bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Malayanised Chinese-Language Cinema
Authors: Hee Wai-Siam
Published: September 2020

The fifth chapter discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director Yi Shui created a Malayanised Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and ’60s and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in relation to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This chapter rereads Yi Shui’s On
Issues
of
the
Malayanisation
of
Chinese-Language
Cinema, examining its ‘Chinese-language cinema’ against the context of the Third World politics of ‘Malayanisation’ in the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter explores how Chinese-language cinema settles and resolves the diverse linguistic and cultural identities of Singaporean and Malayan Chinese audiences with varying backgrounds. ‘Chinese language’, as a term including both Mandarin and topolects, becomes a bargaining chip for Chinese-speaking peoples to resist the dual political oppression of English- and Malay-speaking groups. This chapter also analyses Yi Shui’s Chinese-language cinema practice through examining contemporary discourse and debates in Singaporean and Malayan periodicals on Malayanised Chinese-language cinema. The semi-documentary Third World film The
Lion
City and the melodrama Black
Gold, set in a tin mine, feature multiple coexisting Chinese languages and attempt to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various topolect groups.
Fairy Tales and the Creation of the “Future Nation” of Manchukuo
Authors: Shi Chen
Published: September 2020

From 1932 to 1945, imperial Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo in a region now known as Northeast China. During those 14 years, the region’s literary world did not fall silent, though after the regime's demise, it was scarcely studied by scholars for over three decades. Since 1978, investigation of Manchukuo literature has revived considerably. However, research on children's literature, especially of fairy tales, is still a blank field. This continues, even though substantial numbers of fairy tales were published during the Japanese occupation, consciously and unconsciously shaping what was deemed the "future nation" of Manchukuo. Fairy tales exerted far-reaching influences upon local children's education. This chapter argues, through analysis of fairy tale writers’ careers, texts, and media networks, that these tales were not only entertaining literary creations but constituted powerful propaganda tools to construct and deconstruct the puppet regime’s "Kingly Paradise." Manchukuo’s fairy tales thus deserve greater status in research of the history of modern Chinese – and East Asian – literature.
Spiritual Resistance
Authors: Lei Jiang
Published: September 2020

Although the Great Unity Herald was the Manchukuo State Council's official newspaper, hundreds of works of resistance literature were published in four supplements, where intellectuals wrote their history and expressed a spirit of resistance via literary channels. Supplements to the Great Unity Herald demonstrate strong deviations from political and cultural identities fostered by the Manchukuo state. This study excavates and analyses supplements and works of resistance literature, finding that Manchukuo authorities oppressed at least 49 editors, journalists, and authors, resulting in arrest, execution, or forced exile for the majority. With support of resistance organizations, and despite official oppression, a prevalent phenomenon of divergence from state narratives developed in supplements within Manchukuo's Chinese newspapers.
Zhu Ti and I
Authors: Ju Ke , Zhengzhong Li
Published: September 2020

In this chapter, Li Zhengzhong (pen name Ke Ju) (b. 1921) provides a heart-felt remembrance of his wife, writer Zhang Xingjuan (penname Zhu Ti) (1923-2012), her career, and their lives together. Married for over sixty years, they comprise one couple of the “Northeast’s four famous husband-wife writers.” Li is one of the last surviving Manchukuo-based Chinese writers and editors.
Acculturation and Border-Crossing in Manchukuo Literature
Authors: Yan Chen
Published: September 2020

Manchukuo was a colonized state where heterogeneous cultures met, interacted, and collided. The region’s culture and literature formed amidst vexing moral and ethical dilemmas, while new vocabularies and theories were imported from Japan and Europe. Local intellectuals simultaneously felt stimulated and suppressed, while evincing strong desires to express themselves within a diverse colonial culture; their writings therefore reveal border-crossing characteristics. This chapter analyzes multiple entanglements formed amidst that colonial culture - between tradition and modernity, local and international influences, and support for and resistance against colonialism, to reveal the complex features of literary practices in Manchukuo.
Luo Tuosheng and Manchukuo Literature
Authors: Akio Ōkubo
Published: September 2020

This chapter utilizes newly discovered historical records and literary materials from China and Japan to investigate questions about Luo Tuosheng, a Manchukuo overseas student in imperial Japan, examining his identity, literary activities in Japan, and imprisonment. Luo played a central role in launching the influential "Mobei wenxue qingnian-hui" (Mobei Literary Youth Association) often overlooked by scholars, and thus provides a glimpse into Manchukuo overseas student engagement in Japan. The establishment and setbacks of this association will also be clarified.
“The Soldiers Must Have the Real Fighting Spirit”
Authors: Perelman Elisheva A.
Published: September 2020

