bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult: A Literature Review
Authors: Ranger Terence
Published: July 2008

In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have changed in one way and how little in another. Scotland Yard is now incredibly scientific. The assumed ritual murder of ‘Adam’, the African boy whose torso was found in the Thames, has allowed a dazzling exhibition of what scientific method can now achieve. On the other hand police interpretations of the African occult still combine ignorance, scepticism and credulity.
Pentecostalism Beyond Belief: Trust and Democracy in a Malawian Township
Authors: Englund Harri
Published: July 2008

The concept of belief, when applied in its strong sense, assumes an inner state that sets believers apart from non-believers. This article suggests that a concept of trust is more appropriate for the study of the religious orientation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo, an impoverished township in Malawi's capital city. Trust is a critical issue because even fellow members of Pentecostal congregations can turn out to have been sent by the Devil. Pastors also have to exercise considerable forbearance in order to encourage spiritual growth among backsliders. The boundaries of Pentecostal congregations are often permeable, with little emphasis on doctrinal differences. Pentecostal Christians also have frequent contact with kin, neighbours, customers and co-workers who do not share their religious orientation. Rather than being a matter of calculating risks, trust emerges in relation to the existential dangers of misfortune, hunger and disease that affect the lives of all township dwellers. Everyday contexts of township life are as important as proselytizing in generating trust between Pentecostals and those who are yet to experience the second birth in the Holy Spirit. In contrast to views that lament Africans’ particularized trust relations as an obstacle to democracy, this article suggests that generalized trust can emerge from a particular religious orientation. The article draws attention to the actual sources of civility and trust in contemporary Africa.
The Teso Insurgency Remembered: Churches, Burials and Propriety
Authors: Jones Ben
Published: July 2008

From 1986 to 1993 the Teso region of eastern Uganda experienced a violent insurgency. The insurgency was remembered as a time of brutality, when norms of respect and reciprocity were broken down. Younger men targeted and killed older men, and life retreated inwards. In the years since the insurgency a number of institutional developments have reflected on this experience. A growing number of Pentecostal churches have been established in the region, while charismatic forms of worship have been introduced in Anglican and Catholic churches. Burial societies have been set up and in the local courts the presentation of cases has undergone a change of emphasis. In all these different institutions there has been an attempt to draw a line under the violence of the recent past. A growing emphasis on notions of propriety and respectability – whether in church, in court, or at a burial – was a common theme in the life of Teso villages. In emphasizing new forms of sociality and obligation, churches and burial societies promoted a sense of fortunes restored; a belief that the past could be divorced from the present. At the same time, however, the attempt to draw a line under the past made the insurgency, or rather the memory of the insurgency, a powerful catalyst for change. The article examines the continuing influence the insurgency has over processes of social and political change in Teso.
Practices of Relatedness and the Re-Invention of Duol as a Network of Care for Orphans and Widows in Western Kenya
Authors: Nyambedha Erick Otieno , Aagaard-Hansen Jens
Published: July 2008

Duol is a term used in reference to traditional Luo life to signify unity and solidarity within a lineage under the authority of the elders. This authority was most prominent in the pre-colonial period, and continued up to independence. It declined steadily under the impact of modernity during the post-independence period. Consequently, the institution oí duol fell into disuse. The emergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic has renewed the need for unity and solidarity in finding community-based solutions. The original principles of duol are now manifested in a transformed version of duol and similar collaborative community initiatives. This article suggests that efforts to assist communities adversely affected by HIV/AIDS pandemic should base their interventions in the various community-based collaborative initiatives. Traditional institutions, it is argued, may be re-invented in times of turmoil as new forms of relatedness through which human agency is focused to counter serious challenges to rural communities.
Crompton's Campaign: The Professionalisation of Dance Pedagogy in Late Victorian England
Authors: Buckland Theresa Jill
Published: July 2008

In late Victorian England, dance teachers lacked national representation and means of communication among themselves to address professional concerns. By 1930, at least ten professional associations had emerged in Britain, some of which, such as the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), The British Association of Teachers and Dancing (BATD) and the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD), are still active today. Little has been written about the wider context of their foundation and of earlier initiatives to establish a professional body for dance pedagogy in England. A key figure in contemporaneous efforts to develop an infrastructure was Robert Morris Crompton (c.1845–1926), a London-based dancing master.

