Search results for ""Àmsterdam""

The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the form of archaeological findings, as well as new techniques such as GIS modelling, the authors collectively demonstrate the existence of a very early global maritime trade. From architecture to cuisine, and language to clothing, evidence points to early connections both within Asia and between Asia and other continents—well before European explorations of the Global South. The human stories presented here offer insights into both the extent and limits of this global exchange, showing how goods and people travelled vast distances, how they were embedded in regional networks, and how local cultures were shaped as a result.

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The essential objective of this study is to unpack the complicity between historians and secularization theory in the study of late ancient and early medieval Christianity—and then suggest a way out. In this work of historiography of religion, Enrico Beltramini argues that religious history is inherently secular and produces distorted representations of the Christian past. He suggests moving from an epistemological to a hermeneutical approach so that the supernatural worldview of the Christian past can be addressed on its own terms. This work also engages Markus’s saeculum and replaces Markus’s secularized relationship between the Kingdom and the government of the civitas with the Augustinian association of the Kingdom and divine government.

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This book examines a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figural silks depicting legendary lovers from the Khamsa (Quintet) of epic Persian poetry. Codified by Nizami Ganjavi in the twelfth century, the Khamsa gained popularity in the Persian-speaking realm through illustrated manuscripts produced for the elite, creating a template for illustrating climactic scenes in the love stories of “Layla and Majnun” and “Khusrau and Shirin” that appear on early modern silks. Attributed to Safavid Iran, the publication proposes that dress fashioned from these silks represented Sufi ideals based on the characters. Migration of weavers between Safavid and Mughal courts resulted in producing goods for a sophisticated and educated elite, demonstrating shared cultural values and potential reattribution. Through an examination of primary source materials, literary analysis of the original text, and close iconographical study of figural designs, the study presents original cross-disciplinary arguments about patronage, provenance, and the socio-cultural significance of wearing these silks.

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Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare’s works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

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Justice and injustice were subjects of ongoing debate in medieval Europe. Received classical and biblical models both influenced how these qualities of moral and political life were perceived, discussed and acted upon. Important among these influences was the anonymous seventh-century Irish text, On The Twelve Abuses of the Age, a biblically-inspired discussion of the moral duties particular to each sector of society. This volume probes its long influence, and its interaction with the revival of classical ideas. By bringing together scholars of political thought and practice, in lay and religious contexts spanning the seventh to fourteenth centuries, this volume crosses boundaries of periodisation, discipline and approach to reflect upon the medieval evolution of concepts of injustice and means of redress. Contributions address how ideas about justice and injustice were discussed among scholars and theologians, and how those ideas were translated into action through complaint and advice throughout the medieval period.

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With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. Whether they are providing new spaces to imagine and practice alternative forms of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns. This book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today’s Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices. Each section explores different aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games. As a result, the book’s comprehensive scope covers a variety of angles, methodologies, and case studies, significantly expanding the field of green media studies.

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Translation was a critical mode of discourse for early modern writers. Gifting Translation in Early Modern England: Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship examines the intersection of translation and the culture of gift-giving in early modern England, arguing that this intersection allowed women to subvert dominant modes of discourse through acts of linguistic and inter-semiotic translation and conventions of gifting. The book considers four early modern translators: Mary Bassett, Jane Lumley, Jane Seager, and Esther Inglis. These women negotiate the rhetorics of translation and gift-culture in order to articulate political and religious affiliations and beliefs in their carefully crafted manuscript gift-books. This book offers a critical lens through which to read early modern translations in relation to the materiality of early modern gift culture.

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How did the breakdown of Roman rule in the Iberian Peninsula eventually result in the formation of a Visigothic kingdom with authority centralised in Toledo? This collection of essays challenges the view that local powers were straightforwardly subjugated to the expanding central power of the monarchy. Rather than interpret countervailing events as mere ‘delays’ in this inevitable process, the contributors to this book interrogate where these events came from, which causes can be uncovered and how much influence individual actors had in this process. What emerges is a story of contested interests seeking cooperation through institutions and social practices that were flexible enough to stabilise a system that was hierarchical yet mutually beneficial for multiple social groups. By examining the Visigothic settlement, the interplay between central and local power, the use of ethnic identity, projections of authority, and the role of the Church, this book articulates a model for understanding the formation of a large and important early medieval kingdom.

