British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs – serie

China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music.Jonathan Stock is an authority on Chinese music, with previous books on Chinese flute and violin solos and Abing, a twentieth-century composer. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, Stock's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai allows him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and the first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. He next focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a specially 'musical' reading of gendered performance. Further chapters reverse conventional ethnomusicological arguments that music constructs place by looking at how Shanghai's institutions before 1949 shaped the environment within which troupes developed new dramatic materials and competed for work. In considering reforms post-1949, the author shows how the infusion of explicit political content actually weakened the expressive impact of these dramas. Finally, developments since 1980 are reviewed. The book includes songs and illustrations of performance styles.An innovative combination of urban and historical ethnomusicology, the book's findings will engage the historian of China and general scholar of music alike.

From the Renaissance well into the eighteenth century hundreds of Latin poems, some running to tens of thousands of verses, were produced on subjects as multifarious as they were topical: meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, the arts of sculpture and engraving, writing and conversation, the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate, the pious life and the urbane life. Loyola's Bees is the first full-length study of the Latin didactic poetry of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic Reformation order whose priests were the leading exponents of the genre in the early modern period. If post-Romantic readers have, in the main, lost the taste for a 'poetry of things', the poems in this book will command scholarly attention at least for what they reveal about early modern social, cultural, and intellectual life, Jesuit attitudes to the New World and the New Science, and the circulation of Latin literature in France and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But modern readers will also be pleasantly surprised by their literary qualities. Often elegant, witty, and for all their enthusiastic engagement with contemporary events and inventions, self-consciously 'classical' in form, Jesuit didactic poems are a treasure waiting to be discovered by students of the classical tradition.Loyola's Bees is no mere descriptive survey, however. Haskell sets out to resolve the paradox of the crack troops of early modern Catholicism devoting so much time to the composition of Latin verse of a secular orientation. Poems on a wide and disparate range of subjects are analysed from the unifying perspective of Jesuit ideology, and Haskell articulates the ways in which the Society's distinctive brand of humanist pedagogy, together with its apostolic (world-directed) spiritual ethos, determined both the specific forms and vigorous fortune of the Latin didactic genre in the early modern period.

The State of the Political offers a broad-ranging re-interpretation of the understanding of politics and the state in the writings of three major German thinkers, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. It rejects the typical separation of these writers on the basis of their allegedly incompatible ideological positions, and suggests instead that once properly located in their historical context, the tendentious character of these interpretative boundaries becomes clear.The book interprets the conceptions of politics and the state in the writings of these three thinkers by means of an investigation of their adaptation and modification of particular German traditions of thinking about the state, or Staatsrechtslehre. Indeed, when the theoretical considerations of this state-legal theory are combined with their contemporary political criticism, a richer and more deeply textured account of the issues that engaged the attention of Weber, Schmitt and Neumann is possible. Thus, the broad range of subjects discussed in this book include parliamentarism and democracy in Germany, academic freedom and political economy, political representation, cultural criticism and patriotism, and the relationship between rationality, law, sovereignty and the constitution.The State of the Political is based on extensive consideration of primary and secondary materials, and is held together by a general focus on the importance to these authors of distilling an adequate account of the state and the political - largely because this could bolster their subsequent criticisms of contemporary politics. The study attempts to restore a sense of proportion to discussion of their writings, focusing on the extensive ideas that they shared rather than insisting on their necessary ideological separation. It is a detailed re-appraisal of a crucial moment in modern intellectual history, and highlights the profound importance of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann for the history of European ideas.

This book takes a radical approach to the study of traditional songs. Folk song scholarship was originally obsessed with notions of completeness and narrative coherence; even now long narratives hold a privileged place in most folk song canons. Yet field notebooks and recordings (and, increasingly, publications) overwhelmingly suggest that apparently 'broken' and drastically shortened versions are not perceived as incomplete by those who sing them. Dealing with a wide range of traditions and languages, this study turns the focus on these 'dog-ends' of oral tradition, and looks closely at how very short texts convey meaning in performance by working the audience's knowledge of a highly allusive idiom. What emerges is the tenacity of meaning in the connotative and metaphorical language of traditional song, and the extraordinary adaptability of songs in different cultural contexts. Such pieces have a strong metonymic force: they should not be seen as residual 'last leaves' of a once-complete tradition, but as dynamic elements in the process of oral transmission.Not all song fragments remain in their natural environment, and this book also explores relocations and dislocations as songs are adapted to new contexts: a ballad of love and death is used to count pins in lace-making, song-snippets trail subversive meanings in the novels of Charles Dickens. Because they are variable and elusive to dating, songs have had little attention from the literary establishment: the authors show both how certain critical approaches can be fruitfully applied to song texts, and how concepts from studies in oral traditions prefigure aspects of contemporary critical theory. Like the songs themselves, this book crosses and recrosses the perceived divide between the literary and the oral. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.

