Search results for ""stanford university press""
Stanford University Press Sino-Japanese Relations: Interaction, Logic, and Transformation
This book casts doubt on many prevailing assumptions about the complex relationship between Japan and China. Based on ten years of research in the United States, China, and Japan, the author argues that the relationship is now more dispute-prone but manageable politically, and that the twto countries are more integrated economically than in prior years. Military uncertainty persists, however, and depsite increased contact between the two nations' governments, the relationship between China and Japan remains cool.
£32.00
Stanford University Press Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China
The Chinese economy's return to commodification and privatization has greatly diversified China's institutional landscape. With the migration of more than 140 million villagers to cities and rapid urbanization of rural settlements, it is no longer possible to presume that the nation can be divided into strictly urban or rural classifications. Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China draws on a wide variety of recent national surveys and detailed case studies to capture the diversity of postsocialist China and identify the contradictory dynamics forging contemporary social stratification. Focusing on economic inequality, social stratification, power relations, and everyday life chances, the volume provides an overview of postsocialist class order and contributes to current debates over the forces driving global inequalities. This book will be a must read for those interested in social inequality, stratification, class formation, postsocialist transformations, and China and Asian studies.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China
This book-length ethnography of the revival of a popular religious temple in contemporary rural China examines the organizational and cultural logics that inform the staging of popular religious activities. It also explores the politics of the religious revival, detailing the relationships of village-level local activists and local state agents wtih temple associations and temple bosses. Shedding light on shifting state-society relationships in the reform era, this book is of interest to scholars and students in Asian Studies, the social sciences, and religious and ritual studies.
£24.99
Stanford University Press Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley
From the eighteenth century to the present, travellers, explorers, journalists, imaginative writers like Samuel Johnson, and legendary reggae musician Bob Marley have shared a fascination with Abyssinia. So did even earlier writers and mapmakers, who thought Abyssinia was the land of the mythical (and fabulously rich) Christian ruler, Prester John. The principal subject of this book is the allure of the exotic, as represented by Abyssinia, to the British imagination. In addition to Johnson and Marley, some others included are the eighteenth-century Scot James Bruce, nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, author Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger (best known of twentieth-century British explorers), Sylvia Pankhurst (crusading journalist and daughter of the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), and the contemporary Irish traveller Dervla Murphy. The author also considers the beginnings of anthropology and the variations of quest narrative in modern travel writing.
£29.99
Stanford University Press Human Rights for the 21st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture
A new moral, ethical, and legal framework is needed for international human rights law. Never in human history has there been such an elaborate international system for human rights, yet from massive disasters, such as the Darfur genocide, to everyday tragedies, such as female genital mutilation, human rights abuses continue at an alarming rate. As the world population increases and global trade brings new wealth as well as new problems, international law can and should respond better to those who live in fear of violence, neglect, or harm. Modern critiques global human rights fall into three categories: sovereignty, culture, and civil society. These are not new problems, but have long been debated as part of the legal philosophical tradition. Taking lessons from tradition and recasting them in contemporary light, Helen Stacy proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current approaches: relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights. She forcefully argues that law and courts must play a vital role in forging a better human rights vision in the future.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions
Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions is the Center for Effective Organizations' (CEO) fifth study of human resources in large corporations. The only long-term analysis of its kind, this text compares data from CEO's earlier studies to data collected in 2007—12 years of data in total. Like CEO's previous research, this project measures whether the HR function is changing and on gauging its effectiveness. Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau pay particular attention to whether HR is changing to become an effective strategic partner. They also analyze how organizations can more effectively manage their human capital. The results show some important changes, and indicate what HR needs to do to be effective in the years to come. The text identifies best practices and effective organizational designs. This is a must-read for scholars and practitioners engaged in Human Resource Management.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis
The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way. Halliday and Carruthers show how global actors—including the IMF, World Bank, UN, and international professional associations—developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Indonesia and Korea, the authors reveal how national policymakers contested and negotiated domestic laws in the context of global pressures. The first study of its kind, this book offers a theory of legal change to explain why global/local tensions produce implementation gaps. Through its analysis of globalization, this book has lessons for international organizations and developing and transition economies the world over.
£29.99
Stanford University Press Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class
Rise of the Red Engineers explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups—the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China's old educated elite—coalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the country's propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the way—after his death—for the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which—as China's premier school of technology—was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party's preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders.