This section turns to the Protestant nondenominational organization which soon followed on the heels of the Y.M.C.A., The Salvation Army. Following a brief history of The Army and its work in England, the chapter looks at the arrival of the organization in Japan. In both England and in Japan, The Salvation Army emphasized the urban population that the Y.M.C.A. had overlooked, including subaltern issues of poverty, illness, and prostitution. In addition, The Army employed its history of devotion to divine healing or theotherapy in Japan. However, it also built a handful of hospitals to minister to the urban poor, carving out a niche among those the Y.M.C.A. had presumably forsaken. In doing so, The Salvation Army’s moral enterprise actually had a few means of assisting the victims of tuberculosis, although most of those assisted were male.
Introduction
Authors: Ming-kin Chu
Published: September 2020

An emperor does not rule a country alone. He needs to recruit officials to assist in governing the realm. The Song founder inherited a civil service examinations system originating in the Sui dynasty (581–618) that rose to prominence in the Tang dynasty (618–907), whose chief purpose became the selection of deserving candidates for public service. Yet the extent to which the examination system could select genuinely capable and morally upright officials was always in question, since it evaluated candidates based primarily on written work, not personal conduct. In reaction, some officials in the Northern Song (960–1127) argued that government schools should play some role in the official recruitment process to better guarantee the moral comportment of students. Fan Zhongyan ...
Contesting Political and Ideological Control
Authors: Ming-kin Chu
Published: September 2020

Chapter 6 offers a critical analysis of the effectiveness of political and ideological control that Cai Jing imposed at government schools through a prosopographical survey of teachers and students in the Imperial University. Despite the fact that teachers were required to report the illicit deeds of students, some of them did not fully adhere to the regulations as prescribed by Cai Jing. As a result, some students were indulged to circulate prohibited works and even criticize government officials and policies, which culminated in student protests and appeals in 1126. Compared with Cai Jing’s failure, Huizong’s efforts to recruit morally upright officials proved not to be in vain after all, since some students demonstrated their loyal endeavors to save the Song in the midst of the Jurchen invasions.
Conclusion
Authors: Ming-kin Chu
Published: September 2020

This book addresses the politics of higher education in Imperial China during the Northern Song period. Building on recent insights in new political history, this book focuses on the fluid political processes revolving around institutional changes and interactions between the different political agents involved. Similar to its European counterparts, where struggles between emperors and popes as well as chancellors and bishops helped shape universities in medieval Europe,...
Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities
Authors: Wei John
Published: September 2020

Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities examines the germination and movements of emergent queer cultures and social practices in the early twenty-first century. Under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development, the configurations and understandings of gender and sexuality have become less sedentary and increasingly mobilized beyond traditional frameworks, categories, and boundaries. Through a reconsideration and requalification of queer mobilities, this groundbreaking project integrates and intervenes into the changing family and kinship structure, internal and international migrations, cultural flows and counterflows, and social inclusion and exclusion in queer China and Sinophone Asia.
It considers the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes that have conjointly structured and sustained queer people’s ongoing longings and sufferings, establishing fresh concepts and new paradigms in a rich and provocative social analysis and cultural critique of queer homecoming and homemaking, cultural production and circulation, and middle class formation and position. Through an interdisciplinary approach and expansive scope, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities offers a revolutionary framework that interweaves sexual mobility and modernity with geographical, cultural, and social class migration and mobilization to interrogate the meanings of mobilities for queer people amid China’s internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival in the twenty-first century.
Introduction
Authors: Wei John
Published: September 2020

This chapter forays into the ongoing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological transformations concerning queer people in China and other Chinese societies. Through the assemblage of geographical, cultural, and social class migrations, it sheds light on the entangled formulations of queer kinship, cultural flows, and social mobilization that are productive by and of the increasingly ubiquitous and imperative mobilities. This chapter questions the emergent homocapitalist and homonormative cultures in today’s China, investigates the complex sexual identity politics and identity labels, and examines the values and pitfalls of combining digital and traditional anthropologies with cultural critique and social analysis in understanding transgressive desires.
Home and Migration
Authors: Wei John
Published: September 2020

In the context of transnational and border-crossing migration, this chapter focuses on the newly emerged (post-2008) queer films created by and for queer people, and the underlying queer mobilities on and off screens, as vehicles to understand the issue of home and migration through autobiographical and cinematic queer homecoming and homemaking. Through an investigation of the heterotopic non-places in migration, this chapter examines queer people’s emotionally embodied experiences of mobilities. The unfulfilled homecoming and homemaking and the unsettled bodies and desires in the long process of uprooting—with or without the chance to put down the roots for regrounding—inevitably become constituent of and productive of the stretched kinship structure.
Little Ruby’s Hand: Young Women and the Emotional Experience of Caregiving in Britain after the First World War
Authors: Roper Michael
Published: September 2020

