This interdisciplinary study explores how classical ideals of generosity influenced the writing and practice of gift giving in medieval Europe. In assuming that medieval gift giving was shaped by oral 'folk models', historians have traditionally followed in the footsteps of social anthropologists and sociologists such as Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu. This first in-depth investigation into the influence of the classical ideals of generosity and gift giving in medieval Europe reveals to the contrary how historians have underestimated the impact of classical literature and philosophy on medieval culture and ritual. Focusing on the idea of the gift expounded in the classical texts read most widely in the Middle Ages, including Seneca the Younger's De beneficiis and Cicero's De officiis, Lars Kjær investigates how these ideas were received, adapted and utilised by medieval writers across a range of genres, and how they influenced the practice of generosity.
The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.
This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.
Are you curious to know what all human languages have in common and in what ways they differ? Do you want to find out how language can be used to trace different peoples and their past? Then this book is for you! Now in its third edition, it guides beginners through the rich diversity of the world's languages. It presupposes no background in linguistics, and introduces the reader to linguistic concepts with the help of problem sets, end of chapter exercises and an extensive bibliography. Charts of language families provide geographical and genealogical information, and engaging sidebars with demographic, social, historical and geographical facts help to contextualise and bring languages to life. This edition includes a fully updated glossary of all linguistic terms used, new problem sets, and a new chapter on cartography. Supplementary online materials include links to all websites mentioned, and answers to the exercises for instructors.
Museums today find themselves within a mediatized society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatized: they present a uniqu
A ground-breaking discovery in the history of the life sciences,the discovery of the pulmonary transit of blood, was a prerequisite for William Harvey’s fully developed theory of blood circulation thr
Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.
The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though ostensibly about bringing modernity, progress, and prosperity to the deserts, the transformation of Central Asia's landscapes through tsarist- and Soviet-era hydraulic projects bore the hallmarks of a colonial experiment. Examining how both regimes used irrigation-age fantasies of bringing the deserts to life as a means of claiming legitimacy in Central Asia, Maya K. Peterson brings a fresh perspective to the history of Russia's conquest and rule of Central Asia.
This book focuses on the 'Gospel of Mary' in the context of a broader analysis of early Christian dialogue gospels - a popular literary genre used to present Jesus as conversing with select disciples and answering a series of questions on life, death and the cosmos at the conclusion of his earthly career. Jesus' teachings in these texts can vary greatly, from affirming the resurrection of the flesh to denying it completely. This book highlights the diversity of perspective within this genre, bringing together New Testament, 'gnostic' and (proto-)orthodox texts. Yet each text is based on the premise that it contains new or clarified teaching from the risen or glorified Lord, often in the form of a final revelation concerned with the disciples' eschatological salvation. This book offers a fresh and in-depth analysis of the 'Gospel of Mary' in the context of the dialogue gospel genre, concentrating on the narrative frame, the eschatological teachings, and the relationship between the two.
'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what (if any) changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism.
Energy, and access to energy, are essential to human life, civilisation and development. A number of energy issues - including energy security, energy prices and the polluting emissions for energy use
While human beings might be rational animals, they are emotional animals as well. Emotions play a central role in all areas of our lives and if we are to have a proper understanding of human life and
Anthropology is a generous, open-ended, comparative and yet critical inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of life in the one world we all inhabit. This book is premised on the claim that thes
Both in antiquity and ever since the Renaissance Lucretius' De Rerum Natura has been admired – and condemned – for its startling poetry, its evangelical faith in materialist causation, and its seductive advocacy of the Epicurean good life. Approaches to Lucretius assembles an international team of classicists and philosophers to take stock of a range of critical approaches to which this influential poem has given rise and which in turn have shaped its interpretation, including textual criticism, the text's strategies for engaging the reader with its author and his message, the 'atomology' that posits a correlation of the letters of the poem with the atoms of the universe, the literary and philosophical intertexts that mediate the poem, and the political and ideological questions that it raises. Thirteen essays take up a variety of positions within these traditions of interpretation, innovating within them and advancing beyond them in new directions.
Trauma is a leading cause of death and disability around the world, and the leading cause of death in those aged under forty-five years. Conditions such as airway obstruction, hemorrhage, pneumothorax, tamponade, bowel rupture, vascular injury, and pelvic fracture can cause death if not appropriately diagnosed and managed. This essential book provides emergency physicians with an easy-to-use reference and source for traumatic injury evaluation and management in the emergency department. It covers approaches to common, life-threatening, and traumatic diseases in the emergency department, for use on shift and as a reference for further learning. Each chapter includes a succinct overview of common traumatic injuries, with evaluation and management pearls and pitfalls. Highly illustrated with images from one of the busiest trauma centers in the US, and featuring expert contributions from a diverse set of attending physicians, this is an essential text for all emergency medicine practitione
Organizational change is a reality of 21st-century working life, but what psychological effects does it have on individual workers, and what coping strategies can be used to mediate its impact? In tod
Social democratic parties and the system of social democracy are a central part of political life in the West. This book focuses on social democracy as a party and a broad movement as well as a unique
