BiblioVault - Books about Age

Oeconomies in the Age of Newton

2003 Supplement, Volume 35

Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi

Duke University Press

While the history of early modern science is well-charted terrain, less has been recorded on the economic thinking of the same period and less still on the intersection of these fields. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Oeconomies in the Age of Newton offers a detailed account of economic concepts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume focuses on “oeconomics”—as “economics” was spelled at that time—which implies a view of economics as shaped by the Greek concept of the household. Examining a range of “oeconomic” curiosities, Oeconomies in the Age of Newton provides intriguing insights into a historical conceptualization of economic relations that differs markedly from the more narrowly defined economics of today.

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On Not Dying

Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience

Abou Farman

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality

Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.

On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?

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The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture

Expression, Art, and Politics in an Age of Addiction

Travis D. Stimeling

West Virginia University Press, 2020

The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. From the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia to the role of cough syrup in mumble rap, and from a queer Appalachian zine to protests against the Sackler family’s art-world philanthropy, the essays here explore the intersections of expressive culture, addiction, and recovery.

Written for an audience of people working on the front lines of the opioid crisis, the book is essential reading for social workers, addiction counselors, halfway house managers, and people with opioid use disorder. It will also appeal to the community of scholars interested in understanding how aesthetics shape our engagement with critical social issues, particularly in the fields of literary and film criticism, museum studies, and ethnomusicology.

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Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution

Huseyn Efendi

Harvard University Press

Huseyn Efendi, a scribe in the Treasury of Ottoman Egypt who put his service at the disposal of Napoleon Bonaparte during the French expedition to Egypt (1798–1801), wrote his account of Ottoman Egypt in the form of answers to questions posed by the French administrative and financial experts.

Stanford Shaw’s translation is supplemented by an introduction describing the French expedition, and by detailed notes based on material found in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul and Cairo.

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