bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There
Authors: Barton Carlin A. , Boyarin Daniel
Published: May 2017

When one encounters the word “religion” in a translation of an ancient text: First, cross out the word whenever it occurs. Next, find a copy of the text in question in its original language and see what word (if any) is being translated by “religion.” Third, come up with a different translation: It almost doesn’t matter what. Anything besides “religion.”...
Segregated by a Perfect Fear. The Terrible War Band of the Anti-Emperor: The Coniuratio and the Sacramentum
Authors: Barton Carlin A. , Boyarin Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter continues placing Tertullian’s concepts (of religio, disciplina, fides, etc.) within the broader framework—not only of his own thought, but of Roman life and thought.
Precarious Integration. Managing the Fears of the Romans: Tertullian on Tenterhooks
Authors: Barton Carlin A. , Boyarin Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the often very different understanding of the world that Tertullian expresses in his “negotiatory” or “conciliatory” moods.
A Jewish Actor in the Audience: Josephan Doublespeak
Authors: Barton Carlin A. , Boyarin Daniel
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, we explore Josephus further, attempting to show how the word thrēskeia, which appears in his writing more than in any other writer prior to him, is frequently used to produce a kind of double-meaning, with two readings available, a positive one for Jewish readers and a negative one for Romans. This usage fits in with other patterns of equivocation in Josephus’s writing (as well as in other Roman writers of his days) and is hard to see if one is focused on a chimerical “religion.”
Conclusion: What You Find When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There
Authors: Barton Carlin A. , Boyarin Daniel
Published: May 2017

Our readers will surely have noticed two “I’s” in this book: two speakers with distinct voices but a perhaps surprising degree of agreement in substance between them. This book is the product of the confluence of two projects that we were working on respectively about five years ago. Barton was studying the Roman sacrificial system (to which she will now return), and Boyarin was tracing the genealogy of “Judaism” (to which he will now return). At a certain point, reading each other’s early drafts, we realized that the propaedeutic for both projects was similar: a close study of the ancient Latin and Greek terms later taken to mean “religion” was a necessary foundation for both our projects. Barton, a Roman historian, took on the Latin work. She had long wrestled with the meanings of ...
The One and the Manor
Authors: Stout Daniel M.
Published: May 2017

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.
Castes of Exception
Authors: Stout Daniel M.
Published: May 2017

Chapter three looks at James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It argues that the book criticizes both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism for their incoherent theories of identity. Both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism imagine identity as an unchanging property or state that individual persons inherit and possess regardless of their actions in the here and now. The debilitating consequences of this position are shown in the Sinner’s sense that, though he lives in the world, he doesn’t act in it.
Nothing Personal
Authors: Stout Daniel M.
Published: May 2017

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.
Cleaning Up Jim Crow
Authors: Goldberg David E.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 5 examines how the moral and physical health of consumers and consumer districts became tied to economic rights, commercial expansion, and political stability. Intertwined in these debates were competing consumer and leisure discourses. Free consumer advocates advanced and protected the underground economy of leisure and advocates of consumer protection advanced a program of economic growth and environmental justice. Together, these campaigns helped contain campaigns for integrated leisure by solidifying the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Conclusion
Authors: Goldberg David E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter briefly details the post-1920 northern freedom struggle at the Jersey Shore. Despite continued efforts by grassroots black activists to press for integration, the black merchant class exploited the gradual decline of white entertainment spaces and the growing appeal of black consumer culture to lure in white customers and to downplay direct civil rights action. Rather than the typical “long march to freedom” promoted in many oft-told accounts, this chapter argues that the promise of consumption and the accompanying culture of growth spurred the region’s long retreat from earlier civil rights victories.
Conclusion
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: May 2017

The conclusion is an alternate, and somewhat more original, account of the book’s aims—more “readable” in many ways and synthetic in its incorporation of others’ valuable insights. There would be no conclusion such as the one presented here without the “hard work” of the first three chapters. Its focal point is accordingly to be found in the development of a “material spirituality” lodged within the potentiality of the human being—something that is never severed from the possibility of encounter with an O/other, even if such an encounter continuously fails to be recorded in words—examined here through the concrete dynamics found in the practices of writing and publishing. Though the conclusion could certainly “stand alone” from the rest of the work, it achieves its “fuller” sense in light of what came before it, and, in this sense, points beyond the merely theoretical and toward that creative and spiritual dimension of human existence we have been pining for all along, which pushes the boundaries of both philosophy and theology more than just a little bit, and which may only be graspable through the failures of our representations.
“The Shadow of the Cloud”: Racial Speculation and Cultural Vision in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that as a narrative of kidnap rather than birth into slavery, Solomon Northup’s historical predicament dramatizes the rhetorical predicament of all ex-slave narrators. Northup is a free man who has been mistaken for a slave. This is, in existential terms, the condition of all ex-slave narrators: although they have been treated as objects, they must prove to their readers that this is a fundamental misrecognition, that they have been subjects all along. The chapter argues that Northup challenges this visual mistake by producing two contradictory strains within his narrative: he meticulously executes the authenticating requirements that restore his freedom and fulfill the literary expectations of authenticity, while evacuating those conventions of racial meaning through a series of visual metaphors and scenes of witnessing that reveal the absurdity of the racial logic motivating the conventions of authentication.
Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance
Authors: Neary Janet
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.
Commentary on a Passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

