bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sexuality in the 21st Century
Authors: Jovanovic Jasna , Williams Jean Calterone
Published: January 2024

Emerging adulthood is an important period for sexuality development. This chapter reviews trends in sexual behavior that show some consistency over time but also reveal new dynamics in how young adults experiment with various forms of casual sexual relationships. Hookups, friends-with-benefits relationships, and the use of social media all relate to current aspects of sexual behavior. This chapter employs feminist and queer theories to examine the ways gender, sexual agency, and fluidity in sexual identities impact emerging adults’ sexual behavior. As young adults explore new ways of expressing sexual and gender identities, they demonstrate the limitations imposed by heteronormativity and homonormativity. The chapter makes the case that fluidity in gender and sexual identities shapes the context for interpreting trends in sexual and relationship choices and behaviors.
Adoption and Relationships in the 21st Century
Authors: Pinderhughes Ellen E. , Lee Seungmi M. , Smith Madeline C.
Published: January 2024

With deep historical roots, adoption in the 21st century has shifted with changing times and mores. Adoptive families are diverse with respect to type of adoption (private, public/through foster care, intercountry), adoptees’ race/ethnicity and match to that of parents, gender identity and/or family members’ sexual/romantic orientation, and degree of contact with birth families. Adoptive families raise children in the context of community, local, national, and international values, policies, and practices, often navigating insensitive or invalidating comments. This chapter will cover critical themes such as adoptive identity, adoption socialization—how parents support adoptees’ adoption-related identity development and ethnic-racial socialization—how parents support identity development needs of adoptees of color, boundary management, navigating contact with birth parents, and adoptees as parents. We examine influences of 21st-century realities such as social media, global connections, and developments in adoption clinical practice that shape domestic and international adoption policies and practices.
Close Relationships and Mental Health
Authors: Esplin Charlotte R. , Hatch S. Gabe , Braithwaite Scott R.
Published: January 2024

Relationships have been described as the “keystone” of human functioning, as they have been found to be associated with both greater levels of subjective well-being and fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, psychotic disorders, and substance use. This chapter focuses on why relationships matter, the association between close relationships and mental health, where relationships and mental health problems become intertwined, and how relationship functioning can be improved. Two opposing hypotheses have sought to explain this finding. On one hand, proponents of the experience hypothesis argue that a strong relationship is associated with better mental health outcomes, while on the other hand, proponents of the selection hypothesis argue that mentally healthy individuals select into marriages at a greater rate than mentally ill counterparts. The chapter examines the research on these two hypotheses and outlines a model for how relationships affect mental health, or vice versa. Then, it looks at specific psychopathologies and relationship quality in the context of the experience hypothesis and selection hypothesis and explores the role that broad personality factors play in mental health and relationship outcomes. Much research explicates the negative relationship between neuroticism and relationship quality, and the authors explore the specific mechanisms of interpersonal and intrapersonal pathways of neuroticism. Lastly, they review the research that shows that treating a troubled relationship is just as effective, if not more effective, than simply treating symptoms of mental illness. Finally, the chapter outlines some of the most efficacious treatment modalities for couples who are experiencing symptoms of mental illness.
Four Principles
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that while great work continues in current choral singing, overall it has lost sight of its purpose. The chapter defines that purpose in terms of four principles. The first is that all artistic practice is about people, and the primary function of choral singing is to create connection. Second, for choral singing to be successful, it needs to have impact by creating change in the communities of singers and listeners who engage with it. The third principle is social justice, which can be achieved through integrating the daily practice of equity and inclusion into the artistic work and social spaces of choirs. The fourth, stylistic openness, proposes a radically non-canonical approach to repertoire and programming. The function of choral singing becomes making an impact by connecting the full diversity of people through song by any stylistic means necessary.
Vocal Sound
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter critiques the use of classical vocal sound in non-classical contexts. It examines definitions of good vocal sound in choral singing and suggests they can be stylistically narrow and exclude BIPOC and other singers from many vocal traditions, limiting connection and impact. Science-based advances in vocal pedagogy have enabled new understandings of how singers can use the voice safely, enjoyably, and with high levels of sophistication in a wide range of styles. Examples include larynx position, fold mass, onsets, diction, and vibrato. Drawing on the work of James Jordan and Jo Estill, warm-up workshops demonstrate how stylistically neutral approaches to vocal pedagogy have given choral directors new tools with which to support choral singers in producing a range of vocal sound at every level of choral education. Current and future choral directors need new training and program design, to improve skills and change attitudes toward singing in popular styles.
Programming, Repertoire, and Show Design
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter opens with three models of creative practice, as tools to support programming, show design, and repertoire choice. The text then demonstrates how those models might be implemented via a detailed examination of two programs on contrasting themes. One was a singalong show and the other a about a social issue affecting the lives of many LGBTQIA+ people. The text breaks down the very different programming processes of both, lays out strategies used, and goes through repertoire and design choices, alongside the rationales that underlie them. Two longer practical workshops then offer the chance to apply those same programming strategies to your own choir’s work. Common issues are identified, including programming clichés, creating good flow, and ensuring programs have impact by being stylistically open, equitable, and reflecting the needs of the community ecosystem that surrounds your group.
Teaching and Learning in Rehearsal
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter is about how choral directors can use teaching and learning strategies in rehearsal to make it a place of connection, effective and inclusive learning, and impactful music-making, that facilitates growth and change in whole people as well as in their singing. The text discusses learning style, the relationship between formal and informal learning, and the way in which principles of connection, impact, social justice, and stylistic openness can be integrated into teaching and learning as the rehearsal process unfolds. Workshops in this chapter are organized in four batches, around the journey a choir takes toward a show. They start at the warm-up, move through the initial teaching of a piece to the reviewing, running, and refining phase, and finish with final performance preparations. Learning and rehearsing by ear and from notation is a recurring theme.
Directing and Leading a Choral Community
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores how a choral director leads. The first half examines the personal and organizational aspects of directing and leading a choral community, and the second focuses specifically on leading music-making. The connected artistic leader leads from the center. They build coalitions, using their two-way relationships to facilitate collaborative in-the-moment interactions in and around the music-making, with singers, audiences, stakeholders, and other leaders. They are managed in ways that challenge them and enable them to grow as artists. They offer fellowship, empowerment, and a safer space to singers of all social and economic backgrounds, in both the social practices and the musical practices of the group. In directing non-classical styles and, for example, working with rhythm sections, the same ability to collaborate, stand back and let others lead in teams leads to authentic and empowering music-making, and can bring new voices to the table.
An Activist Vision for Choral Singing
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

