bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ruídos urbanos na cidade de São Paulo, Brasil: um estudo de caso
Authors: Silva Gilmar da , Côrtes Pedro Luiz , Dias António Guerner , Lima Igor Silva , Grangeiro Andre Luis Dias , Fernandes Henrique de Carvalho
Published: January 2019

Diante das inúmeras oportunidades que as grandes metrópoles oferecem à população, tem-se notado na cidade de São Paulo, bem como, em outros grandes centros um crescimento geométrico desordenado, onde não se respeitam as diretrizes impostas pelos critérios de uso e ocupação do solo instituído pelos seus planos diretores. O espaço físico cada vez mais reduzido e a falta de planejamento e fiscalização dos órgãos responsáveis pelas metrópoles aproximam as edificações de lugares que geram níveis elevados de ruído como grandes avenidas, linhas férreas, aeroportos, terminais rodoviários e outros, tornando o ruído urbano um problema a ser resolvido ou mitigado, sabendo que este é um grande causador de danos à saúde. Diante de tal fato, essa pesquisa levantou os níveis de ruídos urbanos em 6 pontos (P1, P2, P3, P4, P5 e P6) no entorno da estação do Metrô Guilhermina Esperança na cidade de São Paulo. Para a realização das medições do índice de ruído utilizou-se um equipamento chamado decibelímetro que foi calibrado em laboratório credenciado pelo Inmetro. Os resultados desta pesquisa demonstram que na região de estudo, os níveis de ruído provocados pela passagem dos trens, bem como o ruído do ambiente ultrapassaram os limites estabelecidos pela norma técnica que regula o assunto que é a ABNT – NBR 10.151:2000. Esses ruídos geram no entorno da área pesquisada condições impróprias de habitabilidade se constituindo num problema de saúde ambiental. Todavia uma das soluções propostas para amenizar ou mitigar os impactos provocados por este fenômeno, seria a instalação de barreiras acústicas.
Sound for Thought: Listening as Metabolism
Authors: Butera Michael Vincenzo
Published: January 2019

The metaphor of metabolism, in its permeating and incorporative senses, can extend fruitfully beyond digestion. Here, I consider it as analogous to the phenomenological process of audition. Neither static nor disaffected in a state of abstract rationality, but necessarily implicated in the objects and contexts of listening, the auditor ingests, accepts, disseminates, and expulses sound. Through this, we might see the beginnings of a phenomenological vocabulary which is based in incorporative perceptual subjectivity (not universal aesthetics) and the inimitable character of audition (thus not primarily visualistic). Beyond the construction of an organic auditory phenomenology, the analogy of metabolism and audition suggests a reciprocal correspondence between the listening subject and the world within which sounds are manifested. Furthermore, these metaphors speak to a specific history of philosophical discourse concerning issues of temporal subjectivity, oral othering, and affective perception.
Voices on the wind: Compositional Approaches to the identification and Interrogation of Meaning in the Soundscape
Authors: Leadley Marcus Jonathan
Published: January 2019

@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.FootnoteTextChar { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } In this paper I explore the relationship between environmental sound, perception and utterance. I identify meaning as a property of utterance, the situated instance of language use, and locate its presence in the soundscape as a point of reference for all humans that constitute a particular acoustic community. My starting point is the premise that our experience of aural space and the soundscape are so profoundly connected to our experience of what it is to be human that there is a direct relationship, established over millennia, between the environments in which communication takes place and the ways in which we communicate. Further to this, I suggest that sound is the binding agent in a dialogic relationship between consciousness, environment and context. I argue that this binding operates through a process in which differing degrees of awareness and recognition of soundscape features, structures and inter-relations facilitate a shift between basic hearing functions and more informed modes of listening. This leads, in turn, to expression through mimicry, performativity and utterance. In other words, the dialogic characteristic of the relationship is located in the reciprocity between hearing, speaking and environmental phenomena.   The central hypothesis of this paper states that, without sound binding us into this dialogic relationship with environment and context, we would not have been able to develop inter-human sounds in order to function as social beings. I argue that this relationship underpins the formation of linguistic tools that both help structure, and provide access to the perceptual and conceptual knowledge of the world that we store in memory. This combined knowledge structure informs both our external engagements and sense of self. Both my initial premise and hypothesis are supported by theoretical and practical research, including participant observation and feedback from a series of sound installations designed to progress the inquiry.
Music and the emergence of experimental science in early modern Europe
Authors: Gouk Penelope
Published: January 2019

