Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

This long-awaited project presents the results of a major research effort to determine the parameters of the stylistic variability of Arab folk music in Israel. Central to this old and highly improvised musical tradition is a unique modal framework that combines the concept of maqam—the foundation of Arab music theory—with other characteristics, including those of the text. Palestinian Arab Music is a comprehensive analysis of this music as actually practiced, examining both musical and nonmusical factors, their connection with the traits of individual performers, and their interaction with sociocultural phenomena.Working initially with their own 1957 invention, the Cohen-Katz Melograph, and later with computers, Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz recorded and digitized several hundred Palestinian music performances. The authors analyzed the musical tradition in light of its main variables. These include musical parameters, modal frameworks, the form and structure of the music, its poetic texts, and aspects of the social functions of the tradition. As a result of their study, the vexed aspect of intonation in practice is revealed to exist in a special relationship with the scale systems or maqamat, which are in turn of great importance to organizing the music and determining its modal systems.

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How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social and political forces at play in the production of history. Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American commemorations, public and academic debates, and scholarly research, David William Cohen explores the "walls and passageways" between academic and non-academic productions of history.

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In this historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, the author examines the body of work on the intellectual, social and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the 19th century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it. Cohen's discussions range from scholarly interpretations of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, to the question of why the Scientific Revolution took place in 17th-century Western Europe, rather than in ancient Greece, China or the Islamic world. Cohen contends that the emergence of early modern science was essential to the rise of the modern world, in the way it fostered advances in technology.

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The city of Florence has long been admired as the home of the brilliant artistic and literary achievement of the early Renaissance. But most histories of Florence go no further than the first decades of the sixteenth century. They thus give the impression that Florentine culture died suddenly along with the generation of Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Andrea del Sarto. Eric Cochrane shows that the Florentines maintained their creativity long after they had lost their position as the cultural leaders of Europe. When their political philosophy and historiography ran dry, they turned to the practical problems of civil administration. When their artists finally yielded to outside influence, they turned to music and the natural sciences. Even during the darkest days of the great economic depression of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they succeeded in preserving-almost alone in Europe - the blessings of external peace and domestic tranquility.

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Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book-when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante-as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome.Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

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Latin epics such as Virgil's "Aeneid", Lucan's "Civil War", and Statius' "Thebaid" addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In "The Commerce of War", Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society. Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the "Aeneid", customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. "Civil War" takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the "Thebaid", which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

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The untold story of Chicago’s pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago’s influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest’s biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance—broadcast from the city’s South Loop starting in 1924—flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like “Hillbilly Heaven” in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City—celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.

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The United States is distinctive among Western countries in its reliance on nonprofit institutions to perform major social functions. This reliance is rooted in American history and is fostered by federal tax provisions for charitable giving. In this study, Charles T. Clotfelter demonstrates that changes in tax policy—effected through legislation or inflation—can have a significant impact on the level and composition of giving. Clotfelter focuses on empirical analysis of the effects of tax policy on charitable giving in four major areas: individual contributions, volunteering, corporate giving, and charitable bequests. For each area, discussions of economic theory and relevant tax law precede a review of the data and methodology used in econometric studies of charitable giving. In addition, new econometric analyses are presented, as well as empirical data on the effect of taxes on foundations. While taxes are not the most important determinant of contributions, the results of the analyses presented here suggest that charitable deductions, as well as tax rates and other aspects of the tax system, are significant factors in determining the size and distribution of charitable giving. This work is a model for policy-oriented research efforts, but it also supplies a major (and very timely) addition to the evidence that must inform future proposals for tax reform.

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Cline recounts the development of quantum theory, capturing the atmosphere of argument and discovery among physicists in the 1920s. She explores the backgrounds of the major figures—Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Einstein—separately, but draws them together as they begin to consider each other's questions about the nature of matter.

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Donald D. Clayton's Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis remains the standard work on the subject, a popular textbook for students in astronomy and astrophysics and a rich sourcebook for researchers. The basic principles of physics as they apply to the origin and evolution of stars and physical processes of the stellar interior are thoroughly and systematically set out. Clayton's new preface, which includes commentary and selected references to the recent literature, reviews the most important research carried out since the book's original publication in 1968.

