bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Framing Inequality at the Ground Level
Authors: Guardino Matt
Published: March 2019

This chapter demonstrates that neoliberal news coverage of economic and social welfare policy can shape public opinion in politically consequential ways. It presents an analysis of media content during the 2010 debate over extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts that largely confirms the coverage patterns of earlier economic and social welfare policy debates. It follows this analysis with an online survey experiment. This experiment demonstrates significant effects on public opinion generated by narrow issue framing in news coverage of corporate tax policy. The chapter ends by discussing implications of these findings for public opinion, political knowledge, and socioeconomic inequality.
What’s New? Media, Public Opinion, and Democracy in the 21st Century
Authors: Guardino Matt
Published: March 2019

This chapter contextualizes the book’s historical analyses within more recent media developments. It emphasizes the continuing relevance of the book’s analyses of news media and public opinion in the 21st-century technological environment. The chapter connects durable tendencies in corporate news to newer commercial and technological developments in online communication and social media. It explains how emerging forms and uses of media technology often provide new means of influence for corporate media and other centers of concentrated political-economic power. The chapter also presents an empirical analysis of neoliberal news coverage during the 2017 debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act. It ends by discussing possible media reforms that focus on institutional and systemic changes in U.S. political communication.
Against Capital Punishment
Authors: Yost Benjamin S.
Published: March 2019

Against Capital Punishment offers an innovative proceduralist argument against the death penalty. Worries about procedural injustice animate many popular and scholarly objections to capital punishment. Philosophers and legal theorists are attracted to procedural abolitionism because it sidesteps controversies over whether murderers deserve death, holding out a promise of gaining rational purchase among death penalty retentionists. Following in this path, the book remains agnostic on the substantive immorality of execution; in fact, it takes pains to reconstruct the best arguments for capital punishment and presumes the appropriateness of execution in limited cases. At the same time, the book contends that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. The heart of Against Capital Punishment is a philosophical defense of the well-known irrevocability argument, which analyzes the argument’s premises, establishes their validity, and vindicates them against objections. The central claim is that execution violates the principle of remedy, which requires legal institutions to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The death penalty is repellent to the principle of remedy by dint of its irrevocability. The incompatibility of remedy and execution is the crux of the irrevocability argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the obligatory remedial measures, execution is impermissible. Against Capital Punishment also reveals itself to be free from two serious defects plaguing other versions of proceduralism: the retributivist challenge and the problem of controversial consequences.
Case Studies and Caveats
Authors: Marks Jonathan H.
Published: March 2019

This chapter outlines several partnership case studies involving the food and beverage sector, especially soda companies. These case studies are drawn from the United States, Britain, and India. The analysis highlights certain problematic features—for example, use of corporate logos, trademarks, and color schemes that are likely to promote consumption of products that are exacerbating obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). But, more fundamentally, the analysis ties the case studies to the broader systemic effects discussed in the preceding chapters. These include framing effects, agenda distortion, and impacts on the integrity of and trust in public health agencies.
In Praise of Separation
Authors: Marks Jonathan H.
Published: March 2019

This chapter offers a novel theoretical approach to the ethical hazards arising from public-private interactions. It outlines the role that separation of powers plays in the public sphere, regulating interactions between different branches of government. Antitrust or competition laws play a parallel role in the private sphere, regulating interactions among corporations. Given these norms for addressing reciprocity and influence in the context of public-public and private-private interactions respectively, the chapter makes the case for analogous norms to govern public-private interactions. Rationales for public-private partnerships (PPPs) are analogous to claims that have been decisively rejected when offered as justifications for violations of separation of powers. These rationales similarly fail to justify the public-private partnership paradigm. If public health agencies wish to preserve their independence, integrity, and credibility, they should maintain arm’s length relationships with industry. The chapter outlines a set of principles that can help public officials interpret existing norms (such as conflicts of interest policies) and develop new norms to govern interactions with the private sector.
Religious Freedom in Islam
Authors: Philpott Daniel
Published: March 2019