Choreographer, writer, and founder-editor of the first periodical devoted to dance in England (Dancing, 1891–1893), Robert Crompton finally succeeded in establishing a national organisation that was devoted to both social and stage dancing in 1904. As the first president of the ISTD, his visionary ideals of an annual technical congress, improvements in the status of the profession, and the future enhancement of dance as an art were placed on a firm institutional footing. Charlatan practitioners, declining standards in the ballroom, and unhelpful licensing laws, together with a scattered and highly individualised competitive profession, were challenges in the early 1890s that Crompton initially failed to overcome. Records of his dreams and anxieties in Dancing provide valuable insight into the problems that beset the teachers of the time. In tandem with other source material relating to the social context for dance of the period, consideration of the trials and aspirations that lay behind Crompton's campaign for a national professional association help to broaden understanding of the place of dance in late Victorian society in England.
Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music
Authors: Duerden Rachel
Published: July 2008

Dance and music have several features in common – rhythm, metre, tempo, and the fact that they are structured in and through time – but they are also intrinsically different, they each ‘mean’ differently, making the task of talking about their interrelationship challenging. Perhaps, however, this combination of closeness and distance is what makes it possible to see dance as a metaphor for music, and vice versa. The closeness between the two announces a relationship, a connection that then extends beyond the natural affinity to embrace something more remote and surprising. In other words, linking two disparate entities in a way similar to metaphor highlights a clear point of contact between them, but it also invites us to consider additional connections – the ghostly resonances that become apparent through close study.

Through an analysis in which illustrations are drawn from Balanchine and Stravinsky's Agon (1957) and Mark Morris' Falling Down Stairs (1997) set to J. S. Bach's 3rd Suite for Cello, this article examines the use of metaphor in talking about our responses to dance and music, thus illuminating some of the potential for subtlety and depth in their relationship, and the corresponding insights into human experience that they may offer.
Episodes (1959): Entente Cordiale?
Authors: Kane Angela
Published: July 2008

This article investigates Episodes (1959), which was a co-production by the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company. It assesses the immediate and longer-term impact of the work, both conceptually and choreographically, and the extent to which it can be considered ‘a historic meeting of two dance worlds’, as the New York Post claimed at the time. The article also explores the motivations of the three key figures involved – George Balanchine and Martha Graham as co-choreographers, and Lincoln Kirstein, General Director of NYCB – and the different working practices of the two companies. It draws upon dancers' accounts of the co-production, including Paul Taylor who performed in Balanchine's choreography, and extensive correspondence between Graham's company and NYCB.
‘Rules for Design’: Beauty and Grace in Caroso's Choreographies
Authors: Nevile Jennifer
Published: July 2008

This article examines the changes Fabritio Caroso made to his choreographies from his first treatise Il ballarino (1581) to those from his second, Nobiltà di dame (1600), as well as the terms Caroso used to refer to these changes and the significance that these terms had for him. While modern scholars have discussed these changes as evincing an increased interest in symmetry by Caroso, the dance master did not employ this term in his treatises at all. The terms he did use were closer to the earlier concepts of Vitruvius's symmetria and of Leon Battista Alberti's concinnitas. The analysis of his choreographic changes demonstrate that Caroso was not particularly focused on symmetry in the modern sense, that is, in increasing the number of mirror or rotational symmetrical spatial patterns in his revised choreographies. What we do see in Caroso's revised choreographies is an increased interest in balance and repetition, the arrangement and number of elements, and a concern to provide a theory or rules for designing choreographies that were articulated and written down, and conformed to the prevailing theory of beauty in the other arts, in order that his choreographies would also be judged to be perfect and to epitomise grace and beauty.
Fragment of the Sovereign as Hermaphrodite: Time, History, and the Exception in Le Ballet de Madame
Authors: Franko Mark
Published: July 2008

The fragment in Le Ballet de Madame (1615) is the Androgyne ballet in which a young Louis XIII on the verge of his majority performs the role of a Hermaphrodite. The analysis reveals the complex iconography of this role with respect to the recent erasure of his succession to kingship after the death of Henri IV in 1610. The presence to social memory of the king's unmourned corpse is relived in the Hermaphrodite figure, which is also a phoenix. But, this is only possible through the sexual imbroglio of the incorporation of the patriarch's body in that of his successor, a veritable figure of melancholy in psychoanalytic terms. Hence, the hermaphrodite fragment proves important to the political imaginary of absolutism in that we can perceive that the body natural of the king is brought to the fore at the expense of the body politic. The analysis is carried forth through the study of a series of contemporary texts devoted to this ballet and the theoretical background provided by twentieth-century interpretations of baroque power: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Georgio Agamben. The king as Hermaphrodite shows the bare life of sovereignty and the embodiment of the exception, which is Carl Schmidt's answer to Benjamin's notion of allegory. Hence, the essay brings extensive historical research into dialogue with contemporary theory at the level of the analysis of theatricality as a mode of symbolic action.
Burlesque Ballet, a Ballad and a Banquet in Ben Jonson's The Gypsies Metamorphos'd (1621)
Authors: Ravelhofer Barbara
Published: July 2008