This is a long overdue examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity.Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as 'official' figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept, and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol'ts's work shows that the borders between 'official' and 'unofficial' literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. Dr Hodgson discusses how Berggol'ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy, and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol'ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion which connects texts of different genres, 'official' as well as 'unofficial' writing.This study will provoke readers into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable, but which (like Ol'ga Berggol'ts) was far more complex and intriguing.

The Sibe are an immigrant group, Qing dynasty bannermen who made a three-year "long march" from Manchuria in the 18th century to serve as a border garrison in the newly conquered Western Regions of the Qing Chinese empire. They preserved their military structure and a discrete identity in the multi-ethnic region of Xinjiang and are now officially recognised as an ethnic minority nationality under the People's Republic. They are known in China today as the last speakers of the Manchu language, and as preservers of their ancient traditions. This study of their music culture reveals not fossilised tradition but a shifting web of borrowings, assimilation and retention.Singing the Village is a readable, anthropologically interesting and musically informed account of culture and performance in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The book approaches musical and ritual life in this ethnically diverse region through an understanding of society in terms of negotiation, practice and performance. It explores the relations between shamanism, song and notions of externality and danger, bringing recent theories on shamanism to bear on questions of the structural and affective powers of ritual music. It focuses on the historical demands of identity, boundary maintenance and creation among the Sibe, and on the role of musical performance in maintaining popular memory, and it discusses the impact of state policies of the Chinese Communist Party on village musical and ritual life.Singing the Village draws on a wide range of Chinese, Sibe-Manchu language sources, and oral sources including musical recordings and interviews gathered in the course of fieldwork in Xinjiang. It includes musical transcriptions, glossaries of Sibe-Manchu and Chinese terms, and is accompanied by a free CD which includes 30 original field recordings.

Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics.Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

This study looks at the relationship between popular recreations and the spaces in which they took place, and in doing so it provides a history of how England enjoyed itself during the long eighteenth century.Because the poor lacked land of their own, public spaces were needed for their sports and pastimes. Such recreations included: parish wakes and feasts; civic fairs and celebrations; football, cricket and other athletic sports; bull- and bear-baiting; and the annual celebrations of Shrove Tuesday and Guy Fawkes.Three case studies form the core of this book, each looking at the recreations and spaces to be found in different types of settlement: first, the streets and squares of provincial market towns; then the diverse vacant spaces to be found in industrialising towns and villages of the west Midlands and West Riding of Yorkshire; and finally the village greens of rural England. Through a detailed examination of contemporary books, diaries and newspapers, and records in over forty archives, Dr Griffin addresses the questions of what spaces were used, and what was the interaction with those who used and controlled the land.The industrial revolution has been seen to have had a negative impact on popular recreation; through its innovative use of the concept of space, this book provides a welcome alternative to this traditional view.

This book covers one of the most important and persistent problems in nineteenth-century European diplomacy, the Eastern Question. The Eastern Question was essentially a short hand for comprehending the international consequences caused by the gradual and apparently terminal decline of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. This volume examines the military and diplomatic policies of Russia, as it struggled with the Ottoman Empire for influence in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The only research monograph in English to cover this subject in such breadth and depth, Russia and the Eastern Question is based on extensive use of Russian archive sources. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of issues such as the development of Russian military thought, the origins and conduct of the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War, the origins and conduct of the 1826-1828 Russo-Persian War and the Treaty of Adrianople. The author also branches out into new territory by considering issues such as the Russian army's use of Balkan irregulars, the reform of the Danubian Principalities (1829 -1834), the ideas of the 'Russian Party' and the little-known subject of Russian public opinion toward the Eastern Question. Providing a fascinating integration of the various aspects of Russian military thought, war planning and campaign history, diplomacy, imperial expansion, geopolitics and propaganda into a coherent whole, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in the fields of nineteenth-century Russian, Ottoman, Balkan, Caucasus and Persian history, European diplomacy and warfare and war and society studies. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the historical background to the Crimean war and later episodes in the Eastern Question.