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This text examines actual attempts to "prepare" for catastrophes and finds that the policies adopted by corporations and government agencies are fundamentally rhetorical: the plans have no chance to succeed, yet they serve both the organizations and the public as symbols of control, order and stability. These "fantasy documents" attempt to inspire confidence in organizations, but Lee Clarke suggests that they are disturbing persuasions, soothing the perception that ultimately one cannot control technological advances. For example, Clarke studies corporations' plans for cleaning up oil spills in Prince William Sound prior to the "Exxon Valdez" debacle, and he finds that the accepted strategies were not just unrealistic but completely untenable. Although different organizations were required to have a cleanup plan for huge spills in the sound, a really massive spill was unprecedented, and the accepted policy was little more than a patchwork of guesses based on (mostly unsuccessful) cleanups after smaller accidents. Clarke points out that reassuring rhetoric (under the guise of expert prediction) may have no basis in fact or truth because no such basis is attainable. In uncovering the dangers of planning when implementation is a fantasy, Clark concludes that society would be safer, smarter, and fairer if organizations could admit their limitations.

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"Counter-Amores I.2". "Proof". Than brandished fire yet will I prove more strong - I burn unshaken, burn and die day-long. The hooked fish, torn, must learn to slip the bait Teasing the hook let go before too late. Not with you, but against you, love, I bruise My mouth, manage myself such pain I choose. I will this torment as I can't will love From you or me - what can a body prove? Though neither yours nor love's, still I'm a slave. Unite me from myself - I'm yours to have. Jennifer Clarvoe's second book, "Counter-Amores", wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid's "Amores", and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take revenge. They suggest that we discover what we love by fighting, by bringing our angry, hungry, imperfect selves into the battle. Like a man who shouts for the echo back from a cliff, or the scientist who teaches her parrot to say, "I love you," or the philosopher who wonders what it is like to be a bat, or Temple Grandin's lucid imaginings of the last moments of cattle destined for slaughter, the speakers in these poems seek to find themselves in relation to an ever-widening circle of unknowable others. Yearning for "the sweet cool hum of fridge and fluorescent that sang 'home,'" we're as likely to find "fifty-seven clicks and flickering channels pitched to the galaxy." Song itself becomes a site for gorgeous struggle, just as bella means both "beautiful" and "wars."

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When we think of the ways we use language, we think of face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, reading and writing, and even talking to oneself. These are arenas of language use—theaters of action in which people do things with language. But what exactly are they doing with language? What are their goals and intentions? By what processes do they achieve these goals? In these twelve essays, Herbert H. Clark and his colleagues discuss the collective nature of language—the ways in which people coordinate with each other to determine the meaning of what they say. According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a "common ground" of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this "common ground" from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. Clark also discusses the means by which speakers design their utterances for particular audiences and coordinate their use of language with other participants in a language arena. He argues that language use in conversation is a collaborative process, where speaker and listener work together to establish that the listener understands the speaker's meaning. Since people often use words to mean something quite different from the dictionary definitions of those words, Clark offers a realistic perspective on how speakers and listeners coordinate on the meanings of words. This collection presents outstanding examples of Clark's pioneering work on the pragmatics of language use and it will interest psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers.

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The poems in The Weave Room reveal the life of a textile mill as it weathers a decisive social and human moment. Whether speaking in the voice of a weaver trying to quell a crowd about to turn violent over unionization or in his own voice as one of the mill's employees, Chitwood brings together many social and historical threads to show the pattern of a people and a place that has received little treatment in American poetry.

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Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation - be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must also take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state's ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

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Candace Clark here seeks to identify the role sympathy plays in constructing the social order of American society. She explores the difference it makes for individuals, for relationships and for group solidarity if one person gives or withholds sympathy from another. She finds that when we sympathize, we not only express our concern and caring for another, but accrue "sympathy credits" for ourselves. Claiming, receiving, owing and giving sympathy are all subject to an intricate etiquette. The text also tackles a darker, less obvious side of sympathy - how we use it to gain power over others in evryday encounters. When sympathy points out people's problems or their inability to handle those problems, a show of sympathy can humiliate or diminish the recipient. Clark uses a wide variety of data-collection methods that include interviews, surveys and participant observation - "intensive eavesdropping" - in settings such as hospitals and funeral palours to support her case. Ultimately she constructs a kind of social tour of sympathy, revealing that the emotional experience modern Americans call sympathy has a history, a logic and a life of its own.