£97.20
Stanford University Press (Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): How have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably weak cooperation? How has a group of lesser, self-identified Southeast Asian powers gone beyond its original regional purview to shape the form and content of Asian Pacific and East Asian regionalisms? According to Alice Ba, the answers lie in ASEAN's founding arguments: arguments that were premised on an assumed regional disunity. She demonstrates how these arguments draw critical causal connections that make Southeast Asian regionalism a necessary response to problems, give rise to its defining informality and consensus-seeking process, and also constrain ASEAN's regionalism. Tracing debates about ASEAN's intra- and extra-regional relations over four decades, she argues for a process-driven view of cooperation, sheds light on intervening processes of argument and debate, and highlights interacting material, ideational, and social forces in the construction of regions and regionalisms.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens
People's experiences of racial inequality in adulthood are well documented, but less attention is given to the racial inequalities that children and adolescents face. Growing Up in America provides a rich, first-hand account of the different social worlds that teens of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds experience. In their own words, these American teens describe, conflicts with parents, pressures from other teens, school experiences, and religious beliefs that drive their various understandings of the world. As the book reveals, teens' unequal experiences have a significant impact on their adult lives and their potential for social mobility. Directly confronting the constellation of advantages and disadvantages white, black, Hispanic, and Asian teens face today, this work provides a framework for understanding the relationship between socialization in adolescence and social inequality in adulthood. By uncovering the role racial and ethnic differences play early on, we can better understand the sources of inequality in American life.
£74.70
Stanford University Press The Metamorphoses of Tintin: or Tintin for Adults
The Belgian artist Georges Remi's (Hergé) legendary creation, Tintin is a figure whose adventures have enchanted readers in Europe for the last eighty years. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the twentieth century, with translations published in over 50 languages and more than 200 million copies of the books sold to date. With the proliferation of Tintin blogs, Steven Spielberg's and Peter Jackson's planned cinematographic adaptations, and a Tintin museum scheduled to open in Belgium in the near future, there are many signs that the popularity of Hergé's boy hero continues to grow. The Metamorphoses of Tintin is the English translation of the first critical study of the canonical Tintin cartoons. Published in French in 1984 and republished many times since, this pioneering work examines the long career of both the cartoonist and his creation. Hergé's right-wing upbringing, all too apparent in his first two albums, brought accusations of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism, but in the endless revisions he undertook over the course of his career, he proved skillful at evading his critics. After the Second World War, Tintin's adventures became more psychological than political, thus appealing to a wider range of readers. He left behind the real world and came to occupy the center of a fictional universe where he tirelessly championed the underdog. A figure without origins, he turned international hero at the very moment that Western nations were becoming homogenized and transmitting their commodities and values on a global scale. Arguing that the series of albums thus offers a reflection on the whole of twentieth-century life, Jean-Marie Apostolidès traces the evolution of Tintin's character and reveals the unity of Hergé's masterpiece.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Romanticism and the Rise of English
Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 Romanticism and the Rise of English addresses a peculiar development in contemporary literary criticism: the disappearance of the history of the English language as a relevant topic. Elfenbein argues for a return not to older modes of criticism, but to questions about the relation between literature and language that have vanished from contemporary investigation. His book is an example of a kind of work that has often been called for but rarely realized—a social philology that takes seriously the formal and institutional forces shaping the production of English. This results not only in a history of English, but also in a recovery of major events shaping English studies as a coherent discipline. This book points to new directions in literary criticism by arguing for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history.
£89.10
Stanford University Press Disaster Response and Homeland Security: What Works, What Doesn't
Hurricane Katrina is the latest in a series of major disasters that were not well managed, but it is not likely to be the last. Category 4 and category 5 hurricanes will, according to most predictions, become both more frequent and more intense in the future due to global warming and/or natural weather cycles. In addition, it is often said that another terrorist attack on the United States is inevitable; that it is a question of when, not whether. Add to that the scare over a possible avian flu pandemic. As a result, the United States should expect that disaster response—to natural and other types of disasters—will continue to be of vital concern to the American public and the policymakers and officials who deal with disaster response and relief, including the military. The U.S. disaster relief program reflects a basic division of responsibility between federal, state, and local governments that has generally stood the test of time. At the federal level, a single agency, FEMA—now under the Department of Homeland Security—has been charged with the responsibility for coordinating the activities of the various federal agencies that have a role in disaster relief. A successful disaster response requires three things: timely and effective coordination between state and federal governments; effective coordination among the federal agencies; and effective coordination between and among state and local government agencies. Miskel examines the effects that operational failures after Hurricanes Agnes, Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina have had on the organizational design and operating principles of the disaster response system program. He also discusses the impact of 9/11 and the evolving role of the military, and he identifies reforms that should be implemented to improve the nation's ability to respond in the future.
