bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Development and plasma characterization of an 850 MHz surface-wave plasma source
Authors: Sahu B. B. , Koga S. , Toyoda H. , Han Jeon G.
Published: October 2017

This work presents a simple design of surface wave plasma (SWP) source based on cylindrical cavity excited by ∼ 850 MHz ultra high frequency (UHF) wave. The cavity equipped with four rectangular slots demonstrates the usefulness of a large aperture coupling for plasma generation using top-wall excitation. The UHF power is coupled to the plasma through an upper dielectric wall placed at the open end of a coaxial transmission line that is short-circuited at the other end to construct a coaxial transmission line resonator. Using high-frequency microwave simulation the structure of the cylindrical cavity and the slots are designed and fabricated. Numerous plasma diagnostic methods are used to study the plasma characteristics and the mechanism of surface wave (SW) plasma generation. The plasma generation capability of the source is investigated at various operating pressures and UHF powers. It is seen that reasonably radial uniform plasmas with a very high plasma density ∼ 1011 cm-3 can be produced by a wide variation of pressures from 10 mTorr to 180 mTorr. Further, the usefulness of this UHF plasma source for large area plasma application is realized.
Surface discharge induced interactions of filaments in argon dielectric barrier discharge at atmospheric pressure
Authors: Li Xuechen , Zhang Panpan , Chu Jingdi , Zhang Qi , Lin Xiaotong , Jia Pengying , Dong Lifang
Published: October 2017

A needle-plate geometry is used to generate two barrier-discharge filaments composed of volume discharge and surface discharge in atmospheric pressure argon, interactions of which are investigated for the first time on the nanosecond timescale using an intensified charge-coupled device. The results indicate that the onset of volume discharges for the two filaments have a periodical discharge sequence, which implies interactions of the two filaments. Moreover, strong interactions of the two filaments are controlled through surface discharges, one of which is induced by that of the other filament during the positive discharge. Different from repulsive streamers, counter-propagating streamers are attractive between the two filaments.
Anisotropic kinetic energy release and gyroscopic behavior of CO2 super rotors from an optical centrifuge
Authors: Murray Matthew J. , Ogden Hannah M. , Mullin Amy S.
Published: October 2017

An optical centrifuge is used to generate an ensemble of CO2 super rotors with oriented angular momentum. The collision dynamics and energy transfer behavior of the super rotor molecules are investigated using high-resolution transient IR absorption spectroscopy. New multipass IR detection provides improved sensitivity to perform polarization-dependent transient studies for rotational states with 76 ≤ J ≤ 100. Polarization-dependent measurements show that the collision-induced kinetic energy release is spatially anisotropic and results from both near-resonant energy transfer between super rotor molecules and non-resonant energy transfer between super rotors and thermal molecules. J-dependent studies show that the extent and duration of the orientational anisotropy increase with rotational angular momentum. The super rotors exhibit behavior akin to molecular gyroscopes, wherein molecules with larger amounts of angular momentum are less likely to change their angular momentum orientation through collisions.
Mychodea and the Mychodeaceae (Gigartinales, Rhodophyta) revisited: molecular analyses shed light on interspecies relationships in Australia’s largest endemic algal genus and family
Authors: Kraft Gerald T. , Saunders Gary W.
Published: October 2017

The red algal genus Mychodea Hook.f. & Harv. is not only Australia’s largest wholly endemic macroalgal genus, it and the family Mychodeaceae (of which it is the sole member) appear to be the largest completely endemic algal genus and family from any continental landmass in the world. Kraft’s 1978 morpho-taxonomic monograph credited Mychodea with 11 species varyingly distributed between Geraldton, Western Australia, south and eastward across the coasts of South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, and northwards into southern New South Wales. Dismissed or discounted was every former extra-Australian attribution of the genus. In the over 40 years since completion of the research, further explorations of marine habitats in Australia have uncovered additional species, and the application of molecular-assisted taxonomic and phylogenetic methodologies has now allowed a substantial refinement of Mychodea systematics. We here document 19 Mychodea species, for 16 of which we have molecular data that support inferences of probable species relationships. To the 11 species treated by Kraft we now add 4 that are recently discovered, resurrect 2 that were synonymised with a third species in his 1978 work, and treat 2 species-level Western Australian entities that remain unnamed for lack of sufficient reproductive material. Mychodea is characterised by elaborate vegetative structures and some of the most complex fertilisation, diploidisation and embryogenesis processes of any red alga, which we detail and illustrate. Distinguishing features of the individual species are highlighted, some of which are particularly unusual.
A revision of the Triodia basedowii species complex and close relatives (Poaceae: Chloridoideae)
Authors: Anderson Benjamin M. , Thiele Kevin R. , Barrett Matthew D.
Published: October 2017