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Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation - be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must also take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state's ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

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Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid-hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

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Meet Greg. He's a stocky guy with an outsized swagger. He's been the intimidating, yet sociable don of his posse of friends - including Abe, Keith, Mike, Kevin, and Freddie Fredericks - but one arid summer the tide begins to shift and the third-ranking Kevin starts to get ambitious and seeks a higher position within this social club. But this is no ordinary tale of gangland betrayal - Greg and his entourage are bull elephants in Etosha National Park, Namibia, where, for the last twenty years, Caitlin O'Connell has been a keen observer of their complicated friendships. In Elephant Don, O'Connell, one of the leading experts on elephant communication and social behavior, takes us inside the little-known world of African male elephants, a world that is steeped in ritual, where bonds are maintained by unexpected tenderness punctuated by violence. Elephant Don tracks Greg and his group of bulls as O'Connell tries to understand the vicissitudes of male friendship, power struggles, and play. A frequently heart-wrenching portrayal of commitment, loyalty, and affection between individuals yearning for companionship, it vividly captures the incredible repertoire of elephant behavior and communication. Greg, O'Connell shows, is sometimes a tyrant and other times a benevolent dictator as he attempts to hold on to his position at the top. Though Elephant Don is Greg's story, it is also the story of O'Connell and the challenges and triumphs of field research in environs more hospitable to lions and snakes than scientists. Readers will be drawn into dramatic tales of an elephant society at once exotic and surprisingly familiar, as O'Connell's decades of close research reveal extraordinary discoveries about a male society not wholly unlike our own. Surely we've all known a Greg or two, and through this book we may come to know them in a whole new light.

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Communities of Style examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200-600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory. Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goods - particularly ivories and metal works - and how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.

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In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residents was one that Liebling described as the apotheosis of such criticism: a postcard that read, simply, "You were never in Chicago." Neil Steinberg has lived in and around Chicago for more than three decades-ever since he left his hometown of Berea, Ohio, to attend Northwestern - yet he remains fascinated by the dynamics captured in Liebling's anecdote. In You Were Never in Chicago, Steinberg weaves the story of his own coming-of-age as a young outsider who made his way into the inner circles and upper levels of Chicago journalism with a nuanced portrait of the city that would surprise even lifelong residents. Throughout, Steinberg never loses the curiosity and close observation of an outsider, while thoughtfully considering how this perspective has shaped the city, and what it really means to belong. Intimate and layered, You Were Never in Chicago will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all Chicagoans - be they born in the city or forever transplanted.

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In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in extraordinary new ways. Medical men mapped diseases to understand epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate to uncover weather patterns, and Northerners created slave maps to assess the power of the South. And after the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how thematic maps demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography. This radical shift in spatial thought and representation opened the door to the idea that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that are uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas, changing forever the very meaning of a map.

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"We have in this book a Rosetta stone for mediating, or translating, African musical behavior and aesthetics."—Andrew Tracey, African Music"John Miller Chernoff, who spent 10 years studying African drumming, has a flair for descriptive writing, and his first-person narratives should be easily understood by any reader, while ringing unmistakably true for the reader who has also been to West Africa."—Roderick Knight, Washington Post Book World"Ethnomusicologists must be proud that their discipline has produced a book that will, beyond doubt, rank as a classic of African studies."—Peter Fryer, Research in Literatures"A marvelous book. . . . Not many scholars will ever be able to achieve the kind of synthesis of 'doing' and 'writing about' their subject matter that Chernoff has achieved, but he has given us an excellent illustration of what is possible."—Chet Creider, Culture"Chernoff develops a brilliant and penetrating musicological essay that is, at the same time, an intensely personal and even touching account of musical and cultural discovery that anyone with an interest in Africa can and should read. . . . No other writing comes close to approaching Chernoff's ability to convey a feeling of how African music 'works'"—James Koetting, Africana Journal"Four stars. One of the few books I know of that talks of the political, social, and spiritual meanings of music. I was moved. It was so nice I read it twice."—David Byrne of "Talking Heads"The companion cassette tape has 44 examples of the music discussed in the book. It consists of field recordings illustrating cross-rhythms, multiple meters, call and response forms, etc.

