bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘A Country Free by Default’: Barthes and the Atmospheric Experience of Literature
Authors: Pint Kris
Published: September 2020

In the last decade of his life, Barthes increasingly turned to classical literature for the expression of what he called ‘minimal existence’. He found an ideal way to access this experience in literary descriptions of the nuances of the weather, le temps qu’il fait. In these passages, the virtual space of literature opens up the existential space of the experiencing body, by providing a discourse to explore atmospheric conditions. As the experience of the atmosphere is cultural, a form of education is needed in order fully to appreciate it. It was this education Barthes found in the abandoned, untimely field of classical literature: ‘a country free by default’. Barthes’s literary explorations of the weather can be understood as a crucial part of the ethical project he developed at the Collège de France. Barthes’s ‘active semiology’ urges us to consider literature as a personal, intimate ‘guide de vie’, and to understand literary semiology not only as a contribution to a field of knowledge, but also to a field of experience. The sensation and expression of atmospheric conditions becomes an unexpected way to defend the existential and critical value of literature in our contemporary, increasingly virtualised information society.
The Tale of al-Barrāq Son of Rawḥān and Laylā the Chaste: A Translation
Authors: Hammond Marlé
Published: September 2020

The romance between al-Barrāq and his cousin Laylā unfolds against a backdrop of internecine Arab military skirmishes, where al-Barrāq proves his valour as a warrior. Laylā’s father reneges on a promise to allow the cousins to marry and accepts a proposal from an Arab king. Meanwhile, a Persian king, Shahrmayh, also desires to marry her. Laylā is abducted by a stooge of King Shahrmayh named Burd, who imprisons and tortures her. Laylā then recites a poem in which she describes her suffering and calls on her kinsmen to rescue her. Her poem is overheard by a sympathetic servant and conveyed to al-Barrāq through a series of messengers. Al-Barrāq then appeals to his fellow Arabs to rally to Laylā’s rescue. United, they nearly defeat the Persians, but they are vastly outnumbered. The Arab armies retreat, leaving al-Barrāq alone in enemy territory. Al-Barrāq, through a combination of ruse and might, succeeds in slaying both Burd and King Shahrmayh, frees his beloved from captivity and returns with her astride his horse to Arab lands. At the tale’s end, al-Barrāq and Laylā marry, and it is discovered that she is a virgin, despite all the threats to her chastity.
The Narrative, Its Components and Its ‘Novelisation’
Authors: Hammond Marlé
Published: September 2020

This chapter represents a narratological breakdown of the tale. Drawing on the theory of Seymour Chatman, Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, I discuss the tale and its relationship to the ʿUdhrī love tale, the popular epic and the novel in terms of its discourse, setting, characters and events. I argue that the tale has a plot with a ‘homophonic’ texture, whereby a ‘melody’ of singular events (such as the abduction, torture and rescue of Laylā) overlays a ‘drone’ of repeated events (namely battle scenes). I conclude with a comparison of the tale with its twentieth-century novelistic adaptation and a discussion of what the comparison reveals about the pre-history of the Arabic novel.
A Long Wait for a Train
Authors: Plotch Philip Mark
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of New York's near-mythical subway under Second Avenue. Since the 1930s, the line has symbolized New York's inability to modernize its infrastructure and accommodate its residents. While the number of people living and working in New York City has grown, its rapid transit system of underground and elevated rail lines has shrunk. Moreover, while politicians have repeatedly promised a Second Avenue subway to help advance their own careers, they have failed to acknowledge the enormous challenges involved in paying for it. Nevertheless, the first three of sixteen planned Second Avenue subway stations opened to the public on New Year's Day in 2017. On a per-mile basis, the completed section of the Second Avenue subway was the most expensive subway extension ever built anywhere in the world. Given its limited resources, New York has to make tough decisions about prioritizing subway improvements. Ultimately, the Second Avenue subway story reveals how rebuilding and expanding the subway requires visionary leaders. Transportation officials must develop comprehensive plans, civic and business leaders need to generate public support, and elected officials must champion improvements and secure resources.
Building a Subway and Unleashing the Plagues
Authors: Plotch Philip Mark
Published: September 2020

