bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Pepinsky Thomas B. , Liddle R. William , Mujani Saiful
Published: January 2018

The resurgence of Islam in private and public life, in Indonesia and elsewhere, is one of the most important phenomena of our time. Its implications for politics and society are also widely misunderstood. Piety among Indonesian Muslims is essentially unrelated to most of the basic problems of political and economic life that analysts of religion and public life have addressed. Instead, the social and economic transformations that are co-occurring alongside the resurgence of Islam in Indonesia are the best predictors of how Muslims think and behave. These findings reorient our understanding of Islam and democracy in contemporary Indonesia. They should also inform policymakers interested in Islam, religious revitalization, democracy, and relations between the West and the Muslim world.
The Practices of Experimentalism in Latin@ and Latin American Music
Authors: Alonso-Minutti Ana R. , Herrera Eduardo , Madrid Alejandro L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces the main theoretical issues discussed in the book and puts them in dialogue with contemporary discussions about them. The book’s adoption of the plural term “experimentalisms” points toward a purposeful decentering of the usual US and Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. The case studies in this volume contribute to this by challenging discourses about Latin@s and Latin Americans and experimentalism that have historically marginalized them. As such, the notion of “experimentalisms” works as a performative operation of sound, soundings, music, and musicking that gives social and historical meaning to the networks it temporarily conforms and situates. The authors propose an understanding of music experimentalisms as a series of continuous presences that navigate fluidly in a transhistorical imaginary encounter of pasts and presents.
Experimental Alternatives
Authors: Thomas Susan
Published: January 2018

In 1969 the director of Cuba’s film institute, Alfredo Guevara, founded a musical collective whose official purpose was to provide film music for Cuba’s vibrant and experimental new socialist cinema. The resulting Grupo de Experimentación Sonora represented something of a “rescue mission” for artists who for reasons political, aesthetic, or of personality found themselves on the margins of increasingly conservative and restrictive state-run cultural institutions. Under the direction of composer Leo Brouwer, the Grupo incorporated musicians who became some of the Revolution’s most renowned artists. Brouwer declared that the primary mission of the Grupo was not to create film music but “to transform the repertoire of Cuban popular music to the best of our abilities.” The Grupo merged discourses of the artistic avant-garde with those of revolutionary praxis and in doing so, positioned their sonic experiments both aesthetically and politically. The Grupo has had a marked impact on later groups who also struggled on the margins of state institutions. Drawing overt references to the Grupo and appropriating similar avant-garde rhetoric, collectives such as Habana Abierta and Interactivo promoted a new musical and social “revolution from within,” one that advocated from the margins of official discourse for a radically new transnational model of Cuban citizenship and civic participation.
Peruvian Cumbia at the Theoretical Limits of Techno-Utopian Hybridity
Authors: Tucker Joshua
Published: January 2018

This essay analyzes the transformation of Peruvian chicha, an adaptation of Colombian cumbia, from an unassuming working-class music into a central feature in new nationalist discourses that seek to overcome older elitist and racist models of national identification from transnational perspectives. As part of this discussion, the chapter considers the work of intellectual cosmopolitans who appeal to notions of electronic experimentation, psychedelic playfulness, and musical agency, thus resignifying chicha as an aesthetic solution for the intellectual shortcomings of an earlier era. Chicha musicians become retrospective theorists of international hybridity and nationalist mestizaje whose experimentalism challenges the limits of previous identity discourses, providing aesthetic utopian alternatives.
Gatas y Vatas
Authors: Alonso-Minutti Ana R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter centers on the activities of Gatas y Vatas, an annual experimental music festival in New Mexico that features solo performances by local practitioners. Initiated by young female Hispanic musicians as an attempt to counteract the white male dominance of local music scenes, Gatas y Vatas has become a catalyst of female empowerment where participants experience liberation while defying gender norms in an all-inclusive environment. Alonso-Minutti examines how the practices fostered in the festival are tied to a locally perceived freedom granted by Albuquerque’s complex cultural makeup. To the “Gatas,” the city is a place where “everything is possible.” She argues that this sentiment of endless potential drives performers to experiment with sound, noise, technology, and the environment and to engage in activities that foster a feminist ideal rooted in a Hispanic connection. The result is a community-oriented experimental atmosphere that has reached levels of inclusion and female equality rarely seen in experimental music scenes.
Naked
Authors: Thomason Krista K.
Published: January 2018