The rulers of Venice prided themselves on their unique brand of justice, which was a source of both ridicule and admiration for foreign commentators. Dr Shaw uncovers what this special justice meant for ordinary subjects by studying the history of one of the oldest magistracies of the city, a body responsible for handling petty market crime and small claims litigation. This volume examines how changing ideas about justice at the level of the political elite were related to judicial and policing practices in the courtroom and on the street. It shows how failure to invest in the state bureaucracy allowed corruption to flourish and effectively delegated power to private interest groups such as the guilds. At the same time, the volume reveals that the bottom level of civil justice was fast, cheap and accessible. Everyone had the chance to be heard, and the poor and disadvantaged could hope for justice along with the rich and powerful. This volume will be essential reading for historians of Venice and specialists in the history of early modern cities, and also of wider interest to scholars interested in the connections between economic, legal and social structures.

This volume is a study of revolution, genocide and national identity in Bosnia-Hercegovina during World War II. It explains the civil war between two rival guerrilla movements - the Partisans and the Chetniks - both in terms of long-term socio-economic and cultural fissures in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and in terms of short-term differences in policy and ideology. A chronological narrative history of the Bosnian Partisan movement allows the reader to understand how it evolved, as it first provoked the emergence of its Chetnik rival, and was then forced to adapt under pressure from the latter. This volume will be essential reading for scholars and students of the former Yugoslavia, and for all those interested in Communism, nationalism, revolution, or genocide.

This is the first critical biography of Xavier Marmier. The celebrity of Marmier was such that his death made headline news in most major newspapers in France. Marmier made his reputation as a traveller, travel writer, translator, literary critic, comparatist, journalist, novelist, poet, lecturer, linguist, ethnologist, social historian, and latterly as an outspoken member of the Académie française. His work had a great deal of influence, both direct and indirect, on literary and intellectual developments in France, and also had a significant impact in a number of the countries he visited. Although his name still figures in studies of comparative literature or the history of travel writing, his innovations have gradually been eclipsed by his successors in various fields, resulting in the neglect of his overall achievements. Marmier's numerous and diverse achievements are assessed here for the first time in their intellectual and historical context, and within the framework of his colourful and somewhat controversial private life. This volume will be essential reading for scholars and students of the history of nineteenth-century French literature and intellectual life, the history of literary criticism, travel writing, the introduction of foreign literature to France, and those with an interest in the intellectual, social and cultural history of the regions Marmier visited.

This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required them rejecting the sexual conventions of the Victorian era.From the early 1880s and well into the twentieth century, the efforts of these writers and activists existed in critical tension with other contemporary developments in literary culture. Livesey maps the ongoing dialogue between socialist writers like William Morris, decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and defining figures of early modernism including Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. She concludes that socialist writers developed a distinct political aesthetic in which the love of beauty was to act as a force for revolutionary change. The book draws on archival research and extensive study of socialist periodicals, together with readings of works by writers including Morris, Wilde, Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, Isabella Ford, Carpenter, Alfred Orage, Woolf and Fry. Livesey uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, she provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts a vital route to that future.

Traditional Chinese law, including Qing law, was often criticized as being inapplicable in civil trials and it was often believed that the magistrate's court preferred mediation rather than decision-making. This volume challenges these views and repairs the distorted picture of Qing civil justice.With a detailed analysis of the Qing law codes and of one hundred nineteenth-century case records from Baodi county, the volume examines much-debated issues such as the approach of Qing law to civil and criminal matters, punishment and mediation in civil trials, Confucius' preference for education and the idea of anti-litigation.A significant contribution to the field of traditional Chinese law this volume will be of essential interest to those who seek to understand the Qing legal system and its development in China.

What is the nature of knowledge? Anthropology imagines it possible to divide or separate social and analytical relations, whereby knowledge travels between persons as a thing. And yet, Bolivip imagines knowledge as the bodily resources or parts of a person that can be extended or combined with others. This methodological exchange is modelled on a moment from Bolivip - an exchange of skin whereby knowledge is returned in respect of prior nurture and care given, and two people become encompassed by one skin.The Min area of Papua New Guinea has proven to be one of the most enigmatic cultures in anthropological experience. But rather than accept this resistance to analysis as a problem of Melanesian secrecy, this volume suggests that archaic notions of anthropological knowledge have been the problem all along. Taking up the 'Min problem' head on, this study suggests a novel solution to the impasse.The argument works through alternating chapters: an imagistic ethnography of Bolivip describes how arboreal and horticultural metaphors motivate the growth of persons and plants by circulating bodily resources through others. Knowledge here comes from those who contribute to conception, and is withheld until a person is capable of bearing it. These images are used to provide new readings of classic Melanesianist texts - Mead, Bateson and Fortune - substituting theoretical ideas for intimate relations; Weiner and Strathern's own experiments with anthropology modelled on Melanesia; and Barth's reading of secrecy amongst the Min.The book provides an valuable insight into our own assumptions about knowledge and the world by means of insights into the aesthetics of a Papua New Guinean lifeworld.

