bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dark Networks
Authors: Gilbert Jane , Gaunt Simon , Burgwinkle William
Published: May 2020

This chapter pursues the theme of travel, focusing on how both the representation and, crucially, the non-representation of movements, travels, and networks become key to the retooling of some texts in transmission. In the first section of this chapter, we show how the prose Tristan is made to travel, indeed is relocated to the Mediterranean, through a prologue and lengthy prequel; the whole of British culture is thereby glossed as a dislocation of, and exile from, the holy East. The second section takes a well-known and much-studied manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, and follows a textual (non-)thread via the Paon (Peacock) cycle of Alexander texts, to trace the career of a poet, Jean de le Mote, whose career exemplifies cultural networks that today are often overlooked.
Divergent Paths
Authors: Eibl Ferdinand
Published: May 2020

The chapter is macro-comparative in nature and examines to what extent the theoretical framework is in line with the historical patterns of authoritarian regime formation. Drawing on historical case accounts, Arabic language secondary liter­ ature, and autobiographical material written by actors involved in the early elite struggles, the chapter spotlights how intra-elite conflict and communal cleavages shaped elites’ incentives for welfare provision. In addition, the chapter maps out the geostrategic environment in which regime formation took place, highlighting differences in the exposure to external threat and the endowment with resources as key constraining factors on welfare distribution. It does so in the form of comparative narratives of coalition formation and the geostrategic context, and demonstrates how the combination of elite competition, communal cleavages, and the geostrategic context widened or narrowed the authoritarian support coalitions.
Programmable Integrated Photonics
Authors: Capmany José , Pérez Daniel
Published: May 2020

Programmable Integrated Photonics (PIP) is a new paradigm that aims at designing common integrated optical hardware configurations, which by suitable programming can implement a variety of functionalities that, in turn, can be exploited as basic operations in many application fields. Programmability enables by means of external control signals both chip reconfiguration for multifunction operation as well as chip stabilization against non-ideal operation due to fluctuations in environmental conditions and fabrication errors. Programming also allows activating parts of the chip, which are not essential for the implementation of a given functionality but can be of help in reducing noise levels through the diversion of undesired reflections. After some years where the Application Specific Photonic Integrated Circuit (ASPIC) paradigm has completely dominated the field of integrated optics, there is an increasing interest in PIP justified by the surge of a number of emerging applications that are and will be calling for true flexibility, reconfigurability as well as low-cost, compact and low-power consuming devices. This book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to this emergent field covering aspects that range from the basic aspects of technologies and building photonic component blocks to the design alternatives and principles of complex programmable photonics circuits, their limiting factors, techniques for characterization and performance monitoring/control and their salient applications both in the classical as well as in the quantum information fields. The book concentrates and focuses mainly on the distinctive features of programmable photonics as compared to more traditional ASPIC approaches.
Practical Implementation of Programmable Photonic Circuits
Authors: Capmany José , Pérez Daniel
Published: May 2020

In covering the fundamentals and ideal implementation of integrated multi-port interferometers and waveguide meshes, we saw that solutions with larger integration density of programmable unit cells enables the synthesis of more complex circuits. However, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) generally suffer from design and fabrication errors and other non-ideal working conditions, which compromises performance and scalability. In addition, PICs require the development of two additional tiers (electronic hardware and software) to allow their programmability, optimisation and (re)configuration. This chapter introduces basic practical considerations of programmable PIC design and reviews experimental demonstrations of both multi-port interferometers and waveguide mesh arrangements. It analyses the main error sources and their impact on circuit performance and investigates the most challenging evolution obstacles for very large-scale programmable PICs. It introduces an analytical method for arbitrary waveguide mesh analysis. Finally, it presents a general architecture for the control subsystem and introduces the software framework and main algorithms.
Actions and Abstractions
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

The philosophical analysis of action often leads to abstractions. I argue that we can avoid some of these abstractions by keeping in mind that actions are defined and individuated by their circumstances; they are always situated or contextual. I argue that the most appropriate way to think of actions and circumstances is to think of them as ordered according to the action’s highest realized affordance within an agentive situation. The concepts of affordance and agentive situation are both relational; they reference both the agent (including the agent’s intention) and the action environment (which is social and cultural). The concept of basic action can also lead to abstractions. To avoid an abstract snapshot analysis of action we need to think of action as a process, as something temporal and more dynamic.
Interaction
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