Is Islam hospitable to religious freedom? The question is at the heart of a public controversy over Islam that has raged in the West over the past decade-and-a-half. Religious freedom is important because it promotes democracy and peace and reduces ills like civil war, terrorism, and violence. Religious freedom also is simply a matter of justice—not an exclusively Western principle but rather a universal human right rooted in human nature. The heart of the book confronts the question of Islam and religious freedom through an empirical examination of Muslim-majority countries. From a satellite view, looking at these countries in the aggregate, the book finds that the Muslim world is far less free than the rest of the world. Zooming in more closely on Muslim-majority countries, though, the picture looks more diverse. Some one-fourth of Muslim-majority countries are in fact religiously free. Among the unfree, 40% are repressive because they are governed by a hostile secularism imported from the West, and the other 60% are Islamist. The emergent picture is both honest and hopeful. Amplifying hope are two chapters that identify “seeds of freedom” in the Islamic tradition and that present the Catholic Church’s long road to religious freedom as a promising model for Islam. Another chapter looks at the Arab Uprisings of 2011, arguing that religious freedom explains much about both their broad failure and their isolated success. The book closes with lessons for expanding religious freedom in the Muslim world and the world at large.
Secular Repressive States in the Muslim World
Authors: Philpott Daniel
Published: March 2019

This chapter continues the book’s analysis of religious freedom in Muslim-majority states by looking at the second of three categories of regimes that are defined by their political theology. This category is secular repressive states, of which there are 15. It defines the basic features of secular repressive states, portraying them through the concept of negative secularism. It looks particularly closely at Turkey, the standard-bearer of repressive secularism, and at Egypt, also an important case. It also focuses on other countries of this kind in the Arab world and in Central Asia, two regions where they are concentrated. This category of state shows that Islam is not the only source of repression in the Muslim-majority world, thus adding to the picture of diversity begun in the previous chapter.
Religiously Repressive States in the Muslim World
Authors: Philpott Daniel
Published: March 2019

This chapter continues the book’s analysis of religious freedom in Muslim-majority states by looking at the third of three categories of regimes that are each defined by their political theology. This category is religiously repressive states. It defines the basic features of religiously repressive states, portraying them through the concept of Islamism, a form of political ideology. It identifies Saudi Arabia and Iran as the standard-bearers of this category and focuses on other countries in this category around the world, which total 21. This chapter makes the case for “Islamoskepticism,” though it also argues that this view does not explain everything about this type of regime.
Realizing Religious Freedom in Islam
Authors: Philpott Daniel
Published: March 2019

This concluding chapter offers six recommendations for increasing the sphere of religious freedom in the Muslim-majority world and in the globe in general. These are drawn from the book’s foregoing analysis. The chapter calls for a “gestalt” shift by which religious freedom is recognized as a universal principle, not a Western value; for a recognition of Islam’s capacity for religious freedom; for a rejection of negative secularism; and for an expansion of religious freedom in the Muslim world. Then, the chapter turns its attention to the rise of religious freedom in the foreign policy of the United States and other Western states, recommending that these states “mainstream” religious freedom in their foreign policies. It also recommends building transnational networks involving religious freedom constituencies.
Who Speaks for Nature?
Authors: Eisenstadt Todd A. , West Karleen Jones
Published: March 2019

Parting from conventional social science arguments that people speak for the ethnic groups they represent or for social or class-based groups, this study argues that attitudes of Ecuador’s Amazon citizens are shaped by environmental vulnerability, and specifically exposure to environmental degradation. Using results of a nationwide survey to demonstrate that vulnerability matters in determining environmental attitudes of respondents, the authors argue that groups might have more success mobilizing on behalf of the environment through geographically based “polycentric rights,” rather than through more traditional and ethnically bound multicultural rights. This book offers among the first methodological bridges between scholarship considering social movements, and predominantly ethnic groups, as primary agents of environmental change in Latin America and those emphasizing the agency of individuals. The authors conduct a nationwide survey to glean respondent positions on a range of environmental issues, then contextualize these findings through scores of in-depth interviews with indigenous, environmental, government, academic, and civil society leaders throughout Ecuador between 2014 and 2017. They find that some abstract issues—like indigenous worldviews—affect peoples’ attitudes, but that concrete experiences—such as that of living in areas of environmental degradation due to oil drilling—is a more important conditioner of environmental attitudes. The authors qualify post-materialism, an early theory of environmentalism, which argues that material well-being makes citizens more protective of the environment. The book concludes that post-materialism must be tempered by individual vulnerability, and that group activism is more successful where people have not yet been adversely impacted by environmental degradation such as oil spills and forest destruction.
How Science, Religion, and Politics Influence Indigenous Attitudes on Climate Change in Ecuador
Authors: Eisenstadt Todd A. , West Karleen Jones
Published: March 2019