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While living in West Africa in the 1970s, John Chernoff recorded the stories of "Hawa," a spirited and brilliant but uneducated woman whose insistence on being respected and treated fairly propelled her, ironically, into a life of marginality and luck as an "ashawo," or bar girl. Rejecting traditional marriage options and cut off from family support, she is like many women in Africa who come to depend on the help they receive from one another, from boyfriends, and from the men they meet in bars and nightclubs. Refusing to see herself as a victim, Hawa embraces the freedom her lifestyle permits and seeks the broadest experience available to her.In Exchange Is Not Robbery and its predecessor, Hustling Is Not Stealing, a chronicle of exploitation is transformed by verbal art into an ebullient comedy. In Hustling Is Not Stealing, Hawa is a playful warrior struggling against circumstances in Ghana and Togo. In Exchange Is Not Robbery, Hawa returns to her native Burkina Faso, where she achieves greater control over her life but faces new difficulties. As a woman making sacrifices to live independently, Hawa sees her own situation become more complex as she confronts an atmosphere in Burkina Faso that is in some ways more challenging than the one she left behind, and the moral ambiguities of her life begin to intensify.Combining elements of folklore and memoir, Hawa's stories portray the diverse social landscape of West Africa. Individually the anecdotes can be funny, shocking, or poignant; assembled together they offer a sweeping critical and satirical vision.

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In the spring of 2003, Jacques Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Mustapha Cherif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital, where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it.As Cherif relates in this account of their dialogue, the topic of Islam held special resonance for Derrida - perhaps it is to be expected that near the end of his life his thoughts would return to Algeria, the country where he was born in 1941. Indeed, these roots served as the impetus for their conversation, which first centers on the ways in which Derrida's Algerian-Jewish identity has shaped his thinking. From there, the two men move to broader questions of secularism and democracy; to politics and religion and how the former manipulates the latter; and to the parallels between xenophobia in the West and fanaticism among Islamists.Ultimately, their discussion is an attempt to tear down the notion that Islam and the West are two civilizations locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy and to reconsider them as the two shores of the Mediterranean - two halves of the same geographical, religious, and cultural sphere. "Islam and the West" is a crucial opportunity to further our understanding of Derrida's views on the key political and religious divisions of our time and an often moving testament to the power of friendship and solidarity to surmount them.

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Cheney and Seyfarth enter the minds of vervet monkeys and other primates to explore the nature of primate intelligence and the evolution of cognition. "This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done, something about how monkeys see their world, and something about themselves, the mental models they inhabit."—Roger Lewin, Washington Post Book World"A fascinating intellectual odyssey and a superb summary of where science stands."—Geoffrey Cowley, Newsweek"A once-in-the-history-of-science enterprise."—Duane M. Rumbaugh, Quarterly Review of Biology

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Last summer, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years, Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in Burning Man's organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun. "Enabling Creative Chaos" tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man's organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.

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In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, 'He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.' "Baboon Metaphysics" is Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's fascinating response to Darwin's challenge.Cheney and Seyfarth set up camp in Botswana's Okavango Delta, where they could intimately observe baboons and their social world. Baboons live in groups of up to 150, including a handful of males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. Such numbers force baboons to form a complicated mix of short-term bonds for mating and longer-term friendships based on careful calculations of status and individual need.But "Baboon Metaphysics" is concerned with much more than just baboons' social organization - Cheney and Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies it. Using innovative field experiments, the authors learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, "Baboon Metaphysics" gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

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Last summer, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years, Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in Burning Man's organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun. "Enabling Creative Chaos" tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man's organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.

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Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology presents a timely collection of pioneering work in the study of these diverse and fascinating ecosystems. Modeled on the highly successful Foundations of Ecology, this book consists of facsimiles of papers chosen by world experts in tropical biology as the "classics" in the field. The papers are organized into sections on related topics, each introduced with a discussion of their role in triggering subsequent research. Topics covered include ecological and evolutionary perspectives on the origins of tropical diversity; plant-animal interactions; patterns of species diversity and distribution of arthropods, vertebrates, and plants; forest dynamics and ecosystem ecology; conservation biology; and tropical forest management.Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology makes essential works in the development of tropical biology available in a convenient form to both senior scholars interested in the roots of their discipline and to students encountering the field for the first time, as well as to everyone concerned with tropical conservation.

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The baby abandoned on the doorstep is a phenomenon that has virtually disappeared from our experience, but in the early modern world, unwanted children were a very real problem. In The Unwanted Child, Joel F. Harrington skillfully recreates sixteenth-century Nuremberg to explore what befell abandoned children in this period in vivid detail. From the harrowing to the inspiring, this critically acclaimed text paints a gripping picture of life on the streets five centuries ago.

