bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Questions
Authors: Gibson James L. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: November 2018

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.
The Biology of War
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: November 2018

The eugenical stupidity of warfare was a major theme in the thinking of Darwinians during the First World War. Americans Vernon Kellogg and David Star Jordan were very vocal on this theme, although as a result of spending time with the German High Command while on war relief work in Belgium, Kellogg gave up his pacifism and began to argue the necessity of the conflict. Eugenical worries also haunted the British, although some like Sir Arthur Keith saw the bright side to things, and felt that evolutionary good could come from conflict. The Scottish common sense of zoo director Peter Chalmers Mitchell showed that many of the wilder claims about the good and bad effects of war really don’t hold up. He argued that we must accept that culture overwhelms the biology of the case. Across the trenches, Friedrich von Bernhardi argued the virtues and necessity of war before, during, and after the conflict. Germany was betrayed by inadequates.
Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

Sri Ramakrishna is widely known as a nineteenth-century Indian mystic who affirmed the harmony of all religions on the basis of his richly varied spiritual experiences and eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Ayon Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna was also a sophisticated philosopher of great contemporary relevance. Through a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna’s recorded oral teachings in the original Bengali, Maharaj reconstructs his philosophical positions and analyzes them from a cross-cultural perspective. Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical journey culminated in the exalted state of “vijñāna,” his term for the “intimate knowledge” of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. This spiritual standpoint of vijñāna, Maharaj contends, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central issues in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, including the infinitude of God, religious diversity, mystical experience, and the problem of evil. Sri Ramakrishna’s vijñāna-based religious pluralism—when grasped in all its subtlety—proves to have major philosophical advantages over dominant Western models. Moreover, his mystical testimony and teachings not only cut across long-standing debates about the nature of mystical experience but also bolster recent defenses of its epistemic value. Maharaj further demonstrates that Sri Ramakrishna’s unique response to the problem of evil resonates strongly with Western “soul-making” theodicies and contemporary theories of skeptical theism.
“All Faiths Are Paths”
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter reconstructs from Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings a unique and philosophically sophisticated model of religious pluralism. For Sri Ramakrishna, God is infinite, so there are correspondingly infinite ways of approaching and realizing God. Therefore, all religions and spiritual philosophies—both theistic and nontheistic—are salvifically effective paths to one common goal: God-realization, or the direct spiritual experience of God in any of His innumerable aspects or forms. Maharaj then examines Sri Ramakrishna’s response to the thorny problem of conflicting religious truth-claims. Sri Ramakrishna reconciles religious claims about the nature of the ultimate reality by claiming that every religion captures a uniquely real aspect of the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. Regarding other types of religious truth-claims, Sri Ramakrishna maintains that while every religion errs on some points of doctrine, these errors do not substantially diminish the salvific efficacy of religions. Finally, Maharaj defends Sri Ramakrishna’s doctrine of religious pluralism against numerous objections.
Sri Ramakrishna’s Multidimensional Response to the Problem of Evil
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter reconstructs Sri Ramakrishna’s response to the problem of evil. Several of Sri Ramakrishna’s visitors argued that instances of apparently pointless evil make it reasonable to believe that God does not exist. In response, Sri Ramakrishna would often observe that the ways of an omniscient and omnipotent God are inscrutable to the finite human intellect—a response, Maharaj argues, that is best understood as a skeptical theist position. Sri Ramakrishna’s skeptical theism dovetails with a full-blown theodicy—a positive account of why God permits evil and suffering. Maharaj reconstructs Sri Ramakrishna’s “saint-making” theodicy: since God has created this world as an environment for saint-making, evil is as necessary as good. Sri Ramakrishna’s theodicy culminates in an appeal to the panentheistic experience of vijñāna, which reveals to him that God has become everything in the universe. From this mystical standpoint, Sri Ramakrishna does not so much solve as dissolve the problem of evil.
Fail Better
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines martial arts practice as an encounter with failure, in which a practitioner withstands both getting hit and launching shots that do not land. Martial arts practice signals the possibilities of failure but also admits its painful consequences, literally and metaphorically. Therefore, this chapter suggests, martial arts provide an opportunity to rethink cultural associations of failure in a society that would deny it. Even the current celebration of failure in the form of “failing up” and “soft landings” focuses only on instances when failure becomes transmuted into success, disavowing its consequences and ignoring the conditions from which it emerges. This chapter includes a consideration of the differing race, class, and gender associations with failure. It also puts forward a theory of the live—as in live training and live weapon but also live performance—as predicated upon failure.
The Global Gag Rule and Women's Reproductive Health
Authors: Rodgers Yana van der Meulen
Published: November 2018