Conclusions from previous chapters are summarized and organized around the idea that the purpose of choral singing is to facilitate change, and that choral singing is ripe for change itself. For such change to occur, the chapter argues for an activist vision for choral singing, characterized by persistence, striving, and taking action through and around music-making, all of which are already characteristics of a choral director’s work. The chapter demonstrates how this activist stance can then be applied both to the musical and social practices of choirs in our new era of activism. The chapter ends with four statements. These include that the arts should be centrally and equitably important all our lives; that choirs should be interactive and flexible, singing in all kinds of styles in all kinds of spaces; that the musical and educational skills of choral directors should be updated; and that choral singing embodies community and change.
Calls to Action
Authors: Beale Charles W.
Published: January 2024

In this short final chapter, a series of calls to action offer choral directors next steps—concrete things to do with their choirs as they begin to transform. Calls to action on connection provide specific strategies for building deeper personal, community, and organizational relationships. A set on impact focuses on story-telling, sharing through audio and video, and prioritizing your art. A collection of specific actions across both social and musical practices are identified that will facilitate social justice goals. To be more stylistically open, calls to action include widening the community of musicians you work with, spending more time listening to music, researching new repertoire from new places, finding out your singer favorites, doing more improvising, and developing the skills as a choral director to create a wider range of vocal sound with your group.
Introduction
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

Industrial Massachusetts is often used as a classic example of “rust-belt” decline: a place that flowered in America’s industrial heyday only to be left to rust as the industrial epicenter of the United States shifted southward and, ultimately, out of the United States altogether. This book tells a very different story. Tracing the successive rise and fall of the Massachusetts whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries over the past 200 years, it explores how Massachusetts business, labor, and political leaders repeatedly mobilized the lure of crisis itself—in everything from cheap workers and slashed tax rates to low rents and high manufacturing subsidies—to pull and push both capital and workers across the continents and rebuild shattered economies.
Economies in Motion
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