In contrast to standard accounts of social cognition I offer an alternative account—interaction theory. According to this approach we understand other people primarily by means of a diverse set of embodied, social, and cultural practices governed by social norms. Our understanding of someone’s action is frequently shaped by shared pragmatic contexts and in terms of social roles. Developmentally this interaction account builds on three sets of processes or abilities: primary intersubjectivity, a set of sensory-motor abilities and action-oriented perceptual capacities involved in face-to-face dyadic interaction; secondary intersubjectivity, a set of abilities involving joint attention and joint actions with others in shared pragmatic and social contexts; and communicative and narrative competencies that explain more advanced aspects of understanding others. This chapter explores the meaning of and the science behind primary and secondary intersubjectivity.
Direct Social Perception
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

In this chapter I further develop interaction theory and the concept of primary intersubjectivity by providing evidence for our ability to directly perceive intentions and emotions. Intentions and emotions can be understood at least in part as composed of perceivable patterns of contextualized embodied behaviors. I argue that perception is “smart” and in no need of inferential or simulational supplementation in most instances of social interaction. I consider that even some theory theorists have acknowledged the role of perception but not without giving up the idea of a subpersonal processing that amounts to an inferential mindreading. I also consider recent predictive processing accounts and argue for an embodied-enactive interpretation of such processes. Finally, I consider concerns about direct social perception raised by research in social psychology.
Prologue
Authors: Oro Daniel
Published: May 2020

The idea of combining social species, information, perturbations, and nonlinear responses related to dispersal originated naively a long time ago, in the Gulf of Roses in the western Mediterranean. As a kid, I used to spend holidays in a tiny village nearby the ruins of Empuries, a magical place where an ancient Greek colony was founded in 575 BC, later occupied by the Romans. I remember going to the beach where I would place my towel sheltered from the wind behind a large section of the ancient Greek dock built on huge stones. More than 2100 years later, one can still enjoy the mosaics, the temple columns, and the large walls protecting the Roman city from the outside. Once, while visiting this place with my parents, I asked them why that magnificent settlement was abandoned, vanished, and was buried by dust, but I did not get a convincing answer (even now, I would not be able to answer this question if asked by my own kids). Archaeologists believe that the collapse of Empuries was caused by a combination of factors, namely the appearance of other flourishing communities (Barcino and Tarraco, or Barcelona and Tarragona as they are known today) and a perturbed environmental regime, caused by an accumulation of sediments resulting from a nearby river, which disabled the use of the harbour. These factors likely contributed to dispersal, which ended up in the abandonment of the city. In any case, my wonderings about Empuries remained dormant for the next 40 years. But these questions slowly awakened when one of my fieldwork studies monitoring Audouin’s gulls at the Ebro Delta was unexpectedly affected by a perturbation that began in the mid-1990s. This breeding patch, which came to hold almost 75% of the total world population of this once endangered species, has collapsed in recent times, but strikingly it remained apparently resilient for many years (Figure P1). The Ebro Delta shared with Empuries the characteristic of being an exceptionally suitable habitat allowing a population to flourish, prior to eventual collapse. Empuries and the Ebro Delta represent all of the issues I have come to be interested in as a researcher: a social group thriving in a favourable patch, perturbations generating dispersal, and a nonlinear response leading to patch extinction (as a form of a new stable state). Some years ago a reading of Marten Scheffer’s book about critical transitions was also very inspiring. Understanding why Empuries and the Ebro Delta collapsed has intrigued my curiosity over the past several years, and has led me to take the leap in writing this book....
Evolution of Sociality and Nonlinear Population Dynamics
Authors: Oro Daniel
Published: May 2020

Sociality appears in many life histories during evolution. Some eusocial bees show evolutionary reversions to solitary behaviour, and populations of the same species can be solitary or social, likely depending on local environmental features. Social species need a minimum size to perform adaptive behaviours, such as the search for resources, which is crucial especially under perturbations. This minimum size may become a threshold, setting a phase transition for separating two stable states, from disorganized and maladaptive to organized and adaptive, which also shows hysteresis. The chapter also explores evolution via facilitation or cooperation (e.g. social information) under the theoretical framework of multilevel selection, by which there is likely an effect of the social group’s genes on individual fitness. Perturbations appear as a strong source of evolutionary processes. In humans, warfare acts as a very powerful selective pressure for competition between groups and thus for cooperation. Sociality has also many costs, such as a higher risk for the spread of infectious disease, the appearance of traps by social haunting philopatry, stronger aggression and competition, and a higher risk of being attacked by predators. Finally, the evolution of cultures is explored; optimization of social learning, social copying, and cultural transmission may have nonlinear consequences for population dynamics.
Poverty has a Woman’s face
Authors: Michalopoulos Constantine
Published: May 2020

