bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Living-Into Presence, Wonder, and Play
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter develops three pivotal themes for affecting others such that they become more attentive to participating in a non-individualistic account of the imago Dei understood as being an ‘artful planet’: presence, wonder, and play. These themes are equiprimordial existential structures that aid us in ordering human experiences. Presence, broadly speaking, is a disposition or orientation; it names an existential commitment to being aware of the intra-active, non-separable difference that subtends our lived experiences. Wonder is a mood or an attitude that allows the world to appear to us with an openness or ‘making proximate’ of those desires that are askew to our predominant, norming orientations: an attentiveness to disorientations. Finally, play is an expression of freedom. It allows us to explore and construct worlds of other possibilities that are engrossing; with these acts of imagination we act ‘as if’ this possible world is, which then imparts meaning to our ordinary living in the world.
Epilogue: Ad Astra Per Aspera
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

What happens when the Anthropocene and the imago Dei become corroborative symbols in the astrobiological contexts that shape our engagement with the world today? My argument has been that, in the face of various instances of ecological crises, the Anthropocene symbolizes the existential concerns at stake in this devastation so that we better understand that our way of meaningfully orienting our existence toward the natural world is askew. To remember that we are the imago Dei can give us courage to stay with the trouble of this disorientation a moment longer and imaginatively play out new realities that confront the inevitable ecological devastations that have been wrought upon the earth.
Introduction
Authors: Seitz John C. , Hinze Christine Firer
Published: January 2021

This introduction offers a history of the collaborative effort that produced the volume, explains the rationale for the volume, explores the key problems the volume takes up, and offers brief summaries of each essay.
An Integral Ecology as the Ground for Good Business
Authors: Naughton Michael
Published: January 2021

Integral ecology is an increasingly important term in Catholic social teaching. This paper brings this term in relation to business drawing upon the integral relationship between human and natural ecology. Pope Francis and his two predecessors believe that the current ecological conversation can increase our sensitivity to our impact on the natural environment as well as help us to rediscover the moral and spiritual consciousness of human
nature and development that has been weakened and disordered in the wider culture. An integral ecology can enlarge our notion of the good, especially the good in business. Without the cultural and environmental insights from an integral ecology that has the capacity to provide deep moral and spiritual roots, business will always be prone to see itself within its own autonomous and utilitarian sphere failing to connect to the natural and human realities in which it is embedded.
Generative Businesses Fostering Vitality
Authors: Waddock Sandra
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the idea of generative businesses that focus on goals of vitality at multiple levels, with operations based on principles of renewal, restoration, and resilience. Key is shifting the core understanding of the role(s) of businesses in society and how we—and they—view the world. To do that, we need to fundamentally change the memes—the core cultural artifacts—that surround the idea of business. This chapter uses a shamanic rationale—the idea of according dignity to all people, other living beings, and Earth itself in all its manifestations—to argue for a radically different business system that works in harmony and balance with the planet—a form of planetary stewardship on the part of businesses. Generative businesses serve the communities in which they operate, creating vitality in the form of connections and community, stable and decent employment opportunities, and a holistic approach to doing business.
Curing the “Disease” in Corporatized Higher Education
Authors: Beyer Gerald J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter treats the corporatization of higher education in the United States. In particular, the chapter contends that corporatized higher education has imported individualistic practices and models from the business world, modern economics, and more broadly neoliberal capitalism into higher education. A vision of the human person as selfish, hypercompetitive, solipsistic, and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good (homo economicus) undergirds these models and practices. The chapter discusses the so-called Dickeson model and Responsibility Centered Management (RCM) to illustrate the kinds of practices that flow from this anthropology. It also advances the argument that harmful “symptoms” of the corporatization of higher education such as the casualization of the academic workforce (known as “adjunctification”) have been accepted, at least partially, as a result this flawed understanding of human person. The second half of the essay turns to the Catholic social tradition to prescribe some possible “cures” to the “disease” in corporatized higher education.
The “Dignity of Motherhood” Demands Something Different
Authors: Holscher Kathleen
Published: January 2021

