Flourishing Fasts is the first book in any language to explore the history of the Zhaijiao, commonly translated as “vegetarian sects,” that originated in southeastern China during the Ming and Qing dynasties and are still active in contemporary Taiwan. Combining historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, Nikolas Broy reveals the entangled nature of the Zhaijiao—and other Chinese sectarian groups—within their socioreligious environment. Conventionally considered nonconformist dissenters or lay Buddhists, the Zhaijiao in fact embody one intersection of the “Three Teachings” of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism and manifest aspects of local religious life and universal salvationist teachings. Not limited to everyday religious rites such as worshiping local gods, conducting initiation festivals, and performing ritual services for nonmembers, the Zhaijiao also serve as institutions around which social and political life are centered—for example through mobilizing local resources for public enterprises or articulating property rights vis-à-vis the state.

In this wide-ranging discussion that covers practices, religious symbols and teachings, mythological narratives, moral values, architecture, and material culture over more than four hundred years, Broy situates the Zhaijiao at the very core of local societies and shows how they actively engage in political, economic, legal, and cultural affairs.

High-profile case studies provide compliance professionals with a deep, holistic understanding of modern-day money laundering to better detect and deter it

Money laundering is a serious crime that presents a heightened, yet underrated, global threat. Although often thought of as a victimless crime, money laundering significantly impacts the global financial system, which leads to further crime, corruption, human exploitation, and environmental degradation and causes tremendous human suffering, especially in the most impoverished populations. Recent advances in technology, communications, and globalization mean there are more illicit funds in circulation today than ever before. In order to catch these criminals and expose their underground networks, compliance professionals must learn to navigate an increasingly complex web of criminal activity.

In The Flow of Illicit Funds, Ola M. Tucker goes beyond the implementation of anti–money laundering compliance programs offered by most guides and provides professionals with a holistic understanding of the modern money laundering system. Using recent case studies, Tucker explains some of the most common money laundering techniques used by criminals today, describes the key role of the financial system in the disguise and transfer of illicit funds, and offers valuable insight into how financial institutions can protect themselves from being used as conduits for the movement of dirty money. The book concludes by offering suggestions to help compliance professionals better detect and deter money laundering.

Through this unique perspective, compliance professionals and students will gain a broader overall understanding of the process of money laundering and the techniques criminals commonly use, including valuable insight into how criminals find legal loopholes and manipulate the financial system.

The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds. During the last thirty years, archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, Indigenous scholars, and linguists have emphasized the antiquity and geographical extent of similar Flower World beliefs among ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World.

Flower Worlds are not simply ethereal, otherworldly domains, but rather they are embodied in lived experience, activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the use of material objects and ritual spaces. This comprehensive book illuminates the origins of Flower Worlds as a key aspect of religions and histories among societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. It also explores the role of Flower Worlds in shaping ritual economies, politics, and cross-cultural interaction among Indigenous peoples.

Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.

Contributors: Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, James M. Córdova, Davide Domenici, Ángel González López, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael D. Mathiowetz, Cameron L. McNeil, Felipe S. Molina, Johannes Neurath, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, David Delgado Shorter, Karl A. Taube, Andrew D. Turner, Lorena Vázquez Vallín, Dorothy Washburn

Josef van Ess is the world's most distinguished scholar of classical kalam, the Muslim theology that was the precursor to, and foundation for, modern Islam. This book makes available, for the first time in English, the fruit of van Ess's thirty-five years of work in the field. A lucid and authoritative introduction to classical Islam, it opens a window on the intellectual world that gave rise to Muslim theology.

A sustained look at important issues in early kalam, The Flowering of Muslim Theology discusses the emergence of theology in the classical period and offers acute and illuminating comparisons with the Christian (and Jewish) traditions. Van Ess looks at the issue of heresy, at early ideas about straying from true belief. In a substantial and original instance of Koranic exegesis, he considers a problem much debated among classical theologians: whether it is possible to see God. He examines the different ways in which early Muslim thinkers appropriated atomism, a natural philosophy that was originally materialistic and atheistic, for their own theological purposes. He explores the explosive mix of theology and political thought, in an analysis of the development of ideas about the role and authority of a ruler. And he considers the relationship, or contradiction, between faith and knowledge: the enduring question of how one can know whether something is right or true.

