bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Network Dynamics
Authors: Dodds Peter , Watts Duncan J.
Published: June 2017

This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of paths potentially useful for diffusion. It also discusses the structure requirements for network diffusion and shows how these requirements are affected when we assume edges come and go over time. Finally, it describes the effect of tie order on diffusion potential as well as the correlation between network evolution and diffusion.
Time and Scheduling
Authors: Feld Scott , Grofman Bernard
Published: June 2017

This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize time; research that has examined how the organization of time has changed over history; and studies on the female labor force, the household division of labor, and time budgets more generally. The discussion then turns to formal insights that explain why schedule coordination is such a problem and describes the macro-level social implications of scheduling conflicts, focusing on hierarchies, segregation, and boundary-maintenance dynamics.
Dominance Hierarchies
Authors: Kalyvas Stathis
Published: June 2017

This article explores how dominance hierarchies develop their typical structures. It tackles a number of questions, for example: how is it that different groups develop the same kinds of hierarchy structures, even when the structures arise spontaneously, without being imposed by central authority; what mechanisms generate these hierarchy structures; or whether an understanding the development of hierarchies provides more general insight into the evolution of other kinds of social structures in small groups. The article first reviews theoretical models for the explanation of dominance relationships and dominance hierarchies (‘pecking orders’) in small groups of animals before considering hierarchies in small groups of humans. It then introduces an interaction-process model of animal hierarchies that explains linear hierarchy structures and avoids some of the limitations inherent in the earlier models. It concludes by comparing models for the development of status hierarchies in humans with those for animal hierarchies.
Conflict
Authors: Breen Richard
Published: June 2017

: This article examines the role of individual preferences and actions in producing conflict and how conflict shapes preferences, identity, and actions. Using an analytical approach, it looks at the causes and consequences of interpersonal and group conflict, with particular emphasis on the microfoundations of conflict and peace. It also considers how conflict causes action and the formation of collective identity, much as collective identity gives rise to conflict and action. After reviewing some of the challenges raised by the study of conflict, the article discusses the link between interpersonal conflict and individual-level dynamics. It then explores ethnic and class conflict in relation to group-level dynamics, along with the endogenous dynamics of violent conflict in the context of civil war. Finally, it highlights the importance of alliance as a mechanism linking local cleavages into a conflict’s master cleavage.
Beliefs
Authors: Rydgren Jens
Published: June 2017

This article examines the multiple mechanisms by which beliefs are formed — from observation, social influence/socialization, induction, deduction from other beliefs, adaptation to desire (wishful thinking), and dissonance-reduction mechanisms — as well as the conditions under which each arises and the characteristic processes (and problems) associated with each. The discussion is generally set in a socio-cognitive framework, which is based on the assumption that individuals are motivated by an ‘effort after meaning’. The article first considers the role of categorization in belief formation before turning to inductive reasoning and analogism. It then describes the conditions under which people’s beliefs are particularly likely to be influenced by others, followed by an analysis of the mechanism of dissonance reduction. It suggests that while beliefs are slippery and difficult to nail down, they need to be taken into account in any explanation of action.
Preferences
Authors: Freese Jeremy
Published: June 2017

This article examines four basic issues regarding ‘preferences’ as an explanatory concept in analytical sociology. First, it explains how the ontology of preference should be understood; that is, the question of what preferences are. It challenges both the ideas that preferences are ‘mental events’ and that they are ‘behavioral tendencies.’ Second, given that real-world alternatives may be characterized by numerous different attributes, the article considers the question of which attributes may be most salient to understanding action. It also explores the link between personality and preferences and how organizations act according to preferences. Finally, it describes how preferences change over time, paying attention to the preferences of actors being a target of purposive action by others and by actors themselves.
Signaling
Authors: Gambetta Diego
Published: June 2017

This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cost, receiver-dependent cost, and third party-dependent cost, along with multiple sources of cost and signals that cost nothing to honest signalers. It also takes a look at a number of applications for signaling theory and concludes with an assessment of the genealogy of the theory, from Thorstein Veblen and Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Spence, and Alan Grafen.
Neural Mechanisms of Criminal Decision Making in Adolescence
Authors: Klapwijk Eduard T. , van den Bos Wouter , Güroğlu Berna
Published: June 2017