In summer 1621, George Villiers, then Marquess of Buckingham, invited the king and an exclusive circle of courtiers to inaugurate his newly restored countryside residence Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland, Lincolnshire. On this occasion, he commissioned Ben Jonson with a masque, The Gypsies Metamorphos'd, in which he himself and various friends performed as dancing, pick-pocketing and palm-reading gipsies. The Gypsies Metamorphos'd was a risqué piece which experimented with innovative features, some of them outrageous. In particular, Jonson and his collaborators drew upon French-style ballet and banqueting fashions which they combined with traditional English music and song. This essay explains the reason for these artistic choices.
The Politics of Protection: Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria
Authors: Pratten David
Published: July 2008

Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigeria's political economy and its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion.

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.
A New Name for an Old Practice: Vigilantes in South-Western Nigeria
Authors: Fourchard Laurent
Published: July 2008

It is often considered probable that the recent rise of vigilante groups in Nigeria means an erosion of the state monopoly of legitimate violence as well as a marked decline in state sovereignty over the national territory. However, this conclusion does not take into consideration the fact that in Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a term initially proposed by the police in the mid-1980s as a substitute for an older practice known in the western part of the country since the colonial period as the ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ system. Hence, instead of looking at vigilante groups as a response to a supposed increase in crime or a supposed decline of the police force, we should consider them – initially at least – as a first attempt to introduce forms of community policing in order to improve the appalling image of the police. As such, in south-western Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a new name for an old practice of policing that should be considered in an extended timeframe (from the 1930s onward), a period in which violent crime has been perceived as a potential danger. Finally, within the ongoing debate on the ‘privatization of the state’ in Africa, non-state policing in Nigeria testifies to a continuum existing since the colonial period rather than to the appearance of new phenomena in the 1980s or the 1990s.
‘The Thief Eats His Shame’: Practice and Power in Nigerian Vigilantism
Authors: Pratten David
Published: July 2008

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice. It is a lens on the politics of post-colonial Africa, on the current political economy of Nigeria, and on its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. The legitimation of vigilante activity has extended beyond dissatisfaction with current levels of law and order and the failings of the Nigeria Police. To understand the local legitimacy of vigilantism in post-colonial Nigeria, indeed, it is also necessary to recognize its internal imperatives. Vigilantism in this context is embedded in narratives of contested rights, in familiar everyday practices, understandings of personhood and knowledge, and in alternative, older registers of governmentality. In addition to mapping temporal and spatial communities in which young men are vested with the right to exercise justice, this article assesses the legitimacy of Annang vigilantism within cultural frameworks of accountability linked to conceptions of agency, personhood and power, and the oppositions this produces between vigilantes and thieves.
Social Mobilization and Collective Violence: Vigilantes and Militias in The Lowlands of Plateau State, Central Nigeria
Authors: Higazi Adam
Published: July 2008

The collective violence in rural areas of southern and central Plateau State between June 2002 and May 2004 was accompanied by widespread social mobilization and heightened ethnic and religious divisions. Vigilantes adapted to the new insecurity and were important local actors in the crisis, but became polarized along religious lines. Their emphasis shifted from vigilance against theft within villages to vigilance against the more serious threats posed by armed militias. The intersection of vigilantes and militias was situational; where there was less violence vigilantes were more prominent, but elsewhere their functions merged. Social action and the patterns of violence were shaped by power relations between identity groups and the struggle for territory. The notion of indigeneity continues to be used by all sides to make territorial claims, and historical narratives of belonging and grievance are actively put forward to bolster political legitimacy. The violence was also strongly defined by religion – the political dominance of Muslims, especially in Wase, generating particular animosity. Religious and cultural beliefs were also expressed by vigilantes and militias themselves, and, while not a direct cause of violence, supernatural beliefs did affect forms of mobilization and decision making.
From ‘People's Struggle’ to ‘This War of Today’: Entanglements of Peace and Conflict in Guinea-Bissau
Authors: Temudo Marina Padrão
Published: July 2008