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Why do species live where they live? What determines the abundance and diversity of species in a given area? What role do species play in the functioning of entire ecosystems? All of these questions share a single core concept - the ecological niche. Although the niche concept has fallen into disfavour among ecologists in recent years, Jonathan M. Chase and Mathew A. Leibold argue that the niche is an ideal tool with which to unify disparate research and theoretical approaches in contemporary ecology. Chase and Leibold define the niche as including both what an organism needs from its environment and how that organism's activities shape its environment. Drawing on the theory of consumer-resource interactions, as well as its graphical analysis, they develop a framework for understanding niches that is flexible enough to include a variety of small- and large-scale processes, from resource competition, predation and stress to community structure, biodiversity and ecosystem function. Chase and Leibold's synthetic approach should interest ecologists from a wide range of subdisciplines.

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With "Mande Music", Eric Charry offers the most comprehensive source available on one of Africa's richest and most sophisticated music cultures. Using resources as disparate as early Arabic travel accounts, oral histories and archival research as well as his own extensive music lessons and interviews, Charry traces this music culture from its origins in the 13th-century Mali empire to the recording studios of Paris and New York. He focuses on the four major spheres of Mande music - hunter's music, music of the jelis or griots, jembe and other drumming, and guitar-based modern music - exploring how each evolved, the types of instruments used, the major artists, and how each sphere relates to the others. With its maps, illustrations and musical transcriptions, as well as an exhaustive bibliography, discography and videography, this book is useful reading for those seeking an in-depth look at one of the most exciting, innovative and deep-rooted phenomena on the world music scene. A compact disc is available separately.

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History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all, but instead flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and path-breaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/1457), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis-gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning - Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it - the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present.

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Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments; the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses; and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments.The essays and rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith.The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt.

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Wordsworth is England's greatest poet of the French Revolution: he witnessed some of its events first hand, participated in its intellectual and social ambitions, and eventually developed his celebrated poetic campaign in response to its enthusiasms. But how should that response be understood? Combining careful interpretive analysis with wide-ranging historical scholarship, Chandler presents a challenging new account of the political views implicit in Wordsworth's major works–in The Prelude, above all, but also in the central lyrics and shorter narrative poems.Central to the discussion, which restores Wordsworth to both the French and English contexts in which he matured, is a consideration of his relation to Rousseau and Burke. Chandler maintains that by the time Wordsworth set forth his "program for poetry" in 1798, he had turned away from the Rousseauist idea of nature that had informed his early republican writings. He had already become a poet of what Burke called "second nature"–human nature cultivated by custom, habit, and tradition–and an opponent of the quest for first principles that his friend Coleridge could not forsake. In his analysis of the poetry, Chandler suggests that even Wordsworth's most apparently private moments, the lyrical "spots of time," ideologically embodied the uncalculated habits of an oral narrative discipline and a native English mind.

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For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original. In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.

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In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape." Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of "school," understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton.

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This work consists of an introduction and 11 articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of various issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena.

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From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs. In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete? With more than ten million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects. “Illuminating. . . . Castronova’s analysis of the economics of fun is intriguing. Virtual-world economies are designed to make the resulting game interesting and enjoyable for their inhabitants. Many games follow a rags-to-riches storyline, for example. But how can all the players end up in the top 10%? Simple: the upwardly mobile human players need only be a subset of the world's population. An underclass of computer-controlled 'bot' citizens, meanwhile, stays poor forever. Mr. Castronova explains all this with clarity, wit, and a merciful lack of academic jargon.”—The Economist “Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations.”—Tim Harford, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Focusing on the most recent triad of Italian poetic genius--Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Eugenio Montale--Joseph Cary not only presents striking biographical portraits as he facilitates our understanding of their poetry; he also guides us through the first few decades of twentieth-century Italy, a most difficult period in its literary and cultural development.

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Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857 - from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while Basevi's work is still widely cited and discussed - and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world - no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi fills this gap, at the same time providing an invaluable critical apparatus and commentary on Basevi's book. As a contemporary of Verdi and a trained musician, erudite scholar, and critic conversant with current and past operatic repertories, Basevi presented pointed discussion of the operas and their historical context, offering today's readers a unique window into many aspects of operatic culture, and culture in general, in Verdi's Italy. He wrote with precision on formal aspects, use of melody and orchestration, and other compositional features, which made his study an acknowledged model for the growing field of music criticism. Carefully annotated and with an engaging introduction and detailed glossary by editor Stefano Castelvecchi, this translation illuminates Basevi's musical and historical references as well as aspects of his language that remain difficult to grasp even for Italian readers. Making Basevi's important contribution to our understanding of Verdi and his operas available to a broad audience for the first time, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi will delight scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.

