bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Historicizing Resilience
Authors: Haldon John 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
In this chapter, the concept of “resilience” is introduced. Applying C. S. Holling's theory of adaptive change to the idea that the Byzantine Empire was “always collapsing,” the chapter offers various ways in which this can be used to understand sociopolitical frameworks within which empires and communities move through history. By showing the persistence of Byzantine institutions faced with the rise of the Abbasids and the adaptability of the identities of the people living in frontier zones, the chapter argues for a more holistic approach to questions of collapse, conquest, and continuity by taking into account the fact that these developments occurred in the context of a large and unyielding ecosystem. Whether or not a political institution collapsed—or was brought to its knees by outside forces—is invariably the result not just of human agency or military contingency but of a dynamic interplay of a great number of often uncontrollable phenomena.
Hope and Honor
Authors: Einwohner Rachel L. 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
Holocaust accounts typically cast Jewish victims as meek, going “like sheep to the slaughter.” Given such portrayals, people ask, “Why didn’t Jews resist?” But Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This book’s goal is not to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity; however, it instead argues that Jewish resistance deserves explanation. Research on social movements shows that protest occurs when protesters have an opportunity for action and both the material resources and belief in themselves to get their protest off the ground, but members of Jewish resistance movements lacked these factors. So why did they fight back? Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, the book answers this question by comparing three Jewish ghettos during World War II: Warsaw (site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943), Vilna (where activists planned for armed resistance in the ghetto but could not achieve that goal), and Łódź (where no plans for armed resistance emerged). It finds that resistance rested on Jews’ assessments of the threats facing them, and especially on their hope for survival. Somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival and saw such resistance as the best response to their situation. These findings have implications for other examples of resistance under extreme conditions, such as prison riots and rebellions of enslaved people.
Fighting for Honor in the Warsaw Ghetto
Authors: Einwohner Rachel L. 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
Chapter 3 explains how framing and assessments of threat led to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It shows that while the ghetto residents were initially unaware of the Nazi regime’s genocidal plans, they eventually came to believe that they would not survive the ghetto. This conclusion of hopelessness was critical to the emergence of two youth-led resistance organizations, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW), who advocated armed resistance. Equally importantly, these youth activists framed resistance as something that would not save Jewish lives, but instead would allow Jews to choose a dignified and honorable death rather than a passive acceptance of their murder. Thus, assessments of the situation as both hopeless yet amenable to an honorable death facilitated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Saving the Folk
Authors: Drake Jamil W. 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
Chapter 4 examines the Myrdal-Carnegie Negro Problem Study of the late 1930s, on cusp of World War II. It concentrates on the study’s work on religion by discussing the works of Guy Johnson and Allison Davis, a Black social anthropologist. Davis studied a variety of religious cultures in Natchez, Mississippi, such as Pentecostal, Holiness, and Spiritualism. Although he did not use the folk category, Davis nevertheless used “cultural lag” to frame what he took to be lower-class religion. He argued that these emotional, cathartic lower-class religions contributed to the maintenance of the “caste and class” system that subjugated Black and the poor populations in Mississippi Delta. Davis adds to Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s perspective that the lower-class religion of the rural folk populations was considered a “pathology” and consequently hindered the struggle for racial democracy, otherwise known as the “American Creed.” Thus, Davis, along with Johnson, supported Myrdal’s view that Black religion was not a source of salvation within the contours of the American republic. Rather, he felt that the welfare state could do for Black people and the broader southern economy what Black religion could not. Yet, the folk category simplified the complexity of Black religious expression and politics. It is difficult to assign religious practices to homogeneous racial and class demographics in the Delta. But in the end, this chapter argues that the Negro Problem Study generated the idea of the rural folk roots of the religion of poverty that was migrating to the urban North with the emerging “cults and sects.”
Preserving the Folk
Authors: Drake Jamil W. 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
Chapter 5 examines the field recordings of John Lomax in the Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma Study in Mississippi in 1941. It shows how Lomax’s use of the folk category contrasted with that of the liberal-minded social scientists in the previous chapters. Folk did not signal a culturally deficient population. Rather, it revealed the vibrant and rich religious and blues traditions among rural Blacks. Yet, this chapter argues that his agrarianism recycled the liberal-minded social scientific view of the folk that cast the religious cultures of the populations as isolated from modern society, particularly urbanization, mechanization/industrialization, and education. This is why he had a hard time in Clarksdale, particularly at the Baptist Convention, where the choir performed choral arrangements and outside vendors sold “gospel blues” sheet music. His view that folk was the natural and pure sounds of the rural Black communities betrayed how his recording sessions were manufactured due to his affiliation with government. Additionally, songsters like “Muddy Waters” demanded their money from him after their recording sessions. In the end, this chapter argues that Lomax’s romantic nationalism fell into the same traps of the liberal-minded social scientists.
