bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding Variation in Corruption and White-Collar Crime
Authors: Kupatadze Alexander
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the internal and external causes of variations in corruption and white-collar crime through a comparative case study of Georgia and Armenia. From the domestic perspective, different outcomes in relation to ethnic conflicts, as well as differences in terms of the political elite’s stability (a radical changeover of political elites in Georgia versus a continuation of existing elite networks in Armenia), explain the varying degrees of corruption and white-collar crime rates between the two states. From the external dimension, this chapter states that the varying attitudes toward Russia and amenability to Western influence have provided different incentives for reform in Georgia and Armenia, and resulted in different outcomes with reference to corruption.
Baku
Authors: Valiyev Anar
Published: December 2017

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Baku has undergone a tremendous transformation. In this context, demographic trends for the last decade have been quite favourable toward the development of Baku, with a constant increase in population due to the high net-in migration from the rural areas of Azerbaijan. Consequently, it is not surprising that Baku exerts a disproportionately significant influence on the national economy. The city continues to be the leading recipient of investment, most of which is funneled into the construction industry. The post-Soviet transition toward a market economy has enabled Baku to make tremendous progress in urban development and to become one of the fastest growing cities in the region. This chapter looks at the development pattern of Baku, and its attempts to emulate Gulf cities. It will try to answer the question of whether Baku will be able to copy the pattern of the “Pearl of UAE” successfully, or if it will fail because of indigenous and exogenous factors.
Rising Powers and the Risks of War
Authors: Walt Stephen M.
Published: December 2017

For realist theory, major shifts in the balance of power are a potent source of conflict and war. The main exception, which does not disprove the rule, is the United States. Realists believe China’s continued rise will lead to greater security competition between the United States and China and a heightened danger of war. China will try to reduce the US security presence in Asia, leading to competition for allies and influence. In the near term, most Asian states will balance Chinese power by aligning with Washington, but this process will not take place smoothly. Instead, America’s Asian alliances will face dilemmas of collective action, and uncertainty about alliances will tempt China to play “divide-and-rule” and lead to recurring crises. Realist theory cannot tell us the date when serious trouble will arise or the circumstances under which it will occur. But it warns that the potential for trouble is growing.
The Weight of the Past in China’s Relations with Its Asian Neighbors
Authors: Westad Odd Arne
Published: December 2017

Historically, regional power shifts have tended to be messy affairs. Such changes often produced not only wars, but long, drawn-out forms of conflict that devastated the regions in which they occurred. With the exception of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, none of these power-shift conflicts have yet been truly global, and it is unlikely that the rivalry between the United States and China will spill over into a global confrontation any time soon. The chapter provides an overview of two of the key conflict areas within East Asia, notably Korea and Southeast Asia, mainly from a Chinese perspective, and it indicates how a better understanding of the international history of the region can help with measuring the framework for current rivalries. It also suggests key issues for consideration in terms of how the potential for great power conflict can be reduced.
The Rise and Fall of the China Model
Authors: Pei Minxin
Published: December 2017

A critical variable determining the future relationship between China and the United States is the change in the relative balance of power, which depends on the sustainability of China’s economic growth. While China has produced three decades of double-digit growth, this paper argues that China’s rise has peaked. The factors that have contributed to China’s rapid growth, such as efficiency gains produced by market-oriented reforms, practically unlimited access to global markets, and the demographic dividend, are either disappearing or dissipating. Simultaneously, obstacles to future growth, such as systemic corruption, environmental degradation, and demographic ageing, are becoming more salient. Economic slowdown will threaten the survival strategy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, the CCP has followed a sophisticated strategy to maintain power. An economic slowdown will likely cause an unravelling of this strategy, which depends on revenues generated by growth for its sustainability.
Axis of Opposition
Authors: Cox Michael
Published: December 2017

Received wisdom states that China and Russia are more likely bound to be rivals than partners. This chapter challenges this notion and traces the growing significance for both parties of the relationship over the past twenty years. It suggests that the relationship has developed into something very serious with the twin purpose for both of maintaining stability and order at home while contesting what both view as a Western-created and US-led order abroad. This does not mean they do not have other interests, but this does not detract from the main argument being advanced here: that China, which has so few serious partners in the world today, has found a serious one in Russia; and that Russia has also discovered one in China.
Introduction
Authors: Beek Jan , Göpfert Mirco , Owen Olly , Steinberg Jonny
Published: December 2017