This chapter considers the work of the Catholic Medical Mission Sisters as midwives in New Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century. The sisters’ experimental initiative to provide midwifery and home birthing services to local women was integral to anti-poverty work in the state, and conformed to a midcentury Catholic view in which economic justice, understood solely in the context of the money economy, failed to address the unique dignity of women tied to the vocation of motherhood. The sisters’ work sheds light on how Catholic ideas about femaleness informed non-economic initiatives aimed at the poor, even as it also reveals the layered effects of historical experiments, economic or otherwise, to honor the “dignity of the poor,” when those experiments happened across differences of race, and in the shadow of asymmetrical relations of political power.
Uniquely Okinawan
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

This study explores the planning considerations of the United States military in formulating and implementing policy for the occupation of Okinawa from April 1945 to July 1946. American soldiers, Marines, and sailors on Okinawa encountered not only a Japanese enemy, but a large local population. The Okinawans were ethically different from the Japanese, yet Okinawa shared politics with Japan as a legal prefecture. When devising occupation policies, the United States military analyzed practical military considerations such as resources, weapons capability and terrain, as well as attempted to ascertain a conclusive definition of Okinawa’s relation to Japan through conscious, open, rational analysis of racial and ethnic identity. While the Marines held steadfast to the image of the enemy civilian, soldiers’ ideas about the race, ethnicity, and identity of the Okinawans evolved through their interactions with the civilians on the battlefield. As the population exhibited obedience and cooperation, the Army expressed feelings of kinship toward the civilians and reshaped its military government policies toward leniency. With the exception of the Marines, the U.S. military recognized the Okinawans as competent and civilized: a group that formed a distinct, separate, unique ethnic community that was neither American nor Japanese in its likeness. Considerations of race, ethnicity, and identity by the Americans deeply influenced the conduct of the occupation beyond practical concerns of resources and battlefield conditions. The mercurial nature of the identity of the Okinawans displays both the malleability of race and ethnicity and its centrality in occupation planning.
“Japanese” Warriors?
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

Since Okinawan’s integration into the Japanese nation as a prefecture in 1879, the Japanese government embarked on a program of propaganda and indoctrination to ensure loyalty in its new Okinawan subjects. As the Pacific War drew ever closer to the island of Okinawa, the Japanese government mandated that all civilians work for the war cause. The National Mobilization Act committed every resource toward supporting the war effort and every person prepared for war. Young Okinawans rallied to Japan’s cause with innocent fervor unmatched by their elders. The older population did not share the intensity of the children’s enthusiasm, but they still committed to serving the Japanese Empire as its subjects. In a practical manner, adult Okinawans prepared their families for the rough conditions that would result from a battle waged on their land. On the brink of the battle, Okinawans saw Japan as their country and felt compelled to protect it.
Having a Say
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

Under the chaotic and insufferable conditions of war, the Okinawans fled their homes and struggled for survival without food, water, or shelter. In their desperate travels, the Okinawans had numerous encounters with the Japanese military, sometimes seeking out the troops for protection. Most encounters, however, ended in violence and brutality. Shaken by the dissonance between the rhetoric of indoctrination and the acts of cruelty that demonstrated an abandonment of the preached ideals of shared nationhood, the Okinawans processed the duplicity of the Japanese by practically pursuing methods to ensure survival and by re-evaluating their own identity. The population began to question their commitment to Japan and their identity as Japanese subjects. The Okinawans actively reconstructed an identity to improve their situation. Through conscious process and interaction with both the Japanese and Americans, they came to a collective identity as Okinawan.
The US Navy Period
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

With the end of the Pacific War, responsibility for military government on Okinawa transferred to the U.S. Navy. American combat troops on Okinawa adjusted their priority from enemy engagement to demobilization, and military government changed its mission from amassing the population to full occupation of a prefecture from a defeated country. Overwhelmed by a large, displaced population who still had urgent needs for basic sustenance and medical treatment, the Navy issued ad hoc directives and did not build strategically toward a defined, long-term goal. Early Navy military government failed to adapt to the new peacetime environment; it did not attempt to rebuild and its assumptions of Okinawan identity remained stagnated in a wartime state. Navy military government struggled so profoundly in completing day to day requirements that any developments toward improvement in the program failed to reach fruition in 1945.
New Visions, New Interpretations of Identity
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