To assess the influence of science and religion on climate change, in this chapter we analyze our national survey focused on climate change in Ecuador and find that with regard to climate change specifically, religiosity and indigenous cosmovision impact respondents’ belief in climate change. Contrary to the US-centered literature on religious beliefs and climate change in the West, religiosity and cosmovision have positive effects on climate change beliefs. Recognizing that possession of an indigenous cosmovision and a Catholic or Protestant religious identity are not incompatible, we also consider how these traits interact. In addition to being influenced by both science and religion, respondents adjust their beliefs in climate change depending on whether they were located on the nation’s extractive frontier. We also show with case studies that science, religion, and a history of extractivism all impact citizen beliefs in climate change.
Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics
Authors: Raymond Mark
Published: March 2019

Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics identifies a class of social practices of rule-making, interpretation, and application, demonstrating the causal importance of these practices (and the procedural rules that constitute and govern them) in explaining outcomes in world politics. The book utilizes rule-oriented and practice-turn constructivist approaches to argue that procedural rules about rule-making, or secondary rules, shape the way that actors present and evaluate proposals for change in the rules and institutions that structure international systems. The book examines four important international security cases: the social construction of great power management after the Napoleonic Wars; the creation of a rule against the use of force, except in cases of self-defense and collective security, enshrined in the Kellogg-Briand Pact; contestation of the international system by al-Qaeda in the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks; and United Nations efforts to establish norms for state conduct in the cyber domain. The book makes several contributions to International Relations theory. It provides insight into how actors know how and when to engage in specific forms of social construction. It extends the application of practice-turn constructivism to processes of making and interpreting rules. It improves upon existing tools to explain change in the rules and institutions of the international system. Finally, it demonstrates the utility of the book’s approach for the study of global governance, the international system, and for emerging efforts to identify forms and sites of authority and hierarchy in world politics.
Introduction
Authors: Raymond Mark
Published: March 2019

This chapter begins by identifying a gap in International Relations scholarship. Despite many proposed mechanisms by which actors create and change various forms of shared knowledge (such as persuasion, norm contestation, and strategic social construction), the field lacks clear knowledge about how these mechanisms relate or compare to one another, and about how actors know how and when to engage in them. It then introduces the central argument of the book—that participants in world politics are also simultaneously engaged in an ongoing social practice of rule-making, interpretation, and application. This practice, itself governed by specialized procedural rules, provides an instruction manual that enables actors to engage in contextually appropriate ways of making and interpreting rules. These procedural rules shape outcomes, and thus help to explain change in international rules and institutions. The chapter concludes by introducing the case studies and by providing an overview of the plan of the book.
Social Practices of Rule-Making
Authors: Raymond Mark
Published: March 2019

This chapter begins by outlining the conceptions of rules, institutions, and social practices employed throughout the book. It demonstrates that attention to procedural rules for rule-making and interpretation, or secondary rules, sheds light on the puzzle of how actors know how and when to engage in particular forms of social construction and therefore on why we observe patterned practices of global rule-making. Secondary rules shape the way actors present and evaluate proposals for making, changing, and interpreting rules. As such, they are a key overlooked cause of the form, process, and timing of change in the rules and institutions of the international system. They also help explain the success or failure of particular attempts to create such change, since proposals presented according to relevant secondary rules are more likely to be accepted. Finally, the chapter outlines the book’s significance and contributions, and discusses issues of method and evidence.
Banning War
Authors: Raymond Mark
Published: March 2019

This chapter questions standard interpretations of the interwar period as one of failed utopianism. It demonstrates that the Locarno agreements and especially the Kellogg-Briand Pact were part of a larger rule system originating in the late nineteenth century that sought to curtail the state’s right to use force. In particular, it shows that secondary rules can create unintended outcomes. Neither Kellogg nor Briand sought to create a multilateral treaty banning war except in self-defense and collective security. Rather, in seeking to manipulate procedural rules to force each other into abandoning the treaty, both men came to genuinely embrace it. This norm clearly informed subsequent state practice, despite being imperfectly adhered to, and was reasserted in the UN Charter. The case also shows the robustness of social practices of rule-making, which were adhered to consistently even by new states like Japan and states like the Soviet Union that had renounced international institutions.
Self-Determination
Authors: Kuokkanen Rauna
Published: March 2019

