bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Places That Talk— and Listen
Authors: Mannheim Bruce 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The chapter offers an integrated account of Quechua speakers de communidad, who share substance with the places in which they were born, with other places, and with their domestic animals. The animals speak in grunts, interpreted conventionally. In order to understand these places, one must work from auguries or from a session mediated by a ritual specialist, a misayuq, “keeper of the table.” Pre-Columbian Andean polities treated key ritual places—mountains, rivers, and pilgrimage sites—as places that spoke, as oracles, and consulted oracular interpreters. In short, “Quechua” as a speech community is not coterminous with Runa simi, “human language,” nor with Quechua as a linguistic community. While on one dimension, Quechua as a linguistic community breaks down ritually, on a second dimension, Quechua as a speech community breaks down socially and politically.
Language, Nahua Life-Cycle Rituals, and Indigenous Identity
Authors: de la Cruz Abelardo 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Life-cycle rituals have been studied by anthropologists in a variety of contexts. This chapter, based on my research in my own community as an Indigenous anthropologist and as a native speaker of Nahuatl, presents a distinctive and innovative perspective on these rituals: that of Nahua communities whose members have negotiated the divide between received Nahua ritual protocols designated as el costumbre, “custom,” and the demands of Native catechists influenced by liberation theology movements of the 1970s in Latin America. The chapter focuses on the oral performances and descriptions of several ceremonies among the Nahua of the Huasteca region in Mexico, including the ritual bathing of infants, healing rituals, and protocols for addressing the continuous presence of dead parents in a household, as reported by their relatives.
Ritual Language in West Africa
Authors: Sweet Nikolas 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Drawing on a variety of anthropological analyses of ritual language in West Africa, this chapter examines assumptions of participants and participation in contemporary and historical work. While much scholarship has made implicit assumptions about the boundaries of ritual participation, critically examining these issues highlights the creative use of ritual language as a force for social action. This chapter explores participation through several dimensions including: 1) performance, 2) expanded participation across time and space; 3) factions and groups; 4) multimodal interaction; and 5) and subjectivity.
The Anthropology of Ritual Language
Authors: Tavárez David 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter examines classic and current anthropological and social science approaches to ritualized activities and ritual language. As an introduction to the topic, it surveys early anthropological proposals by Boas, Durkheim, and Malinowski. It then turns to the influential work of Turner, Tambiah, and Rappaport before introducing a concise survey of current debates and methods. It also includes a discussion of recent research on the five major topical areas that provide a structure for the chapters in this volume, and it also situates the handbook’s chapters within classic and emerging paradigms.
Indigenous Territoriality and the Mediation of Space and Scale in Ritual Language
Authors: Liffman Paul 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
For Wixaritari (Huichol people) the visionary recognition (nierika) and naming of ancestral emergence-places (kakaiyarita) is central to the process of claiming territory (kiekari) not only where they live in the Sierra Madre Occidental, but throughout their historical sphere of exchange relationships in western and north-central Mexico. This has resulted in the appearance of homonymous toponyms in multiple sites across considerable distances. In some cases, Wixarika ceremonial experts have had to deliberate which site out of several is eligible for government cultural heritage protection for Indigenous sacred places. Making ritual processes part of wider territorial claims requires translating shamans’ narrations of their dialogs with ancestral figures in the landscape, first from esoteric ritual registers into standard Wixarika and then into Spanish. This serial interpretation makes shamanistic identifications of place legible and therefore politically salient with broader publics on regional, national, and global scales: a process of semiotic mediation and interpretive lamination.
Language, Worldview, and Rituals of Daily Social Interaction
Authors: O’Neill Sean 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Worldview, as a trope, has long been invoked by anthropologists as a way of addressing the broad scope of wisdom (and related ideologies) that most cultures transmit. In ethnographic terms, there are many opportunities for witnessing the use of language as an instrument for transmitting such compelling “visions of the world,” as can be observed both in terms of small-scale rituals, such as private prayers or, alternatively, as large-scale public rites, such as the classic world renewal cycles found in many cultures. This chapter examines two apparently disparate cases, starting with the classic “world renewal ceremonies” of Northwest California as a canonical case of a redemptive ritual aimed at restoring justice, redressing wrongdoing, and restoring a sense of balance. The second case examines the small-scale rites that play out on an everyday basis, as familiar scripts and conversations twists that ultimately support racism, often as micro-aggressions.