By mid-December 1945, the U.S. Navy incorporated Okinawans into the administration of military government. As the Okinawans assumed their new role, the Navy constructed a feasible and sustainable local government structure dependant on Okinawan custom and participation. Okinawans, serving in positions of administrative influence, demonstrated their ability to govern and the power of their leadership. Seaman, no longer under the stress and fear of combat conditions, formed both formal and informal relationships with the Okinawans within the context of their duties. Through such close interactions, Naval troops reassessed Okinawan identity as not only separate from Japan, but also free from congenial comparisons with America. The Nay devised military government policy that led to Okinawan influence in government, medical structure, education, and crime management.
Conclusion
Authors: Short Courtney A.
Published: January 2021

The wartime occupation of Okinawa demonstrates the crucial role that considerations of race and ethnicity have on the conduct of military government. American military government planners recognized both the possible threat a population of 463,000 civilians might pose and the complexities of the relationship between Okinawa and Japan. Without losing sight of the impact that the civilians would have on military operations, planners from all services, including the Marines, analyzed the ethnicity of the Okinawans and how their cultural distinctiveness might inform their behavior. While the Marines’ policy prohibited further assessment of the population upon landing on the island, preliminary analyses provided the military leadership of all services with a more robust understanding of the battlefield that they faced and thus better prepared them to preserve military lives, safeguard American secrets, and win the battle. Acknowledgment of ethnic differences, done in a manner that seeks educative understanding, should hopefully foster cognizant policy that still supports military goals. An examination of the wartime occupation of Okinawa provides an example for effective military government programs now and in the future.
Parenthyrsos
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

The chapter re-examines the eighteenth-century sublime, which we tend to think of in superlatives: the greatest, the most high, the absolute limit. It challenges conventional wisdom that the sublime represents a disenchantment with rules, restraints, and decorum, and therefore breaks with the classical middle. The readings construct a counter-narrative by concentrating on descriptions of its production rather than its effects, and considering some fastidious, anxious accounts by Longinus, G. E. Lessing, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant about how to successfully achieve the sublime while avoiding the many pitfalls that surround it. The strategic calculation that goes into the rhetorical management of the sublime suggests that it is something other than absolutely individual, unmediated expression, and that it is closely aligned with the shaded complexities of the middle, rather than the stark simplicity of extremes. Moderation emerges, therefore, as a function of rhetorical rather than normative or aesthetic calculation.
The Medium Eats the Message
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

The chapter examines the complications of “mediatization” around 1800 in two separate senses. The first involves the growth in the variety, reach, and influence of media of communication. The second is a reorganization of political power in the wake of Napoleon, whereby territories that were formerly answerable only to the Emperor and therefore stood in “immediate” relation to imperial power became “mediatized.” Both developments and their profound consequences are represented in Kleist’s novella, “Michael Kohlhaas.” The text frames Kohlhaas’s spiral into madness and immoderation with a chain of virulent circulating signifiers (horses, letters, missives, prophecies, and so on) and an almost obsessive attention to borders, boundaries, and lines of difference that can only be crossed at great cost. Reading Kleist’s text alongside twentieth-century commentaries reveals how its urgent insights into language, force, and justice are intertwined with deep misgivings about mediality and its proliferating logic.
Radically Neutral
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

Revisiting Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel and Haiti, the chapter considers the political and epistemological implications of romantic middling. Buck-Morss imagines a universal history that comprises lateral, virtual connections in the place of static differences and identities. Universal history challenges the coercive thinking represented by Hegelian dialectics and celebrates instead free circulation and connection around a middle ground of radical neutrality. Central to this promise is the trope of “syncretism”—harmonious mixture and exchange of properties across porous borders. A counter-image can be found in Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” whose tale of betrayal exposes the violence that remains repressed but legible in the term “syncretism,” first introduced into the modern European languages to describe closing-off rather than an opening-up of borders. The chapter considers Kleist’s critique of medial thinking alongside some passages from The Phenomenology of Spirit to show how the medial is already, even for Hegel, fraught with contradiction.
Love Language
Authors: Sng Zachary
Published: January 2021