This chapter details the challenges brought about by the construction of the Second Avenue subway. Despite the extensive efforts of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to minimize impacts, the businesses and residents along Second Avenue had little patience for the construction. Residents lived with loud noises outside their windows and they also complained about dust. Moreover, water, electricity, cable, and telephone services were periodically halted. Manhattan's Community Board 8, which covers the Upper East Side between 59th and 96th Streets, served as a conduit between the community and the MTA. In response to the complaints from residents, MTA Capital Construction president Michael Horodniceanu implemented what was by far the most ambitious community outreach effort the MTA had ever conducted. Horodniceanu's efforts helped Upper East Siders understand the project's enormous scale and the MTA's extensive efforts to minimize construction impacts. Likewise, construction officials became much more sensitive to the community when they heard directly from residents and business owners at workshops.
Andrew Cuomo’s Finish Line
Authors: Plotch Philip Mark
Published: September 2020

This chapter recounts how, in late 2015, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to prioritize the Second Avenue subway, pressuring the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to complete the project by January 1, 2017. When making decisions about the Second Avenue subway, MTA officials always had to balance various factors, including budget, schedule, and quality. Cuomo changed the MTA's priorities to emphasize speed. As a result, some factors were deemphasized, such as New York City Transit's concerns about maintainability, budget officials' worries about cost overruns, and engineers' expectations that they would thoroughly test every single component. The governor's insistence on meeting the New Year's deadline would consume the MTA as it turned its attention from other projects, other escalators, and other signal systems. Ultimately, Governor Cuomo had pressed the right buttons to open up the Second Avenue subway on first day of the New Year. But New Yorkers did not realize what happens when a public agency pours too much of its attention and resources into expediting one megaproject.
War Is Justiciable, Until It Isn’t
Authors: Farrier Jasmine
Published: September 2020

This chapter demonstrates that courts were once comfortable entering into the fray when they have clear congressional guidelines about war authorization (private lawsuits) and when members of Congress press their claims through political as well as legal channels (Cambodia cases). It also shows that federal courts can have a place in war powers conflicts—and they did up through the mid-twentieth century, but only in individual plaintiff cases. Although no federal court has ever ordered a president to stop a war, there was once more comfort in judicial engagement in war-related constitutional questions, at least from the founding generation through the Civil War and beyond; the Cold War changed all three branches' orientations. Member litigation began during the Vietnam War out of frustration with imbalance of power that took permanent root in the Cold War and then remained in the political culture under new international pressures in the 1990s and after 9/11. The chapter then details the first two member cases surrounding the Vietnam War's expansion.
A University Professorship and Marriage, 1876–1879
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on the courtship and early days of marriage of Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock. It was soon after he was made Assistant Professor of Entomology at Cornell University, that Henry spent a holiday vacation at Anna's home. They had a happy visit, but there was no engagement to announce until several months later. They were becoming very well acquainted and the companionship on which their marriage was based was steadily becoming closer and more important to them both. Anna and Henry were then wed on October of 1878. The chapter describes their home, Fall Creek Cottage, and their amusing housekeeping incidents. At this period, Cornell University was a small institution and the faculty families were very friendly. Despite housework and visitors, both Anna and Henry found time for intellectual pursuits.
The Year 1888–1889; With a Winter in Germany
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's trip abroad to Germany. For a long time, Henry had struggled with the German language, in which so many treatises on zoology were written. He had finally concluded that a winter in Germany was necessary before he finished Part II of the textbook An Introduction to Entomology. Henry at once arranged for his university work under Rudolph Leuckart, the celebrated zoologist. Women were not admitted to the University of Leipsic at that time, but Professor Leuckart permitted Anna to attend one of his lectures, asking only that she came early and departed late—before and after the regular students. Back at Cornell University, after the Germany trip, the summer term of 1889 in entomology was well attended and Henry, as usual, enjoyed the summer teaching very much. He felt that leading his pupils to see the insects living in their natural environment was most important.
The Nature Study Movement at Cornell University; A Journey South to Study Spiders
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter details Anna Botsford Comstock's early days in the nature study education movement. She joined several key figures—Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Mary Rogers Miller—who were already involved in nature education initiatives at Cornell University with Liberty Hyde Bailey. During the years 1891 to 1893 there was general agricultural depression in the East, and New York City found itself called upon, for the first time in history, to help people who flocked in from the rural districts in search of work. Mr. George T. Powell, who was director of Farmers' Institutes, was called in as an expert in a conference to consider the situation. He maintained that poor farming was one of the reasons for agricultural depression, and that the only permanent remedy would be to interest the children of the rural districts in farming. He also declared that nature study was the means to use to interest the child in the farm.
“How to Know Butterflies” and the “Confessions to a Heathen Idol”
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the teaching experiences of Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock at Chautauqua. At Chautauqua, they had a very large field class and they were both tired when they returned to Ithaca early in August of 1903. Henry had 33 classes in his summer term that year. He gave a course of lectures on spiders, which was very popular. Meanwhile, Anna's problem in the Chautauqua classes was a difficult one. The teachers had no background of science, and it seemed best to get each one in the class interested in some phase of nature that they could follow by themselves later. Anna found trees, ferns, birds, and butterflies adapted for this work. However, all the butterfly books were too advanced for use in these courses. As such, Anna besought her husband to write one with her. On November 13, 1903, she accepted the trusteeship of William Smith College.
The 65th Milestone and Retirement
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter recounts John Henry Comstock's 65th birthday on February 24, 1914, which he willingly celebrated. To him, it symbolized freedom from executive slavery and unfettered opportunity to do the work he loved best. The principal event in the Comstocks' lives that spring were the retirement of Henry and the 40th reunion of his class. He was very busy much of the time with correspondence in connection with the reunion and in making arrangements for the entertainment of the returning members. In addition, he was more or less anxious regarding his part in the exercises in connection with the presentation of the Comstock Memorial Library Fund. Meanwhile, in the fall, Anna Botsford Comstock was busy lecturing at Kalamazoo, Michigan, and at Dayton, Ohio. Her Pet Book, which she had written with the idea of making the lives of all sorts of pets happier, was published on December 2, 1914. She also attended the meetings of the Nature Study Society of America with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the same time, the Comstock Publishing Company already had enough books to make a display in the Corner Book Store of Ithaca windows.
Florida and Retirement
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's journey to the South. First stopping in Richmond, Virginia, they traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. In the middle of January of 1919, the Comstocks found themselves settled at St. George Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, to spend the winter there. The chapter also looks at the semi-centennial celebration of Cornell University in June of 1919. Anna continued teaching at the College of Agriculture and on July 31, she was made a full professor. She regarded it as a tribute to her long service, but it was also a tribute to the Department of Nature Study which she had built up. On April 17, 1920, the first part of Henry's Introduction to Entomology was published. Dealing with the structure and metamorphosis of insects, it was used in the Cornell laboratory. The chapter then considers Anna's retirement. On January 27, 1921, she gave her last lecture before the class of regular students of Cornell.
Mentone
Authors: Comstock Anna Botsford
Published: September 2020