Moral philosophers have long argued that shame can be a morally valuable emotion that helps people realize when they fail to be the kinds of people they aspire to be. According to these arguments, people feel shame when they fail to live up to the norms, standards, and ideals that are valued as part of a virtuous life. But lurking in the shadows is the dark side of shame. People might feel shame when they fail to live up to their values, but they also feel shame about sex, nudity, being ugly, fat, stupid, or low-class. What is worse, people often respond to shame with violence and self-destruction. This book argues for a unified account of shame that embraces shame’s dark side. Rather than try to explain away the troubling cases as irrational or misguided, it presents an account of shame that makes sense of both its good and bad side. Shame is the experience of a tension between two aspects of one’s self: one’s self-conception and one’s identity. People are liable to feelings of shame because they are not always who they take themselves to be. Shame is a valuable moral emotion, and even though it has a dark side, people would not be better off without it.
Introduction
Authors: Thomason Krista K.
Published: January 2018

The introduction surveys the philosophical literature about shame. Philosophers have long been troubled by the dual nature of shame. On the one hand, it seems to be an emotion that is central to the development of virtue. On the other hand, it arises in cases that have no obvious moral import and it can hinder rather than help moral progress. Much of the philosophical literature has aimed to find a way to reconcile these two sides of shame by explaining away or de-emphasizing one of the two sides. This introduction raises questions about the viability of those strategies and provides an outline for the rest of the book.
Ajax
Authors: Thomason Krista K.
Published: January 2018

The first chapter introduces the story of Ajax to help illustrate three philosophical positions on shame: the traditional view, the naturalistic view, and the pessimistic view. It begins with an exposition of the traditional view and explains why it might be a tempting account of shame as a moral emotion. It then introduces the dark side of shame and shows that the traditional view cannot account for it. Given these concerns, the naturalistic view might be seen as an alternative. The chapter shows how the naturalistic view cannot explain how shame might be morally valuable. Chapter 1 ends with a question: can one provide an account of shame that shows how it can be morally valuable while at the same time making sense of its dark side?
Ajax Reviled
Authors: Thomason Krista K.
Published: January 2018

Shaming punishments have increased in popularity, and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become mediums for public shaming of bad behavior. Can these practices be justified? This chapter distinguishes between three practices all labeled “shaming:” invitations to shame, shaming, and stigmatizing. It then argues that invitations to shame can be justified in certain circumstances, but shaming and stigmatizing cannot be justified. The primary argument in favor of shaming and stigmatizing is that both practices are powerful tools to change behavior. Shaming is the practice of holding up the flaws of others for public scorn, and this practice is unjustified even when it is done for noble reasons.
Conclusion
Authors: Thomason Krista K.
Published: January 2018

The conclusion summarizes the main aims of the book. Even though shame can be a painful and damaging emotion, we would still not be better off without it. A continued liability to shame shows that we accept that we are not always the people we think we are, but accepting this fact is a sign of moral maturity. Additionally, this conclusion raises questions about moral philosophy’s commitment to positive moral psychology. Although some philosophers have defended negative emotions, the field as a whole still treats positive feelings as better and more desirable than negative feelings. But it is reasonable to ask whether moral agents should try to be “emotional saints.”
Signs of Virginity
Authors: Rosenberg Michael
Published: January 2018

The notion that bleeding “should” accompany the “loss” of female virginity—a mode of thinking about virginity that encourages male sexual aggression—is so widespread that it is often taken for granted. Yet, Michael Rosenberg argues in Signs of Virginity that this idea is a specific product of Deut. 22:13–21. Deuteronomy’s violent virginity has held sway in Jewish and Christian circles more or less ever since, but Rosenberg points to two writers—Augustine of Hippo and the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud—who, even as they perpetuate patriarchal assumptions about female virginity, nonetheless attempt to subvert the emphasis on dominance bequeathed to them by Deuteronomy. Unlike the authors of earlier Rabbinic and Christian texts, who modified but fundamentally maintained and even extended the Deuteronomic ideal, the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine both construct alternative models of female virginity that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity, encouraging men to be gentle, rather that brutal, in their sexual behavior. Indeed, this vision of masculinity as fundamentally gentle fits into the broader idealization of masculinity propagated by both the Babylonian Talmud’s authors and Augustine, who reject what the latter called a “lust for dominance” as a masculine ideal.
Virginity and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Authors: Rosenberg Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers a wide range of virginity tests across cultures. Although virginity testing is commonly imbricated with issues of sexual violence, the specific form of virginity manifest through bleeding and wounds is unique to cultures influenced by Deuteronomy. In literature and legal texts from the non-Christian and non-Jewish Greco-Roman world, there is a total absence of descriptions of physical tests of virginity. The chapter briefly describes other medical exams of virginity in the ancient and medieval West. The chapter then turns to discuss tests based not on the physical traits of a woman, but rather on her ability to survive some ordeal or to perform some particular task. The chapter concludes by examining virginity tests not in terms of their means, but of their effects, asking, Do they encourage, or discourage, male physical violence as a component of sexual activity in general and initial sexual experience in particular?
Open Doors and Accused Brides
Authors: Rosenberg Michael
Published: January 2018