This article aims at contributing to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary West Africa by adopting a bi-focal analysis that looks both at power struggles within the urban elite and at the grassroots multi-ethnic setting in southern Guinea-Bissau. I pay close attention to the social dynamics of rural peoples' perspectives, coping strategies and inter-ethnic conflicts. Local conflicts are elucidated as an ongoing process that traverses times of war and peace. Although they are subject to manipulation by urban actors, local conflicts are also a matter of continuous negotiation and partial consensus at the grassroots. In stark contrast to this, the struggles in the ruling group are characterized by an escalating spiral of factionalism, diminishing compromises and elimination of rivals. By analysing the relationship between urban and rural actors and the role of cosmology, the article also aims to shed new light on the multiple shapes patron–client relations can assume in Africa.
Negotiated or Negated? The Rhetoric and Reality of Customary Tenure in an Ashanti Village in Ghana
Authors: Ubink Janine M.
Published: July 2008

Customary land tenure is seen as a field in which social and political relationships are diverse, overlapping and competing. Property regimes are, therefore, often analysed in terms of processes of negotiation, with people's social and political identities as central elements. This article studies the negotiability of customary tenure in peri-urban Ghana where land is at the centre of intense and unequal competition and closely tied up with struggles over authority. It focuses on one village to provide a grassroots view of processes of contestation of customary rights to land. The analysis of how and to what extent local actors in this village deal with, negotiate and struggle for rights to land confirms that contestants for land never operate on a level playing field. Postulating the social inequalities of local communities, the article analyses whether it is useful to place all local land dealings under the term ‘negotiations’, or whether such a characterization stretches the boundaries of the term too far and risks undermining the significance of local stratification and ignoring the winners and losers in a contest with uncertain rules.
‘Préparation du romanesque’ in Roland Barthes's Reading of Sarrasine
Authors: STAFFORD ANDY
Published: July 2008

By considering S/Z (1970) as an early example of the romanesque (novelistic) in Roland Barthes's oeuvre, this article considers the generic and thematic anticipation of La Préparation du roman in Barthes's seminars of the late 1960s. It suggests that his seminar notes on Balzac's Sarrasine written in 1968 and 1969 (and on which S/Z is based) are a form of proto-essayism, albeit given as seminars in the institutional context of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. This essayism is traced through the notion of perte de soi (loss of self) evident in two aspects of the seminar notes: firstly, in the ‘drugged reading’ that Barthes proposes, and then through his ambivalence to the literary character. Working ‘retroactively’, the article concludes that La Préparation du roman can help us to explain S/Z and its genesis, that is proactively, by applying this perte de soi to the act of one about to write a novel.
Preparing the Novel: Spiralling Back
Authors: CULLER JONATHAN
Published: July 2008

La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, and perversely takes Haiku as a model. This new project constitutes in many respects a regression to literary and cultural ideas Barthes had previously rejected. Most seriously, it involves a turn away from reflection on language, which had been crucial to Barthes's work. But there are other ways in which the change in approach brings new insights to a thinking of the novel and of literature.
On Judging the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Authors: Reynolds Matthew
Published: July 2008

The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, funded by Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen's College, and St Anne's College in Oxford, is awarded annually. It is judged by a panel of three Oxford acadamics and/or translators, plus a guest judge from the wider literary world.

The 2007 shortlist consisted of modern novels from France, Austria, and Norway; the selected poems of a contemporary German poet; three volumes of the writings of a Swiss dramatist, essayist, and story-writer; and a parallel-text version of Dante. The field of eligible books published during 2006 had of course been far larger, and was also wider-ranging, for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is for Englishings of prose fiction, poetry, and drama from living European languages. I have been a judge for the last four years now, and each time, when faced with the pile of eighty-odd entries, the multiple source languages (a few known to me, most not), the gamut of genres – from crime fiction and chick lit through Dumas (say) to Tolstoy and the poetry of Rilke or Kaplinski; not to mention the variety of translation challenges and ways of meeting them, from the exfoliation of a much-translated classic to the acute responsibility of introducing a writer for the first time, from the fairly straightforward demands of genre fiction to the peculiar meld of liberty and rigour required by the translation of poetry – each time, when faced with all this, I have asked: How on earth do you set about it? How can such incommensurables be compared?
‘Gimme de kneebone bent’: Liturgics, Dance, Resistance and a Hermeneutics of the Knees
Authors: Carvalhaes Cláudio
Published: July 2008

Shall we all dance to the Lord? But what Lord? To whose Lord shall we bend our knees in prayer, honour, dance and praise? Can our knees be naked? Can we open our legs? How much skin can we show without apologizing? Are we allowed to get the sensuous fever while dancing a tango, a salsa, or a samba? How should our knees behave in the house of the Lord? And whose house is God's house? Is there a proper way to dance in a worship service? What parts of our bodies can we move without distressing the proper liturgical order rooted in respect, faith, rationality, tradition and good manners?