The global impact of four women Ministers of Development on empowering women and eradicating their poverty was varied, multidimensional, and substantial but difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. Their very existence and actions as a group had an important demonstration effect in empowering women in developing countries. Though they did not launch a joint ‘gender’ initiative as such, they each took many initiatives in their national development policies to raise the profile of gender issues, increase women’s empowerment, and reduce their poverty. They also worked together to support international undertakings aimed at improving women’s access to education and health care, and empowering them on issues of family planning. More broadly they supported initiatives on women’s rights and strengthening their status in society. This chapter starts with a short review of their efforts to empower women before they became ministers. It then presents examples of their efforts as Development Ministers at the national level as well as in support of global initiatives in which one or more of them were involved.
A Coherence Deficit
Authors: Michalopoulos Constantine
Published: May 2020

Policy coherence for development involves the systematic establishment of mutually reinforcing policy action across government departments and agencies to promote poverty reduction and sustainable development. Coherence was a central theme of the U4 from the very beginning of their collaboration. This chapter discusses U4 efforts to promote policy coherence to deal with three issues: first, it addresses conflicts between aid objectives and developed country trade policy. Subsidized agricultural exports from the USA and Europe wreaked havoc on assistance programmes trying to increase production and incomes of poor farmers in Africa. Second, it discusses U4 efforts to ensure that poor countries were able to use aid money to buy goods or services from the least expensive source and were not forced to buy only from the donor—whose producers may not have been competitive. The final section discusses coherence between environment and development concerns as they emerged in the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.
Flying Africans, Black Pilots
Authors: Trotter David
Published: May 2020

This chapter resumes the exposition of the interface as a cultural form begun in Chapter 2, in relation to Conrad’s sea captains. In advancing that account into the middle decades of the twentieth century, it addresses a new technology: mechanically powered flight. The paradigmatic interface was now the cockpit of an aeroplane, rather than the quarterdeck of a ship. This is not a straightforward story of technological progress. In the United States, race had come to determine what is gained and lost by passage across the threshold of the interface. The chapter’s topic is the conjunction of interwar aviation technology with a version of the slavery-era legend of the Flying Africans which gained traction in African-American politics and culture (especially Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement) in the 1920s, and subsequently caught the attention of blues singers like Lead Belly and writers like Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison.
Conclusion
Authors: Trotter David
Published: May 2020

This chapter offers a brief recapitulation of what has been learnt by approaching British and other literatures of the period 1850 to 1950 from the perspective of the ideas of signal and interface. It concludes that, while the pressure these ideas exerted did indeed remain constant throughout the period, it took an eccentric emphasis on aspects of form to reconfigure the text itself as a manipulation of signal-to-noise ratio. The ‘modernism’ which took shape in works by Lewis, Loy, and Mirrlees was a specialist affair. The chapter concludes with two further case studies. The first has to do with the function of a particular architectural feature—the corridor—in nineteenth-century British poetry and fiction; the second with the hugely influential theory and practice of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who thought that political solidarity was best expressed by means of what we would now term ‘social media’.
The Linguistic Properties of Weather Reports
Authors: Collins John
Published: May 2020

The chapter seeks to settle on the general syntactic and semantic properties of weather reports. In particular, it is argued that the locative construal of weather reports is adjunctional, that is, the position for a locative phrase is optional and so does not militate for any syntactic or lexical structure when such a position is not overtly occupied. It is also argued that Recanati’s arguments to a similar conclusion can be faulted in ways the strict linguistic argument on offer cannot be. It is concluded, in light of the phenomena discussed, that relevant meteorological predicates are derived from a general principle that raises nominal roots into verbal positions.
Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options
Authors: Horvath Joachim , Meyer Karina , Wiegmann Alex
Published: May 2020

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense.
Introduction
Authors: Floyd-Wilson Mary , Sullivan, Jr. Garrett A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces a geographic approach to embodiment that analyses a range of somatic practices—including sensory apprehension, affection, memory, and cognition—as operating across both body and world. It situates the work of various prominent scholars within what the editors of this volume dub a geographic turn in the literary and cultural study of embodiment. Finally, it traces connections among the essays collected in The Geographies of Embodiment to Early Modern England.
Hi Mho Ji Kudd
Authors: Harris Jonathan Gil
Published: May 2020