Scalar Poetics in Ritual Language
Authors: Harr Adam 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Ritual is often theorized as mediating between different scales of space, time, and sociality. Ritual performances may be positioned between sacred and profane orders of time, between collective and individual intentions, between public acts and private beliefs, between global and local communities, or between apparently durable, expansive texts and ephemeral, localized contexts. Scholars have pointed out that these kinds of scalar distinctions are not ontologically prior to interaction but are produced through social interaction. This chapter examines the kinds of scalar processes that are motivated by the poetic qualities of ritual registers of language, with a focus on the scalar affordances of the intensified semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic parallelisms that often characterize ritual languages. Illustrations of scalar poetics are drawn from a variety of settings in Indonesia.
Language and Ritual Healing
Authors: Knowlton Timothy W. 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Language often plays an indispensable role in ritual healing practices, where it is characterized by distinctive prosodic, grammatical, and discursive resources. Questions of how language marks and contributes to the therapeutic efficacy of ritual healing practices have invited numerous claims over the decades, from symbolist, semiotic, performative, and phenomenological perspectives. This chapter explores those features of ritual language that are commonly employed in ritual healing, with special attention to the relative importance of semantic content or structural form as they relate to these claims concerning therapeutic efficacy. Case studies from around the world are examined, with special emphasis on those from the Indigenous Americas.
Language, Ritual, and Political Legitimation in Colonial Guatemala
Authors: Romero Sergio 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter considers power relations as a key factor in the persistence of pre-Hispanic accession rituals in the first five decades after the Spanish invasion of highland Guatemala in 1523. In these decades a “peaceful conquest” model was implemented under the inspiration of Friar Bartolomé de las Casas and his Dominican companions. Traditional Maya accession rituals based on cosmological principles continued to be enacted for decades after the first conversions among Maya nobles. In this cross-linguistic comparative case study (Kaqchikel, K’iche’, Q’eqchi’), I argue for power as a key determinant constraining the ways in which rituals signify and act in colonial contexts.
Digital Humanities and Literary Realism
Authors: Skorinkin Daniil , Orekhov Boris 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter investigates literary prose of the realist era in Russia using digital humanities methods. It focuses on how computational analysis can enhance an understanding of descriptions of literary characters, geographical locations, and lexical composition in literary texts. Using a corpus of more than five hundred texts (forty-six million word occurrences), it eschews the focus on individual writers and puts Russian realism within the broader context of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The authors employed word embeddings and vector semantics to analyze character descriptions in realist literature. The results indicated that the “typical” aspects of literary characters often overshadowed their individuality, reflecting the realist focus on common human experiences. The study utilized geocoding techniques to map mentions of geographical locations within the texts. This analysis showed that realist literature turned from portraying historical (and largely mythical) settings of Muscovite Rus’, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics to the then-new capital Saint Petersburg, to western Europe, and to the “new” eastern and southern peripheries of the Russian Empire as it continued to expand. With the help of a contrastive corpus analysis approach the authors examined the general lexical composition of the texts. This analysis showed that realist prose diverges from its romantic predecessor in its higher degree of dialogism, focusing more attention on depictions of everyday life, and in more explicit portrayal of thought, conscience, and human experience. However, it also showed that the poetry of the realist era did not undergo the same transition and maintained much of the romantic aesthetics, remaining a refuge for more conservative genres.
Lived Traditions and the Pursuit of Happiness in Thailand
Authors: Scott Rachelle M. 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter uses a “lived religion” approach to examine discourses and practices aimed at the cultivation of happiness in contemporary Thai Buddhism. Happiness is not a conventional topic in Buddhist studies, especially given the importance of dukkha (suffering) in the Buddha’s teachings. When we approach the topic, however, from a “lived religion” perspective, we see that the pursuit of happiness is a rather common theme in the discourses and practices of many Buddhists. This chapter will explore how some Thai Buddhists pursue happiness through financial prosperity, personal and professional success, and a general sense of well-being. The essay examines three case studies: the pursuit of wealth in Thai spirit cults; the Dhammakāya movement’s valorization of wealth, success, and happiness; and the correlation of religious practice and general well-being in lay meditation communities, social media, publications, and religious tourism. These case studies will show how the “pursuit of happiness” occupies a place within the broader framework of Thai Buddhist practice.