Chapter 1 examines the conceptions of Indigenous self-determination. It begins with an overview of the global political discourse of Indigenous self-determination as a foundational right articulated especially within the UN framework since the 1980s. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork and building on Iris Marion Young’s concept of nondomination and Jennifer Nedelsky’s theory of relational autonomy, the chapter develops a theory of Indigenous self-determination that posits it as a foundational value that seeks to restructure all relations of domination, including gender, governance, colonial social and material relations, and unequal relations of justice. The chapter argues that an exclusive focus on the rights discourse provides a limited legalistic and state-centered conception of Indigenous self-determination that does not reflect the breadth of Indigenous self-determination, nor pays adequate attention to relations of domination beyond the state. In the participant interviews, Indigenous self-determination was defined in much broader terms than political autonomy construed as having control of one’s own affairs and decision-making powers as a distinct entity. Instead of focusing on politics and international law, the participants typically discussed the underlying values shaping their conceptions of Indigenous self-determination such as relationality, the paramount significance of the land, and freedom from domination.
Implementing Indigenous Self-Determination
Authors: Kuokkanen Rauna
Published: March 2019

Indigenous self-government is the political theory and practice of the right to self-determination. It is a political arrangement that enables a group to govern themselves according to their own will and through their own institutions. This chapter considers the degree of Indigenous self-determination in the three regions through participant discussions. In spite of increasing participation of Indigenous women in formal politics and their involvement in self-determination struggles from the outset, literature and scholarship especially from a comparative perspective on Indigenous women’s views on self-government remains next to nonexistent. Yet there are a number of similarities globally between Indigenous women’s struggles for political voice, representation, and rights and against the imposition and internalization of colonial patriarchal policies and laws. This chapter fills the gap by examining Indigenous women’s views on the current efforts of implementing indigenous self-determination and the ways in which the efforts have a connection to the everyday life of individuals. It begins with Greenland, with the most extensive self-government arrangements, and concludes with the Sámi Parliaments, whose authority is largely limited to consultation with the state and administration of state funding to Sámi language and culture.
Self-Determination and Violence against Indigenous Women
Authors: Kuokkanen Rauna
Published: March 2019

Indigenous feminist discourse links the realities of multilayered violence faced by Indigenous women to questions of self-determination, self-government, and the survival of Indigenous communities. This chapter considers how Indigenous political institutions and leadership address gendered violence. Nearly all interviewees agreed that violence against women is a self-determination issue, but pointed out that existing self-government institutions do not address the problem as such (if at all). Another problem, also mentioned by some interviewees, is the limited resources. There are, however, increasing attempts to address violence against Indigenous women by Indigenous political institutions, including self-government bodies, although there is considerable variance between the three regions examined here. Building on existing considerations of gendered violence and gender justice in Indigenous contexts and using interview data, the author advances a theory of Indigenous self-determination that affirms Indigenous women’s rights and gender justice.
Honorable Business
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

Many people are suspicious of business, as well as of markets and commercial society. Are they right to be suspicious? Examples like Enron and Bernie Madoff do not help the impression many have of it as prone to dubious behavior and potentially disastrous negative consequences. But there are bad actors in all walks of life, not just in business. Is there something special about business that encourages, or even rewards, bad behavior? Can there be such a thing as honorable business? While there certainly is dishonorable business, there is indeed also such a thing as honorable business. Honorable business sees as its primary purpose to create value—for all parties. It looks for mutually voluntary and mutually beneficial transactions, so that both sides of any exchange are benefited, leading to increasing prosperity not just for one person or for one group at the expense of others but simultaneously for everyone involved. Done correctly, honorable business is thus a positive-sum activity that can enable flourishing for individuals and prosperity for society. This book offers a conception of what it means for an individual to flourish and what the public institutions are of which honorable business can form an integral part. It also offers original responses to several central objections raised to business, markets, and commercial society. It argues for a new framework for business ethics that articulates the role that the honorable businessperson, and honorable business, can, and must, play in a just and humane society.
Introduction
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