The seventeenth century witnessed major advances in physics and experimental science. This paper argues that while the role of new visual technologies (e.g. the microscope) has been well studied, less attention has been paid to acoustic technologies in early modern natural philosophy. In particular, I attend to the relationship between making music, a specific form of organised sound mediated through instruments, and the production of new scientific knowledge. On the one hand, this relationship developed in the context of acoustics, a new discipline first mapped out by Francis Bacon. On the other hand, music’s relationship to natural philosophy was also more fundamental, since harmony was understood as an organising principle of the universe, the laws of musical strings providing a model for other forms of vibrative motion. I also show the importance of musical training for Galileo’s experiments and the significance of harmony for Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.
Facing sound – voicing art
Authors: Lønstrup Ansa
Published: January 2019

This article is based on examples of contemporary audiovisual art with a primary focus on the Tony Oursler solo exhibition Face to Face in Aarhus Art Museum ARoS, 2012. My investigation involves a combination of qualitative interviews with visitors, observations of the audience’s interactions with the exhibition and the artwork in the museum space, and short analyses of individual works of art based on reception aesthetics, phenomenology, and newer writings on sound, voice and listening. The focus of the investigation is the quality and possible perspectives of the interaction with audiovisual works of art, articulating and sounding out their own ‘voices’. This methodological combination has been chosen to transgress the dichotomy between the aesthetic or hermeneutic artwork ‘text’ analysis and cultural theory, which focuses on the context understood as the framing, the cultural acts and agendas around the aesthetic ‘text’. The article will include experiences with another exhibition, David Lynch: The Air is on Fire (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2007 and Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand, Copenhagen, 2010- 2011). The two exhibitions are fundamentally different in their integration of sound. My field of interest concerns the exploration of sound as artistic material in audiovisual combinations and those audiovisual works of art that might cause a change in the participatory strategy of the art museum towards the audience.
The acoustic phenomenon of ‘cocktail party’
Authors: Bubaris Nikos
Published: January 2019

The term ‘cocktail party effect’ derives from acoustics and refers to the possibility to distinguish the voice of a particular speaker amid the noisy confusion produced by a plethora of overlapping voices and conversations. In this article I propose a conceptual elaboration of the term by considering the acoustic phenomenon in question, both literally and metaphorically, as one of the most characteristic conditions shaping contemporary collective and acoustic experience in environments overloaded with information. In the first part, I discuss the conditionsthat give rise to the cocktail party acoustic phenomenon, as they relate to particular types of social, communicative and listening practices. In the second part, I present a case study of the phenomenon based on the creation of a soundscape composition developed in conjunction with a written text, both occasioned by the political activity in the public space of the Syntagma Square in Athens during the summer of 2011.
Improving models for urban soundscape systems
Authors: Harvey Lawrence
Published: January 2019

Large-scale urban soundscape systems offer novel environments for electroacoustic composers, sound artists and sound designers to extend their practice beyond concert halls, art galleries and screen-based digital media. One such system with 156 loudspeakers was installed in 1991 on the Southgate Arts and Leisure Precinct in central Melbourne. Over the next 15 years another three large multichannel soundscape systems were installed on other sites close to the first. A fifth system was established for a single work of art in 2006. Despite this private and public investment in sound art estimated at over one million Australian dollars, several systems are no longer in operation while some remaining systems require technical and curatorial development to ensure their continued cultural presence. To investigate why some systems had failed, interviews were conducted with key players in the development and operation of the five systems. A report from the interviews was produced and is the basis of this paper framing critical issues for improving models of urban soundscape practice. Following a brief overview of related studies in urban sound practices, and descriptions of the system and original study, key themes that emerged from the interviews are examined.
Acoustic architecture before science. The case of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw
Authors: Cressmann Darryl
Published: January 2019

Concert halls are designed for attentively listening to music. To guarantee that the listening experience mediated by these buildings is acoustically correct, architects rely upon math- ematical formulas to measure and predict how a building will sound. Armed with these formulas, they are able to experiment with unconventional concert hall designs without compromising the acoustics. The achievements of modern architectural acoustics are a valorisa- tion of the mathematical formulas used to predict acoustics. Indeed, the development of a predictive theory of architectural acoustics by Wallace Sabine in 1900 has been celebrated as the beginning of a new era of understanding sound and acoustic design. However, overlooked in this scientific triumphalism are the aesthetic standards that shape the acoustic design of buildings for music. Sabine’s formula transformed our understanding of how music behaves in an enclosed space, but it did not change our understanding of how music should sound in these spaces. In this paper I explore these points through a history of the acoustic design of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, which opened in 1888. Through an examination of the history of the acoustic design of the Concertgebouw, I describe the process of acoustic design prior to Sabine as a process of aural imitation. With this concept I reconceptualise the history of acoustic architecture to better recognise, first, how Sabine’s theory is simply a more effective form of aural imitation, and second, how the quantification of sound has led to a subjective idea of good sound becoming fixed as an objective measure of what good sound should be.
Adapting Peircean semiotics to sound theory and practice
Authors: Murray Leo
Published: January 2019