‘Little Ruby’ was the daughter of the head gardener at St Dunstan’s, the voluntary organisation set up in 1915 to support blinded servicemen, whose role as a guide was widely represented in pictures and sculptures during the war and who became an iconic symbol of the charity. This chapter draws on the story of Ruby to explore the role played by children—and young girls in particular—in the care of disabled soldiers after the war. Based on interviews with descendants born in the 1920s and 1930s, and now in their eighties and nineties, it explores the domestic history of caregiving through the eyes of daughters. Their experience of growing up was often at odds with the historical narratives surrounding young women between the wars, who are assumed to have enjoyed more freedom and leisure than their mothers. Many daughters of disabled servicemen experienced strong pressures to remain living at home and help their mothers through domestic and paid work. Their ambitions for education, career and service during the Second World War were often constrained. Looking back now, in an age where the domestic obligations of young women are fewer and their career aspirations are taken more seriously, the women expressed contrary feelings. On the one hand, they continued to regard familial duty as a valued aspect of their identities as daughters. On the other hand, they talked about the emotional pressures of care and their regrets at opportunities lost. Focusing on the life course from girlhood to old age, the chapter reveals the impact of the First World War across the 20th century and through the lives of those born after the conflict’s end.
Wounded Pride and Petty Jealousies: Private Lives and Public Diplomacy in Second World War Cairo
Authors: Francis Martin
Published: September 2020

This chapter offers a case study of the affective registers of British imperial policy during the Second World War. It examines how the conduct of war and diplomacy by Sir Miles Lampson, British Ambassador in Cairo, was shaped by his emotional dispositions, in particular his domestic obligations and attachments, his insecure pride, and his susceptibility to jealousy and resentment. It locates Lampson’s personal negotiation between private feeling and public action in the broader context of the heightened emotional registers of wartime Egypt, where it became virtually impossible to quarantine intimate desires, especially romantic and sexual longings, within the private sphere. More critically, it also demonstrates how broader anxieties about Britain’s waning global hegemony during the Second World War were manifested in the various forms of psychological projection, displacement, and compulsion exhibited by Lampson, and also in the Ambassador’s recourse in his statecraft to gossip and rumour.
Communities of Feeling: Fear, Death, and Grief in the Writing of British Servicemen in the Second World War
Authors: Noakes Lucy
Published: September 2020

The Second World War saw the conscription and mobilisation of around 5.8 million British men for military service. Very few had any prior military experience or training. This chapter looks at some of the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by men serving in the Army to consider how they tried to construct a new, militarised sense of identity, and the emotional styles that they used to communicate this. Letters, diaries, and memoirs provided a resource for both the expression of emotions that could not be articulated in the military community, and for the process of fashioning a new militarised selfhood. Drawing on work undertaken by historians working on the construction of selfhood, the chapter examines a range of these documents to consider the ways that men constructed and articulated this new militarised identity, and the emotional styles that they utilised to do so. However, war provided multiple challenges to these new, hybrid, identities, none more so than the threat of death, or the death of friends and comrades. The chapter concludes by considering the emotional styles that some men used to record their encounters with death, and the ways that these encounters could destabilise their new, militarised, selfhoods.
In Search of Victor: Transnationalism, Emotion, and War
Authors: Damousi Joy
Published: September 2020

In October 1949, in the closing month of the Greek Civil War, a young soldier named Pandelis Klinkatsis was killed stepping on a landmine in Northern Greece. Pandelis was my uncle. The announcement of his death devastated his immediate family including my mother Sophia. I focus this chapter on the individual story of the loss of my uncle and my mother’s grief to cast a wider canvas on the emotions of war and their enduring legacies. This story explores the repercussions of war such as migration, the impact on sibling and romantic love, absence and separation during and after war. It examines the implications of these displacements in writing an emotional history of war. Such a history is typically conveyed through oral storytelling, and oral history forms the basis of the narrative. But there are two other ways in which the memory and emotion of war experience are kept alive in a transnational world. The first expression is in the form of photography, the second is the role grave sites play in the nexus between mourning and memory over time. Pandelis’s story takes us to Greece, Austria, America, and Australia. I argue that it encapsulates the complex geographical and emotional fragments created by war, which are manifest in love and death, mourning and memory, in a transnational context across four countries. Both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War created a landscape of emotions—the legacies of which are indelible—and continue to the present day.
Barthes’s Frenchness
Authors: Roger Philippe
Published: September 2020