Our knees connect liturgy with ecclesiology, theology, colonialisation, dance and bodies. I was asked to write about dance in Brazil/Latin America, perhaps because Brazil is well known for its dancing spirit, as one can see in our carnival, samba, joy and beautiful women. All of that is true. But the task for this article was more specific. I had to write about dance within Christian communities. Then, the whole aspect of dance was turned upside down in my head. In truth, we do not dance in historic Protestant churches in Brazil and in that regard, we do not differ one inch from many of our brothers and sisters in Edinburgh, Rome, Geneva or the United States – at least when dance is concerned. We just do not dance. Only our Pentecostal brothers and sisters can dance.
Discrimination and Testimonial Knowledge
Authors: Greco John
Published: July 2008

Sanford Goldberg has called our attention to an interesting problem: How is it that young children can learn from the testimony of their caregivers (their parents, teachers, and nannies, for example) even when the children themselves are undiscriminating consumers of testimony? Part One describes the importance and scope of the problem, showing that it generalizes beyond tots and their caregivers. Part Two considers and rejects several strategies for solving the problem, including Goldberg's own. Part Three defends a solution, positing a previously unnoticed social dimension to knowledge.
A Culture of Justification: The Pragmatist's Epistemic Argument for Democracy
Authors: Misak Cheryl
Published: July 2008

The pragmatist view of politics is at its very heart epistemic, for it treats morals and politics as a kind of deliberation or inquiry, not terribly unlike other kinds of inquiry. With the exception of Richard Rorty, the pragmatists argue that morals and politics, like science, aim at the truth or at getting things right and that the best method for achieving this aim is a method they sometimes call the scientific method or the method of intelligence – what would now be termed deliberative democracy. Hence, the pragmatists offer an argument for democracy which appeals to the quality of the decisions supplied by democratic procedure. Why should we value decisions that are the products of voting after open debate over private decision-making and then voting, over bargaining, or over elimination of those who disagree with us? We should value them because the deliberative democratic method is more likely to give us true or right or justified answers to our questions. Rorty, of course, thinks that no inquiry aims at the truth and that nothing about pragmatism speaks in democracy's favor. This paper will show how his brand of pragmatism betrays what is good and deeply interesting in the pragmatist tradition.
Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation
Authors: RASTEGAR KAMRAN
Published: July 2008

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, ‘nationalism’ and ‘novelism’, and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as ‘the habitual subordination of writing to the novel’ – it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.
Truth, Fiction and Autobiography in the Modern Urdu Narrative Tradition
Authors: YAQIN AMINA
Published: July 2008

From its various beginnings in the nineteenth century and ever since the rise of print capitalism on the Indian subcontinent, the Urdu novel has become a prime medium of expression for writers seeking to fuse the narrative traditions of both the East and the West. As a hybrid genre which took shape during the nineteenth century, the Urdu novel's early beginnings were associated with the theme of historical romance; this eventually gave way to the influence of realism in the first half of the twentieth century. By and large, the Urdu novel incorporates influences encompassing the fantastical oral storytelling tradition of the dastan or the qissa (elaborate lengthy heroic tales of adventure, magic and honour), the masnavi (a form of narrative poem), Urdu grammars, religious pamphlets and journals, and the European novel.
Reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow as Parody: Difference as Sameness
Authors: EROL SİBEL
Published: July 2008

In presenting the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, the Swedish Academy commended him for his discovery of ‘new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’.1 The deliberate choice of ‘clash’ is a coded, evocative way of simultaneously bringing up the now well-worn phrase ‘the clash of civilizations’ and disavowing it by replacing ‘civilizations’ with ‘cultures’. This is also carefully balanced with the more positive word ‘interlacings’. However, the impression remains that concerns of political correctness on the Academy's part have affected their language formulation more than their actual thinking. After all, does not the reformulation of this cliché convey cum grano salis the same message as the original that was alluded to, indicating that Pamuk's main problematic is the clash of civilizations ?
Book Reviews
Authors: MORRIS MARK
Published: July 2008

In 1925, a year central to the concerns of Advertising Tower, the short-lived short story writer Kajii Motojirô published a tale called ‘Lemon’. It has long been considered one the classics of Japanese short fiction. The climax of the story locates the focal character in one embodiment of Western-orientated Japanese modernity – the book section of Tokyo's Maruzen Department Store. The down-at-the-heel narrator has brought with him one shiny yellow lemon. He heaps up an armload of expensive, illustrated art books, sticks the lemon in the pile, and awaits the cataclysm.