Chapter 4 engages with Plato’s Symposium, P. B. Shelley’s “On Love,” and Friedrich Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry. These texts share an ancient trope of love as the metaxu, an agent of the in-between that enables exchange between mortals and gods, self and other. The figure of middling love is crucial to Shelley’s and Schlegel’s reception of Plato. In Shelley’s fragment, middling logic operates at the level of address and voice to complicate claims about self and other, type and anti-type, reducing desire to the pure motion of language and emptying out the self. Schlegel’s Dialogue draws on the circling movement that repeatedly drives the self out of itself toward the other and back again. Unlike Hegel, he radically undercuts any possibility of ascension or resolution, instead underscoring the tendency to divide and divide again. The chapter considers this restless middle, continually subject to division, as the crux of romantic philology.
Negotiating Sovereignty
Authors: Hall Ryan
Published: January 2021

This essay looks at nineteenth-century treaty-making between Blackfoot peoples and the U.S. and Canadian governments. All parties initially saw treaties as assertions of their own sovereignty over the Northwest Plains. Hall argues that the two treaty regimes were interrelated in significant ways and that the human costs of the transformation of Canadian and American sovereignty in this period were ultimately devastating for Blackfoot peoples in both economic and cultural terms (an outcome they did not foresee or believe they had agreed to).
Indian Raids in Northern Mexico and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty
Authors: Basante Marcela Terrazas y
Published: January 2021

This essay focuses on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States in the decades following the Mexican-American War. There, American, Apache, Comanche, and Mexican inhabitants came into contact with one another and their distinctive and sometimes conflicting understandings of sovereignty led to significant discord. In different ways, Mexico and the U.S. sought to assert control over part of these borderlands, which included restricting the movement of outsiders within their territory. Apache and Comanche peoples, on the contrary, regarded free movement across the region as “irrevocable.” The increasing American population both provided demand for livestock that drove indigenous raids into Mexico and curtailed access to land and resources, promoting migration across the border and making it exceedingly difficult for Mexico to assert sovereign control over northern territory.
State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America
Authors: Clark Christopher
Published: January 2021

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.
City Sovereignty in the Era of the American Civil War
Authors: Ryan Mary P.
Published: January 2021

This essay focuses on San Francisco’s complex story of land development in the period of dramatic growth during and after California’s Gold Rush. The author draws attention to the local level of government where sovereignty “was particularly ambiguous and unstable in the era of the American Civil War” and “the most contentious issue was not slavery but property, not labor but land.” Ryan demonstrates that land law in San Francisco was made primarily by local actors who “arrogated ‘sovereign’ authority unto themselves” such that “governance was the work of a succession of self-appointed and competing town councils, given little direction from Washington or anywhere else.”
Conclusion
Authors: Towers Frank
Published: January 2021

Whereas the introduction to this volume focused on the question of sovereignty and the nation-state, our conclusion takes stock of another important theme of this volume, writing North American history outside of a national framework. Riding the crest of a wave of studies on transnational and global comparative studies of the nineteenth century, historians working in this field would do well to pause briefly to take stock of its achievements, limitations, and future research questions....
Civil Religion: Secularism As Religion?
Authors: Butler Judith
Published: January 2021

Describes the genealogy and construction of the concept of civil religion in Balibar’s work, stressing its relation to Spinoza’s work and opening onto the critique of political and philosophical secularism, this last a “neutral,” mediating position which may be the “true religion of civic life” today, if it is not one pole of two within civil reiligion, the other religion itself, whose oscillating opposition lies at the heart of the contemporary conception of freedom.
Conversion
Authors: David-Ménard Monique
Published: January 2021

Identifies, defines, and examines the distinction between absolute objective violence and absolute subjective violence in Balibar’s works. Considers whether either form of violence converts into a political disposition or ground.
Interior Frontiers
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: January 2021