Adolescence is a time of change in which there is an increase and peak in criminal behavior. This chapter discusses the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying criminal decision making in adolescents. First, it provides a brief overview of the neural basis of decision making in typically developing adolescents. Second, it discusses studies that examine decision-making processes in delinquent and antisocial adolescents compared to their typically developing peers. The chapter focuses on executive functioning and empathy, and it is concluded that delinquent and antisocial adolescents mainly display affective deficits. This is manifested in risky and impulsive decisions and in impaired sensitivity to the distress and perspectives of other people. Finally, the chapter argues that future research on criminal decision making in adolescence could benefit from focusing on subgroups of offenders and from including environmental factors such as peer influence in experimental designs.
High Stakes
Authors: Brennan Iain R.
Published: June 2017

This chapter describes the contradictory roles that weapons play in offender decision making as mechanisms that can both increase the physical harm to a victim of violence and also reduce the need for physical harm in victims of robbery. Because weapons serve simultaneously offensive and defensive purposes, the way in which offenders carry and use weapons is subject to a complex decision-making process. This process is presented and interpreted from a rational perspective, incorporating an offender’s calculation of potential benefits and costs as well as the uncertainty of a victim’s response. A rational analysis of weapon carrying and use is presented along with research evidence suggesting that culture and availability are important influences on weapon of choice and weapon-related behavior. The chapter concludes with a review of the effectiveness of weapons in reducing victim resistance and retaliation showing that weapon use is a high-reward/high-cost activity.
Simulating Crime Event Decision Making
Authors: Birks Daniel
Published: June 2017

Crime is the result of numerous interconnected and interdependent crime event decisions made by potential offenders, victims, and crime preventers. The majority of these decisions go unobserved, and the situations within which they take place are difficult to control in support of traditional experimental studies. For these reasons, it can be difficult to identify causal links between individual behavior and observable crime phenomena and, in turn, to assess the veracity of proposed crime event decision calculi. This chapter discusses the use of agent-based modeling (ABM), and particularly agent-based social simulation (ABSS), in studying such crime event decision calculi. It outlines how ABM can be used to construct formal models of crime event actors, the decisions they make, and the interactions that occur among them. Subsequently, it proposes that ABSS provide unique means to formally assess the explanatory capacity of proposed crime event decision calculi in explaining observable characteristics of crime.
“Deciding” to Kill
Authors: Brookman Fiona , Wright Michelle
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the cognitive, affective, and situational factors that influence the decision-making processes of those who kill. With little existing research that specifically focuses on homicide offender decision making, this chapter brings together criminological and psychological research on violence-related cognition, affect, and the situational dynamics of violent encounters. The authors make the case for combining these three perspectives in order to better understand decision making and homicide. Four case studies, two cases of homicide and two of sublethal encounters, illuminate offenders’ thoughts and feelings prior to and during the commission of the offense and illustrate the complex interplay of cognitive, affective, and situational factors in lethal and near-lethal events. The chapter concludes with proposed avenues for future research.
The Reasoning Sex Offender
Authors: Beauregard Eric
Published: June 2017

Although not well supported by empirical evidence, there exists a long tradition of beliefs suggesting that sex offenders suffer from mental disorders and are mainly driven by an uncontrollable impulse to sexually offend. Despite accumulating evidence showing the versatility of sex offenders, researchers have yet to examine their decision making similar to what has been done with other types of criminals (e.g., robbers, burglars, shoplifters, and car thieves). This chapter presents a review of the literature on the decision making involved in sexual crimes, specifically focusing on the decision making involved at the different crime stages—that is, before, during, and following the crime. Therefore, the goal is to take the reader through the different decision points an offender has to go through when committing a sexual crime. By doing so, this chapter aims to show that sex offenders are “reasoning” offenders similar to other types of criminals.
Burglary Decisions
Authors: Coupe Timothy
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines burglary event decisions, decisions leading up to the burglary, and the burglary characteristics that provide insights into them. It critically reviews the evidence on burglary decisions; highlights gaps in knowledge, methodologies, and aspects of theory; and discusses the potential for additional research. It draws on studies based on interviews and experimental research with imprisoned offenders and, less commonly, active burglars, as well as research on targeting patterns and burglary target characteristics. Topics are ordered to consider theories, targeting strategies, and selection decisions; decisions at the scene relating to entering, while inside, and leaving premises; decisions about which goods to steal and their disposal; and the evaluation of successful and unsuccessful decisions. The extent to which selected theories help explain key decisions is critically assessed.
Biosocial Criminology and Models of Criminal Decision Making
Authors: Treiber Kyle
Published: June 2017