In recent decades, the long arm of US politics has reached the intimate lives of women all over the world. Since 1984, healthcare organizations in developing countries have faced major cuts in US foreign aid if they perform or promote abortions as a method of family planning. The policy—commonly known as the global gag rule—is a hallmark of Republican administrations. The reinstatement and expansion of the global gag rule by Donald Trump in January 2017 caused a firestorm of debate. Proponents emphasize the importance of reducing abortions globally, while critics predict large increases in unsafe abortions and maternal mortality resulting from disruptions to family-planning services. How plausible are the various claims and projections? This question is surprisingly difficult to answer because there is little statistical evidence on the global gag rule. This book helps to fill the gap by conducting a systematic analysis of how the global gag rule affects women’s reproductive health across developing regions. The analysis yields three important messages: (1) in the majority of countries that receive US family-planning assistance, the global gag rule has failed to achieve its objective of reducing abortions; (2) there is no definitive relationship between restrictive national abortion laws and abortion rates; and (3) the 2017 expansion of the global gag rule will have adverse effects on a dashboard of health indicators for women, men, and children. These powerful messages should be heard by policymakers over the voices calling for an ideologically based policy that has counterproductive results.
Fertility and Contraceptive Use
Authors: Rodgers Yana van der Meulen
Published: November 2018

This chapter uses analysis of aggregate data, a theoretical model, and a review of the empirical literature to examine the relationship between contraceptive availability and fertility. A correlation analysis shows that as contraceptive use rises, fertility rates fall, thus supporting the main rationale for investments in family-planning programs. These aggregate data on contraception and fertility are consistent with a theoretical model of women’s reproductive health decisions. The model can be used to predict the effects of an increase in the cost of contraceptives as might occur under the global gag rule. Higher prices and decreased availability of contraceptives are predicted to lower the intensity with which women use contraception, which results in a higher risk of unintended pregnancies. Depending on the relative costs of having an abortion and giving birth, more unintended pregnancies will lead to higher abortion rates or birth rates or both.
A Bhakti Guide for the Perplexed Brahmin
Authors: Ben-Herut Gil
Published: November 2018

The fourth chapter addresses Brahminism. Against contemporary understandings of Brahminism as completely antagonistic to (and antagonized by) Vīraśaivas, I read the relevant stories in the Ragaḷegaḷu as accommodating Brahmins who are also avid devotees of Śiva. In my approach I use a basic distinction between “Brahminness”—a birth-given condition that allows for the ceding of some Brahminical practices for maintaining devotional values when a social context generates conflict—and “Brahminism,” which stands for the set of traditional and orthodox Brahminical values of social difference and separation. While Brahminism is met with staunch resistance in the stories of the Ragaḷegaḷu, Brahminness is accommodated under certain conditions. Read with this distinction in mind, I argue, the Ragaḷegaḷu points to the wish of Harihara, himself a Brahmin, to guide the traditional Brahmin in the unorthodox social terrain of Bhakti while allowing him to maintain his traditional religious and social identity as a Brahmin.
Conclusion
Authors: Ben-Herut Gil
Published: November 2018

The conclusion provides an overview of Harihara’s treatment of the early Kannada Śivabhakti tradition in the Ragaḷegaḷu. The overview is organized according to several themes that are central in the broader study of South Asian devotional traditions: the tradition’s public memory, social inequity and conservatism, iconic worship and traditional ritual, orthodoxy and its rejection, and religious others. Harihara’s literary project is considered in terms of its appeal to large and multiple audiences in contemporaneous society, including Brahmin and educated elites and non-elite communities. The conclusion ends with discussing the need for developing more nuanced and context-sensitive methods for understanding pre-modern devotional traditions in South Asia.
The Mindful Elite
Authors: Kucinskas Jaime
Published: November 2018