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The modern research university originated in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely due to the creation and expansion of the teaching and research laboratory. The universities and the sciences underwent a laboratory revolution that fundamentally changed the nature of both. This revolutionary development began in chemistry, where Justus Liebig is credited with systematically employing his students in his ongoing research during the 1830s. Later, this development spread to other fields, including the social sciences and the humanities. The consequences for the universities were colossal. The expansion of the laboratories demanded extensive new building programs, reshaping the outlook of the university. The social structure of the university also diversified because of this laboratory expansion, while what it meant to be a scientist changed dramatically. This volume explores the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions of the rise of the modern research laboratory within universities and their consequent reshaping.

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From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred — and been invested with moral weight — in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals’ legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect hospitals’ resources. This status could also, however, be invoked to impose limits on who could serve in and be served by hospitals. As recent scholarship demonstrates, disputes over whom hospitals should serve, and how, find parallels in other periods of history and current debates.

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Leeuwenhoek’s Legatees and Beijerinck’s Beneficiaries: A History of Medical Virology in The Netherlands offers a tour of the history of Dutch medical virology. Beginning with the discovery of the first virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, the authors investigate the reception and redefinition of his concept in medical circles and its implications for medical practice. The relatively slow progress of these areas in the first half of the twentieth century and their explosive growth in the wake of molecular techniques are examined. The surveillance and control of virus diseases in the field of public health is treated in depth, as are tumour virus research and the important Dutch contributions to technical developments instrumental in advancing virology worldwide. Particular attention is paid to oft forgotten virus research in the former Dutch colonies in the East and West Indies and Africa.

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Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China explores the role played by woman, and their visual representations, in introducing modern design and modern ways of living to China. It investigates this through an analysis of how women and modern design were represented in the advertisements, photographs, and films of Republican-era China. This study explores the intersection of modernity and the Chinese woman, as they negotiated their changing identities through, and with, new designs that proliferated in Chinese households in the first half of the twentieth century. The advertisements, mass media, photographs and films took on the function of social conditioning, conveying to the viewers ideas of modern social standards, behavior and appearances. With women both instrumentalised within these images, and addressed through them, their visual representations became metaphors that fashioned a new portrait of China, while concurrently impacting on the identity, agency and subjectivity of women themselves.

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Long before China promulgated the official One Belt One Road initiatives, vast networks of cross-border exchanges already existed across Asia and Eurasia. The dynamics of such trade and resource flows have largely been outside state control, and are pushed to the realm of the shadow economy. The official initiative is a state-driven attempt to enhance the orderly flow of resources across countries along the Belt and Road, hence extending the reach of the states to the shadow economies. This volume offers a bottom-up view of the transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia, and analyses its clash and mesh with the state-orchestrated Belt and Road cooperation. By undertaking a comparative study of country cases along the new silk roads, the book underlines the intended and unintended consequences of such competing routes of connectivity on the socio-economic conditions of local communities.

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The Asian Migrant’s Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality brings together papers that investigate the way Asian migrants experience, think about, perceive and utilize their bodies as part of the journeys they have embarked on. In exploring how bodies are physically and symbolically marked by migration experiences, this edited volume seeks to move beyond the immediate effects of hard labour and (potentially) exploitative or abusive situations. It shows that migrants are not only on the receiving end where it concerns their bodies, nor are their bodies only utilized for their work as migrants: they also seek control over their bodies and to make them part of strategies to express themselves. The collective papers in The Asian Migrant’s Body argue that the body itself is a primary site for understanding how migrants reflect on and experience their migration trajectories.

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A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the information flow. A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there were many examples of ŸprivateŒ applications too. This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diplomatic letter, a military order, a diary or a private letter, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.

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In her detailed retelling of three iconic movements in India, Professor Emerita Krishna Mallick, PhD, gives hope to grassroots activists working toward environmental justice. Each movement deals with a different crisis and affected population: Chipko, famed for tree-hugging women in the Himalayan forest; Narmada, for villagers displaced by a massive dam; and Navdanya, for hundreds of thousands of farmers whose livelihoods were lost to a compact made by the Indian government and neoliberal purveyors of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Relentlessly researched, Environmental Movements of India: Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Navdanya presents these movements in a framework that explores Hindu Vedic wisdom, as well as Development Ethics, Global Environment Ethics, Feminist Care Ethics, and the Capability Approach. At a moment when the climate threatens populations who live closest to nature – and depend upon its fodder for heat, its water for life, and its seeds for food – Mallick shows how nonviolent action can give poor people an effective voice.