The term “honorable business” will strike many as counterintuitive. Many are suspicious of business, as the widespread notion that business, or businesspeople, should “give back” to society—perhaps to atone for their sins—suggests. Honorable Business argues that there is a way of understanding business activity such that it is beneficial and even morally praiseworthy, and thus not in need of atonement. The introduction to Honorable Business outlines the elements of the book’s argument, including the content of each chapter, but it also places the book’s argument in its proper context: who its audience is, and why its argument is necessary.
A Code of Business Ethics
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 3 argues that the ultimate purpose of business is to create value—for all parties, simultaneously. It explains what the purpose of a firm is, and, on that basis, it offers a proposal regarding what should be part of any firm’s mission statement. It then proposes a code of business ethics that captures the duties of the individual businessperson, and goes on to articulate a conception of honorable business that allows business to achieve its main purpose of the creation of value. This code enables the individual to navigate the inevitable dilemmas that arise in business, which are in important respects not dissimilar to dilemmas that arise in other walks of human life. It also describes a conception of professionalism that connects to business’s purpose and the “hierarchy of moral value” of which it forms a part.
Obstacles to Achieving the Purpose of Business
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 6 looks at several problems businesses can face in the achievement of their proper goal within a market economy. These include Karl Marx’s notions of “alienation,” lying, and exploitation, the extent to which markets and commercial society can conflict with some of our deep-seated and possibly pretheoretic intuitions, and problems associated with asymmetries of knowledge and so-called rational ignorance. This chapter outlines how businesses should deal with such worries and address them in good faith. It also articulates a claim about the proper scope of business’s moral obligations, which will go some way toward helping businesses focus not only on what they can do but on what they should do.
Honorable Business and Valuing What We Ought
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 8 looks at several more worries about, and objections raised to, markets and business. This chapter focuses specifically on concerns raised about how markets can induce us to misvalue things—valuing some things too highly, valuing other things not enough. Chapter 8 argues that it is not things but rather people and their choices that should be valued. It also argues that one can advocate both liberty and virtue, that is, respecting people’s right to choose while retaining the moral authority to criticize—though not interfere with—their choices. It argues that working for wages is not plausibly similar to slavery and hence, contrary to some critics’ claims, should not be described as such. Finally, the chapter discusses tragedies of the commons and explores the ways that honorable business might address and mitigate some, if not all, of them.
Why Business?
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 9 brings the threads of the previous chapters together to develop an integrated picture of honorable business. It first argues that there is such a thing as honorable business, and it articulates its core elements, linking them to the conception of moral agency, hierarchy of moral value, and code of business ethics developed in earlier chapters. It also describes what dishonorable business is. It articulates the “negative” duties of business—the “don’ts—as well as its positive obligations—the “dos”—and argues that the “don’ts” require our attention first, but that the “dos” nevertheless can generate obligations as well. Chapter 9 suggests that honorable business not only provides material prosperity but also enables and encourages proper moral relations among people based on the mutual respect that our inherent dignity requires. Seen in the proper light, this conception of honorable business could actually be a moral calling.
The Devil Is a Woman
Authors: Phillips James
Published: March 2019

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.
Introduction
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

Applying J. L. Austin’s distinction between constative and performative speech to history-making offers terminology for studying how knowledge about the past is produced and wielded in the present. In drawing a distinction between a historical event as a constative fact and the performative effect of talking about that historical event in the present, scholars can identify historical genres. Just as literary genres are defined by chronotopes (the relationship between time, space, and the hero), so too historical genres can be defined by chronotopes. By indexing these chronotopes, ritual can work to situate people within time and space. In post-Soviet Buryatia, rituals become spaces where people can explore alternative chronotopes and re-evaluate the past. The chapter offers key background information and argues that the stakes of history are higher both in post-authoritarian contexts and among indigenous peoples.
An Inauguration for Etigelov
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

This chapter describes the inauguration of a Buddhist monument (stupa) in honor of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, a pre-revolutionary Buddhist leader who has returned in the post-Soviet period as a miraculously preserved body. This ritual allows us to see how three different historical genres coexist in the same context, thereby illustrating the larger argument of the book. These genres are a Buddhist institutional genre produced by the Buddhist Sangha, a local shamanic genre that focuses on state violence and draws on shamanic ideas about place spirits, and a Soviet genre that tells the history of the same village as a collective farm. This chapter presents an example of how multiple historical genres coexist and how people code-switch between them, depending on the context in which “us” is invoked.
City Day
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