Internal borders occupy ambiguous and obscure sorts of spaces. They may divide the “interior of a territory or empire,” “isolate,” and thus “individualize it,” and serve “as expressions of the very constitution of the subject.” “Interior frontiers” are malleable, situated and responsive, and have opaque power. The term itself, Balibar claims, embodies “the non-representable limit of every border, as it would be seen ‘from within’ its delineation.”
Materialism
Authors: Maniglier Patrice
Published: January 2021

Argues that materialism is a political concept precisely because it bears on what is political in metaphysics in general, metaphysics being understood here a as the exercise in constructing and exploring conceptual consistencies. Balibar’s work constantly maintains the two requirements that we cannot do away with metaphysics, while metaphysics cannot do away with politics.
The Political
Authors: Ophir Adi
Published: January 2021

Identifies and discusses two “binding” political principles in Balibar’s work: equaliberty, and an explicit and systematic negation of the universalist dimension of equality and liberty. This other principle binds “a politics of purity.” Juxtaposing these two antagonistic forms of politics and explicating their common ground helps articulate an outline for a concept of the political that does not exclude one type of politics in favor of the other but is rather realized equally in both. The two types (and their opposite binding principles) are symmetrical in certain respects that make them equally (and especially well) equipped to demonstrate basic aspects of the political event and of the political as an event.
Punishment
Authors: Fassin Didier
Published: January 2021

Offers a consideration of “punishment” in terms of two sociological currents that differently consider what it means to define a social practice, a Durkheimian and a Weberian current.
Race
Authors: Elsayed Hanan
Published: January 2021

Explores the three nodal points of Balibar's analysis of race and racism: 1) The relation between race and racism, on the one hand, and nation and nationalism, on the other, both grounded in what Balibar calls “fictive identity.” 2) The relation between race and racism and the theory and practice of universalism, the definition of the human through the identification/production of anthropological differences, and the tendency of equality (a notion central to any universalism) to become confused with similitude and likeness. 3) The process by which the foreigner becomes the stranger, who will in turn become the enemy, and the essentialization of language and culture and its relation to the production of the inassimilable and incompatible that underlie many of the contemporary forms of racism.
Rights
Authors: Bernstein J. M.
Published: January 2021