From the halls of the Ivy League to the C-suite at Fortune 500 companies, this book reveals the people behind the mindfulness movement, and the engine they built to propel mindfulness into public consciousness. Based on over a hundred interviews with meditating scientists, religious leaders, educators, businesspeople, and investors, this book shows how this highly accomplished, affluent group has popularized meditation as a tool for health, happiness, and social reform over the past forty years. Rather than working through temples or using social movement tactics like protest to improve society, they mobilized by building elite networks advocating the benefits of meditation across professions. They built momentum by drawing in successful, affluent people and their prestigious institutions, including Ivy League and flagship research universities, and Fortune 100 companies like Google and General Mills. To broaden meditation’s appeal, they made manifold adaptations along the way. In the end, does mindfulness really make our society better? Or has mindfulness lost its authenticity? This book reveals how elite movements can spread, and how powerful spiritual and self-help movements can transform individuals in their wake. Yet, spreading the dharma came with unintended consequences. With their focus on individual transformation, the mindful elite have fallen short of the movement’s lofty ambitions to bring about broader structural and institutional change. Ultimately, this idealistic myopia unintentionally came to reinforce some of the problems it originally aspired to solve.
Making Mindfulness Appealing
Authors: Kucinskas Jaime
Published: November 2018

This chapter traces the process through which contemplatives transformed Buddhist meditation into many contemplative subcultures to resonate with specific professional audiences in science, business, education, and the military. Contemplatives translated meditation into local vernacular languages, eliminated religious elements unlikely to resonate with targeted audiences, and adapted traditional religious goals of meditation to align with institutional aims. These translation processes created a variegated contemplative culture that was selectively coupled to match certain institutional structures and norms, while decoupled from other aspects of the institutional status quo in an effort to promote individual growth and broader change. The various forms of contemplative culture made the movement appealing to many audiences. While the wide variety of forms helped contemplative practice to spread widely and forestalled opposition from outsiders, the wide variety of forms also had shortcomings. Contemplative leaders lack of regulation over the dynamic processes altering their Buddhist-inspired practices, led to some cultural forms that failed to support their initial purposes and goals.
Local Traffic
Authors: Slobin Mark
Published: November 2018

This chapter surveys the “neighborhood” music of Detroit’s many subcultures in a city based on massive migration for auto industry work: European immigrants (including Polish, Armenian, Greek, Croatian, and others); southern white immigrants, with a focus on country music; and African Americans from the South, bringing jazz, blues, church, and other community musical expressions. Details include the networks and institutions each community built in Detroit, with regional and national connections.
The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City
Authors: Moodie Deonnie
Published: November 2018

This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) as a case study in the phenomenon by which middle-class Hindus work to modernize temples. At the height of the colonial era in the 1890s, they wrote books and articles attaching this temple to both rationalist and spiritual forms of Hinduism. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, they filed and adjudicated lawsuits to secularize and democratize its management structure. Today, in the wake of India’s economic liberalization, they work to gentrify Kālīghāṭ’s physical spaces. The conceptual, institutional, and physical forms of this religious site are thus facets through which middle-class Hindus produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities’ and their nation’s. The use of Kālīghāṭ as a means to modernization is by no means uncontested. The temple plays a very different role in the lives and livelihoods of individuals from across the class spectrum. The future of this and other temples across India thus relies on complex negotiations between actors of multiple class backgrounds who read their various needs onto these sites.
Introduction
Authors: Moodie Deonnie
Published: November 2018

This chapter introduces the temple and the contours of the most recent modernization projects imposed upon it through the voices of devotees, renovators, temple Brahmins, and beggars at Kālīghāṭ. This material is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork. In this way, I show—rather than tell—what kinds of resonances the temple has for actors of various class backgrounds today and the kinds of modernist idioms the middle classes apply to the temple. I further situate my work in scholarly conversations, including those focused on temples, India’s middle classes, multiple modernities, notions of the “public,” and the study of colonial and contemporary Bengal.
The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

