Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association
How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.
After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.
Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today. International organizations such as the United Nations frequently invoke these inaccurate stories to justify environmental conservation and development projects in the arid and semiarid lands in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. Recent research in arid lands ecology and new paleoecological evidence, however, do not support many claims of deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in this region.
Diana K. Davis’s pioneering analysis reveals the critical influence of French scientists and administrators who established much of the purported scientific basis of these stories during the colonial period in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, illustrating the key role of environmental narratives in imperial expansion. The processes set in place by the use of this narrative not only systematically disadvantaged the majority of North Africans but also led to profound changes in the landscape, some of which produced the land degradation that continues to plague the Maghreb today.
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome exposes many of the political, economic, and ideological goals of the French colonial project in these arid lands and the resulting definition of desertification that continues to inform global environmental and development projects. The first book on the environmental history of the Maghreb, this volume reframes much conventional thinking about the North African environment. Davis’s book is essential reading for those interested in global environmental history.
In a fascinating analysis of critical themes in Feodor Dostoevsky’s work, René Girard explores the implications of the Russian author’s “underground,” a site of isolation, alienation, and resentment. Brilliantly translated, this book is a testament to Girard’s remarkable engagement with Dostoevsky’s work, through which he discusses numerous aspects of the human condition, including desire, which Girard argues is “triangular” or “mimetic”—copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our own. Girard’s interdisciplinary approach allows him to shed new light on religion, spirituality, and redemption in Dostoevsky’s writing, culminating in a revelatory discussion of the author’s spiritual understanding and personal integration. Resurrection is an essential and thought-provoking companion to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.
In this groundbreaking publication, originally published in 1972, George Nickelsburg places ideas in their historical circumstances as he probes biblical and postbiblical texts and challenges widely accepted scholarship. The continuities in literary forms demonstrate that divine justice was the central issue, but that people differed as to whether that justice was enacted in this life, in the assumption to heaven, in a resurrection, or in the ongoing life as an immortal soul.
The expanded edition includes subsequent studies on the resurrection accounts and theologies of the New Testament, the New Testament passion narratives, and Jewish and Christian theologies about the Son of Man.
This book provides a window into aspects of the ancient apocalyptic worldview whose dynamics and functions are often misunderstood.
Explore the embodied foundations of Paul's resurrection ideals
It is commonly recognized that Paul's resurrection ideals are bodily ideals, though this dictum is usually configured along literal and metaphorical lines. The realism of future resurrected bodies is disconnected from the metaphoricity of bodily transformation in the present. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this fresh and innovative study addresses this problem. By eschewing the opposition of metaphor and realism, Tappenden explores the concepts and metaphors Paul uses to fashion notions of resurrection, and the uses to which those notions are put. Rather than asserting resurrection as a disembodied, cognicentric proposition, this book illuminates the body's central role in shaping and grounding the apostle's thought and writings.
Features:
PNBA Novel of the Year
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Haunted by the deaths of his parents and uncle, Frank Cassidy journeys north to dispute a cousin's claim to the family farm, where he meets a stranger who might resolve mysteries about Frank's past.The stories in this accomplished collection range in setting from the West Indies to the Pacific Northwest, presenting characters that include a photojournalist in Haiti introduced to the islanders' belief in zombiism, an ex-policeman working in a paper mill, a hospital patient on New Year's Day, and a teenager practicing martial arts. Their stories are at times grotesque and desperate but always engrossing.
What sets these stories apart from other contemporary fiction is their skilled and evocative sense of place—Working creates atmospheres that almost become separate characters with their own critical significance and influence. Convincing in his portrayal of a harsh, often violent side of life, Working jars us and demands attention.
In this highly readable and thoroughly original book, Karl Kroeber questions the assumptions about storytelling we have inherited from the exponents of modernism and postmodernism. These assumptions have led to overly formalistic and universalizing conceptions of narrative that mystify the social functions of storytelling. Even "politically correct" critics have Eurocentrically defined story as too "primitive" to be taken seriously as art. Kroeber reminds us that the fundamental value of storytelling lies in retelling, this paradoxical remaking anew that constitutes story's role as one of the essential modes of discourse. His work develops some recent anthropological and feminist criticism to delineate the participative function of audience in narrative performances.