This paper argues that the semiotic model proposed by C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) has the potential to be adapted to sound in order to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework and meta- language for describing sound both as product and as practice. The flexibility of the Peircean model means that it is ideally suited to the analysis of sound and sound/image combinations and to the analysis of audio-visual media. The starting point of the decision-making process for sound producers and designers can be framed by some fundamental questions: (a) What does the audience need to know? (b) How should the audience feel? And (c) what should they think? With the overall goal of the soundtrack being to ‘serve the needs of the story’, the choices in the soundtrack are geared around creating these understandings or emotional responses. The opening sequence from The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) is examined to illustrate the Peircean model as it is applied to sound in the audio-visual soundtrack. Viewed in this way the soundtrack can be thought of as a kind of trail of breadcrumbs, a part of the narrative which allows the audience to search for cause and consequence for themselves. A Peircean semiotic approach can then be used to inform the process of designing the soundtrack as well as aid in the analysis of the finished work.
Carceral soundscapes. Sonic violence and embodied experience in film about imprisonment
Authors: Lovatt Philippa
Published: January 2019

Post 9/11 the ‘invisibility’ of political prisoners as part of the ‘war on terror’ has had a direct correlation with the concealment of abusive treatment of detainees in the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Details of these abuse scandals have indicated that there has been a notable shift away from the optical towards the sonic as a form of punishment and torture, with accounts of detainees being subjected to rock music played for prolonged periods at excruciating volumes (Smith, 2008). Addressing a number of key concerns – sound and phe- nomenology, sound and the ethics of spectatorship, sound and the experience/intensification of confinement, sound as a (potential) mode of resistance/control – this paper will investigate the use of sound in cinematic depictions of imprisonment including A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956), Hunger (McQueen, 2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012). The aim is to explore how an auditory perspective might complicate previously held ocularcentric conceptions of power in penal institutions (Foucault, 1977) and to examine how this experience of sound is represented on screen. The essay also considers how sound design can bridge the distance between self and other, and align the spectator emotionally, ethically and politically with a film’s characters. The essay thus proposes that an ethical spectatorship may require cinematic auditors to listen more critically, and it claims that a better understanding of the fundamental role that sound and listening play in the articulation and recognition – or indeed, disavowal – of the subjectivity of prisoners within these narratives may lead to an increased awareness of the politics of aesthetics of individual films. The essay concludes by suggesting that the field of sound studies creates further opportunities for research that explores these important questions about representation, spectatorship and ethics from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Vocal Woolf: The audiobook as a technology of health
Authors: Björkén-Nyberg Cecilia
Published: January 2019

This article explores the therapeutic potential of the performing audiobook voice. It takes as its point of departure the view that the audiobook negotiates the semantics of a text and its vocal manifestation. A key idea is that the performing voice is an affordance for creating a salutogenic sense of coherence in the listener. The argument is theoretically situated within the context of the psychology and sociology of music, with affect regulation and ‘health musicking’ as significant elements. The British actress Juliet Stevenson’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s second novel Night and Day (1919) will be approached as a case of ‘health musicking’ and an eventbased appreciation of sonic culture. This discussion will focus on the listeners’ appropriation of the sound object for their own empowering purposes.
Beyond insulation and isolation: Towards an attuning approach to noise in hospitals
Authors: Højlund Marie Koldkjær
Published: January 2019

Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise levels as the main causal explanation for ranking noise as a critical stressor for patients, relatives and staff. Therefore, the most widely used strategies to tackle the problem in practice are insulation and isolation strategies to reduce measurable and perceptual noise levels. However, these strategies do not actively support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is a key element in creating healing environments, according to the paradigm of Evidence-Based Design and Healing Architecture. This article suggests that the gap in contemporary research is intimately linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field, which is incapable of accommodating the multisensory and atmospheric conditions amplifying the experience of noise. This article argues that an attuning approach should be included in the field to help bridge the gap by offering active ways of attuning to the shared environment.
Voicing memories
Authors: Neumark Norie
Published: January 2019

Last night as I was falling asleep, I put in my earbuds to listen to an audiobook. To get into the Nordic mood to write for a journal coming out of Scandinavia, I scrolled to one of Henning Mankell’s famous detectives, Kurt Wallander. On the verge of sleep, somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness – like memory itself – I listened to Wallander, through his narrator, listening to the room at the scene of the crime, waiting for it to speak to him, to voice what had happened there. Through the haze of half-sleep I wondered whose memory was being voiced in that assemblage comprised of the iPod and earbuds, the audiobook, the room, the narrator, the author and my own memories of watching Krister Henriksson play Wallander and of listening to other Wallander books? And when I woke today and slid the earbuds out of my ears, I felt ready to attend to assemblages and the memories that they voice.
Multi-Voiced Archival Performances and Sun Ra/ El Saturn Collection
Authors: Harnetty Brian
Published: January 2019