City Day is a public celebration of the anniversary of Ulan-Ude’s founding. The public holiday, with a parade and speeches, indexes a chronotope and genre of history labeled the hospitality genre. This genre tells the history of Buryatia as a series of arrivals, beginning with the Buryats, followed by the Cossacks and Old Believer Orthodox Christians (Semeiskie). Both Cossacks and Old Believer Orthodox are Russian and yet not Russian, produced as local ethnic groups in opposition to the central Russian state, thereby transforming what might be a story of Russian colonization into a history of successive migrations. This genre produces a local history of multi-ethnic coexistence and toleration that contrasts the peaceful and multi-ethnic local with the national, and produces Buryatia as a place where many ethnicities have always, and will continue, to live together in peace and neighborly conviviality.
Opening the Center, Opening the Roads
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

Chapter 5 describes the inauguration of the Tengeri Shaman Association’s center in downtown Ulan-Ude. Tengeri considers contemporary social problems to be the karmic debt of violence from the Soviet period and sees Buddhism as a foreign colonizing power. By reaching back to the court of Chinghis Khan, when shamanism was a state religion, the shamans at Tengeri seek to recover the true, universal religion of all humanity, restore positive relationships with ancestor spirits and in the process, seek to solve social problems faced by contemporary Buryats. Their rituals produce a shamanic chronotope within which the past (as ancestor spirits) is co-present. Shamans thereby are able to produce an ongoing and malleable relationship with the past, that enables them to reconfigure the temporal double-bind faced by indigenous populations. They are able to restore “traditional” practices while rejecting the linear timeline that evaluates these practices through their distance from the modern.
Porous Selves
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

Chapter 6 narrates a shamanic initiation and describes the family history that is produced in the process of diagnosing the initiate’s shamanic calling. In Yuri’s initiation we see the stakes of embracing one historical genre over another. For Yuri, whose father is Buryat and his mother Russian, whether or not he accepts a shamanic genealogical genre of the past is a matter of life or death for him and his family. This chapter illustrates the kind of relationships to the past that shamanic practices can build, and shows how engaging with historical genres can transform conceptions of self for post-Soviet subjects. The shamanic genre critiques the kind of self, the New Soviet Person, that Soviet modernism sought to cultivate. Through the process of diagnosing a calling and initiation, the aspiring shaman remakes themselves into porous subject, subjected to the will of their ancestors.
Epilogue
Authors: Quijada Justine Buck
Published: March 2019

The epilogue re-caps the arguments presented in the previous chapters, and revisits Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as an analytic terminology for an anthropology of history. The epilogue argues that a comparative approach to indigenous revitalization projects in post-Soviet secular Buryatia reveals the contingent and creative nature of human conceptions of time and space, and the productive capacity of ritual. The chronotopes indexed in rituals exist as negotiated, contingent, performative evocations of pasts that continuously produce Buryats as subjects in the present. The epilogue also reminds readers that all the previous chapters are linked by the way in which contemporary Buryats emphasize materiality as proof for belief, and argues that this is a secular conception that undergirds contemporary Siberian religious practices. The materiality of ritual appears to participants to exceed its explanations, grounding revived post-Soviet religious practice in a secular discourse of evidentiary proof.
The Dark Double
Authors: Tsygankov Andrei P.
Published: March 2019

This book studies the role of US media in presenting American values as principally different from and superior to those of Russia. The analysis focuses on the media’s narratives, frames, and nature of criticism of the Russian side and is based on texts of editorials of selected mainstream newspapers in the United States and other media sources. The book identifies five media narratives of Russia—“transition to democracy” (1991–1995), “chaos” (1995–2005), “neo-Soviet autocracy” (2005–2013), “foreign enemy” (since 2014), and “collusion” (since 2016)—each emerging in a particular context and supported by distinct frames. The increasingly negative presentation of Russia in the US media is explained by the countries’ cultural differences, interstate competition, and polarizing domestic politics. Interstate conflicts served to consolidate the media’s presentation of Russia as “autocratic,” adversarial, and involved in “collusion” with Donald Trump to undermine American democracy. Russia’s centralization of power and anti-American attitudes also contributed to the US media presentation of Russia as a hostile Other. These internal developments did not initially challenge US values and interests and were secondary in their impact on the formation of Russia image in America. The United States’ domestic partisan divide further exacerbated perception of Russia as a threat to American democracy. Russia’s interference in the US elections deepened the existing divide, with Russia becoming a convenient target for media attacks. Future value conflicts in world politics are likely to develop in the areas where states lack internal confidence and where their preferences over the international system conflict.
Russia Fights Back
Authors: Tsygankov Andrei P.
Published: March 2019