£18.99
Stanford University Press The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior: 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To
In this book, Hoyk and Hersey describe 45 "unethical traps" into which any one of us can fall. These traps, they say, can erupt in any organizational environment. Some of these traps distort our perception of right and wrong—so we actually believe our unethical behavior is right. Many of them are psychological in nature, and if we are not aware of them they are like illusions—webs of deception. In the authors' analysis, these traps significantly contributed to the large-scale corporate disasters we witnessed in recent years. Hoyk and Hersey take account of these realities and offer a "real-world" method that will predict, preclude, and, if necessary, "get us out of" these traps. Given the increased scrutiny under which all executives and mangers operate today, this book is a 'must read' for anyone who is charged with achieving an organization's mission—whether that mission is increasing profit, serving the common good, or both.
£20.99
Stanford University Press Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust
The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. Engel demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be sequestered from their field, assigning it instead to historians of Europe, Germany, or the Third Reich. He shows that reasons for this counterintuitive situation lie in the evolution of the Jewish historical profession since the 1920s. This one-of-a-kind study takes readers on a tour of twentieth-century scholars of the history of European Jewry, and the social and political contexts in which they worked, in order to understand why many have declined to view their subject from the vantage point of Jews' encounter with the Third Reich. Engel argues vehemently against this separation and describes ways in which a few exceptional scholars have used the Holocaust to illuminate key problems in the Jewish past.
£55.80
Stanford University Press The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas
Too often, Levinas's thought is distanced from traditional ethical enterprises, especially from normative ethics. It is put into the service of directly normative ends such as a call for respect for women or disadvantaged social groups, or for new normative understandings of the relation of doctors to patients or teachers to students and the like. There is nothing wrong with using Levinas for normative purposes, but this demands that we be clear on what account of normativity can be found in his work. Perpich re-reads central ethical concepts in Levinas's thought (alterity, the face, and responsibility) in order to offer the first full account of his contribution to our understanding of normativity or the ways in which others' claims are binding on us. She then extends this interpretation into two vexed areas of Levinas scholarship: the possibility of developing an environmental ethics based on his work and the possibility of applying his ethics to the emancipatory projects of new left social movements.
£81.90
Stanford University Press Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India
Schooling Passions explores an important, yet often overlooked dimension of nationalism—its embodied and emotional components. It does so by focusing on another oft-neglected area, that of elementary education in the modern state. Through an ethnographic study of schools in western India, Véronique Benei examines the idioms through which teachers, students, and parents make meaning of their political world. She articulates how urban middle- and lower-class citizens negotiate the processes of self-making through the minutiae of daily life at school and extracurricular activities, ranging from school trips to competitions and parent gatherings. To document how processes of identity formation are embodied, Benei draws upon cultural repertoires of emotionality. This book shifts the typical focus of attention away from communal violence onto everyday "banal nationalism." Paying due attention to the formulation of "senses of belonging," this book explores the sensory production and daily manufacture of nationhood and citizenship and how nationalism is nurtured in a nation's youth.
£23.99
Stanford University Press The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt
The Power of Representation traces the emergence of modern Egyptian national identity from the mid-1870s through the 1910s. During this period, a new class of Egyptian urban intellectuals—teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists—came into prominence. Adapting modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and universal citizenship, this group reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and created a national sense of "Egyptian-ness" drawn from ideas about Egypt's large peasant population. The book breaks new ground by calling into question the notion, common in historiography of the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that in the nineteenth century "secular" aptitudes and areas of competency were somehow separate from "religious" ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions Michael Gasper shows how religion became integral to modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.
£48.60
Stanford University Press The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War
Why did the Soviet Union spark war in 1967 between Israel and the Arab states by falsely informing Syria and Egypt that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border? Based on newly available archival sources, The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War answers this controversial question more fully than ever before. Directly opposing the thesis of the recently published Foxbats over Dimona by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, the contributors to this volume argue that Moscow had absolutely no intention of starting a war. The Soviet Union's reason for involvement in the region had more to do with enhancing its own status as a Cold War power than any desire for particular outcomes for Syria and Egypt. In addition to assessing Soviet involvement in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War, this book covers the USSR's relations with Syria and Egypt, Soviet aims, U.S. and Israeli perceptions of Soviet involvement, Soviet intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition (1969-70), and the impact of the conflicts on Soviet-Jewish attitudes. This book as a whole demonstrates how the Soviet Union's actions gave little consideration to the long- or mid-term consequences of their policy, and how firing the first shot compelled them to react to events.