This article critically explores creative reinterpretations of a sonic archive. It focusses on the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection, a catalogue of the experimental jazz composer Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914-93). In 2010 the collection’s caretakers commissioned visual artists, writers and musicians, including myself, to create new works based on the recordings. Each resulting work acts as an archival performance, understood here as any embodied reimagining and recontextualisation of the archive. Together, the works suggest a process of listening to and remixing the archive ‘from below’, rather than a singular, top-down authority of archival interpretation and power. I examine these works through analysis and artist interviews, noting a tension between appropriation and recontextualisation on one hand and archival stewardship and acknowledgement on the other. I observe how exchange, conflict, solidarity and accountability are all potentially present within each archival performance.
The One-shot Sequence and the Rhetoric of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema and the Films of Paolo Sorrentino
Authors: Zagarrio Vito
Published: January 2019

The one-shot sequence – the articulation of an entire scene through a
single, unbroken long take – is one of the cinema’s most important
rhetorical devices and has therefore been much used and widely theorised over
the years. This article provides a brief overview of these theories and of the
multiple ways in which the one-shot sequence has been used both in world cinema
(in general) and Italian cinema (in particular) in order to contextualise its
use by one of Italian cinema’s best-known and most significant
practitioners, Paolo Sorrentino. Through close analyses of one-shot sequences in
Sorrentino’s films L’uomo in più/One Man
Up, Le conseguenze dell’amore/The Consequences of
Love, This Is the Place and Il divo –
La vita spettacoloare di Giulio Andreotti – the article argues
that Sorrentino’s predilection for the device is best explained by the
wide variety of functions that it serves (as a mark of directorial bravura and
auteur status; as a self-reflexive device and meditation on the cinematic gaze;
as a political tool; and as a means of generating emotion). While rooted in
history, Sorrentino’s use of the one-shot sequence thus transcends its
position within Italian film history and discourse.
Aesthetics of contingency
Authors: Augustine Matthew C.
Published: January 2019

Aesthetics of contingency provides an important reconsideration of seventeenth-century literature in light of new understandings of the English past. Emphasising the contingency of the political in revolutionary England and its extended aftermath, Matthew Augustine challenges prevailing literary histories plotted according to structural conflicts and teleological narrative. In their place, he offers an innovative account of imaginative and polemical writing, in an effort to view later seventeenth-century literature on its own terms: without certainty about the future, or indeed the recent past. In hewing to this premise, the familiar outline of the period – with red lines drawn at 1642, 1660, or 1688 – becomes suggestively blurred. For all of Milton’s prophetic gestures, for all of Dryden’s presumption to speak for, to epitomise his Age, writing from the later decades of the seventeenth century remained supremely responsive to uncertainty, to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. A study of major writings from the Personal Rule to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, this book also re-examines the material conditions of literature in this age. By carefully deciphering the multi-layered forces at work in acts of writing and reception, and with due consideration for the forms in which texts were cast, this book explores the complex nature of making meaning in and making meaning out of later Stuart England.
The Last Stand
Authors: Williams Terry
Published: January 2019

David, tall, lanky, middle class kid with freckles, who hung himself in the garage. When a young person commit suicide is anyone to blame? Blame is difficult because the death erases all blame and smothers finger pointing, or at least it should. What is remarkable about David and the other kids who either attempt or commit suicide (and the notes reflect this) is they all have the desire for love, to be themselves, to seek approval or to be forgiven.
Shock Jock
Authors: Williams Terry
Published: January 2019

Boots, a handsome, overachieving jock, who talks about “queer theories, cross dresses and loves Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies. He said his sexual proclivity was another issue he needed to figure out. He chose Satanism because of his hatred of the church and as a way to deal with problem at home.
On the Road
Authors: Williams Terry
Published: January 2019

On the Road: (Pp.): Cody, a runaway’s journal. Cody told about his trips on the road after his parents said he had to either get a job or move on. “What am I supposed to do now? Was his immediate reponse. Each of his lettters, reveal something about himself: a wisdom, some new knowledge about a different culture, a shattered sterotype, an adventure where appearances are deceiving. In some ways he was trying to collect wisdoms in his travel because he wants to be different than his parents.
Born-Again Virgin
Authors: Williams Terry
Published: January 2019