The chapter argues that Russia is partly responsible for its hostile perception by the US media. The Kremlin’s actions, including laws preventing gays and lesbians from speaking publicly, criminal trials against some of government’s critics, corruption, election falsifications, and assertive foreign policy, have contributed to such perceptions. The issue is the proportion and nuances of such criticism. The chapter assesses US media presentations as distortions of reality and questions the prudence of presenting other nations’ values as fundamentally threatening to those of America, particularly when they do not result in egregious examples of violence. The chapter also discusses Russia’s reactions to its presentation in the United States and argues that Russia’s anti-Americanism is reactive and dependent on pressure from the United States.
Conclusion
Authors: Tsygankov Andrei P.
Published: March 2019

The conclusion summarizes the argument and assesses potential for future cultural conflicts in world politics. Cultural and political divides come from different sources, but in times of acute interstate competition culture and politics tend to reinforce each other, exacerbating international tensions. Future competition for values is not likely to take the form of a new Cold War yet the intense rivalry for power and rules means a continuous culture wars in world politics. Russia is not doomed to be the United States’ Dark Double. US-Russia relations may gradually become less dependent on presenting each other as potential ideological threats if the two nations learn to reframe bilateral relations in value-free terms.
Quantifying the Harm of Death
Authors: Nord Erik
Published: March 2019

In economic evaluation of health interventions and in measurements of burden of disease, the harm of death is routinely quantified. Can this make sense? I review approaches to measuring willingness to pay to reduce risks of death, discuss methods used in health economics and burden of disease estimation for measuring the undesirability of death relative to the undesirability of illness, and address context-dependent variation in the harm of death. I conclude that most of the approaches to quantifying the harm of death are in fact quantifications of something else or quantifications based on questionable assumptions. However, there is a relatively straightforward approach consisting in studying how many averted cases of a given health loss people think an averted death is equal to in value and priority merit. Results from such studies can help policymakers set priorities between health programs in accord with population values.
The Badness of Death
Authors: Frithjof Norheim Ole
Published: March 2019

In this chapter, I discuss the Time-Relative Interest Account (TRIA) and the Life Comparative Account (LCA) and their implications for summary measures of population health and fair priority setting in health care. First, I argue that an extreme interpretation of TRIA is incompatible with the standard practice of measuring population health by life expectancy at birth as an indicator. Implementing a policy of always saving adults before children would decrease life expectancy in a population. This implication is untenable. Second, I argue that a moderate interpretation of TRIA is compatible with earlier attempts to measure the burden of disease in populations by using marginal age weights in the valuation of Disability-Adjusted Life Years lost. The authors of the Global Burden of Disease study subsequently abandoned age weights. Third, I argue that marginal age weights used for determining social priority for health improvements may be appropriate.
Life Years at Stake
Authors: Mogensen Andreas
Published: March 2019

In quantifying the global burden of disease in terms of Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), we must determine both Years of Life Lost (YLLs) and Years Lost to Disability (YLDs). In setting priorities for global health, many have felt that YLLs should not always simply equal life expectancy at death. To this end, Dean Jamison and colleagues recommend the use of a DALY metric that incorporates Acquisition of Life Potential (ALP). When an individual dies, the YLLs that we would otherwise count are multiplied by the value of the ALP function, which rises gradually from 0 to 1 during the first stages of an individual’s life. Jamison et al. do not provide a detailed philosophical justification for the use of gradual ALP. In this chapter I explain why I believe the Time-Relative Interest Account represents the most plausible ethical basis for the ALP approach and describe how we might model ALP in light of this account.
People Aren’t Replaceable
Authors: Hutchinson Michelle
Published: March 2019

According to commonly used global health metrics such as the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY), saving an infant’s life seems to be no better than letting that infant die and bringing into existence another who will live for the same length of time. Yet we have a strong intuition that it is much better to save the infant—we believe that death is bad over and above the loss of healthy life years. I will consider both principles and empirical factors which might be driving that, and discuss what the implications might be for which global health interventions we should prioritize.
Health Care Rationing and the Badness of Death
Authors: Campbell Tim
Published: March 2019

According to Jeff McMahan, health care professionals ought to save an individual, A, from dying as a young adult (e.g., at age 30) rather than save some other individual, B, from dying as a newborn, even if the latter intervention would give B twice as many years of full-quality life as the former intervention would give A. Call this claim Young Adults over Newborns. In this chapter, I argue that if we accept Young Adults over Newborns, then we must reject at least one of three other more plausible claims. This constitutes a strong reason to reject Young Adults over Newborns.
Living Religion
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