This chapter argues that Police in Africa bears testimony to a renaissance in empirically grounded, ethnographic long-term research on the everyday dimensions of police work, combined with a re-focussing on the state as a central figure in policing and the production of in/security, and a seriousness vis-à-vis the everydayness and banality of bureaucratic work in Africa. It reflects current debates about the state and bureaucracy in Africa as well as the ethnography and sociology of police and policing, all the while refuting African exceptionalism. It also gives an overview of the contributions to the volume.
What is the Concept of Professionalization Good for?
Authors: Glasman Joël
Published: December 2017

Drawing on archival material and oral sources from historical research on the Togolese police, this chapter argues that the notion of professionalization, until now a hidden passenger of police studies, is not a useful analytical category to make sense of police organisations. Like many of the notions used in police support and Security Sector Reform projects, it is both teleological and Eurocentric, and as such creates analytical problems. The underlying presupposition is that African police are still not professional enough; and professionalization is often equated with adherence to strict bureaucratic standards. Yet this chapters shows that the bureaucratizsation of late colonial Togolese police was also perfectly in line with a rise in police violence and the neglect of legal norms.
The Colonial Subtext of British-Led Police Reform in Sierra Leone
Authors: Krogstad Erlend Grøner
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the role of memories of Sierra Leone’s
British colonial past in shaping policing practices in the wake of a long civil war. Sierra Leonean powerholders mobilise this history nostalgically to build international alliances, ensure continued funding and as an insurance against coups. This is a particularly complex exemplar of the global and historical interconnectedness of police, for the connections here are as much to the past as to the present, and as much to Sierra Leone itself as to Europe.
Policing Boundaries
Authors: Pratten David
Published: December 2017

Starting from research on vigilantism and informal justice in Nigeria, this chapter looks at policing practices in the light of their links to wider practices and repertoires of legitimacy, visibility, knowledge, and punishment used in controlling crime and social deviance and resolving disputes in Africa. These practices include both long-established cultural framings of rectitude and popular legitimacy and practices which appropriate ‘state-ness’, as demonstrated by vigilante groups with whom police forces share a public space.
The Belly of the Police
Authors: Hornberger Julia
Published: December 2017

This chapter adopts a nuanced view of accusation of African police of being corrupt, particularly with regards to what is often called ‘petty corruption’. Entitled ‘The Belly of the Police’, this chapter takes Jean-François Bayart’s metaphor of the stomach seriously and argues that giving food to police officers is a serious form of corruption, as it creates reciprocal obligations that are more meaningful than the exchange of money. Food fundamentally structures police work, determining how officials interact with each other and with citizens.
Politics at Home Abroad
Authors: Danielson Michael S.
Published: December 2017

Despite intense migratory flows between Mexico and the United States, migrants have had surprisingly low participation and impact in national politics in Mexico. Nevertheless, this book begins by hypothesizing that participation may be more robust and impact more noteworthy at the subnational level due to the fact that the economic and social importance of migration varies widely within Mexico. Based on this framing, three related research questions are presented and the need for a mixed-method approach to answer them addressed. While case studies of significant migrant impact are insufficient to fully capture the breadth of effects, quantitative studies are inadequate to the task of uncovering the historical processes and causal mechanisms behind observed correlations. Finally, the chapter summarizes the different data sources used, justifies the case selection rationale, and outlines the structure of the rest of the book.
Migration and Subnational Politics in Mexico
Authors: Danielson Michael S.
Published: December 2017

This chapter begins with a review of the literature on the relationship between migration and hometown democracy. Migration can affect the politics of sending places through both direct and indirect channels, and the nature of migrant impact has been found to both enhance and weaken democracy. Four hypothesized channels of migrant political influence are then identified. These include the “mode of engagement” (with whom do migrants form alliances?); “attitudes, behaviors, and ideologies” (how does migration experience change migrants?); representation (what kind of migrants engage?); and unintended consequences (the aggregate impact of migrant engagement depends on the reactions of non-migrants). After discussing these mechanisms, and their potentially democracy-enhancing and democracy-weakening outcomes, the chapter outlines a process model of migrant-led political change, which provides a framework to analyze continuity and change in Mexican municipal politics in the face of migration.
Ovid's Homer
Authors: Boyd Barbara
Published: December 2017