Gabriella, a lesbian teenager taught to hate boys falls in love with a young man, gets pregnant and tries to commit suicide. She believe love and hate were brought together by chance circumstances; life is unplanned, unrehearsed, strictly spontaneous moments, where the “thing” just happened and there is no immediate resoultion for the conflict it wrought. These circumstances placed her into an anxiety ridden capsule which made her think constantly of killing herself.
Homo Erectus
Authors: Torrey E. Fuller
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes Homo erectus and its lifestyle. It made more sophisticated handaxes, controlled fire, and migrated halfway around the world. Cognitively, it is likely that Homo erectus had developed self-awareness, and their brains evolved in areas associated with the cognitive trait.
Institutions, Finance, Trade
Authors: Klooster Wim , Oostindie Gert
Published: January 2019

For governance, investment, and the shipment and sale of Atlantic goods the overseas Dutch depended on the United Provinces. The West India Company, which maintained its slave trade monopoly until the 1730s, provided the umbrella for most activities in the Dutch Atlantic world, although Suriname and Berbice were ruled by separate entities in which the WIC was only a partner. In mid-century, the Dutch Guiana colonies offered Dutch investors attractive opportunities, which led to the transfer of tremendous amounts of credit. An artificial boom followed, which failed to produce high profits and ended in a credit crisis which would thwart the further plantation growth of Suriname. Cash crops from Suriname and the other New World colonies were carried in massive quantities to the Dutch Republic, while the Dutch slave trade not only provisioned the Dutch colonies, but also those of other empires.
West Africa
Authors: Klooster Wim , Oostindie Gert
Published: January 2019

The Dutch forts in West Africa were a crucial link in the Dutch gold and ivory trades, and even if the Gold Coast never dominated the Dutch slave trade, the forts were indispensable to the functioning of the commerce in enslaved Africans. The nature of Dutch “society” in this area was distinct from that in Guiana or the Caribbean islands. Housing only sojourners, not settlers, the forts were home almost exclusively to male Europeans. Their high mortality rate – and eagerness to return to Europe – helped shape a community in perpetual flux, as its individual members were constantly replaced by newcomers, and, increasingly, Eurafricans.
The Guianas
Authors: Klooster Wim , Oostindie Gert
Published: January 2019

The Dutch started to develop parts of the Guianas mainly because they had not succeeded in conquering, defending and exploiting Caribbean islands suitable for profitable plantation agriculture. The colonial economies remained fragile and growth would increasingly depend on credits extended from the Republic. The one unique and lasting Dutch contribution to the technology of sugar production was the adaptation of the Dutch polder system to plantation agriculture. The population of the colonies was overwhelmingly of African birth and descent, and almost entirely enslaved. While manumission was rare, in Suriname the major route out of slavery was marronage, and Berbice saw a major slave revolt, which almost ended Dutch rule.
The Insular Caribbean
Authors: Klooster Wim , Oostindie Gert
Published: January 2019

Although plantation agriculture did exist, what made the Dutch islands special, in particular Curacao and Statia, was their functioning as regional entrepôts. Demographically, the large number of Jewish settlers and German soldiers is striking on Curaçao, as is the early development of a considerable community of free people of African and Eurafrican origins. The merchant community of Statia was amongst the most cosmopolitan in the Americas, with Protestant Dutch settlers a minority group and English as the prevailing language. Marronage may have functioned as a safety valve for the slave system, but outright revolts also occurred on Curaçao, at least on four occasions. Metropolitan Dutch cultural influence was limited and did not block the emergence of a relatively stable Creole culture nurtured more by the island’s regional connections than by its links to a faraway metropolis.
The Circulation of Knowledge
Authors: Klooster Wim , Oostindie Gert
Published: January 2019

Given the small number of free citizens, the dearth of local educational facilities and the crassly exploitative character of their societies, the Dutch islands were cultural wastelands like other early modern Caribbean societies. At the same time, ideas, technology and expertise circulated within a Dutch Atlantic world that transcended the narrow boundaries of the metropolis and its colonies and involved a quite extensive network across the wider Atlantic world. There is considerable evidence of scholarly research and its practical uses, ranging from geography and the natural sciences through medicine and agrarian expertise to ethnography. Dutch scholarly interest in the Atlantic colonies, if any, centered on Suriname, with its promising plantation sector and spectacular biodiversity.
Prelude to the Korean War
Authors: Heer Paul J.
Published: January 2019

This chapter discusses how Kennan attempted to apply his strategic vision along the periphery of East Asia, after having assessed that China and the rest of the mainland were strategically expendable to the United States. He advocated the neutralization of Japan and the Philippines—but did so inconsistently—and the avoidance of any US security commitments on the Korean Peninsula or in Southeast Asia, especially Indochina. The chapter chronicles the roles that Kennan and Davies played in various policy deliberations on these countries under Acheson. It concludes with a benchmark summary of Kennan’s cumulative impact on US policy towards East Asia on the eve of the outbreak of the Korean War.
Korea
Authors: Heer Paul J.
Published: January 2019