In the early nineteenth century, the whaling industry brought immense wealth to the city of New Bedford and the Massachusetts South Coast. The industry’s collapse over the course of the 1860s would launch the area into a spiraling crisis. As capital and labor fled New Bedford’s whaling ships and wharves, desperate municipal leaders sought to transform the city into a textile manufacturing center. Economic crisis in the Whaling City not only fostered local governments eager to do almost anything to spur industrial development—slashing taxes, cutting welfare rolls, and building infrastructure—but it also gifted textile capitalists with the massive labor force that whaleships had helped carry to Massachusetts a generation earlier. Through the fires of economic catastrophe, the first generation of mass manufacturing arose in South Coast Massachusetts.
Un-Making Industrial Massachusetts
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces the origins and consequences of textile deindustrialization in South Coast Massachusetts. Deindustrialization was not an inevitable product of industrial maturation, widening wage differentials, or global competition. Instead, certain workers (and certain business leaders) made deliberate choices that led to industrial collapse. While some workers pursued expansive organizing drives in the hope of undercutting the lure of capital mobility, many skilled workers remained committed to craft insularity and local autonomy. While some elite textile mill operators—realizing that they could readily liquidate their mills or move elsewhere—refused to tackle thorny problems like market saturation or outdated technology, a much larger group of business operators sought to preserve northern industry. Labor and capital never spoke with one voice. The internal conflicts among them would prove decisive in causing industrial catastrophe.
Toward Free Migration
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter interrogates how Massachusetts workers (in particular, Azorean immigrants) worked throughout the 1950s and 1960s to reopen the possibility of American immigration for their brethren back home. Why, despite decades of migratory stagnation—a result of the immigration quota regime created in the 1920s—did the connections between Portugal and Massachusetts remain so strong? The answer, in part, centers on the machinations of a fascist dictatorship in Portugal determined to foment Portuguese nationalism in its emigrant communities abroad. While other immigrant groups drifted toward new, more thoroughly American identities in the midcentury era, fascist Portugal used its might—manifested through often covert mechanisms—to make sure Portuguese Americans stayed deeply connected to their homeland. Through the circuitous connections of the global capitalist system, the Portuguese state was in part responsible for reopening the doors to migration for Portuguese immigrants and, by extension, the resurgence of Massachusetts manufacturing in the 1960s.
The Holy Warrior
Authors: Gohel Sajjan M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter follows al-Zawahiri’s journey as a member of the Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan, where he formed his pivotal terrorist partnership with Osama bin Laden whilst plotting against his adversary Abdullah Azzam. It was during this period that al-Zawahiri demonstrated long-term thinking including recruiting Egyptians and sending them to the United States to infiltrate the military and act as spies for him, providing operational intelligence. Al-Zawahiri could also sense that bin Laden was on the rise in the world of jihadism, and he wanted to have his own stake in that growth whilst removing or ostracizing any detractors. This period was a moment of opportunity for al-Zawahiri.
Live to Fight Another Day
Authors: Gohel Sajjan M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explains how al-Zawahiri survived the bombing of Tora Bora and sought to reconstitute al-Qaeda in Pakistan and evolve the group’s ideology, tactics, and strategy against the West. This includes unleashing plots globally and inspiring affiliates. The convergence with Pakistani terrorist groups as well as the Haqqani Network coincides with al-Zawahiri taking control of al-Qaeda communiqués from bin Laden and directly engaging with the public. Other important dimensions include opening a new front in Iraq where al-Qaeda had opportunities to expand but where old rivalries also re-emerged. During this period, the United States made numerous efforts to apprehend or kill al-Zawahiri, who not only evaded capture each time but also turned the tables by recruiting triple agents.
Changing of the Knights
Authors: Gohel Sajjan M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks at the setbacks al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda encountered, from failing to capitalise on the vacuum created by the Arab Spring, the Navy Seals operation that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, and perhaps the biggest challenge, the emergence of ISIS. ISIS challenged al-Qaeda’s doctrine, recruiting fighters and expanding its territorial base. As al-Qaeda’s leader, al-Zawahiri struggled to challenge the perception that he had become a marginalised figure amongst jihadists, fighting for significance as the head of a weakening terrorist franchise in fierce competition with ISIS. This chapter also assesses the Abbottabad documents from bin Laden’s compound, providing greater insights into the inner workings of al-Qaeda and al-Zawahiri’s sometimes fractured relationships with other terrorists.
The First Revolution
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

Civilizations in the Ancient Near East, such as the Assyrian and the Babylonian, introduced characteristic elements of citizenship. These characteristics relate to the basis of both rule and membership. This “hinge” period in human history started from approximately 2500 BCE. Similarly, bounded territory became a way of identifying a community of people beyond just blood ties. From the classical period (from about 500 BCE), the Greeks, Romans, and Ancient Israelites had a particular influence on the development of citizenship. Greek citizenship put the issue of rule at the forefront. Rome’s formative contribution lay in the attention to rights and obligations, as a basis to unite citizens within a broad political community. Ancient Israel imparted a model of territorial nationhood, influencing concepts of national citizenship following the Protestant Reformation. Citizenship was not culturally specific; the case of India in 500 BCE is briefly noted in this light.
Practices of Citizenship
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