Perennial grasses commonly known as ‘spinifex’ (Triodia R.Br.) are iconic Australian plants, predominantly found in the arid interior of the continent. In some areas, such as the economically important Pilbara region of Western Australia, current species taxonomy does not account for observed diversity. Previous morphological and molecular studies of Triodia basedowii E.Pritz. and related species have revealed multiple unnamed lineages requiring taxonomic recognition. Here, we describe and name eight new species of Triodia, including T. birriliburu B.M.Anderson, T. chichesterensis B.M.Anderson, T. glabra B.M.Anderson & M.D.Barrett, T. infesta B.M.Anderson & M.D.Barrett, T. mallota B.M.Anderson & M.D.Barrett, T. nana B.M.Anderson, T. scintillans B.M.Anderson & M.D.Barrett, and T. vanleeuwenii B.M.Anderson & M.D.Barrett. We also provide recircumscriptions and revised descriptions for T. basedowii, T. lanigera Domin, T. concinna N.T.Burb. and T. plurinervata N.T.Burb. A key to species and photographs are included.
Advanced second language learners experience difficulties processing reduced word pronunciation variants
Authors: Ernestus Mirjam , Dikmans Mirte E. , Giezenaar Ghislaine
Published: October 2017

Words are often pronounced with fewer segments in casual conversations than in formal speech. Previous research has shown that foreign language learners and beginning second language learners experience problems processing reduced speech. We examined whether this also holds for advanced second language learners. We designed a dictation task in Dutch consisting of sentences spliced from casual conversations and an unreduced counterpart of this task, with the same sentences carefully articulated by the same speaker. Advanced second language learners of Dutch produced substantially more transcription errors for the reduced than for the unreduced sentences. These errors made the sentences incomprehensible or led to non-intended meanings. The learners often did not rely on the semantic and syntactic information in the sentence or on the subsegmental cues to overcome the reductions. Hence, advanced second language learners also appear to suffer from the reduced pronunciation variants of words that are abundant in everyday conversations.
Keeping up with the monolinguals
Authors: Liu Liquan , Han Mengru , Kager René
Published: October 2017

Previous studies investigating possible differences between monolingual and bilingual infants’ vocabulary development have produced mixed results. The current study examines the size of the total receptive and expressive vocabulary, total conceptual vocabulary, and specific Dutch vocabulary of two hundred 8- to 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants born and living in the Netherlands. Families completed a Dutch version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. Results illustrate that bilingual infants keep up with monolinguals even in Dutch receptive and expressive vocabulary sizes, showing no trace of delay in the development of the socially dominant language. The overall findings constitute an extension of work on vocabulary acquisition and challenge existing theories that suggest a developmental delay among bilingual learners. The equal pace of development between the monolingual and bilingual groups provides new insights into the influence and perhaps advantages of early bilingual language acquisition.
How does coping change with development? A review of childhood and adolescence sport coping research
Authors: Holt Nicholas L. , Hoar Sharleen , Fraser Shawn N.
Published: October 2017

It is important to study how children and adolescents cope with stressors in sport because effective coping enhances sport experiences and prevents psychological and physiological problems that can lead to sport withdrawal. The purpose of this review was to summarize the existing child and adolescent coping research to establish how coping changes with development in the achievement context of sport. We reviewed and summarized relevant coping research published from 1980 to 2004 using a ‘content analysis’ approach to identify consistencies and limitations in this literature. Four content areas were examined: coping responses, gender differences, consistency of coping/coping style, and coping effectiveness. Ways in which coping changes with development from childhood to adolescence were examined within each of these content areas. Fundamental future research questions and implications for research design are presented.
Activation of ROCK and MLCK tunes regional stress fiber formation and mechanics via preferential myosin light chain phosphorylation
Authors: Kassianidou Elena , Hughes Jasmine H. , Kumar Sanjay
Published: October 2017

The assembly and mechanics of actomyosin stress fibers (SFs) depend on myosin regulatory light chain (RLC) phosphorylation, which is driven by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) and Rho-associated kinase (ROCK). Although previous work suggests that MLCK and ROCK control distinct pools of cellular SFs, it remains unclear how these kinases differ in their regulation of RLC phosphorylation or how phosphorylation influences individual SF mechanics. Here, we combine genetic approaches with biophysical tools to explore relationships between kinase activity, RLC phosphorylation, SF localization, and SF mechanics. We show that graded MLCK overexpression increases RLC monophosphorylation (p-RLC) in a graded manner and that this p-RLC localizes to peripheral SFs. Conversely, graded ROCK overexpression preferentially increases RLC diphosphorylation (pp-RLC), with pp-RLC localizing to central SFs. Interrogation of single SFs with subcellular laser ablation reveals that MLCK and ROCK quantitatively regulate the viscoelastic properties of peripheral and central SFs, respectively. The effects of MLCK and ROCK on single-SF mechanics may be correspondingly phenocopied by overexpression of mono- and diphosphomimetic RLC mutants. Our results point to a model in which MLCK and ROCK regulate peripheral and central SF viscoelastic properties through mono- and diphosphorylation of RLC, offering new quantitative connections between kinase activity, RLC phosphorylation, and SF viscoelasticity.
Non-Standard Preferences
Authors: Jappelli Tullio , Pistaferri Luigi
Published: October 2017