In this, the third chapter from the work that began the twentieth-century Hegel renaissance in France, Wahl’s 1929 Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, he relates the chapter on “the Unhappy Consciousness” to earlier and later chapters of the Phenomenology (“Master and Slave,” “Stoicism and Scepticism,” “Culture,” “Revealed Religion,” “Absolute Knowing”) as well as Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history. Wahl’s was the first major French study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), marking a turn away from Hegel’s Science of Logic to the affective and experiential basis of Hegel’s dialectical method.
Poetry and Metaphysics
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

In this foundational article from 1939, Wahl elucidates several fundamental connections between metaphysics and poetry, and demonstrates how various French, German, and English language poets convey profound metaphysical ideas. Wahl shows how poetry is able to join opposites, without fully reconciling them, in such a way that allows for both transcendence and a return to immanence. This is, however, not unlike metaphysics as Wahl understands it. He accordingly concludes with the idea that “the core of poetry will always be metaphysics, and it is quite possible that the core of metaphysics is, equally, always poetry.”
Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey
Authors: Wahl Jean
Published: May 2017

In this mature writing, Wahl looks back on his career and offers a succinct account of his philosophical and poetic journey. It not only touches on many of his philosophical, poetic, and artistic influences—Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, James, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Whitehead, Claudel, Novalis, and Valéry, Cézanne and Van Gogh—but also but brings them together in such a way as to present his own unique concerns with a radical empiricism, with relativity, negativity, and facticity, with the concrete, with surpassing dichotomies, with “the silences of the dialectic,” with transcending transcendence, and especially with the preeminence of poetry. Along the way, Wahl demonstrates how poetry is crucial to his personal philosophical quest by interspersing his wide-ranging discussions with several poems of his own.
Situating the Self in the Abyss
Authors: Yountae An
Published: May 2017

This chapter sets the stage for a general overview of the key themes, questions, and the methodological framework of the book. It begins with the questions that Martinican thinkers Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant raise regarding the possibility of constructing the being, self, and collective identity in the context of colonial oppression. A brief review of philosophical discourses and critical theories that address questions of race, (post)coloniality, and the global state of trans-spatiality (diasporization) such as Kant, theories of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial theory, and Latin American decolonial thought (“the decolonial turn”) will provide the framework for theorizing some of the central terms undergirding the book. These contesting discourses provide the various frameworks with which to read the abyss from diverse perspectives.
The Mystical Abyss
Authors: Yountae An
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the notion of the abyss as it has been developed within the tradition of Western philosophy and theology. It traces the abyss back to its first inception in Neoplatonic philosophy by Plato and his Timaeus, followed by Plotinus who develops the traces of panentheist mysticism lurking in Plato’s system into the seed of negative theology. In the Neoplatonic tradition and medieval mysticism of Pseudo-Dioysius and Meister Eckhart, the abyss points to the theological crossroad in which finitude and infinity, creaturely vulnerability and divine potency intersect with each other. The paradoxical path of via negativa renders the abyss a site of uncertainty and unknowing in which both God and the self are uncreated (Eckhart). Subsequently, the ethical implication or potential of the abyss is probed via the works of contemporary philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Zizek) who engage negative theology from a postmodern perspective.
The Metaphysical Context of Intentionality
Authors: Moati Raoul , Wyche Daniel
Published: May 2017

Chapter 6 explores Levinas’s critique of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, through the description of teaching as the very foundational ground of all intentionality.
“Ego sum, ego existo”: Descartes on the Verge of Heresy
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Descartes's references to the biblical sum qui sum and Ego sum in Descartes's Meditations, specifically from the Second Meditation onward, and how, “[b]y the idea of God,” Descartes might really not have meant “anything other than all men usually mean when they speak.” It posits that these references do not point to God, and that furthermore it was never God who designates himself in this manner. From a reference or an intersection inscribed in a literary heritage, this chapter thus arrives at a rupture, a brutal denegation, which might prove unacceptable to the faithful of revealed religion and consequently to the theologians.
Private Crime, Public Madness
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: May 2017