This chapter explores how integrating the science of criminal decision making and contemporary biosocial criminology can benefit our understanding of why people make criminal action decisions and the role of biological factors. It reviews relevant biosocial findings but argues that efforts to link them to criminal decision making are limited by the lack of a strong model of the action process. It then compares how key components of this process—motivation, perception, and choice—are portrayed in models of criminal decision making with what is currently known about their biomechanics. It concludes that models of criminal decision making would benefit from the integration of evidence from the biological sciences and that some common assumptions may need to be reconsidered. It argues that biosocial criminology would benefit from a stronger, more biologically informed model of criminal decision making, which could better explain the role of biological factors in crime causation.
Situational Crime Prevention and Offender Decision Making
Authors: Sidebottom Aiden , Tilley Nick
Published: June 2017

This chapter focuses on situational crime prevention, a method for reducing opportunities for crime by manipulating the immediate environment. It begins by charting the origins and development of situational crime prevention. It then describes how rational choice was later added as the model of offender decision making to underpin situational crime prevention. Three questions are then considered: Is rational choice the only possible theoretical underpinning for situational crime prevention? Is rational choice a satisfactory account of offender decision making? Does rational choice need to be supplemented for the purposes of crime prevention research and practice, and if so, with what?
Personality and Offender Decision Making
Authors: Jones Shayne
Published: June 2017

This chapter introduces readers to the notion of personality and how it relates to offending through decision making. It also demonstrates the importance of personality to criminological inquiry more generally. The chapter begins with an explanation of what is personality, with a focus on two of the more common structural models used to measure it. In addition, a review of the robust association between personality and offending is provided. This is followed by an explanation of the theoretical and empirical linkages between personality and offender decision making. The final section provides readers with a sense of how personality can be better integrated into criminology and the advantages that can be realized by doing so.
From Objectivity to the Absolute Idea in Hegel’s Logic
Authors: Kreines James
Published: June 2017

The topic of this chapter is the difficult conclusion of Hegel’s Science of Logic, concerning what Hegel calls ‘Objectivity’ and the ‘Absolute Idea’. It is argued that there are two keys to finding Hegel’s argument and its philosophical strengths. First, Hegel takes a kind of metaphysics as basic to philosophy. Second, Hegel aims to support an ambitious metaphysics, but not (as is sometimes thought) a form of metaphysical monism; rather, Hegel argues that there is something with absolute metaphysical priority, but this is something that must be realized in something with less metaphysical priority. This is what Hegel means by the frequent refrain that the absolute cannot be a beginning, but must come at the end. The advantages of this metaphysical interpretive approach are compared with competing advantages of others, including an approach by means of a comparison with the deductions from the Transcendental Analytic of Kant’s first Critique.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Art
Authors: Moland Lydia L.
Published: June 2017

Despite Hegel’s effusive praise for art as one of the ways humans express truth, art by his description is both essentially limited and at perpetual risk of ending. This hybrid assessment is apparent first in Hegel’s account of art’s development, which shows art culminating in classical sculpture’s perfect unity, but then, unable to depict Christianity’s interiority, evolving into religion, surrendering to division, or dissipating into prose. It is also evident in his ranking of artistic genres from architecture to poetry according to their ability to help humans produce themselves both individually and collectively: the more adequately art depicts human self-understanding, the more it risks ceasing to be art. Nevertheless, art’s myriad endings do not exhaust its potential. Art that makes humans alive to the unity and interdependence at the heart of reality continues to express the Idea and so achieves Hegel’s ambitions for its role in human life.
Hegel’s Jena Practical Philosophy
Authors: Nance Michael
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the development of Hegel’s Jena social and political philosophy prior to the publication of the Phenomenology, with a focus on Hegel’s engagement with Fichte. Hegel’s culminating project in his Jena practical philosophy involves synthesizing two social ideals: classical Greek communitarianism and modern liberal individualism. According to Hegel’s conception, the classical communitarian ideal threatens a form of nihilism: the destruction of free, independent subjectivity. The modern individualist ideal, by contrast, threatens atomism: the breakdown of community attachments in favor of the pursuit of private interests. Hegel’s Jena project is to avoid nihilism and atomism by synthesizing the two ideals into one coherent picture of ethical life. Two related conceptual innovations prove crucial to this project: first, the idea that human agency is formed through a struggle for recognition; and second, the idea that modern ethical life is a shape of objective spirit.
Marx and Hegel
Authors: Shuangli Zhang
Published: June 2017