In the real world many facts appear to conflict with the assum ptions of the standard life-cycle model and its main hypotheses. The mental accounting model challenges the assumption that resources are fungible. Substantial evidence produced by psychology, laboratory experiments, and empirical studies points out that people do not make time-consistent decisions, leading to the analysis of time-inconsistent preferences and hyperbolic discounting, a model in which rational agents make time-inconsistent decisions. A third critique is that people are in fact not fully informed about financial opportunities (the equity premium, say, or the virtue of diversification). In this chapter we review the literature on financial sophistication. A final departure from the standard approach explicitly models another important fact of life, namely, that our own choices are affected by the choices of other consumers, owing to social preferences.
SeqBox: RNAseq/ChIPseq reproducible analysis on a consumer game computer
Authors: Beccuti Marco , Cordero Francesca , Arigoni Maddalena , Panero Riccardo , Amparore Elvio G , Donatelli Susanna , Calogero Raffaele A
Published: October 2017

Short reads sequencing technology has been used for more than a decade now. However, the analysis of RNAseq and ChIPseq data is still computational demanding and the simple access to raw data does not guarantee results reproducibility between laboratories. To address these two aspects, we developed SeqBox, a cheap, efficient and reproducible RNAseq/ChIPseq hardware/software solution based on NUC6I7KYK mini-PC (an Intel consumer game computer with a fast processor and a high performance SSD disk), and Docker container platform. In SeqBox the analysis of RNAseq and ChIPseq data is supported by a friendly GUI. This allows access to fast and reproducible analysis also to scientists with/without scripting experience.

Availability and implementation

Docker container images, docker4seq package and the GUI are available at http://www.bioinformatica.unito.it/reproducibile.bioinformatics.html.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Further Issues in Humanitarian Intervention
Authors: Tesón Fernando R.
Published: October 2017

The chapter examines three issues addressed in the literature. The first is the objection that governments cannot be trusted with making these intervention decisions. The chapter accepts the force of the objection, but argues that such government failure must be part of the proportionality calculus. The second issue is whether consent matters for intervention. The chapter claims that the consent of the victims' fellow citizens is irrelevant, as is the consent of the incumbent regime and its supporters. And finally, the chapter proposes an alliance of rights-respecting governments as the more plausible institutional alternative to approve and supervise justified interventions.
Appendix The Iraq War
Authors: Tesón Fernando R.
Published: October 2017

RECENT EMPIRICAL RESEARCH HAS CONFIRMED what most of us suspected: some humanitarian interventions succeed, others fail.1 Neither optimistic liberal interventionism nor pessimistic realist noninterventionism have carried the day. Taylor Seybolt lists as reasonably successful interventions the protection of Kurds in northern Iraq in 1992,...
Why Sovereignty (Still) Matters
Authors: Tesón Fernando R.
Published: October 2017

To adequately strike a balance between internal and external threats, we must recognize both that intervention can help mitigate threats that come from within society and that intervention itself poses a threat. While intervention can provide protection against tyrants, warlords, and the like, it can also fail and make matters worse. This chapter argues why this threat balance is likely tilted toward a presumption against intervention. One part of this argument concerns the important role played by sovereignty judgments in international affairs. Another part involves the value of self-determination, which intervention can threaten.
Humanitarian Nonintervention
Authors: Tesón Fernando R.
Published: October 2017

This final chapter further defends the presumption against intervention. It rejects the idea that there’s a duty to intervene, but also shows that the presumption against intervention is not an excuse for inactivity or complacency. Rather, it strengthens the case for alternative ways of addressing the problem of conflict and oppression, such as freeing up international migration.
Introduction
Authors: Wagoner Brady
Published: October 2017

In recent decades, memory has been increasingly conceptualized, within many theoretical and disciplinary fields, as constituted by social and cultural life. This book seizes the opportunity to develop a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue on the ways in which memory and culture mutually constitute one another. In this understanding, memory takes on a dynamic and constructive form that works at the intersection of a community’s continuity with the past and innovation for the future. This book similarly builds on key ideas from the past in order to arrive at new approaches for integrating culture and memory into unified theoretical frameworks. This introduction sets the groundwork for these developments by exploring the different meanings assigned to the terms “culture” and “memory,” outlining key assumptions about memory built upon in this volume, and providing a preview of its chapters.
The Evolutionary Origins of Human Cultural Memory
Authors: Donald Merlin
Published: October 2017