This chapter attempts to clarify the questions raised by the relations between madness and justice, with reference to the heritage of the French Revolution. It also assesses the distinction between crime and madness and their respective treatments in public and private spheres. Indeed, what prompts current discussions on the function of the psychiatrist in the courtroom or on the role of judgments of civil capacity in the treatment of mental illness, is yet again the perspective offered by the reframing of the Penal Code (including the famous Article 64, which makes “insanity”—or, in the more recent version, “psychic or neuro-psychic disturbance”—into the principal operator of the nullification of a crime or a delict, either in its juridical reality or in its penal consequences).
From Scenes to Authorities
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

If there is such a thing as “Scholasticism,” it is something like a style of composing arguments around ranked quotations. This chapter pursues the question about what happens to the scenes of instruction in earlier moral works when they are broken up for use as authorities (auctoritates) in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Using the example of two works by Ambrose and Cicero, this chapter argues that the Summa disposes authorities taken from them not to evoke or erase their scenes but to show confidence in the coherence of competing theological traditions as ways back to the original scenes of instruction in incarnation, Gospels, and sacraments.
The Summa in (Our) Libraries
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

Over many centuries, under many regimes of Christian power, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae has suffered the misfortunate of becoming an enforced text. Its authority has depended in many cases on misinterpretation. From the beginning, its structural innovations were undone by excerpting and rewriting. With Tridentine Thomism, its fortunes were tied to centralized notions about Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Later still, with neo-Thomism, Thomas’s book was conscripted by a variety of modern disciplines for projects very different from Thomas’s own. Faced with this motley history of reception, a contemporary may be tempted to ask whether the Summa has succeeded or failed. It is more useful to ask whether and how its structure might still work as moral teaching.
The Good That Draws the Will
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: May 2017

The middle part of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae begins with the end that motivates human action properly speaking. The highest natural end is a vision of God in beatitude that can only be obtained through a gift of grace. Thomas’s central argument is modeled after ancient genres of philosophical exhortation or protreptic, but he adapts these in the Summa as he does in his preaching. Thomas turns from the last end to the will, since the will must move the human being toward that end. At the origin of the circular relations of will and intellect, Thomas discovers God already present.
Beyond the Political
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2017

In the second chapter, Nancy situates his early work on “the inoperative community” in relation to the condition of being exposed (which he draws from Heidegger’s thought of Dasein as ek-static or “outside-itself”). This would distinguish community from the sharing of a common essence or community understood as substance. Addressing the conflicts of interpretation and disagreements raised by Blanchot concerning Nancy’s work, emphasis is placed on the reception of Bataille, notably the political interpretations of Bataille’s writings. The political context in which Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community was written is also explored in relation to Blanchot’s relation to Bataille. The relation between community, politics, and the political is explored in terms of an “overcoming,” or a movement “beyond the political.”
Coda
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: May 2017

In an issue of Critique from 1990 that paid homage to Samuel Beckett, and in reference to the French version of How It Is, Blanchot’s text concludes with this note:

These closing words—Temps et peine et soi soi-disant, as Beckett’s French has them—need to be read with care; ...
Entrance: The Spies of Jericho
Authors: Szendy Peter
Published: May 2017

The premises of an archaeology of espionage: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the story of the walls of Jericho from the Bible. Listening and spying form an immemorial alliance.
Toward the Absence of Time
Authors: Rodríguez Matos Jaime
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the concept of time at the heart of political modernity, particularly as it is embodied in various phases of the Cuban Revolution. It sets out a way of understanding a perhaps unexpected continuity in the concept of politics underwriting the Revolutionary State across different moments in its history. The chapter shows to what extent the opposition of the one and the many, the one hegemonic time of Capitalist modernity and the multiple peripheral temporalities that confront and fracture it, only serves to occlude the metaphysical structure of modern political time as a whole. The chapter is concerned, on the one hand, with the retroactive changes that obtain in our image of politics once we take into account recent developments such as the period that follows the fall of the USSR and the contemporary moment of “normalizing” relations between the US and Cuba. On the other hand, the chapter is concerned with the various theoretical models available to think the political temporalities at issue.
Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s)
Authors: Rodríguez Matos Jaime
Published: May 2017

The conclusion brings together the consequences that can be drawn from the analyses in the book by way of a reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s use of Lezama Lima’s texts, particularly those drawn from the posthumous novel Oppiano Licario, in the 2004 film Notre Musique. The conclusion explores the consequences of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition. This formless temporality would be Lezama’s writing of the formless occupying a fractured now: the difference between linear and multiple temporalities, an-archically at odds with the theologico-political distribution of time into hell, purgatory, and paradise. This would be the time of the absence of time, of sameness without Form, in which the absence of time no longer means the eternity.
Writing of the Formless
Authors: Rodríguez Matos Jaime
Published: May 2017