What do we learn if we look in parallel at the past of two distinct parts of the world? Anne Haour weighs this question by considering both the central Sahel of West Africa and the European countries around the North Sea, for the period 800-1500. This is a time for which historical records are scarce, and to which archaeology is making ever-increasing contributions. It is also, and foremost, a time when the central Sahel and northern Europe alike were undergoing far-reaching changes that were to define key aspects of their identity today. New monotheistic religions were replacing the animist faiths, states and empire becoming consolidated, new trading networks being set up, new towns emerging, fortifications being erected as symbols and in defence against raiders and invaders. Do these elements of convergence mean that we can unpick much wider themes of similarity between northern Europe and Sahelian West Africa? This volume's central argument is that we can understand one area better by seeking inspiration from another. There is much talk by researchers today of the value of comparative approaches and cross-cutting studies; this book puts them to the test.Lucid and thought-provoking, this book will be of interest to scholars and students, historians and archaeologists, West Africanists and Europeanists.

Altruism' was coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s as a theoretical term in his 'cerebral theory' and as the central ideal of his atheistic 'Religion of Humanity'. In The Invention of Altruism, Thomas Dixon traces this new language of 'altruism' as it spread through British culture between the 1850s and the 1900s, and in doing so provides a new portrait of Victorian moral thought. Drawing attention to the importance of Comtean positivism in setting the agenda for debates about science and religion, this volume challenges received ideas about both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as moral philosophers. Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition, throughout the natural world. Spencer was the instigator of an Anti-Aggression League and an advocate of greater altruism in Britain's dealings with the 'lower races'. It also sheds light on the rise of popular socialism in the 1880s, on the creation of the idealist 'altruist' in novels of the 1890s, and on the individualistic philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and G. E. Moore - authors considered by some to be representative of fin de siècle 'egomania.'This wide-ranging study in the history of ideas is highly relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.

We know that many people converted to Islam in colonial East Africa, but the why and how remain obscure. Recently, these Muslim congregations have come under scrutiny for producing Islamic radicals, but again the causes are poorly understood. This book traces the history of Muslim congregations in a mainland Tanzanian region from their inception in the early twentieth century to the early 2000s, using the records of governments and missions as well as hundreds of interviews. It argues that rural villagers became Muslim of their own initiative, in the pursuit of more equitable relations with Muslim townspeople and among themselves. The egalitarian ethos of these rural Muslims resonated with that of Tanzania's movement for independence, in which they strongly participated. The current conflicts among Muslims are rooted partly in their shifting and problematic relationship with successive post-independence governments, but also in the transitions in gender relations, education and ritual observance to which Islamization has contributed.

The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980-1630 BC). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from Ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the gods, the king, or humanity. This volume provides the first full literary analysis of this poem for a century. It provides a detailed study of questions such as: its date of composition; its historicity; the identity of its protagonists and setting; its reception history within Egyptian culture; and whether it really is a unified literary composition, or a redacted collection of texts of heterogenous origin. Providing a new reading of the poem, within the cultural milieu that produced it, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and students of Ancient Egyptian literature, the Old Testament and comparative religion.

In this innovative book, Toni Erskine offers a challenging and original normative approach to some of the most pressing practical concerns in world politics - including the contested nature of the prohibitions against torture and the targeting of civilians in the 'war on terror'.Erskine's vision of 'embedded cosmopolitanism' responds to the charge that conventional cosmopolitan arguments neglect the profound importance of community and culture, particularity and passion. Bringing together insights from communitarian and feminist political thought, she defends the idea that community membership is morally constitutive - while arguing that the communities that define us are not necessarily territorially bounded and that a moral perspective situated in them need not be parochial.Erskine employs this framework to explore some of the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by contemporary warfare. Can universal principles of restraint demanded by conventional laws of war be robustly defended from a position that also acknowledges the moral force of particular ties and loyalties? By highlighting the links that exist even between warring communities, she offers new reasons for giving a positive response - reasons that reconcile claims to local attachments and global obligations.Embedded Cosmopolitanism provides a powerful account of where we stand in relation to 'strangers' and 'enemies' in a diverse and divided world; and provides a new theoretical framework for addressing the relationship between our moral starting point and the scope of our duties to others.