This chapter chronicles and assesses Kennan’s role in policy deliberations following the outbreak of the Korean War. It examines the inconsistency between his support for US military intervention—on behalf of US credibility and prestige—and his prior dismissal of Korea’s strategic importance. It highlights his warnings against US military intervention by General MacArthur north of the 38th Parallel, and his role in dealing with the disastrous consequences that followed that intervention. The chapter characterizes Kennan’s growing disillusionment with his marginalization in policymaking under Acheson, and with the overall direction of US policy toward East Asia in the wake of the war crisis.
Vietnam
Authors: Heer Paul J.
Published: January 2019

This chapter chronicles Kennan’s emergence as a public critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War fifteen years after he had warned against a US military commitment in Indochina. This episode echoed both his earlier strategic vision in East Asia—which asserted the absence of vital US interests on the mainland—and the earlier dilemma he faced in reconciling that vision with his assessment of the importance of maintaining US prestige and credibility there. The chapter highlights how Kennan declared that his doctrine of containment was not applicable in Vietnam, but that he avoided advocating complete military withdrawal until US prestige was irretrievably lost there.
Ethnic Politics in the Borderlands
Authors: Kopstein Jeffrey S. , Wittenberg Jason
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores how the diffuse ethnic divides of the era of nationalist mobilization during the 19th and 20th centuries re-emerged as specific partisan disputes in independent Poland. These political disputes—over economic redistribution, state ownership, and the proper limits of minority autonomy—colored life in virtually every community and provided the context in which the deadly violence of 1941 would ultimately occur. By translating ethnic demography into political weight, democratic politics in interwar Poland heightened ethnic tensions. Where powerful and articulate Jewish nationalist political parties and movements emerged, Poles and Ukrainians came to understand that the region’s Jews would not and could not be part of their respective nation-building projects.
Measuring Threat and Violence
Authors: Kopstein Jeffrey S. , Wittenberg Jason
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes our data and methods. Our analysis is based on an original dataset of census returns, electoral results, and pogrom location information. We gathered these data at the lowest geographical unit for which they could be merged, yielding observations for over 2,000 localities. We use census data on religion and electoral data on support for Jewish and non-Jewish nationalist parties to measure the degree of perceived political threat prior to the outbreak of war. We establish the characteristics of those localities where pogroms occurred using a variety of methods, including multivariate statistical models and ecological inference.
The Power of Mahjong
Authors: Wang Di
Published: January 2019

This chapter brings out conflicts among neighbors, examines the role of the Residential Committee in the neighborhood, observes the responses of the municipal government and official media concerning the city’s image. Mahjong brings us face to face with changes in daily life and popular culture at the turn of the current century, as daily life moves away from communist control and “socialist morality.” It also serves my argument that these changes reflect a much broader political, economic, social, and cultural transformation in which conflicts between individual rights and the collective interests have become prominent.
Transitions, Continuities, and the Struggle for Monastic Lordship
Authors: Vanderputten Steven
Published: January 2019

This chapter looks at the period around 900 to argue that, below a surface of change brought about by wars, invasions, and local upheavals, a more significant process of transformation was unfolding, determined by socio-political, institutional, and religious alterations initiated several decades earlier. Two observations are essential to understanding this phenomenon. First, that the reorganization of the female monastic landscape in these decades resulted primarily from the progressive reorganization of Lotharingian regional politics. And second, that some religious groups at least continued to rely on the ‘coping strategies’ discussed in the preceding chapter. Far from being the fortunate survivors of processes over which they had had no control, the women in these houses and their male associates were actively involved in securing the continued existence and societal relevance of female communities.
New Beginnings
Authors: Vanderputten Steven
Published: January 2019

This chapter reviews the evidence for simultaneous processes of expansion and contraction in women's monasticism around the year 1000. It investigates, in order, the mechanisms and outcomes of a revived interest on the part of aristocratic agents in founding dynastic sanctuaries served by women religious; the more complex involvement of bishops in the creation of specifically Benedictine nunneries; and finally, episcopal dealings with ‘ambiguous’ monastic communities. From these discussions emerges a picture of an aggressive attempt on the part of clerical agents to insert female religious groups into ecclesiastical structures of power, and aggressive moves to suppress the women’s control over their own spiritual identities and material destinies. These interventions were key to shaping a discourse that denounced non-Benedictine forms of religious observance for women as unsuitable, and to legitimizing a mode of conduct on the part of male reformers that disregarded the interests and opinions of the religious themselves.
Monastic Ambiguities in the New Millennium
Authors: Vanderputten Steven
Published: January 2019