The second part of the book is not divided into chapters. Rather, it is composed of sections of varying length. Its central concern is to trace the treatment of the question of the void in the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima. This entails an examination of Lezama’s reading of the history of void throughout the Western philosophical, religious, political, and artistic traditions. The central tension of this section lies in tracing Lezama’s engagement and ultimate unworking of the structure of a transcendental dictation, which informs and splits the subject, and which is the structure central to modern political and aesthetic subjectivity. Taken together, these readings can be understood as the unfolding of Lezama’s own highly idiosyncratic and baroque take on the question of the ontological difference (which he ironically and famously dismissed in his comments on Heidegger). The central insight that ensues is that of a thought on time that is beyond the forming or framing dialectic of the One and the Many. It is in this idea of a time beyond Time(s) that we find Lezama’s most radical political insights.
Introduction
Authors: Crawley Ashon T.
Published: May 2017

What is Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility about? Using Ferguson, Missouri, as a starting point, the Introduction considers the concept of “otherwise possibilities.” In order to argue that categorical distinction is a problem for theological-philosophical thought, the Introduction analyses a recent book in Womanist Theology as a specific example of the general problem of categorical thought.
Breath
Authors: Crawley Ashon T.
Published: May 2017

Breathing is the foundation for black performance. Attention to whooping practices in Blackpentecostal church services makes explicit the ways breathing can be aestheticized in the cause of producing justice. Breathing was foundational to enslavement narratives; for example, the case of breathing is only mentioned in explicit, intense forms, such as during violence, recorded often as “heart-rending shrieks.” In this chapter, breathing is considered as taken up specifically in black performance as a critique of the ways breath was stolen through theological-philosophical violence.
Introduction: A Place for Comparative Theology in Christian Systematic Reflection
Authors: Roberts Michelle Voss
Published: May 2017

The editor, Michelle Voss Roberts, introduces the history and methods of comparative theology and argues for its importance in the study of systematics. The essays in the volume represent the best practices of comparative theology, exciting new approaches to it, and fresh perspectives on familiar topics in Christian systematic theology. The introduction suggests four uses for the volume: 1) as a way into Christian systematic theology; 2) as a way to test theological categories; 3) as proposals for doctrinal reflection; and 4) as an invitation to the reader to take up the activity of comparative reading.
The Dance of Emptiness
Authors: Sydnor Jon Paul
Published: May 2017

Jon Paul Sydnor’s essay, “The Dance of Emptiness,” compares two doctrines, Nagarjuna’s Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and Jürgen Moltmann’s Christian doctrine of the social Trinity. The essay is an attempt to produce constructive theology in relation to the doctrine of God that is relevant to individual and church life. The two doctrines are rich in the similarities that make comparison possible and the differences that make it fruitful. Emptiness and social Trinity gradually draw near to each other as the essay moves from discrete, mechanical comparison to a more concrete, organic mode of comparison. The conclusion reflects on the data gained through the comparison, the promise of comparative theology, and the importance of interdependence between the religions.
Like a Dog’s Curly Tail: Finding Perfection in a World of Imperfection
Authors: Long Jeffery D.
Published: May 2017

Jeffery Long, a Hindu theologian, explores the problem of evil as it is raised and addressed by thinkers in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition of Hinduism and by two separate schools of thought from contemporary Christianity. The textual sources used from the Ramakrishna tradition consist of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna as found in the primary sources on his life, as well as the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. From Christianity, Long employs works of John Hick and David Ray Griffin on the topic of theodicy. Despite the fact that the latter two authors hail from the same religious tradition, Long shows that Hick and Ramakrishna are in closer agreement on this topic than either is with Griffin’s process theology. The essay offers a revised version of the Ramakrishna-Hick theodicy that takes Griffin’s objections into account.
Women’s Virtue, Church Leadership, and the Problem of Gender Complementarity
Authors: Tiemeier Tracy Sayuki
Published: May 2017

Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier reads classical Indian theological arguments on women’s virtue as an analogue for rethinking Catholic teachings on gender complementarity. By a sustained comparison of depictions of female virtue in the fifth-century South Indian Tamil epic, the Cilappatikaram, with Catholic hierarchical and feminist approaches to women’s roles in the Church, she constructs a theology of gender that embraces women’s bodily and ritual power without falling into a reductive or essentializing complementarity. Tiemeier finds more complex ways for talking about women and power in Catholic theology, makes a case for women’s ordination by deconstructing and reconstructing the Church’s fundamental anthropological arguments against women’s ordination, and makes a comprehensive argument for the significance of varied roles for women in the Church.
Sleeper, Awake
Authors: Betcher Sharon V.
Published: May 2017