A work of intellectual history enlivened by vivid examples, The Flowering of Muslim Theology gives a wider audience rare insight into Islam's rich classical past.

One of the world's leading evolutionary biologists here reexamines the evolutionary history of flowering plants. This important book is the first to interpret the phylogeny of flowering plants in the light of modern knowledge about genetics, developmental biology, and ecology.

Mr. Stebbins is concerned with the evolution of genera, families, and other higher taxa; his analysis is based upon a unified theory that identifies the same fundamental processes at work in the origin of both species and the broader taxonomic categories. He shows, however, that subspecific evolution depends primarily on the natural selection of vegetative characters, whereas the emphasis at the transspecific level is on reproductive characters.

Major changes in evolutionary direction are interpreted as resulting from an interaction of environmental change and the inherent capacity of the organism to alter preferentially in some ways and not in others. The author facilitates this discussion by examining reversibility in certain simple evolutionary trends.

After reviewing basic principles and exploring major patterns of evolution in flowering plants, Mr. Stebbins turns to their actual history. On the basis of a detailed analysis he concludes that the most primitive forms are not represented in any extant category and are not found in the fossil record. His work gives definitive weight to the researches of others who have postulated a monophyletic origin of the angiosperms from a single, extinct group.

Although this beautifully illustrated volume will prove indispensable to botanists, it will be of great interest also to any student of evolutionary theory, theoretical biology, and ecology.

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.

Flows of Violence offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants.

The book critically examines how everyday crime and state neglect intersect, altering the improvised practices of water storage and access among the population. It also highlights the innovative mechanisms employed by social movements and ordinary citizens to cope with and resist these challenges.

Flows of Violence is an essential read for scholars in anthropology, geography, and Latin American studies, offering valuable insights into the sociopolitical impacts of infrastructure. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond.

Fluted Points of the Far West provides the first large-scale overview of fluted points in the far western United States, including details of their attributes, trends in production, and range of variability. It serves as a compendium of groundbreaking research by the California Fluted Lanceolate Uniform Testing and Evaluation Database (CalFLUTED) project. Details regarding size, morphology, material, basal flaking technology, breakage patterns, repair patterns, manufacturing (as revealed by unfinished fluted bifaces), margin grinding, and flute scratching are provided through this research, both in terms of general trends and noteworthy exceptions.

Designed as a ready reference, these data are also summarized for each of the four sample states covered: California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Summaries introduce the history and circumstances of fluted point studies by state, a list of references for each state used in the CalFLUTED study reports, a comprehensive listing of the relevant CalFLUTED study reports, and a breakdown by state of fluted point attribute details as listed above.

Reviews and discussions cover a range of topics, including classification of fluted points, identifying flute scars, and indicative traits that a fluted point is not from the prehistoric Far West. Additional discussions cover hafting alternatives, fluted point dating, far western fluted point typology, and the likely direction of further research on a range of fluted point topics.

The forensic entomologist turns a dispassionate, analytic eye on scenes from which most people would recoil--human corpses in various stages of decay, usually the remains of people who have met a premature end through accident or mayhem. To Lee Goff and his fellow forensic entomologists, each body recovered at a crime scene is an ecosystem, a unique microenvironment colonized in succession by a diverse array of flies, beetles, mites, spiders, and other arthropods: some using the body to provision their young, some feeding directly on the tissues and by-products of decay, and still others preying on the scavengers.

Using actual cases on which he has consulted, Goff shows how knowledge of these insects and their habits allows forensic entomologists to furnish investigators with crucial evidence about crimes. Even when a body has been reduced to a skeleton, insect evidence can often provide the only available estimate of the postmortem interval, or time elapsed since death, as well as clues to whether the body has been moved from the original crime scene, and whether drugs have contributed to the death.

An experienced forensic investigator who regularly advises law enforcement agencies in the United States and abroad, Goff is uniquely qualified to tell the fascinating if unsettling story of the development and practice of forensic entomology.

The ‘unbearable 80s’, as the last decade of the Ceauşescu era has been called in Romania, are in the focus of this quasi-autobiographical work. The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive regime and provides a stark depiction of a man’s intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule. 

A leading scientist dispels all the current mysteries about flying saucers in a new book which tells in so many words how to make them in the kitchen sink. Flying saucers or their equivalents have been observed for centuries. Many of them are caused, says Dr. Menzel, by conditions in the atmosphere—conditions which he has simulated in his laboratory; photographs of some of his experiments are among the book's many illustrations.