In depicting how audiences contribute to storytelling transactions, Kroeber carries us into a surprising array of examples, ranging from a Mesopotamian sculpture to Derek Walcott's Omeros; startling juxtapositions, such as Cervantes to Vermeer; and innovative readings of familiar novels and paintings. Tom Wolfe's comparison of his Bonfire of the Vanities to Vanity Fair is critically analyzed, as are the differences between Thackeray's novel and Joyce's Ulysses and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Other discussions focus on traditional Native American stories, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and narrative paintings of Giotto, Holman Hunt, and Roy Lichtenstein. Kroeber deploys the ideas of Ricoeur and Bakhtin to reassess dramatically the field of narrative theory, demonstrating why contemporary narratologists overrate plot and undervalue story's capacity to give meaning to the contingencies of real experience. Retelling/Rereading provides solid theoretical grounding for a new understanding of storytelling's strange role in twentieth-century art and of our need to develop a truly multicultural narrative criticism.
Retention is a vital issue for institutions, but as these students’ stories show, leaving college is often the result of complex and idiosyncratic individual situations that make institutional efforts difficult and ultimately ineffective. An adjustment of institutional and pedagogical objectives is needed to refocus on educating as many students as possible, including those who might leave before graduation.
Much of the pedagogy, curricula, and methodologies of composition studies assume students are preparing for further academic study. Retention and Resistance argues for a new kairotic pedagogy that moves toward an emphasis on the present classroom experience and takes students’ varied experiences into account. Infusing the discourse of retention with three individual student voices, Powell explores the obligation of faculty to participate in designing an institution that educates all students, no matter where they are in their educational journey or how far that journey will go.
From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students’ transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis.
Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics.
First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education.
Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, Michael Day, Bruce Feinstein, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, Nathan Garrett, Joanne Baird Giordano, Tawanda Gipson, Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, Holly Hassel, Jennifer Heinert, Ashley J. Holmes, Rita Malenczyk, Christopher P. Parker, Cassandra Phillips, Anna Plemons, Pegeen Reichert Powell, Marc Scott, Robin Snead, Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, Susan Wolff Murphy
Being a child in American society can be problematic. Twenty percent of American children live in poverty, parents are divorcing at high rates, and educational institutions are not always fulfilling their goals. Against this backdrop, children are often patronized or idealized by adults. Rarely do we look for the strengths within children that can serve as the foundation for growth and development. In Rethinking Childhood, twenty contributors, coming from the disciplines of anthropology, government, law, psychology, education, religion, philosophy, and sociology, provide a multidisciplinary view of childhood by listening and understanding the ways children shape their own futures. Topics include education, poverty, family life, divorce, neighborhood life, sports, the internet, and legal status. In all these areas, children have both voice and agency. They construct their own social networks and social reality, sort out their own values, and assess and cope with the perplexing world around them. The contributors present ideas that lead not only to new analyses but also to innovative policy applications.
Taken together, these essays develop a new paradigm for understanding childhood as children experience these years. This paradigm challenges readers to develop fresh ways of listening to children’s voices that enable both children and adults to cross the barriers of age, experience, and stereotyping that make communication difficult.
A volume in the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner.
What does it mean to be an expert? In Rethinking Expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans offer a radical new perspective on the role of expertise in the practice of science and the public evaluation of technology.
Collins and Evans present a Periodic Table of Expertises based on the idea of tacit knowledge—knowledge that we have but cannot explain. They then look at how some expertises are used to judge others, how laypeople judge between experts, and how credentials are used to evaluate them. Throughout, Collins and Evans ask an important question: how can the public make use of science and technology before there is consensus in the scientific community? This book has wide implications for public policy and for those who seek to understand science and benefit from it.
“Starts to lay the groundwork for solving a critical problem—how to restore the force of technical scientific information in public controversies, without importing disguised political agendas.”—Nature
“A rich and detailed ‘periodic table’ of expertise . . . full of case studies, anecdotes and intriguing experiments.”—Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)
The third volume of Pierre Nora’s monumental work documenting the history and culture of France turns to French manners, mores, and society. While previous volumes focused on specific historical events, people, and institutions within France, the essays in Legacies are concerned with the kinds of things that make up the heart of French culture: conversation, cafés, songs, wine, gallantry, and places imbued with national symbolism such as Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur cathedrals. Linking these diverse topics together is the idea of patrimony—a term used by the French to designate the collective culture of the country or its national heritage—a concept that has undergone radical changes beginning with the Revolution and corresponding to other dramatic ruptures throughout France’s history.