This chapter recounts Anna Botsford and John Henry Comstock's trip abroad to Mentone in the winter of 1926. Mentone proved to be a very attractive modern city with an ancient city on a hill in its midst. One of the Comstocks' first activities was a trip to Monte Carlo in Monaco, where they watched people gamble. They then visited La Turbie and Eze. After, they made a pilgrimage to the entomological station in Mentone where they were welcomed by the chief, Raymond Poutier, and shown every courtesy. Henry had great respect for Monsieur Poutier's excellent work as an entomologist, accomplished with such limited financial support. The Comstocks' trip to Mentone was to be their last major sojourn together before Henry was stricken with his first stroke in the summer of that same year.
Staging Dissidence
Authors: Kelz Robert
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the history and repertoire of the Free German Stage. Though publicly promoted as an inclusive social space for antifascists, Zionists, and apolitical refugees, in private correspondence the founder Paul Walter Jacob initially hoped the stage would become a center for anti-Hitler activists. The enterprise was guided by politically inspired principles of antifascist community building and competitive cultural representation vis-à-vis the Argentine host society and, especially, against the nationalist bloc. In addition, from the outset, their conflictive relationship was immanent to the identities of the Free German Stage and the German Theater, as well as many of their supporters. The chapter also investigates backlash against the Free German Stage from Nazi Germany, nationalist German emigrants, and the Argentine government.
Incisions and Inscriptions
Authors: Pearson Trais
Published: September 2020

This chapter follows the dead body as it moved out of the public spaces of vernacular forensics and into the sequestered space of medicolegal science, the morgue. It attends to the efforts of the Siamese state to implement medicolegal science in the form of autopsies (incisions) capable of producing forms of documentary evidence (inscriptions) that foreign consular courts would recognize in the prosecution of foreign residents accused of having harmed Siamese subjects. Engaging with science studies scholarship on the work of mediation, the chapter focuses on the collaborative work of Dr. P. A. Nightingale, a British physician in the employ of the Siamese state, and Mo (Dr.) Meng Yim, his Sino-Thai assistant and translator. It discovers in the documentary fruits of their collaborative labor, the death certificate, a “boundary object” capable of entertaining discordant forms of knowledge. It became a testament to the emergence of a new form of necropolitics in Siam.
Spirits in a Material World
Authors: Pearson Trais
Published: September 2020