This book is the first extended modern study of the Latin poet Ovid’s Homeric intertextuality. Ovid’s relationship with the Homeric poems is shown to be neither occasional nor simply incidental; rather, careful and creative readings of the abundant evidence of Ovid’s career-long engagement with the Iliad and the Odyssey demonstrate a coherent and profound pattern of animated intertextuality and transformative reception. Passages and poems from throughout Ovid’s major works offer a vivid picture of the ways in which Ovid styles himself as a worthy successor to Homer. Central to the discussion throughout the book are two central tropes, articulated on both the thematic and metatexual levels: paternity and desire. For Ovid, the poetics of paternity is a way of reading the Homeric poems, as well as a way of positioning himself as a legitimate heir to Homer’s poetic authority; and the poetics of desire, expressed especially strongly through repetition, allows Ovid to characterize himself as a devoted reader and editor of Homer, whose emulation of his model is grounded in an intimate appreciation for and knowledge of the text. Through a sustained reading sensitive to the dynamics of reception, this book puts forward a new perspective on Ovid, and offers a fertile model for the analysis of Latin poetry.
Seeing Double: Ovid’s Diomedes
Authors: Boyd Barbara Weiden
Published: December 2017

Chapter 2 focuses on the Homeric character Diomedes and his appearances in Ovid’s poetry. It begins with a detailed discussion of the scene in Iliad Book 4 in which Agamemnon chastises Diomedes for not being quicker to join the fighting, comparing him to his detriment with his father, Tydeus. The discussion focuses on a small but significant ambiguity in this episode regarding Diomedes’s response to Agamemnon, and then proceeds to a more general consideration of the centrality of paternity to Homeric values. A reading informed by the poetics of metatextuality suggests the relevance of this scene to Ovid’s relationship with Homer. The remainder of the chapter offers a detailed analysis of two episodes in the Ovidian corpus featuring Diomedes, Amores 1.7 and an episode in Metamorphoses Book 14, and suggests how Ovid uses them as opportunities to position himself as the poetic “son” of Homer.
Paternity Tests
Authors: Boyd Barbara Weiden
Published: December 2017

Chapter 5 is devoted to the poetics of paternity in Ovid’s exile poems. Ovid repeatedly invokes paternity in describing his poems, referring to them as his “children” and suggesting analogies between his own plight and that of some of the doomed sons in ancient myth. In Epistulae ex Ponto 3.9, Ovid compares himself to Thersites’s father, who felt affection for his son despite the contempt in which he was held by others; Ovid claims a similar indulgence regarding the lack of polish evident in his “children,” the exile poetry. He even hints at, if only momentarily, divine parentage in Tristia 3.14, as he compares his poems to Minerva—and, by implication, himself to Jupiter, the goddess’s sole parent. The emotional connection Ovid establishes between himself and his poems reaches an emotional highpoint in Tristia 1.7, when he invokes a comparison with Althea, responsible for killing the son she loves.
Poetic Daughters
Authors: Boyd Barbara Weiden
Published: December 2017

Chapter 6 considers the evidence for a tradition of personification that identifies the Iliad and Odyssey as Homer’s daughters. This personification, likely a product of the Hellenistic age, is known from the visual record, as exemplified by the Archelaus relief. It is also expressed in several Hellenistic epigrams that use the conceit that poetry can help to perpetuate its creator’s fame much as children sustain the reputation of their parents. But the basic elements of the idea predate the Hellenistic period: In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima clearly implies a correspondence between Homer’s poems and children: they constitute the offspring that guarantee Homer’s immortal fame. In Tristia 3.7, Ovid addresses a young woman, Perilla, in terms that suggest a father-daughter relationship and uses this poem to encourage the survival of his poetic immortality. Ovid’s Perilla can best be understood not as a historical figure but as a poetic construct—a scripta puella.
The Impact of Collaboration on the Epistemic Cultures of Science
Authors: Brad Wray K.
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines how collaborative research affects the epistemic cultures of science. It begins by arguing that some groups of scientists hold views that are irreducibly the views of the group. The chapter also examines some normative issues that have arisen in the epistemic cultures of science. First, it considers how collaborative research threatens to erode the traditional notion of authorship in science. Second, it examines how collaborative research in science affects refereeing. The chapter argues that the norms of authorship and the refereeing practices have not developed to address the challenges encountered in the cultures of science where collaborative research is commonplace.
A Clustering-Based Approach to Collective Beliefs
Authors: Bonnay Denis
Published: December 2017

In this chapter, I argue in favor of a new approach to collective beliefs in unorganized groups, in terms of doxastic clustering. When a group does not have dedicated mechanisms for production of collective beliefs, and when individual beliefs of members of the group are diverse, it does not make much sense to attribute to the group some average beliefs or any other kind of collective beliefs produced by aggregating individual beliefs. Rather, beliefs are meaningfully attributed to coherent subgroups of individuals who share similar opinions. In this case, attribution of collective beliefs involves both clustering, that is partitioning the group into coherent doxastic units, and aggregation, that is aggregating individual opinions within coherent clusters. Adapting standard judgment aggregation theory, I propose a formal framework for doxastic clustering and provide an axiomatic characterization of majoritarian intra-cluster aggregation.
Portico
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