The Babylonian Talmud introduces an entirely new standard for testing a woman’s virginity—a groom’s subjective experience of his bride as an “open door” rather than “locked.” This standard places even greater power in the hands of men, thus diminishing the safety of new brides. At the same time, it generates a discourse of male sexuality that discourages aggressive sexual activity—a revolution in sexual ideals. The chapter then studies the series of six stories that follow the legal pericope concerning the “open door.” These stories undercut the ability of men to make claims against brides’ virginity, as they create a sustained attack on the idea of objectivity, using the two kinds of virginity test developed in the legal pericope and the assumption that the “open door” test is more “subjective” than blood claims to undermine the perceived objectivity of all virginity testing.
Impure Nuptials and Sex as Work
Authors: Rosenberg Michael
Published: January 2018

A number of Talmudic passages, not specifically about virginity testing, buttress the claims made in the previous chapter. The Babylonian Talmud creates a legal culture in which wedding-night bleeding triggers a prohibition on any further sexual relations, thus discouraging sexual aggression. Similarly, the Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of first-time penetrative intercourse on the Sabbath focuses on divorcing the sexual act from acts of violence; this passage also connects a bride’s experience on her wedding night to that of a baby boy at his circumcision, the latter of which is explicitly marked as painful. Finally, an explicit discussion in the Babylonian Talmud tries to minimize descriptions of brides’ pain on their wedding night, in the process revealing Rabbinic male anxiety about their complicity in causing pain.
(De)Mythologizing the Hymen
Authors: Rosenberg Michael
Published: January 2018

Augustine of Hippo, it is argued, shares more in common, on the topic of virginity testing, with the Rabbis of Babylonia than he does with other Church Fathers such as Cyprian and Ambrose. The latter are typical of late antique Christian authors, speaking in the mixed registers of faith and anatomy as found in works such as the Mishnah and the Protevangelium. Augustine, by contrast, utterly rejects gynecology as a means of establishing virginity. Although his move is quite different from that of the Babylonian Talmud, it seems that he and the Rabbinic work’s authorship share a set of concerns: an interest in subverting dominant norms of masculinity and rejecting the lust for dominance.
The Civil War Dead and American Modernity
Authors: Finseth Ian
Published: January 2018

Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.
The “Ghastly Spectacle”
Authors: Finseth Ian
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on how witneᶊes to Civil War death made sense of their traumatic experience. The ethical challenge was one of recognition: to see and know the often-anonymous dead for who and what they were. Yet the dead were invariably integrated into familiar frameworks of meaning and into the conventions of aesthetics and rhetoric. Drawing on insights from phenomenology, pragmatism, Freudian psychology, and affect theory, the chapter shows that the psychological proceᶊes of abstraction and typification underlay a social logic of necrophilic dependency that both thrived on the dead and yet resisted their complex individuality. This problem is then connected to a long-standing cultural and historical melancholia whereby the Civil War dead have been internalized and eternalized as representational artifacts within a society that remains divided and ambivalent over the meaning of the war.
Blood and Ink
Authors: Finseth Ian
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates the ways in which the Civil War dead appeared in nineteenth-century histories of the war. As the practice and philosophy of history both evolved, the dead provided a means of navigating the crisis of historical representation precipitated by the conflict. On one hand, they are routinely depersonalized, reduced to “objective” data, so as to contain the unexampled carnage of the war and to demarcate, by contrast, a more enlightened postwar modernity. On the other, the dead are revered as sacred relics that provide a sense of stabilizing connection to a common history. Ultimately, the tension between these modes of historical consciousneᶊ is resolved by a teleological narrative of national self-creation. This narrative, linked to the rise of American imperialism, tended to subsume, without fully negating, the social alienation that wayward attachments to the dead, in both Southern history and African American counter-history, could nourish.
Plotting Mortality
Authors: Finseth Ian
Published: January 2018

In returning to the Civil War, postbellum American writers depended on the literary conventions and mythic structures of meaning by which a vast and violent history could be incorporated into fictional narrative. The result was a struggle between “romantic” and “realist” patterns of meaning that reflected the existential anxieties of American modernity: the sense of epistemological limitation and the dread of ontological purposeleᶊneᶊ. In the former, the war prompts the expreᶊion of nostalgia for a pre-capitalist, premodern, and pre-secular world. In the latter, the war is linked to the rise of complex networks of information, technology, and economics, and seems to embody the disenchanted condition of modernity. The Civil War dead are central to both modes of representation, and yet they resist the systems of mediation by which they are turned into moral exempla, symbolic commodities, and icons of national identity.
The Struggle Over Truth
Authors: Schaflechner Jürgen
Published: January 2018