Barthes doesn’t think in terms of identity, even less national identity, yet amongst his contemporaries (the ‘French theorists’) his writing seems the most ‘French’. He admits this somewhat paradoxically by devoting sarcastic analyses to ‘Frenchness’ whilst testifying, in the more intimate pages of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, to a profound attachment to the ‘land’ of his childhood, the ‘light of the South-West’, ways of being and speaking, or of preferring pears to exotic fruit. This book sparked the revisionist reading of Barthes’s intellectual itinerary that would gather momentum after his death: behind the structuralist and fellow-traveller of the avant-garde lurked a conservative writer, a crypto-Gidian explorer of the self. In fact, a benefit of the 1975 commission was to enable Barthes’s return to anthropology. Michelet par lui-même (1954) and Mythologies (1957) had allowed Barthes to explore national identity in historical and anthropological terms, and a custom-made ‘ethnology of France’ (‘Notre France, in the manner of Michelet’) was a persistent project. Although formulated with calculated lightness, the question of Frenchness runs throughout this ‘Barthes by himself’; far from signalling a farewell to politics and ideology, it provided the right frame for a socio-anthropological exploration of France and Barthes’s ‘French’ identity.
Barthes, the Desire to Write, and the Prevision of the Work
Authors: Pierrot Anne Herschberg
Published: September 2020

This chapter explores the connections between Le Lexique de l’auteur (the seminar of 1973–4 in which Barthes reflects on the genesis of the text that will become Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), La Préparation du roman (his last Collège de France lecture course of 1978–80), and critical essays he wrote in the mid- and late 1970s on scription, the ductus, and writing as gesture (from an anthropological point of view, as in the posthumously published Variations sur l’écriture, and within the paintings of Bernard Réquichot and Cy Twombly). The main focus will be on Barthes’s reflection, across the two seminars, on the idea of the virtual work: his exploration of the modalities of literary genesis in the grammatical mood of the ‘as if’, and his development of ways of modelling literary genesis through the concept of the œuvre-maquette. This bringing together of modelling, genesis, and writing as process, placed in relation to the desire to write as a significant dimension of actual writing, is one of the strikingly original aspects of Barthes’s 1970s thought. It is one that the posthumous publication of the seminars and lectures allows us to understand.
Topological constraints in early multicellularity favor reproductive division of labor
Authors: Yanni David , Jacobeen Shane , Márquez-Zacarías Pedro , Weitz Joshua S , Ratcliff William C , Yunker Peter J
Published: September 2020

Reproductive division of labor (e.g. germ-soma specialization) is a hallmark of the evolution of multicellularity, signifying the emergence of a new type of individual and facilitating the evolution of increased organismal complexity. A large body of work from evolutionary biology, economics, and ecology has shown that specialization is beneficial when further division of labor produces an accelerating increase in absolute productivity (i.e. productivity is a convex function of specialization). Here we show that reproductive specialization is qualitatively different from classical models of resource sharing, and can evolve even when the benefits of specialization are saturating (i.e. productivity is a concave function of specialization). Through analytical theory and evolutionary individual-based simulations, we demonstrate that reproductive specialization is strongly favored in sparse networks of cellular interactions that reflect the morphology of early, simple multicellular organisms, highlighting the importance of restricted social interactions in the evolution of reproductive specialization.
Training deep neural density estimators to identify mechanistic models of neural dynamics
Authors: Gonçalves Pedro J , Lueckmann Jan-Matthis , Deistler Michael , Nonnenmacher Marcel , Öcal Kaan , Bassetto Giacomo , Chintaluri Chaitanya , Podlaski William F , Haddad Sara A , Vogels Tim P , Greenberg David S , Macke Jakob H
Published: September 2020

Mechanistic modeling in neuroscience aims to explain observed phenomena in terms of underlying causes. However, determining which model parameters agree with complex and stochastic neural data presents a significant challenge. We address this challenge with a machine learning tool which uses deep neural density estimators—trained using model simulations—to carry out Bayesian inference and retrieve the full space of parameters compatible with raw data or selected data features. Our method is scalable in parameters and data features and can rapidly analyze new data after initial training. We demonstrate the power and flexibility of our approach on receptive fields, ion channels, and Hodgkin–Huxley models. We also characterize the space of circuit configurations giving rise to rhythmic activity in the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion, and use these results to derive hypotheses for underlying compensation mechanisms. Our approach will help close the gap between data-driven and theory-driven models of neural dynamics.
MAPK activity dynamics regulate non-cell autonomous effects of oncogene expression
Authors: Aikin Timothy J , Peterson Amy F , Pokrass Michael J , Clark Helen R , Regot Sergi
Published: September 2020