Using evocative language, the book opens with a historical and contemporary exploration of the desire that motivates contemplative practitioners to seek an intimate relationship with the divine. It describes the effect of globalization and religious pluralism by noting a trend of Americans’ abandonment of mainline Christian institutions, their exploration of other contemplative traditions, and their subsequent return to Christianity when they discover its mystical history and current-day contemplative practices. The chapter describes core terms, concepts, research parameters, and basic sociological and historical information about the research community, a network of American monastic and non-monastic contemplative Christians who practice a meditation technique called Centering Prayer. Chapter 1 also introduces the terms apophatic and cataphatic to the ritual studies lexicon and offers a basic description of the novel ethnographic methodology that the author developed for research in silent communities.
Antechapel
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of the monastic tenet of stability, showing the methods by which teachers and communities help ground newcomers in their intentions to follow demanding contemplative Christian alternatives while nevertheless allowing for ambiguity and open-mindedness toward people who follow other lifeways. Rather than depending on unreliable belief and emotion, neophytes learn to keep intentions and practices as a way of working toward “contemplative transformation,” a kind of religious conversion. The difficulties they have in learning practices and principles, especially discipline, humility, and detachment, reveal some deep-seated American cultural motifs of self-identity, self-achievement, and acquisition. Ethnographic examples illustrate the critical role of teachers in stabilizing neophytes as they struggle to learn the paradox of focusing their lives while retaining a non-judgmental, pluralistic outlook. Some key practices include keeping a rule of life, practicing silence and Centering Prayer, maintaining a sense of humor, and serving others through social action.
Gate
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

Expanding on the work of Fredrik Barth and Pierre Bourdieu, Chapter 4 introduces a new theory of differential knowledge that helps account for diversity in pluralistic societies. It discusses the key roles of agency, habitus, and an uneven distribution of knowledge in the Centering Prayer movement, and coins the term “performative knowledge” to describe the technical and rhetorical skill with which leaders encouraged their followers. It compares the surprising differences of monastic and non-monastic versions of a Holy Week ritual, thus showing how leaders used their social and cultural capital to authenticate chosen histories in order to innovate new rites or stabilize long-established forms: some monastics worked to evoke an ethos of atonement, whereas a non-monastic community cultivated eros through the biblical theme of Love Mysticism. The role of individual leadership and charisma was especially crucial in the American environment in which religious institutions have limited authority.
Choir
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

Expanding on the notion of “keeping intention,” introduced in Chapter 2, Chapter 5 shows how contemplative Christians refine their capacity to “keep attention” and cultivate “contemplative senses” through formal group rituals, body awareness techniques, and the construction of aesthetic environments. It notes the contemplative Christian concept of the Body of Christ in which individual bodies and the collective body are perceived as interconnected entities with expandable and contractible boundaries. The chapter describes the monastic Daily Office and how non-monastic contemplatives adapt monastic rites to their lives outside monasteries. Introducing the important relationship between agency and habitus in contemplative practice, the chapter also develops a model that explicates the process of changing perception, called “contemplative transformation,” as an ever-moving ritualization between “posture” (intentional cataphatic ritual action and positive knowledge) and “flow” (apophatic, ambiguous “inner gestures” and “unknowing”).
Sacristy
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

A contribution to the field of lived religion, Chapter 6 critiques the idea of ritual as a reified category separate from ordinary life. Contemplative Christians sought to lead lives of “ceaseless prayer” by learning to “keep attention” in their everyday activities with contemplative awareness techniques, including keeping a monastic daily rhythm and practicing “conscious work.” The chapter illustrates their efforts with an ethnographic example describing how Wisdom School participants treated a flu epidemic as an opportunity to engage contemplative ways of being. It also includes reports of individual practitioners’ “intentional living” in the privacy of their homes. Summarizing the significance of the ritualization of everyday life in this community, one woman’s charismatic description of the contemplative aspects of kitchen work leads to a theoretical analysis of how ordinary tasks can prompt “transformation” through practitioners’ combination of attention, intention, unknowing, and ritualized action.
Sanctuary
Authors: Pryce Paula
Published: December 2017