Listening to British Nature
Authors: Guida Michael 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This cultural history of early twentieth-century Britain shows how the sounds and rhythms of the natural world were listened to, interpreted, and used amid the pressures of modern life. The book argues that despite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature’s voices were drawn close to provide everyday security, sustenance, and a sense of the future. Nature’s sonic presences were not obliterated by the noise of war, the advent of radio broadcasting, and the rush of the everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living. This book examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures in order to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who used quiet and rural rhythms to restore shell-shocked soldiers, and of ramblers who sought to immerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors. It shows how home front listening in the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong, broadcast by the BBC. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace and unpredictabilities of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around. To listen to nature, in relation to the changing soundscape of the modernizing world, was to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be part of the future.
Introduction
Authors: Guida Michael 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
Listening, as a way of paying attention to the natural environment and understanding its status and meanings, is the subject of this book. It exposes the significance of the sounds of nature in everyday lives in relation to the changing soundscape of the modernizing world. In part this is a history of the sounds of early twentieth century Britain, but more importantly it is a history of listening to and interpreting those sounds because with this emphasis I have been able to re-think our understanding of which sounds were significant in the social, cultural and private lives of the people of Britain. By focusing on listening attention, the book reveals the highly interconnected relationship between nature and modern life—that nature’s musicality, energy and tranquilities were highly valued and drawn close despite and sometimes because of the surrounding intensity of man-made or machine sounds.
The rambler’s search for the sensuous
Authors: Guida Michael 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
By examining the habits and experiences of walking in the countryside, moors, and mountains a deeply sensual public connection to nature is found in this chapter. Listening is part of this, but so too are touching and other sensory encounters. While rambling on one hand was an escape from the trials of urban and working life, it is argued that the weekend excursions that so many Britons participated in are better thought of as an exchange and balancing out of different sensations available in different places. Having said that, it was encounters with heather, streams, and rock formations that set the pulse racing. Rambling was by no means simply a search for peace and quiet, or for hilltop contemplation, rather walkers relished the accentuation of body rhythms and the stimulation that came from direct interaction with the natural environment.
Modern birdsong and civilization at war
Authors: Guida Michael 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
The modernization of listening is explored through the work of the German nature sound recordist and wartime broadcaster, Ludwig Koch, whose birdsong programmes were known to millions of adults and children during WWII. The sound of birdsong on the airwaves was not tainted by the cultural divisions that human music and speech could provoke in listeners; rather it struck a patriotic note and provided solace on the home front. The potency of birdsong during wartime is demonstrated when senior establishment figures ruminate about the possibility of appeasing Hitler by broadcasting the song of a nightingale to Germany. It is argued that these men were inspired by a vision of civilization strengthened by the presence of birds, whose voices they believed could express British moral values better than human ones.
The Power of Performance
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter details one of the performances in the exhibition “Move: Choreographing You” at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre in 2010. The exhibition looked at the way performance and visual art intersect and collaborate. In one of the performances, the audience entered Queen Elizabeth Hall while the performers were already on the stage. Xavier Le Roy, the choreographer, then addressed the audience and encouraged everyone to have a conversation, including the performers. There was no use of amplification during the show, so everyone had to try very hard to make themselves heard. Conversation is not just talking; it is a dynamic of shared attention and listening. Ultimately, what the audience experienced in the theater was a simple, uncontrived, spontaneous group phenomenon. And it had to with politics and power: speakers sought to project their personal power into the situation. Indeed, what the audience experienced was a kind of political theater.
