Search results for ""stanford university press""
Stanford University Press Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine
In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.
£25.99
Stanford University Press The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan
The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.
£23.99
Stanford University Press The Fire and the Tale
What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power.
£16.99
Stanford University Press Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)
Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen.
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Stanford University Press The Use of Bodies
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western politics and thought. The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first uses Aristotle's discussion of slavery as a starting point for radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the enigmatic concept of "form-of-life," which is in many ways the motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual thinkers (Debord, Foucault, and Heidegger), while the epilogue pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living philosophers.
£23.99
Stanford University Press How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School
Each year, over 40,000 new students enter America's law schools. Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more. How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether. Young provides readers with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily. This book is an indispensable companion for today's law students, prospective law students, and anyone who cares about making law students' lives better. Bursting with warmth, realism, and a touch of firebrand wit, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School equips law students with much-needed wisdom for thriving during those three crucial years.
£18.99
Stanford University Press The Right’s First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech & the Return of Conservative Libertarianism
Not so long ago, being aggressively "pro–free speech" was as closely associated with American political liberalism as being pro-choice, pro–affirmative action, or pro–gun control. With little notice, this political dynamic has been shaken to the core. The Right's First Amendment examines how conservatives came to adopt and co-opt constitutional free speech rights. In the 1960s, free speech on college campuses was seen as a guarantee for social agitators, hippies, and peaceniks. Today, for many conservatives, it represents instead a crucial shield that protects traditionalists from a perceived scourge of political correctness and liberal oversensitivity. Over a similar period, free market conservatives have risen up to embrace a once unknown, but now cherished, liberty: freedom of commercial expression. What do these changes mean for the future of First Amendment interpretation? Wayne Batchis offers a fresh entry point into these issues by grounding his study in both political and legal scholarship. Surveying six decades of writings from the preeminent conservative publication National Review alongside the evolving constitutional law and ideological predispositions of Supreme Court justices deciding these issues, Batchis asks the conservative political movement to answer to its judicial logic, revealing how this keystone of our civic American beliefs now carries a much more complex and nuanced political identity.
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Stanford University Press Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965
Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
£34.00
Stanford University Press The Burnout Society
Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.
£11.99
Stanford University Press What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon
What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.
£29.99
Stanford University Press Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty
In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being.
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Stanford University Press The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women
Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics. Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement's feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its universal goal and gradually gave way to nationalist concerns over "undesirable" migrants and state control over women themselves. Addressing an issue that is still of great concern today, this book sheds light on the ability of international non-governmental organizations to challenge state power, the motivations for state involvement in humanitarian issues pertaining to women, and the importance of gender and sexuality to state officials engaged in nation building.
£23.99
Stanford University Press New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq
Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s. As the book reveals, the ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of a perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sadly, from a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship, and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative in the region—and the dominant narrative we have come to know today.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa
Since the late 1700s, when the Jewish community ceased to be a semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the United States and individual Jews became integrated—culturally, socially, and politically—into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish status and identity have occupied a prominent and contentious place in Jewish legal discourse. This book examines a wide array of legal opinions written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century orthodox rabbis in Europe, the United States, and Israel. It argues that these rabbis' divergent positions—based on the same legal precedents—demonstrate that they were doing more than delivering legal opinions. Instead, they were crafting public policy for Jewish society in response to Jews' social and political interactions as equals with the non-Jewish persons in whose midst they dwelled. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance prefaces its analysis of modern opinions with a discussion of the classical Jewish sources upon which they draw.