Harris tells the story of Father Thomas Stephens, whose interactions with the landscape, language, and food of India refashioned his English body. By unpacking the phrase ‘hi mho ji kudd’, a Konkani translation of ‘hoc est corpus meum’ (which is inscribed beneath the altar in a Jesuit church in Goa), Harris provides an account of a more worldly transformation than that offered by the Eucharist. As the author of the epic poem Kristapurana (Story of Christ), Stephens participated in the ‘Jesuit tradition of inculturation’. And yet, Stephens’s love of the Marathi language ‘Indianized’ not only the Christianity he preached but also his own body. Stephens’s poetic use of the kalpataru, the coconut tree, as Eden’s Tree of Life, invokes a daily experience of interacting with Goan coconuts, underscoring the recalibration of Stephens’s flesh ‘into something Indian’.
The Moral World
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how central it is, for Kant, that the concept of God only comes downstream from, and after, the possibility of belief in the ‘moral world’. This moral world is the realm of freedom, wherein autonomy is possible. Only if (deterministic) space and time do not go ‘all the way down’, are freedom, and autonomy, possible. If space and time are ‘things-in-themselves’, Kant asserts, ‘then freedom cannot be saved’ (A536/B564). Only if there is a dimension of reality beyond mechanism, is end-setting, and so autonomy, and the highest good possible. Not even God could achieve the highest good in a universe without end-setting, and without freedom, because this universe would be a sort of ‘desert’ with no ‘inner value’. The sequence of thought we find, both in the second Critique, and in other texts is this: first of all, Kant identifies a need for happiness in proportion to virtue; then Kant identifies the obstacle to the realization of such happiness, which is the mechanistic and deterministic structure of nature; and then Kant moves to the solution, which involves leaning into the realm of freedom, which realm includes God. The significance of the third phase in the progression of thought (the realm of freedom) has not been sufficiently considered, it is argued, when considering the Kant’s ‘moral proof’, and the relationship, for Kant, between morality, the highest good, and God.
Freedom as the Guarantor of the Possibility of the Highest Good
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

The chapter articulates the following problem: given all that Kant’s notion of freedom, and the intelligible realm can achieve, what precisely is the role of God? That is, what do we need God for? And then, even if we have identified a role which God is expected to fill, there is the further question of whether God can fulfil this role, consistently with Kant’s wider commitments. It is suggested that God either seems to be ‘too much’, or ‘not enough’: ‘too much’, in that God can seem redundant, given all that is achieved by the notion of freedom, and ‘not enough’, in that, were God needed to make up some sort of deficit in our moral status, this would seem to violate Kant’s restrictions on human freedom, which is always ‘all or nothing’, such that all our free actions must come as a first cause from ourselves, and ourselves alone. This is a problem that threatens the cogency of Kant’s ‘moral proof’, which is to say, his understanding of the relationship between the highest good, happiness, and the existence of God.
The roots of ditransitive verbs of caused possession
Authors: Beavers John , Koontz-Garboden Andrew
Published: May 2020

Chapter 3 examines English ditransitive verbs, which show the dative alternation between indirect object and to frames, each supposedly reflecting a different template for a single manner-describing root. It shows that these two templates are semantically highly underspecified, and it is the root that fleshes out many of the surface verb’s basic entailments. These entailments include change-of-state, possession, and co-location, all of which are independently known to be templatic meanings, arguing again against Bifurcation. The root also governs whether the verb even shows the dative alternation, a root-conditioned syntactic effect. A formal analysis of root/template composition is developed that relies on manner roots being able to impose conditions on the template’s result states in ways that predict the verb’s grammatical and semantic behavior. Counterproposals that might retain Bifurcation are also considered, though it is argued that they are dispreferred for various reasons.
Trade Policy in Multilevel Government
Authors: Freudlsperger Christian
Published: May 2020