In the first chapter, the author evaluates the various possibilities to engage with the empirical material collected for this book. Due to the shrine’s new accessibility, paired with its recent institutionalization, many formerly disconnected practices and narratives started to meet on a regular basis. Doing fieldwork at the site, together with engaging with a variety of texts and other media, the author was confronted with the question of how to organize all of these voices that uniformly claimed to speak the truth about the shrine and its annexed practices. Chapter 1 elaborates on the theoretical foundations of this work through a concept the author calls “the solidification of tradition.” Utilizing newer anthropological theories of the ontological turn and supplementing them with the political philosophy of post-foundationalism helps the author to produce his own engagement with the various truth-claims encountered during his research.
(Un)necessary Hardships in “Getting There”
Authors: Schaflechner Jürgen
Published: January 2018

Chapter 4 uses modern-day case studies and extensive fieldwork to depict the current situation for those undertaking the pilgrimage. It shows how the construction of the MCH brought about a modernization of transportation to the shrine and also a renaissance of the walking practice to Hinglaj. It demonstrates how the infrastructure that developed along with the MCH, easier access to water, and a reduced chance of becoming lost in the desert have led to a revitalization of walking patterns and to new interpretations of the concept of austerity (Skt. tapasyā). A case study of a group of Gujarati pilgrims from India shows the situation for Hinglaj devotees on the other side of the border whose path to the Goddess contrasts starkly with that of their Pakistani counterparts. The chapter also discusses how recent developments around Hinglaj have exposed a gap between the traditional discursive representations of the pilgrimage and current practices at the shrine.
Culture Writing
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: January 2018

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists. As the British and French Empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to assess their discipline’s complicity with imperialism and experimented with literary forms and techniques. The book shows that the “literary turn” in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 1980s. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of modernist artistic experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States, bringing anthropology back home. The book discusses literary writers who had a significant professional engagement with anthropology and brought some of its techniques and research questions into literary composition: Barbara Pym (Britain), Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow (United States), Édouard Glissant (Martinique), and Michel Leiris (France). On the side of ethnography, there is analysis of works by anthropologists who adopted literary forms for their writing about culture: Laura Bohannan (United States), Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss (France), and Mary Douglas (Britain). The book concludes with an afterword that shows how the literature–anthropology conversation continues into the postcolonial period in the work of the Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and the Jamaican author-sociologist Erna Brodber.
“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-headed households, gay and lesbian relationships, and networks of female friendship and civic engagement. Pym’s novels of the 1950s implicitly criticize the synchronic, functionalist anthropology of kinship tables that dominated the discipline in Britain, substituting an interest in a new anthropology that could investigate social change. Specific anthropological work on West African social changes underpins Pym’s English fiction, including several journal articles that Pym was editing while she worked on her novels.
The Sun Also Sets
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: January 2018

It was in anthropological fiction that the challenges to the discipline of anthropology in the 1950s were most visibly registered, in terms of anthropology’s complicity with imperialism and its adoption of technical and professional practices that excluded amateurs and outsiders. This chapter analyzes the early science fiction of Ursula Le Guin, in which anthropologists are protagonists who grapple with their dual role as bearers of imperial power and observers of indigenous customs. The second half of the chapter focuses on the work of the anthropologist Laura Bohannan, who turned her fieldwork in northern Nigeria into a novel, one that dramatizes the ambiguous position of the anthropologist as a woman, as a “European,” and as an American.
“Every Guy Has His Own Africa”
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the writer Saul Bellow as an anthropological novelist, focusing on his African novel, Henderson the Rain King. Bellow incorporates ethnographic source material, including some from his erstwhile teacher Melville Herskovits, but Henderson is a bumbling caricature of the academic fieldworker. Nevertheless, the novel asks essential anthropological questions about how culture determines human behavior and thought and how cultural patterns change. I compare Bellow’s work with C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, which promoted the ideas of technical know-how and knowledge transfer from the West to the developing world that Bellow satirizes. The chapter ends with an analysis of the South African writer Bessie Head, whose story “The Woman from America” highlights the dangers of development projects that fail to pay attention to local conditions, just as Henderson does.
“L’Ethnologue de Soi-même”
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the early novels of Édouard Glissant set in Martinique, which are more anthropological than critics have realized up to now, as well as his early essays. Glissant studied anthropology in Paris (where Michel Leiris was his adviser), and even though he was an anticolonial writer and activist, he turned in his literary work toward the human science that was most marked by its birth under colonialism, anthropology. The chapter ends by arguing that Glissant’s literary meditation, Soleil de la conscience, can be read as a kind of ethnographic chronicle of Paris in the 1950s, a Caribbean anthropology of the French Métropole.
Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society
Authors: Lubben James , Barth Richard P. , Fong Rowena , Flynn Marilyn L. , Sherraden Michael , Uehara Edwina
Published: January 2018