The term cultural memory describes a group’s shared experience, skill, and knowledge that is retained and updated through time. Individual memory has its social roots in this system. Although resources are distributed across different minds in the network, they must all obey the standards of thought and behavior imposed by belonging to it. As such, no single person can carry the burden of the system alone and thus has only modest possibilities of changing it. Cultural memory has evolved in relation to embodied, narrative, and institutional modes of representation. Humans became skilled before they became articulate: The prime driver of early evolution of mind and memory was tool master rather than language. This embodied mode of cultural memory still persists (e.g., in ritual, craft, and the arts) but has been transformed with the emergence of narrative mode and later the theoretical or institutional mode, which is dominant today.
Approaches to Testimony
Authors: Takagi Kotaro , Mori Naohisa
Published: October 2017

This chapter develops an ecological and social approach to testimony as an everyday memory practice. It first analyzes the nature of this practice through a history of psychological testimony for more than a century. In recent decades, two approaches to testimony have been dominant: the cognitive and the discursive one, each with its own problems. A hint at a new theory exists in Neisser’s classic study of “John Dean’s memory.” Neisser introduced the concept of “repisodic memory,” roughly defining this concept as representatives or common characteristics of a series of events, in contrast to “episodic memory,” which refers to the representation of a single event. The chapter examines the concept and integrates it with Gibson’s ecological perspective of perception and Bartlett’s schema theory in a synthesis that combines the two approaches. The validity of the new theory is demonstrated by referring to practical and experimental studies that have been performed.
History, Collective Memories, or National Memories?
Authors: Carretero Mario , van Alphen Floor
Published: October 2017

This chapter analyzes differences between memory and history stemming from a theoretical distinction between romantic and idealized goals and enlightened and critical understanding goals of history education. National narratives and national identity are two key elements in the construction of both collective memories and history education. This chapter analyzes and provides examples of theoretical and empirical work involving six different dimensions of school history narratives: a homogeneous historical subject, identification processes, heroic and idealized key historical figures, a monocausal and teleological account of historical events, moral value judgments, and an essentialist conceptualization of nation and national identity. Finally, a concise analysis of school historical re-enactments as a cultural scenario, which greatly contributes to the interiorization of the previously mentioned narratives, is presented.
“Cheap and Easy Radicalism”
Authors: Burton Justin Adams
Published: October 2017

Kendrick Lamar registers as an explicitly political rapper who speaks against police violence and for black solidarity. But the reception of Kendrick Lamar—the idea of Kendrick as found in journalistic accounts of what he does—actually works against this notion of him as a rapper with progressive politics. This chapter explores the way legible politics can be easily co-opted into the mainstream by considering how Kendrick is received in a post-race, anti-black political discourse. The post-race reception of Kendrick takes the same form as neoliberalism’s creative destruction; his politics parallel neoliberalism’s economics. Lester Spence’s theory of black parallel publics in hip hop is expanded to include more contemporary examples and a post-race milieu.
Intimate Pleasures and the Madness of Love
Authors: Tulloch John , Middleweek Belinda
Published: October 2017

Chapter 7 analyzes the real sex films Ken Park and Irréversible in the context of different sexual/social aesthetics in sexually explicit films by drawing on “old” and “new” forms of narrative theory as a “bridging synthesis” of disciplinary approaches. The different generations of narrative theory alluded to in this chapter concern Will Wright’s old critical realist analysis of the Western genre and Tanya Krzywinska’s new, postmodernist “narrative formula” approach. This chapter opens with narrative comparison of one European and one US real sex film to point to their similar narrative reversals and contradictions in the context of the “normal chaos of love,” with a major focus on Ken Park’s narrative. Wright’s and Krzywinska’s theoretically and generationally different versions of narrative theory are thus drawn together in terms of current risk sociological history and distinguished from each other epistemologically for further consideration in later chapters.
Beyond High Theories of Intimacy
Authors: Tulloch John , Middleweek Belinda
Published: October 2017

Chapter 10 explores the ways in which intertexuality within and between the stages of writing, directing, and performing the film The Piano Teacher create a multi-authored text. In the absence of an ethnography of production impossible for films made in the past, the authors devised a “soft ethnography” approach focused on some key players in this “multiply authored” semiotic model (namely, the prize-winning author, director, and lead actor) to suggest the flow and feedback between these different “signatures” in the text. This soft ethnography is grounded in knowledge of the writer’s discursive history and politics, the director’s television/film sense of liberation via “obscene” cinema, and the actor’s “directing” (via her construction of character) through her performance as a developing part of her star persona. These personal/public negotiations are symptomatic of the reflexive “synthesize and extend” interdisciplinary approach of Real Sex Cinema.
Philosophies of Qualitative Research
Authors: Brinkmann Svend
Published: October 2017