William O. Gardener has looked back at the decade of the 1920s in Japan in this fascinating, sometimes frustrating, always informative study of how modernism in the arts and literature were generated within Japan's particular experience of cultural, social and political modernity.
Re-Conceiving Voice in Modern Verse
Authors: SCOTT CLIVE
Published: July 2008

This investigation into the speaking of modern verse (i.e. free verse and after) has, as its broadest founding assumptions that, as verse readers, we have lost sight of the history and anthropology of linguistic utterance and human listening, and that we continue to believe that the aim of metrico-rhythmic analysis is to get it right, once and for all, rather than to get it maximally appropriate, relativistically. I go back in time to a treatise on versification of the early nineteenth century, say, and think ‘Poor old soul, how linguistically unsophisticated, how misguided’, rather than thinking ‘So this is how poets and readers of this period actually perceived verse, how they heard it, how they composed it’, and then asking ‘How should I register, in verse-scansion, what wehear, what we are capable of hearing, today?’. If the train and camera, for example, have changed the dynamics and variety of optical perception, how has oral and aural production been affected by the development of voice-styles and voice-engineering?
The Musical-Artistic Story: Hoffmann, Odoevsky and Pasternak
Authors: CORNWELL NEIL
Published: July 2008

The artistic story is an acknowledged sub-genre of Romantic fiction. The ‘artist’ – usually a poet or writer, sometimes a painter, or occasionally a representative of another art form – is a common enough figure in Romantic literature, with extensions into the Gothic-fantastic, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One has only to think of Bulgakov's ‘Master’ (in his celebrated The Master and Margarita). In other, on the whole more mainstream – though often at least equally complex – areas of, for instance, Russian fiction, another obvious figure of some prominence would be Doctor Iurii Zhivago. American campus fiction (without my wishing, by any means, to reduce Pale Fire to that rather bland category) offers Vladimir Nabokov's rival figure of the poet, John Shade.
Celestial Discords: The Music of Dante's Paradise
Authors: SLAWINSKI MAURICE
Published: July 2008

The music that I am concerned with in the present paper is not that of angelic choirs and lyre-strumming seraphim (though of course there is that too in Paradiso). Rather, it is the music of Dante's poetry, and more precisely, the relative lack of a particular kind of word-music that one might expect to feature in an account of Paradise: the music of ecstasy, or jouissance. Because if one of the poem's aims is to communicate the experience of someone who claims actually to have been there, then it might be suggested, to adapt an elegant phrase of Roland Barthes, that Dante's is a somewhat sparing ecstasy, a jouissance parsimonieuse.

Setting aside the fraught issue – the subject of animated debate to this day – of whether Dante had actually experienced a vision of some kind, and therefore believed his account of the Hereafter to be in some sense ‘factual’, there is no doubt that in writing the Paradisohe intended somehow to representthe state of bliss, an intent to which he refers with the polysemic verb figurare, meaning at one and the same time depict, imagine and, in accordance with contemporary allegory and typology, identify in the things pertaining to this world intimations of the transcendent truths of the next. If therefore Dante is sparing in his celestial jouissancethis is in part because the demands of earthly representation are such that the state of blessedness, and even Heaven's more transient effects on the ‘still flesh-and-blood’ Dante-character, can only be adumbrated, rapidly suggested and just as rapidly left off. At the root of Dante's achievement, as Auerbach taught us to recognize, is his extraordinary skill as a story-teller, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Paradiso, where, beyond time, there is in a sense no celestial story to tell. Dante fills that void with a variety of earthly stories instead: exemplary human lives and the history of mankind generally as a journey whose end-purpose is the celestial city; scientific, philosophical and theological narratives explaining how everything in creation exists and operates to fulfil that end-purpose; the story of Dante's own progress through the heavens.
Writing Like Music: Luciano Berio, Umberto Eco and the New Avant-Garde
Authors: MUSSGNUG FLORIAN
Published: July 2008