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Stanford University Press The Present Alone is Our Happiness, Second Edition: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson
One of the most influential historians of ancient philosophy of the past half-century, Pierre Hadot was adept at using ancient philosophers to illuminate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary life. This new edition of The Present Alone is Our Happiness, which has been significantly revised and expanded to include two previously untranslated essays, is an ideal introduction to some of Hadot's more scholarly work. In it, we discover that to be an Epicurean is not merely to think like one; it is to adopt a way of living where limiting desires is the condition for happiness. Being an Aristotelian, similarly, is to choose a life that involves contemplation, and being a Cynic is to follow Diogenes in his refusal of quotidian convention and the mentality of ordinary people. If so many ancient philosophers founded schools, Hadot explains, it was precisely because they were proposing how to live life on a daily basis. We learn here that the history of philosophy has been something more than just that of a discourse. The founding texts of Greek philosophy, after all, were notes taken from oral exercises undertaken in concrete circumstances and contexts, most often a dialogue between students and specific interlocutors who meant to shed light on their students' real existence. The immense contribution of this book, which also traces Hadot's own personal itinerary in a touching manner, is to remind us, through direct language and numerous examples, what the theoretical aspect of philosophy often masks: its vital and existential dimensions.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Flesh of My Flesh
What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for "wholeness" refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light:Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Locating Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad
This book is a comparative study of Hyderabadi emigrants settling in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Canada, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates at the end of the twentieth century. Based on ten years of fieldwork and extensive interviews, it traces Hyderabadi culture and institutions in these places of settlement, looking at the different versions of Hyderabadi history transmitted and the personal networks and collective bodies formed abroad. Hyderabad, Islamic, and Urdu associations, in addition to other groups are surveyed, as are the marriages of the migrants and the subsequent generations. The author shows how memories of old Hyderabad are retained, redefined, or discarded depending on generation, gender, class, and connections to the Nizam's former state of Hyderabad and the national narratives of the new sites of settlement. Throughout the book, she emphasizes the role of the state in identity formation, the importance of language and religion for retention and reformulation of identities, and the instability of diasporic communities both within and across national boundaries.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Husserl’s Phenomenology
It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon both Husserl's published works and posthumous material, Husserl's Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl's thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking.
£21.99
Stanford University Press The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition
Now combined in one volume, these two books helped focus national attention in the early 1980s on the movement for a nuclear freeze. The Fate of the Earth painted a chilling picture of the planet in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, while The Abolition offered a proposal for full-scale nuclear disarmament. With the recent tensions in India and Pakistan, and concerns about nuclear proliferation around the globe, public attention is once again focused on the worldwide nuclear situation. The author is at the forefront of the discussion. In February 1998, his lengthy essay constituted the centerpiece of a special, widely distributed issue of The Nation dealing with the nuclear arms race. The relevance of his two books for today's debates is undeniable, as many experts assert that the nuclear situation is more dangerous than ever. Reviews of The Fate of the Earth "This is a work of enormous force. There are moments when it seems to hurtle almost out of control, across an extraordinary range of fact and thought. But in the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the years of the nuclear age. It compels us—and compel is the right word—to confront head on the nuclear peril." —New York Times Book Review "There have been thousands of commentaries on what this new destructive power of man means; but my guess is that Schell's book . . . will become the classic statement of the emerging consciousness." —Max Lerner, New Republic Reviews of The Abolition "As always, Schell is interesting and ingenious, eloquent and sometimes moving. He presents his case with clarity, and with candor about its possible shortcomings." —New Republic "A reasoned argument. . . . As this work will do much to stimulate the ongoing nuclear debate, it is highly recommended." —Library Journal
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Stanford University Press Dialectic of Enlightenment
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.
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Stanford University Press Selected Writings
Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most significant writings on these and other topics. Its purpose is to provide a general introduction to Kofman's thought, which has been highly influential in both Europe and America. Although some of the selections have been published previously, the majority of the books contents appear in English translation for the first time.
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Stanford University Press Poetry as Experience
Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry as Experience addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action—a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan insisted, is a remainder to the lyric voice alone: Singbarer Rest. Lacoue-Labarthe's detailed analyses of two decisive poems by Celan, "Tübingen, Jänner" and "Todtnauberg"—the one a response to Hölderlin, the other to Heidegger—and his sustained reading of "The Meridian" present Celan's verse of singularity as the movement at and beyond the border of generalizable experience, i.e., as an experience, a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the subject. For Lacoue-Labarthe, poetry after the Shoah, the poetry of bared singularity, is no longer a poetry that would correspond to the concept of the subject—or, for that matter, to the concept of poetry—but is rather the language of the decept. Only by being disappointed of the heroic language of idealistic poetry, and of the mytho-ontological tendencies of philosophy, can Celan's poetry keep open the possibility of another history, another future.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
This is a wide-ranging intellectual history of how, in the 18th century, Europe came to be conceived as divided into "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe". The author argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction and intellectual artifice created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. He shows how the philosophers viewed the continent from the perspective of Paris and deliberately cultivated an idea of the backwardness of "Eastern Europe" the more readily to affirm the importance of "Western Europe".
