Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

Pitirim Sorokin rose from a peasant childhood in Russia to become a major figure in the history of sociology. However, he was considered both a pioneer and an outcast. This text includes essays by this controversial thinker which range from his early Russian years to his final work in the 1960s. His early American works are considered to have opened new vistas in rural sociology, social stratification, and theory, and won him the chairmanship of sociology at Harvard University. A constant innovator, Pitirim next explored the vast expanse of human affairs, and outlined the surfacing crisis of modernity. At the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism he developed a blueprint for social reconstruction. In the early 1960s, his work was again recognized, and he became president of the American Sociological Association.

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Son of a Holocaust survivor, Jason Sommer writes of troubles that unfold at the intersection of history made and personality in making, of self and other, of wakefulness and sleep. His world is post-Holocaust, and the poetic voice in this book is one which emerges from that calamity, telling the stories of those who have finally begun to speak to him, and now through him. As a survivor's child, Sommer must consider how to live in the wake of history, among those who are indelibly marked by it.

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Why do so many people voluntarily consent to searches by have the police search their person or vehicle when they know that they are carrying contraband or evidence of illegal activity? Does everyone understand the Miranda warning? How well can people recognize a voice on tape? Can linguistic experts identify who wrote an anonymous threatening letter?Speaking of Crime answers these questions and examines the complex role of language within our criminal justice system. Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma compile numerous cases, ranging from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton to the JonBenét Ramsey case, that provide real-life examples of how language functions in arrests, investigations, interrogations, confessions, and trials. In a clear and accessible style, Solan and Tiersma show how recent advances in the study of language can aid in understanding how legal problems arise and how they might be solved.With compelling discussions current issues and controversies, this book is a provocative state-of-the-art survey that will be of enormous value to legal scholars and professionals throughout the criminal justice system.

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In 1935 geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, radiation physicist Karl G. Zimmer, and quantum physicist Max Delbruck published "On the Nature of Gene Mutation and Gene Structure", known subsequently as the "Three-Man Paper". This seminal paper advanced work on the physical exploration of the structure of the gene through radiation physics and suggested ways in which physics could reveal definite information about gene structure, mutation, and action. Representing a new level of collaboration between physics and biology, it played an important role in the birth of the new field of molecular biology. The paper's results were popularized for a wide audience in the "What is Life?", lectures of physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1944. Despite its historical impact on the biological sciences, the paper has remained largely inaccessible because it was only published in a short-lived German periodical. "Creating a Physical Biology" makes the "Three Man Paper" available in English for the first time. Brandon Fogel's translation is accompanied by an introductory essay by Fogel and Phillip R. Sloan and a set of essays by leading historians and philosophers of biology that explore the context, contents, and subsequent influence of the paper, as well as its importance for the wider philosophical analysis of biological reductionism.

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With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge - and are able to create conditions for lasting stability - is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy. In "Birth of Hegemony", Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon's ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel's account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.

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Winner of the American Bar Association's 1992 Silver Gavel Award "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to public understanding of the American system of law and justice.""Mr. Sobol has produced a readable yet fully researched and detailed study of the operation of the bankruptcy and its effects upon all concerned—the women who were injured, the swarms of lawyers who represented parties in the bankruptcy, and the court which oversaw the bankruptcy in Richmond. . . . This book adds greatly to the current debate about how strong a managerial federal judge our system should have."—Paul D. Rheingold, New York Law Journal"Bending the Law is polemical and relentless. It is also minutely researched, fluidly written, and persuasive."—Paul Reidinger, ABA Journal"Bending the Law is a must read for bankruptcy practitioners, and for anyone else concerned about the use of bankruptcy law to deal with mass torts. Although its author is a civil rights lawyer, he details the subtle art of practicing bankruptcy law with a discerning eye, and is a gifted storyteller as well."—Joryn Jenkins, Federal Bar News and Journal"This is an accessible history of the case by a veteran civil-rights lawyer."—Washington Post Book World