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Contemporary art is often obsessed with the new, but it has recently begun to turn to projects centering on research and delving into archives, all in the name of seeking and questioning historical truth. From filmmakers to sculptors to conceptualists, artists of all stripes are digging into the rubble of the past. In this catalog that accompanies an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in the fall of 2013, Dieter Roelstraete gathers a diverse range of international artists to explore the theme of melding archival and experiential modes of storytelling - what he calls "the archaeological imaginary" - particularly in the wake of 9/11. The Way of the Shovel offers a well-constructed balance among excursions into the situation of contemporary art, broad philosophical arguments around the subjects of history and the archive, and cultural analysis. Roelstraete's opening essay maps the critical terrain, while Ian Alden Russell explores the roots of archaeology and its manifestations in twentieth-century art, Bill Brown examines artistic practices that involve historical artifacts and archival material, Sophie Berrebi offers a critique of the "document" as seen in art after the 1960s, and Diedrich Diederichsen writes on the monumentalization of history in European art. The book features work by both established and young artists, and thoughtful entries by Roelstraete accompany the exhibition catalog, along with statements from artists Moyra Davey, Rebecca Keller, Joachim Koester, Hito Steyerl, and Zin Taylor. The first exhibition to showcase this innovative approach to some of the most intriguing art of the past decade, The Way of the Shovel is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the forces driving contemporary art.

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Thinking in Henry James identifies what is genuinely strange and radical about James's concept of consciousness—first, the idea that it may not always be situated within this or that person but rather exists outside or "between," in some transpersonal place; and second, the idea that consciousness may have power over things and people outside the person who thinks. Examining these and other counterintuitive representations of consciousness, Cameron asks, "How do we make sense of these conceptions of thinking?"

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In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, their impact on modern science and society was profound. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies - telegraphy, photography, cinematography - Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this "perceptual moment" throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction-time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Canales traces such developments and the resulting technologies and laboratory practices to provide a provocative new perspective on our device-driven existence. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, "A Tenth of a Second" sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

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Long before the guillotines of the 1789 Revolution brought a grisly political end to the ancien regime, Jay Caplan argues, the culture of absolutism had already perished. This book traces the emergence of a post-absolutist culture across a range of works and genres: Saint-Simon's memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency; Voltaire's first tragedy, "Oedipe"; Watteau's last great painting, "L'Enseigne de Gersaint"; the plays of Marivaux; and Casanova's "History of My Life". While absolutist culture had focused on value directly represented in people (for example, those of noble blood) and things (for example, coins made of precious metals), post-absolutist culture instead explored the capacity of signs to stand for something real (for example, John Law's banknotes or Marivaux's plays in which actions rather than birth signify nobility). Between the image of the Sun King and visions of the godlike Romantic self, Caplan discovers a post-absolutist France wracked by surprisingly modern conflicts over the true sources of value and legitimacy.

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"Who Leads Whom?" is an ambitious study that addresses some of the most important questions in contemporary American politics: Do presidents pander to public opinion by backing popular policy measures that they believe would actually harm the country? Why do presidents "go public" with policy appeals? And do those appeals affect legislative outcomes? Analyzing the actions of modern presidents ranging from Eisenhower to Clinton, Brandice Canes-Wrone demonstrates that presidents' involvement of the mass public, by putting pressure on Congress, shifts policy in the direction of majority opinion. More important, she also shows that presidents rarely cater to the mass citizenry unless they already agree with the public's preferred course of action. With contemporary politics so connected to the pulse of the American people, "Who Leads Whom?" offers much-needed insight into how public opinion actually works in our democratic process. Integrating perspectives from presidential studies, legislative politics, public opinion, and rational choice theory, this theoretical and empirical inquiry will appeal to a wide range of scholars of American political processes.

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Since the creation of minority-dominated congressional districts in 1991, the Supreme Court has condemned the move as akin to "political apartheid", while many African-American leaders argue that such districts are required for authentic representation. In this treatment of the subject, David Canon shows that the unintended consequences of black majority districts actually contradict the common wisdom that whites will not be adequately represented in these areas. Not only do black candidates need white votes to win, but this crucial "swing" vote often decides the race. And, once elected, even the black members who appeal primarily to black voters usually do a better job than white members of walking the racial tightrope, balancing the needs of their diverse constituents. Ultimately, Canon contends, minority districting is good for the country as a whole. These districts not only give African Americans a greater voice in the political process, they promote a politics of commonality - a biracial politics - rather than a politics of difference.

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