Die Dichtung des Lyrikers kann nichts aussagen, was nicht in der ungeheuersten Allgemeinheit und Allgültigkeit bereits in der Musik lag, die ihn zur Bilderrede nötigte. Der Weltsymbolik der Musik ist eben deshalb mit der Sprache auf keine Weise erschöpfend beizukommen. (The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness of the music that compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music).
Two Kinds of Social Epistemology
Authors: Quinton Anthony
Published: July 2008

Social Epistemology arose from the recognition that nearly all that we believe or claim to know is second hand and derived from the speech or writing of others. The “we” of “our knowledge” here is, of course, “educated members of advanced industrial societies”. Our remoter, but still identifiably, human ancestors, without speech or writing, picked up such knowledge or belief as they had on their own, apart from what they may have leant from the reactions of others to the presence of quarry or danger. Palaeolithic man, having mastered speech, had access to plenty of second hand knowledge. But it was only of what the people he directly met could tell him. With writing a vast new range of informants is brought into play. Clay tablets and papyrus rolls give way to codices – in other words, books – and another gigantic step forward is made with the invention of printing. We would appear to be going through a comparable information revolution at the present day. We, as defined above, either posses or have ready access to a vast assemblage of common knowledge, actual or claimed. How are we to rationally to decide how much of this we are to accept? It is obviously not all worthy, or equally worthy of acceptance.
Group Knowledge Analyzed
Authors: Tuomela Raimo
Published: July 2008

One can speak of knowledge in an impersonal sense: It is accepted as knowledge that copper expands when heated, that the capital of Finland is Helsinki, and that no one under 18 years of age is entitled to vote in national elections. Such knowledge is not an abstract entity floating around in some kind of Platonic “third world”. Rather it is knowledge that some actual agent or agents actually have or have had as contents of their appropriate mental states (belief states) and that others on this basis can have as their knowledge. People find out things either by themselves or together, and often what they come to believe about the world is true and more or less well-grounded, thus knowledge much in the sense of traditional epistemology. We may say then that there isknowledge in groupsor communities, e.g. in the scientific community, that such and such is the case, and that in some casesgroups as groups know; and in all these cases there must be or have been actual knowers.
Epistemology and Education: An Incomplete Guide to the Social-Epistemological Issues
Authors: Siegel Harvey
Published: July 2008

Recent work in epistemology has focused increasingly on the social dimensions of knowledge and inquiry. Education is one important social arena in which knowledge plays a leading role, and in which knowledge-claims are presented, analyzed, evaluated, and transmitted. Philosophers of education have long attended to the epistemological issues raised by the theory and practice of education (along with the moral, metaphysical, social-political, and mind/language issues so raised). While historically philosophical issues concerning education were treated alongside other philosophical issues, in recent times the former set of issues have been largely neglected by philosophers working in the core areas of the discipline. Interestingly, the rise of social epistemology has been accompanied by a renewed interest by mainstream philosophers in philosophical questions concerning education. Whether or not this accompaniment is accidental, or is legitimately explainable in terms of broad intellectual, philosophical, or social/political currents and movements, I will not endeavor to address here. The increasing respectability of and philosophical interest in both social epistemology and philosophy of education are in any case salutary developments, each signaling both a broadening of the set of interests and issues deemed legitimate by practitioners of the parent discipline, and an increased willingness to take seriously the philosophical problems raised by the ubiquitous social/communal effort to transmit/transform culture(s) by way of education.
Minding One's Cognitive Systems: When Does a Group of Minds Constitute a Single Cognitive Unit?
Authors: Rupert Robert
Published: July 2008

The possibility of group minds or group mental states has been considered by a number of authors addressing issues in social epistemology and related areas (Goldman 2004, Pettit 2003, Gilbert 2004, Hutchins 1995). An appeal to group minds might, in the end, do indispensable explanatory work in the social or cognitive sciences. I am skeptical, though, and this essay lays out some of the reasons for my skepticism. The concerns raised herein constitute challenges to the advocates of group minds (or group mental states), challenges that might be overcome as theoretical and empirical work proceeds. Nevertheless, these hurdles are, I think, genuine and substantive, so much so that my tentative conclusion will not be optimistic. If a group mind is supposed to be a single mental system having two or more minds as proper parts, the prospects for group minds seem dim–or so I will argue.
Credit for Making a Discovery
Authors: Rescher Nicholas
Published: July 2008

How is one properly to allocate credit for making a discovery in science or elsewhere where the conjoint effort of several individuals is involved? When a group of investigators cooperates in making a discovery, how should the credit for this achievement be apportioned among them to assure that everyone receives their proper share?