Trade Policy in Multilevel Government investigates how multilevel polities organize openness in a globalizing political and economic environment. In recent years, the multilevel politics of trade caught the broader public’s attention, not least due to the Wallonian regional parliament’s initial rejection of the EU-Canada trade deal in 2016. In all multilevel polities, competencies held by states and regions have increasingly become the subject of international rule-setting. This is particularly so in the field of trade, which has progressively targeted so-called “behind the border” regulatory barriers. In their reaction to this “deep trade” agenda, constituent units in different multilevel polities have shown widely varying degrees of openness to liberalizing their markets. Why is that? Trade Policy in Multilevel Government argues that domestic institutions and procedures of intergovernmental relations are the decisive factor. Countering a widely held belief among practitioners and analysts of trade policy that involving subcentral actors complicates trade negotiations, it demonstrates that the more voice a multilevel polity affords its constituent units in trade policy-making, the less the latter have an incentive eventually to exit from emerging trade deals. While in shared rule systems constituent unit governments are directly represented along the entirety of the policy cycle, in self-rule systems territorial representation is achieved merely indirectly. Shared rule systems are hence more effective than self-rule systems in organizing openness to trade. The book tests the explanatory power of this theory on the understudied case of international procurement liberalization in extensive studies of three systems of multilevel government: Canada, the European Union, and the United States.
Glimpses of Fifteenth-Century Albania
Authors: Malcolm Noel
Published: May 2020

The narratives written by pilgrims who travelled from Venice to the Holy Land provide quite a rich source of information about Albania and its coastal territory during the fifteenth century. This was the period when Western interest in Albania was stimulated by Skanderbeg’s revolt against Ottoman rule. However, the Albanian lands were mostly untravelled and unknown by outsiders; after the city of Shkodër was conquered by the Ottomans (from Venice), only the Venetian-ruled port-city of Durrës was visited. The pilgrim narratives supply some first-hand descriptions of that city, but they also record the second-hand knowledge that circulated about other parts of the coastline, including the territory of Himarë with its notoriously fierce inhabitants. The dangers of travel down this part of the Adriatic coast are also vividly illustrated: the pilgrims feared Ottoman naval vessels, pirate attacks, and sudden storms.
Crypto-Christianity and Religious Amphibianism in the Ottoman Balkans
Authors: Malcolm Noel
Published: May 2020

Christianity—secret adherence to Christian religious practices by people who outwardly professed Islam—is known to have occurred in several parts of the Ottoman Empire; this essay concerns the crypto-Christians of Kosovo, who were very unusual in adhering to Roman Catholicism. Distinctions are made here between crypto-Christianity and a range of other practices or circumstances that have been partly confused with it in previous accounts: the fact of close social coexistence between Muslims and Christians; the existence of religious syncretism, which allowed the borrowing and sharing of some ritual practices; and the principle of ‘theological equivalentism’ (the claim, made by some Muslims, that each person could be saved in his or her own faith). These things were not the same as crypto-Christianity, but they involved different kinds of religious ‘amphibianism’, creating conditions in which crypto-Christianity could survive more easily. The story of Catholic crypto-Christianity in Kosovo and northern Albania begins with reports from Catholic priests in the seventeenth century. Contributory factors seem to have been the economic incentive for men to convert to Islam to escape the taxes on Christians, and the fact that women (who were not tax-payers) could remain Christian, as Christian wives were permitted under Islamic law. This essay then traces the history of the crypto-Catholics of Kosovo, who survived, despite the strong official disapproval of the Church, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The ‘Great Migration’ of the Serbs from Kosovo (1690)
Authors: Malcolm Noel
Published: May 2020

This essay examines both the historical facts concerning the migration of Serbs from Kosovo in 1690, and the claims made about that migration by subsequent historians—claims which, at their most extreme, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Serbs departed, with huge effects on the ethnic composition of the region. This essay demonstrates that there was no large-scale organized exodus of Serbs under the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch, Arsenije Crnojević: his departure from Kosovo in early 1690 was extremely hasty, and he had not, in any case, been leading organized resistance to the Ottomans. A large number of Serbs did move with the Patriarch to Hungarian territory later in that year; he himself gave their numbers as 30,000 or 40,000. But they had gathered, from many areas, in the Belgrade region, and only a small proportion were from Kosovo itself. One unsupported claim was made many years later, by a Serbian monk, that the Patriarch had brought 37,000 families to Hungary; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many Serb writers interpreted that figure maximally, while also assuming that all those people had come from Kosovo. This essay analyses the ideological influences (operating primarily on Serbs within the Habsburg territories in the nineteenth century) that helped to shape that interpretation; it also criticizes excessive claims made by modern Albanian and Turkish historians.
Myths of Albanian National Identity
Authors: Malcolm Noel
Published: May 2020