A large fraction of human cancers contain genetic alterations within the Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) signaling network that promote unpredictable phenotypes. Previous studies have shown that the temporal patterns of MAPK activity (i.e. signaling dynamics) differentially regulate cell behavior. However, the role of signaling dynamics in mediating the effects of cancer driving mutations has not been systematically explored. Here, we show that oncogene expression leads to either pulsatile or sustained ERK activity that correlate with opposing cellular behaviors (i.e. proliferation vs. cell cycle arrest, respectively). Moreover, sustained–but not pulsatile–ERK activity triggers ERK activity waves in unperturbed neighboring cells that depend on the membrane metalloprotease ADAM17 and EGFR activity. Interestingly, the ADAM17-EGFR signaling axis coordinates neighboring cell migration toward oncogenic cells and is required for oncogenic cell extrusion. Overall, our data suggests that the temporal patterns of MAPK activity differentially regulate cell autonomous and non-cell autonomous effects of oncogene expression.
Planning from the Bottom Up
Authors: Plotch Philip Mark
Published: September 2020

This chapter recounts how New York City Transit Authority rail service planners Peter Cafiero, Chuck Kirchner, Glenn Lunden, and Jon Melnick resurrected the Second Avenue subway in 1988. Even though the Transit Authority was in the early stages of its 1987–91 capital program, the planners' bosses wanted to start getting ready for the next program, which would run from 1992 to 1996. The first step would be to create a document that assessed the authority's long-term needs and identified projects that would rehabilitate the subway system, increase ridership, improve productivity, and expand system capacity. One proposal the planners wrote to address the Lexington Avenue's problems was an idea that the MTA planner Bob Olmsted had first championed in 1975—a Second Avenue subway north of 63rd Street. As the Second Avenue subway proposal moved up the Transit Authority hierarchy, the authority's president, David Gunn, agreed that the time was right to begin thinking about expanding the subway system. Before he could devote significant resources to advancing the Second Avenue subway, however, it would have to compete with other potential megaprojects under discussion at the MTA's agencies.
Systemic Constitutional Dysfunction
Authors: Farrier Jasmine
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of congressional litigation, which provides an outlet for the frustrations and constitutional arguments of members. Members often file the lawsuit because they know the regular legislative process will stall or fail to overcome a presidential veto even if they manage to pass a bill that curtails executive branch power. Member lawsuits deserve attention individually and together as separation of powers phenomena that are distinct from private litigation on the same topics. Private suits are more likely to succeed for a variety of reasons, while member suits provide an index of constitutional dysfunction. Ultimately, member lawsuits do not offer a simple solution to past, present, or future institutional imbalances, but they certainly provide opportunity for fresh analysis on how constitutional separation of powers principles can fall apart without deep and wide support. The chapter then considers the role of federal courts in constitutional conflicts.
The Boyhood of John Henry Comstock, 1849–1865
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the childhood of John Henry Comstock. Henry lived with his Uncle Daniel when his mother became ill and was unable to do anything to support him. It was there that he had his first schooling. However, Henry had the misfortune to stammer in his speech and Uncle John undertook to break him of the habit by corporal punishment, a measure scarcely suited to the temperament of a highly nervous and sensitive child. In the summer of 1860, when he was eleven years old, Henry took a hand in his own destiny and decided to go see his mother, who was then living in Schenectady. Along the way, he met Captain Lewis Turner and his wife Rebecca, who took him in and offered him board and clothes and three months of winter schooling. Thus passed his boyhood, now that he had found a home which welcomed him and welcomed his mother when she could spare the time for a visit. In 1861, the Civil War came on and Henry was greatly affected by it. Two years later, he tried to enlist but was ruled out because of his youth and small stature.
A Sailor and a Scholar
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines John Henry Comstock's experience as a sailor and a scholar. Living as he did among sailors, it was natural that he should turn to sailing as the most available means of earning money. His first experience was on a small lumber vessel plying between Oswego, New York and Kingston, Canada. At the end of the first season of sailing, Henry had twenty dollars in his pocket after he had bought his clothing for the coming year, and with this surplus he started home. When he started school, the devoted teacher Miss Eleanor Dickinson encouraged Henry to take up algebra. It was the first time in his life that even a thought of higher education had dawned on his mind. A new world then opened to the boy, and Miss Dickinson taught him his algebra after school hours. To her influence Henry always attributed his ambition for an education; he had become thoroughly imbued with the desire for a college education and gave his whole thought and energy to his work in school. The chapter then details Henry's terms at Mexico Academy and Falley Seminary. In the fall of 1869, he entered Cornell University.
Undergraduate Days at Cornell, 1870–1874