Exploring the role of credit is vital to understanding any economy. In the past two decades historians of many European regions have become increasingly aware that medieval credit, far from being the preserve of merchants, bankers, or monarchs, was actually of basic importance to the ordinary villagers who made up most of the population.This is the first study devoted to credit in rural England in the middle ages. Focusing in particular on seven well-documented villages, it examines in detail some of the many thousands of village credit transactions of this period, identifies the people who performed them, and explores the social relationships brought about by involvement in credit. The evidence comes primarily from inter-peasant debt litigation recorded in the proceedings of manor courts, which were the private legal jurisdictions of landlords. A comparative study which discusses the English evidence alongside findings from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe, it argues that the prevailing view of medieval English credit as a marker of poverty and crisis is inadequate. In fact, the credit networks of the English countryside were surprisingly resilient in the face of the fourteenth-century crises associated with plague, famine, and economic depression. This volume will be essential reading for specialists on medieval Britain and will also engage a more general readership interested in conditions and structures in pre-industrial and developing societies.

The Popish plot was an alleged Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and re-introduce the Catholic faith to England. Despite it being a fiction, belief in the plot became widespread and many innocent Catholics were sent to their deaths.Moving away from the focus of recent histories of the plot, which remain predominately in the realms of parliamentary discussion, courts of law and the councils of the King, this volume considers how details of the plot circulated more broadly. It investigates the many media used, primarily print, but also manuscript and word of mouth, for instance in books, pamphlets, newspapers, and ballads. The most prolific commentator on the Popish plot was Roger L'Estrange, the press censor during the reigns of Charles II and James II. L'Estrange was interested in the working of the London book trade at this time, and as one who did not believe there was a Popish plot, wrote prolifically in order publicly to cast doubt upon it. L'Estrange's writings provide us with valuable insights into the production, dissemination, and reception of political opinion in this period. Drawing on the latest insights of literary studies, political history, and the history of the book and reading this volume will further understanding in how belief in such an extraordinary plot took hold amongst so many.

This is an ethnographic study of kinship and the nature and behaviour of ownership amongst the much-studied Sepik River Iatmul people.Until very recently, anthropology has remained a Western analytical project for understanding and conceptualising non-Western societies, and was often geared towards the pragmatics of colonial and post-colonial interest. In the spirit of social science, anthropology has formulated a rigorous method of research and a specialised language of description and analysis. Embedded within this approach are metaphysical assumptions about the nature of human society, culture, history, and so forth.This volume provides the vantage point from which to rethink anthropology's central assumption about social relations by focusing on the way in which social relations are assumed and prefigured in the methodological approach in data gathering and in subsequent theorisation. It presents an ethnographic study of the nature of personhood, name and marriage systems, gender, understandings of kinship, and concomitant issues of ownership amongst the Sepik River Iatmul people, a people well-known and of enduring importance to anthropology on either side of the Atlantic and in Australasia.Written from the viewpoint of a Melanesian scholar who comes from a country that has been the subject of much anthropological thinking, this volume engages with and examines the foundational assumptions of anthropology.

This volume asks fundamental questions about the political impact of cultural institutions by exploring the power struggles for control over such institutions in Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate rule. Countering assertions of French imperial cultural ascendancy and self-confidence, the author demonstrates the diverse capacities of Arab and other local communities, to forge competing cultural identities that would, in later years, form the basis for rising political self-enfranchisement.Drawing on a wide array of written sources and oral testimonies, the author illuminates how political and religious leaders fought to harness the force of culture through projects as diverse as schools, cinema, scouting, and tourism. These leaders were to be found not only in the French colonial administration or the burgeoning Syrian and Lebanese parliaments, but also in student societies, missionary congregations, and philanthropic organizations. The author pays particular attention to the last decade of French rule before Syrian and Lebanese independence as a critical time of transition and debate.The rich individual histories of institutions such as the American University of Beirut, the secular French Mission laique, or the Jesuit missionaries come together in a broader narrative that speaks to the ongoing Syrian and Lebanese journeys toward national identity.