This epilogue considers acquittal through the absolution of the apparition—where supernatural beings help to dictate the actions and fates of the living. It is only in the latter world that it makes sense for one to undertake kan-tham khwan, the action of making amends for a lost life through a compensatory payment made to the spirit of the deceased. The chapter illustrates that, insofar as kan-tham khwan masquerades as a payment made to placate the spirit of the deceased, it conforms to the logic and spirit of traditional forms of remediation for lost life. It is a testament to the survival of customary modes of action in an age of ostensibly normalized and homogeneous forms of law and order. At the same time, however, it is a form of action that imparts indemnification or legal protection for the injurer or culpable party. In this respect, kan-tham khwan participates in the long-standing logic of noblesse oblige, whereby social superiors are entitled to make amends for potentially wrongful actions that cost the lives of their subordinates. Within this backdrop, the chapter draws some inferences on the state of social and economic inequality in contemporary Thailand.
The End of the Garage Studio as a Technomasculine Space
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines how Studio Desire's workers were managed after acquisition by Digital Creatives in the 2000s. It documents the dynamics of what the game developers called “the trade-off” between financial security and autonomy. This trade-off reveals the interactions and struggle between the residual and the emergent cultures, where frictions occurred since the market survival of Digital Creatives depended on its abilities to streamline creative production. Overall, Studio Desire's workers did not fundamentally see a problem with it as they had wanted to be acquired by a major publisher in the first place. Yet the introduction of new organizational structures led to the advent of a more impersonal culture and inequalities, all mediated within a gendered context. By looking at how game developers deploy passion in their descriptions of work, the chapter provides a distinct focus by gendering labor practices and reframing the “garage” as a gendered space.
Gaming the City
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses how Studio Desire's relocation contingently brought about the revitalization of Game City's downtown. This revitalization was possible as discourses, imaginaries, and alliances at the local level converged around neoliberal public–private partnerships that fetishized creativity, privileged middle-class values, and promoted art as the engine of economic growth. The chapter also unravels how geography, materiality, and space in the digital economy are far from being dead and are, in fact, indispensable to the reproduction of life. Even in the context of globalization, how workers exercise their labor power depends on the physical features, affordances, design logic, and limitations of a particular workplace. Space also matters as it casts social reproduction as a frame.
Reproducing Technomasculinity
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This chapter assesses the domestic dimensions of the unequal ludopolitical regime. Keeping the discussion on social reproduction alive, it asks: What kind of classed femininities are at work in the domestic space, as far as the reproduction of techno-masculinity at Studio Desire is concerned? Drawing on interviews with game developers' partners, the chapter reveals the dialectical relationship between Studio Desire's techno-masculine work culture and the domestic labor behind it. The taxing emotional toxicity at work is rendered tolerable thanks to the mobilization of women's emotional capacities at home. The chapter's distinct focus lies in its framing of women not simply as providers of domestic work but also as active agents who politically critique industry practices. Overall, it provides a response to techno-utopian claims about how digital technologies would terminate social inequalities within the domestic space, pointing to continuities in terms of love's exploitative dimensions.
Production Error
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This chapter reveals how even upper-rank workers are not exempt from layoffs, financial insecurity, and the anxiety of working in a hit-driven industry. While being bought out by Digital Creatives initially provided financial security for Studio Desire's game developers, Digital Creatives' hasty, adverse investment decisions destabilized their flagship studio. When Digital Creatives eventually declared bankruptcy, Studio Desire's developers found themselves working in a perpetual-growth machine without much morale. The chapter then addresses workers' indifference toward unionization. Game developers' perception of creative work—that one needs to think outside the box, that creative work is decidedly different from blue-collar work, and that therefore unions would not be helpful—is socially structured. Yet they seem to be indifferent to facing and managing risk in more collective ways.
Conclusion
Authors: Bulut Ergin
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter provides a critique of liberal attempts at achieving “quality of life” in the game industry. It considers universal basic income, game industry unionization, and the radical imagining of a postwork society. The chapter also emphasizes the immediate need for making demands based on utopian hopes. Through hope and praxis, game developers and workers can provide partial answers as to how people can disautomatize themselves, denaturalize their commitment to work, liberate play from its instrumentalized forms, and reconstruct work as collaborative and creative activity outside relations of domination. The chapter then makes a call for being killjoys against a future that is primarily shaped by the unequal regime of ludopolitics because game workers—and people, as players and citizens—deserve better.
Introduction
Authors: Noggle James
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter discusses the peculiar combination of the unfelt emergence and motions of strongly felt feelings, which appears all over eighteenth-century writing. The usages express something deep but inexplicit about how affect was understood in the eighteenth century, how feeling, passions, the emotions, and even perception itself were seen subtly to come into existence and move people. Instead of drawing attention to itself as an especially significant, well-defined concept or idea, a word like insensibly occurs almost in passing in the period's writing. But this unstudied casualness, far from rendering its meaning insignificant, holds a key to its power. A scarcely noticed but crucial and consistent set of gestures to an affect that cannot be felt: that is the terrain this book explores. Instead of indicating a mere lack of feeling—an affective blockage, impassivity, stupefaction—insensibly unfolding processes initiate and build strong feeling or make it possible.
Philosophy
Authors: Noggle James
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.
Political Economy
Authors: Noggle James
Published: September 2020