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This book explores the interaction between religion and nationalism in the Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Cheng-tian Kuo analyses the dominant religions, including Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, and folk religions, but he also goes beyond that, showing how in recent decades the Chinese state has tightened its control over religion to an unprecedented degree. Indeed, it could almost be said to have constructed a wholly new religion, Chinese Patriotism. The same period, however, has seen the growth of democratic civil religions, which could challenge the state.

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Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.

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Maritime trade is the backbone of the world’s economy. Around ninety percent of all goods are transported by ship, and since World War II, shipbuilding has undergone major changes in response to new commercial pressures and opportunities. Early British dominance, for example, was later undermined in the 1950s by competition from the Japanese, who have since been overtaken by South Korea and, most recently, China. The case studies in this volume trace these and other important developments in the shipbuilding and ship repair industries, as well as workers’ responses to these historic transformations.

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Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin’s film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings within Benjamin’s ‘anthropological materialism’, a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term ‘innervation’, Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin’s writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he began to theorize about films.

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Fans of cult films don't just watch the movies they love-they frequently engage with them in other, more creative ways as well. Making European Cult Cinema explores the ways in which that fandom could be understood as an alternative economy of fan enterprise, through a close look at how fans produce and distribute artifacts and commodities related to cult films. Built around interviews and ethnographic observations-and even the author's own fan enterprise-the book creates an innovative theoretical framework that draws in ideas from cultural studies and political economy to introduce the concept of an 'alternative economy' as a way to understand fan productions.

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The first English-language book to focus on northeast Sino-Russian border economies, Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands examines how trans-border economies function in practice. The authors offer an anthropological understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the state. They argue that the history of suspicion and the securitised character of the Sino-Russian border mean that trust is at a premium. The chapters show how diverse kinds of cross-border business manage to operate, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust.

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This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society.

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This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.

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In 1763, the Dutch ship Amstelveen set sail from the Dutch East Indies for Muscat, Oman. Through a tragic combination of human error and rough seas, the ship never made it to port, sinking off the southern coast of Oman. The thirty surviving crew members then faced a terrible trek across a desolate desert landscape to Muscat. Drawing on the logbook of Cornelis Eyks, the ship’s only surviving officer,Klaas Doornbos tells the fascinating story of the men’s journey across the Gulf of Oman desert, their encounters with the country’s inhabitants, and their struggle to survive. Quoting extensively from Eyks’s logbook, Doornbos describes how the sailors,barefoot and almost naked, walked hundreds of miles in the blazing sun in the hope of reaching civilization. Some of the men died on the way, while the fate of others is uncertain. It was not until 1766 that Eyks and the remaining men reached Muscat.Throughout Doornbos uses Eyks’s logbook - the oldest remaining European account of the area - to reveal much about the desert coast of Oman and its people. Equal parts social history, anthropology, and survival chronicle, this gripping account of the Amstelveen’s crew is a thrilling piece of naval history.

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"Zomia" is a term coined in 2002 to describe the broad swath of mountainous land in Southeast Asia that has always been beyond the reach of lowland governments despite their technical claims to control. This book expands the anthropological reach of that term, applying it to any deterritorialised people, from cast-out migrants to modern resisters-in the process finding new ways to understand the realities of peoples and ethnicities that refuse to become part of the modern state.

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This volume presents a batch of incisive new essays on the relationship between Roman imperial power and ideology and Christian and Jewish life and thought within the empire. Employing diverse methodologies that include historical criticism, rhetorical criticism, postcolonial criticism, and social historical studies, the contributors offer fresh perspectives on a question that is crucial for our understanding not only of the late Roman Empire, but also of the growth and change of Christianity and Judaism in the imperial period.

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Is it possible to talk about Dutch art after 1680 outside the prevailing critical framework of the "age of decline"? Although an increasing number of studies are being published on the art and society of this period, genre painting of this era continues to be dismissed as an uninspired repetition of the art of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age. In this stunningly illustrated study, Aono reconsiders the long-dismissed genre painting from 1680-1750. Grounded in close analysis of a range of paintings and primary sources, this study illuminates the main features of genre painting, highlighting the ways in which these elements related to the painters' close connections to, on the one hand, collectors, and on the other, to classicism, one of the dominant artistic styles of that time. Three case studies, richly supplemented by a catalogue of 29 selected painters and their work, offer the first clear picture of the genre painting of the period while providing new insights into painters' activities, collectors' tastes and the contemporary art market.