The problem being considered here is not that of assessing importance—of determining how much credit there is to go around. That is something else again. The present problem, rather, is that of how that credit, be it great or small, should be allocated to the parties responsible for the discovery at issue? It is, accordingly, not the amount of credit but its distribution that is at issue.
Kuhn's Risk-Spreading Argument and the Organization of Scientific Communities
Authors: D'Agostino Fred
Published: July 2008

One of Thomas Kuhn's profoundest arguments (alas, sadly neglected) is introduced in the 1970 “Postscript” toThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Kuhn 1970). Kuhn is discussing the idea of a “disciplinary matrix” as a more adequate articulation of the “paradigm” notion he'd introduced in the first, 1962, edition of his famous work (Kuhn 1962). He notes that one “element” of disciplinary matrices is likely to be common to most or even all such matrices, unlike the other elements which serve to distinguish specific disciplines and sub-disciplines from one another. This is the element which he calls “values”, which, as he notes (1970, 184), being common to a number of otherwise distinct disciplinary matrices, “do much to provide a sense of community to natural scientists as a whole”. On the other hand, they also do much, and crucially in Kuhn's view, to promote and sustain a healthy diversity among the practitioners who share any specific disciplinary matrix. In particular, Kuhn claims (1970, 186) that “individual variability in the application of shared values may serve functions essential to science.”
Economic Epistemology: Hopes and Horrors
Authors: Mäki Uskali
Published: July 2008

The cultural and epistemic status of science is under attack. Social and cultural studies of science are widely perceived to offer evidence and arguments in support of an anti-science campaign. They portray science as a mundane social endeavour, akin to religion and politics, with no privileged access to truthful information about the (socially unconstructed) real world. Science is under threat and needs defence. Old philosophical legitimations have lost their bite. Alarm bells ring, new troops have to be mobilised. Call economics, the good old friend of the status quo depicting it as a generally beneficial social order while accommodating a rather mundane picture of human behaviour. In contrast to constructivist and relativist sociology of scientific knowledge, economic accounts of science seek to provide a rigorous defence of the cultural and epistemic legitimacy of science by accommodating plausible elements in the sociological accounts and by embedding them in invisible-hand arguments about the functioning of some market-like structure within science. Viewed through economic spectacles, science re-emerges from the ashes as stronger and more beautiful than ever. A spectator raises an innocent question: is economics itself strong and beautiful enough to offer such alleviating services? In order to examine the emerging issue of disciplinary credibility, we need to look at economics itself more closely, and we need to address traditional issues in the philosophy of science as well as less traditional issues of reflexivity. We will see that the above caricature concerning the role of economics in the science wars calls for heavy qualifications if not wholesale rejection (no comment here on the caricatured role of the SSK).
Boundary Work and the Science Wars: James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?
Authors: Sismondo Sergio
Published: July 2008

The Science Wars have not involved any violence, nor even threats of violence. Thus the label “wars” for this series of discussions, mostly one-sided and mostly located within the academy, is something of an overblown metaphor. Nonetheless, I will suggest that there are some respects in which the metaphor is appropriate. The Science Wars involve territory, albeit a metaphorical kind of territory. They inspire work that can be best interpreted as ideological, a result of disciplinary interests. Moreover, fellow participants in the wars and others reward that ideological work.

My goal in this is to display efforts to maintain a discipline's epistemic authority, the recognition that members of that discipline have legitimate claims to knowledge on a subject. The central section of the paper takes the form of a discussion of one recent contribution to the Science Wars, James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?My argument is at least somewhat generalizable beyond this book, and it therefore points to interesting phenomena related to epistemic authority.
Circles of Reason: Some Feminist Reflections on Reason and Rationality
Authors: Longino Helen
Published: July 2008

Rationality and reason are topics so fraught for feminists that any useful reflection on them requires some prior exploration of the difficulties they have caused. One of those difficulties for feminists and, I suspect, for others in the margins of modernity, is the rhetoric of reason – the ways reason is bandied about as a qualification differentially bestowed on different types of person. Rhetorically, it functions in different ways depending on whether it is being denied or affirmed. In this paper, I want to explore these rhetorics of reason as they are considered in the work of two feminist philosophers. I shall draw on their work for some suggestions about how to think about rationality, and begin to use those suggestions to develop a constructive account that withstands the rhetorical temptations.
On Dreaming and Being Lied To
Authors: Faulkner Paul
Published: July 2008

As sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean would suggest. This has substantial implications for any non-sceptical epistemological theory of testimony.