Highlighting the interconnected roles of agency, habitus, and ambiguity, this chapter describes the book’s core thesis: the variability and interdependence of three culturally specific knowledge types (performative knowledge, unknowing, and unitive being), which result from practitioners’ differing capacities to “evoke the divine.” Expressed as an algebraic formula, this new epistemological theory of differential knowledge adds to classic studies of ritual and perception by detailing the diversity and fluidity with which “communitas” or phenomenological intersubjectivity actually occurs in a particular ethnographic context. It offers an anthropology of knowledge that can assist in the analysis of complex pluralistic societies. The chapter’s extensive use of ethnographic narrative and poetic language conveys how the three variable knowledge types arise in people’s ritualized lives and demonstrates how the ethnographer used intersubjective fieldwork methods to gain insights to contemplative experience even in environments of silence and interiority.
Horizontal Egalitarianism
Authors: Rondel David
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines Marxism and socialism as a paradigm of “horizontal” egalitarianism. Whereas liberals typically endorse a regime of political equality (a Rechtstaat), the chapter shows how, from a Marxist perspective, the end that socialism serves and capitalism impedes is social—not merely political—equality. On this view, the real site of equality is on the ground, in civil society, and in everyday social relationships. The egalitarian vision at the heart of Marx’s thought consists in a community of free and equal social citizens. It is a vision for which egalitarian social relationships grounded in a cooperative and productive ethos are paramount.
Richard Rorty on Equality and Cultural Politics
Authors: Rondel David
Published: December 2017

This chapter provides a sympathetic sketch of Rorty’s “ethnocentric” liberalism and defends it against several critics. It also highlights the importance of “redescription” in Rorty’s thought and illustrate how what Rorty calls “cultural politics” together with his (anti-Kantian) “sentimentalist” conception of moral progress provides a useful lens through which to grasp the “cultural-valuational” register of egalitarian theorizing. Rorty’s political theory has been chastised for its apparent conservatism. But this chapter argues that Rorty’s endorsement of the Sellarsian thesis that “all awareness is a linguistic affair” coupled with his controversial claim that “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” opens up a potentially unlimited space for goods to be pursued and bads to be rejected. This makes Rortyan “cultural politics” as radical or conservative as spinners of new descriptions are apt to make it.
Conclusion
Authors: Rondel David
Published: December 2017

This chapter puts pragmatist egalitarianism to work, and shows how it reconciles many of the disputes that philosophical egalitarians are engaged in. It also considers inequality in the real world and provides an analysis of racial inequality in the United States. Racial inequality involves a complex imbroglio of (a) institutions like banks, the criminal justice system, media of various kinds, public schools, the healthcare system, zoning laws, electoral politics, public transportation, etc., (b) private individual feelings and biases about black work ethic, loan worthiness, personal responsibility, attitude, ambition, etc., (c) nebulous cultural meanings about black inferiority, violence, criminality, lesser intelligence, and, crucially, (d) the subtle ways in which (a), (b), and (c) mutually reinforce each other. The argument in this chapter is that all three variables are irreducible, triangulated, and mutually constituting and supporting.
Rhopographic Photography and Atemporal Cinema
Authors: Germana Michael
Published: December 2017

Chapter 3 posits a conceptual connection between two archives Ellison left behind after his death: a sprawling manuscript of an unfinished second novel which Ellison worked on for forty years, which was posthumously published in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting . . .; and a collection of hundreds of Polaroid photographs taken by Ellison over the last thirty years of his life that depict objects instead of people. As this chapter demonstrates, these ontographic Polaroids represent antidotes to the ways of seeing formalized by visual technologies that shape the identities of Welborn McIntyre and Senator Sunraider in Three Days. It concludes with an illustration of how Ellison’s rhopographic still life photographs collectively represent the author’s personal attempts to work through the same paradox that ensnares his characters: how to use a visual technology that formalizes static time in order to reveal the dynamism of becoming and the heterogeneous, durational nature of temporality.
A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times
Authors: Germana Michael
Published: December 2017

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.
Conclusion
Authors: Germana Michael
Published: December 2017

In “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” the acceptance speech he wrote for the National Book Award presentation ceremony at which he was honored, Ellison likens himself and his fellow novelists to Menelaus and his companions trying to find their way back home in Homer’s ...
Kabuliwallah
Authors: Paliwal Avinash
Published: December 2017

Modern India’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan were officially instituted in 1950. But relations between the people of these countries are civilizational, and based on extensive cultural exchange. Starting with the impact of Rabindranath Tagore’s legendary short story, Kabuliwallah, on India’s imagination of Afghanistan and its people, this chapter offers a long historical view of India-Afghanistan relations. Its main focus, however, remains on British India’s approach towards Afghanistan and the 1947-1979 phase when India fought three wars with Pakistan and one with China. This historical overview allows for the teasing out the aforementioned drivers of India’s Afghanistan policy.
The Taliban Dilemma
Authors: Paliwal Avinash
Published: December 2017