As a whole, these twelve essays by leading French historians add up to an illuminating and well-rounded portrait of those cherished traditions that together form the basic foundation for the distinctive culture of the French.
Analysts today routinely look toward the media and popular culture as a way of understanding global security. Although only a decade ago, such a focus would have seemed out of place, the proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has transformed our knowledge of near and distant events so that it has become impossible to separate the politics of war, suffering, terrorism, and security from the practices and processes of the media.
This book brings together ten path-breaking essays that explore the ways our notions of fear, insecurity, and danger are fostered by intermediary sources such as television, radio, film, satellite imaging, and the Internet. The contributors, from a wide range of disciplines, show how both fictional and fact-based threats to global security have helped to create and sustain a culture that is deeply distrustful. Topics range from the Patriot Act, to the censorship of media personalities, to the role that television programming plays as an interpretative frame for current events.
Designed to promote strategic thinking about the relationships between media, popular culture, and global security, this book is essential reading for scholars of international relations, technology, and media studies.
Western women’s involvement in Persia dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when female adventurers and missionaries first encountered their veiled Muslim “sisters.” Twentieth-century Western and state-sponsored Iranian feminists continued to use the image of the veiled woman as the embodiment of backwardness. Yet, following the 1979 revolution, indigenous Iranian feminists became more vocal in their resistance to this characterization.
In Rethinking Global Sisterhood, Nima Naghibi makes powerful connections among feminism, imperialism, and the discourses of global sisterhood. Naghibi investigates topics including the state-sponsored Women’s Organization of Iran and the involvement of feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the Iranian feminism movement before and during the 1979 revolution. With a potent analysis of cinema, she examines the veiled woman in the films of Tahmineh Milani, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Kim Longinotto, and Mahnaz Afzali.
At a time when Western relations with the Muslim world are in crisis, Rethinking Global Sisterhood provides much-needed insights and explores the limitations and possibilities of cross-cultural feminist social and political interventions.
Nima Naghibi is assistant professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.
States are increasingly important players in the current efforts to reform U.S. health care, as the federal government withdraws from this responsibility. Robert B. Hackey analyzes the varied routes states have taken in reformulating health care policy and provides a road map of what specific strategies work and why.
In this comparative case study, Hackey focuses on four states—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island—that have had markedly different experiences with regulating health care over the past two decades. Hackey's detailed comparisons show how the states' policies changed over time, moving from regulatory to market-oriented solutions, and examines which policy programs appear best poised to meet the future.
Hackey uses regime theory to explain how the states' policy choices concerning cost control and entry regulation were shaped by the prevailing political culture and institution of each state. He concludes that the autonomy of state government form special interests is vital to the successful adoption, implementation and outcome of state initiatives.
Rethinking Health Care Policy offers policymakers, planners and specialists useful insights into the politics of state regulation and into future directions for health care reform.
While recent books have explored Arab and Turkish nationalism, the nuances of Iran have received scant book-length study—until now. Capturing the significant changes in approach that have shaped this specialization, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity shares innovative research and charts new areas of analysis from an array of scholars in the field.
Delving into a wide range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives, the essays—all previously unpublished—encompass social history, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and comparative analysis to address such topics as:
Interdisciplinary in essence, the essays also draw from sociology, gender studies, and art and architecture. Posing compelling questions while challenging the conventional historiographical traditions, the authors (many of whom represent a new generation of Iranian studies scholars) give voice to a research approach that embraces the modern era’s complexity while emphasizing Iranian nationalism’s contested, multifaceted, and continuously transformative possibilities.
What should we do with teenagers who commit crimes? Are they children whose offenses are the result of immaturity and circumstances, or are they in fact criminals?
“Adult time for adult crime” has been the justice system’s mantra for the last twenty years. But locking up so many young people puts a strain on state budgets—and ironically, the evidence suggests it ultimately increases crime.