Postcolonialism
Authors: Brennan Timothy 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The term “postcolonialism” suggests a cohesive outlook as though it had a definite chronology and a clearly demarcated inside and outside. In fact, it has neither, and should not be confused with “postcolonial studies”—a broader, more non-denominational response to Eurocentrism. Postcolonialism, by contrast, presented itself as a unified theory of the postcolonial as such, drawing its inspirations from the more conservative strains of Continental European philosophy. To that degree, it was a selective tradition that disavowed its precursors in the interwar communist movements and the anticolonial liberation movements, whose intellectual resources were mainly left-Hegelian. The divisions within postcolonial studies, then, are evoked by the term, and they extend from political to teleological ones (is the goal to make modernity more widely accessible or to destroy it, for example?). These positions and counter-positions represent tensions between two kinds of constituencies: (1) an upwardly mobile diaspora of scholars allied with the liberal centers of the Anglo-American university; and (2) a non-denominational, multi-ethnic left interested in civic betterment, internationalism, and resistance to US foreign policy. These tensions are explored in an analysis of two contemporary schools of thought that bear on postcolonialism: “decoloniality” (which might more accurately be called “nativism” or “indigeneity”) and Actor Network Theory (or post-critique).
1945 Pan-African Congress
Authors: James Leslie 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter examines what made the 1945 PAC possible and what it signified. Rather than seek to define the conference as a symbol of either continuity or change, the chapter identifies aspects of both in order to reveal the multiple projects at play in the pan-African movement at this time. Scholarship on the conference and on pan-Africanism as ideology and movement has certainly identified the broad intellectual currents in operation, such as anticolonialism and labor rights. But these have tended to characterize the 1945 PAC as a move toward a more discrete politics. The 1945 PAC is, from this point of view, an intriguing and somewhat perplexing affair for pan-African and Global South political history. How could this meeting set out intellectual currents relevant to an inclusive transregional politics of unity and solidarity? The answer lies precisely in appreciating the varied anticolonial positions and the multiple visions for socioeconomic improvement. Approaching the 1945 PAC as an event driven by organizational momentum and intellectual debate, importantly, frees it from a distinct trajectory within a chain of organizational pan-African conferences and, instead, opens up examination of the ideas at play.
Circulation Narratives and Spy Literature
Authors: Haslanger Andrea 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
Tales told by speaking things and animals appear in great number from the 1760s on, offering their readers eyewitness accounts of the exploits of the things’ human owners. But the form of the so-called circulation narrative, also commonly called the it-narrative, emerges much earlier in the century, in texts that combine urban reportage with reflection on the changing conditions of economic exchange and on philosophical questions of materialism and metempsychosis. This chapter asserts that these early circulation narratives develop narrative modes of omniscience that are adopted not only by later it-narratives but also by novels. Though they do not erase the human—all of these texts are primarily interested in the exploits of human characters, in coffee-houses and drawing rooms, in carriages and shops, in alleyways and taverns—they employ the mobility and the unobtrusiveness of the coin or the pet or the anonymous observer to locate perception beyond the human.
Encounters with the East
Authors: Dimmock Matthew 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This period begins with the first translation of the Qur’an into English, The Alcoran of Mahomet (1649), a political intervention in the aftermath of regicide as much as an advance in the theological understanding of Islam. In contrast, the period ends with the explosion in popularity of the ‘oriental tale’ following the translation of Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights (1708), which introduced new narrative forms and new ways of thinking about an East defined by brutal despotism, eroticism, and magic. These two very different books offer a sense of the spectrum of prose writing concerning the East in this period, the new prose styles generated in the process of ‘translation’, and the imaginative and stylistic innovations that followed. They also show some of the preoccupations that recur: liberty and tyranny; sex and pornography; religious difference and discovery; and the nature of tale-telling.
Essays
Authors: Murphy Kathryn 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The essay, a genre notoriously resistant to definition, seems to be particularly diffuse in the period 1640–1714. Over 1,500 books were printed in the period whose titles identified them as essays, on a bewildering variety of subjects, at varying length, and including some verse. This chapter will ask what work the generic term ‘essay’ does for such disparate projects, and why its implications of provisionality, experiment, and personal style were compatible with the aims of so many different styles of writing in the period. What may seem incorrigible plurality conceals some commonalities and developments which situate the essay in the wider context of developments in prose and learned culture. The chapter addresses these as three interlinked themes which characterize the development that can be seen across the period: experience and experiment; the deinstitutionalization of philosophy; and the essayistic persona.