£55.80
Stanford University Press Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military
An estimated 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently volunteer to serve in the Israeli military, a force fighting other Palestinians just miles away in occupied territories. Surrounded takes a close look at this controversial group of soldiers, examining the complex reasons these people join the army and the wider implications of their decisions in terms of security and citizenship. Most observers perceive a clear and powerful divide in the political tensions and open hostilities between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, but often fail to notice those who straddle this divide—Palestinian citizens of Israel. These soldiers comprise no more than half a percent of this population, but their stories provide a powerful vantage point from which to consider a question faced by all Palestinians in Israel: to what extent are they, in fact, Israeli? Surrounded contains over seventy interviews with soldiers, and provides a unique glimpse of their conflicting experiences of acceptance, integration, and marginalization within the Israeli military. Concluding with comparisons to similar situations around the world, the book upends nationalist understandings of how wars and those who fight in them work. A key to a more complex understanding of ethnic conflict, this gripping and revealing look at a select group of soldiers will immensely alter ideas about the reasons why people choose to fight, particularly on "the wrong side" of a war.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Bleached Faith: The Tragic Cost When Religion Is Forced into the Public Square
Public recognition of religion has been a part of American political life from the beginning of our country, and that is not going to change. But in recent years, the effort by some to challenge the long held separation of church and state by imposing religion in the public sphere has caused more harm than good. Along the lines of other incredulous "neo-Enlightenment" books, Bleached Faith makes a forceful case that the gravest threat to real faith comes from those who would water down religion in order to win the dubious honor of forcing it into public buildings and classrooms. The freedom of religion we enjoy in the United States, both as a matter of law and practice, is extraordinary by any measure. However, when American courts allow the government to insert religious symbolism in public spaces, real religion is the loser. Goldberg argues that people on both sides of this debate should resist this corruption of religion. The book provides a survey of the legal and political environment in which battles over the public display of the Ten Commandments, the teaching of intelligent design in our schools, and the celebration of religious holidays take place. Goldberg firmly maintains that, "if American religion becomes a watered-down broth that is indistinguishable from consumerism and science, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. My opposition to pushing religion into the courthouse and the biology classroom does not stem from hostility to religion. I am opposed to bleached faith—the empty symbolism that diminishes the power of real belief."
£20.99
Stanford University Press The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950
This is the first book-length history of Chinese teahouses in the English-speaking world or in China. The Teahouse examines economic, social, political, and cultural changes as funneled through the teahouses of Chengdu during the first half of the twentieth century. The images brought together in this work paint a complete picture of everyday culture in the most basic unit of public life. This microhistorical examination of the teahouse and public life takes us into the heart of a city to explore urban society in depth, and provides a new way to look at the Chinese city and at daily life.
£89.10
Stanford University Press Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia
Into the Red explores the emergence of a credit card market in post-Soviet Russia during the formative period from 1988 to 2007. In her analysis, Alya Guseva locates the dynamics of market building in the social structure, specifically the creative use of social networks.Until now, network scholars have overlooked the role that networks play in facilitating exchange in mass markets because they have exclusively focused on firm-to-firm or person-to-person ties. Into the Red demonstrates how networks that combine individuals and organizations help to build markets for mass consumption. The book is situated on the cutting edge of emerging interdisciplinary research, linking multiple layers of analysis with institutional evolution. Using an intricate framework, Guseva chronicles both the creation of a credit card market and the making of a mass consumer. These processes are placed in the context of the ongoing restructuring in postcommunist Russia and the expansion of Western markets and ideologies through the rest of the world.
£59.40
Stanford University Press Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China
This lively study explores how social and economic changes to Chinese society create new cultural values and forms of inequality. Amy Hanser examines changes to a particular set of jobs—service work, in this case salesclerk work—and the nature of the social interactions involved. It argues that a new "structure of entitlement," which makes elite groups feel more entitled to public forms of respect and social esteem, is constructed in settings like new, luxury department stores. The book not only shows how this change involves increasingly unequal relations between clerks and customers, but also demonstrates how marketplaces have become sites where social differences—and inequalities—are recognized and justified. The study's importance lies in its attention to ethnographic detail, its application of cultural theories of inequality to China, and its contribution to our understanding of contemporary China. Unlike other studies of inequality in urban China, this book takes a unique setting—the marketplace and the interactions between customers and salespeople—and a unique approach—the author herself worked as a salesclerk in three settings.
£78.30
Stanford University Press The Civic Life of American Religion
Religious groups constitute a large part of America's voluntary sector, yet relatively few works have investigated them broadly. This collection of essays investigates the public roles of religious congregations and associations. With contributions by premier social scientists, the work gets to the bottom of how effective—or ineffective—religious groups are in offering social services, fostering community life, and creating discussion of social issues such as homosexuality and welfare reform. Arguing that religious groups experience many of the same constraints and opportunities as nonreligious associations, the book's new assessment of religious groups' public roles goes beyond pessimists' fears that these groups promote culture wars, as well as optimists' expectations that religious groups are always good for society. Touching on themes as old as the American republic, this work brings into focus an urgent, current discussion that will be of great interest to students of religion and society, public religion, civil society, or religion and politics, as well as to religious leaders and policymakers.