The Grand Challenges for Social Work (GCSW) focuses on big, important and compelling problems for all of American society. Sponsored by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the 12 Grand Challenges address issues of healthy youth development, the health gap, family violence, long and productive lives, social isolation, homelessness, changing climate environments, technology for social good, smart decarceration, economic inequity, financial capacity, and equal opportunity and justice. GCSW is designed to promote scientific and transformative innovation in social work, engage the social work profession in strengthening the ties among social work organizations, foster transdisciplinary research, create greater acknowledgement of social work science within the discipline and by other and related disciplines, and expand the student pipeline into the social work profession.
Ensure Healthy Development for All Youth
Authors: Jenson Jeffrey M. , Hawkins J. David
Published: January 2018

Each year, more than six million young people receive treatment for severe mental, emotional, or behavioral problems. Strong evidence shows us how to prevent many behavioral health problems before they emerge. By unleashing the power of prevention through widespread use of proven approaches, we can help all youth grow up to become healthy and productive adults.
Advance Long and Productive Lives
Authors: Morrow-Howell Nancy , Gonzales Ernest , James Jacquelyn B. , Matz-Costa Christina , Putnam Michelle
Published: January 2018

Increased automation and longevity demand new thinking by employers and employees regarding productivity. Young people are increasingly disconnected from education or work and the labor force faces significant retirements in the next decades. Throughout the lifespan, fuller engagement in education and paid and unpaid productive activities can generate a wealth of benefits, including better health and well-being, greater financial security, and a more vital society.
Create Social Responses to a Changing Environment
Authors: Kemp Susan P. , Palinkas Lawrence A. , Mason Lisa Reyes
Published: January 2018

The environmental challenges reshaping contemporary societies pose profound risks to human well-being, particularly for marginalized communities. Climate change and urban development threaten health, undermine coping, and deepen existing social and environmental inequities. A changing global environment requires transformative social responses: new partnerships, deep engagement with local communities, and innovations to strengthen individual and collective assets.
Conclusion
Authors: Barth Richard P. , Fong Rowena , Lubben James , Butts Sarah Christa
Published: January 2018

The Grand Challenges have spawned involvement and action in many ways—most notably through a network for each of the 12 Grand Challenges. The networks are flexibly organized, are co-led or multiply-led, and include leading scholars, junior scholars, doctoral students, MSW students, BSW students, and practitioners. Multiple national organizations, including the National Association of Social Workers, the Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for Social Work and Research are using their national and regional conferences and newsletters to spread information about the grand challenges and to help the profession organize around them. Special issues of journals and volumes of books about the grand challenges are lifting up the scholarship and universities are adopting some or all of the grand challenges to focus on solving major social problems.
Introduction
Authors: Davis Donald R.
Published: January 2018

Between 1930 and 1962, the eminent Sanskritist and lawyer Pandurang Vaman Kane (pronounced KAH-nay) produced a five-volume monograph entitled History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law), published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India. This work of over 6,500 pages provides much more than a narrow focus on law or the special genre of Sanskrit literature devoted to religious and legal duties, the Dharmaśāstra. It contains rather something close to an intellectual history of Hinduism, from its origins in the Vedic texts to contemporary debates about the “reform” of Hinduism in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kane understood his task as presenting the broadest possible survey of the role legal, religious, and ethical thought in the history of Hinduism, with regular incursions into other religious traditions as well. A modern scholar of Dharmaśāstra, Richard Lariviere, is fond of saying, “We all make our living from Kane’s footnotes.” Indeed, Kane’s work has become a constant source of reference and orientation in South Asian studies of law, religion, ritual, literature, history, and more. It is a work that has perhaps literally launched a thousand dissertations because it is so easy to refer a student or a colleague to the appropriate section of Kane as a way to get their bearings in relation to hundreds of topics in the fields of Hindu studies or Indian social and intellectual history....
Epistemology of Law
Authors: Olivelle Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how we come to know dharma, that is, the epistemic sources of dharma. This is the first issue to be addressed in almost all Dharmaśāstras. The answers in the earliest texts refer to the Veda, the smṛtis, and normative practice called ācāra, as the triple source of dharma. A major issue confronting the authors is whether all of the dharma propounded in the Dharmaśāstras is derived from the Veda directly or indirectly, or whether there are also “worldly” dharmas, such as those relating to the king and to legal procedure. The historical reality at the beginnings of Dharmaśāstric composition, however, as during the medieval period when the Nibandhas were written, was that dharma of the Dharmaśāstras was very much anchored in the actual customary laws of various geographically and temporally dispersed communities.
Social Classes
Authors: Aktor Mikael
Published: January 2018