The Enlightenment is customarily seen as marking the beginning of the modern world. Enlightenment figures turned to “laws of nature”—a medieval concept—to advance notions of “natural rights” to promote individual rights and to delegitimize divine rule. But ironically that same natural law approach helped seed primordialist principles in the nation-state itself. By making humans “of nature,” from whence humans derived their rights, Enlightenment thinkers also implanted primordial understandings in the foundations of modern politics. These Enlightenment thinkers naturalized categories of what became the constituent elements of modern democracies: the individual, nation, and race. The Latin etymological associations of nature—birth, genitalia, and natio—were raised to the level of organizing principles. In practice, ostensibly republican states had ethnic threads weave through definitions of nationhood and ethnonationalist states had civic threads. This chapter challenges conventional approaches to the Enlightenment and considers the cases of France, Germany, and the United States.
The Turn to Human Rights and Its Vulnerabilities
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

In the post-war period, the foundation of human rights treaties steadily expanded, building on the trunk of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. States largely ignored the treaties and initially little case law was generated. However, from the 1970s international human rights law began to be taken more seriously in democracies, driven by demands such as large migrant populations of uncertain legal status. Citizenship practice evolves in this context, informing the expansion of rights to noncitizen residents and phenomena like dual citizenship. This undergirds what has been called “postnational citizenship.” But key vulnerabilities have meant that this turn makes for an “unfinished revolution.” Human rights have been driven judicially for the most part. This “judicialization of politics” gave sustenance to charges of a democratic deficit, giving ballast to populist movements.
Xuedou's 100 Odes to Old Cases
Authors: Heine Steven
Published: January 2024

This book is a complete translation with interpretative comments of the eloquent yet enigmatic verses commenting on one hundred cases composed in 1038 by the master Xuedou Chongxian (980–1052). A representative of the Yunmen branch of Chan that he helped revive and bring to prominence during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), before its impact declined with the fall of the capital in Kaifeng, Xuedou demonstrates a unique literary flair for explicating gong’an that is evident in numerous writings included in his recorded sayings. In particular, Xuedou’s 100 Odes to Old Cases (C. Xuedou baize songgu, J. Setchō hyakusoku juko) is recognized as the seminal discourse that has greatly influenced the way stories of former teachers (guze) have been appreciated and appropriated for the past thousand years. This text, which became the basis for the Blue Cliff Record that is also cited in these translations, continues to exert a profound impact on the overall legacy of East Asian Buddhist intellectual history and religious literature. Xuedou’s verses reflect the author’s unique capacity for taming through elegance the undisciplined and deluded minds of followers struggling with self-imposed obstacles to discern reality and thereby discover inner peace. He cites extensively multiple Chan sources, uses extensively irregular meter to disrupt the reader’s expectations, and evokes unusual allusions to Chinese lore while often interjecting personal comments or lyrical imagery that goes beyond a reliance on doctrine.
On Reading the Text
Authors: Heine Steven
Published: January 2024

