentalism. Hinduism contains numerous references to the worship of the divine in nature in its Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Sutras, and its other sacred texts. Millions of Hindus recite Sanskrit mantras daily to revere rivers, mountains, trees, animals, and the earth. Although the Chipko (tree-hugging) Movement is the most widely known example of Hindu environmental leadership, there are examples of Hindu action for the environment that are centuries old. Mahatma Gandhi exemplified many of the Hindu teachings, and his example continues to inspire contemporary social, religious, and environmental leaders in their efforts to protect the planet.
Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature
Authors: Gardner Hunter H.
Published: August 2019

Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.