This chapter shows how India’s Afghanistan policy witnessed an 180-degree shift in April 1991. Far from cutting contact, Indian policymakers — dominated by conciliators — officially recognised the Mujahideen government despite the latter being dependent on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This shift was momentous given India’s traditional mistrust of the Afghan Islamists. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban complicated this conciliatory approach. Contrary to the arguments of existing literature, there was an undercurrent in New Delhi to engage with the Taliban. Having dealt with the Mujahideen, the conciliators were confident of finding a sympathetic audience among senior Taliban leadership, which, they argued, would protect Indian interests in Afghanistan and were not being remote-controlled by Pakistan. The partisans, however, with support from Iran and Russia, marginalized the conciliators and successfully pushed India towards backing the anti-Taliban United Front.
War and Terror
Authors: Paliwal Avinash
Published: December 2017

The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha in March 2001 outraged India (and the world). It killed any scope for conciliation with the Taliban. In this context, the US decision to take military action in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks was welcomed by many in India. However, Washington’s decision to undertake such action without UN approval (which came only in December 2001) sparked another round of debate between the partisans and the conciliators. As this chapter shows, the former were enthusiastic about supporting the US in its global war on terror, but the latter advocated caution given Washington’s willingness to partner with Islamabad. Despite the global trend to ‘fight terrorism’, the conciliators were successful in steering India away from getting involved in Afghanistan militarily.
All Talked Out
Authors: Trout J.D.
Published: December 2017

Few topics animate, even polarize, philosophers, more than Naturalism, a doctrine which states that philosophy is continuous with, and perhaps even replaceable by, sciences worthy of the name. On one side, fans of technical progress believe that the sciences can indeed replace philosophy with something that allows us to reason and explain better. On the other, advocates of the humanities herald the insights and methods of disciplines seemingly beyond the reach of science. But these disputes are often more about turf than truth. All Talked Out exemplifies the power of science in a philosopher’s hands and takes a welcome look at the resulting fate of philosophy. Based on Trout’s Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, each chapter presents a novel and positive view of intellectual advances while addressing traditional topics in philosophy, and each chapter explains why these achievements occurred despite the archaic and often retrograde influence of philosophical doctrine and method. While foundational reflection remains as necessary as ever, philosophy, as it is conceived of in the halls of academia, no longer adds anything distinctively useful. At its best, philosophy is a place to grow new ideas. But many other disciplines can and do provide that incubation. In the end, we don’t have to kill philosophy; but we do have to figure out what it’s good for. Following a spirited Introduction, the first lecture takes stock of the growing field of evidence-based approaches to reasoning and, in light of these scientific developments, criticizes important failures in epistemology as it is currently practiced in the English-speaking world. The second lecture examines the psychological impulse to explain, the resulting sense of understanding, and the natural limits on cognitively appreciating the subject we have explained. The final lecture, on social policy, presents the proper reaction to the idea that scientific evidence matters to responsible governance.
Taking People as We Find Them
Authors: Trout J.D.
Published: December 2017

People across the world arrive at well-being—both subjective and objective—in different ways. Rather than beginning this search at the philosopher’s home, in the mind of potentially idiosyncratic intellectuals, Chapter 4 begins in a way that is thoroughly empirical, by examining the personal and social norms that are in place when people have all the signs of well-being. This evidence-based program examines what actually makes for happy lives, not what people think happy lives ought to look like. The chapter argues that each of the proposed policy arrangements—about the redistribution of inheritance; the dissolution of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology; and the structural elimination of conflicts of interest in job and policy settings—has the weight of empirical evidence in its favor.
Introduction
Authors: Jay Gregory S.
Published: December 2017

The introduction argues that a tradition of liberal white race fiction has been a key component of American literary history. It surveys scholarship defining “racial liberalism” and “racial capitalism” and considers their application to literary analysis and concludes with summaries of the book’s chapters. Summarizing the common features of these novels, the introduction explains how they used a variety of literary devices, struggled to criticize racism, called for social and political change, and promoted liberal philosophies of freedom and equality. Empathy, sympathy, and an appeal to the emotions of readers are essential features of each book, moreover, for liberal race fiction imagines that changing how we feel about racial injustice will motivate us to do something about it.
How Does It Feel to Be a Trademark?
Authors: Jay Gregory S.
Published: December 2017

Hurst’s best-selling novel of the 1930s portrayed the life of a New Woman business tycoon and the African American maid whose family waffle recipe became the basis for an “Aunt Jemima” kind of product and fortune. Stereotypes such as the “mammy” and “tragic mulatta” are either damaging caricatures or images to expose racism, depending on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The novel’s use of limited point of view works to satirize Bea Pullman’s racism even as the novel looks sympathetically on her quasi-feminist ambitions. The decision of the light-skinned Peola to leave the United States presents an indictment of society’s racism, though it breaks her mother’s heart. The film version of the novel from 1934 offers an interesting comparison to more stereotypical black images in cinema at the time, though some critics still found it offensive.
Desegregating Liberalism
Authors: Jay Gregory S.
Published: December 2017