There is a growing sense that many liberal states are in the midst of a shift in norms—a shift that is happening slowly and for a variety of reasons relating to security. The Internet and tech booms—paving the way for new forms of electronic surveillance—predated the 9/11 attacks by several years, while the police’s vast use of secret informants and deceptive operations began well before that. The recent uptick in reactionary movements—movements in which the rule of law seems expendable—began many years after 9/11 and continues to this day. One way to describe this book is as an examination of the moral limits on modern police practices that flow from the basic legal and philosophical tenets of the liberal tradition. The central argument is that policing in liberal states is constrained by a liberal conception of persons coupled with particular rule-of-law principles. Part I consists of three chapters that constitute the book’s theoretical foundation, including an overview of the police’s law enforcement role in the liberal polity and a methodology for evaluating that role. Part II consists of three chapters that address applications of the theory, including the police’s use of informants, deceptive operations, and surveillance. The upshot is that policing in liberal societies has become illiberal in light of its response to both internal and external threats to security. The book provides an account of what it might mean to retrieve policing that is consistent with the basic tenets of liberalism.
Existentialism in America
Authors: Mangrum Benjamin
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the transformation of postwar liberalism by identifying the development of an American idiom within the existential thought that became influential after the Second World War. I frame the concerns and historical development of American existentialism through the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face (starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire). Contrasts are drawn between Ellison and two other writers: Carlos Bulosan and Ann Petry. In addition, the chapter discuses Cold War containment politics, McCarthy era anxieties about communism, changes in perceptions of organized labor, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and cultural attitudes regarding the American welfare state and political action.
Introduction
Authors: Urban Hugh B. , Johnson Greg
Published: November 2018

The introduction lays the groundwork for the volume by discussing some of the key issues in the current academic study of religion and scholarly suggestions for its future directions. The volume is inspired by the work of Bruce Lincoln and his bold reformulation of the “history of religions” as a critical methodology. Rather than a search for an irreducible “Sacred” or for universal archetypes, history of religions is, for Lincoln, an approach that critically analyzes the temporal, material, social, and political aspects of those phenomena that are claimed to be transcendent and eternal. The introduction examines the major themes and contributions of Lincoln’s work as well as the most important criticisms that have been leveled at his critical approach and its implications for the study of religion today.
Ritual, Advocacy, and Authority
Authors: Johnson Greg
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the role of ritual in the contemporary context of Hawaiian indigenous communities and their disputes over rights to sacred lands. The focus of the chapter concerns Native Hawaiian challenges to the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project on Mauna Kea. The chapter addresses not only the more recognizably “religious” rituals performed in this context but also the rituals of political protest and legal contestation. In a challenge to Bruce Lincoln’s approach, the author reflexively analyzes his own role as both a scholar of and an advocate for these communities (a role that would seem to be condemned by Lincoln’s critical approach). Concluding, the chapter offers reflections on the stakes of advocacy for scholars of religion.
Death, Nationalism, and Sacrifice
Authors: Urban Hugh B.
Published: November 2018

This chapter takes up Bruce Lincoln’s idea of ritual as an “instrument of struggle” in order to examine the intense debates over animal sacrifice in modern India. Looking specifically at recent controversies surrounding sacrifice in the state of Assam, the chapter suggests that animal killing lies at the center of a much larger series of struggles over religious identity and the boundaries of the modern nation. Most recently, sacrifice has become central to debates over tourism and economic development in northeast India, as conservative Hindu politicians have tried to transform Assam into a new engine of national growth, while at the same time trying to purify the local practices of their messier and bloodier aspects.
Rereading Charlie Hebdo
Authors: Mukherjee S. Romi
Published: November 2018

This chapter takes a more critical approach to Bruce Lincoln’s work, by interrogating the limits of his “irreverent” methodology itself. Focusing on the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the response by Lincoln and Anthony Yu, this chapter argues that Lincoln perhaps failed to follow through with his own irreverent approach when he French Muslims against this sort of religious satire. Charlie Hebdo was ultimately far more uncompromising in its irreverence than Lincoln himself, raising profound questions not simply about the role of the academic study of religion but about secularism and religious freedom in the twenty-first century.
Sovereignty as a Right and as a Duty
Authors: Weinrib Jacob
Published: November 2018

The organizing principle of Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy is that each person has a basic right to equal freedom. This principle poses a challenge to the very possibility and purpose of sovereignty. It poses a challenge for the possibility of sovereignty because that idea divides persons into rulers and ruled and empowers the former to change the normative situation of the latter by conferring rights, powers, and immunities, or even imposing coercible obligations. But if each person has a right to equal freedom, how could sovereignty—with its attendant division of persons into ruler and ruled—be possible? Kant’s answer is that sovereignty is possible because it is constitutive of the condition in which private persons interact with one another on terms of equal freedom. Such an approach gives Kant resources both to explain how sovereignty can be justified to those bound by it and to deny that every organization that has a monopoly on violence exercises sovereignty. The right to equal freedom also has significant ramifications for thinking about the kinds of purposes that sovereign power may serve. Implicit in the justification of the sovereign’s right to exercise public authority is an overarching duty to bring the legal order as a whole into the deepest possible conformity with its own animating principle, equal freedom. Thus, Kant’s account of how sovereignty is possible culminates in an account of the duty that accompanies its exercise.
A Two-Level Account of Executive Authority
Authors: Skerker Michael
Published: November 2018