This book is about the different philosophical paradigms and ideas that influence qualitative research. Its aim is to discuss and evaluate the ways that philosophical positions inform qualitative research as currently practiced. Unlike other contributions to the field, this book takes a historical perspective and shows how the philosophical ideas have evolved and influenced qualitative research in previous times and today. Today, qualitative researchers often report on their philosophical commitments (if they do so at all) in a separate section of their papers, but this book is written from the perspective that philosophical ideas influence everything in the research process from the first formulation of a research theme to the final reporting of the results. Therefore, it is preferable to highlight how this happens. Philosophy should thus not be thought of as a purely abstract discipline, disconnected from the practicalities of research, but rather as a concrete and pervasive aspect of all qualitative research practices. This book does not provide in-depth treatments of qualitative methods and techniques such as interviewing, document analysis, or participant observation, but rather aims to introduce and discuss the philosophical issues that are relevant regardless of the specific methods employed by qualitative researchers.
American Philosophies of Qualitative Research
Authors: Brinkmann Svend
Published: October 2017

This chapter introduces the philosophy of pragmatism and its application in the social sciences. In philosophy, there are disagreements between anti-realist pragmatists and realist pragmatists, but all strands of pragmatism conceive of the human being as an active, participating creature who knows the world through acting in it. Methodologically, the core of pragmatism is abduction. Unlike induction (going from many individual instances to general knowledge) and deduction (testing general hypotheses deduced from existing knowledge), abduction begins with a breakdown in our understanding of something and is oriented toward making the indeterminate more determinate in order to facilitate action. This chapter also argues that the pragmatist research ethos can often be described as “making the hidden dubious” because there is a focus on action—what we do, how we experience it, and what the consequences are—rather than on hidden social structures or deeper layers of the social world.
The Social Enterprise Trust Deficit
Authors: Reiser Dana Brakman , Dean Steven A.
Published: October 2017

This chapter explains why social enterprises have more difficulty gaining access to capital than conventional businesses do. It begins with the insight that law lends both for-profits and nonprofits the stability they need to raise capital; legal doctrine and enforcement mechanisms combine to reassure donors and investors that their contributions to standard businesses and charities will be well spent. Using the tools of game theory, the chapter then describes the more challenging assurance problem faced by social enterprise founders and investors. For either an entrepreneur or investor to commit capital to the venture, each must trust the other to remain faithful to both of its dual missions—and particularly to be willing to trade more social good for lower financial returns. The chapter concludes by describing why neither traditional for-profit and nonprofit law nor the first-generation of social enterprise law satisfactorily bridge this trust deficit.
Introduction
Authors: Parker Emily Anne , van Leeuwen Anne
Published: October 2017

This volume returns to Beauvoir, to Irigaray, and to a critical dialogue between their projects. The motivation is not to produce dutiful interpretations that ignore their limits; rather the task here is to identify the most incisive moments of these bodies of work to articulate the trajectories that we find in these projects, ones that they set up as well as ones that they did not and could not have anticipated. We return to Beauvoir and Irigaray because the richness of their thought far exceeds the reductive parameters of a largely white, Eurocentric, bourgeois second-wave debate and because the fecundity these projects as well as an adequate critique of their work remains largely still to be elaborated. We hope that positioning them in critical dialogue will open up one possible richly complex and contested space for multiplicitous contemporary feminist theories.
Toward a “New and Possible Meeting”
Authors: Parker Emily Anne
Published: October 2017

Audre Lorde understood giving isolated conceptual attention to sexual difference to be a tool of social control. I first discuss this claim in the context of Lorde’s philosophy of difference. I argue that Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and All Men Are Mortal offer in the figure of ambiguity a philosophy of difference that anticipates important aspects of that of Lorde: in these Beauvoirian texts ambiguity articulates an approach which is simultaneously ecological and political. However, to find this thread in Beauvoir’s oeuvre, it is necessary to read against images that she uses in both books to index ambiguity: Marianne de Sinclair (in All Men are Mortal) and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (in The Ethics of Ambiguity). These images suggest the conceptual reduction of difference to sexual difference that Lorde warns against. I argue that Beauvoirian ambiguity has a power that can override the two figures that she uses to represent it.
Burial
Authors: Choi Mihwa
Published: October 2017

Burials had become a focal point of some Confucian efforts to build a socio-moral order based on Confucian norms. “Simple burial,” idealized by scholar-officials, used a simple pit tomb with minimal burial items, based on the mainstream Confucian tradition of rejecting literary and material expression of the concrete social imaginaries of the world-beyond. Its focus rested with a tomb inscription tablet highlighting the public accomplishments and virtue of the deceased. On the other hand, many rich merchants were able to conduct a “lavish burial,” believing that the material furnishing of the tomb would actually influence the soul’s transitional process and its well-being in the world-beyond. Nevertheless, there were some exceptional cases that did not fit into the general pattern of correlations between social groups and burial practices, which suggests that tombs tended to remain as private spaces.
Scientific Theories and Fodorian Exceptionalism
Authors: Pylyshyn Zenon W.
Published: October 2017