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter details John Henry Comstock's early years at Cornell University with his budding entomological interests. Henry, mindful of the speed with which cash on hand evaporates in college, sought work and found it in the construction of McGraw Hall. He applied for work to Elijah Cornell, who was a brother of Ezra Cornell and also the builder in charge of the erection of McGraw Hall. Thus Henry worked and studied and with his room-mate boarded himself. At Christmas, he went home to Hurricane Hall. On his return to the University in January of 1871, something happened which was to profoundly influence Henry's future life: Dr. Burt G. Wilder had chosen him as his assistant. Professor Wilder had charge of Zoology and Physiology in Cornell and was a brilliant teacher. Henry then developed an interest in entomology, the study of insects.
Anna Botsford Comstock—Childhood and Girlhood
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the childhood and girlhood of Anna Botsford Comstock, recounting the story of her family and heritage. Her parents' earlier marriages complicated Anna's relationships and greatly enriched her life. Anna was taught to work early, and she learned to sew before she was four years old and to knit when she was six. In Sunday school, she asked puzzling questions, which were answered by some quotation from the Bible, instead of reasonably. Thus, Anna came to regard the Bible as a refuge for ignorance and a stifler of reason, a prejudice that remained a secret in her mind until after she too reached the age of reason and came to realize its majesty and beauty. The chapter then looks at Anna's experience studying English Grammar, which she hated until she came to appreciate it after she studied Latin. She also attended a “select school” in Otto wherein she took a few drawing lessons. When Anna was fourteen, the teacher in the primary room of their village school took ill and had to leave six weeks before the term ended; she was asked to take her place. She then attended “Chamberlain Institute and Female College” at Randolph and started for Cornell University in November of 1874 wherein she studied both botany and zoology.
A Sabbatical Year Abroad—Egypt and Greece
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's sabbatical year abroad in Egypt and Greece. On January 1, 1908, the Comstocks boarded the Italian steamer “Perseo,” bounded for Alexandria. Arriving early on January 5 in the city of Euclid and Cleopatra, the Comstocks then visited the Egyptian Quarter—a narrow, crooked street through houses that date back to Cleopatra's time. From Alexandria, they traveled to Cairo, where they wandered through the Ezbekieh Gardens and admired the palm trees and studied the hooded crows. They also took a train to Old Cairo and visited the pyramids. However, one of their most interesting experiences in Cairo was a visit to the University which is held in the Mosque of Gamai el-Azhar. Later, it was on the S.S. Osmaniah that the Comstocks took passage from Alexandria to Greece. They then went to the Acropolis and the Parthenon in Athens.
Italy, Switzerland, and Home
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter details Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's trip to Italy and Switzerland. The Comstocks went from Greece to Sicily on the German steamship “Baiern,” reaching Taormina on March 8, 1908. It was the most picturesque town they had ever visited, and Aetna seemed to them the most beautiful mountain they had ever seen. They then registered in the Berlitz School for instruction in the Italian language. On one of their last days in Taormina, they climbed Mt. Venere, from the heights of which they had a view of chaotic mountain ranges and peaks, a long coast line, and a blue sea. From Taormina, they traveled to Sorrento, Amalfi, Pompeii, Rome, and Venice. They also went to the Entomological Experiment Station in Florence. After their visits to Verona, Turin, and Bellagio, they were tired and found Locarno a good point for resting. On June 10, the Comstocks took the train for St. Gotthard tunnel.
Chapter 15: 1908–1912, Cornell’s New Quarters for Entomology and Nature Study
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's return to Ithaca on August 4, 1908. The Comstock's new official quarters in Roberts Hall at Cornell University were of great interest to them. At last, Henry had a large laboratory with ample windows, with no sashes to bring a bar across the field of the microscope. The insect collections were placed on the same floor as the lecture room, which is a great convenience. In contrast, Anna's experience was not so gratifying. The Nature Study Department was housed in the two west rooms on the fourth floor. The window in her room was so high that one could see out only when standing. Nevertheless, Anna had shelves for her books and a roll-top desk, which seemed a luxury. It was during the winter of 1909 that she conceived the idea of writing her Handbook of Nature Study. The chapter then looks at the expansion of the Comstock Publishing Company in December of 1909.
The Toronto Meeting of the A. A. A. S. 1922. A surprising election and a voyage westward
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines the American Association for the Advancement of Science (A. A. A. S.) meeting in Toronto in the last week in December of 1921. On the evening of December 28, a great surprise came to John Henry Comstock—a dinner was given in his honor. It was held in Annersley House, Victoria College, of the University of Toronto and there were sixty-nine present, many of them Henry's old students and all of them personal friends. The entomological meetings were excellent; the Comstocks listened to the scientific papers by many of their old students. On May 6, 1923, Anna Botsford Comstock was elected as one of the twelve greatest women in America by the League of Women Voters. The chapter then looks at the Comstocks' voyage to the West.
Indemnity and Identity
Authors: Pearson Trais
Published: September 2020