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The Nature of Selection is a straightforward, self-contained introduction to philosophical and biological problems in evolutionary theory. It presents a powerful analysis of the evolutionary concepts of natural selection, fitness, and adaptation and clarifies controversial issues concerning altruism, group selection, and the idea that organisms are survival machines built for the good of the genes that inhabit them. "Sober's is the answering philosophical voice, the voice of a first-rate philosopher and a knowledgeable student of contemporary evolutionary theory. His book merits broad attention among both communities. It should also inspire others to continue the conversation."-Philip Kitcher, Nature "Elliott Sober has made extraordinarily important contributions to our understanding of biological problems in evolutionary biology and causality. The Nature of Selection is a major contribution to understanding epistemological problems in evolutionary theory. I predict that it will have a long lasting place in the literature."-Richard C. Lewontin

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Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra, historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.

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Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's "1909 Plan of Chicago", co-authored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. His concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago's stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation's second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan's creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect's belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, this insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

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Liberation theology is a school of Roman Catholic thought which teaches that a primary duty of the church must be to promote social and economic justice. In this book, Christian Smith explains how and why the liberation theology movement emerged and succeeded when and where it did.

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Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, mostly because of the purported link between his thought and the political movement known as neoconservatism. Steven B. Smith, though, surprisingly depicts Strauss not as the high priest of neoconservatism but as a friend of liberal democracy - perhaps the best defender democracy has ever had. Moreover, in "Reading Leo Strauss", Smith shows that Strauss' defense of liberal democracy was closely connected to his skepticism of both the extreme Left and extreme Right. It was as a skeptic, Smith argues, that Strauss considered the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation - a conflict Strauss dubbed the "theologico-political problem." Calling this problem "the theme of my investigations," Strauss asked the same fundamental question throughout his life: what is the relation of the political order to revelation in general and Judaism in particular? Smith bases his book on this question and assesses Strauss' attempt to direct the teaching of political science away from the examination of mass behavior and interest-group politics and toward the study of the philosophical principles on which politics are based. With his provocative, lucid study, Smith establishes a distinctive form of Straussian liberalism himself.

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We know how a Shakespeare play sounds when performed today, but what would listeners have heard within the wooden "O" of the Globe Theater in 1599? What sounds would have filled the air in early modern England, and what would these sounds have meant to people in that largely oral culture? In this journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Bruce R. Smith explores both the physical aspects of human speech (ears, lungs, tongue) and the surrounding environment (buildings, landscape, climate), as well as social and political structures. Drawing on a range of evidence, he crafts a historical phenomenology of sound, from reconstructions of the "soundscapes" of city, country, and court to accounts of the acoustic properties of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres and how scripts designed for the two spaces exploited sound very differently.

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In "Poetic Closure", distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith's book remains essential reading in poetic theory.

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The fruits of knowledge - such as books, data, and ideas - tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

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Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

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The question of responsibility plays a critical role not only in our attempts to resolve social and political problems, but in our very conceptions of what those problems are. Who, for example, is to blame for apartheid in South Africa? Is the South African government responsible? What about multinational corporations that do business there? Will uncovering the "true facts of the matter" lead us to the right answer? In an argument both compelling and provocative, Marion Smiley demonstrates how attributions of blame—far from being based on an objective process of factual discovery—are instead judgments that we ourselves make on the basis of our own political and social points of view. She argues that our conception of responsibility is a singularly modern one that locates the source of blameworthiness in an individual's free will. After exploring the flaws inherent in this conception, she shows how our judgments of blame evolve out of our configuration of social roles, our conception of communal boundaries, and the distribution of power upon which both are based. The great strength of Smiley's study lies in the way in which it brings together both rigorous philosophical analysis and an appreciation of the dynamics of social and political practice. By developing a pragmatic conception of moral responsibility, this work illustrates both how moral philosophy can enhance our understanding of social and political practices and why reflection on these practices is necessary to the reconstruction of our moral concepts.