Argues that Étienne Balibar’s political philosophy innovates a complex constellation of concepts aimed at reviving and renewing the great tradition of radical democracy. Yet, not only is Balibar’s concept of rights the most exorbitant in his conceptual armory, but it is also the conceptual fulcrum on which his political philosophy pivots: without its particular normative insistence, the constellation falls to pieces.
Circling the Elephant
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor. In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology. Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions.” Thatamanil also notes troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and Trinity. This book proposes a new theology of religious diversity, one that opens the door to true interreligious learning.
Introduction: Revisiting an Old Tale
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter introduces, reformulates, and defends the old Indian allegory of the blind men and the elephant to argue that, despite critiques, it remains a valuable tool for thinking about religious diversity. Appealing to John Hull, theologian of blindness, the book reformulates the ancient tale as one about blindfolded men and the elephant. After reformulating the tale, the author puts it to new uses. He argues that theology of religious diversity is the work of accounting for why there are so many different accounts of the elephant, comparative theology is the work of actually walking over to another side of the elephant, and constructive theology is the venture of actually redescribing the elephant in light of the other two tasks. This chapter argues that all three tasks must be done together.
No One Ascends Alone
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter surveys and assesses major contemporary versions of pluralist and particularist theologies of religious diversity including those of John Hick, David Ray Griffin, and Mark Heim. While finding commendable elements in each, the chapter argues for a relational pluralism derived from the work of Roland Faber and Catherine Keller. Central to the work of this chapter is the challenge to accounts of “religion” which tend to homogenize out difference and accounts of “religions” which tend to reify traditions over against each other. Even positive pluralist accounts that seek to speak of the different religions as valid paths up the same or even different mountains often fail to recognize just how deeply intertwined religious traditions are. Relational pluralism, by contrast, rightly recognizes that religious traditions have always emerged in relation and that their ongoing flourishing will continue to require relational encounter.
Comparative Theology After Religion?
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter employs genealogy of religion, critical race theory, and Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism to call into question the way in which uninterrogated notions about “religion” and “religions” compromise theologies of religious diversity. At the heart of the argument is the claim that both the categories “religions” and “races” were invented to reify traditions and peoples over against each other and to develop hierarchies of valuation. Reification is the precondition for ranking, and where there is reification there can be no learning. These reifications persist and complicate and compromise theologies of religious diversity and comparative theology. If Christian theology is to take up the project of interreligious learning, then a variety of extant theories of religion must be called into question. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes that there is no way to simply jettison “religion” and “religions.” These categories must be given new meaning.
Defining the Religious
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes on the following tasks. First, it contends that genealogy of religions does not dispel the possibility of advancing new theories of the religious. Genealogical inquiry can provide a clearing in which new critically self-conscious definitions of the religious can be deployed because here is no doing without the category altogether. Second, this chapter offers a definition of the religious that attempts to avoid the kinds of reifications that have plagued theories that have not passed through the turbulent waters of the genealogical project. To be religious is to seek comprehensive qualitative orientation by means of interpretive schemes and therapeutic regimes assembled from the always fluid repertoires of religious traditions. Because religious traditions have always been composed of contested and fluid repertoires, no religion is a reified self-identical and static something that admits of no porosity and thus forestalls interreligious learning.
God as Ground, Singularity, and Relation
Authors: Thatamanil John J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter is the culmination of the book. What previous chapters called for—the integration of theology of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology—this chapter performs. It offers a new constructive theology of the trinity, a theology of the trinity that is worked out with the help of Hindus and Buddhists. Such a theology is simultaneously a way to think about religious neighbors, a way of learning from those neighbors, and a way to reimagine the divine life. Specifically, this chapter advocates an account of God/ultimate reality as ground, singularity, and relation. Although these features of the divine life can be discerned across traditions, this chapter argues that certain strands of particular traditions focus on one account of ultimacy at the relative expense of others. But this degree of focus is precisely what makes interreligious learning possible, necessary, and rewarding.
On Universals
Authors: Balibar Etienne
Published: January 2021

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.
On Universalism
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores ideas and arguments with Alain Badiou on the theme of universalism and universality. It argues that a philosophical discourse on the categories of the universal, universality, and universalism—their meaning and use—must be a critical discourse. The chapter then adopts a critical and dialectic point of view in order to elucidate a discourse of universalism that allows one to incorporate its contradictory conditions, the contradictions that always already affect its conditions. It indicates three orientations which are particularly significant from this point of view. The first has to do with the dilemmas or dichotomized utterances of universalism in philosophy; the second concerns the intrinsic ambivalence of the institution of the universal, or the universal as “truth”; and the third deals with what can be called, in quasi-Weberian terms, the responsibility (or responsibilities) involved in a politics of the universal that many support.
A New Quarrel
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: January 2021

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.
Study on the System of Penalty Substitution in Taiwan, China—Based on 494 Commutation Judicial Documents
Authors: Du Weiwei
Published: January 2021

Although the penalty substitution system has not been established in mainland China, there is no lack of relevant discussion. Some scholars suggest that we should learn from the introduction of a commutation system to alleviate the disadvantages of short-term freedom penalty and the difficulty of fine penalty implementation; other scholars discuss the function and value of penalty substitution. In mainland China, short-term free penalty and fine penalty are statutory punishments for many crimes, and if the penalty replacement can be realized within a reasonable range, it can also alleviate the disadvantages of the execution of the penalty. The judicial system of Taiwan is rich in judicial practice and has a long time to revise. Based on legislative data and 494 judicial documents related to commutation in Taiwan, China, a comprehensive review of the penalty substitution system in Taiwan will help to explore the role and limitations of penalty substitution as an alternative to punishment.
Personality and Employees’ Information Security Behavior among Generational Cohorts
Authors: Warrington Cartmell , Syed Javaid , Tappin Ruth M.
Published: January 2021