This chapter argues that the intellectual relationship between Marx and Hegel is characterized by Marx’s threefold inheritance of Hegel’s philosophical legacy. First, through the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, Marx put forward the critique of civil society as the task of thinking. Then, through the comparative reading of Hegel’s Philosophy and political economy, Marx acquired the perspective for carrying out his critique of civil society, that is, to analyze the historical character of civil society through investigating the relations of labor division in it. Finally, through the critique of social domination within capitalist society, especially the intertwinement of the reification of social relations and the standpoint of “the understanding,” Marx realized that Hegel’s dialectic is precisely the method to carry out the project of critique of political economy. Based on this, the chapter also explains why Hegel’s philosophy was criticized by Marx as ideological.
Hegel’s Revival in Analytic Philosophy
Authors: deVries Willem A.
Published: June 2017

Analytic philosophy is rediscovering Hegel. This chapter examines a particularly strong thread of new analytic Hegelianism, sometimes called ‘Pittsburgh Hegelianism’, which began with the work of Wilfrid Sellars. In trying to bring Anglo-American philosophy from its empiricist phase into a more sophisticated, corrected Kantianism, Sellars moved in substantially Hegelian directions. Sellars’s work has been extended and revised by his Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell and Robert B. Brandom. The sociality and historicity of reason, the proper treatment of space and time, conceptual holism, inferentialism, the reality of conceptual structure, the structure of experience, and the nature of normativity are the central concerns of Pittsburgh Hegelianism.
Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology
Authors: Jenkins Scott
Published: June 2017

This chapter argues that the wide range of topics that Hegel considers in the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit titled “Self-Consciousness”—including desire, recognition, death, work, and spirit—are all components of a non-genetic account of the self-conscious experience enjoyed by all persons. For Hegel, self-consciousness is essentially practical insofar as it involves a desiring relation to objects, and it is essentially social insofar as that relation becomes self-consciousness only through the recognition of other subjects whose ends constrain one’s own desiring activity. Hegel presents this position on self-consciousness through the figure of the bondsman that relates to itself as a subject only by recognizing the authority of others. This chapter concludes by considering how Hegel’s rethinking of the norms of self-conscious thought and action as ‘spirit’ both grounds his position on the unboundedness of cognitive capacities and makes necessary an examination of the historical development of spirit.
Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit
Authors: Alznauer Mark
Published: June 2017

Chapter 6 shows how and why Hegel’s general project in Phenomenology leads him to develop the kind of social theory we find in Spirit. The author argues that Spirit provides an intrinsically normative history of modernity: one that can simultaneously explain and justify the quintessentially modern commitment to freedom. This account focuses on two key philosophic claims Hegel makes: first, that guidance by practical reason is only possible if one belongs to a certain kind of social life, one characteristic of free nations; and, second, that the history of European civilization can be reconstructed as the progressive resolution of the necessary internal contradictions that afflict free nations.
Absolute Knowledge and the Ethical Conclusion of the Phenomenology
Authors: Moyar Dean
Published: June 2017

Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic that the deduction of the concept of science was accomplished at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit in ‘Absolute Knowledge.’ This chapter links the deduction claim to the metaphor of a ladder to science that Hegel discusses in the Phenomenology Preface, and to the sublation of the form of objectivity that is the focus of ‘Absolute Knowledge.’ It argues that this reconciliation of self-consciousness with objectivity coincides with the task of unifying the theoretical and practical domains. Once one appreciates that Hegel’s goal is such a unification, one can see why he holds that the agent of conscience is already quite close to possessing absolute knowledge. The agent’s knowledge in deliberation, together with the agent’s relation to other agents in the process of recognizing action on conscience, has the same conceptual form as the complete theoretical object, the expanded version of the Concept, or inferential objectivity.
Love, Jealousy, and Compersion
Authors: de Sousa Ronald
Published: June 2017

Jealousy is widely regarded as a “negative emotion.” Recently, however, there have been attempts to rehabilitate it, either as biologically functional or even as a moral virtue. This chapter rejects these defenses. It suggests that the standard jealousy-eliciting sexual or romantic situation can and sometimes should be re-gestalted as an occasion for “compersion,” or joy taken in the loved one’s pleasure and happiness. The possibility of such a transmutation is suggested by the fact that a common core of arousal can sometimes elicit contrary emotional responses, depending on the framing story in terms of which it is construed. The idea also draws support from an analogy with the dual nature of pain, as both sensation and aversive/motivation. If an aversive jealousy response can be converted into compersion in the way suggested, it would illustrate an important aspect of the mutability of emotions. It would also have highly desirable practical consequences.
Compassion
Authors: Cassell Eric J.
Published: June 2017