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Unlike other multi-ethnic nations, such as Myanmar and India, where official language policy has sparked bloody clashes, Thailand has maintained relative stability despite its 80 languages. In this study of the relations among politics, geography and language, William A. Smalley shows how Thailand has maintained national unity through an elaborate social and linguistic hierarchy. Smalley contends that because the people of Thailand perceive their social hierarchy as the normal order, Standard Thai, spoken by members of the higher levels of society, prevails as the uncontested national language. By examining the hierarchy of Thailand's diverse languages and dialects in light of Thai history, education, culture and religion, Smalley shows how Thailand has been able to keep its many ethnic groups at peace. "Linguistic Diversity and National Unity" explores the intricate relationship between language and power and the ways in which social and linguistic rank can be used to perpetuate order.

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In February of 1971, in the Laotian village of Nam Chia, a forty-one year old farmer named Shong Lue Yang was assassinated by government soldiers. Shong Lue claimed to have been descended of God and given the mission of delivering the first true Hmong alphabet. Many believed him to be the Hmong people's long-awaited messiah, and his thousands of followers knew him as "Mother (Source) of Writing." An anthropological linguist who has worked among the Hmong, William A. Smalley joins Shong Lue's chief disciple, Chia Koua Vang, and one of his associates, to tell the fascinating story of how the previously unschooled farmer developed his remarkable writing system through four stages of increasing sophistication. The uniqueness of Shong Lue's achievement is highlighted by a comparison of Shong Lue's writing system to other known Hmong systems and to the history of writing as a whole. In addition to a nontechnical linguistic analysis of the script and a survey of its current use, Mother of Writing provides an intriguing cultural account of Shong Lue's life. The book traces the twenty-year-long struggle to disseminate the script after Shong Lue's death, first by handwriting, then by primitive moveable type, an abortive attempt to design a wooden typewriter, and finally by modern wordprocessing. In a moving concluding chapter, Smalley discusses his own complex feelings about his coauthors' story.

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Why do people identify with political parties? How stable are those identifications? Stable party systems, with a limited number of parties and mostly stable voter identification with a party, are normally considered significant signals of a steady democracy. In Dynamic Partisanship, Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson study changing patterns of partisanship in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia over the last fifty years in order to disentangle possible reasons for shifting partisanship and party identification. The authors argue that changes in partisanship can be explained by adjustments in voters’ attitudes toward issues or parties; the success or failure of policies advocated by parties; or alterations in parties’ positions on key issues. They contend that, while all three factors contribute, it is the latter, a party changing positions on a chief concern, that most consistently leads voters to or from a particular party. Their approach provides a deeper knowledge of the critical moving parts in democratic politics.

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In "The Chain" , Sleigh explores the nature of memory and its ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegies, portraits, and love poems, he movingly dramatizes the ambiguous nature of truth and the difficulties the moral imagination must overcome in recalling, understanding, and judging the past.

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This book features contributions from twenty six leading experts that survey the theoretical, historical, methodological, empirical, and clinical aspects of repression and the repressive personality style, from both psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological perspectives."Rarely does a volume present contributions on a controversial topic from such distinguished clinicians and experimentalists . . . . There is something of interest in this volume for almost anyone involved in experimental cognitive psychology and psychiatry."—Carroll E. Izard, Contemporary Psychology"The concept of repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. . . . This is a delightful book, unusually well-written. . . . Recommended."—Choice"Readable, thorough, wide ranging and consistently interesting. . . . A testament to the continuing power of psychodynamic ideas when faced with individual psychopathology."—Sue Llewelyn, Psychologist"Singer has brought together some of the best empirical research in the areas of unconscious mental activity and repression—that is at once interdisciplinary and scholarly."—Howard D. Lerner, International Review of Psycho-analysis"A rich reference, replete with summaries and citations, covering a variety of topics related to the psychology of repression and dissociation. . . . A thoughtful, detailed and eclectic discussion of the scientific and theoretical basis of repression and dissociation."—Steven Lazrove, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry

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In 1877, the American Humane Society was formed as the national organization for animal and child protection. Thirty years later, there were 354 anticruelty organizations chartered in the United States, nearly 200 of which were similarly invested in the welfare of both humans and animals. In The Rights of the Defenseless, Susan J. Pearson seeks to understand the institutional, cultural, legal, and political significance of the perceived bond between these two kinds of helpless creatures, and the attempts made to protect them.Unlike many of today’s humane organizations, those Pearson follows were delegated police powers to make arrests and bring cases of cruelty to animals and children before local magistrates. Those whom they prosecuted were subject to fines, jail time, and the removal of either animal or child from their possession. Pearson explores the limits of and motivation behind this power and argues that while these reformers claimed nothing more than sympathy with the helpless and a desire to protect their rights, they turned “cruelty” into a social problem, stretched government resources, and expanded the state through private associations. The first book to explore these dual organizations and their storied history, The Rights of the Defenseless will appeal broadly to reform-minded historians and social theorists alike.

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The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return? With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.

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Originally published in 1979, Serengeti: Dynamics of an Ecosystem was immediately recognized as the first synthesis of the patterns and processes of a major ecosystem. A prototype for initial studies, Serengeti contains baseline data for further and comparative studies of ecosystems. The new Serengeti II builds on the information presented originally in Serengeti; both books together offer essential information and insights for ecology and conservation biology.

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In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

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This critique of the postmodern turn discusses the distinctive aspects of postmodern scholarship: the pervasiveness of the literary and the flight from grand theory to local knowledge. Simpson examines defining features of postmodern thought - storytelling, autobiography, anecdote and localism - and traces their unacknowledged roots in literature and literary criticism. Considering such examples as the conversational turn in philosophy led by Richard Rorty and the anecdotal qualities of the New Historicism, he argues that much of contemporary scholarship is literary in its terms, methods, and assumptions about knowledge; in their often unconscious adoption of literary approaches, scholars have a limited way of looking at the world. He warns scholars against mistaking the migration of ideas from one discipline to another for a radically new response to the postmodern age. In his assessment of the academic postmodern enterprise, Simpson recognizes that both the literary turn and the emphasis on local, subjective voices have done much to enrich knowledge. But he also identifies the danger in abandoning synthetic knowledge to particular truths, cautioning that "we would be foolish to pretend that little narratives are true alternatives to grand ones, rather than chips off a larger block whose shape we can no longer see because we are not looking."

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A Muslim scholar with extensive experience in Africa, T. Abdou Maliqalim Simone was recruited by the Islamic fundamentalist Shari'a Movement in Sudan to act as consultant for its project to unite Muslims and non-Muslims in Khartoum's shanty towns. Based on his interviews with hundreds of individuals during this time, plus extensive historical and archival research, "In Whose Image?" is an examination of the use of Islam as a tool for political transformation. Drawing a detailed portrait of political fundamentalism during the 1985-89 period of democratic rule in the Sudan, Simone shows how the Shari'a Movement attempted to shape a viable social order by linking religious integrity and economic development, where religious practice was to dominate all aspects of society and individuals' daily lives. However, because Sudanese society is remarkably diverse ethnically and religiously, this often led to conflict, fragmentation and violence in the name of Islam. Simone's own Islamic background leads him to deplore the violence and the devastating psychological, economic and cultural consequences of one form of Islamic radicalism, while holding to the hope that a viable form of this inherently political religion can in fact be applied. As a counterpoint, he ends with a discussion of South Africa's Call of Islam, which seeks political unity through a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. As an introduction to religious discourse in Africa, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of African Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology and Political Science.