In this bold book, two leading scholars in law and adolescent development offer a comprehensive and pragmatic way forward. They argue that juvenile justice should be grounded in the best available psychological science, which shows that adolescence is a distinctive state of cognitive and emotional development. Although adolescents are not children, they are also not fully responsible adults.
Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg outline a new developmental model of juvenile justice that recognizes adolescents’ immaturity but also holds them accountable. Developmentally based laws and policies would make it possible for young people who have committed crimes to grow into responsible adults, rather than career criminals, and would lighten the present burden on the legal and prison systems. In the end, this model would better serve the interests of justice, and it would also be less wasteful of money and lives than the harsh and ineffective policies of the last generation.
Bhikhu Parekh argues for a pluralist perspective on cultural diversity. Writing from both within the liberal tradition and outside of it as a critic, he challenges what he calls the "moral monism" of much of traditional moral philosophy, including contemporary liberalism--its tendency to assert that only one way of life or set of values is worthwhile and to dismiss the rest as misguided or false. He defends his pluralist perspective both at the level of theory and in subtle nuanced analyses of recent controversies. Thus, he offers careful and clear accounts of why cultural differences should be respected and publicly affirmed, why the separation of church and state cannot be used to justify the separation of religion and politics, and why the initial critique of Salman Rushdie (before a Fatwa threatened his life) deserved more serious attention than it received.
Rejecting naturalism, which posits that humans have a relatively fixed nature and that culture is an incidental, and "culturalism," which posits that they are socially and culturally constructed with only a minimal set of features in common, he argues for a dialogic interplay between human commonalities and cultural differences. This will allow, Parekh argues, genuinely balanced and thoughtful compromises on even the most controversial cultural issues in the new multicultural world in which we live.
Contributors. Barry Barnes, Dagmar Barnouw, Lorraine Code, Lorraine Daston, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary E. Hawkesworth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Allan Megill, Peter Miller, Andy Pickering, Theodore M. Porter
The dominant trend in pastoralist studies has long assumed that pastoralism and pastoral gender relations are inherently patriarchal. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, use diverse analytic approaches to demonstrate that pastoralist gender relations are dynamic, relational, historical, and produced through complex local-translocal interactions. Combining theoretically sophisticated analysis with detailed case studies, this collection will appeal to those doing research and teaching in African studies, gender studies, anthropology, and history. Among the topics discussed are pastoralism, patriarchy, and history among Maasai in Tanganyika; women’s roles in peacemaking in Somali society; the fertility of houses and herds; gender, aging, and postchildbearing experience in a Tuareg community; and milk selling among Fulani women in Northern Burkina Faso.
Scientific and technological innovations are forcing patent law into the spotlight and revealing its many glaring inadequacies. Take, for example, the patent case that almost shut down the BlackBerry, or the growing phenomenon of patent trolling, in which patents are acquired for the sole purpose of entrapping companies whose products relate to them. And patents on genes have everyone up in arms—and our courts confused.
Robin Feldman explains why patents are causing so much trouble. The problem lies in our assumption that patents set clear boundaries for rights to an invention. In reality, they do no such thing. The very nature of inventions makes them impossible to describe unambiguously for all time. When something is so new that we do not understand yet how it works, what it is capable of doing, or how it could be applied—as is often the case in biotechnology—description is necessarily slippery.
Instead of hoping for clear boundaries, and moaning when we don’t get them, Rethinking Patent Law urges lawmakers to focus on what the law can do well: craft rules that anticipate the bargaining that will occur as rights unfold. By steering clear of laws that distort the bargaining process, lawmakers can help courts answer difficult questions, such as whether genes, software, and business methods constitute patentable subject matter, whether patents in the life sciences should control inventions that have yet to be discovered, and how to resolve the battles between pharmaceutical companies and generics.
Did Paul have formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric, or did he learn what he knew of persuasion informally, as social practice? Pauline scholars recognize the importance of this question both for determining Paul’s social status and for conceptualizing the nature of his letters, but they have been unable to reach a consensus. Using 2 Corinthians 10–13 as a test case, Ryan Schellenberg undertakes a set of comparisons with non-Western speakers—most compellingly, the Seneca orator Red Jacket—to demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies Paul employs in this text are also attested in speakers known to have had no formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric. Since there are no specific indicators of formal training in the way Paul uses these strategies, their appearance in his letters does not constitute evidence that Paul received formal rhetorical education.