Compassion is a feeling evoked by the serious troubles of another where the onlooker can identify with the sufferer and believes that it is possible that he or she might have the same difficulty. The troubles must not be self-inflicted. Discussions of compassion go back to Aristotle, although they were originally called “pity.” The idea of compassion rests on beliefs about the social nature of everyday life as well as clear evidence of identification with others, which is even found in newborns. The everyday world is a social world. The place of the internet and contemporary social media in these processes is discussed. The idea of spirit is discussed, as are the religious and philosophical origins of the idea. Social situations where compassion is absent are discussed. The importance of compassion in medicine is stressed. Suffering, its definition and its importance in compassion are covered.
Speculation, Conceptualization, or Evidence?
Authors: Downey Christina A. , Henderson Reggie E.
Published: June 2017

This chapter traces the history of examinations of well-being since the founding of psychology in 1879. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) asserted that positive psychology as a scientific discipline was to focus on empirical examinations of valued individual experiences and traits, as well as group and institutional characteristics that mark positive functioning. Positive psychology set parameters on the types of evidence that would be given credence in the field. Many scholars had described well-being prior to 2000, but much of this work could not counted as within the bounds of the new positive psychology because of how the different movements approached gathering evidence. Therefore, the founding of positive psychology represented another step in an ongoing debate in psychology regarding the conduct of scientific research on human characteristics and behavior, and its accomplishments can be viewed as a paradigm shift in the study of well-being.
Manchester
Authors: Nevell Michael
Published: June 2017

This chapter provides an overview of one of the most significant nineteenth-century industrial cities: Manchester. It reviews the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century background to the emergence of the nineteenth-century industrial city: weak local lordship and the concentration of commercial power in a small group of entrepreneurial textile families. What emerged was a template for the industrial city: an urban-based textile manufacturing centre with dedicated workers’ housing serviced by a detailed and efficient transport network. This model would be copied by cities in Europe and North America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The outline of the nineteenth-century industrial city is described through its archaeology, in the form of standing structures and excavated evidence. This includes the canal and railway infrastructure, the excavation of workers’ housing and the recording of surviving workshop dwellings, and the survey and excavation of Manchester’s most important manufacturing type-site: the steam-powered cotton spinning mill.
Far Behind the Front
Authors: Pettersson Claes
Published: June 2017

The ascent of Sweden as a major military power in Northern Europe in the seventeenth century is forever connected to the Thirty Years War. The story of King Gustavus Adolphus, and battles like Breitenfeld, Lech, Lützen, and Nördlingen mark the real beginning of the Swedish Age of Greatness. In recent decades battlefield archaeology has proved important in describing these events, widening our understanding of the military actions and their effects on local populations. This chapter focuses on Jönköping, a Swedish town where the early modern period has been examined archaeologically over three decades. This town can be used as a metaphor for Sweden during the seventeenth century as the inherent weakness of the new empire becomes evident. Events here exemplify both the visions held by the absolutist state and their consequences for ordinary people. The chapter also provides a background to the mobilization of local resources and logistics that made the Swedish war effort of 1627–48 possible.
Middle East
Authors: Bouwen Frans
Published: June 2017

The Middle East is marked by a rich diversity of church traditions. This has historically given rise to divisions, and every search for Christian unity must find a delicate balance between unity and diversity. The Middle East Council of Churches, which includes almost all of the historical churches, is a privileged instrument in this ecumenical endeavour, through its main units on faith and unity, education and renewal, life and service, and its programme on interreligious dialogue. It has met with various difficulties over the years but has recently made a new start. Some bilateral pastoral agreements deserve to be highlighted. Ecumenical relations are also conditioned by political instability in the region, which differs from country to country. Christians in the region have a strong awareness of belonging together, facing the same challenges, and being called to work together for their future. An ecumenism of martyrdom has become part of life.
Games
Authors: Bloom Gina
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the historical intersections between theatre and games in order to understand the formal dimensions of spectatorship within the specific institution of the early modern theatre and the dramas staged within it. It considers how early modern card and board games would have trained theatre audiences in the performative conventions of a newly commercialized stage, and how theatricality itself becomes a kind of game whose rules are explored, modified, and constantly reinvented through their performance by actors and the audiences who watched them. It shows that staged parlour games in the plays A Woman Killed with Kindness and Arden of Faversham call upon audiences to participate in theatre in ways that are reminiscent of traditional and rival entertainment forms. It also argues that game scenes in drama do not simply theatricalize the everyday activity of playing games in a tavern or parlour. Rather, they take advantage of the fact that the experiences of gameplay and of theatre-going were commensurate on a number of levels.
Festivity
Authors: Lin Erika T.
Published: June 2017