This chapter contrasts Xuedou’s 100 Odes with Fenyang’s songgu collection by examining several comparable poems; it then presents an approach to reading and deciphering the Odes by considering three interrelated rhetorical aspects of the construction of the songgu, with each section of the chapter accompanied by a table illustrating how the key theme can be examined for all one hundred cases. The first aspect concerns how the gong’an selected by Xuedou are cited from previous Chan texts, particularly transmission of the lamp records published in the early Northern Song. The second element refers to the irregular meter embedded in many odes that shows the author’s distinctive approach to merging literature with didactic discourse. The third and most important element involves a method for understanding the allusive and intrusive qualities of Xuedou’s fundamentally instructive rhetoric.
Introduction
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the work, explaining its structure, which by focusing on Ōuchi leaders allows for a totalizing narrative that weaves together long-term processes and events through the lens of specific leaders and explains important themes of the study: (1) the creation of a distinct Ōuchi ethnicity, (2) the rise of the city of Yamaguchi, (3) how the present study challenges the accepted narrative of Japan from 1467 to 1568 as being an “Era of Warring States,” in favor of describing Japan as a segmented polity with two political centers, Kyoto and Yamaguchi, (4) the impact of mining and trade, providing a new view on diplomatic relations and piracy in East Asia, and (5) insight into late medieval Japanese religion, focusing on star worship and the Ōuchi practice of adopting state shrines for their own ends.
The Collapse
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter recounts the process between 1551 and 1557 whereby Ōuchi rule collapsed, under the rule of Yoshinaga, the last lord, who hailed from the Ōtomo lands. It reveals his appeals to Ōuchi ethnicity, and early successes in governing, and defeating Amago rivals, before the cataclysmic defeat at Itsukushima, and the ensuing collapse of integrated Ōuchi rule, with the western regions falling under the control of the Ōtomo and the eastern regions the Mōri. The chapter discusses efforts of early Christian missionaries, their successes and failures in Yamaguchi, as well as enduring Myōken worship. Finally, it recounts Yoshinaga’s flight and death, the end of Ōuchi rule in western Japan, and the onset of widespread piracy after the fall of the Ōuchi.
Idolatry in the Scriptures
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the theme of idolatry in the Christian scriptures, both Old and New Testaments. The chapter first considers the biblical idea that humans are inherently worshiping creatures. Then it explores some themes in biblical treatments of idolatry and shows how they question some modern binaries: enchanted/disenchanted, religious/secular, believers/nonbelievers, worshipers/nonworshipers. Idolatry includes greed, reliance on military power, attachment to material things, and other kinds of devotion to what is not God. The chapter considers the place of images in the biblical material, arguing that Israelite aniconism leaves room for a kind of sacramental seeking of God through the material world. The chapter considers the negative consequences of idolatry, most notably the theme that we are oppressed by gods of our own making. Finally, the chapter examines self-critique and sympathy in biblical accounts of idolatry.
Marion on Idolatry as a Mirror to the Self
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of the idol. For Marion, idolatry is ultimately a form of narcissism, but Marion develops a more sympathetic account of idolatry as an authentic expression of the human experience of the divine. First, the chapter shows how Marion’s critique of idolatry fits into his attack on ontotheology. It then examines three stages of Marion’s treatment of the idol. In the first stage, Marion regards the idol theologically as a mirror to the self. In the second stage, Marion considers the idol phenomenologically in the form of human-made art; the self is overwhelmed by the idol as a saturated phenomenon. In his third stage, idolatry is the resistance the self offers to the truth. Finally, the chapter explores Marion’s passing reference to a “splendid idolatry,” the giving over of the self to something larger than the self.
Why Think America Is God’s Country?
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

America’s founding documents, above all the Declaration of Independence, speak of God as undergirding human rights and, in effect, blessing the American experiment in democracy. Inscribing “In God We Trust” on our currency reinforces this view, and politicians and office-holders commonly refer to God as if America had what some call a civil religion—a perspective that (in this case) embodies a kind of generic conception of a beneficent God who cares about humanity in general and America in particular. In the eyes of even its loosely religious citizens, this longstanding and often reiterated pattern makes it natural to think of America as very much God’s country.
This Is Awkward
Authors: Plakias Alexandra
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents the analysis of awkwardness in terms of social scripts, which serves as the basis for the rest of the book. It begins with a discussion of the etymology of “awkwardness” before giving an analysis of awkwardness as a property: awkwardness is a property of social interactions that arises when one or more parties lacks a script. The phenomenological components of feeling awkward include uncertainty, discomfort, and self-consciousness, each of which is discussed in turn. One concern about analyzing awkwardness as a social phenomenon is that it will force us to revise our ordinary usage, but this worry turns out to be misplaced. While actions, physical movement, and even inanimate objects can still aptly be described as awkward, the chapter argues that people should refrain from applying the label to individuals.
Our Call as Response
Authors: McCarthy David Matzko
Published: January 2024

The chapter proposes that the common good is an apt and advantageous framework for vocation. The common good is defined as conditions of common life—social, economic, and political—that provide opportunity for persons and communities to flourish as individuals and in relation to others. Attending to the common good requires an orientation to the good of others and a commitment to institutions that are directed to shared goods (e.g., health care, education, political, and economic institutions). Responding to callings in terms of the common good depends on an understanding of justice that cultivates an ecology of solidarity and mutual dependence, an understanding of rights matched with social responsibilities, and an understanding of the virtues needed to meet the challenges of injustice and dysfunctions of our basic institutions. Colleges and universities, as they are basic institutions of common life, have an important role in fostering responsiveness to the common good.
Measures and Mortals
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