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Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

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Published in 1918, "The View of Life" is Georg Simmel's final work. Famously deemed 'the brightest man in Europe by George Santayana, Simmel addressed a variety of topics across his essayistic writings, which have influenced scholars in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, a set of core issues emerged over the course of his career, most centrally the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms and the nature and genesis of authentic individuality. Composed in the years before his death, "The View of Life" was, according to Simmel, his 'testament', a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger's "Being and Time" and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars has been extolled by Jurgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel's last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

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"Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago."—Donald N. Levine Half of the material included in this edition of Simmel's writings represents new translations. This includes Simmel's important, lengthy, and previously untranslated "Group Expansion and Development of Individuality," as well as three selections from his most neglected work, Philosophy of Money; in addition, the introduction to Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, chapter one of the Lebensanschauung, and three essays are translated for the first time.

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The story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution. With "An Orchard Invisible", Jonathan Silvertown presents the oft-ignored seed with the natural history it deserves, one nearly as varied and surprising as the earth's flora itself. In a clear and engaging style, he delves into the science of seeds: How and why do some lie dormant for years on end? How did seeds evolve? The wide variety of uses that humans have developed for seeds of all sorts also receives a fascinating look, studded with examples, including foods, oils, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals. An able guide with an eye for the unusual, Silver-town is happy to take readers on unexpected - but always interesting - tangents, from Lyme disease to human color vision to the Salem witch trials. But he never lets us forget that the driving force behind the story of seeds - its theme, even - is evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new solutions to the challenges of life.

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What did it mean to be a man in colonial Latin America? More specifically, what did indigenous and Iberian groups think of men who had sexual relations with other men? Providing comprehensive analyses of how male homosexualities were represented in areas under both Portuguese and Spanish control, "Infamous Desire" is the first book-length attempt to answer such questions. Each of the contributors connects male homosexual behaviour to broader gender systems - both indigenous and European - that defined masculinity and femininity, and relate sodomy to concepts of desire and power. But they sometimes draw very different conclusions. For instance, based on his study of the "berdache" (indigenous cross-dressers), Richard Trexler argues that homosexuality as we know it today did not exist in colonial Latin America, while Luiz Mott uses Inquisition documents to reveal a community of sodomites whom he believes shared a homosexual identity rooted in their common oppression. "Infamous Desire" should be valuable for anyone studying sexuality, gender or power relations in colonial Latin America.

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This one-of-a-kind, lavishly illustrated anthology celebrates Audubon's connection to the sea through both his words and art. The American naturalist John James Audubon (1785-1851) is widely remembered for his iconic paintings of American birdlife. But as this anthology makes clear, Audubon was also a brilliant writer-and his keen gaze took in far more than creatures of the sky. Culled from his published and unpublished writings, Audubon at Sea explores Audubon's diverse observations of the ocean, the coast, and their human and animal inhabitants. With Audubon expert Christoph Irmscher and scholar of the sea Richard J. King as our guides, we set sail from the humid expanses of the American South to the shores of England and the chilly landscapes of the Canadian North. We learn not only about the diversity of sea life Audubon documented-birds, sharks, fish, and whales-but also about life aboard ship, travel in early America, Audubon's work habits, and the origins of beloved paintings. And as we face an unfathomable loss of seabirds today, Audubon's warnings about the fragility of birdlife in his time are prescient and newly relevant. Charting the course of Audubon's life and work, from his birth in Haiti to his death in Manhattan, Irmscher and King's wide-ranging introduction and carefully drawn commentary confront the challenges Audubon's legacy poses for us today, including his participation in American slavery and the thousands of birds he killed for his art. Beautifully illustrated, with a foreword by distinguished photographer and conservationist Subhankar Banerjee, and rounded out by hundreds of historical and ornithological notes, Audubon at Sea is the most comprehensively annotated collection of Audubon's work ever published.

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The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period - epitomized by the events of May 1968 - were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them. "The Disobedient Generation" collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the '60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation's private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.