The Big Five Factors Model (FFM) of personality traits theory was tested for its ability to explain employee information security behavior (EISB), when age, measured by generational cohort (GCOHORT), moderated the relationship between the independent variables (IVs) extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, intellect (EACESI) and the dependent variable (DV), employees’ information security behavior (EISB) which is measured by file protection behavior (FPB). Three age groups defined GCOHORT: 52–70 years old (1946–1964, Baby Boomers), 36–51 yrs old (1965–1980, Generation X), and 18– 35 yrs. Old (1981–1998, Millennial). Results of hierarchical multiple regressions analyses revealed statistically significant relationships between overall personality traits, four individual factors of personality traits, and the DV (p < .05). However, contrary to expectations, GCOHORT did not moderate the relationship between any of the main IVs and the DV (p > .05). Recommendations for future research are offered.
Comparing the Risk Spillover from Oil and Gas to Investment Grade and High-yield Bonds through Optimal Copulas
Authors: Rahman Md Lutfur , Shahzad Syed Jawad Hussain , Uddin Gazi Salah , Dutta Anupam
Published: January 2021

This paper compares the tail dependence and risk spillovers from the oil and gas to high-yield (HY) and investment grade (IG) bond markets. We use time-varying optimal copula framework to examine the dependence and further quantify upside and downside risk spillovers. We also explore how energy futures can be used to hedge risk of HY and IG bond portfolios. Our results show that the bond returns are more sensitive to risk shocks in the oil market compared to gas market. We find both negative and positive tail dependence between the bond and energy pairs and the relationship is stronger during the oil-crunch period. The dependence however is asymmetric across the tails. Finally, compared to oil futures, gas futures are found to be better hedge for the bond investment. These results can help in managing portfolio risk and designing optimal asset allocation strategies. These might also assist in formulating policies and regulations to manage the effects of cross-market risk transmissions.
THE IMPACT OF POOR WASTE MANAGEMENT PRACTICE ON THE CAMPUS STUDENTS: THE CASE OF GONDAR UNIVERSITY OF “TEWODROS” CAMPUS, ETHIOPIA
Authors: Wondimu Habtamu
Published: January 2021

This study aimed to examine the impact of poor solid waste management on student’s health care at Gondar University of “Tewodros” campus. The study used a mixed-method approach. To recruit sample respondents', both probability and non-probability sampling methods have been employed. In the meantime, the study revealed the sources of solid waste, it is understood that the poorly collected and managed solid wastes of the study area due to the lack of necessary materials and facilities of waste collection, lack of laborers engaged in street sweeping and daily removal of solid waste is now becoming the major causes of environmental problems such as surface and groundwater pollution problems. Besides, the student’s health office personnel in the interview approached the general health status of the students on the campus during this year. Accordingly, dysentery, common cold, and typhoid are the most frequently appear disease on the Tewodros campus. Therefore, there should be a “students committee “at the campus level to control illegal dumping and to develop practice and habits of poor waste handling and disposal in the community, and there must be apparent regulation and policy frameworks that prohibit poor waste management.
HEALTH CARE EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA: AN EMPIRICAL APPRAISAL OF THE NEXUS
Authors: Imandojemu Alemu Kingsley , Imonikhe Desmond Uareime , Akinlosotu Nathaniel Toyosi , Babatunde Aina Jamiu
Published: January 2021

A nation’s wealth is often described in terms of their physical stock of capital per time for the promotion of economic growth. One of such physical stock of capital is a healthy labour force. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship between health expenditure and economic growth in Nigeria from 1985 to 2019. To determine this, annual time series data was collected from various issues of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin and the World Development Indicator (WDI). Stationarity, long run relationship, equation estimation and causality were determined using the Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF), Johansen-Cointegration, Parsimonious Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) and Pairwise Granger Causality test respectively. The result showed that a long run relationship exist among the variables while the ECM showed that in event of a disequilibrium, the system would restore itself to equilibrium at an adjustment speed of approximately 85.5percent. The result uncovered that current and past percentage of health expenditure in total expenditure (PHETE), government final consumption expenditure (GFCE), and labour force participation (LABF) all had direct impact on national growth (real GDP per capita) while current and past number of infant deaths (NUFD) had inverse relationship with national growth.
Result further showed that there exists a unidirectional causality running from NUFD to RGDPPC; from GFCE to RGDPPC; from LABF to RGDPPC, from NUFD to PHETE, from LABF to PHETE, from NUFD to GFCE and from NUFD to LABF. It was recommended that the federal government through the Ministry of Health should endeavour to encourage private-public partnership in the building of quality health infrastructure such as hospitals with state of art facilities in localities where standard health care centres are not accessible to working citizens.
The Nature of Magic
Authors: Augé C. Riley
Published: January 2021