Many scholars and activists seek to eliminate “race”—the word and the concept—from our vocabulary. Their claim is clear: because science has shown that racial essentialism is false and because the idea of race has proved virulent, we should do away with the concept entirely. Michael O. Hardimon criticizes this line of thinking, arguing that we must recognize the real ways in which race exists in order to revise our understanding of its significance.
Rethinking Race provides a novel answer to the question “What is race?” Pernicious, traditional racialism maintains that people can be judged and ranked according to innate racial features. Hardimon points out that those who would eliminate race make the mistake of associating the word only with this view. He agrees that this concept should be jettisoned, but draws a distinction with three alternative ideas: first, a stripped-down version of the ordinary concept of race that recognizes minimal physical differences between races but does not consider them significant; second, a scientific understanding of populations with shared lines of descent; and third, an acknowledgment of “socialrace” as a separate construction.
Hardimon provides a language for understanding the ways in which races do and do not exist. His account is realistic in recognizing the physical features of races, as well as the existence of races in our social world. But it is deflationary in rejecting the concept of hierarchical or defining racial characteristics. Ultimately, Rethinking Race offers a philosophical basis for repudiating racism without blinding ourselves to reality.
In Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School, Jennifer Seibel Trainor proposes a new understanding of the roots of racism, one that is based on attention to the role of emotion and the dynamics of persuasion. This one-year ethnographic study argues against previous assumptions about racism, demonstrating instead how rhetoric and emotion, as well as the processes and culture of schools, are involved in the formation of racist beliefs.
Telling the story of a year spent in an all-white high school, Trainor suggests that contrary to prevailing opinion, racism often does not stem from ignorance, a lack of exposure to other cultures, or the desire to protect white privilege. Rather, the causes of racism are frequently found in the realms of emotion and language, as opposed to rational calculations of privilege or political ideologies. Trainor maintains that racist assertions often originate not from prejudiced attitudes or beliefs but from metaphorical connections between racist ideas and nonracist values. These values are reinforced, even promoted by schooling via "emotioned rules" in place in classrooms: in tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals, and practices that exert a powerful—though largely unacknowledged—persuasive force on student feelings and beliefs about race.
Through in-depth analysis of established anti-racist pedagogies, student behavior, and racial discourses, Trainor illustrates the manner in which racist ideas are subtly upheld through social and literacy education in the classroom—and are thus embedded in the infrastructures of schools themselves. It is the emotional and rhetorical framework of the classroom that lends racism its compelling power in the minds of students, even as teachers endeavor to address the issue of cultural discrimination. This effort is continually hindered by an incomplete understanding of the function of emotions in relation to antiracist persuasion and cannot be remedied until the root of the problem is addressed.
Rethinking Racism calls for a fresh approach to understanding racism and its causes, offering crucial insight into the formative role of schooling in the perpetuation of discriminatory beliefs. In addition, this highly readable narrative draws from white students' own stories about the meanings of race in their learning and their lives. It thus provides new ways of thinking about how researchers and teachers rep- resent whiteness. Blending narrative with more traditional forms of ethnographic analysis, Rethinking Racism uncovers the ways in which constructions of racism originate in literacy research and in our classrooms—and how these constructions themselves can limit the rhetorical positions students enact.
In recent years, almost daily media attention has been focused on the plight of the homeless in cities across the United States. Drawing upon experiences in the U.S. and Europe, John Gilderbloom and Richard Appelbaum challenge conventional assumptions concerning the operation of housing markets and provide policy alternatives directed at the needs of low- and moderate-income families. Rethinking Rental Housing is a ground-breaking analysis that shows the value of applying a broad sociological approach to urban problems, one that takes into account the basic economic, social, and political dimensions of the urban housing crisis.
Gilderbloom and Appelbaum predict that this crisis will worsen in the 1990s and argue that a "supply and demand" approach will not work in this case because housing markets are not competitive. They propose that the most effective approach to affordable housing is to provide non-market alternatives fashioned after European housing programs, particularly the Swedish model.
