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Jews and Arabs in Israel Encountering their Identities reveals the powerful potential of inter-group dialogues to transform identities and mutually negating relations. Using meetings with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arabian students who attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as case studies, Kahanoff examines the hidden psychological dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and illustrates how each participant's sense of identity shifted in response to encounters with conflicting perspectives. Kahanoff contends that an awareness of the limitations of dialogue, without the renunciation of its value, is the most realistic basis upon which to build a sustainable agreement. This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, sociology, religious studies, political science, and communication studies.

Within the United States alone, almost fifteen percent of the population lives in poverty. Ethics in an Age of Savage Inequalities investigates what moral obligations the middle class might have to the poor. While there are no simple ethical prescriptions, the fact remains that many of us afford small luxuries while others in the world struggle to live on less than a dollar a day. James J. Winchester suggests that we can and should give not only charity, but restitution to the poor. Looking at extraction of minerals and the plight of service workers in the United States among many other things, this book demonstrates how the middle class benefits from the exploitation of the poor and harms the environment in ways that threaten people in poverty. Winchester argues that now is the time to take political action to reduce the savage inequalities in this world. Of interest to anyone involved in ethics, social justice, sociology, and even political science, Ethics in an Age of Savage Inequalities explores the idea that money is only a small part of what we owe to the poor.

Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking tracks Americans' changing attitudes about cigarette smoking over the last century. With data from more than five thousand public and privately conducted polls, this book carefully examines how Americans came to understand the health risks of smoking; how the tobacco industry sought to reframe smoking; and how public opinion support for tobacco control affected lawsuits, elections, and public policies. This book tests several well-known linkage models that connect public opinion with public policy. It shows that conventional wisdom about public opinion and tobacco control policy is often mistaken. This book offers the first in-depth look at American public opinion and cigarette smoking during the last century.

Phenomenalism, Phenomenology and the Question of Time: A Comparative Study of the Theories of Mach, Husserl, and Boltzmann analyzes two interconnected themes: the split between phenomenalism and phenomenology, and the question of time in relation to physical processes and irreversibility in physics.The first theme is the overlooked connections between the modern phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (and his mentor Franz Brentano) and phenomenalism as associated with Ernst Mach. The book's historical-conceptual perspective draws attention to the ways in which Husserl's twentieth century advance of phenomenological method was conceived in relation to Mach's late nineteenth century and early twentieth century work both in science and philosophy. At first glance, Mach's phenomenalism appears to be in stark contrast to Husserl's phenomenology, but on closer inspection, it influenced and informed its inception. By analyzing Husserl's revolutionary method of phenomenology in connection to Mach's earlier conceptions, the book elucidates the rise of modern physics, especially through the work of Ludwig Boltzmann, as an important context to both Mach's philosophical work and Husserl's early overtures into phenomenology and his later critique of the ';crisis' of European sciences. The discursive affinities and differences between phenomenalism and phenomenology are examined in terms of a more contemporary debate over naturalizing phenomenology, either as a method continuous with science or reduced to it. This immanent tension is examined and evaluated specifically through the second thematic axis of the book, which deals with the question of time and irreversibility. Time in physics conforms to an explanatory scheme that relegates the issues of directionality and symmetry of time to concepts that are radically different from any phenomenological attempts to explain temporality in terms of intuition and consciousness. It is precisely through the notion of irreversibility that both perspectives, scientific and phenomenological, explicate time's arrow not as a mere manifestation of sensory asymmetry, as Mach would have it, but rather, through indirect descriptions of time and temporal objects. The issue of time's arrow, irreversibility, and Boltzmann's physical hypotheses regarding the nature of time are introduced and comparatively assessed with Husserl's work on phenomenology and the role of temporality to consciousness.