Irrational Man
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter reviews Woody Allen's Irrational Man (2015), which tells the story of an alcoholic philosophy professor who arrives one summer to take up a teaching gig at an idyllic, elite liberal arts college. One of the charms of Allen's movies is the way he puts people on display in what they say. His movies are driven by conversation. In his enacted conversations, one gets to see not only what people think about themselves as well as about each other but also how they choose to show themselves in their social worlds. Irrational Man is no different. But much of the conversation in this movie is philosophical; it is quasi-Socratic dialogue, and what is enacted are arguments and justifications for people's actions. Do ends justify means? Are people free to do what they want? Are people free to act according to their own, perhaps entirely individual, conception of what is right? Much of what gets illuminated in Allen's cinematic conversations—as in the conversations of a genuine philosophical dialog—is never said aloud and perhaps cannot be made explicit.
RoboCop’s Philosophers
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter discusses RoboCop (2014). It is difficult to find an argument for one side or the other of the artificial intelligence debate in RoboCop. On the surface, the movie seems to buy into an opposition between the rational mind and the emotional soul; the latter makes humans special, whereas the former is shared by man and machine. But it is possible to read the movie as pulling the rug out from under that simple-minded opposition. Alex, the hero robot cop, comes out of the lab an unfeeling drone, acting automatically, according to program. But gradually he takes form as a person with values, memories, projects, and feelings. Perhaps the film's real focus, like that of the original of which it is a remake, is the criticism of corporate capitalism. The movie makes the argument that there are dangers attached to technology whatever stand one takes on the more philosophical problems, especially in the setting of capitalism.
Pointing the Way to Liberation in Star Trek: Voyager
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter analyzes Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Until recently, the Star Trek franchise has always been a fantasy about a better future, with clean technology, human rights, food replicators, and the health and wealth and moral vision to explore strange new worlds in a search for knowledge. But it has also always been a vision of a future in which people's lives are structured in almost military-like power hierarchies. Voyager breaks with all that, or tries to. The puzzle at the heart of Voyager is that the crew is cast away, lost in space, and so they are not so much set adrift as set free. The chapter then reflects on the terrifying and tragic loss of Malaysian Airlines 370. It also considers the idea of balancing the complicated demands of life in the information age.
An Awkward Synthesis
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter examines Pete Docter’s Inside Out (2015), the playful and ambitious story of the emotional life of a young girl, Riley, who is uprooted when her parents move to a new city so that her father can take up a job. René Descartes offered, but did not endorse, the idea that the body is a ship and the self resides in the body the way a ship's pilot does. Meanwhile, David Hume advanced the idea that there is no self, that what we call the self is in fact just a bundle of perceptions, feelings, and ideas. Contemporary cognitive science combines these two ideas in a most awkward synthesis: we are our brain, which in turn is modeled not as a self but as a vast army of little selves, or agencies, whose collective operations give rise to what looks from the outside like a single person or animal; but some of the events happening inside of us really are ours. Inside Out unfolds more like a textbook presentation of the awkward synthesis than by providing any insight into what it is like to be Riley or any other person. The chapter then assesses the role of gender in the film.
The Philosophical Eye
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter describes the painter Adolph Menzel, who devoted himself to the task of making pictures. Plato thought of the painter as merely recording an image that was delivered to the senses. It is easy to make a picture of anything, he wrote; one simply holds a mirror up to it. The human action of seeing is, for Plato, also akin to holding up a mirror to the world. What one sees are nothing but images. Enter Menzel, whose work embodies a commitment to the refutation of this Platonic idea. The sketches of this compulsive and unstoppable artist, no less than his oil paintings and his gouaches, are not so much documentations of what there is as investigations of the way we manufacture our own experience. Ultimately, what Menzel teaches is that art can be a way of doing philosophy.
Is It Okay if Art Is Boring?
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter discusses whether it is okay if art is boring. Works of art, in all their variety, afford us the opportunity for boredom—and they do so when everything in our lives mitigates against boredom. Art's boredom, like philosophy's, is a valuable boredom. This boredom itself is an aspect of art's work, its power to disrupt and, in disrupting, reveal us to ourselves. But works of art do not just present themselves as obscure and out of focus. They also must give the audience the resources that they require to make sense of them. Works of art, then, are contractually guaranteed opportunities to move from not seeing to seeing, or from not getting it to getting it. Boredom can be a symptom of the fact that we are out of our comfort zone.