Dr. Menzel docs much more than debunk. He describes all the varied phenomena that have been misinterpreted as flying saucers, from the aurora borealis and the rainbow to radar mirages, and tells what causes them. He shows how our perceptions of these natural phenomena have been unconsciously distorted by fears, superstitions, and religious beliefs. He uncovers the intentional hoaxes and the practical jokes that have misled the public. He goes into the international repercussions of flying-saucer scares. All in all, this is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written about what the minds of men can fabricate about the real world.

It is admirably written science for the citizen, as well as being topical and controversial. The subject matter of the book was featured in recent articles in Look.

Winner, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, 2019

The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective’s work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.

Blending RCAF members’ biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective’s output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF’s verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.

When, at the end of the First World War, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, soldier and popular hero, assumed the role of self-appointed peacemaker, he proved himself a source of embarrassment and irritation. Challenging Georges Clemenceau's right to negotiate the peace settlement, Foch attempted to arrange a peace which, according to him, would provide France with security, but which, according to his civilian superior, would have lost France's urgently needed allies.

French internal conflict in civil-military relations during the Versailles Peace Conference was thus primarily between Clemenceau and Foch, both inspired by the most patriotic of motives.

Foch versus Clemenceau gives a vivid account of the diplomatic maneuvers among France, its allies, and Germany during the period of the Conference. It sketches the Rhineland separatist movement in 1919--with Dorten's abortive, even amusing putsch, the Palatine-Rhineland Rebellion--as incidental background to the momentous struggle between Foch and his field commanders on the one hand and the President of the Council, Clemenceau, on the other over their differing conceptions of a realizable peace which could guarantee France's security.

Here is a brief but comprehensive tour of the physiology of vision, guided by one of the grand masters of the discipline. Offering first a solid grounding in structure and function, the book emphasizes those areas that the author considers to be of most significance in current research. Much attention is given to the role of vision in circadian timekeeping, the development of the visual system, the effect of aging on the eye, and the provocative questions of perception and illusion.

An eminently readable text, Focus on Vision will more than satisfy the needs of students in ophthalmology, optometry, physiological optics, biology, psychology, and art. It is fully illustrated and contains lists of references and further reading. The questions at the end of each chapter may be used to test understanding or simply to excite discussion.

Written in close collaboration with Mr. Seckler and those who know him, Foggy Mountain Troubadour is the first full-length biography of an American original. Penny Parsons follows a journey from North Carolina schoolhouses to the Grand Ole Opry stage and the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, from boarding houses to radio studios and traveling five to a car on two-lane roads to make the next show. Throughout, she captures the warm humor, hard choices, and vivid details of a brilliant artist's life as he criss-crosses a nation and a century making music.

Independent city-states (poleis) such as Athens have been viewed traditionally as the most advanced stage of state formation in ancient Greece. By contrast, this pioneering book argues that for some Greeks the ethnos, a regionally based ethnic group, and the koinon, or regional confederation, were equally valid units of social and political life and that these ethnic identities were astonishingly durable.

Jeremy McInerney sets his study in Phokis, a region in central Greece dominated by Mount Parnassos that shared a border with the panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi. He explores how ecological conditions, land use, and external factors such as invasion contributed to the formation of a Phokian territory. Then, drawing on numerous interdisciplinary sources, he traces the history of the region from the Archaic age down to the Roman period. McInerney shows how shared myths, hero cults, and military alliances created an ethnic identity that held the region together over centuries, despite repeated invasions. He concludes that the Phokian koinon survived because it was founded ultimately on the tenacity of the smaller communities of Greece.

Although Richard Hooker (1554–1600) is now known principally as the author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in his lifetime the Tractates and Sermons brought him greater notoriety. Hooker’s views on justification, the perseverance of faith, and the relationship of the Church of Rome to the reformed Church of England were widely reported, and texts of the tracts were extensively circulated in manuscript.

Thanks to the meticulous editing of Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the contemporary impact of these debates can now be appreciated for the first time. These tracts provide a unique perspective on the turbulent world of late Elizabethan theology. In addition, they lay the doctrinal foundations of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity itself and—with the excellent commentary of Egil Grislis, Professor of Theology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, enable us to trace the intellectual formation of sixteenth-century England’s most innovative and provocative theologian.