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Throughout his long career, Edward Shils brought a wide knowledge of academic institutions to discussions about higher education. "The Calling of Education" features Shils's most incisive writing on this topic from the last 25 years of his life. The first essay, "The Academic Ethic," articulates the unique ethical demands of the academic profession and directs special attention to the integration of teaching and research. Other pieces, including Shils's renowned Jefferson lectures, focus on perennial issues in higher learning: the meaning of academic freedom, the connection between universities and the state, and the criteria for appointing individuals to academic positions. Edward Shils understood the university as a great symphonic conductor comprehends the value of each instrument and section, both separately and in co-operation. "The Calling of Education" offers Shils's insightful perspective on problems that are no less pressing than when he first confronted them.

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Ranging widely across many disciplines, this collection of essays demonstrates a distaste for intellectuals who "run with the intellectual mob", and a deep respect for those who maintain their integrity under great pressure. The collection includes an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work towards addressing its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth, and most controversial, president; an account of the Polish emigre Leopold Labedz's outspoken resistance to communism, and an essay on Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri. Many of these essays have appeared in "The American Scholar", edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.

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Edward Shils's attempt to work out a macrosociological theory which does justice both to the spiritual and intellectual dispositions and powers of the mind and to the reality of the larger society is an enterprise that has spanned several decades. In his steps toward the development of this theory he has not proceeded deductively; rather he has worked from his own concrete observations of Western, Asian, and African societies. Thus, despite the inevitable abstractness of marcrosociological theory, the papers in this volume—which have been published separately since the Second World War—have a quality of vivid substantiality that makes the theoretical statements they present easier to comprehend. Professor Shils has attempted to develop a theory that has a place for more than those parts of society that are generated from the biological nature of human beings and those parts that are engendered by the desires of individuals, acting for themselves or for groups and categories of individuals, to maintain and increase their power over other human beings and to secure material goods and services for themselves. He has argued that there are constituents of society in which human beings seek and cultivate connections with objects that transcend those needed to satisfy biological necessity and the desire for material objects and power over others. This third stratum of social existence, he concludes, cannot be reduced to the other two and cannot be disregarded in any serious attempt to understand the function of any society. Thus Edward Shils, without disregarding its many valuable achievements, has nevertheless parted ways with much of modern sociology. For this collection of papers the author has written an introductory intellectual autobiography that places each essay in the setting of the development of his thought and that connects it with his other writings.

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Donated in the late fifteenth century to the papal choir, the musical manuscript "Cappella Sistina 14" reflects a new style of mass composition used by some of the era's most noted composers. "Masses for the Sistine Chapel" makes the complete contents of "Cappella Sistina 14" - held in the Vatican Library - available for the first time. Featuring fifteen masses and four mass fragments, this volume includes works by such composers as Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Antoine Busnoys. In a comprehensive introduction and critical commentary on each work, Richard Sherr places the choirbook in its historical context, describing its physical makeup as well as the repertory. Sherr's critical edition of this celebrated manuscript finally provides the insight necessary to inform future performances and recordings of its influential contents.

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There is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with sound—whether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us. ​Sound and Affect maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions.

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A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing. Moments of clarity and revelation are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty and irresolution within which we make our lives? Amid the drudgery of daily responsibilities and under a cloud of political foreboding, there's beauty in errancy, in meandering, in tracking perception's bright thread without knowing where it leads. Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her brief, sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet-possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows, beautifully, how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.

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This work explores the inner world of American Black professional women during the Jim Crow era. It is a story of struggle and empowerment, of the strength of a group of women who worked against daunting odds to improve the world for themselves and their people. Shaw has done research into the lives of social workers, librarians, nurses and teachers from the 1870s through the 1950s. The women tell, in their own words, about their families, their values and their expectations. Shaw explains the forces and factors that made them exceptional and of the choices and commitments that made them leaders in their communities. This book explores a world in which African-American families, communities and schools worked to encourage the self-confidence, individual initiative and social responsibility of girls. Shaw shows how, in a society that denied black women full professional status, these girls embraced and in turn defined an ideal of "socially responsible individualism" that balanced private and public sphere responsibilities. A collective portrait of character shaped in the toughest circumstances, this book aims to provide more than a study of the socialization of these women as children and the organization of their work as adults. It also provides a study of leadership - of how African American communities gave their daughters the power to succeed in and change a hostile world.