An important feature of this book is the discussion of tenant movements that have tried to implement community values in opposition to values of development and landlord capital. One of the very few publications on rental housing, it is unique in applying a sociological framework to the study of this topic.
As members of various and often conflicting communities, how do we reconcile what we have come to understand as our human rights with our responsibilities toward one another? With the bright thread of individualism woven through the American psyche, where can our sense of duty toward others be found? What has happened to our love—even our concern—for our neighbor?
In this revised edition of his magisterial exploration of these critical questions, renowned ethicist Arthur Dyck revisits and profoundly hones his call for the moral bonds of community. In all areas of contemporary life, be it in business, politics, health care, religion—and even in family relationships—the "right" of individuals to consider themselves first has taken precedence over our responsibilities toward others. Dyck contends that we must recast the language of rights to take into account our once natural obligations to all the communities of which we are a part.
Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities, at the nexus of ethics, political theory, public policy, and law, traces how the peculiarly American formulations of the rights of the individual have assaulted our connections with, and responsibilities for, those around us. Dyck critically examines contemporary society and the relationship between responsibilities and rights, particularly as they are expressed in medicine and health care, to maintain that while indeed rights and responsibilities form the moral bonds of community, we must begin with the rudimentary task of taking better care of one another.
In a fervent appeal for clearer thinking on social issues, Christopher Jencks reexamines the way Americans think about race, poverty, crime, heredity, welfare, and the underclass. Arguing that neither liberal nor conservative ideas about these issues withstand close scrutiny, he calls for less emphasis on political principles and more attention to specific programs. Jencks describes how welfare policy was dominated in the early 1980s by conservatives who promoted ideas that justified cutting back sharply on the social programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. They believed that a period of sustained economic growth, with low taxes and free markets, would do more to help poor people than coddling them with government assistance.
Despite the economic expansion of the later Reagan years, however, the problems of persistent poverty grew even more serious. The liberals took the initiative in the late 1980s, but their proposals failed to win broad popular support. With clarity and a gift for apt analogy, Jencks analyzes influential books on such subjects as affirmative action (Thomas Sowell), the “safety net” (Charles Murray), the effects of heredity on learning and propensity to commit crime (James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein), ghetto culture and the underclass (William J. Wilson). His intention throughout is “to unbundle the empirical and moral assumptions that traditional ideologies tie together, making the reader's picture of the world more complicated”—in other words, to force us (readers and policymakers) to look at the way various remedial plans actually succeed or fail.
For example, he believes that until we transform AFDC so that it reinforces rather than subverts American ideals about work and marriage, efforts to build a humane welfare state will never succeed. Other prescriptions, initially surprising and sometimes shocking, show demonstrable good sense once they are examined. As the author says, “If this book encourages readers to think about social policy more concretely, it will have served its primary purpose.”
Conventional wisdom holds that all nations must repay debt. Regardless of the legitimacy of the regime that signs the contract, a country that fails to honor its loan obligations damages its reputation, inviting still greater problems down the road. Yet difficult dilemmas arise from this assumption. Should today's South Africa be responsible for apartheid-era debt? Is it reasonable to tether postwar Iraq with Saddam Hussein's excesses?
Rethinking Sovereign Debt is a probing historical analysis of how sovereign debt continuity--the rule that nations should repay loans even after a major regime change, or expect reputational consequences--became the consensus approach. Odette Lienau contends that the practice is not essential for functioning international capital markets, and demonstrates how it relies on ideas of absolutist government that have come under fire over the last century. Challenging previous accounts, Lienau incorporates a wealth of original research to argue that Soviet Russia's repudiation of Tsarist debt and Great Britain's 1923 arbitration with Costa Rica hint at the feasibility of selective debt cancellation. She traces the notion of debt continuity from the post-World War I era to the present, emphasizing the role of government officials, the World Bank, and private-market actors in shaping our existing framework.
Lienau calls on scholars and policymakers to recognize political choice and historical precedent in sovereign debt and reputation, in order to move beyond an impasse when a government is overthrown.