This chapter describes the themes of measurement, mortality, and solarity as central organizing concepts in the post-Ṛgvedic approach to personhood as recorded in the Brāhmaṇas. Personhood is here linked to the procedures and experiential dynamics of ritual performances. Puruṣas afford the bases for the measurement and orientation according to the mythology of Viṣṇu and its relationship to the use of gnomons. The solar and mortal qualities of puruṣas are explored through reference to the mythology of Mārtāṇḍa. Combined, the themes of measurement and mortality indicate experiential dynamics of ritual proceedings, specifically as linked to the ascetic aspects of initiatory procedures requiring an observance of brahmacarya. These are further discerned in the mythology of the Pravargya rite, involving the riddle of the “head of the sacrifice.” Thematic links between brahmacārins and puruṣas are explored. The Atharvaveda is proposed as a source for the elevation of puruṣa-based idioms within the Vedic canon.
Equal to the World
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the Āyurvedic approach to personhood in its foundational works, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitās. Puruṣas are defined by their elemental and mental constitution, which is the basis of their perceptual experience, and by their relation to the universal self (ātman). A Sāṃkhyan metaphysical model is forwarded that reframes these definitions according to the scheme of tattvas. Āyurveda operationalizes these definitions to assert that person (puruṣa) and world (loka) relate by a logic of identity (sāmānya). The logic of identity in Āyurvedic theory is clarified and linked to the Āyurvedic concept of a “true understanding” (satyā buddhi). The chapter then explains the person’s pathway to the development of this “true understanding,” involving the rectifying harmonization of the person’s sensory, “digestive” yoga, such that this yoga produces states of “equilibrium” (sāmya) and “appropriateness” (sātmya). The paradigmatic character of Āyurveda’s approach to personhood for the pre-Classical period is emphasized.
Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson
Authors: Piilonen Miriam
Published: January 2024

Chapter 1 introduces Herbert Spencer’s musical thinking through a letter that Spencer wrote to the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson. This letter sets the scene for a reading of Spencer’s theory of music psychology and his rise to fame within nineteenth-century mental science. Soon after, Spencer wrote to Charles Darwin and the two began a lifelong correspondence. This chapter recounts the non-Darwinian terrain of Victorian musical culture as a messy field of inquiry where Darwin’s music theory foundered and Spencer’s sailed more smoothly into the popular imagination. Reflections on the implications of historical music-evolution theories for current research mark the ends of each chapter in this book. This chapter concludes with a reflection on an underappreciated aspect of Spencer’s musical thinking: his philosophical reflections on the earworm (a mental tune that plays on repeat).
Sound Symbolism in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought
Authors: Piilonen Miriam
Published: January 2024

Chapter 3 analyzes the theory of sound symbolism (mimetic uses of sounds to represent things) that undergirds Spencer’s theory of music and language origins. For Spencer, music is a development from vocal expression and specifically from impassioned speech, as consolidated by his dictum: “All music is originally vocal.” In Spencer’s essays on language—such as “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1881) and Philosophy of Style (1884)—he argues that language began as sonic imitations of the phenomenal world. This chapter locates Spencer within a long history of imaginative speculations about sound symbolism and the so-called well-designedness of music and language—alongside Plato, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, and Max Müller, among others—and critically examines these theories. The chapter concludes with an extended engagement with Gary Tomlinson’s evolutionary theory of music, which implicitly demonstrates a way to avoid the pitfalls of Spencerian sound symbolism.
Oppression or Emancipation? Part (ii)
Authors: Nathan Marco J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 7 continues the discussion of discrimination and marginalization but shifts the spotlight from races to sex and gender. The chapter’s guiding query is whether the feminist agenda needs some overarching concept of human nature. Human nature was instrumental to early waves of feminism. Some recent feminist scholars have rejected this line of thinking. They consider the notion of human nature conceptually bankrupt and pernicious from practical and political standpoints. Yet, the pendulum may be swinging back. According to a “new feminist humanism,” emancipation presupposes—indeed requires—the regulative ideal provided by human nature, grounding the moral and political equality of all people. Feminism is deeply intertwined with the concept of human nature. This leads us back to the book’s original problems: what this human nature is and how to study it. Neither the natural nor the social sciences seem to provide a solid foundation for such investigations.
Normality
Authors: Nathan Marco J.
Published: January 2024

Human nature purports to describe and explain “normal” humans. But what is the relevant notion of normality? Can we find a definition that singles out some individuals as “typical” without thereby suggesting that they are superior to their “abnormal” counterparts? Normality and its sociopolitical implications are the subject of Chapter 8. It begins by asking on what basis we should distinguish between healthy and pathological states of an individual. Next, it explores a strategy to define health qua normal function and considers some critical responses according to which normal function cannot be naturalized but is part of a political agenda. The final sections present various accounts of disability and an original “ecological” model of disabling conditions. The bottom line is that normality is not the key to human nature. Human nature is the key to normality. This raises the question of where such definition can be found.
Supporting Childwishes
Authors: Richie Cristina
Published: January 2024