The chapter sketches how Fodor and I, beginning from different perspectives, were led to make a sharp distinction between registering certain distal objects in visual perception and categorizing and recognizing these objects. The precategorical or nonconceptual operations in categorizing were unlike cognitive processes in general in that they were insensitive to beliefs or to inferences from background knowledge, thus they were barred from using expectations even when the latter were relevant to correct decisions or goal-driven actions. We postulated certain fixed mechanisms of perception—what I called perceptual architecture and Fodor called modules. I explored these mechanisms empirically which led to the notion of indexing by a mechanism I called a FINST.
The Mnemonic Imagination and Second-Generation Migrant Experience
Authors: Keightley Emily , Pickering Michael
Published: October 2017

Drawing on our concept of the mnemonic imagination, this chapter shows how the past is reactivated and pieced together into a relatively coherent narrative in the interests of identity and the effective management of change. In forming the synthetic hub of remembering and imagining, the mnemonic imagination is mobilized in bringing past, present, and future into meaningful correspondence. This chapter illustrates how this happens via an ethnographic case study involving Kia Kapoor, a second-generation Indian woman in her early 30s living in England, who uses her work as a professional photographer to help her negotiate her own difficult past as someone caught between two cultures. The case demonstrates mnemonic imagining at work in a particular cross-generational and cross-cultural context, taking into account how it can be thwarted by various obstacles and how, through considerable resistance and struggle, it can help overcome the consequences of radical sociocultural disruption.
Epilogue
Authors: Ussishkin Daniel
Published: October 2017

The epilogue explores the fate of morale in the aftermath of the period of postwar reconstruction. Morale has remained central to articulations of collective conduct and has come to be accepted as a given. It would play a central role in military discussions of conduct, particularly as it was related to questions of sexuality, while at the workplace notions of morale management ran out of steam and increasingly was understood in terms of individual sense of well-being. The notion of morale was central to the Thatcherite critique of the “postwar consensus,” which was at odds with earlier links between morale and social reconstruction.
Anarchy in the Pure Land
Authors: Ritzinger Justin
Published: October 2017

Anarchy in the Pure Land investigates the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha, promoted by the Chinese Buddhist reform movement spearheaded by Taixu as an avenue through which to consider the formation of alternative modernities. The cult presents an apparent anomaly: It shows precisely the kind of concern for ritual, supernatural beings, and the afterlife that much scholarship contends the reformers rejected in the name of “modernity.” This book shows that rather than a concession to tradition, the reimagining of ideas and practices associated with Maitreya was an important site for formulating a Buddhist vision of modernity. To make sense of this it develops a new perspective on alternative modernities by drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of moral frameworks, arguing that the cult of Maitreya represents an attempt to articulate a new constellation of values that integrates novel understandings of the good clustered around modern visions of utopia with the central Buddhist value of Buddhahood. Part I traces the roots of this constellation to Taixu’s youthful career as an anarchist. Part II examines its articulation in the “Maitreya School’s” theology and the cult’s development from its inception to World War II. Part III examines its subsequent decline and its contemporary legacy within and beyond orthodox Buddhism.
Introduction
Authors: Ritzinger Justin R.
Published: October 2017

The introduction presents the anomaly at the heart of the study: namely, that the “reform faction” of modern Chinese Buddhism, which is generally portrayed as demythologized, promoted devotion to the bodhisattva Maitreya and rebirth in his heavenly pure land. It frames this anomaly in the context of scholarship on modern Buddhism and Chinese religions and lays out a “pull” model of religious modernization derived from the thought of Charles Taylor as a counterbalance to the prevailing “push” models derived from Weberian and postmodernist models. It also introduces the four key aspects of the earlier Maitreyan tradition and offers a discussion of the sources, structure, and significance of the work.
Future Interrupted
Authors: Ritzinger Justin R.
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines the reasons for the decline of the Maitreya School. It suffered first from a series of unfortunate historical happenstances: the devastation of World War II, Taixu’s untimely death in 1947, and the Communist revolution of 1949. Under the Communists on the Mainland, there was no space for further development or propagation of the cult. Under the Nationalists on Taiwan, things were not as dire, but the cult suffered there too. Yinshun, Taixu’s most prominent follower, developed Taixu’s Maitreyan thought in ways that diffused its underlying values while making their radical roots explicit. Under martial law, this provided the pretext for rivals to bring Yinshun down, which had a chilling effect on potential proponents.
How Meditation Works
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: October 2017