Many elements of modern Albanian national ideology developed outside the Albanian lands themselves; this essay examines the ideas about the identity of the Albanian people which were put forward by an influential group of writers in early-twentieth-century America. The key figures were Fan Noli, Faik Konitsa, Kostandin Çekrezi and Kristo Dako. Although they wrote mainly in émigré papers, their arguments sought a much wider audience, especially in the period 1912–21, when the fate of Albania lay in the hands of the major Western powers. Four main categories of ‘myth’ or talismanic doctrine are identified and discussed. The myth of origins and priority claimed that the Albanians were the most ancient people of south-eastern Europe, having preceded even the ancient Greeks. The myth of ethnic homogeneity and cultural purity asserted that the Albanian people had never undergone any large-scale processes of admixture or dilution by foreign populations and foreign cultures. The myth of permanent national struggle maintained that Albanians had always fought to throw off rule by non-Albanians, whether Roman, Slav or Ottoman. And the myth of indifference to religion said that for the Albanians, religion had never been a primary marker of identity, and that their changes in religion had typically been tactical moves, made for the higher purpose of national survival. This mutually reinforcing pattern of claims thus offers a classic example of the mythic style of identity formation.
Rationality and Decisional Autonomy
Authors: Pugh Jonathan
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains the role that theoretical and practical rationality play in decisional autonomy. The author contrasts his rationalist approach with other prominent rationalist theories of autonomy in bioethics developed by Rebecca Walker and Julian Savulescu. He suggests that one way in which both of these theories fall short is that they fail to offer a deep explanation of why we should trust that our evaluative judgements are the seat of autonomous decision-making. In order to provide such an explanation, in the second half of the chapter, the author situates his rationalist account in the literature on the philosophy of action. The discussion suggests that coherence theories of personal autonomy can offer this kind of explanation, and argues that supplementing such theories with considerations of theoretical rationality and an objectivist account of reasons can help to forestall some objections to such an approach.
Rational Autonomy and Decision-Making Capacity
Authors: Pugh Jonathan
Published: May 2020

Rationalist accounts of autonomy are often criticized on the basis of anti-paternalist concerns: If only rational decisions can be autonomous, one might worry that eccentric decisions may not be respected, and that more people would be found to lack decision-making capacity. The main aim of this chapter is to show how a rationalist approach can respond to the various ways in which such anti-paternalist concerns can be raised. The author first outlines some prominent accounts of decision-making capacity in the law and clinical literature, and claims that the widely adopted sliding-scale view of capacity need not fall foul of anti-paternalistic concerns. He then defends a rationalist approach to understanding decision-making capacity in ideal contexts from anti-paternalist concerns. The author concludes by responding to an epistemic version of the anti-paternalist objection in non-ideal contexts, according to which incorporating considerations of rationality into assessments of decision-making capacity would make costly errors in this assessment more likely.
A Bank of Issue Forged in Silver and Tears
Authors: Lie Einar
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the formation of Norges Bank. Norges Bank was formed in 1816 by resolution of the Storting, Norway’s new parliament. The bank was not given any explicit role in government financing. However, two tasks—providing credit for the public and stability in the monetary system—were fundamental to the bank’s creation and almost every discussion of its operations for the next quarter of a century. Moreover, when chartering Norges Bank in 1816, the Storting resolved that the Norwegian monetary unit—the speciedaler—should be convertible into silver at an exchange rate that was well above the note’s purchasing power and market value at the time. Indeed, one fundamental premise in all of the proposals that proliferated in 1816, influenced by the monetary chaos during the Napoleonic Wars, was that the value of the nation’s new paper money must be backed by silver.
The Investment Manager
Authors: Lie Einar
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses how the management of the nation’s long-term savings in what is now the Government Pension Fund Global brought Norges Bank a brand new responsibility from the mid-1990s, and an unusual one for a central bank. While many central banks have historically played an important part in contributing to government financing and investing government debt in liquid securities, this had never been one of Norges Bank’s main roles. Indeed, one of the key aims of the acts of 1816 and 1891 was to prevent the government from funding itself through the central bank. From the mid-1990s, however, Norges Bank was in a way given the opposite task: a separate mandate to manage the country’s financial wealth on behalf of the government by investing it abroad in long-term bonds, shares, and eventually real estate. Within twenty years, thanks to high oil prices and substantial inflows from the government, the fund’s market value soared from nothing to around NOK 7 trillion. In recent years, the fund’s rapid expansion and financial importance have brought Norges Bank—and Norway—at least as much international attention as the bank’s more traditional roles in monetary policy and financial stability.
Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution
Authors: Allsopp Niall
Published: May 2020