Lillian Smith, born in the American South, became a leading critic of white supremacy and segregation in the years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Her essays and most famous novel were radical challenges to the Jim Crow system and notable for their feminist critique of patriarchal gender norms. The chapter traces Smith’s development as an activist and writer, examines the literary devices she uses in her writing to educate readers, and considers her lasting impact on race studies and women’s studies. An analysis of her bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, demonstrates Smith’s commitment to exposing how racism and repressive sexual mores distort the lives of its major protagonists. Examination of the two editions of her major work, Killers of the Dream, shows how its autobiographical and pedagogical devices further develop the formal characteristics of liberal race fiction.
Afterword
Authors: Jay Gregory S.
Published: December 2017

Recently African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published an award-winning book, Between the World and Me, which can serve as a useful perspective on racial liberalism today. The book’s literary form as a letter to his son, which is drawn from the work of James Baldwin, echoes the narrative strategies of addressing the reader found in all the novels studied in previous chapters. Here again the reader is positioned as a listener, student, and subject for moral education. But his audience is his black son, making his book a departure from the white-centered texts previously dominant in the race liberal tradition. Coates, too, engages in both historical teaching and emotional polemic, making us again explore why white readers (and writers) need to be reminded that “black lives matter.”
Bodies Bad and Gentle
Authors: Beeston Alix
Published: December 2017

Recovering the photographic contexts for Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives at its first publication in North America in 1909, this chapter interprets the text’s formal fragmentation and repetition in terms of the deconstructive syntax of spacing and doubling in Surrealist photography. Just as the Surrealists used the photographic frame to convulse the real, the narrative frame in Stein’s composite text serves to constitute its realist narration as narration and, more specifically, as a typological system of discourse. To be narrated typologically, for the three women in Three Lives, is to be silenced and killed; but Stein also recasts silence and deathly disappearance as a means of resistance, an intransigent acting out of type that is metaphorically reticulated in the blank interstices that separate and bridge her serialized lives.
Introduction
Authors: Lawrence Jeffrey
Published: December 2017

In the summer of 2011, while drinking with friends in a Mexico City pulquería, I met a writer from Los Angeles who had just finished reading the English translation of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives, 1998]. The novel, which follows the founders of a 1970s Mexican avant-garde literary movement across four continents and a span of twenty years, had appeared in the United States with much fanfare a few years earlier. Since the ...
Accounting for Moral Parenthood
Authors: Millum Joseph
Published: December 2017

The core of a theory of moral parenthood is an account of parental rights and parental responsibilities: how we acquire them and in what they consist. Such a theory can help us identify who the parents are and tell us what they may do to and for their children, what they should and should not do, and what claims they have against others who might interfere or assist. This chapter explains why a theory of moral parenthood is needed in order to resolve pressing ethical questions relating to parents and children. It outlines the method of reflective equilibrium that is used throughout the rest of the book, sketches the theory of rights that the book adopts, distinguishes parents from procreators, and lays out some important assumptions.
The Content of Parental Responsibilities
Authors: Millum Joseph
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the content of parental responsibilities. It argues that when someone takes on parental responsibilities, she takes on duties to provide a subset of what is collectively owed to all children within a society. That subset must include duties to provide the goods that children are owed that can only be provided by a constant caregiver—filial goods. It also must, in a just society, mean that it is possible for parents to do their duties, yet for the society to remain just. This constraint, along with the constraint that the child’s rights take precedence, allows us to rule out certain putative parental responsibilities a priori. For example, I argue that parents do not have a duty to pass on their wealth to their children.
Evolved Attitudes to Animals
Authors: Kasperbauer T.J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter looks at how our attitudes to animals have been shaped by different roles animals played in our evolutionary history. It reviews research on attitudes toward animals across cultures and among very young children. The main argument of the chapter is that we primarily inherited antagonistic attitudes toward animals from our evolutionary forebears. Antagonistic and aversive reactions to animals are discussed within the context of predator–prey relationships and disease avoidance. Positive attitudes to animals are also accounted for by looking at the evolution of pet-keeping and caring for animals. Attitudes toward animals among groups of indigenous people are considered in order to test the validity of the evolutionary account presented in the chapter.
Dehumanizing Animals
Authors: Kasperbauer T.J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter presents the core psychological account of the book. It reviews research on dehumanization toward human beings and explains how this process is similarly applied to non-human animals. It also makes a novel proposal for how animals could have come to present psychological threats to human beings and as a result be viewed negatively. The chapter describes ways in which animals are treated as part of an outgroup, even in the absence of overt hostility between humans and animals. Terror management theory and the psychology of dehumanization, fear, and disgust are used to explain how people make both positive and negative evaluations of animals. Evolutionary explanations for responding to animal threats are considered in order to further substantiate the importance of dehumanization in human attitudes toward animals.
Introduction
Authors: Zamir Tzachi
Published: December 2017