Meditation is often described in terms of internal “states” that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently. These practices, however, only “work” in specific social and cultural contexts, and the work they do may be quite different in divergent contexts. McMahan theorizes meditation practices as cultivating ways of being in specific social imaginaries constituted by a cultural repertoire of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, power relations, available identities, structures of authority, and conceptions of the cosmos. This theorization extrapolates from recent studies of the historical embeddedness of psychosomatic illnesses that suggest that certain historical eras generate specific “symptom pools.” This recontextualization of meditation as a cultural practice underlines the necessity of humanistic study of meditation and the impossibility of a totalizing neurophysiological “explanation” of how meditation works.
Reflections on Indian Buddhist Thought and the Scientific Study of Meditation, or
Authors: Waldron William S.
Published: October 2017

One of the fundamental distinctions in the modern academy is the difference between studying human life as people experience it and studying it in terms of impersonal causal processes—the so-called first- and third-person approaches. This dichotomy is reflected in the study of meditation, in which neuroscientists attempt to correlate their “objective” findings with the “subjective” reports of meditators. This very distinction, though, invites two extremes: either these discourses are ultimately incommensurable or one discourse—the subjective—should be reduced to the “true,” objective discourse. This chapter criticizes putatively pure subjectivity or objectivity from Buddhist philosophical perspectives, especially the non-duality of subject and object, and seeks to articulate a middle ground between reductionism and incommensurability.
“Mind the Gap”
Authors: Cook Joanna
Published: October 2017

This chapter focuses on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) in the United Kingdom. It argues that at the levels of both structure and practice, therapists and practitioners frame mindfulness as a method for distinguishing between appearance and reality. Drawing on ethnography from a two-year therapist-training program in MBCT, it is demonstrated that mindfulness and science are understood to produce complementary forms of evidence. Both are framed as protocols for aligning human representation with the ways the world is. This concern to distinguish “appearance” from “reality” also informs the practice of mindfulness. Practitioners work to develop a decentered perspective (to see thoughts as “not really real”). Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s technique of phenomenological modification, it is argued that in both instances—the epistemological equivalency created between scientific and meditative practice, and learning to relate differently to thoughts—the categories of “appearance” and “reality” are created.
“Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t?”
Authors: Cassaniti Julia
Published: October 2017

In his highly influential book Wherever You Go, There You Are (1995) Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests a particular kind of person revealed through mindfulness: a “you” to be found wherever you go. But who are “you”? Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter demonstrates that for many people there is no “you” exposed through Buddhist mindfulness practices, but instead local articulations of ideas about anattā, or non-self. “Spirits” of the person, called khwan, are also implicated: khwan are thought to be vulnerable to dispersal due to a lack of mindfulness, resulting in possible mental disorder. Through an analysis of the multiple constructions of the person in Thailand, the chapter argues that the “you” revealed in mindfulness has less to do with what is scientifically or even religiously real, and more to do with the authority of culturally constructed claims about what that “you” looks like, wherever you go.
Connected by Commitment
Authors: Marin Mara
Published: October 2017

Connected by Commitment examines our obligations to transform structures of oppression and argues that they should be understood on the model of “commitments.” Commitments are relationships of obligation developed over time through the accumulated effect of open-ended actions and responses. The book examines three spheres of social relations (legal relations, intimate relations of care, and work relations) and argues that in each of them oppressive relations are maintained by processes that make a mutual vulnerability invisible and in so doing are able to place it disproportionately on disadvantaged social groups. The notion of commitment is crucial for understanding how these processes can be undermined and oppressive structures can be transformed because it can explain how the cumulative effects of individual actions are implicated in sustaining oppressive relations. For example, understanding legal relations as commitments makes visible the continuous labor of compliance required by the law from those it governs and, in so doing, makes visible both the unequal burdens the law puts on different social groups and the possibilities of resistance intrinsic to the enforcement function of the law. The notion of commitment highlights the fact that we incur obligations to dismantle unjust social structures in virtue of our participation in them over time, of the cumulative effects of our actions, irrespective of our intentions. Commitment is essential to making sense of our collective obligations to transform oppression, and thus it offers a model of solidarity against multiple forms of oppression.
Care, Oppression, and Marriage as Commitment
Authors: Marin Mara
Published: October 2017

Chapter 4 argues that the sphere of intimate care, which takes shape around the practice of attending to each other’s needs, makes us vulnerable to each other. Providing care requires “skills of flexibility” because needs make demands at times that cannot be easily foreseen, change over time, and have to be interpreted. Under current social arrangements and understandings of value, the labor involved in exercising these skills is made invisible, and thus a condition of mutual vulnerability is disproportionately placed on caregivers. This creates two social groups, caregivers and care receivers, that stand in an oppressive, unjust social relation. Marriage law reform should be guided by the aim of remedying this form of injustice. Marriage law should be modeled on the notion of commitment, which would acknowledge the structural, social relational, and open-ended nature of the claims of justice made on behalf of caregivers.
Gabino Barreda and Contemporary Ideas (September 12, 1910)
Authors: Vasconcelos José
Published: October 2017