This chapter explores how money moves people in two ways, as depicted in eighteenth-century commercial writing. Obviously, it incites and gratifies powerful passions: greed, envy, and “self-liking,” in Bernard Mandeville's terms early in the century—or, as Adam Smith later has it, feelings appropriate to different social stations, such as merchants' slow-burning passion for gain or the consuming vanities of the rich and great. Strong feelings serve as the prime movers of commerce. But money also affects people in ways they feel just barely or not at all. Their personally, passionately motivated acts lead them unawares to participate in the movement of money as a social force. Indeed, the insensible movements of money, prices, tendencies of taxation, and the like seem to float free of any particular human feeling, motive, or agency. Ultimately, the feeling and unfeeling generated by commerce intertwine as themes in the period's writing, and together they expand the affective range of commercial life beyond what scholars have usually thought of as “economic sentiments.”
Introduction
Authors: Phillips Sarah G.
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter lays out the case of Somaliland and the role of international intervention within the region’s troubled history. Somalilanders’ historically grounded fear about the velocity of war—and the irrelevance of international actors to containing its spread—is foregrounded such that in times of crisis, mobilizing for political violence is largely bracketed out as a viable, or perhaps even logical, course of action. The chapter briefly lays the groundwork for this case study by delving into the history of Somaliland with respect to its parent state, the Republic of Somalia. It notes the unusual divergence in the levels of violence experienced by Somaliland and the Republic of Somalia since the 1990s. In addition to Somaliland’s history, the chapter also lays out the methodology for conducting Somaliland’s case study as well as the impact of discourse literature upon the study.
Local Ownership and the Rules of the Game
Authors: Phillips Sarah G.
Published: September 2020

This chapter shows how Somaliland’s institutions have helped to facilitate both war and peace, which is reflected in the way that the independence discourse emphasizes that peace is never guaranteed and so must be actively nurtured. It charts the evolution of the governance institutions that structured key aspects of Somaliland’s recovery between 1991 and 1997, contextualizing their role in ending the violence and in the subsequent maintenance of peace. It emphasizes the contested nature of their emergence and the degree to which their contingency diminishes the notion that there is a “basic set of tools emerging from experience” that can be applied to post-conflict situations. After illustrating the complexity of the rules of the game that were iteratively established over several years and across dozens of the clan-based conferences, the chapter zooms in to examine the government’s institutional capacity to enforce rules that are not directly related to either to violence or civil order: the payment of tax. It argues that the government’s inability to compel people to pay tax has actually helped to produce a limited measure of taxation compliance.
War and Peace in the Independence Discourse
Authors: Phillips Sarah G.
Published: September 2020

This chapter spotlights the powerful discourse about independence that re/produced shared meanings about each of these elements, demonstrating their contingent nature. It argues that the maintenance of peace is less a function of institutional strength than of a discourse that structures the conditions of possibility such that political violence seems illogical or dangerous. The discourse articulates engrained popular ideas about the proximity—and dangerous unpredictability—of violence. The visible consequences of failing to negotiate a peace settlement in Somalia undoubtedly reinforced Somalilanders’ motivations to succeed in doing so. For Somalilanders, the war in and around Mogadishu provided a tangible worst-case scenario that graphically illustrated the potential for violence to spiral out of control in structural circumstances that closely resembled Somaliland’s. It suggests that the maintenance of peace rests, to a significant degree, on the reproduction of a belief that violence is undesirable, rather than the enforcement capacity of the institutions that articulate that belief.
Conclusion
Authors: Phillips Sarah G.
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter presents an argument regarding international intervention in fragile states. It does not assert an anti-aid mindset so much as it argues that focusing on international aid distracts external actors from a greater issue at hand—whether or not aid is even necessary in the first place. The chapter argues that “aid matters less than we think” it does because it is does not alter the asymmetries that make it difficult for countries in the Global South to extract themselves from violence and poverty. In fact, it expresses those asymmetries. The chapter goes on to clarify this stance within the fragile states discourse and the necessary fiction of intervention in fragile states. To conclude, the chapter takes one final look at Somaliland’s exceptionalism.
Time of Hope, 1964–1967
Authors: Hurtado-Torres Sebastián
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines how, between 1964 and 1969, relations between the U.S. government and the Chilean government were conducted mostly through the channels established by the work of U.S. ambassadors and political officers assigned to Chile. This mode of operation was an underlying condition for the U.S. embassy's deep level of involvement in Chilean politics in the years of the Frei administration. The chapter then looks at the appointment of Ralph Dungan as ambassador to Chile. Dungan adhered, broadly speaking, to the ideas encompassed in modernization theory that served as the intellectual basis for U.S. foreign policy in the Kennedy–Johnson era, so his personal convictions converged nicely with the political project of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party. This ideological affinity made for smooth functioning of the relations between Chile and the United States while Dungan served as ambassador in Santiago even when the positions of both parties were at odds, as in the case of the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965.
The Presidential Candidacy of Radomiro Tomic
Authors: Hurtado-Torres Sebastián
Published: September 2020