Setting out from the question “How do we live as/for a time being?,” Sharon Betcher observes that for many Western persons in the milieu of the “spiritual, but not religious,” the Christian promise of salvation as immortality of soul—a ballast for the anxiety of our transient passage—has become nonfunctional. She consequently considers the question by thinking with a contemporary guru that is often of first, popular resort—Deepak Chopra. While appreciating the ways in which teachers such as Chopra refresh interest in spiritual practice, Betcher notes a tendency toward uncritical appropriation of their presumably “perennial wisdom.” Further, she suspects these paths reduce soteriology to individual matters of health, itself a bit of an imperial conceit. Consequently, she holds Chopra in conversation with Anantanand Rambachan’s elucidation of Advaita Vedanta and a Christian theopoetics of Spirit, epitomized in the work of process theologian Catherine Keller. Amidst global economic fragility and given the onset of the Anthropocene, the question of soteriology here revolves around spiritual resilience to live in the midst of the mundane.
Salvation in the After-Living
Authors: Rambo Shelly
Published: May 2017

While both Sharon Betcher and Joshua Ralston turn attention away from interpreting salvation in terms of salvific ends, Shelly Rambo’s chapter questions whether the discourse of ends and the afterlife might be employed to speak to the present afterlife of trauma. It reflects on how discourses of salvation within Christianity, in particular, might be redirected to address lived somatic realities, thus registering fear and anxiety. Situating readers in the Johannine Upper Room in the aftermath of the death of Jesus, this chapter recasts the meaning of salvation in light of endings. It gestures toward aesthetic modes of comparative theology as offering a means of countering religious violence, turning a discourse of ends into practices of living in the aftermath of violent endings.
The Way It Is
Authors: Williamson Terrion L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the trope of the strong black woman by way of the “superwoman” of R&B musical parlance, particularly as expressed by R&B artist Karyn White in her 1988 hit song “Superwoman.” It extends this discussion to a consideration of the reality television series Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is in order to document the complex enactments of black female social intimacy and to say something about how black women collectively navigate trauma and pain by way of their music, as well as through their interactions with each other.
Guanaco’s diet and forage preferences in Nothofagus forest environments of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Authors: Quinteros Claudia-Pamela , Bava José-Omar , Gobbi Miriam-Edith , Defossé Guillermo-Emilio
Published: May 2017

Aim of study: Guanaco (Lama guanicoe Müller), is a South American native ungulate widely distributed in Patagonia, which in the island of Tierra del Fuego (TF), extends its habitat into Nothofagus spp. forests. Within these forests, guanacos consume lenga (Nothofagus pumilio) leaves and twigs, and other understory species. The aim of this work was to determine: 1) the spring and summer diet of free ranging guanacos, and 2) which plants, grown in the forest understory, guanacos do prefer, or avoid, in these seasons of great forage abundance.Area of study: Tierra del Fuego (Argentina), on three representative areas which combined Nothofagus forests and adjacent meadows (vegas).Material and Methods: Guanacos’ diet was determined by comparing epidermal and non-epidermal plant fragments with micro-histological analyses of feces. The analysis was made from composite samples of fresh feces, collected at the seasons of maximum forage productivity (spring and summer).Main results: During spring, 48% of guanacos’ diet was composed of lenga leaves, 30% of grass-like species, 15% of grasses, and less than 7% of herbs, shrubs, and lichens. In summer, 40% of the diet was composed of grasses, 30% of lenga leaves, 25% of grass-like species and the rest corresponded to herbs, shrubs, and lichens. Within the forest understory, guanaco selected lenga leaves and twigs, grass species were consumed according to their availability (or sometimes rejected), while other herbs were not consumed at all.Research highlights: Guanacos’ consumption preference for lenga, even considering the high availability of other forages, could adversely affect forest regeneration.
Effectiveness of native arbuscular mycorrhiza on the growth of four tree forest species from the Santa Marta Mountain, Veracruz (Mexico)
Authors: Retama-Ortiz Yolanda , Ávila-Bello Carlos H. , Alarcón Alejandro , Ferrera-Cerrato Ronald
Published: May 2017