£19.99
Stanford University Press Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, following the worldwide collapse of communism, China ascended from being one of the most egalitarian societies in the world to one of the more unequal. Wang Feng documents the process of rising inequality in urban China during this period, and explores the underlying structural forces that define China's emerging social landscape. By treating social categories created under socialism, such as cities and work organizations, as explicit forces generating inequality, the author reveals a pattern that embodies both enlarging inequality between social categories and persistent equality within them. This pattern is traced to China's post-socialist political economy and to a long-existing cultural tradition that places a premium on harmony and group solidarity. China's great reversal from equality to inequality is a powerful example of how social categories, not individual traits and preferences, structure and maintain inequality.
£48.60
Stanford University Press Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France
Early one morning in 1996, the sanctuary of a Parisian church was suddenly disrupted by a police raid. A group of undocumented immigrant families had taken refuge in the church under threat of deportation due to the French state's increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Rather than disperse and hide, these sans-papiers—people literally without papers— came together to bring to light the deep contradictions in the French state's immigration policies and practices. Reinventing the Republic chronicles the struggle of the sans-papiers to become rights-bearing citizens, and links different social movements to reveal the many ways in which concepts of citizenship and nationality intersect with debates over gender, sexuality, and immigration. Drawing on in-depth interviews and a variety of texts, this disquieting book provides new insights into how exclusion and discrimination operate and influence each other in the world today.
£20.99
Stanford University Press Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective
Varieties of Feminism investigates the development of German feminism by contrasting it with women's movements that arise in countries, like the United States, committed to liberalism. With both conservative Christian and social democratic principles framing the feminist discourses and movement goals, which in turn shape public policy gains, Germany provides a tantalizing case study of gender politics done differently. The German feminist trajectory reflects new political opportunities created first by national reunification and later, by European Union integration, as well as by historically established assumptions about social justice, family values, and state responsibility for the common good. Tracing the opportunities, constraints, and conflicts generated by using class struggle as the framework for gender mobilization—juxtaposing this with the liberal tradition where gender and race are more typically framed as similar—Ferree reveals how German feminists developed strategies and movement priorities quite different from those in the United States.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Comparing the Incomparable
In Comparing the Incomparable, Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions that would permit one society to shed light on another. Some years ago, he undertook the study of "construction sites" grouped around general questions to be put to historians and ethnologists about their particular areas of expertise. Four of these comparative experiments are presented in the chapters of this book. The first concerns myths and practices related to the founding of cities or sacred spaces from Africa to Japan to Ancient Greece. The second looks at "regimes of historicity" and asks why we speak of history and what we mean by it, which leads to a comparison of cultural philosophies and of the ways different cultures express themselves, be they oral, written, or visual. The third chapter, following in the footsteps of comparative philologist Georges Dumézil, turns to polytheistic pantheons, arguing that we should not only look at the gods in and of themselves but also at the relations between them. The final section of the book examines how, from Ancient Greek democracy to the Ochollo of Ethiopia to the French Revolution, peoples form a consciousness of themselves that translates into assembly practices. A deliberately post-deconstructionist manifesto against the dangers of incommensurability, Detienne argues for and engages in the constructive comparison of societies of a great temporal and spatial diversity. The result testifies to what new and illuminating insights his comparatist method can produce.
£16.99
Stanford University Press Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics
Thomas Hobbes is an iconic figure who serves as an easy reference for pundits commenting on the brutality of war as well as for critics of a distinctly modern individualism in which calculating and rapacious self-interest is the cause of the violence, destruction, and exploitation endemic to the contemporary world. Frost's reading of Hobbes's philosophy shows us that underlying such visions of self and politics is another iconic figure: that of the Cartesian subject. What gives the iconic Hobbes his hardcore individualism and its corollary accounts of instrumentalism, conflict, and absolutism is a Cartesian rendering of the self as split into mind and body. Carefully elaborating Hobbes's materialist ontology, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker challenges both our implicit Cartesian assumptions about the self and the commonplace Hobbes that so readily figures violence in our political imagination. Through his materialism, Hobbes presents an alternative modern account of self-consciousness, reason, agency, power, freedom, and responsibility. In doing so, he shows that our fundamental intersubjectivity and interdependence require that we pursue peace above all else.