This chapter locates festivity within the early modern theatre. Through an analysis of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, it considers how holidays functioned not as communal rituals but as commodified entertainments; how one-off experiences tied to the cyclical rhythms of the seasons came to be understood as performances that could be enacted year-round—that is, rendered intelligible as theatre within linear models of historical time; and how playing came to be imagined not only as a mode of sociality but also as a vendible commodity. The chapter shows how the commercialization of theatre altered the economic exchanges at the heart of traditional festivity and argues that the professional stage was engaged in a complex project to situate its own performances in relation to existing festive practices. By focusing on early modern contexts, it highlights the ways in which theatricality serves and produces multiple—and, from a modern perspective, often unexpected—cultural functions and effects.
Optics
Authors: Crane Mary Thomas
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines one of the most problematic aspects of early modern theatre: its vexed relation to sight, seeing, spectacle, and illusion. It considers whether theatre offered the audience a version of the truth or a deceptive illusion, or whether it offered an illusion that had no effect on reality or one that could influence and transform it in some way. It explores the relationship between theatre and visual illusion by focusing on four plays: Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar. It shows that early modern plays persistently delegitimize visual technologies in order to assert the theatre’s distinctiveness and legitimacy as a mimetic medium by transforming optics into a deceptive, magical practice.
Now
Authors: Maisano Scott
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines a fundamental formal and phenomenological dimension to theatrical experience—time—and notes that the essence of theatre is ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. Building on the foundational work of Antonin Artaud, the chapter rethinks the problem of theatrical occasionality and argues that the temporal unit favoured by Performance Studies—the presentness of the ‘now’— must be abandoned in favour of an alternative idea of temporality that is at once as old as Parmenides and Zeno and as new as Albert Einstein and string theory. It considers the character of Time in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a singular and strange choric figure, granting us a metaphysical view of time and of life beyond what we know from our mundane, earthly, individual human existences. It argues that The Winter’s Tale amounts to nothing less than a theatrical experiment in the nature of time itself as at once a perceived, represented, and actualized series of events.
Hospitality
Authors: Lupton Julia Reinhard
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the longstanding interrelationships among theatre, households, and what it calls ‘acts of reception’: the performed rituals of welcoming, accommodating, sharing, and dwelling, as well as their more inhospitable alternatives. It considers what hospitality might have to do with theatricality, what they have in common, and what each renders visible in the other. It also explores hospitality’s connections with biopolitics, political theology, and political ecology, and more specifically the confluence of its biopolitical, political–theological, and political–ecological investments. It shows how life in hospitality events manifests itself as theatre and how scenes of accommodation and conviviality and their refusal or violation abound in the mythic situations of dramatic literature. Finally, it explains how the dramatic character of hospitality—its generation of occasions for consumption, enjoyment, and wonder as well as resistance, scepticism, and betrayal—intertwines it with theatricality as a simultaneously formal and material effect.
Becoming-Indian
Authors: Harris Jonathan Gil
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines how travellers to the New World and to India made sense of their encounters by framing them specifically in reference to the performance techniques and even the architecture of the theatre, in ways both positive and negative. It first considers John Smith’s description of what he calls a ‘Virginia Maske’ in his Generall History of Virginia (1624), a reminder of how the specific textures of early modern theatricality rather than a generalized, abstract notion of performance shaped travellers’ understandings of ‘all the world’s a stage’. It then looks at the case of Thomas Coryate, England’s first travel writer, to show how theatrical performance became a means of self-transformation in both mind and body, an act of imaginative self-incorporation that blurred subject with object and dissolved the boundaries of cultural identities. It also discusses the theatricality of the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, as described in 1616 by Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe.
Passions
Authors: Hoxby Blair
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the theory of the passions in relation to early modern theatre. It first considers the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics and particularly how the writings of ancient critics located the essence of tragedy in the passions that it imitated and aroused. It then turns to John Dryden and John Milton, who both regarded the passions, not ‘character’, as the most important objects of imitation, and reconstructs a critical and poetic world in which the ‘personation’ of passion was thought to be essential to the formal capacities of theatre and the source of the profound collective experiences it made possible. It also explores the passions in dramatic poetry and on stage, along with the emergence of character as a more important unit of dramatic meaning than passion. The chapter concludes by suggesting that William Shakespeare also sought to represent and sway the passions, and therefore did not lie outside the mainstream of early modern theatre.
Off-stage
Authors: Womack Peter
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines the dynamic construction of the off-stage space and the ways in which it renders the stage radically incomplete. More specifically, it considers how early modern performance replaces the absolute, sacred, and cosmic space of medieval performance with a newly secularized space of representation that could become fictional in a way that the medieval stage could not. To highlight the moment when the stage is empty and the audience is listening to an off-stage sound effect, the chapter offers a reading of the tragedy The Insatiate Countess. It shows that the playhouse stage is not an ‘absolute space’, but is irreducibly relational: a space-between, a threshold. It explains how this threshold might work in theatrical practice through an analysis of Richard III. It also discusses Arden of Faversham to demonstrate that the domestic version of ‘within’ has one spatial signification in particular: it is the woman’s place. Finally, it looks at the tiring-house as domestic chamber to illustrate the doctrine that certain things are withdrawn from view because they are forbidden.
Skill
Authors: Tribble Evelyn
Published: June 2017