This chapter will consider whether an inhabitant of a liberal state needs to be informed of all her government’s policies in order for that government to have legitimate authority to compel her actions. Another way of putting this question is whether government authority in a liberal state depends on full transparency. Security actors in a liberal state are charged with maintaining a relatively crime-free and peaceful society because such an environment is a necessary precondition for a person’s full enjoyment of her rights over time. State agents should pick consent-worthy tactics indexed to this consent-worthy end. Since efficacious tactics may be in tension with respect for people’s rights, consent-worthy tactics will be those that are the most efficacious, effective, reliable, proportionate, and rights-respecting available. Transparency is not necessary for legitimacy since legitimate government actions are indexed to the hypothetical consent of a generic person rather than the explicit consent of particular people. Transparency is necessary for inhabitants to ensure that state agents do not err or become corrupt in the pursuit of otherwise legitimate aims. Yet the complete disclosure of government actions will compromise some legitimate security-seeking missions. In these cases, the moral need for secrecy trumps the need for disclosure. Liberal governments then can conceal the existence of certain programs without compromising their authority to implement them. Secrecy opens the door to corruption, but thankfully, these parameters apply to few tactics.
Logically Private Laws
Authors: MacIntosh Duncan
Published: November 2018

This chapter argues that there could in principle be laws whose existence, legitimacy, goodness, and efficacy as laws depend upon their being private, in this sense: their existence is not widely known. More specifically, the existence of the laws is not known to those who legitimately benefit from the laws and yet who would misguidedly destroy the laws were they to come to know of them, and the existence of the laws is not known to those who would illegitimately benefit from being able to circumvent the laws, and who could illegitimately circumvent them were they to come to know of them. (The idea is that the secrecy of these laws increases their efficacy against bad behavior, and their secrecy makes it less likely that the public will lose its nerve and demand the rescinding of laws that are in fact in the public interest.) These laws are therefore in a way logically private: they cannot at one and the same time exist, have the foregoing virtues, and be public. After proposing some general conditions under which one might think such laws ought to be enacted, this chapter moots logical objections to the very idea that there could be such laws, practical objections to their workability, and moral objections to their permissibility.
Bahrain Anno 2017: Peace or Regime-Change?
Authors: Matwijkiw Anja , Matwijkiw Bronik
Published: November 2018

Transitional justice addresses conflicts and their resolution with the use of a conceptual and normative apparatus that captures, clarifies and, wherever possible, corrects failed states. These undermine values that derive from humanity, the conditio sine qua non for social cohesiveness. Notwithstanding, the six-year anniversary of the 2011 civil unrest in Bahrain is a reminder of the fact that post-conflict success—which entails compliance with the United Nations rule of law standards—is still a contentious issue. Thus, the national rulers’ interest in maintaining the system may continue to compete with the international stake in legitimate statehood without thereby compelling those in power to consider the constituency that primarily depends upon them for their freedom and welfare: the majority of people in Bahrain. Logically, system-conservation requires peace. Ethically, peace is problematic for the same reason. This accentuates the need for change, especially since (so-called) conflict-resolution has resulted in strict(er) law-and-order measures.
Introductory Note
Authors: Treves Tullio
Published: November 2018

The only judgment handed out by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in 2016 concerns the preliminary objections raised by Italy in the M/V Norstar case between Panama and Italy. The judgment of 4 November 2016 rejects all these objections. The case concerned the seizure of a Panama-flagged vessel in a Spanish port, upon request of the Italian authorities in connection with criminal proceedings pending in Italy. The Tribunal found that jurisdiction could be based on Articles 87 and 300 of UNCLOS which, in its view, were “relevant” in the case. Interesting remarks in the judgment concern the notion of international dispute, the “indispensable third party” and exhaustion of local remedies.
The Construction of a Humanized International Law
Authors: Augusto Antônio , Trindade Cançado
Published: November 2018