The notions of class (varṇa) and caste (jāti) run through the Dharmaśāstra literature on all levels. They regulate marriage, economic transactions, work, punishment, penance, entitlement to rituals, identity markers like the sacred thread, and social interaction in general. Although this social structure was ideal in nature and not equally confirmed in other genres of ancient and medieval literature, it has nevertheless had an immense impact on Indian society. The chapter presents an overview of the system with its three privileged classes, the Brahmins, the Kṣatriyas, and the Vaiśyas, the fourth underprivileged class, the Śūdras, and, at the bottom of the society, the lowest so-called untouchable castes. It also discusses the understanding of human differences that lies at the center of the system and the possible economic and political motivations of the Brahmin authors of the texts.
The Vedic Student
Authors: Lubin Timothy
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the form and purpose of the Vedic studentship, and the special importance that came to be attached to it as Brahmins sought to reposition their tradition as a basis for establishing religious and legal norms for society. Studentship took the form of a regimen (vrata) of mildly ascetical observances (strict chastity and restrictions on speech, diet, and dress, along with other ritual duties), collectively known as brahmacarya. This regimen, probably at first constitutive of Brahmin status, is extended in the Vedic codes of domestic ritual (gṛhyasūtras) to two other classes of male Āryas as well. The initiation into this observance, symbolically a rebirth through the Veda, becomes in fact the marker of Ārya social status and it provides a template for a multitude of other similar expiatory or supererogatory regimens that structure the life of Smārta Brahmanical piety.
Marriage and the Householder
Authors: Jamison Stephanie W.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the figure of the householder (gṛhastha), the lynchpin of the dharma system, occupying the second stage of the codified āśrama system. It first considers the word gṛhastha and notes that it has made its way into the dharma literature from Middle Indo-Aryan and heterodox religious circles. This terminological discontinuity suggests that there is also conceptual discontinuity between the Vedic married head of household and the householder depicted in the dharma texts. Since the householder must be married, the chapter then treats the institution of marriage: who and when to marry and the types of marriage as found in the dharma texts, as well as the marriage ceremony itself. It then turns to the legal and ritual obligations of the married couple, including the dissolution of the marriage by death or other means.
Women
Authors: Jamison Stephanie W.
Published: January 2018

This chapter treats the legal and religious status of women and some of the changes in that status over the period of the dharma sūtras and Manu, covering the following topics: lack of independence and the guarding of women; legal status and the growing visibility of women to the law as shown by the treatment of adultery; women’s life stages and the male figures associated with them; ritual partnership in marriage; life-cycle rites, especially with regard to conception, pregnancy and childbirth, menstrual and childbirth taboos; women’s property (strīdhana) and inheritance; and roles for women, including mother, spinster, appointed daughter (putrikā), courtesan, and nun/renunciate.
Children
Authors: Davis Donald R.
Published: January 2018

Classical Hindu law distinguishes the childhood, youth, and adulthood of male children in terms of ritual and legal eligibility and duty. Childhood is marked both by freedom from the constraints and obligations of ritual and law and by ritual ineligibility and legal incapacity. The consecratory rite of the sacred thread marks a son’s eligibility and obligation for religious study and ritual. Youth is the period of religious training that culminates in the completion of studies and in marriage. Legal majority is recognized for sons at age sixteen, while full ritual rights and duties commence only with marriage. In the classical texts, the onset of menstruation marks a daughter’s eligibility to marry, though her legal capacity remains restricted in principle. Daughters thus figure prominently in the intricate negotiations of marriage, kinship, and family reputation.
Inheritance
Authors: Rocher Ludo
Published: January 2018

Chapter 12 traces the changes to the Hindu law of inheritance (dāyavibhāga) that occurred from the time of the ancient smṛtis to the present. Hindu inheritance was originally intestate and linked to the duty and capability to perform mortuary rites (śrāddhas). Issues of primogeniture and the ranking of heirs in the absence of sons and grandsons showed variations across the smṛtis, which later commentaries and topical digests (nibandhas) sought to resolve, with differing results. In the British period, variations became organized under regional patterns, with different leading texts governing separate areas of the country. At first relying on pandits’ interpretation of law texts, Anglo-Indian courts progressively turned to a British style of case law, relying on precedent. After Independence, the Indian government broke with the past, abrogating traditional law and promulgating a new, uniform system of inheritance law for all Hindus with the Hindu Succession Act of 1956.
Daily Duties
Authors: Lubin Timothy
Published: January 2018