This chapter makes the case that compensatory arrangements made in the aftermath of injury and death effectively constituted a new and distinctive mode of legal subjectivity in the form of persons endowed with certain privileges and obligations, and in contradistinction to prior forms of rights and responsibility grounded in social relations. In nineteenth-century Siam, death required compensation, typically in the form of an ex gratia payment made to the relatives of the deceased without the intervention of courts or the admission of legal or moral responsibility. These compensatory arrangements, which were often reached outside of legal institutions and independent of judicial authority, were predicated not on a sense of universal rights and the dignity of human life but rather on customary modes of action and hierarchical social assumptions inherent in acts of noblesse oblige. It was not just the Siamese elite, however, who enjoyed this privileged position of status and the entitlement to regard the lives of others with beneficence. Here, the chapter examines these practices to consider not only the diverse forms of logic, interest, and authority that gave rise to them, but the manner of legal subjectivity that they might be said to have constituted.
Treaty Port Tort
Authors: Pearson Trais
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers the kinds of legal and medicolegal disputes that arose when foreign residents sustained injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company. It looks at the kinds of expertise and institutions responsible for adjudicating claims for compensation and considers the rights of the Bangkok Tramway Company, its employees, managers, and shareholders. In answering these questions, the chapter analyzes “jurisdictional politics,” “conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities,” in the plural legal arena of treaty port Bangkok. It deconstructs historical metanarratives about the “Westernization” or “modernization” of Thai law by revealing the fractious nature of Western law, including evidence of internecine squabbles between the representatives of legal and medical expertise—barristers and physicians—but also among the laypeople who advocated for particular brands of European legal tradition. It therefore complicates celebratory narratives of legal liberalism by demonstrating how nationalist sentiments and professional self-interest were the true impetus for legal change, not any grand imperial ambitions for bestowing law as a civilizing force.
Morbid Subjects
Authors: Pearson Trais
Published: September 2020

This chapter reveals how Siamese state officials came to see unnatural death as a specter of foreign violence against Siamese bodies and how they appealed to medicolegal science to address this problem. In stark contrast to other colonial legal jurisdictions, where medical jurisprudence helped to bolster (white) racial privilege, the chapter argues that medicolegal concern rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents. These residents often enjoyed extraterritorial legal privileges from the consular officials and institutions who protected them. To consider the broader conditions that helped to make unnatural death and forensic medicine a forum for political contestation in Siam, the chapter highlights two such factors: extraterritorial legal rights and the associated problem of differential standards of medicolegal evidence in foreign consular courts and the registration of Asian immigrants in Siam as the political subjects of foreign powers. Both cases offer surprising evidence suggesting that under certain conditions political affiliation transcended racial difference in the colonial world.
For Whom the Love Works in Video Game Production?
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of precarious labor in the video game industry. The emergence of video games as a medium goes back to a moment of “refusal of work” when Pentagon scientists, tasked with beating the USSR during the Cold War, ended up creating ludic experiences on their work computers during times of boredom. Today, contemporary video game production is a serious, lucrative business. Tracing Studio Desire's transition from its early days as an independent studio to a financialized structure after its acquisition by Digital Creatives in the 2000s, this book examines the inequalities that structure the lives of game developers in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It unpacks Studio Desire's story as it unfolds through four interlinked processes: rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization. Among these, precarization anchors the whole story.
Self-Reliance and Elite Networks
Authors: Phillips Sarah G.
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines the backgrounds of several elite networks and coalitions that were instrumental to establishing independence and, subsequently, peace in the 1990s, focusing on the relationships, configurations of power, and ideas that they drew on and further embedded. Being denied access to significant external funding or support, these networks were largely dependent upon one another for either their survival as elites or for their prosperity. Their mutual dependence reverberates throughout the independence discourse, building layers of meaning around the idea that Somaliland was forged through the self-reliance of its people, which followed on from the self-reliance demonstrated by earlier civil society movements and the Somali National Movement (SNM) guerilla fighters. This framing of history is not only used to illustrate the authenticity of Somaliland’s independence but also the degree to which its experience upends hegemonic assumptions about state fragility and the usefulness of international intervention for correcting it. This chapter thus explores the ways in which the autonomy of local actors is framed as one of the core elements of Somaliland’s peace-building processes.
A Handful of Gendarmes, Two Worlds, and the Frontier Between
Authors: Göpfert Mirco
Published: September 2020