£29.99
Stanford University Press Byzantium and Its Army, 284-1081
The Byzantine Empire was almost always ready to fight, and often fought for its life. During much of its history its provinces were military districts called themes, and acclamation by the army, not coronation or inheritance, was what made a man emperor. The army overthrew twenty-odd rulers, and tried to oust many more. It was large and expansive but on the whole it served its purpose well. Over eight centuries, despite losing a surprising number of battles, the army succeeded in preserving both itself and Byzantium. In view of its importance in Byzantine history, it is surprising that this volume is the first general book on the Byzantine army in any language. The author traces the army’s impact on the Byzantine state and society from the army’s reorganization under Diocletian (284-305) until its disintegration in the aftermath of the battle of Manzikert (1071). He suggests solutions to some major unresolved questions of Byzantine military history: how big was the army, how was it organized, how much of it was cavalry, how much was it paid, how was it supplied, when and why did it receive land grants in the themes, and why, after surviving so many disasters, did it fail to survive the not particularly disastrous eleventh century?
£27.99
Stanford University Press Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own. The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars. Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.
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Stanford University Press The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation
This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship, one that can be situated somewhere between cultural studies and cultural history while being more specific than either. Cultural analysis as a critical practice is based on a keen awareness of the critic's situatedness in the present—the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture. Thus it can be summarized by the phrase "cultural memory in the present." Far from being indifferent to history, cultural analysis is devoted to understanding the past as part of the present, as what we have around us. The essays gathered here represent the current state of an emerging field of inquiry. At the same time, they suggest to the larger academic world what cultural analysis can and should do, or be, as an interdisciplinary practice. The challenge for this volume is to counter the common assumption that interdisciplinarity makes the object of inquiry vague and the methodology muddled. In meeting that challenge, it offers close textual and visual readings of subjects ranging from Vermeer to abstract expressionism, from the Book of Ruth to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, from the history of cinema to popular culture in Zaire. The essays in Part I, "Don't Look Now: Visual Memory in the Present," explore in detailed case studies centered on the theme of visuality or looking, the tricky consequences of the uncertainties regarding history that the presentness of the past entails. Part II, "Close-ups and Mirrors: The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference," demonstrates and advocates "listening" to the object without the New Critical naïveté that claims the text speaks for itself. Instead, the essays create the kind of dialogical situation that is a major characteristic of cultural analysis; the text does not speak for itself, but it does speak back. The essays in Part III, "Method Matters: Reflections on the Identity of Cultural Analysis," do not propose any "directions for use" or authoritative statements on how to do cultural analysis. Arranged in pairs of opposites, the essays represent the kind of fruitful tension that stimulates debate. Though no definite answers are proposed, and conflicting views are left in conflict, the essays stimulate a (self-)reflection on cultural analysis, its practices, and its understandings.
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Stanford University Press Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in "the public secret"—defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated. Arguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."
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Stanford University Press Democracy From Above?: The Unfulfilled Promise of Nationally Mandated Participatory Reforms
People are increasingly unhappy with their governments in democracies around the world. In countries as diverse as India, Ecuador, and Uganda, governments are responding to frustrations by mandating greater citizen participation at the local and state level. Officials embrace participatory reforms, believing that citizen councils and committees lead to improved accountability and more informed communities. Yet there's been little research on the efficacy of these efforts to improve democracy, despite an explosion in their popularity since the mid-1980s. Democracy from Above? tests the hypothesis that top-down reforms strengthen democracies and evaluates the conditions that affect their success. Stephanie L. McNulty addresses the global context of participatory reforms in developing nations. She observes and interprets what happens after greater citizen involvement is mandated in seventeen countries, with close case studies of Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru. The first cross-national comparison on this issue, Democracy from Above? explores whether the reforms effectively redress the persistent problems of discrimination, elite capture, clientelism, and corruption in the countries that adopt them. As officials and reformers around the world and at every level of government look to strengthen citizen involvement and confidence in the political process, McNulty provides a clear understanding of the possibilities and limitations of nationally mandated participatory reforms.
£25.19
Stanford University Press The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan
The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.
£99.00
Stanford University Press Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel
This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.