The new jus gentium of our times is centred on the human person, and has much advanced on humanist grounds. The general principles of law form the substratum of the legal order itself. Of great significance is the direct access of individuals to international justice nowadays. The recent cycle of UN World Conferences has, as a common denominator, the particular attention to the conditions of life and needs of protection of human beings. There has been a reassuring gradual expansion of the material content of jus cogens. International jurisprudence has evolved in pursuance of humanist thinking, in the line of jusnaturalism.
Introduction
Authors: Woolley Samuel C. , Howard Philip N.
Published: November 2018

Computational propaganda is an emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the Internet. The term describes the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, algorithms, and big data tasked with manipulating public opinion. Our research shows that this new mode of interrupting and influencing communication is on the rise around the globe. Advances in computing technology, especially around social automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, mean that computational propaganda is becoming more sophisticated and harder to track. This introduction explores the foundations of computational propaganda. It describes the key role of automated manipulation of algorithms in recent efforts to control political communication worldwide. We discuss the social data science of political communication and build upon the argument that algorithms and other computational tools now play an important political role in news consumption, issue awareness, and cultural understanding. We unpack key findings of the nine country case studies that follow—exploring the role of computational propaganda during events from local and national elections in Brazil to the ongoing security crisis between Ukraine and Russia. Our methodology in this work has been purposefully mixed, using quantitative analysis of data from several social media platforms and qualitative work that includes interviews with the people who design and deploy political bots and disinformation campaigns. Finally, we highlight original evidence about how this manipulation and amplification of disinformation is produced, managed, and circulated by political operatives and governments, and describe paths for both democratic intervention and future research in this space.
Brazil
Authors: Arnaudo Dan
Published: November 2018

Computational propaganda can take the form of automated accounts (bots) spreading information, algorithmic manipulation, and fake news to shape public opinion, among other methods. These techniques are being used in combination with the analysis and usage of large data sets of information about citizens held by corporations and governments. This form of propaganda is spreading to countries all over the world, most notably during the 2016 US presidential elections and the run-up to the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union (Brexit). This chapter examines the use of computational propaganda in Brazil, by looking at three recent cases: the 2014 presidential elections, the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, and the 2016 municipal elections in Rio de Janeiro. It examines the legal framework governing the Internet and the electoral process online, particularly how this process relates to computational propaganda. It also seeks to understand how bots are involved in multifarious economic and political themes, and in ongoing debates in the country about corruption, privatization, and social and economic reform. Through a collection and analysis of hashtags related to major investigations into corruption in politics, as well as to proposed reforms to social support systems and the protests related to them, the chapter identifies bots that are involved in these debates and how they operate. Finally, it looks at potential responses to this kind of propaganda, from legal, technical, and organizational perspectives, as well as indications of future trends in the use of these techniques in Brazilian society and politics.
Electoral laws
Authors: Hasen Richard L.
Published: November 2018

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the legal and political integrity issues raised in the 2016 elections. It begins by describing the now normal voting wars between the hyperpolarized parties, lawsuits aimed at shaping the rules for the registration of voters, the conduct of voting, and the counting of ballots. Restrictive voting laws have increased in number and severity in many states with Republican legislatures, and the judiciary itself often divides along partisan lines in determining controversial laws’ legality. The chapter then turns to the troubling escalation in the wars, from candidate Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud and election rigging to Russian (and other) meddling, the rise of “fake news,” and problems with vote-counting machinery and election administration. It concludes by considering the role that governmental and nongovernmental institutions can play in protecting American election administration from internal and external threats and restoring confidence in elections.
Voter Identification
Authors: Bergman Elizabeth , Tran Dari Sylvester , Yates Philip
Published: November 2018

Chapter 6 examines the role of voter identification requirements to register and cast a ballot in the 2016 U.S. election. Evidence is drawn from a county-level data set based on public records of votes cast for the two major party candidates to investigate the effects of lax and strict voter registration requirements in 50 U.S. states plus D.C. on the number of votes won by Clinton and Trump at county level, controlling for the demographic characteristics of counties, such as educational and poverty levels. The study concludes that, even with these controls, the type of voter ID laws did significantly impact the outcome; in the 2016 election, the estimates suggest that voter ID laws increased GOP support by 1.8% and lowered support for Democrats by 0.7%. In close contests, this made a difference, with voter ID significantly influencing the vote in favor of the GOP.
Transparency
Authors: Vanka Nandi , Davis-Roberts Avery , Carroll David
Published: November 2018