This chapter provides a background of the gendarmerie brigade in Godiya, one of Niger's almost sixty so-called brigades territoriales, the gendarmerie's street-level units tasked primarily with criminal investigations. The particular case of the Nigerien gendarmerie sheds light on what may be in the dark but is nonetheless essential to any police and bureaucratic organization: fragile police legitimacy, the lag between les textes and le social, between official norms and human practices, bureaucratic formats and the complexity of lived life, and all of this in the context of multiple conflicting, often incompatible expectations and demands from within and without one's own organization. While enforcing the law, the gendarmes formatted stories about peoples' lives to fit the needs of the bureaucratic form. While producing arrangements, they kept these forms and lives apart, thereby allowing for mutually compatible forms of sociality and morality. The one produced separation through connection, the other connection through separation. This ambivalent coexistence of connection and separation is what this book wants to grasp with the notion of the frontier.
Notes from the Hastings Natural History Reservation
Authors: Farnsworth John Seibert
Published: September 2020

This chapter details the author's field notes from the Hastings Natural History Reservation. The author was particularly interested in studying acorn woodpeckers and their nest cavities. Acorn woodpeckers fascinate scientists because they live in groups, often with multiple breeding males and females, and nonbreeding helpers. The breeders share mates readily, and females lay eggs in a common nest, which is always a cavity nest. Moreover, they are quite vocal, even for woodpeckers; some would call them “articulate.” At Hastings, ornithologists annotate their field notes in “bird time” rather than “people time.” This is because birds do not transition to daylight saving time the way people do. The chapter then discusses the “ambush,” which is a capture technique developed at Hastings.
The Basque Seroras and Lay Female Religious Life in the Early Modern World
Authors: Scott Amanda L.
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the lay female religious life in the early modern world. Simultaneously ignored, sanctified, suspected of heresy, lauded, and targeted for reform, devout laywomen presented both obstacles and inspiration in the milieu of early modern European religious life. The seroría provided Basque women with a sanctioned and respectable channel, while allowing them freedom of movement and a degree of economic autonomy that was unmatched by other forms of lay religiosity elsewhere in Europe during the late medieval and early modern periods. Yet while the seroría was unique to the Basque lands, it reflected common female impulses to seek spiritual fulfillment at home and in the familiar spheres of their parish communities. These impulses swelled and then tapered off periodically from antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods, yet they were a consistent part of lived Christian experience that mirrored and responded to wider social, economic, and religious movements of the times. The seroras can be understood only within the context of lay and quasi-religious female devotion—in its many permutations—and placing them within this context also helps broaden the definition and parameters of medieval and early modern female religious life.
“Her Duty and Obligation”
Authors: Scott Amanda L.
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines the duties and obligations of the seroras. Seroras expressed piety through practice and action, which were both utilitarian and highly performative. Their practical role, coupled with the formality that went into their selection and installation, places seroras in a category unlike any other iteration of lay devout female service. There were many factors that led women to the semireligious life and seroría. At the most basic level, however, the vocation remained viable and popular for so long because it responded equally to practical needs of the parish community and the parish fabric, or material infrastructure. Even if it was not always fully condoned by diocesan officials, it was mostly considered a benign outlet for female piety. Different localities had slightly different methods for selecting seroras, and responsibilities and rituals of installation varied according to geographic circumstances or patterns of local power and influence. On the whole, however, the institution was remarkably consistent across the Basque lands. Regardless of where they served, most seroras could expect to perform a fairly standard set of duties and to be remunerated in similar ways by the communities they served.
The Aetolian Rout of the Athenians in 426
Authors: Blome David A.
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines the Aetolian Rout of the Athenians in 426. In stark contrast to the prevailing practices of their day, the Aetolians developed a sophisticated way of war that complemented, and was not determined by, the advantages of their physical environment. Collectively, the Aetolians recognized potential large-scale threats and made arrangements to protect themselves, and they did this not as a formal koinon, or federal state, but as an ethnos. Jakob Larsen, a key figure in the study of Greek federal states, concluded that the fifth-century Aetolian ethnos must have constituted some sort of political entity, which he called a “tribal state.” The chapter then considers how the Ophionians, Apodotians, and Eurytanians made a commitment to defend each other and formulated a plan as to how they would do so. These three groups even sent representative embassies abroad, suggesting that the Aetolian ethnos also had something along the lines of a foreign policy. From this it would follow that the fifth-century Aetolians had developed some form of government for deciding on issues that impinged on the entire ethnos. Evidently, though, this loose confederation did not require a formal constitution or even standing institutions or offices to function.