This chapter examines early modern theatricality through the lens of skill. It seeks to reclaim a positive account of the skill and expertise of early modern players, arguing that attention to skill has the potential to reorganize the categories through which we view the early modern theatre. It considers how feats of skill inform our understanding of specific plays by describing an ‘ecological’ model of theatrical skill. It contends that theatre must be relocated onto a continuum with other occasional public games and entertainments, all of which required special combinations of physical, verbal, and cognitive abilities. By attending to the traces, gaps, and fissures in playtexts that open a space for embodied performance practices, the chapter shows that the theatrical experience can be apprehended and evaluated in ways that are quite different from those of much twentieth-century criticism and that require a more complex cognitive and environmental approach to the theatrical event.
Historical Approaches in Revealing the Singing Voice, Part 2
Authors: Schutte Harm K.
Published: June 2017

This chapter describes the development of research on singing in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the current century, with an emphasis on the unique work of the author and colleagues in Groningen, the Netherlands. Research in professional singing has been primarily oriented towards aerodynamic, e.g., flow-related topics, driven by the Bernoulli concept and also the increasing availability of measuring equipment. Simultaneous measurements of flow and subglottic pressure in normal individuals and patients are described, after which the value of these measurements is discussed. Advances in computing have facilitated studying in real time the aligning of formants with harmonics of the voice source over the whole singing range. Because of these new possibilities, studying and comparing singing voice registration events became much easier, and could be integrated into the singing studio. The transition from air-flow concepts to resonance effects is emphasized.
The Archaeology of Figurines and the Human Body in Prehistory
Authors: Meskell Lynn
Published: June 2017

In recent decades the analysis of figurines has been theorized within the broader context of archaeology and material culture, and they have lately become the subject of discussions concerning embodiment, sexuality, performance, personhood, practice, and process. Instead of being separated from other areas of excavation, figurine studies are now more likely to be embedded in interdisciplinary research and to be the subject of scientific research. This review chapter begins with a discussion of figurines as material things in themselves, rather than reflections or resemblances of other externalities. More than other kinds of material culture, we want to know what figurines meant for their makers, because they evoke something so distinctly human. I then outline particular case studies at the forefront in the archaeological context, detailing how novel, explicitly interdisciplinary research is making new types of knowledge possible. I conclude with a series of interlinked studies from the site of Çatalhöyük.
Comparative Perspectives in the Interpretation of Prehistoric Figurines
Authors: Lesure Richard G.
Published: June 2017

The interpretation of prehistoric figurines used to be wildly comparative, most infamously in claims that early figurines, everywhere, represented goddesses. Now, instead, analysts seek to contextualize figurines, emphasizing variable meanings and uses. From the contextualist perspective, comparison itself appears to have been discredited. This chapter argues that contextualist misgivings are legitimate but surmountable; indeed, comparison between contexts is unavoidable. A framework for putting comparison on a sounder footing is described and applied to the Neolithic of the Near East. It turns out that there is indeed patterning at very large scales in the record of prehistoric figurine-making. A narrow contextualism is therefore not enough. Instead of rejecting comparison, we need to work on ways of doing it better.
Southern Africa
Authors: Schoeman Alex
Published: June 2017