£19.99
Stanford University Press Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment
Dead Certainty is about the challenge of judging matters of public concern without a common sense of the good or other shared criteria that validate final decisions. Examining both the philosophical and the practical aspects of this challenge, this book focuses on United States Supreme Court opinions that authorize and regulate the practice of sentencing people to death. Unlike other books that discuss capital punishment, it does not argue for or against the death penalty. Instead, Dead Certainty contributes to a larger project in contemporary political and legal philosophy: re-imagining how people in today's world give coherence and meaning to their shared experience. Culbert's work will be of interest to scholars of political theory, jurisprudence, law and society, rhetoric, continental philosophy, and ethics.
£20.99
Stanford University Press Degrees Without Freedom?: Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India
Degrees Without Freedom? re-evaluates debates on education, modernity, and social change in contemporary development studies and anthropology. Education is widely imputed with the capacity to transform the prospects of the poor. But in the context of widespread unemployment in rural north India, it is better understood as a contradictory resource, providing marginalized youth with certain freedoms but also drawing them more tightly into systems of inequality. The book advances this argument through detailed case studies of educated but unemployed or underemployed young men in rural western Uttar Pradesh. This book draws on fourteen months' ethnographic research with young men from middle caste Hindu, Muslim, and ex-Untouchable backgrounds. In addition to offering a new perspective on how education affects the rural poor in South Asia, Degrees Without Freedom? includes in-depth reflection on the politics of modernity, changing rural masculinities, and caste and communal politics.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Degrees Without Freedom?: Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India
Degrees Without Freedom? re-evaluates debates on education, modernity, and social change in contemporary development studies and anthropology. Education is widely imputed with the capacity to transform the prospects of the poor. But in the context of widespread unemployment in rural north India, it is better understood as a contradictory resource, providing marginalized youth with certain freedoms but also drawing them more tightly into systems of inequality. The book advances this argument through detailed case studies of educated but unemployed or underemployed young men in rural western Uttar Pradesh. This book draws on fourteen months' ethnographic research with young men from middle caste Hindu, Muslim, and ex-Untouchable backgrounds. In addition to offering a new perspective on how education affects the rural poor in South Asia, Degrees Without Freedom? includes in-depth reflection on the politics of modernity, changing rural masculinities, and caste and communal politics.
£81.90
Stanford University Press Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas
Rights in Rebellion examines the global discourse of human rights and its influence on the local culture, identity, and forms of resistance. Through a multi-sited ethnography of various groups in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico—from paramilitaries to a Zapatista community, an indigenous human rights organization, and the Zapatista Good Governance Councils—the book explores how different groups actively engage with the discourse of rights, adapting it to their own individual subjectivities and goals, and develop new forms of resistance to the neoliberal model and its particular configurations of power. Far from being a traditional community study, this book instead follows the discourse of human rights and indigenous rights through their various manifestations. The author offers a compelling argument for the importance of a critical engagement between the anthropologist and her "subjects," passionately making the case for activist research and demonstrating how such an engagement will fortify and enliven academic research.
£20.99
Stanford University Press The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America
Traditionally, scholars of authorship in antebellum America have approached their subject through the lens of professionalization, exploring the ways in which writing moved away from amateurism and into the capitalist marketplace. The Business of Letters breaks new ground by challenging the dominant professionalization model, with its vision of a single literary marketplace. Leon Jackson shows how antebellum authors participated in a variety of different economies including patronage, charity, gift exchange, and competition—each of which had its own rules and reciprocities, its own ethics and exchange rituals, and sometimes even its own currencies. Examining a variety of canonical and non-canonical authors, including women, slaves, and artisans, and drawing on theoretical approaches from anthropology, sociology, social history, and literary criticism, Jackson reveals authors to have been social agents whose acts of authorial exchange involved them in dense webs of community. The decisive transformation of the antebellum period, he concludes, was not from amateurism to professionalism, but, rather, from socially embedded exchange to impersonally conducted business.
£35.00
Stanford University Press The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870-1960
The Great Tradition traces the way in which English constitutional history became a major factor in the development of a national identity that took for granted the superiority of the English as a governing race. In the United States, constitutional history also became an aspect of the United States's self-definition as a nation governed by law. The book's importance lies in the way constitutional history interpreted the past to create a favorable self-image for each country. It deals with constitutional history as a justification for empire, a model for the emergent academic history of the 1870s, a surrogate for political argument in the guise of scholarship, and an element that contributed to the Anglo-American rapprochement before World War I. The book also traces the rise and decline of constitutional history as a fashionable sub-discipline within the academy.
£66.60
Stanford University Press Social Foundations of Limited Dictatorship: Networks and Private Protection During Mexico's Early Industrialization
This innovative new book contributes simultaneously to two different disciplinary fields: comparative political economy and Mexican history. It does so by attempting to explain why Mexico—contrary to the predictions of several dominant theories of economic growth—enjoyed a comparatively high rate of economic growth and development under the highly authoritarian dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911). In conducting a detailed political analysis of Diaz's rule, Armando Razo introduces network analysis to the study of institutions and growth, and shows how dictators can maintain their power with credible growth-enhancing policies.