Taking at face value Archdeacon Hildebrand’s ringing cry for reform at the 1059 synod in Rome, historians have concluded that 'ambiguous' communities of the early 1000s had become thoroughly ‘secularized’, and that women’s monastic spirituality had become almost non-existent. Instead of attempting to find arguments for or against the classic narrative of disastrous ‘secularization’, this chapter focuses on what we know about how these women expressed and positioned themselves. It makes three observations. First, that there still existed an internal culture that nurtured the shaping of ‘ambiguous’ monastic identities. Second, that abbesses and their associates deployed a range of ‘coping strategies’ to secure the long-term future of ‘ambiguous’ communities in light of increased competition and volatile relations with the region’s elites. And finally, that the reform of a female house by no means spelled a better future for its membership.
The White Boy’s Burden
Authors: Honeck Mischa
Published: January 2019

Waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates rarely got a chance to relive the lighter days of his youth. One such moment came on July 28, 2010—a day of celebration at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The year marked the one-hundredth birthday of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), and Gates’s keynote address set the tone for a big patriotic show featuring flags, paratroopers, antiaircraft cannons firing blank shots, and a flyover of F-16 jets. Despite the jubilant occasion, the Pentagon chief had not come to spin campfire yarn. Amid the cheers of almost fifty thousand Scouts gathered at the army installation, Gates, an Eagle Scout from 1958, reaffirmed the movement’s intergenerational contract that promised a relationship of mutual allegiance between boys and men. “I believe that today, as for the past 100 years, there is no finer program for preparing American boys for citizenship and leadership than the Boy Scouts of America.” Reciting the themes of crisis, anxiety, and salvation that supporters of the nation’s foremost youth organization had evoked since its founding, Gates extolled scouting as the best remedy for an America “where the young are increasingly physically unfit and society as a whole languishes in ignoble moral ease.” While many youths had degenerated into “couch potatoes,” the BSA continued to make men and leaders, men of “integrity and decency … ​moral courage” and “strong character—the kind of person who built this country and made it into the greatest democracy and the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world.” More was at stake than the fate of the nation. “The future of the world itself,” said Gates, depended on the “kind of citizens our young people” would become. Only with the ...
From Africa to Antarctica
Authors: Honeck Mischa
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores how the BSA globalized the masculine myth of the frontier to combat the rise of a largely peer-regulated, frivolous, and sexualized youth culture in the 1920s. As the propagated “return to normalcy” after World War I had not led to a reinstatement of prewar gender norms but was contradicted by working and voting women as well as men struggling to find proper peacetime masculinities, Scout leaders rediscovered the foreign as a field to discipline youth and mold men. They arranged two spectacular expeditions, one to Africa and the other to Antarctica, which sent four Eagle Scouts abroad in the hope that their age-appropriate and consumer-friendly enactments of a young frontier masculinity would stabilize dominant hierarchies of age and gender. While the official narratives of these expeditions offered reassurance to white elites, the boys’ appropriations of manhood and empire were often idiosyncratic and inconclusive, pointing to the incongruities between adult projection and youthful experience.
A Brother to All?
Authors: Honeck Mischa
Published: January 2019

Among the structures of inequality brought into relief by world Scouting, race had a particular significance for the BSA. Chapter 4 probes how BSA organizers both responded to and influenced transnational efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to diversify the movement along the lines of race while upholding the belief in racial differences as a justification for empire. Given their concern for social order, BSA executives embraced a cautious approach to making Scouting available to domestic and colonial boys of color. Their strategy was inherently defensive and preemptive: the underlying fear was that, unless properly recruited, Filipino, African American, and Native American boys might join anticolonial movements, sap national vigilance, and threaten the empire from within. In a second step, this chapter investigates how boys and men of color who entered Scouting wrestled with their subordinate status in the movement and, where possible, refashioned it to serve their own social and political interests.
The Dangers of the Gift Master
Authors: Makley Charlene
Published: January 2019

This chapter lays out the basic parameters and stakes of development encounters in the Tibetan region of Rebgong through the story of the author’s expulsion from the village household in which she was living in 2008. The narrative attributes those events to the polluted offering scarves she had inadvertently brought into the home, as local officials anxiously anticipated Tibetan unrest ahead of the Beijing Olympics. The author uses that account to lay out her approach to the politics of personhood and presence among Rebgong Tibetans. She argues that personhood for them is grounded in the moral economy of ambivalently charged hospitality relations (“the battle for fortune”) amidst their intensifying fears of the threat posed to households, villages, and monasteries by state-sponsored market logics and social engineering projects. The Tibetan offering scarf, construed as both a sign and a material medium of exchange, serves to illustrate a linguistic anthropological approach to media and the intersubjective dynamics of meaning, agency and efficacy. The chapter thereby considers the consequences throughout the valley of the arrival of powerful outsiders bearing gifts under the auspices of an increasingly authoritarian capitalism unleashed in the Develop the West campaign.
Othering Spaces, Cementing Treasure
Authors: Makley Charlene
Published: January 2019