This chapter assesses the presidential candidacy of Radomiro Tomic. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Eduardo Frei Montalva appointed his old friend and fellow Christian Democratic leader Radomiro Tomic to the ambassadorship in Washington. The decision, apparently made after consulting with the appointee, clearly looked toward the 1970 presidential election. Tomic, as it was widely known, was second only to Frei in the Christian Democratic leadership, and his nomination as the candidate of the party for the next presidential election was all but preordained. As the country's representative in the most important center of power in the Western Hemisphere, Tomic's image and standing in Chile would be shielded from the potentially negative consequences of being actively involved in domestic politics. At the same time, Tomic would be able to forge links with the Washington establishment, a more than precious asset for someone whose main political goal was to become president of Chile. Ultimately, Tomic was one of the historic leaders of the Christian Democratic Party. Besides his left-leaning political position, what identified Tomic and distinguished him from most politicians of his generation was his charisma.
The United States and the Presidential Election of 1970
Authors: Hurtado-Torres Sebastián
Published: September 2020

This chapter studies the 1970 Chilean presidential election. As the Marxist Left had a good chance of winning, the 1970 election stood as a rare opportunity for a nation to head toward socialism by freely choosing an avowedly Marxist leader and an explicitly revolutionary project. The implications of such a choice, everyone understood, were enormous. From the viewpoint of Salvador Allende and the Left, the so-called “Chilean road to Socialism” would eventually lead to a thorough renovation of Chile's political framework and economic system and realize the goals of social justice long sought by the parties representing the true interests of the working class. From the viewpoint of anti-Marxist sensibilities, especially in the Christian Democratic Party, a government of Popular Unity could transform Chile's fine democracy into an authoritarian or dictatorial system like those of Cuba or Eastern Europe. On the international scene, an Allende victory would also have profound repercussions. An Allende victory would be a huge triumph for the cause of world revolution and, consequently, a crushing blow for the standing of the United States in the global Cold War.
A History of the Gendarmerie in Niger
Authors: Göpfert Mirco
Published: September 2020