Apart from providing a short description of each contribution, this introduction suggests some connections among the essays. An independent question is raised, regarding whether or not Hamlet's philosophizing should be regarded by philosophers as serious abstract analysis, or, rather, as pseudophilosophy via which Hamlet evades his pressing circumstances. Where, in short, should Hamlet's philosophy be located (in his words or in what he shows)? It is suggested that while Hamlet is not a philosopher, he nevertheless embodies some of the more important qualities that non-artificial philosophizing involves. The volume’s essays are then discussed in relation to themes such as knowledge, authenticity, response, roleplaying, and time.
Staging Wisdom through Hamlet
Authors: Woodruff Paul
Published: December 2017

Hamlet illustrates how wisdom can be staged in theater. It ought to be impossible, because theater is watching, and wisdom can't be watched at all. Moreover, people spouting wisdom are rarely worth watching. Successful theater makes fun of those who spout wisdom (such as Polonius) and engages its audiences constantly with humor or emotion, leaving no space for the reflection that leads to wisdom. So how could a play present wisdom successfully in performance? Plato concluded that the playwrights of his time could put nothing but fake wisdom on stage. Plato was wrong: although divine wisdom is beyond the reach of theater, human wisdom is not. Human wisdom lies mainly in recognizing human limitations. In writing to please his audience, Shakespeare succeeded in staging human wisdom, most notably in Hamlet, which brilliantly exposes the folly of those who pretend to be wise.
Self-Uncertainty as Self-Realization
Authors: Kottman Paul A.
Published: December 2017

A central issue in Hamlet is Hamlet’s attempt to live his life as his—his efforts at discerning a course of action that amounts to “leading” a life, rather than just suffering it. Shakespeare’s play addresses Hamlet’s difficulty in doing this, from two sides. First, Hamlet is framed by the breakdown of the social bonds on which the protagonists depend for the meaning and worth of their lives together. The play shows these bonds to be dissolvable. Second, Hamlet’s predicament does not leave us with a desperate nihilism. On the contrary, the play shows how the meaning of a life as individually lived is best gauged by the way it “bears up” under the collapse of traditional, inherited ways of life. Hamlet is what the testing of a new, radically uncertain practical identity looks like. He cultivates an abiding uncertainty about who he might become, as a mode of self-realization.
Madness after Foucault
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

The nineteenth-century imagination of the Middle Ages—specifically the St. John’s Day dances that intensified in the wake of the bubonic plague, or ‘Black Death’—emphasized bacchanalian raucousness. Yet the medicalization of post-plague dances overlooks an important history of pilgrimage, processions, and pre-Christian festivities. This chapter examines the recuperation of medieval histories of dance—barely legible in Latin chronicles and annals—into a history of epidemic madness. This contributes to rewriting Foucault’s history of madness by emphasizing collective exuberance and the emergence of choreomania in the nineteenth century as a figure of ecological reverberation, benignly excessive inarticulacy, and passage, rather than confinement, difference, or danger. Further reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s recuperation of the St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dances into a critique of asceticism, the chapter suggests that the ‘genealogy’ of choreomania is found in the fantasy of a dark and orgiastic medievalism.
Translatio
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

Renegade physician Paracelsus compared St. John’s Day dances to earthquakes, epileptic tremors, and tics. This ecosophical and vitalist concept, according to which all sorts of bodies echo one another’s shaking motions, countered long-held academic prejudice against witchcraft; neither choreomaniacs nor witches were subject to supernatural forces. Rather, the ‘vital spirits’ caused limbs, like branches, to shake. What’s more, dancing was now thought to cure dancing, and municipal authorities keen to keep a Strasbourg dancing mania in check employed guards to help wear dancers out—while exorcism associated religious, municipal, and medical experts. The translatio or passage from collective to individual disorder, epitomized in St. Vitus, now patron saint of all dance maniacs, continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as neurologists’ theories of chorea, epilepsy and insanity aligned popular carousing with individual quaking motions. Choreomania came to signal the epidemic proliferation of what Giorgio Agamben has styled purposeless gesture.