This chapter shows that, just as initiation and training in Veda were being promoted as prerequisites for a life of Ārya piety according to varṇāśrama-dharma, some of the student’s or snātaka’s elaborate standards of bodily purification were made to apply to the ordinary householder as well, constituting that status as an āśrama, that is, as a formal “religious profession.” Those purity norms, together with the basic duties to recite and make offerings (even notional, semi-interiorized offerings), come to be taught as the “minimum daily requirements” of any Ārya householder. This trend crystalizes as a distinct rubric only in post-fifth-century CE Dharmaśāstra works. Included in the list are śauca (ablutions after defecation and urination), ācamana (sipping water), dantadhāvana (tooth cleaning), snāna (bathing), tarpaṇa (satiating the ancestors with libations of water), saṃdhyā or saṃdhyopāsana (worship at the twilights) homa (fire offering), and japa (mantra recitation).
Gifting
Authors: Brick David
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the theory of gifting (dāna) expounded in Dharmaśāstra texts and, to a considerable extent, the related Purāṇa literature. The two salient features of this theory around which the chapter is organized are: (a) Brahmins’ unique right to receive gifts and (b) the absence of reciprocity through return gifts. On the issue of reciprocity, special attention is paid to the seminal work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, as well as to later ethnographical studies of gifting in modern South Asia. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of two divergent developments in the conception of gifting during the medieval period.
Ascetics
Authors: Olivelle Patrick
Published: January 2018

Asceticism lies at the very heart of the Dharmaśāstra project. This chapter explores the various holy modes of life discussed in the Dharmaśāstras, especially the gṛhastha, householder, who is also an ascetic of a sort. The focus of the chapter, however, is the two strictly ascetic institutions: the wandering mendicant (pravrajita) and the forest hermit (vānaprastha). The Dharmaśāstras contain some of the earliest descriptions of these two kinds of ascetics: lifestyle, practices, clothing, food, and penances. The forest hermit is defined by his leaving the human-civilized geography and living a life in the wild, eating uncultivated food and wearing clothes from forest material. The wandering mendicant lives without a fixed abode, possessions, or fire. He is a beggar, obtaining his meager requirements of food and clothing from people in villages. The Dharmaśāstras also present subclassifications of these two often related to the manner in which they obtain their food.
Titles of Law
Authors: McClish Mark
Published: January 2018

The term vyavahārapada has two related meanings: “a matter under dispute” and “an area of litigation,” sometimes rendered as a “title of law.” In the dharma tradition, the vyavahārapadas are the categories of private transactions that can be litigated in royal courts. They pertain to disputes initiated by private parties and are, to that extent, distinct from rules the king might enforce on his own prerogative. This chapter explores the development of the vyavahārapadas, including their origin in the nīti statecraft tradition and appropriation by the early dharma texts. It also explores the manner in which the legal authority of the rules comprising the vyavahārapadas was transformed in the process.
Vows and Observances
Authors: Davis Donald R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the semantic and practical evolution of Hindu religious vows and observances called vrata. The general historical trajectory moves from vratas as the ascetic regimens in Vedic texts (especially observed by students), to vratas as the devotional vows of women in favor of a deity. The standard elements of a classical vow in medieval Dharmaśāstra are described, with a focus on the correct intention, procedures, times, and rewards for taking vows. The topic of vows reveals a common interplay within Dharmaśāstra among customary religious and legal practices, external textual traditions (Purāṇas in this case), and existing Dharmaśāstra norms. The history of vows thus provides helpful insight into intellectual, theological, and historical changes within Hindu law, and Hinduism, more generally.
Pilgrimage
Authors: Jacobsen Knut A.
Published: January 2018

The chapter analyzes the place of pilgrimage in the Dharmaśāstra literature. It suggests that the mentioning of specific place names, the narratives of the places, and their merit distinguish the emergence of a textual tradition of pilgrimage. The topic of pilgrimage places and pilgrimage enter the Dharmaśāstra textual tradition fully only with the Dharmanibandhas, and the number of texts that treat tīrtha and tīrthayātrā as a subject of Dharmaśāstra is surprisingly small. Arguably, the inclusion of pilgrimage in the Dharmanibandhas was to infuse orthodoxy into a tradition that was to some degree driven by the economic benefits of the tīrtha priests. Further, their inclusion indicated that pilgrimage had become central to the economy of certain places. Another purpose may perhaps have been to establish rules and regulations to promote pilgrimage as a practice appropriate for Brahmans. Finally, geographical integration was probably also a factor.
History of the Reception of Dharmaśāstra
Authors: Davis Donald R.
Published: January 2018