How to Love a Fake
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter begins by describing how the venerable New York art dealer Knoedler and Company had sold forty paintings purported to be by Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, and others but that were actually counterfeits made by a man in a Queens garage. We value paintings for their own qualities. If we also admire the painter, this is only because he or she managed to make those objects whose value is otherwise manifest. Perhaps then we should think of painting on what can be called the architecture model. What matters is the distinct achievement of the artist's conception, a conception than can be realized in different ways. Why suppose that a work is a fake or a copy just because the artist him- or herself did not actually make it? What makes a fake a good one is that it realizes, or investigates, or approximates an artist's contribution. It makes a move in a space of possibilities opened up by him or her. It is the very fact of the forgery's success that ensures that what the forger is doing is relevant to the original artist's work and so, at least potentially, a contribution to it.
Monuments
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter looks at monuments, which, as a general rule, obscure the conditions of their own production; they redirect our attention to the person or event they memorialize. Observers do not generally view the monument thinking about the artists. It is distinct power of memorials—it is their point, really—that they obscure their partisan and parochial origins. To destroy a Leonardo is to hurt Leonardo's legacy and to damage our grasp on his historical situation. But to destroy a monument to Robert E. Lee is to hurt his legacy and not that of the responsible artist—and it is to alter our felt relation to Lee’s time and place, rather than the time and place of the manufacture of his memorial. There are all sorts of exceptions to these generalizations: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, DC, for all that it is a memorial, is actually very much associated with Maya Lin, its creator. The chapter then considers the ongoing debate about memorials to the Confederacy.
Bowie, Cheesecake, Sex, and the Meaning of Music
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter addresses the idea that music has a history, looking at David Bowie's 2013 song “Where Are We Now?” Gary Marcus says that music is a kind of cognitive cheesecake: it is a refined craft for tickling the brain by acting on reward systems sensitive to repetition and novelty. The cheesecake theory of music treats music as like a species of masturbation. And masturbation has no history. The good that it delivers is unchanging; it is perfect as it is, and for the simple reason that the mechanics of orgasm are fixed by our basic body plan. To this, it will be objected that the pleasures induced by fat, sugar, and orgasm may be stable, but the means available to us for achieving these ends—the techniques, practices, technologies, and perversions—are indeed always evolving, and with the same rapidity, and so history, as in any other area of technology. Music, from this standpoint, is an evolving technology for auto-titillation and reward. Change in music is technological change—not change in what we like but change in how we get it.
Dylan’s Literature
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter describes how Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan is a rock star, or a folk singer, or a pop musician. He is not a writer, neither of fiction nor of poetry or drama. Pop music and literature are as different as painting is different from filmmaking. The chapter then considers how Dylan himself takes on the question of his relation to literature in his Nobel Prize lecture, which has been published in the form of a recording. As a young person in grammar school, he read many great books, and some of them impressed him deeply. He asserts that he engages themes from these books in his own songs. Dylan then adds that songs are made for singing the way Shakespeare's lines are made to be performed onstage.
You Say “Tomato”
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter highlights the Variation Effect, which is a very important yet poorly understand human phenomenon. Variety occurs not only at the level of regions and populations. It is a mark either of stupidity or arrogance to be unable or unwilling to accommodate one's manner of speech to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. As variation plays a central role in biological evolution, it also plays a fascinating role in the evolution of languages. To perceive or cognize the world at all is to be sensitive to the way patterns of variation allow for invariance to show up for us. We achieve access to what is invariant not because we are blind to variation but because we are so fluent in our mastery of variation that we can let it recede for us and rest in the background. In these ways, we come to appreciate that perception is at bottom an aesthetic achievement.
Art at the Limits of Neuroscience
Authors: Noë Alva 
Published: January 2022

Abstract
This chapter assesses the limitations of neuroscience in bringing art into focus. Neuroscientists working on art almost universally assume what can be called the trigger conception of art. According to the trigger conception, artworks are stimuli that trigger a special kind of event—the aesthetic experience—in us. But artworks do not trigger aesthetic experiences, because aesthetic experiences are not episodes in consciousness like sensory episodes that start and stop, anchored in exposure to a stimulus. In a sense, they are not experiences as the term is used in consciousness research and philosophy. Aesthetic experience, insofar as it is a phenomenon at all, is critical. It unfurls in a space of thought and talk—that is, a space of criticism—and so, in an important sense, in a shared space. Aesthetic experiences are not private or individual; they are social. Indeed, aesthetic experience is something persons, not brains, undertake, and they do so always in the setting of others and against the background of a culture and a history.