Non-procreative parenting and non-medical forms of reproduction must be viable options for adults. Through a two-fold approach to removing medical intervention in biological reproduction and advocating for non-biological parenting, sustainability can be prioritized. Before this can occur, recognition of the deeply embedded social and psychological reasons for reproduction must be addressed. Both as social capital and as a palliative to anxiety over individual mortality, reproduction must be assessed frankly. Public health and other social policies may attempt to build awareness of infertility, attempt measures to prevent infertility, and support acceptance of infertility. There are many ways that adults can parent without procreation, including adoption, fostering, and co-parenting, as well as mentoring, spiritual parenting, caring for step-children, and teaching. Larger social structures that support childwishes will need to be created and maintained. These include work policies that either disincentivize reproduction or incentivize parenting without procreation.
How Polarization Begets Polarization
Authors: Merrill III Samuel , Grofman Bernard , Brunell Thomas L.
Published: January 2024

Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on their Congressional members and district candidates, and maintained by the voters in each Congressional district who must choose between the alternatives offered. These alternatives are today just as extreme in competitive districts as in lopsided ones. Tight national party discipline produces party delegations in Congress that are each ideologically narrowly distributed but are widely separated from one another. As district constituencies become more polarized, with each side egged on by activists, parties are further motivated to move past a threshold and appeal to their respective bases rather than to voters in the political center. Parties with clearly differentiated platforms—once thought to be a desirable goal—have indeed become a reality, but these parties are now feuding camps. What resolution might there be? Could a new reform effort eventually emerge from the current altercation, just as the Progressive Era slowly emerged from the Gilded Age? Could an asymmetry develop in the partisan constraints, which would lead to ascendancy of the center? Or might a new and overriding issue generate a cross-cutting dimension that could open the door to a new politics? Only the future will tell.
Disembodied Brains
Authors: Evans John H.
Published: January 2024

Society has long been fascinated with mixes of humans and animals, and scientists have recently developed human-animal neuro-chimeras, animals with some component of a human brain. Society has also been fascinated by the “brain in the vat,” and now scientists have developed human brain organoids, small parts of a human brain in a dish grown from cells from a person’s body. The typical reaction to these technologies is shock or disgust, responses which this book closely examines. The public tends to believe in a foundational distinction between humans and animals, and the neuro-chimera violates this distinction, resulting in public opposition. Similarly, the public tends to believe that disembodied human parts are not totally separate from the human from whom they were taken, and therefore that a brain organoid in a dish retains the “essence” of its human source. This too results in greater concern about such organoids. The book also examines more general attitudes toward biotechnology that affect the public’s views of neuro-chimeras and organoids. It concludes with a discussion of how to set a public policy so that limits on these technologies are possible—allowing the development of the technologies for medical research but preventing them from achieving the public’s dystopian vision of the very human animal or the organoid that is perceived as actually a part of another human.
What We Know about the Public’s Views of Humans
Authors: Evans John H.
Published: January 2024

This chapter turns to what social-science and humanistic scholarship tells us about the public that can be useful for structuring our inquiry into people’s intuitions about organoids and chimeras. Comparing the public’s views with those of scientists and bioethicists, it examines the public’s notion of what a human is and the foundational distinction between humans and animals. It then turns to examination of the public’s belief in ephemeral connections to disembodied human parts. Using what we know about the public’s intuitions regarding the nature of the human, we can structure our investigation of organoids and chimeras.
Nationalism in the British Empire
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter situates M. P. T. Acharya in Indian nationalist politics of the early twentieth century, exploring his involvement with the nationalist paper India in Madras and Pondicherry, sedition, colonial policing, and surveillance, and his escape from India and into exile in London. The chapter traces his involvement with militant nationalists such as Shyamaji Krishnavarma, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, V. V. S. Aiyar, Lala Har Dayal, Madan Lal Dhingra, and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, and activities at India House in London, including the assassination of Sir William Hutt Curzon-Wyllie and the aftermath. As the chapter argues, Acharya’s activities in India and London reveal a great deal about militant nationalism in the British empire and about how Britain, paradoxically, as the chapter illuminates, afforded more liberties to anticolonial nationalists than India.
The Ghadar Period
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

With a focus on surveillance, immigration, and labor, Chapter Three starts with M. P. T. Acharya’s hasty escape from Europe. As Acharya appeared in New York City and spent the next two years in North America, applying for citizenship in 1913, he became involved in the Ghadar Party and the Hindusthan Association of America (HAA). The chapter provides context to those organizations and to Acharya’s engagement with radical anticolonialism that lead him to brief encounters with prominent anarchists Alexander Berkman and Hippolyte Havel. Ultimately, as the chapter highlights, those global anticolonial networks that Acharya was part of in Europe extended to North America and, in this case, were interweaved with the radical politics of anarchism.
War against the British Empire
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