Excavations of Southern African farming community sites have yielded two figurine types. The first comprises coarse clay figurines found in clusters in central areas in homesteads. These clusters contained anthropomorphic and animal figurines that resemble material culture used in twentieth-century southernmost African initiation schools. The second figurine type, associated with domestic areas, is finer and included toys and stylized human figurines. The stylized human figurines resemble historical figures that embodied ideas about male ownership over the female body, procreative powers, and spirit. The decorations on the stylized female figurines resemble body scarification that might have been used to express personhood. This chapter suggests that the production and use of these clay figurines were enmeshed in ideas about sex and gender, and that figurines materialized ideas, in both ceremonial and domestic contexts, about the adult body as sexed and gendered.
West Africa
Authors: Insoll Timothy
Published: June 2017

Figurines are widely found in archaeological contexts in West Africa. Mostly of clay, more rarely in stone or wood, they served varied purposes. This chapter explores archaeological figurines from across West Africa, focusing upon the main regional concentrations in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, before considering broader interpretive themes. These figurines were ascribed different meanings and had diverse functions. Ancestor figurines recur. Others were perhaps linked with healing and medicine. The internal cavities found in some suggest they might have been perceived as power objects; considered as invested with personhood of some form. Many are found in ritual contexts—shrines, burials—and were likely linked with religions. Others were probably toys. What they seem not to have been is ‘art’, and when labelled as such they become commoditized, and the target of looters and dealers in illegally obtained figurines from West Africa.
Mesoamerica—Olmec Figurines
Authors: Pool Christopher A.
Published: June 2017

The study of Olmec figurines has proven contentious with respect to defining Olmec style, the relation of Olmec style to the Olmec archaeological culture of Mexico’s southern Gulf lowlands, and the representation of social categories, particularly gender categories. Focusing on the Early and Middle Formative ceramic figurine traditions of Olman, the ‘Olmec heartland’ of the southern Gulf lowlands, this chapter reviews previous classifications, examines variation and change in technical and aesthetic styles from a community-of-practice perspective, and discusses the figural representation of gender, age, and other social categories. Variation in the contexts and social uses of Olmec-style figurines outside of the southern Gulf lowlands underscores their reinterpretation within different webs of social identities. Viewing variation in figurine assemblages as the consequence of differential participation of makers and users in overlapping communities of practice offers advantages for conceptualizing the formal variation within Formative figurine styles.
Mesoamerica—Highland Formative (Early to Middle Formative) Figurines
Authors: Blomster Jeffrey P.
Published: June 2017

Figurines are ubiquitous during the Early to Middle Formative (1400–500 bc) throughout the Mesoamerican highlands. As materializations of embodiment, figurines represent productions and performances of cultural practices. Two theses are pursued in this chapter: synchronic juxtapositions in figurine style evince strategies and negotiations of social actors, referencing identity, gender, social norms, affiliation, status and rank, and/or ethnicity, while diachronic changes in figurine frequency and style may reflect larger societal processes. Through comparisons of excavated Early and Middle Formative figurine assemblages from two major highland regions, the southern highlands (the Valleys of Oaxaca and Nochixtlán) and the central highlands (the Basin of Mexico, Puebla, and Morelos), as well as brief comparative detours to Olmec-style figurines from the Gulf Coast and Mokaya figurines from Soconusco, the chapter explores entanglements between synchronic aesthetic negotiations and diachronic changes in figurines and socio-political transformations.
Figurine Traditions from the Amazon
Authors: Barreto Cristiana
Published: June 2017

Stone and ceramic figurines occurred in many pre-Columbian cultures of Amazonia but only appear as recurrent, traditional objects late in the cultural history of the region, primarily in the large settlements which flourished along the Lower Amazon and its estuaries. Marajoara and Santarém ceramics include an array of figurines depicting humans and animals, in languages emphasizing body transformation and reproduction, and, sometimes, decapitation. Some also performed as rattles, or maracas, an instrument traditionally related to shamanic power. Stone figurines from the Lower Amazon present similar modes of body representation and seem to be part of the drug paraphernalia used in shamanic rituals. Rather than being a marker for the appearance of more complex, agrarian societies, Amazonian figurines seem to be related to the intensification of deeply rooted shamanic practices. This chapter reviews the context and repertoires of figurine traditions within the different models proposed in Amazonian archaeology for pre-Columbian societies.