£63.00
Stanford University Press Legal Realism Regained: Saving Realism from Critical Acclaim
Legal Realism Regained presents a comparison between the legal realists, a group of pragmatic legal theorists from the 1920s and 1930s, and critical legal studies, a movement of postmodern legal theory during the end of the twentieth century. The book argues for a return to legal realism and the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James and for a rejection of the postmodern critique of critical legal studies. It discusses the two movements with respect to three topics: their view of history, their view of social science, and their view of language. Rejecting the claim that critical legal studies can be seen as the heir of legal realism, Legal Realism Regained argues that, with respect to each of these three topics, the realists still present a stronger argument than their more radical descendants.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
This book examines the rise of anti-Catholic hostility in early nineteenth-century Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty. French missionaries have long been blamed for the destabilization of dynastic Vietnam and the anti-Catholic violence that preceded the French invasion in 1858. But the focus on the political conflict leading to the Nguyen court's antipathy to the church overlooks the significance of Catholicism as a popular religion. Focusing on, but not limited to, the Cochinchina region, this study explores grassroots experiences of the religion and the conflict between the Nguyen court and missionaries of the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP). To do so, it draws on the correspondence of French missionaries and Vietnamese priests from the MEP archive, and on vernacular Vietnamese translations of the Nguyen dynastic record, to provide a new perspective on Nguyen Vietnam from the 1820s to the 1860s.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences
This book examines the nature of totalitarianism as interpreted by some of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was an entirely unprecedented regime and that the social sciences had integrally misconstrued it. A sociologist who is a critical admirer of Arendt, Baehr looks sympathetically at Arendt's objections to social science and shows that her complaints were in many respects justified. Avoiding broad disciplinary endorsements or dismissals, Baehr reconstructs the theoretical and political stakes of Arendt's encounters with prominent social scientists such as David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. In presenting the first systematic appraisal of Arendt's critique of the social sciences, Baehr examines what it means to see an event as unprecedented. Furthermore, he adapts Arendt and Aron's philosophies to shed light on modern Islamist terrorism and to ask whether it should be categorized alongside Stalinism and National Socialism as totalitarian.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Shari’a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context
This volume presents ten leading scholars' writings on contemporary Islamic law and Muslim thought. The essays examine a range of issues, from modern Muslim discourses on justice, natural law, and the common good, to democracy, the social contract, and "the authority of the preeminent jurist." Changes in how Shari'a has been understood over the centuries are explored, as well as how it has been applied in both Sunni and Shi'i Islam. Debates on the nature, interpretation, reform, and application of Shari'a lie at the core of all Islamist revivalist ideologies and movements of the past two centuries. The demand for the implementation of Shari'a is one of the hallmarks of Islamic fundamentalism, and Shari'a has become one of the most controversial and politicized concepts in Muslim-majority countries today. This is one of the first books to examine how Muslims understand and apply Shari'a in contemporary societies.
£89.10
Stanford University Press The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico
This book is an ambitious and wide-ranging social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous peoples of New Spain, from the Spanish conquest through the first half of the eighteenth century. In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.
£97.20
Stanford University Press The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges
It is widely assumed that admission to elite U.S. universities is based solely on academic merit—the best and brightest are admitted to Harvard, Yale, and their peer institutions as determined by test scores and GPA, and not by lineage or family income. But does reality support those expectations? Or are admissions governed by a logic that rewards socioeconomic status while disguising it as personal merit? The Power of Privilege examines the nexus between social class and admissions at America's top colleges from the vantage point of Yale University, a key actor in the history of higher education. It is a documented history of the institutional gatekeepers, confident of the validity of socially biased measures of merit, seeking to select tomorrow's leadership class from among their economically privileged clientele. Acceptance in prestigious colleges still remains beyond the reach of most students except those from high-income professional families. Ultimately, the author suggests reforms that would move America's top schools toward becoming genuine academic meritocracies.
£78.30
Stanford University Press In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town
Before the discovery of oil in the late 1960s, Oman was one of the poorest countries in the world, with only six kilometers of paved roads and one hospital. By the late 1970s, all that had changed as Oman used its new oil wealth to build a modern infrastructure. In the Time of Oil describes how people in Bahla, an oasis town in the interior of Oman, experienced this dramatic transformation following the discovery of oil, and how they now grapple with the prospect of this resource's future depletion. Focusing on shifting structures of governance and new forms of sociality as well as on the changes brought by mass schooling, piped water, and the fracturing of close ties with East Africa, Mandana Limbert shows how personal memories and local histories produce divergent notions about proper social conduct, piety, and gendered religiosity. With close attention to the subtleties of everyday life and the details of archival documents, poetry, and local histories, Limbert provides a rich historical ethnography of oil development, piety, and social life on the Arabian Peninsula.