When global imperialisms clashed in the First World War, the scales of anti-imperialism also changed. This chapter examines what the war meant for Indian anticolonialists such as Acharya, explored through his involvement with the Indian Independence Committee (IIC) in Berlin and across the Ottoman empire and the Middle East. The chapter provides a detailed account of the Indian-German conspiracy through Acharya’s experiences across the Middle East, a daring sabotage mission to the Suez Canal, and internal disagreements within the IIC, centered on disagreements between Hindus and Muslims. As the chapter suggests, while posing a concerted threat to British rule in India, the creed of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” eventually failed for the Indians. The chapter unveils an anti-imperial history of the First World War that opens new ways of understanding the global scale of the war.
Revolution in Russia
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on M. P. T. Acharya’s fateful journey to Moscow to meet Lenin in July 1919 and subsequent mission to Kabul with Mahendra Pratap and Abdur Rabb. Abandoning the bourgeois nationalism of Pratap, Acharya and Rabb set up the Indian Revolutionary Association (IRA) to agitate among the Muhajirs in the Afghani-Indian borderland. As a representative of the IRA, Acharya attended the Second Congress of the Communist International in July and August 1920 and here met Abani Mukherji, M. N. Roy and his wife, Evelyn Trent, and Mohamed Shafique, all representing different strands of Indian revolutionary groups. As the chapter illuminates, Acharya’s presence at this event has been overlooked, but the chapter seeks to reinstate him into the early history of communism’s relation to anti-imperialism.
Anticolonialism and Anarchism in Weimar Berlin
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores M. P. T. Acharya’s ventures into anarchism, trying to bring the political philosophy into India’s independence struggle from afar, and to place India’s freedom on the agenda of global anarchism. In the mid-1920s, he was involved in a deportation case against Indians in Berlin, which was eventually abandoned, and in challenging the racism of German cultural politics in the Hagenbeck affair. In addition to translating for and frequently contributing to anarchist papers, his articulation of anarchism in Indian papers such as Forward and the People was unique and, eventually, evolved into a heated debate with Jawaharlal Nehru over the brutality of Bolshevik prisons. Acharya’s different approach to the question of freedom, the chapter illustrates, brought together anticolonialism, anarchism, and utopianism in ways that open new ways of understanding the radical landscape of 1920s Berlin as a hub for the entangled world of anti-imperialism and anarchism.
Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Militarism
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines M. P. T. Acharya’s involvement with the League Against Imperialism (LAI) and the anti-militarist organizations the International Anti-Militarist Bureau and the International Antimilitarist Commission. Despite being an early member of the LAI, set up by his old friend Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Acharya had serious misgivings about the Moscow-backed organization. Instead, his involvement in the anarchist movement brought him into the orbit of pacifism and anti-militarism and, by extension, the radical politics of Gandhi. The chapter elucidates some of the major tensions within the broader, left-wing anti-imperialist movement: how did anarchists view anti-imperial struggles? How did anarchists work with communist-backed organizations? How did anarchists connect anti-militarism and anti-imperialism? Acharya dealt with all these questions, as the chapter illustrates, by embracing Gandhism without Gandhi.
Violent Independence
Authors: Laursen Ole Birk
Published: January 2024

This chapter turns to the question of Indian independence and Partition, the assassination of Gandhi, and the rise of Hindu nationalism. As an avowed anarchist, independence and self-government for India did not equate with any meaningful sense of freedom. While Indian leaders negotiated their place in Cold War politics, Acharya’s ideas gained more currency. His central article ‘Les Trusts et la Démocratie’ was reprinted in pamphlet form as Principles of Non-Violent Economics (1947), and he contributed an essay on ‘What is Anarchism?’ to Iqbal Singh and Raja Rao’s stock-taking collection Whither India? (1948). At the same time, he had to face two old interlocutors: Gandhi and Savarkar. The assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a follower of Savarkar’s Hindutva ideology, shook India. Acharya despised the mythological status of Gandhi, even immediately following the assassination, but admired Gandhian tactics; at the same time, he had admired Savarkar’s revolutionary fervor but rejected the ethnic fascism of Hindutva. Post-colonial India, as the chapter elucidates, saw Acharya reconnect with old comrades from the early twentieth-century nationalist movement, testifying to the longevity of revolutionary camaraderie and the role of these revolutionaries in the freedom struggle.