This chapter traces the history of the Nigerien gendarmerie. The gendarmes and their colonial predecessors—the tirailleurs, méharistes, gardes de cercle, and colonial gendarmes—have always worked in vast rural Niger, populated almost exclusively by subsistence farmers and pastoralists. Since the early twentieth century, these “strangers” have disciplined the rural population, managed the French colonial, later Nigerien national territory, spread French as the national language, established bureaucratic procedures, and imposed French colonial, then Nigerien national law. They have been advancing into a sphere they perceived as an “institutional vacuum” open to legitimate intrusion and in need of a new social order. Working between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, rural police forces tried to make society legible to govern it and turn a social hieroglyph into an administratively more convenient format of numbers and texts. At the same time, they attempted to impose a normative order on what they perceive as a savage and chaotic illegitimate sphere. The gendarmes have been pushing this frontier ever since; yet it cannot be crossed—it is the bureaucratic horizon that moves with them.
The Ear
Authors: Göpfert Mirco
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the gendarmes' sense of hearing. Usually, the gendarmes' work began with what they heard people say, how these people told them what they had to say, how the gendarmes listened to them and tried to make sense of what they had just heard. Technically, the gendarmes were supposed to “hear” structure in what they were told; to make a distinction between civil and criminal matters, between felonies, misdemeanors, and minor offences. Their bureaucratically attuned ear, in other words, was supposed to “hear” order behind all the noise. Yet what the gendarmes' “vocational ear” was ultimately attuned to was anything but fixed and clear—among others because the gendarmes had little say in what people told them in the first place. In this frontier-condition, both the world and the senses undergo a process of mutual ordering—or attuning.
The Eye
Authors: Göpfert Mirco
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines how the gendarmes' eye tries to constantly reach out into the unknown, and this reaching out ideally leads to the production of knowledge, facts, and truth. The gendarmes' eye, particularly as a device and metaphor for surveillance, is thus at the heart of the frontier as a project of reaching out, pushing forward, and moving beyond. The gendarmes in Godiya had to grapple with Niger itself, as it was still a very poor “registering machine” and knowledge apparatus. The chapter then sheds some light on what the daily exercise of state surveillance can mean in a context where the state seems to know very little about its citizens. In this context, surveillance in particular and the frontier-project in general does not so much appear like the calculated action conceived by a powerful state dispositive—a strategy—but rather as a tactical way of operating: the improvised, localized, often spontaneous and makeshift practices of “make do.” Indeed, the gendarmes often needed informants—who can be thought of as “knowledge brokers”—to locate or identify a person, to understand the context of a particular complaint and the disputants' relationship, and to know their families' previous history.
Aristotle the Platonist
Authors: Gerson Lloyd P.
Published: September 2020

This chapter evaluates the contributions of Aristotle to the completion of the Platonic project. Although it is undeniably true that Aristotle dissented from many claims made by Plato, it focuses on the principles he shared with Plato, his arguments for these, and some of the illuminating things he had to say about the application of these principles. Aristotle was as opposed to Naturalism as Plato. His argument for the subject matter of the science of being qua being supports Plato's identification of the subject matter of philosophy. Ultimately, one of Aristotle's greatest contributions to the Platonic project is the concept of potency. The chapter then discusses Aristotle's introduction of what has been called the immortal or agent intellect. The immortal intellect seems to be Aristotle's version of what Plato calls “the immortal part of the soul,” that which is separable from the body and capable of knowledge. The chapter also examines Aristotle's own account of a first principle of all, the Unmoved Mover, which had an enormous effect on how later soi-disant Platonists viewed Plato himself.
Plotinus the Platonist
Authors: Gerson Lloyd P.
Published: September 2020

This chapter assesses the contributions of Plotinus to the completion of the Platonic project. In the time between Plato and Plotinus, there were some six hundred years of reflections on the dialogues, Aristotle's testimony, and the indirect tradition. These reflections left multiple seemingly intractable problems and a susceptibility among self-declared Platonists to various charges of inconsistency. The chapter outlines Plotinus's efforts to solve these problems and to introduce consistency into the systematic framework. The three basic principles or hypostases of Plotinus's system unite the elements of Ur-Platonism and the foundational principle. That is, antinominalism, antimaterialism, antimechanism, antiskepticism, and antirelativism have their theoretical foundation in the hierarchically and causally ordered series One/Good, Intellect, and Soul. What this means, among other things, is that the correct version of what Aristotle calls the science of ultimate principles and causes will arrive at this triad. The chapter then looks at Plotinus's critique of Stoicism, distinguishing between Platonic and Stoic wisdom.
Concluding Reflections
Authors: Gerson Lloyd P.
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter examines the term “Neoplatonism,” which has had a mainly pejorative connotation since its invention in the middle of the eighteenth century. If one insists on giving the term some more or less neutral descriptive content, the chapter suggests that it be used to refer to the versions of Platonism born out of criticisms of Plotinus by his successors. These criticisms for the most part focus on the problem of an absolutely simple first principle of all that is causally efficacious. Plato's answer is to appeal to the metaphor of “flowing” to indicate what the Good does eternally. Plotinus's logical argument is to the effect that if the first principle is unique as well as absolutely simple, then the outcome of the flow must be other than absolutely simple; it must be at least minimally complex. And then continued flow means increasing complexity until maximal complexity is achieved. Among the so-called Neoplatonists, an increasingly more refined account of this flow was sought. This account experienced two waves of attack; the first was from Christian philosophers who wanted to identify the first principle of all with the God of scripture. The second wave is related to the first. Roughly in the middle of the seventeenth century, Platonism was so thoroughly mixed up with Christianity that it could not meet the Naturalism of the new physics on philosophical grounds.
Notes from the Santa Cruz Island Reserve
Authors: Farnsworth John Seibert
Published: September 2020