This volume provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of women's involvement in British political culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is based upon extensive archival research, but also engages with recent feminist theories in the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology. The volume is innovative too for its attention to rural experiences of politics, as well as urban. Dr Gleadle not only throws new light on women's political activities but also does much to challenge many traditional assumptions about contemporary politics per se. This includes, for example, fresh insights into the great Reform Act of 1832, attention to the many continuities in political practice and ideas, and a focus upon the primary significance of parish politics within the day-to-day activities of the middling and gentry classes.

This is the first book devoted to the Lombard League, an association created by the city republics of northern Italy in the 12th century in order to defend their autonomy and that of the papacy in a momentous struggle against the German holy roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Consequently, the League has enjoyed an iconic status, and in the 19th century was glorified as a precursor of the Italian struggle for independence in political and historical pamphlets as well as in paintings, novels and even operas.The League played a crucial role in the evolution of Italy's political landscape, but it did more than ensuring its continued fragmentation. Historiography, in fact, has overlooked the collegial cooperation among the medieval Italian polities and this volume offers new interpretations, by examining the League's structure, activity, place in political thought and its links with regional identities.Using documentary evidence, histories, letters, inscriptions and contemporary troubadour poems as well as rhetorical and juridical treatises, Dr Raccagni argues that the League was not just a momentary anti-imperial military alliance, but was rather a body that also provided collective approaches to regional problems, ranging from the peaceful resolution of disputes to the management of regional lines of communication, usurping, in some cases, imperial prerogatives. Yet the League never rejected imperial overlordship per se, and here it is revealed how it survived after the end of the conflict against Frederick I, one of its most lasting legacies being the settlement that it reached with the empire, the Peace of Constance, which became the Magna Carta of the northern Italian polities.

This volume tackles complex theoretical questions about sex and gender and the way that they inform classical Arabic poetics.Arabic literature has a rich tradition of women's poetry, and of lamentation for the dead in particular. Dr Hammond argues that these elegies - marthiya - were received into the literary canon because they echoed the familiar male paradigm of the qas?da, or the heroic ode, while at the same time recasting its spatial and temporal axes from a feminine authorial stance. The volume then moves on to consider women's compositions in non-elegiac genres, such as invective and erotic verse. Dr Hammond also addresses the questions of authenticity that arise when a woman's poem is preserved anecdotally, embedded as dialogue in a story that is narrated, transmitted, and redacted by men. Spanning diverse genres, historical epochs, and geographic locations, this volume will acquaint its readers with all manner of women's verse compositions from the pre-Islamic Arabian lament to the medieval Andalusian love lyric.

Based on long-term fieldwork with herding families along the Mongolian-Russian border, this book examines how people tend to past memories in their homes while navigating new ways of accumulating wealth and fortune in the face of political and economic uncertainties. It is at this intersection, where the politics of tending to the past and the morality of new means of accumulating wealth come together to shape intimate social relations that the book reveals an innovative area for the study of kinship in anthropology. Combining personal experience with ethnographic insight, the volume will be essential reading for social anthropologists and those with a general interest in East Asia and post-socialist countries.

This book presents an archaeological case of prehistoric human environmental impact: a study of ecological and cultural change from the arid south coast of Peru, beginning around 750 BC and culminating in a collapse during the Middle Horizon, around AD 900. Its focus is the lower Ica Valley - today depopulated and bereft of cultivation and yet with archaeological remains attesting to substantial prehistoric occupations - thereby presenting a prima facie case for changed environmental conditions. Previous archaeological interpretations of cultural changes in the region rely heavily on climatic factors such as El Niño floods and long droughts. While the archaeological, geomorphological and archaeobotanical records presented here do indeed include new evidence of huge ancient flood events, they also demonstrate the significance of more gradual, human-induced destruction of Prosopis pallida (huarango) riparian dry-forest. The huarango is a remarkable leguminous hardwood that lives for over a millennium and provides forage, fuel, and food. Moreover, it is crucial to the integration of a fragile desert ecosystem, enhancing microclimate and soil fertility and moisture. Its removal exposed this landscape to the effects of El Niño climatic perturbations long before Europeans arrived in Peru.This case-study therefore contradicts the popular perception that native Americans inflicted barely perceptible disturbance upon a New World Eden. Yet, no less interestingly, it also records correlations between changes in society and degrees of human environmental impact. These allow inferences about the specific contexts in which significant human environmental impacts in the New World did, and did not, arise.