With its rich archaeological and historical record, the Aztec empire provides an intriguing opportunity to understand the dynamics and structure of early states and empires. Rethinking the Aztec Economy brings together leading scholars from multiple disciplines to thoroughly synthesize and examine the nature of goods and their movements across rural and urban landscapes in Mesoamerica. In so doing, they provide a new way of understanding society and economy in the Aztec empire.
The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 synthesizes our current understanding of the Aztec economy and singles out the topics of urbanism and provincial merchant activity for more detailed analysis. Part 2 brings new data and a new conceptual approach that applies insights from behavioral economics to Nahua and Aztec rituals and social objects. Contributors also discuss how high-value luxury goods, such as feather art, provide insights about both economic and sacred concepts of value in Aztec society. Part 3 reexamines the economy at the Aztec periphery. The volume concludes with a synthesis on the scale, integration, and nature of change in the Aztec imperial economy.
Rethinking the Aztec Economy illustrates how superficially different kinds of social contexts were in fact integrated into a single society through the processes of a single economy. Using the world of goods as a crucial entry point, this volume advances scholarly understanding of life in the Aztec world.
Contributors:
Frances F. Berdan
Laura Filloy Nadal
Janine Gasco
Colin Hirth
Kenneth G. Hirth
Sarah Imfeld
María Olvido Moreno Guzmán
Deborah L. Nichols
Alan R. Sandstrom
Pamela Effrein Sandstrom
Michael E. Smith
Barbara L. Stark
Emily Umberger
In our globalized world, differing conceptions of human nature and human values raise questions as to whether universal and partisan claims and perspectives can be reconciled, whether interreligious and intercultural conversations can help build human community, and whether a pluralistic ethos can transcend uncompromising notions as to what is true, good, and just.
In this volume, world-class scholars from religious studies, the humanities, and the social sciences explore what it means to be human through a multiplicity of lives in time and place as different as fourth-century BCE China and the world of an Alzheimer’s patient today. Refusing the binary, these essays go beyond description to theories of aging and acceptance, ethics in caregiving, and the role of ritual in healing the inevitable divide between the human and the ideal.
2023 Book Award, Society for American Archaeology
A dramatic reappraisal of the Inka Empire through the lens of Qullasuyu.
The Inka conquered an immense area extending across five modern nations, yet most English-language publications on the Inka focus on governance in the area of modern Peru. This volume expands the range of scholarship available in English by collecting new and notable research on Qullasuyu, the largest of the four quarters of the empire, which extended south from Cuzco into contemporary Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.
From the study of Qullasuyu arise fresh theoretical perspectives that both complement and challenge what we think we know about the Inka. While existing scholarship emphasizes the political and economic rationales underlying state action, Rethinking the Inka turns to the conquered themselves and reassesses imperial motivations. The book’s chapters, incorporating more than two hundred photographs, explore relations between powerful local lords and their Inka rulers; the roles of nonhumans in the social and political life of the empire; local landscapes remade under Inka rule; and the appropriation and reinterpretation by locals of Inka objects, infrastructure, practices, and symbols. Written by some of South America’s leading archaeologists, Rethinking the Inka is poised to be a landmark book in the field.
Urban parks such as New York City's Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of society. But just the opposite happens when, by design or in ignorance, parks are made inhospitable to certain groups of people.
This pathfinding book argues that cultural diversity should be a key goal in designing and maintaining urban parks. Using case studies of New York City's Prospect Park, Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park, and Jacob Riis Park in the Gateway National Recreation Area, as well as New York's Ellis Island Bridge Proposal and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park, the authors identify specific ways to promote, maintain, and manage cultural diversity in urban parks. They also uncover the factors that can limit park use, including historical interpretive materials that ignore the contributions of different ethnic groups, high entrance or access fees, park usage rules that restrict ethnic activities, and park "restorations" that focus only on historical or aesthetic values. With the wealth of data in this book, urban planners, park professionals, and all concerned citizens will have the tools to create and maintain public parks that serve the needs and interests of all the public.
2023 — Best Subsequent Book — Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
2023 — Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Social Sciences — Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section
2022 — Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize — New England Council of Latin American Studies
2023 — Honorable Mention, LASA Mexico Social Sciences Book Prize — Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
As the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture.
In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s.
In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities.
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