The modern tendency to separate theory and practice, reflection and contemplation, has done inestimable mischief to the life of religion in the modern world. Religion’s claims about God or the world or the nature and destiny of the human spirit have been ripped from their context in religious practice and treated as discrete doctrinal abstractions to be justified or refuted in isolation from the living religious life that is their natural home. Many of the dilemmas faced by those who think seriously about religion today arise from or are intensified by this separation of theory and practice. Trends in contemporary psychology, especially an emphasis on embodiment and relationality, can help the thoughtful religious person of any tradition by returning theory to practice and thereby opening up new avenues of religious knowing and new ways of justifying the commitment to a religiously lived life. This text moves between psychology (especially neuropsychology) and various forms of religious thought in order to demonstrate the validity of living the religiously informed life. This book argues that it is meaningful and reasonable to speak of a “spiritual sense” by discussing ways we can “sense” or “perceive” the reality of God and what that might mean for the religiously concerned person and how it might be understood psychologically and neurologically.
Introduction
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

This text is a dialogue between psychology and theology. In different ways, they both deal with understanding the religiously lived life and with the question of whether there is any validity to living that kind of life. The central question of the book is whether it is meaningful and reasonable to speak of a “spiritual sense,” whether there are ways we can “sense” or perceive the reality of God. The first chapter develops an “embodied-relational” approach to human understanding by drawing on two very different psychological paradigms: clinical psychoanalysis and laboratory research into the role embodiment plays in human understanding. The second chapter builds on this review of the empirical findings to discuss some of their implications for the traditional and virtually universal theological topic of human nature. A popular approach to thinking about religion from a psychological perspective is to treat religions as “meaning systems.” The research cited here suggests that our embodiment directly impacts our understanding of how meanings are arrived at, thus affecting how we understand religious meaning-making—the subject of chapter three. The fourth chapter examines the impact of our embodiment on studying and understanding religion. The fifth chapter explores a case for a “spiritual sense” grounded in an embodied approach to human understanding.
Understanding as Living
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

Drawing upon clinical psychoanalysis and laboratory research, this chapter develops an “embodied-relational” epistemology. The chapter reviews major research findings on the ways embodiment influences the cognitive processes by which we understand ourselves and the world. It also reviews current neuro-network studies whose findings imply the brain can be understood as a single, interactive system and not simply a collection of relatively autonomous domains. The emphasis here is on the brain’s complexity, integration, and a certain degree of openness. Sensory experience is understood as an active, not passive process, involving an intimate interconnection between self and world. The role of proprioception, as well as the five basic senses, is analyzed. The implications of such research findings for human understanding, and especially religious understanding, are elaborated.
The Embodied Mind and the Mind-Suffused Body
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

This chapter reviews current empirical findings relevant to traditional and virtually universal religious teachings about human nature, especially the claim that there is more to human nature than what can be easily described by contemporary natural science. It argues that any purely physicalist account is necessarily incomplete and inadequate and not as compelling as is often assumed in popular discussions of neuroscience. The many ways embodiment impacts our theorizing about our bodies and their sensory capabilities lays the basis for the possibility of a spiritual sense. It also opens up another approach to the “mind-body” dilemma and the issue of dualism.
Meaning-Making
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

An increasingly popular approach to thinking about religion from a psychological perspective is to treat religions as “meaning systems.” A lot of research in the psychology of religion has been conducted within this “meaning systems” paradigm. Such research also demonstrates the positive role religious meaning-making can play in health and resilience, stress and coping, and pro-sociality. The research cited in this book suggests that our embodiment directly impacts our understanding of how meanings are arrived at. This, in turn, affects the ways in which we understand religious meaning-making and moves the concern with justifying the religiously lived life in a more pragmatic direction.
Living Religion
Authors: Jones James W.
Published: March 2019

An embodied approach to human understanding can ground the case for a “spiritual sense” and for understanding religious knowledge as a form of perception, especially if proprioception (and not just ordinary sense perception) is used as an analogue. The long-standing tradition of the existence of a spiritual sense is brought up to date by linking it to various contemporary neuroscientific theories. An embodied-relational model offers several avenues for understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness. Two classical Christian theological texts on religious experience—the Cloud of Unknowing and Scheiermacher’s The Christian Faith—are also discussed.