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Even during the artist's lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates the painter's considerations that determined the striking changes in his development from an early age onwards. This gorgeously illustrated book explores how Rembrandt achieved mastery by systematic exploration of the 'foundations of the art of painting'. According to written sources from the seventeenth century, which were largely misinterpreted until now, these 'foundations' were considered essential at that time. From his first endeavours in painting, Rembrandt embarked on a journey past these foundations, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso', whom Count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes that cannot simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

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Focusing mainly on the European experience including Eastern Europe, this important volume offers an advanced introduction to immigrant incorporation studies from a historical, empirical and theoretical perspective. Beyond incorporation theories, renowned scholars in the field explore incorporation in action in different fields, policy issues and normative dimensions.

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Landscape Biographies explores the long and complex histories of landscapes from personal and social perspectives. As an essential part of human life-worlds, landscapes have the potential to absorb something of people's lives, works, and thoughts. But landscapes also shape their own life-histories at different timescales, transcending human life-cycles and generating their own temporalities and rhythms. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the co-scripting of landscapes and people figures prominently in the (auto-)biographical works of writers and attracts the interest of geographers, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists. This has even resulted in a new genre in landscape research, rapidly gaining in popularity, under the heading of 'landscape biography'. In Landscape Biographies, twenty geographers, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists investigate the diverse ways in which landscapes and monuments have been constructed, transmitted, and transformed from prehistory up to the present, from Manhattan to Shanghai, from Iceland to Portugal, and from England to Estonia. Among the authors are distinguished scholars like Gísli Pálsson, Cornelius Holtorf, Joshua Pollard, and Mark Gillings.

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This landmark bilingual Dutch-English anthology introduces women’s writing in the Low Countries from 1200 to 1875 through a variety of texts characterised by the religious, social, political and feminist engagement of their authors, as well as their extraordinary artistic achievement. Dutch and Flemish female writers produced work of ardent religious passion, ranging from medieval mysticism through the scathing anti-Reformation polemic to pious Anabaptist reflections. Other writers addressed current social and political debates or demonstrated fierce feminist engagement. Talented authors made important contributions to established genres such as the sonnet and the social novel or introduced new ones, like the epistolary novel. This invaluable volume, the first of its kind, explores and illustrates women’s historical involvement in the literary world of the Low Countries, their opportunities and hindrances, and the experiences, which found their way into women’s texts.

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The Annotated Constitution of Japan: A Handbook for the first time makes the entirety of Japan’s constitution accessible in English. The book consists of a historical and contextual overview of how the constitution came into being, followed by descriptions of each of its 103 articles; the meaning of the text, interpretive disputes, academic theories and leading cases arising under them. The book also points out the many subtle distinctions between the English version and the Japanese, some of which arose from the charter’s unique provenance. With contributors representing a broad range of expertise in various areas of Japanese law, the book is written to appeal to academics, students and general readers alike. It is intended to be the first port of call for anyone needing to understand the fundamentals of Japanese constitutional law, whether from the perspective of Japanese studies, comparative law, or political science, but unable to access the text and related literature available in Japanese. Key reference documents in English and Japanese are included as appendices for ease of reference.

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Our society has never been so internationally connected. Companies operate worldwide, retail shelves are filled with products from far and wide, people travel like never before and maintain contacts from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Distant countries have never been so close. Anyone who is practising law today cannot escape this and will increasingly be confronted with cross-border legal issues. Therefore, today’s jurists are expected to have knowledge of their own legal system as well as the law of foreign countries. For this reason, comparative law is integrated today in nearly every law programme at university. Comparing Law offers you an introduction to comparative law. What is comparative law? Why do we compare law and, above all, what methodology does the discipline adopt? These and many other questions are discussed in Part 1 on law comparison as methodology and science. Further parts introduce you to the law of some key jurisdictions. A selection of European countries, such as the UK, France and Germany are covered along with Belgium and the Netherlands. Not only global players, such as the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India and Brazil, are highlighted, but the law of Israel, Islamic law and African legal systems are presented as well. Last but not least, comparative law in practice is also illustrated by approaching a number of topics – both of public law and private law – in a comparative way. Danny Pieters and Bert Demarsin help the reader to understand and appreciate how the law differs from country to country. Enjoy this fascinating and comparative journey of discovery through the world and its legal systems.

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Japan is widely regarded as having a unique culture and a strong national identity. Paradoxically, however, many basic elements of Japanese culture are not originally Japanese. Since the beginning of its history, Japan has been one of the world’s major importers of foreign cultures. Its culture was thoroughly "hybrid" long before that word became fashionable in contemporary global studies. But this does not mean that Japan’s culture lacks originality. The Japanese have always made strikingly original contributions, even improvements, to whatever they imported. Even more significantly, the "hybridity" of their culture produced ongoing tensions that served as a kind of creative dynamo for Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals. This book explores the fundamental creative tension between the native and the foreign in many areas of Japanese culture, from politics and religion to art and literature – a tension also often interpreted as between tradition and modernity.