Aim of the study: The aim of this work was to isolate consortia of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) associated to Liquidambar styraciflua in soils of the Santa Marta Mountain in Veracruz, and to select highly effective mycorrhizal consortia on promoting the growth of four tree forest species with economic and ecological importance.Area of study: Santa Marta Mountain, inside the buffer area of the Los Tuxtlas Biological Reserve in Veracruz (México).Materials and methods: Ten composite samples of rhizosphere soil were collected from L. styraciflua trees of 13-15 cm DBH (diameter at breast height). Roots were fixed in FAA solution to determine the mycorrhizal colonization percentage, the abundance of morphospecies, and its effectiveness in promoting the growth of L. styraciflua, Terminalia amazonia, Cordia alliodora, and Cojoba arborea. Soil physical and chemical characteristics were also analysed, and soil type recognition was performed with the Reference Base for Soil FAO-ISRIC World-SICS. Mycorrhizal colonization was determined by the method of clearing and staining roots with trypan blue; total percentage of colonization was estimated by the Linderman-Biermann method. Spores were extracted for counting and identifying morphospecies from each soil sample, those with more effectiveness were selected and inoculated in the four tree species, based upon a completely random design there were evaluated height, number of leaves, total dry weight and foliar area.Main results: Average mycorrhizal colonization percentage was 45% from natural conditions, samples one and four showed 80% of AMF-colonization. Average number of spores was 617 in 100 g-1 of dry soil. Forty-seven AMF-morphospecies were identified. After eight months significant differences were observed in root colonization, height, number of leaves, total dry weight, leaf area and foliar analysis of N5+, P5+ and K+ on plants inoculated with rhizosphere samples of L. styraciflua. Terminalia amazonia and Cojoba arborea showed greater response to the inoculation of AMF, they showed more height, number of leaves and more total dry weight; whereas C. alliodora appears to be low dependent on AMF.Highlights: Diversispora aurantia and Glomus aggregatum are reported by the first time from Mexican humid tropics. Native AMF have potential biotechnological application. The mycorrhizal consortium six (Glomus and Acaulospora) was the more effective in promoting the development of the four tree species used in the experiment.
Work accidents during cable yarding operations in Central Europe 2006 – 2014
Authors: Allman Michal , Jankovský Martin , Allmanová Zuzana , Ferenčík Michal , Messingerová Valéria , Vlčková Mária , Stoilov Stanimir
Published: May 2017

Aim of study: This study is focused on detailed analysis of accidents in yarding during the years 2006–2014. There is still not enough information about such accidents in Central Europe in the literature available.Area of study: We collected the data on occupational accidents recorded in timber yarding from the databases of the Slovak state forest enterprise. Material and Methods: The data on occupational accidents were recorded according to actual European Regulation, the form of the record meets the requirements of the ESAW (European Statistics on Accidents at Work) methodology. To analyze the data, we used the multiple regression and correlation analysis, contingency tables, and a χ2 –test.Main results: Almost half of the accidents were the foot injuries and the most frequent type of injury was fracture of a bone. The most hazardous operation was yarding. Most of the accidents occurred between 1301-1400 h (22 %). The most frequent agent causing accidents were Particles, dust, splinters, fragments, etc. (14.05 by ESAW). Research highlights: This study informs about the most important risk factors in timber yarding, the most hazardous parts of shift, as well as the days when the most accidents occur during the week, and as such contributes to better understanding of how the accidents happen in timber yarding. The information can be subsequently used in knowledge-based improvement of safety trainings in forest enterprises.
Whole-plant mineral partitioning during the reproductive development of rice (Oryza sativa L.)
Authors: Sperotto Raul A. , Vasconcelos Marta W. , Grusak Michael A. , Fett Janette P.
Published: May 2017

Minimal information exists on whole-plant dynamics of mineral flow. Understanding these phenomena in a model plant such as rice could help in the development of nutritionally enhanced cultivars. A whole-plant mineral accumulation study was performed in rice (cv. Kitaake), using sequential harvests during reproductive development panicle exertion, grain filling, and full maturity stages in order to characterize mineral accumulation in roots, non-flag leaves, flag leaves, stems/sheaths, and panicles. Partition quotient analysis showed that Fe, Zn, Cu and Ni are preferentially accumulated in roots; Mn and Mg are accumulated in leaves; Mo, Ca, and S in roots and leaves; and K in roots, leaves and stems/sheaths. Correlation analysis indicated that changes in the concentrations of mineral pairs Fe-Mn, K-S, Fe-Ni, Cu-Mg, Mn-Ni, S-Mo, Mn-Ca, and Mn-Mg throughout the reproductive development of rice were positively correlated in all four of the above ground organs evaluated, with Fe-Mn and K-S being positively correlated also in roots, which suggest that root-to-shoot transfer is not driven simply by concentrations in roots. These analyses will serve as a starting point for a more detailed examination of mineral transport and accumulation in rice plants.
Beyond the Nasca Lines
Authors: Conlee Christina A.
Published: May 2017