This book presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English Revolution, by focusing on royalist poets who left royalism behind following the execution of the king. These poets reimagined the traditional language of allegiance, articulating a flexible yet absolute form of sovereignty, applicable to a republic, or even to a Cromwellian monarchy. This sovereignty was artificial, and generated through the poetic imagination. Several chapters chart the poets’ close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes’s ideas in contemporary poetry. This context yields new insights into well-known poems by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden. But it also newly opens up major works that have been neglected, including the two original English epics of the Commonwealth period, by William Davenant and Abraham Cowley, along with the early career of Margaret Cavendish, and the plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. The book builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought, to contextualize the poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anti-clericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.
Introduction
Authors: Allsopp Niall
Published: May 2020

This Introduction highlights the poets’ links with each other and with Hobbes, and their flexible allegiances. It maps out the background to their mutually-informing ideas of sovereignty. Although these ideas were shaped by traditional absolutism, they took an unusual and comparatively secular view of sovereignty as an artificial construct. This view was shaped by traditions of Tacitism, neostoicism, and scepticism, and was sharpened immediately following the civil wars by the political debates of the Cavendish circle in Paris and the Engagement controversy in England. In all these respects, the poets’ views evolved through the influence of, but also a critical dialogue with, Thomas Hobbes. Their artificial view of sovereignty relied on the literary imagination to forge and declare political obligations. The Introduction concludes by reflecting on the methods involved in studying the fashioning of political ideas in poetry.
Davenant
Authors: Allsopp Niall
Published: May 2020

Chapter 1 traces the political views recorded in Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert (1650) and Gondibert (1651). At this time, Davenant loosened his ties with royalism, and imagined a more flexible and artificial form of sovereignty. This view was informed by Tacitism, especially by Lipsius, but the chapter particularly maps out the common ground between Davenant and Hobbes, who both attest to reading each others’ work at this time. The chapter notes Davenant’s views on religion (described by John Aubrey as ‘ingeniose Quakerisme’), on vainglory and the psychological causes of conflict, and on sovereignty, which Davenant founded on force (an argument current in the Engagement controversy), and on the power of poetry to constrain the imagination. Although Gondibert itself peters out inconclusively, the chapter concludes by highlighting its imaginative afterlife among satirists, including John Denham and Andrew Marvell.
Davenant and the Protectorate
Authors: Allsopp Niall
Published: May 2020

Chapter 5 presents a new account of Davenant’s involvement, alongside Waller, in the poetic and political culture of the Cromwellian Protectorate. It charts how Waller and Davenant allied with the courtly, civilian faction in the Protectorate, yet sought to persuade their patrons of the value of a more absolutist view of Cromwellian power. New readings of Waller’s A Panegyrick upon my Lord Protector, and Davenant’s drama, The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House, show how these texts drew on sovereignty arguments, informed by Hobbes. Both poets drew increasingly on a language of civility to unite aristocratic power with artificial and absolute sovereignty. The final section focuses on Davenant’s appeal to the leading Cromwellian courtier Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, identifying for the first time how close Davenant came to endorsing a Cromwellian monarchy.
Introduction
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

The introduction foregrounds the field of study and introduces the concepts and specific contexts in which the study is undertaken. It problematizes the existing binaries that remain between culture and labour and uncovers the uncanny relationship between them. The chapter asks what happens to culture and labour in their affective and performative turn, especially in ‘folk’ performances in India when labour becomes a performance, performance becomes labour. The irreducibility of such practices to culture or labour demands the formulation of some other category, and I designate it as cultural labour. Cultural labour is the core of the folk performance in South Asia and therefore the chapter argues that it can also work as a framework to study the performance cultures of subaltern communities. The chapter also discusses research method and methodology and introduces the five performances which have been undertaken in this work.
Landscape
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

Bhuiyan puja is a land and ancestor worship in Bihar observed by the subaltern communities. This form of ritual worship is enacted across India and South Asia with different names. During the performance, the ancestor spirits enter the body of a shaman who represents ancestral figure who performs along with the drummers while praising the land and landscape. This chapter studies the production of the landscape in the light of mnemonic memory and lived experiences. What cultural labour produces is not just a piece of land, but rather a set of relationships with the land and a nexus of inhabitation, place and value. The landscape of the performances of cultural labour presents a complex system of relations of social and material forces in the context of time and cultural geography. This chapter examines the ways performance endows values in the landscape and changes space into place.
Materiality
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