£97.20
Stanford University Press From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico
In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom. An isolated, impoverished backwater for most of the nineteenth century, by 1920, the Soconusco had transformed into a small but vibrant node in the web of global commerce. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little-explored web of small-time producers, shopowners, and laborers played key roles in the rapid expansion of export production. Their deep engagement with rural development challenges the standard top-down narrative of market integration led by economic elites allied with a strong state. Here, Casey Marina Lurtz argues that the export boom owed its success to a diverse body of players whose choices had profound impacts on Latin America's export-driven economy during the first era of globalization.
£97.20
Stanford University Press Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital
By both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic policy agenda. Neoliberalism's Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for "global competitiveness" on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking, neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life. The book explores the sources of neoliberalism's remarkable success and the roots of its current decline. Neoliberalism's appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for our failings, but not enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness—and then demonized as the cause of social ills. By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism, arguing that, far from breaking with the neoliberal model, it actually doubles down on neoliberalism's most destructive features.
£81.00
Stanford University Press Taoism: Growth of a Religion
This is a survey of the history of Taoism from approximately the third century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. For many years, it was customary to divide Taoism into "philosophical Taoism" and "religious Taoism." The author has long argued that this is a false division and that "religious" Taoism is simply the practice of "philosophical" Taoism. She sees Taoism as foremost a religion, and the present work traces the development of Taoism up to the point it reached its mature form (which remains intact today, albeit with modern innovations). The main aim of this history of Taoism is to trace the major lines of its doctrinal evolution, showing the coherence of its development, the wide varieties of factors that came into play over a long period of disconnected eras, the constant absorptions of outside contributions, and the progress that integrates them. The author shows how certain recurrent themes are treated in different ways in different eras and different sects. Among these themes are the Ultimate Truth, immortality, the Sage, the genesis and the end of the world, retribution for good and evil acts, representations of heavens and hells, and the connections between life and the spirit, between life and death, between man and society, and between mystical experience and the social form of religion. The plan of the book is chronological, but the chronology is somewhat fluid given the way Taoism evolved; as it assimilated new features in the course of its growth, it never ceased to continue to develop the old ones. Thus the Celestial Masters sect, which is chronologically the first to attain a structure, is treated at the outset of the book though it exists down to our day, and the Shangqing tradition took shape in the fourth century though its glory years were under the Tang (618-907).
£99.00
Stanford University Press One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era
One Alliance, Two Lenses examines U.S.-Korea relations in a short but dramatic period (1992–2003) that witnessed the end of the Cold War, South Korea's full democratization, inter-Korean engagement, two nuclear crises, and the start of the U.S. war on terror. These events have led to a new era of challenges and opportunities for U.S.-South Korea (ROK) relations. Based on analysis of newly collected data from major American and Korean newspapers, this book argues that the two allies have developed different lenses through which they view their relationship. Shin argues that U.S.-ROK relations, linked to the issue of national identity for Koreans, are largely treated as a matter of policy for Americans—a difference stemming from each nation's relative power and role in the international system. Offering rich empirical data and analysis of a critically important bilateral relationship, Shin also presents policy suggestions to improve a relationship, which—after 50 years—has come under more sustained and serious criticism than ever before.
£94.00
Stanford University Press Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels
A Stanford University Press classic.
£32.40
Stanford University Press The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas
As military forces across the globe adopt new technologies, doctrines, and organizational forms suited to warfare in the information age, defense practitioners and academic specialists are debating the potential consequences of the "revolution in military affairs." The central question of this book is how such revolutions spread, to whom, how quickly, and with what consequences for the global balance of military power. The contributors to this volume—who include historians, political scientists, policy analysts, and sociologists—examine the diffusion of weapons technology, know-how, and methods of conducting military operations over the past two hundred years. The approach reflects the recent reawakening of interest in the relationship between culture and security. The transition from the industrial age to the information age has impacted warfare much as it has other social institutions. Advances in precision weapons, surveillance satellites, robotics, and computer-based information processing, together with organizational changes that network military units, promise to create fundamentally new ways of war; the final outcome of the current revolution is unpredictable—as the North Korean missile program shows—but its global impact will hinge on how the revolution diffuses.