Chapter 8 focuses on issues of transparency, particularly how far U.S. states allow nonpartisan observers to scrutinize the electoral process and results. This is a common practice abroad, where United Nations standards have strengthened the role and rights of international election observers, but it remains a relatively obscure activity at home, with a patchwork of regulations for access across America. The study concludes that rules across the 50 U.S. states regulating processes of electoral observation are relatively limited and ambiguous, GOP states are often more restrictive than Democratic, and a gap exists between legal provisions and state practices. Amid deteriorating trust in U.S elections, this chapter discusses the general disregard for nonpartisan observers, while noting the important potential benefits of greater transparency for restoring confidence in American elections.
America in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Vickery Chad , Szilagyi Heather
Published: November 2018

Chapter 10 highlights a confluence of factors in the United States that produce a high percentage of wasted votes and a system of governance that largely fails to reflect the will of the majority of voters, widely considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study judges the fundamental integrity of key elements of the electoral process in the United States by applying the same standards used to evaluate developing democracies around the world. Several acute challenges to the U.S. electoral process are identified: boundary delimitation for the House of Representatives, the role of the Electoral College in presidential contests, processes of voter registration, and the decentralized administrative framework. The chapter concludes that despite obvious vulnerabilities, the United States is resistant to acknowledging these problems, to reform its electoral process in line with international standards, or to learn from the comparative experience of other countries that have strengthened their elections over time.
Feeding a Thousand Souls
Authors: Nagarajan Vijaya
Published: November 2018

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book investigates aesthetic, symbolic, metaphorical, literary, mathematical, and philosophical meanings of the kōlam, the popular Tamil women’s daily ephemeral practice, a ritual art tradition performed with rice flour on the thresholds of houses in southern India. They range from concepts such as auspiciousness, inauspiciousness, ritual purity, and ritual pollution. Several divinities, too, play a significant role: Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, good luck, well-being, and a quickening energy; Mūdevi, the goddess of poverty, bad luck, illness, and laziness; Bhūdevi, the goddess of the soils, the earth, and the fields; and the god Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. Braiding art history, aesthetics, and design, this book analyzes the presence of the kōlam in medieval Tamil literature, focusing on the saint-poet Āṇṭāḷ. The author shows that the kōlam embodies mathematical principles such as symmetry, fractals, array grammars, picture languages, and infinity. Three types of kōlam competitions are described. The kinship between Bhūdevi and the kōlam is discussed as the author delves into the topics of “embedded ecologies” and “intermittent sacrality.” The author explores the history of the phrase “feeding a thousand souls,” tracing it back to ancient Sanskrit literature, where it was connected to Indian notions of hospitality, karma, and strangers. Its relationship to the theory of karma is represented by its connection to the five ancient sacrifices. This ritual is distinguished as one of the many “rituals of generosity” in Tamil Nadu.
Beginnings
Authors: Nagarajan Vijaya
Published: November 2018

Before dawn each day, millions of Hindu women in Tamil Nadu, India, create a kōlam, a sacred ritual art form, on the thresholds of homes, temples, and businesses. It is usually made of rice flour and therefore is ephemeral. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research, the author seeks to understand the wide range of meanings attributed to the kōlam, such as beauty; auspiciousness; the god Ganesha; the goddesses Lakshmi, Mūdevi, and Bhūdevi; the evil eye; competition; designs; mathematics; ecology; and the idea of “feeding a thousand souls.” This chapter (along with Chapters 2 and 3) lays the foundation for the book. The author describes how her research was influenced by Ivan Illich, A. K. Ramanujan, and Chandralekha. She braids together the diasporic with the home culture, integrating philosophical underpinnings of women’s knowledge systems and oral traditions.
Following Lines of Beauty
Authors: Nagarajan Vijaya
Published: November 2018

This chapter (along with Chapters 1 and 3) introduces the kōlam, a women’s ritual art tradition in Tamil Nadu, and outlines the author’s field research in India. The author found sacred marks not only on the thresholds of homes, businesses, and temples, but also on the foreheads of elephants and on pots and pans. The author relates what she learned from Indian women, a temple singer, a third-gender person, a Muslim student, elephant keepers, an astrologer, and many others. One key person in her research was the choreographer Chandralekha, whose work was deeply influenced by the kōlam. The author learned that men often dismissed the importance of the kōlam. The author recalls that although it was considered unusual for a single woman to travel alone through India as she did, she had only one unnerving encounter, which she describes in detail.
Rituals
Authors: Nagarajan Vijaya
Published: November 2018