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What is literature? Can we measure ‘literariness’ in texts themselves? The innovative Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality asked thousands of Dutch readers for their opinion about contemporary Dutch and translated novels. The public shared which novels they had read, what they really thought of them, and how they judged their quality. Their judgments of the same novels were compared with the results of computational analysis of the books. Using evidence from almost 14,000 readers and building on more textual data than ever before, Van Dalen-Oskam and her team uncovered unconscious biases that shed new light on prejudices many people assumed no longer existed. This monograph explains in an accessible way how the project unfolded, which methods were used, and how the results may change the future of Literary Studies.

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This book is an introduction to Intercultural Communication (IC) that takes into account the much neglected dynamic paradigm of culture in the literature. It posits that culture is not static, context is the driving force for change, and individuals can develop a multicultural mind. It is also the first IC textbook in the field that incorporates insight from evolutionary biology and the newly emerging discipline of cultural neurosciences. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides readers with new angles, encourages critical thinking, and sometimes challenges conventional knowledge in the field. The combination of the author's multicultural academic and journalistic background contributes to a balance of diverse perspectives and world views on cultural theories and discourses. The book is ideal for courses in Intercultural Communication with study cases, discussion topics and class activities.

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Before the first purpose-designed exhibition spaces and painting exhibitions emerged, showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political commemorations, religious festivals, and marketing strategies. Palaces, cloisters, façades, squares, and shops became temporary and privileged venues for art display, where sociability was performed, and the idea of exhibition developed. What were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did displaying art shape a new vocabulary within these events, and conversely, how have these occasions conditioned exhibiting practices? This book traces the origins of the exhibition space by studying its visual and written imagery in the early modern period. It reconsiders events and habits that contributed to shaping the imagery of the exhibition space, and to defining exhibition-making practices, exploring micro-histories and long-term changes.

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Although modern life grows increasingly casual, in many sectors, protocol still reigns supreme. An Expert's Guide to International Protocol offers an overview of its associated practices, including those found within the context of diplomatic relations and the business world. Focusing on a wide range of countries and cultures, the book covers topics like precedence, seating arrangements, flags, ceremonies, invitations, dress codes, gifts and honours, and the roles of the protocol officer, guest and host. Throughout, influential diplomatic, business, and cultural figures share their own experiences with protocols around the world, also throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice” took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

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An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the North American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm? Colonial Objects in Early Modern Sweden and Beyond is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.

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Offering the most comprehensive analysis of Korean cinema from its early history to the present, and including the films of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ki-young, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, and transnational contexts by mobilizing the critical frameworks of feminism, postcolonial critique and comparative film studies. It is attentive to an enmeshment of the cinematic, aesthetics, politics and cultural history.

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This alternative study of archive and photography brings many types of image assemblages into view, always in relation to the regulated systems operating within the institutional milieu. The archive catalogue is presented as a critical tool for mapping image time, and the language of image description is seen as having a life, a worth and an aesthetic value of its own. Functioning at the intersection of text and image, the book combines media culture, archival techniques, and contemporary discourse on art and conceptual writing.

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The Muslim Brotherhood is often represented in mainstream media as a theocratic organisation that preaches Qur’an-based violence and is out to grab power in the West. As this book shows, such representations are wrought with prejudice and oversimplification; the organisation is in reality much more dynamic and diverse. Its goals, ideology and influence have never been static and vary greatly amongst its descendants in both Europe and the Middle East. Joas Wagemakers introduces the reader to this fascinating organisation and the major ideological and historical developments that it has gone through since its emergence in 1928.

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Sino-American Relations brings together high-quality research articles in order to examine one aspect of the political mechanism of modern China, from empire to the PRC: political initiatives to root out corruption. Proceeding chronologically, the eleven chapters explore modern political history through a particular focus on the anti-corruption campaigns of early modern and modern China. Our interdisciplinary analysis draws on methodologies from several distinct fields, including political science, civil law, and mass media. Such an analysis reveals the unique characteristics of China’s urbanization, which have transformed not only the country, but also the CCP – from a rural-based totalitarian party to a city-centered authoritarian party, and from a party of the people to a party of powerful interest groups by 2002–2016.

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