£85.00
Stanford University Press Deterring Terrorism: Theory and Practice
During the Cold War, deterrence theory was the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, popular wisdom dictated that terrorist organizations and radical fanatics could not be deterred—and governments shifted their attention to combating terrorism rather than deterring it. This book challenges that prevailing assumption and offers insight as to when and where terrorism can be deterred. It first identifies how and where theories of deterrence apply to counterterrorism, highlighting how traditional and less-traditional notions of deterrence can be applied to evolving terrorist threats. It then applies these theoretical propositions to real-world threats to establish the role deterrence has within a dynamic counterterrorism strategy—and to identify how metrics can be created for measuring the success of terrorism deterrence strategies. In sum, it provides a foundation for developing effective counterterrorism policies to help states contain or curtail the terrorism challenges they face.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Effective Human Resource Management: A Global Analysis
Effective Human Resource Management is the Center for Effective Organizations' (CEO) sixth report of a fifteen-year study of HR management in today's organizations. The only long-term analysis of its kind, this book compares the findings from CEO's earlier studies to new data collected in 2010. Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau measure how HR management is changing, paying particular attention to what creates a successful HR function—one that contributes to a strategic partnership and overall organizational effectiveness. Moreover, the book identifies best practices in areas such as the design of the HR organization and HR metrics. It clearly points out how the HR function can and should change to meet the future demands of a global and dynamic labor market. For the first time, the study features comparisons between U.S.-based firms and companies in China, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. With this new analysis, organizations can measure their HR organization against a worldwide sample, assessing their positioning in the global marketplace, while creating an international standard for HR management.
£36.00
Stanford University Press Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism?
In this book, Paul Midford engages claims that since 9/11 Japanese public opinion has turned sharply away from pacifism and toward supporting normalization of Japan's military power, in which Japanese troops would fight alongside their American counterparts in various conflicts worldwide. Midford argues that Japanese public opinion has never embraced pacifism. It has, instead, contained significant elements of realism, in that it has acknowledged the utility of military power for defending national territory and independence, but has seen offensive military power as ineffective for promoting other goals—such as suppressing terrorist networks and WMD proliferation, or promoting democracy overseas. Over several decades, these realist attitudes have become more evident as the Japanese state has gradually convinced its public that Tokyo and its military can be trusted with territorial defense, and even with noncombat humanitarian and reconstruction missions overseas. On this basis, says Midford, we should re-conceptualize Japanese public opinion as attitudinal defensive realism.
£89.10
Stanford University Press A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism
"I am not a particularly Jewish thinker," said Emmanuel Levinas, "I am just a thinker." This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called "ethics" is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and U.S. National Security
The last six years have witnessed a virtually unending debate over U.S. policy toward Iraq, a debate that is likely to continue well into the new administration and perhaps the next, notwithstanding recent improvements on the ground. Too often, however, the debate has been narrowly framed in terms of the situation in Iraq and what steps the United States should take there next, leaving the broader impact of the war on American interests largely overlooked. Ultimately, though, the success and failure of the war will have to be judged in terms of its overall contribution to U.S. national security, including those repercussions that extend far beyond the borders of Iraq. This book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the consequences of the Iraq war for the national security of the United States. It is aimed at both those who have not yet made up their minds about the merits of the war and those who wish to ground their opinions in a clearer understanding of what effects the war has actually had. Balance Sheet examines both how the war has advanced or retarded the achievement of other important goals of U.S. national security policy and its impact on the ability of the United States to pursue its security interests now and in the future. Individual chapters by expert authors address such key issues as the war on terror, nuclear non-proliferation, stability in the Middle East, the health of the U.S. military, America's standing in the world, and U.S. public opinion. By doing justice to the full range of stakes involved, this book not only reframes the debate over the Iraq war but provides a necessary foundation for future U.S. policymaking toward Iraq and beyond.
£30.60
Stanford University Press Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts
In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the Female Genital Mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this unprecedented study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across the African “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. These women have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, Between Rites and Rights boldly interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision’s “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Global Broadband Battles: Why the U.S. and Europe Lag While Asia Leads
Broadband communications have become the most important focus in the current evolution of the Internet. But there is a significant difference in the broadband performance of different countries, raising critical issues about the United States, Japan and Korea, and the European Union. The United States gave rise to the Internet, but ranks eleventh in global broadband penetration. Japan and Korea lead the world in broadband penetration, and yet neither country dominates the global information and communications industry. The European Union has developed an effective new regulatory framework for electronic communications, yet follows both Asia and the United States. Global Broadband Battles explains these issues while analyzing the dynamic drivers of the broadband industry, including many of the technologies involved.