The volume includes a newly discovered letter; three newly attributed sermon fragments; and analysis by P. F. Forte of Hooker’s distinctive preaching style.

The writings of Richard Hooker are of central interest to those studying English Renaissance thought and literature. In this, the third volume of a much-needed critical edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, are the posthumous books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker planned the Laws in eight books, but he died shortly after publication of Book Five. Books Six, Seven, and Eight, which contain his analysis of jurisdiction, episcopacy, and the royal supremacy, are here transcribed from versions that have the most authority. The volume also includes Hooker’s autograph notes toward those texts (brought to light by P. G. Stanwood in the course of his research) and the contemporary notes by George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys on a lost draft of Book Six. Mr. Stanwood’s introduction lays to rest all doubts about the authenticity of the last three books as we have them, doubts current since publication of Walton’s Life of Hooker in 1662.

This edition, sponsored by the Folger Library, is providing authoritative texts to serve as a basis for the scholarly reappraisal of Richard Hooker’s writings that is presently underway.

Richard Hooker is the first major voice of Anglican theology, and his defense of the Elizabethan Church against the attacks of the Puritans set the prevailing tone of Anglicanism for centuries to follow. Through his eloquent treatise on ecclesiastical law the medieval political thought of Thomas Aquinas became a part of the English political heritage, to be used by such writers as Locke, Burke, and Coleridge. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is also a primary statement in English of a theory of natural law. Finally, we must turn to Hooker if we are to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance, for he luminously sets forth the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age.

The Folger Library has answered a long-felt need in sponsoring this critical, old-spelling edition of Hooker’s Works, prepared with all the expertise modern scholarship can bring to bear. Six scholars share the editorial responsibility, consulting their eighteen-member Board of Advisers as necessary. The texts for the edition are based on fresh transcriptions of the earliest and most authoritative documents, in many cases manuscripts written or corrected by Hooker himself or contemporary transcripts of these. The critical apparatus for each text records substantive variants among the authoritative documents as well as departures in accidentals from the copy text. The aim of the apparatus is to enable the interested reader to reconstruct the authority underlying the text.

The Preface and Books I–V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Volumes I and II of this edition, represent all of Hooker’s work published in his lifetime. These volumes were prepared by Georges Edelen, Professor of English at Indiana University, and W. Speed Hill, Associate Professor of English, Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York.

We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.

Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—namely, A Christian Letter, 1599—with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws, and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.

John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.

The Mexican folkways described in this monograph, of scientific interest to anthropologists, will fascinate laypeople as well. Isabel Kelly collected these notes in the 1950s, as a diversion when official field work was not feasible, in the vicinity of Torreón and particularly in the nearby village of El Cuije, in northern Mexico. She recounts folk customs and habits, focusing on beliefs and practices related to health and healing and on notions concerning magic. These form, Kelly believes, a core of folk culture which has survived tenaciously in the rural areas and on the outskirts of the cities, among mestizo families of scant education and limited economic resources.

 These people are well acquainted with simple, matter-of-fact illnesses which result from natural causes and which respond to treatment by herbal and other home remedies or by modern medicines. But they also recognize the evil eye and the emotional upset known as “fright.” They are thoroughly familiar with the ever-present danger of ailments which are not “natural” and God-sent, but which are deliberately inflicted by an enemy, through the artifice of a sorcerer or a spiritualist. Such “instigated” illnesses may take any form, from a cold in the head to a false pregnancy. If a person suspects that poor health results from such malevolence, he or she spurns Western medicine and looks instead to the witch or to the spiritualist as the only hope of a cure.

 El Cuije pays an annual quota from community funds to make available modern health services provided by the government. But community funds are similarly drawn upon to provide “medical” attention for those who repair to the sorcerers. Once a week the village truck takes all presumed witchcraft victims to a nearby town, where they receive clinical treatment from professional sorcerers.

 Kelly sees little that is genuinely indigenous in the beliefs and practices described; many of them demonstrably result from infiltration from the Old World in the years following the Spanish Conquest. She considers spiritualistic curing—important in northern Mexico and many other parts of Latin America—in some detail, but the specific outlines of its history in northern Mexico still awaited clarification at the time of her research.