Bidesia can be literally translated as ‘the theatre of the migrants’ or theatre of the indentured labourers. It is a popular ‘folk performance’ from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh regions in eastern India. The performance emerged as a cultural response to the British era colonial out-migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth as a text of tribulation of those who were left behind, remembering those who often forcefully migrated to bides (foreign land) and pardes (another region). Based on the contemporary Bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers) in Bihar, this chapter argues how materiality remains core to the aesthetics of cultural labour and perhaps one of the main reasons for the denigration of ‘folk performances’ of the subaltern communities in India. While the power of bidesia rests in its materiality, the chapter shows how the same materiality become the problem of the bourgeois discourse.
Viscerality
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses dugola (singer-duels) performance in the context of (Syn)aesthetics, which is a unique and sensual approach to the creative process (thinking, producing, receiving). It tries to contextualize the immersive environment in which the music is created, learned, and performed by the performers. Drawing from Eugenio Barba’s claim that performer’s energy is a readily identifiable quality, this chapter studies the principles on which the performers model their muscular and nervous power to intensify their performing capacity. As the intensity between two singer competitors grows, the performance space becomes a magnetic field and creates its affective presence. The performer’s body vibrates with full energy and songs and stories seem to flow in that energy. This chapter will discuss the creative process in which the ‘folk performance’ works in a local cultural context. In caste based Indian society, this (syn)aesthetics offers some unique characteristics of these performers.
The Dilemma of Balancing Growth and Social Justice
Authors: Mitra Subrata
Published: May 2020

At Independence in 1947, India emerged from a century and half of economic stagnation, a radicalized and land-hungry peasantry, chronic food deficit and the spectre of mass starvation and famine looming over parts of the country. Faced with similar challenges, post-war ‘developmental states’ followed the course of economic development based on a template of state-controlled economic designs for growth, investment and trade. However, despite the challenge of resettling millions of refugees following the bloody partition of the country, war against Pakistan, and a violent peasant uprising in the South, the government of India, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, decided to open up all aspects of politics to democratic consultation. Many specialists of the time, including Barrington Moore and Gunnar Myrdal considered a ‘soft-state’, whose power and legitimacy derived from popular consent, to be ill-equipped to take hard decisions such as land reforms, and industrial growth. Contrary to such pessimistic prognoses, India has held together as a strong, stable, emerging economy. One can infer the strength and ingenuity of the Indian model in meeting the twin imperative of growth and justice from the steady growth of Indian economy and democratic consolidation over the past seven decades since Independence.
The Secular and the Religious
Authors: Hasyim Syafiq
Published: May 2020

Chapter four highlights two crucial issues that modern Indonesia has faced as a nation state: a systematic and passionate inclusion of Sharia into the legal and public sphere of this country (Shariatization), and secularization, applied to guard Indonesia, which fulfils the standard of a democratic modern state. These two are problematic considering Indonesia is neither an Islamic nor a secular State. As a non-theocratic State, in fact, Indonesia remains unable to completely stop several efforts of Shariatization promoted by some groups of Muslim society, and as non-secular State, Indonesia cannot adopt a total separation of religion and politics either. This chapter traces the first moment of Indonesia adopting Sharia on one hand and selecting compatible aspects of secularism on the other hand, and analyses how both are maintained in the configuration of the Indonesian nation state.
Spreading the Net
Authors: Metelits Michael D.
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 examines the manner in which the Government of Bombay, convinced of Crawford’s guilt, sought testimonial and documentary evidence, mainly through Indian officials called ‘mamlatdars’. Those officials had to confess under oath that they had paid money for career favours. At law, this constituted bribery of a government official. Confessing this in court under oath was contrary to their best interests, but the presidency government found a way to secure their testimony. Nevertheless, the process of making an evidentiary case was fraught with problems.
Bombay Government Opinions about the Report
Authors: Metelits Michael D.
Published: May 2020

Chapter 7 explores some of the contemporary criticisms of the findings, procedures, and precedents of the Crawford Commissioners’ report that set the scene for the ensuing chapters. The chapter also chronicles reasons for disagreement between several levels of the government. It focuses on dissent, mainly by the Government of Bombay officials, to the procedures and rationale of the commissioners who sat in judgment of Crawford. This chapter captures the frustration of local officials at seeing local savvy and understanding overcome by inappropriate ideas and procedures followed at a higher level of government.