To ground the study of magic and archaeology in seventeenth-century New England within the broader field of anthropological magical belief scholarship, this chapter provides a general discussion of magic with definitions of sympathetic magic, ritual, magical worldview, and apotropaism. Discussion of boundary and threshold concepts and explanations of how magic is believed to function includes notions of secrecy, conflict, and body-house interfacing. The chapter concludes with comparative cultural examples of gendered magical practices, like the construction of kolams, to substantiate the possibility that magical use could also have had a gendered aspect in New England.
Words from the Past
Authors: Augé C. Riley
Published: January 2021

The process of locating and evaluating historical data sources is presented here as a prelude to the analysis of the detailed magical references abstracted from historic archives. The sources are divided into primary and secondary general historical sources including letters, diaries, magical treatises and compilations, sermons, magical symbolism, and herbal collections and the documentary evidence from the Salem witch trials and other court proceedings. These sources provide the first glimpse into concerns over threshold permeability and the use of gender related magic as a crisis response to protect those domestic boundaries.
Archaeology and Magic
Authors: Augé C. Riley
Published: January 2021

This final chapter revisits the volume’s goals to draw conclusions about apotropaic material culture classification and its archaeological presence, the relationship between gendered fear and apotropaic use, risk management contexts, and boundary construction implications based upon the data abstracted, analyzed, and interpreted through the book. At this point a revised criterion model for recognition of magic and ritual in the historical archaeological record is offered for future researchers as a complementary model to the ritual identification model that is currently available and most referenced by archaeologists attempting to recognize and understand indications of belief in magical power in the archaeological record. Lastly, recommendations are proposed for continuing historical and archaeological investigation of magic including sacred measurement, plants, and symbols as elements revealing gendered behaviors to protect and control their lives.
A New Direction in the Study of Ancient Maya Economics
Authors: Demarest Arthur A. , Victor Bart , Andrieu Chloé , Torres Paola
Published: January 2021

This chapter presents a critique of factors inhibiting progress in Maya economic studies, an introduction to approaches that avoid those pitfalls and examples of successful applications of strategic management theory and sociological organization studies. Some errors identified in current studies include shifts in terminology from relative to absolute; huge spatial and temporal frames of reference obscuring patterns and creating continuities, thus minimizing the degree of change; arguments unacceptable in logical and scientific discourse to criticize alternative interpretations, and other fallacies. Strategic management analysis can be applied to specific features of economies, avoiding such errors and overly broad typological concepts (e.g., “market economy,” “redistribution,” “barter,” “inalienable property”). Instead specific aspects of those and other parts of economies are studied as sets composed of variable elements each of which can be evaluated on relative scales. Successful recent applications to Maya economy are summarized, guiding to a vast literature in the sociology organization and of strategic management on “embeddedness,” manipulation of the “biographies of things,” “economic cultures,” “Trust,” innovation legitimation, vertical integration, institutional agency, and hopefully, providing a new direction in the study of Maya economies.
Chert Resource Availability, Production, and Economic Logic
Authors: Horowitz Rachel A. , Canuto Marcello , Andrieu Chloé
Published: January 2021

At a basic level, the lowland Classic Maya economy was a complex web of prestige exchange, centralized distribution, and local market economies. While it is important not to consider the lowland Classic Maya economic system as monolithic, it is also as critical to understand how it articulated with the different levels of social hierarchy. In this chapter, we address the distribution of utilitarian goods in the ancient Maya economy through comparisons of lithic resources, particularly chert, in northwestern Petén and western Belize. We find that access to locally available raw materials affects the involvement of actors of differing sociopolitical status in lithic production and distribution.