£36.00
Stanford University Press Building Experiments: Testing Social Theory
Building Experiments is the essential text for understanding experimental methods. In engaging style, the book shows how theory is employed in experimental design, how experiments test theory, and how proper design and use of experiments can advance the social sciences as explanatory sciences. The interactive nature of the text encourages students to hone their skills, building and running experiments while learning the underlying principles of theory and experimentation. The book addresses practical issues, ranging from the critical analysis of historically important experiments to understanding how to recruit subjects properly and protect their rights. Founding experiments in sociology are compared to founding experiments in physics to demonstrate fundamental cross-disciplinary similarities of theory, experiment, and scientific method. Finally, the book explains how experimental research and theory can be applied in historical and institutional studies. This book will be a key resource in social science methodology courses at all levels.
£72.90
Stanford University Press Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation
Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the last fifteen years, the human need to amend immoral wrongs has been expressed in political discourse as a propensity to apologize for acts of past injustice. Can apology, by bringing closure to conflicts and by opening new possibilities for communication and mutual understanding, cultivate reconciliation and ameliorate the present? Taking Wrongs Seriously examines the increasingly potent role of apology as a social force. Contributors explore in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework the role and function—as well as the limitations—that apology has in promoting dialogue, tolerance, and cooperation between groups confronting one another over past injustices. Fourteen essays draw on a variety of disciplines—including history, international relations, transition studies, sociology, legal studies, psychology, and religion—to explore the real and symbolic transactions that lie at the core of apology. There is no similar introductory text on this subject that includes multiple disciplinary perspectives as well as such a wide geographical and historical spectrum of case studies.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition
This book traces the evolution of Maya civilization through the Pre-Columbian era, a span of some 2,500 years from the origins of complex society within Mesoamerica to the end of the Pre-Columbian world with the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century. The sixth edition presents new archaeological evidence and historical studies and offers the most extensive revisions of this classic work to date. The result is the most thorough and incisive study of the origins and development of ancient Maya civilization ever published.
£36.00
Stanford University Press Pro Bono in Principle and in Practice: Public Service and the Professions
This book explores the aspirational principles and actual practices concerning lawyers’ pro bono service. It begins from the premise that both the profession and the public have much to gain from reducing the gap between ideals and institutions. To that end, the book provides the first broad-scale study of the factors that influence American lawyers’ pro bono work, including an original empirical survey of over 3,000 lawyers. Attention is focused on the workplace factors and law school experiences that encourage charitable public interest activities. The book also includes the first comparative study of public service by looking at volunteer work by other professionals and by lawyers in other countries. Part I of the book explores the literature on altruistic commitments among the public in general, and lawyers in particular. Part II traces the evolution of attorneys’ pro bono responsibilities. Part III presents findings of the empirical survey. Part IV draws on these findings, together with prior research, to propose strategies for increasing and improving lawyers’ pro bono activity.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity
Shanghai today is a thriving, bustling metropolis. But does its avid pursuit of the modern trappings of success truly indicate that it will once again become the shining example of China's commercial and cosmopolitan culture? While history continues to unfold, eminent China scholar Marie-Claire Bergère takes readers back to when Shanghai first opened to the world in 1842 to narrate the city's tumultuous and unique course to the present. Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity is the first comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Divided into four parts, Bergère details Shanghai's beginnings as a treaty port in the mid-nineteenth century; its capitalist boom following the 1911 Revolution; the fifteen years of economic and social decline initiated by the Japanese invasion in 1937, and attempts at resistance; and the city's disgraced years under Communism. Weaving together a range of archival documents and existing histories to create a global picture of Shanghai's past and present, Bergère shows that Shanghai's success was not fated, as some contend, by an evolutionary pattern set into motion long before the arrival of westerners. Rather, her account identifies the relationship between the Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai—their interaction, cooperation, and rivalry—as the driving force behind the creation of an original culture, a specific modernity, founded upon western contributions but adapted to the national Chinese culture. Eclipsed for three decades by socialism, the wheels of the Shanghai spirit began to turn in the 1990s, when the reform movement took off anew. The city is again being referred to as a model for China's current modernization drive. Although it makes no claims to what will happen next, Bergère's Shanghai stands as a compelling and definitive profile of a city whose urban history continues to be redefined, retold, and resold.
£26.99