£81.90
Stanford University Press Testing 1 - 2 - 3: Experimental Design with Applications in Marketing and Service Operations
This book is about the power of statistical experiments. In the past, books on experimental design focused almost entirely on manufacturing problems. In contrast, although this book is relevant to manufacturing and includes useful examples in that area, its emphasis is on applications to marketing and service operations. The authors provide a fresh and practical treatment of the key topics in designing and analyzing experiments. Testing in the business world is commonplace, and the usual approach is to change one factor at a time while holding other factors constant. This approach may seem logical and appealing, but, as the authors explain, it is highly inefficient, and may lead to wrong conclusions. The better method, the authors propose, is to test all factors simultaneously. Doing so not only reduces the costs of experimenting but also provides the decision-maker with better information. Throughout the book, the authors illustrate concepts with practical examples. In addition, the book includes a set of 13 separate real-world cases based on the actual implementation of experimental design methods.
£55.80
Stanford University Press Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failures in San Diego
The early 21st century has not been kind to California's reputation for good government. But the Golden State's governance flaws reflect worrisome national trends with origins in the 1970s and 1980s. Growing voter distrust with government, a demand for services but not taxes to pay for them, a sharp decline in enlightened leadership and effective civic watchdogs, and dysfunctional political institutions have all contributed to the current governance malaise. Until recently, San Diego, California—America's 8th largest city—seemed immune to such systematic governance disorders. This sunny beach town entered the 1990s proclaiming to be "America's Finest City," but in a few short years its reputation went from "Futureville" to "Enron-by-the-Sea." In this eye-opening and telling narrative, Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie mix policy analysis, political theory, and history to explore and explain the unintended but largely predictable failures of governance in San Diego. Using untapped primary sources—interviews with key decision makers and public documents—and benchmarking San Diego with other leading California cities, Paradise Plundered examines critical dimensions of San Diego's governance failure: a multi-billion dollar pension deficit; a chronic budget deficit; inadequate city services and infrastructure; grandiose planning initiatives divorced from dire fiscal realities; an insulated downtown redevelopment program plagued by poorly-crafted public-private partnerships; and, for the metropolitan region, inadequate airport and port facilities, a severe underinvestment in firefighting capacity despite destructive wildfires, and heightened Mexican border security concerns. Far from a sunny story of paradise and prosperity, this account takes stock of an important but understudied city, its failed civic leadership, and poorly performing institutions, policymaking, and planning. Though the extent of these failures may place San Diego in a league of its own, other cities are experiencing similar challenges and political changes. As such, this tale of civic woe offers valuable lessons for urban scholars, practitioners, and general readers concerned about the future of their own cities.
£21.99
Stanford University Press The Philosopher’s Desire: Psychoanalysis, Interpretation, and Truth
This book is about interpretation as it pertains to literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. It argues against certain trends of thought that claim we should do without interpretation by demonstrating that interpretation, as described by psychoanalysis, is already a fundamental aspect of all human experience. Egginton examines the idea of interpretation developed by Freud; how that notion was in turn changed by Lacan; the debate around psychoanalytic interpretation staged by philosophers like Deleuze and Derrida; and finally how a psychoanalytic notion of interpretation is necessary for even the most basic experience of consciousness.
£74.70
Stanford University Press Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn
Whether Islam is compatible with democracy is an increasingly asked question, but ultimately a misguided one. In this book, Asef Bayat proposes that democratic ideals have less to do with the essence of any religion than with how it is practiced. He offers a new approach to Islam and democracy, outlining how the social struggles of student organizations, youth and women's groups, the intelligentsia, and other social movements can make Islam democratic. Making Islam Democratic examines in detail those social movements that have used religion to unleash social and political change, either to legitimize authoritarian rule or, in contrast, to construct an inclusive faith that embraces a democratic polity. It provides a fresh analysis of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution—how it has evolved into the pervasive, post-Islamist reform movement of the early twenty-first century, and how it differed from Egypt's religious "passive revolution." Focusing on events from the Iranian Revolution to the current day, with a comparative focus on Islamism, post-Islamism, and active religious expression across the region, Bayat explores the highly contested relationship between religion, politics, and the quotidian in the Middle East. His book provides an important understanding of the great anxiety of our time—the global march of "Muslim rage"—and offers a hopeful picture of a democratic Middle East.
£21.99