Mock-Scientific Literature
Authors: Lynall Gregory 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The seventeenth century heralded substantial developments not only in scientific knowledge but also in the literary technologies which communicated such new learning. The Royal Society in particular sought to persuade that written accounts could provide proof of matter of fact, investing prose with the authority to convey with accuracy new observations and experiments. For the Royal Society, and the ‘new science’ as a whole, these were nascent yet fragile times, when the discoveries, theories, and literary methods of scientific practitioners encountered intense scrutiny. Reading authors such as Butler, Cavendish, King, Swift, Addison, and Steele, the chapter will consider ‘mock-scientific’ writings which imitate parodically the form and content of emergent kinds of scientific literature, but it will also address prose texts which satirize scientific endeavour via other modes. It will also highlight the close rhetorical proximity of serious and satirical discourse against the new philosophy.
Political Debate
Authors: Knights Mark 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
This chapter ranges across genres in order to examine the relationship between partisanship and polemics. An introduction will examine what constituted political debate (suggesting that the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ became much more important in the 1640s) and how to approach it (stressing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach). The first section of the chapter sets out the nature of political divisions, why they generated debate, and the extent and context of those debates. The next section focuses on polemical literature as a forum in which debate occurred and as a weapon in the partisan struggles of the period. The following section will highlight the inventiveness of polemical literature: in terms of innovation of genre and format (including periodicals and prose dialogues), expression and style, and imagination. The final section will examine reactions to polemical exchanges, looking at the ways in which they were thought to destabilize truth and impartiality.
Political Speculations
Authors: Smith Nigel 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The period 1640–1714 saw the publication and reception of some of the most important works of political theory in the entire history of political thought, instanced most famously in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), described by some as the most important work of philosophy by any Englishman at any time. It would have a serious challenger in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), the most influential work of political theory in the eighteenth century, and usually held to be the cornerstone of the English liberal tradition. At the same time the period is famous for a series of treatises that exploit in a variety of ways utopian tradition and articulate ideal worlds that reflect profoundly on contemporary issues. This chapter analyses not primarily political ideas but the way in which the English language is used on the levels of logic, rhetoric, grammar, syntax, and semantics to make the writings effective.
True Accounts
Authors: Gee Sophie 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
‘True Accounts’ were a species of popular, sensational prose tracts, abounding in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English print culture. Even as the category of ‘fiction’ was coming into being, True Accounts made a niche for themselves by claiming to expose the truth about outlandish or arcane subjects, seemingly more suited to fictions. As a genre, True Accounts prized the exceptional over the ordinary, the singular instance over the category or pattern. True Accounts are at odds with, yet also immersed in, the contradictions of representation in early prose fiction: each genre has a strained, ambivalent relation to the real. As a form rising to popular prominence in the wake of civil war and two revolutions, the True Account reminds us that truth has itself become a newly freighted term, at once contested yet also attainable with a confidence hitherto impossible.
Keys
Authors: McDowell Nicholas 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
The sense of ‘key’ as ‘something which enables the interpretation of an allegorical, cryptic, or otherwise obscure work’ enters English, according to the OED, with Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in 1605; this sense also encompasses ‘a means of translating a foreign text’. The rudimentary keys to Rabelais that had circulated on the continent, which comprised little more than an index identifying the historical or real counterparts of fictional protagonists, were transformed by Peter Motteux’s commentary on his English translation into a complex allegorical superstructure that offered a politicized model for reading a modern literary ‘classic’ like Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is a model that writers like Swift and Pope were provoked not simply to mock, but also to incorporate into the very fabric of their comic fictions: the late Restoration genre of the ‘key’ was part of the complex of literary materials that went into the development of the eighteenth-century novel in English.
Antiquarian Writing
Authors: Roebuck Thomas 
Published: January 2025

Abstract
What is distinctive about antiquarian prose in the period 1640–1714? The revised version of William Camden’s Britannia, edited by the Oxford scholar, Edmund Gibson (1669–1748), and published in 1695, offers us a way to begin to answer this question. Gibson assembled a team of scholars to adapt and update William Camden’s earlier antiquarian masterpiece, his account of all the counties of Britain, published in its final Latin form in 1607, and then translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1610. This chapter will show that Gibson’s approach to the project exposes many of the tensions within antiquarian prose writing, between the undisciplined, unfinished, digressive, and fragmentary, and the forces of coherence, unity, and completion. Using Gibson as a starting point, this chapter will then explore how these tensions are played out across a number of different instances, from the translation of Old English prose to Robert Plot’s natural historical writings. The chapter concludes by revisiting the question of what the study of antiquarian prose can teach us about the fundamental question of the distinction between antiquarianism and history.