This chapter presents the author's field notes from the Santa Cruz Island Reserve. The author was particularly interested in studying island foxes. Lacking natural predators, island foxes tend not to find humans intimidating, indeed appearing tame even though they are technically wild. The island fox is currently on the rebound from endangered status. There were two thousand foxes on Santa Cruz Island in 1994, but canine distemper and golden eagle predation reduced the numbers to under 135 by 2000. The author was also interested in the endangered plants, the red-tailed hawk, the anise swallowtail, and the island scrub-jays. Not only is the island scrub-jay endemic, occurring only on the island, but it is also the only insular land bird in either the United States or Canada. The explanation for this is that scrub-jays seem incapable of crossing significant amounts of water.
Notes from the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory
Authors: Farnsworth John Seibert
Published: September 2020

This chapter highlights the author's field notes from the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (GRRO). A hawkwatcher with the GGRO commits to a rotation during the fall migration, basically mid-August to early December, participating on a team at least one day every other week. The author's team has an exceptional level of experience. The training was rigorous, but the GGRO style was reassuring. The rule for beginners is “When you see a hawk, start to talk.” They had to learn not only the field marks of the nineteen species they might encounter, but also the local topography, where every landmark goes by a distinct name. As a general rule, the more northerly the winds, the better the hawkwatching. The birds, after all, are heading south, and most of them are smart enough to avoid migrating into a headwind whenever possible. The author was especially interested in raptors and ferruginous hawks.
Notes from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest
Authors: Farnsworth John Seibert
Published: September 2020

This chapter details the author's field notes from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. The author was awarded a two-week residency in the forest through the Spring Creek Project, which is administered through Oregon State University. The project began in 2003 and will continue until 2203, fully funded. The mission is to keep a “Forest Log” of ecological reflections for two centuries. The chapter then recounts the author's identification of the trees and plants. The trees include Douglas-firs, western hemlock, western red cedars, and Pacific silver firs. Meanwhile, the plants include the Low Oregon grape, trillium, and Linnaea borealis, better known as “twinflower.” However, there were no blooms to speak of at the end of October.
Introduction
Authors: Blome David A.
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of the ancient Greek scholarship “beyond the polis.” At its broadest, third-world or beyond-the-polis scholarship encompasses all Greek polities aside from Athens and Sparta. In a more focused version, such scholarship concentrates on regions where the polis—that is, a self-governing community of citizens—coexisted with or was subsidiary to other forms of political and social organization. Instead of viewing the ancient Greek world through a single sociopolitical lens, beyond-the-polis scholars seek to contextualize the different state-forms that prevailed elsewhere in the Greek world. In this way, the focus of classical Greek history can shift beyond the polis. This book explores four military encounters during the classical period which document the collective capabilities of upland Greeks, bringing ancient Greek military history and beyond-the-polis scholarship into dialogue with each other.
The Phocian Chalk Raid of the Thessalian Camp Circa 490
Authors: Blome David A.
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the Phocian Chalk Raid of the Thessalian camp circa 490, the most illustrative example of the Phocians' collective capabilities during the late Archaic and early classical periods. Studying the accounts of Herodotus, Pausanias, and Polyaenus, it reconstructs a historiographically marginalized, violent encounter that involved some of the most unusual military tactics ever employed between Greeks. Indeed, the encounter defies virtually every established convention of classical Greek warfare. The Phocians' defensive strategy reflects a sound understanding of the potential threats that surrounded their ethnos. Ultimately, the defense of circa 490 illustrates that even without a formal federal structure, the Phocians still constituted a well-organized and effective political entity. Since an ethnic affiliation, common coinage, and a common meeting place distinguished later koina (federal states), the possibility remains that a federal state existed in Phocis during the time in question. But the point is that there did not need to be a formal federal state in Phocis for an effective defense.
Turf Wars in Colombia’s Red Corner
Authors: Ballvé Teo
Published: September 2020

This chapter shows how, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War drew Urabá's economies of violence into the vortex of insurgency and counterinsurgency, reinforcing the region's reputation as a stateless frontier. The political violence wracking Urabá had clinched its position in the minds of locals and outsiders alike as a lawless, stateless frontier zone. While critical of these discourses of statelessness, the chapter demonstrates how they had a powerful effect on local political struggles. The frontier effect enabled the proliferation of competing state projects, turning the region into an even more fractious social space—a jagged mosaic of rival territorialities. But the violent clashes between insurgency and counterinsurgency that made Urabá into the “red corner” of Colombia were not caused by the absence of the state; they were conflicts over the form and content of statehood itself. None of these struggles played out in the absence of governmental structures and practices.