This chapter discusses the multiple meanings attributed to the kōlam, a women’s ritual art in Tamil Nadu, India. Marking the transition of the private world to the wider public sphere, the author suggests that the kōlam is a sign of the woman householder’s health and therefore the health of her household. It serves as a form of ritual play, a sacred space, and an invitation to the goddess. The kōlam helps to ward off the evil eye, is a way to communicate with the divine, and is central to festivals and celebrations such as Pongal. The chapter introduces the Hindu notion that householders should “feed a thousand souls every day.” The skills involved in making the kōlam are a part of the common knowledge and are passed down through generations, representing the heart of the gift economy. Kōlams are found not only in Tamil Nadu but also throughout the world.
Carmen and the Staging of Spain
Authors: Christoforidis Michael , Kertesz Elizabeth
Published: November 2018

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915.
Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes.
The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.
Reproducing Carmen in the United States
Authors: Christoforidis Michael
Published: November 2018

Chapter 9 explains that Carmen proved an ideal vehicle for the new technologies of the twentieth century, embraced by the new recording artists whose prestige was borrowed from the operatic world. The young American opera star Geraldine Farrar, building on the legacies of Emma Calvé and Maria Gay, enjoyed an unprecedented and unmistakably modern celebrity as Carmen, born of her ability to exploit the confluence of operatic performance, recordings, and the silent film industry. In this context, the Metropolitan Opera’s attempt to stage a genuine Spanish opera in the guise of Enrique Granados’s Goyescas was undermined by comparison with the vibrant New York traditions of Carmen in the winter of 1915–16, when the fashion for all things Spanish was so intense that Carl Van Vechten dubbed it “the Spanish blaze.”
Dissenting Preaching in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World
Authors: Hutchinson Mark P.
Published: November 2018

This chapter points to the shifting social framework for public rhetoric, and the relative position of churches, in the articulation of meaning through preaching in the anglophone world in the twentieth century. Key examples of the art of preaching are explored—Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, Jeremiah Wright, and Peter Taylor Forsyth are discussed among others—to demonstrate that preaching continued to have an effect well into the twentieth century on the motivating rhetoric of such public orators as Barack Obama. That effect shifted, however, with the growth of bureaucratized welfare states, the spread of new technologies, and changes in the nature of the public square. The result was a decline of the influence of the pulpit. Presidents, preachers, and professors rode the same waves, the same oscillations in receptivity to socially constructive speech acts. What varied was the position of their ‘pulpit’ with regard to the public being addressed.
Glocalized and Indigenized Theologies in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Hutchinson Mark P.
Published: November 2018

This chapter points at the relocation of theology through the twentieth century out of universities and ‘public thought’ towards privatized and ‘dissenting’ spaces. These include anti-colonialist and proto-nationalist movements in East Africa, India, and Korea, whereby religion became one means by which subaltern groups maintained their identity over and against a ruling class. In other settings, such as in post-war Minjung theology in Korea, indigenized theology became a means of re-wiring the political discourse as the new nation emerged from war into settings requiring rapid industrialization and modernization. Such popular mobilizations from below are compared to elite, institutional attempts at change from above, and are analysed using the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to tease out those factors which contribute to success in spreading out of the cultures and ‘moments’ of primary indigenization.
Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting Traditions
Authors: Rademaker Laura
Published: November 2018

This chapter bases its analysis of rapid changes in conceptions of race and gender in the contextual shifts in authority, autonomy, and demography within Dissenting Protestantism around the world, particularly between the bureaucratized, wealthy global North and the poor, mostly non-white and female churches in the global South. The chapter ‘embraces the intersection’ of categories of race and gender to avoid overlooking lived, embodied experiences of people as both ‘gendered and raced’. Subjects covered include Pentecostalism’s fresh expressions of gender and conceptions of race, women’s work in the international missionary movement and the social gospel, new dissenting Christianities and expressions of racial identities in a context of decolonization and the rise of independent churches; the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of second-wave feminism; conservative reactions to evangelical feminism, ‘complementarian’ gender roles, and the demographic shift in (D)issenting Protestantism—the rise of the global South.