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Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton's science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Terms like "Newtonianism" are routinely taken as synonyms for "Enlightenment" and "modern" thought, yet the particular conjunction of these terms has a history full of accidents and contingencies. Modern physics, for example, was not the determined result of the rational unfolding of Newton's scientific work in the eighteenth century, nor was the Enlightenment the natural and inevitable consequence of Newton's eighteenth-century reception. Each of these outcomes, in fact, was a contingent event produced by the particular historical developments of the early eighteenth century.A comprehensive study of public culture, "The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment" digs below the surface of the commonplace narratives that link Newton with Enlightenment thought to examine the actual historical changes that brought them together in eighteenth-century time and space. Drawing on the full range of early modern scientific sources, from studied scientific treatises and academic papers to book reviews, commentaries, and private correspondence, J. B. Shank challenges the widely accepted claim that Isaac Newton's solitary genius is the reason for his iconic status as the father of modern physics and the philosophe movement.

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Since recording its first AIDS cases in 1983, Tanzania has reported nearly 90,000 more to the World Health Organization - more than any other country in Africa. The AIDS epidemic has forced Africans to reflect upon the meaning of traditional ideas and practices related to sexuality and fertility, and upon modernity and biomedicine. In this book, anthropologist Philip Setel observes Tanzania's Chagga people and their attempts to cope with and understand AIDS. The work presents an extended case study of the 20th-century AIDS epidemic and the cultural circumstances from which it emerged. It brings together anthropology, demography and epidemiology to explain how a particular community in Africa experiences AIDS.

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These essays examine what has happened to regional experiences that identify and shape culture now that regional foods are disappearing, cultures are dissolving and homogeneity is spreading. Anthropologist and award-winning author of "The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani", C. Nadia Seremetakis, brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news, the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity. The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis and Paul Stoller.

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Examines the turbulent modern history and sociology of the Sri Lankan Buddhist Monkhood and its effects upon contemporary society. Using translated Sinhalese documents and interviews with monks, Sri Lankan anthropologist H.L. Seneviratne unravels the inner workings of this New Buddhism and the ideology on which it is based. Beginning with Anagarika Dharmapala's "rationalization" of Buddhism in the early-20th century, which called for monks to take on a more activist role in the community, Seneviratne shows how the monks have graduallyu revised their role to include involvement in political and economic spheres. The altruistic, morally pure monks of Dharmapala's dream have become, Seneviratne argues, self-centered and arrogant, concealing self-aggrandizement behind a facade of "social service".

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In today’s world, the lines between Europe and the Middle East, between Christian Europeans and Muslim immigrants in their midst, seem to be hardening. Alarmist editorials compare the arrival of Muslim refugees with the “Muslim conquest of 711,” warning that Europe will be called on to defend its borders. Violence and paranoia are alive and well in Fortress Europe. Against this xenophobic tendency, The Feeling of History examines the idea of Andalucismo—a modern tradition founded on the principle that contemporary Andalusia is connected in vitally important ways with medieval Islamic Iberia. Charles Hirschkind explores the works and lives of writers, thinkers, poets, artists, and activists, and he shows how, taken together, they constitute an Andalusian sensorium. Hirschkind also carefully traces the various itineraries of Andalucismo, from colonial and anticolonial efforts to contemporary movements supporting immigrant rights. The Feeling of History offers a nuanced view into the way people experience their own past, while also bearing witness to a philosophy of engaging the Middle East that experiments with alternative futures.

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