Beyond the Nasca Lines examines the origin, rise, fall, and reformation of complex societies through investigations conducted at the archaeological site of La Tiza in the desert of Nasca, Peru. La Tiza was inhabited for over 5000 years and has the longest occupation of any settlement in the region, providing an unprecedented opportunity to examine the dynamics of ancient complex societies. Although the region is famous for the Nasca Lines (ground drawing on the desert floor) that were created by the Nasca culture (A.D. 100–650), many societies thrived in the region before and after that period. From hunters and gatherers of the Middle Preceramic (ca. 3500 B.C.) to the Inca empire (ca. A.D. 1450), the transformation of society is documented with a particular focus on the cycle of the rise of the Nasca culture, subsequent conquest by the Wari state followed by collapse and abandonment, and then the establishment of a new society in the Late Intermediate Period (ca. A.D. 1200). Many factors were involved in these shifts, and included the organization of kinship groups, shifts in subsistence strategies, influxes of immigrants and new ideas, religious movements, climate change, trade and social networks, and external imperial policies. This book is unique from previous studies in Nasca in that it takes a diachronic perspective and addresses the long prehistory of the region from the perspective of a particular site.
The Dynamics of Complex Societies
Authors: Conlee Christina A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents the theoretical background to studying the dynamics of complex societies and presents the perspectives used to interpret the archaeological data from La Tiza and the Nasca region. The theories used to study complexity on the Peruvian coast are detailed, and several central factors are identified. These include the role of marine resources and domesticated plants, increases in coastal/inland interactions, agricultural intensification through irrigation, warfare, religion, and climate change. There is also an exploration of theory on the collapse and regeneration of complex societies.
The Rise and Fall of Complex Societies in Nasca
Authors: Conlee Christina A.
Published: May 2017

In this chapter a summary of the conclusions from the previous chapters is presented. The trajectory of the rise, collapse, and reformation of complex societies in Nasca is examined. In addition, there is a brief section on the colonial and modern periods in the region.
The Variety of Ritual Experience in Premodern States
Authors: Blanton Richard
Published: May 2017

Any turn to collective action in polity-building will create a fertile ground for argumentative discourses about human nature as well as about new cultural production that aims to transform entrenched cultural designs. This chapter addresses how ritual may play a role in such discourses. While no classifying system will properly capture all the nuance and complexity of ritual practice, to add substance to my comparative exercise I follow Stanley Tambiah’s sense that some rituals can be understood as “constitutive” acts, serving to reaffirm that which is bound by convention and not subject to conscious evaluation. For example, Balinese political rituals serve to reaffirm the central, unquestioned, and timeless fact of Balinese kingship (legitimacy of rule)—the sanctified status of corporeal god-kings. By contrast, I found that in the more collective polities, ritual, as Tambiah explains, can more often be understood to “regulate a practical or technical activity … without actually constituting it.” Rather than to “astonish thousands of peasants” and thereby reproduce the central structural property of a government, as in Bali, the civic rituals of the more collective polities allow for a rational evaluation of the polities’ operative principles and their theories of human nature.
Discussant
Authors: Vranich Alexei
Published: May 2017

The discussion chapter contextualizes the essays in this volume on the scholarship of ritual and archaic states. It highlights the importance of ritual as an inherent part of a cultural narrative in past and present societies alike, and how, by studying ritual and its relationship to cultural practices and social organization, we can better understand diverse social groups. The review of the chapters stresses how the authors provide a variety of methodological and interpretive tools. These include the cautious use of ethnographic and ethnohistorical analogy, phenomenological recreations–based universals of human perception and movement, and minute analysis of the discards of ritual and performances, from trash to valued items placed with the deceased.
Life and Afterlife at Cerro Maya, Belize
Authors: Walker Debra S.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 3 reports on a subset of burials and associated burial goods discovered in the 1970s excavations at the Cerro Maya (Cerros) waterfront village. Container burials, remains interred in Maya ceramic vessels, are associated primarily with a presumed bundle house for ancestor veneration and display, while seated, cross-legged burials are associated primarily with a waterfront elite residence that probably housed the family that controlled trade at the nearby dock facility. One seated interment in particular, Burial 15, may have contained a revered founder of the settlement, or anchoring ancestor. Characteristics of the ceramics deposited as grave goods and the profusion of seated cross-legged burials distinguish mortuary practices at Cerro Maya from other Late Preclassic sites in coastal northern Belize and may link them with sites in present day Quintana Roo.
Visualizing Maya Agriculture along the Rio Hondo
Authors: Guderjan Thomas , Luzzadder-Beach Sheryl , Beach Timothy , Krause Samantha , Brown Clifford
Published: May 2017