José Vasconcelos criticizes the view that knowledge is based only on what can be observed and that the world appears to us as a series of phenomena that move from the simple to the complex and from the particular to the general. In general, Vasconcelos is opposed to reducing psychology to biology, as well as reducing ethics to solidarity, altruism, and legacy (the three fundamental ideas of ethics that Barreda borrowed from Comte). Instead, and leaning heavily on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Arthur Schopenhauer, and artists such as Richard Wagner, Vasconcelos faults the Mexican positivist for not being able to see beyond his immediate world, and for failing to appreciate the potential of life or the spirit or the ideal, which cannot be reduced to the material.
Existence as Economy and as Charity
Authors: Caso Antonio
Published: October 2017

Antonio Caso rejects the effort of biologists to reduce life to the organic world, a sphere of existence that is defined by economy and egoism, best summarized in the formula: Life = Minimum Effort x Maximum Gain. The problem is that this cannot explain what he calls “disinterested activity,” such as play, art, and self-sacrifice. His primary example of disinterested or selfless activity is the life of Jesus, which Caso also believes is the height of human dignity. In other words, Caso not only argues that there is more than one order of life or existence; he also argues that selfless activity is ultimately what distinguishes human life, whose best expression is found in the essence of Christianity: to give oneself to others “without fear of exhaustion.” To be human is to be willing to sacrifice oneself, best expressed in the following formula: Sacrifice = Maximum Effort x Minimum Gain.
My Two Cents
Authors: Gaos José
Published: October 2017

In this selection, José Gaos considers the perspectivism of his teacher, José Ortega y Gasset, who famously argued that “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save my circumstance, I do not save myself.” For Gaos, and eventually for Samuel Ramos, this view provided the epistemological justification for a national or continental philosophy—“American philosophy”— insofar as it helped to explain how philosophy could be both universal (concerned with the universe) and circumstantial. Philosophy for Gaos is universal in that it is philosophy sín más (as such), which cannot but acquire a nationality. The only mistake would be to do philosophy for the sake of producing a nationality because that is, in a sense, not doing philosophy.
Philosophy as Commitment (1952)
Authors: Zea Leopoldo
Published: October 2017

Here Leopoldo Zea, the presumptive leader of the Hiperión group, appeals to Sartrean existentialism in order to make his case for the responsibility of philosophy and philosophers. He writes that persons have been thrown into a world that they did not create, which places them in the presence of others for whom they are now responsible. Just as Sartre had announced that persons were condemned to be free, Zea here proclaims that they are condemned to this commitment and this responsibility. This is a call to all Mexican and Latin American philosophers who might believe that the labor of philosophy is of little consequence or that the responsibilities they assume as philosophers are only provisional. Indeed, philosophy as commitment is a philosophy for one’s world, one’s circumstance, and one’s fellows.
On Feminine Culture (1950)
Authors: Castellanos Rosario
Published: October 2017

Sobre cultura femenina is Rosario Castellanos’s first attempt to champion women’s right to participate in the production of culture through certain forms of personal expression. Her argument centers on the notion that culture is a refuge for those who have been exiled from maternity, that is, that the realm of cultural production is reserved for those who are incapable or have chosen not to participate in the giving of human life. Because culture requires egoism and, since maternity is the ultimate rejection of egoism, women can participate in one or the other, but, she suggests, not both. Her immediate concern seems to be with those women who have a choice between maternity and producing culture and have chosen the latter. These women have been devalued and marginalized from opportunities that contribute to meaningful cultural production, a marginalization owed to those structures of patriarchy that have existed since antiquity.
Possibilities and Limitations of the Mexican (1958)
Authors: Revueltas José
Published: October 2017

José Revueltas’s essay represents the kind of anti-essentialist critique that had been leveled against the philosophy of lo mexicano in the previous decades. In his own Marxist-inspired intervention, Revueltas accomplishes two things. First, he provides a history of the concept of Mexican national identity, an idea that, given the complex economic and political history of Mexico, has been impossible to realize. Tracing the Aztec Empire’s failures to unify its various tributaries, which ultimately led to the empire’s downfall at the hands of Cotés, Revueltas suggests that the idea of a common national identity has always been a dream of those seeking political and economic power. The second accomplishment is that he offers a brutal critique of the idea of lo mexicano itself, which, in his interpretation, states that there is or can be a unified national identity that depends on finding those essential commonalities that tie all Mexican people together.