Dharmaśāstra has been received into many Hindu traditions as an influential source of authoritative norms and a touchstone for orthodox or classical Hinduism. This chapter traces points of connection and difference between Dharmaśāstra and other major Hindu textual traditions, including the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, and narrative literature such as the Kathāsaritsāgara and Pañcatantra. The influence of Dharmaśāstra in epigraphical sources and sectarian Hindu traditions is also surveyed. Finally, the reception and use of Dharmaśāstra in both colonial and modern Hindu law is examined in order to understand its diminishing relevance as a direct source of Hindu knowledge and practice.
Introduction
Authors: Escudier Marcel
Published: January 2018

In this chapter the wide array of engineering devices, from the kitchen tap (a valve) to supersonic aircraft, the basic design of which depends upon considerations of the flow of gases and liquids, is shown. Much the same is true of most natural phenomena from the atmosphere and our weather to ocean waves, and the movement of sperm and other bodily fluids. In this textbook a number of the concepts, principles, and procedures which underlie the analysis of any problem involving fluid flow or a fluid at rest are introduced. In this Introduction, examples have been selected for which, by the end of the book, the student should be in a position to make practically useful engineering-design calculations. These include a dam, a rocket motor, a supersonic aerofoil with shock and expansion waves, a turbojet engine, a turbofan engine, and the blading of a gas turbine.
Kinematic description of fluids in motion and approximations
Authors: Escudier Marcel
Published: January 2018

In this chapter some of the terminology and simplifications which enable us to begin to describe and analyse practical fluid-flow problems are introduced. The terms ‘fluid particle’ and ‘streamline’ are defined. The principle of conservation of mass applied to steady one-dimensional flow through a streamtube of varying cross-sectional area resulted in the continuity equation. This important equation relates mass flowrate ṁ, volumetric flowrate Q̇, average fluid velocity V̄, fluid density ρ, and cross-sectional area A: m = ρ Q̇ = ρAV̅ = constant. For a constant-density fluid this result shows that fluid velocity increases if the cross-sectional area decreases, and vice versa. The no-slip boundary condition, a consequence of which is the boundary layer, is introduced.
Engineering applications of Bernoulli’s equation
Authors: Escudier Marcel
Published: January 2018

In this chapter it is shown how Bernoulli’s equation can be applied to practical fluid-flow problems. In the case of internal flows, such as that through a Venturi tube, it is also necessary to use the continuity equation to relate changes in cross-sectional area to changes in flow velocity. For liquid flows it is shown that for sufficiently high flowspeeds the static pressure could fall below the saturated vapour pressure and lead to cavitation. The designs of various flow-measuring devices, including the orifice-plate flowmeter, the Venturi-tube flowmeter, and the Pitot tube, are based on Bernoulli’s equation. The changes in flow velocity occurring in flow through a wind-tunnel contraction are explained by Bernoulli’s equation.
Linear momentum equation and hydrodynamic forces
Authors: Escudier Marcel
Published: January 2018

In this chapter a method is shown for calculating the external reaction force which must be applied to a duct to counteract the hydrodynamic forces generated by a fluid flowing through it. Newton’s second law of motion applied to fluid flow through a duct of arbitrary shape leads to the linear momentum equation for fluid flow. This shows that the change in the momentum flowrate of the fluid is equal to the net force exerted on the fluid. The individual forces which contribute to the net force are the pressure forces at inlet and outlet, and the forces which arise due to the static pressure and shear stress distributed over the wetted interior surface of the duct. The condition of static equilibrium for the duct is used to relate the external restraining force to the force exerted by the flowing fluid on the wetted surface, which is termed the fluid-structure interaction force.
Engineering applications of the linear momentum equation
Authors: Escudier Marcel
Published: January 2018

In this chapter a method is shown for applying the linear momentum equation, together with the continuity equation and either Bernoulli’s equation or some other information about static pressure, to the analysis of a diverse range of practical problems. A key aim is to demonstrate that it is possible to establish a relatively simple theoretical basis which can give quite accurate and useful information about the performance of such complex machines as jet and rocket engines, the jet pump, and the Pelton turbine. Other examples include flow through a sudden enlargement, a convergent nozzle, a pipe bend, a pipe junction, and a cascade of guidevanes. For each example it is shown how to define a suitable control volume.