Chapter 5 draws on a broad range of evidence to develop a view of what the agricultural landscape of the Rio Hondo basin, now on the Belize-Mexican border, must have looked like in the heavily populated Classic era landscape. The authors use Contact period Spanish accounts to describe trade in agricultural products–especially cacao, but also achiote and vanilla–that were particularly prized from this region. Ten years of research on the drained field agricultural systems, such as the Chan Cahal fields near Blue Creek, identified the timespan for commercial level production, and computer assisted analysis of aerial and satellite photographs are beginning to document the massive scale of this enterprise.
Red Wares, Zapatista, Drinking Vessels, Colonists, and Exchange at Cerro Maya
Authors: Son Robin Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter updates Robin Robertson’s 1980 ceramic analysis of Late Preclassic pottery from Cerro Maya (Cerros), Belize. Subsequent research in the region, with more chronological control, has documented that the pottery is mostly Terminal Preclassic in date, including the distinctive Cabro Red type. Some new type designations and comparative descriptive characteristics are reported and, where appropriate, connections with Late Preclassic ceramics at other Maya sites are considered. More broadly, modal comparisons imply strong ceramic affinities between Tulix Phase Cerro Maya and ceramic spheres to the north in present day Quintana Roo and Yucatan, Mexico.
Stone Tools and Trade on the Southern End of Chetumal Bay
Authors: Chiarulli Beverly A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines regional and long-distance trade in several types of lithic artifacts, both chert and obsidian, among communities on Corozal Bay (southern Chetumal Bay), particularly Santa Rita Corozal and Cerro Maya, and interior northern Belize. In this region, there is substantial evidence for trade in stone tools made in northern Belize as well as exchange in imported obsidian. Although trade in stone tools was a long-standing tradition on the bay, this chapter focuses on the Late Preclassic period. During this era, communities around Corozal Bay participated in a vibrant commerce between sites on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán and settlements further inland, particularly Colha, a commercial scale stone tool production center situated on an outcrop of high quality chert. During the Late Preclassic, tranchet adzes, stemmed macroblades, and oval bifaces were exported from Colha in massive quantity.
Coastal Economies
Authors: Mckillop Heather
Published: May 2017

The sea was important to the ancient Maya as a source of ritual and subsistence resources as well as for canoe travel and long distance trade, particularly evidenced in durable goods such as obsidian. This chapter compares the trading system on Chetumal Bay to a similar coastal Maya landscape in the Port Honduras region of southern Belize and its trading port at Wild Cane Cay. The author notes that trading networks reacted to change in market demand for specific kinds of goods, exhibited at coastal sites such as Moho Key on the coast of central Belize. Although Chetumal Bay saw a much longer run as a trading system, the Port Honduras region thrived in the Classic era based in part on a prolific coastal–inland trade in salt. Excavations at the Paynes Creek salt works, for example, revealed a large quantity of salt evaporating vessels (briquetage) essential to producing this mineral necessity. With the Terminal Classic collapse of most inland cities, the southern Belize salt trade declined and populations diminished.
Wharton’s Italian Women
Authors: Bode Rita
Published: May 2017

Chapter 4 examines Wharton’s first novel, the historical fiction The Valley of Decision, in the context of Wharton’s knowledge of and appreciation for Italy that began with her family’s European stays during Wharton’s childhood. In The Valley of Decision, Wharton engages Italian womanhood as a way of exploring womankind’s relationship to learning and culture. The chapter traces Wharton’s admiration for and literary indebtedness to her Victorian predecessor, George Eliot—a writer Wharton read from early on as her letters to Anna Bahlman indicate—and discusses how Wharton’s own female intellectual, Fulvia, is not a replication of but rather a response to Eliot’s Romola.
Beyond the Guidebook
Authors: Lasansky D. Medina
Published: May 2017

In chapter 6, D. Medina Lasansky discusses Wharton’s role in rediscovering the sixteenth-century Franciscan sacro monte of San Vivaldo, located outside San Gimignano. Wharton wrote about the New Jerusalem site for Scribner’s as well in Italian Backgrounds. She commissioned the Florentine firm Fratelli Alinari to photograph sculptures on site, which she attributed to the Della Robbia workshop. Although not formally trained as an art historian, Wharton’s discussion of San Vivaldo shows that she was writing art history more inventive than most contemporary art historians. Of equal importance is that Wharton, like many of her female colleagues, collapsed genres (fiction, history, translation, travel writing) to write about her subjects, including San Vivaldo.