This chapter moves upriver to a prosperous farming village where the author was “captured” as a donor supporting local Tibetan education officials’ efforts to build a new courtyard wall and gate for their village primary school. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” (modernist “other spaces” that attempt to make manifest certain utopic visions) and taking rural primary school facilities as examples of “corrupt architecture,” the author considers key contestations over the nature of value and moral personhood through the story of an unfolding conflict over the quality of concrete used in the school wall, as new infusions of cash called into question the moral status of village education officials. The author thereby narrates the dilemmas of village men who sought to shore up the divinely protected autonomy of their community while responding to central state pressures to construct urbanized “New Socialist Villages” and consolidated primary schools.
The Melodious Sound of the Right-Turning Conch
Authors: Makley Charlene
Published: January 2019

This chapter moves further upriver to one of the poorest villages in the valley, an important rival community to Kharnak village (the focus of Chapter 3). The chapter begins with an account of the author’s “capture” by the village as a donor supporting the repair of their new primary school’s roof. It then tells the story of the village’s conflictual move from their historical location on a mountain peak down to the valley floor and new highway. The author analyzes interactions around village elders’ petition to the local state, as well as a video they made that touts and contextualizes their new Buddhist temple on the valley floor as the abode of a young and rising, charismatic incarnate lama. In the context of school consolidation and state-led resource extraction in the valley, the author considers the historical narratives in the petition and video to be important parts of villagers’ counter-development efforts as they worked to assert the presence of their community in the face of its administrative erasure.
Spectacular Compassion
Authors: Makley Charlene
Published: January 2019

This is the pivotal chapter in the book because it addresses the translocal implications of battles for fortune in the Sino-Tibetan frontier zone, as well as their fundamental relationship to the threat of state violence. The author analyzes forms of state and Buddhist monastic mourning rituals as public displays of “spectacular compassion” in the wake of the military crackdown on Tibetan unrest and the massive Sichuan earthquake that occurred within weeks of each other in the spring of 2008. Here, competing notions of sovereign authority, responsibility, and administrative geography come to a head in the secret theodicies of rumor and grief throughout the Rebgong valley and beyond.
Peace Treaties in Interstate War
Authors: Fazal Tanisha M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter investigates the declining use of peace treaties to conclude interstate war. The main argument of the chapter is that states have reacted to the proliferation of the laws of war by evading the formalities of war, including the use of peace treaties to end wars. The chapter’s findings support this argument, as well as extensions including the hypothesis that states that violate the laws of war during conflict are especially unlikely to conclude peace treaties. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between declarations of war and peace treaties in interstate war, and finds that the use of these two formalities is highly correlated.
Declarations of Independence in Civil Wars
Authors: Fazal Tanisha M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter asks: why, given a rise in secessionism, are secessionists decreasingly likely to issue formal declarations of independence? The main argument of the chapter is that secessionists are especially sensitive to the preferences of the international community, which has expressed strong opposition to unilateral declarations of independence since the founding of the United Nations. The chapter introduces and uses an original dataset on civil wars and three civil war case studies to assess, and ultimately find support for, this claim.
Colliding Empires
Authors: Effros Bonnie
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores how the French discovery of Roman ruins in Algeria was used to legitimate its annexation of the territory. Intellectuals and politicians argued that the Ottoman Empire was illegitimate; France was the true heir of the shared Latinate civilization created by the Roman Empire. The new French Empire would simply reunite the Mediterranean world. These efforts were, however, thwarted by both human and material actors. Parisian museum administrators thought that the North African finds were of low quality and not of much interest. French colonists argued, by contrast, that the Roman artifacts should stay in Algeria, to help build a French imperial identity. And the things themselves resisted; they broke when soldiers tried to extract them and their weight sank the ships used to transport them. The chapter then suggests that nineteenth-century campaigns to steal, export, and re-signify art and antiquities sometimes fell short of their ambitions.
Introduction
Authors: Kamrava Mehran
Published: January 2019

Summarizes the central arguments of the books and presents its main thesis, namely that the Persian Gulf’s security arrangements feature a number of dynamics that make it unstable and insecure. These include emphasis on hard security and neglect of human security, overreliance on the US as an outside balancer, the pervasiveness of security dilemma, and the wilful actions of regional policymakers.