Miguel Pro: Martyrdom and Politics in Twentieth-Century Mexico examines the complex relationship of modern martyrdom as preserved by memory and factual truth, and as retold through stories intended to impel political and religious aims. Martyr narratives depend on institutional affiliation to remain in the public memory, and are altered in order to maintain their ability to mobilize followers within changing social and political contexts. In order to examine the evolution of lasting martyr narratives, Lopez-Menendez scrutinizes the various renditions of the 1927 execution of Miguel Pro, a Jesuit priest caught in the bloody conflict between Catholics and the post-revolutionary state.

This book is about learning how to live the good life. Part biography and part philosophical inquiry, it is a fresh, original interpretation of the intellectual world of the largely forgotten, eighteenth-century professor, Adam Ferguson. Although less well-known today than his famous Scottish contemporaries, Adam Smith and David Hume, Ferguson was considered their equal in the 18th century. The book shows how Ferguson, who grew up speaking Gaelic and English, and spent a decade ministering to a Highlander regiment, developed a distinctive, cross-cultural approach to moral philosophy that is relevant for doing comparative ethics in today's global village. The premise is that life in the twenty-first century is plagued by a moral disorientation that has affinities with the materialism, privatization, social fragmentation and spiritual crises that were emerging in 18th-century, urban Scotland. Like his peers in medical science, Ferguson pursued what was then known as moral science with a particular concern to diagnose and treat moral ';dis-ease.' The book contends that his moral philosophy lectures became strikingly modern experiments in recovering moral mooringsdisclosing epitomes of moral dynamics, investigating the use of moral terms in ordinary language, and crafting moral principles, such as probity, which preserved classical moral virtues but also incorporated the practical wisdom of ';peoples of the mountains.' Although focused on re-discovering Ferguson as a full-blown ethicist before his time, the book is also intended as a primer for the reader's own quest for living a life which is emblematic of ethical integrityThe primary audience for this book is philosophers, historians, religious studies scholars who specialize in ethics, eighteenth-century English literature scholars, and social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists) who focus on the eighteenth-century.

This book examines the reintroduction and recovery of the wolf in the Northern Rocky Mountains. The wolf was driven to brink of extinction through conscious government policy. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 provided the means for wolf's return, which began in the Carter administration and continues in the Obama administration. The battle over the wolf is part of a larger struggle over the management of public lands, generating public law litigation. Interest groups brought suit in federal courts, challenging the Department of Interior's implementation of policy. The federal courts were required to interpret the statutory mandates and review Interior's decisions to insure statutory compliance. The analysis of this public law litigation demonstrates that the federal courts correctly interpreted the statutory mandates and properly supported and checked Interior's decisions. This book focuses on the controversial role of the courts in the resolution of public policy conflicts. Judicial skeptics argue that the courts should not get involved in complex public policy disputes as Judges lack the expertise and information to make informed decisions. Judicial proponents, by contrast, argue that judicial involvement is necessary so Federal courts can oversee federal agencies, which are under conflicting pressure from interest groups, the President, Congress, and their own internal dynamics. This book supports the conclusions of judicial proponents and points out that the federal courts have been instrumental in the return and recovery of the wolf to the Northern Rocky Mountains.

Intimate Partner Violence and Advocate Response: Redefining Love in Western Belize offers new insight into the cross-cultural analysis of gender-based intimate partner violence by blending activist anthropology with in-depth ethnographic research to evaluate and help ameliorate the crisis in Belize. Drawing from twenty months of fieldwork in the Belizean Cayo District conducted between 2002 and 2013, Melissa A. Beske investigates the prevalence and complexity of partner abuse, the contributing cultural and structural factors, and the advocate dynamics across local, national, and transnational frameworks in combating the problem. Combining enlivened narratives, comparative viewpoints, and scholar-activism, this book not only illustrates the lived suffering of partner abuse in Cayo, but it also engages with the passionate commitment of survivors and supporters as they endeavor to create a more equitable and peaceful community. In doing so, it demonstrates an effective strategy for the interdisciplinary assessment of gender-based abuse, which satisfies demands for theoretical impartiality while simultaneously enabling researchers to take an ethical stand in social causes.

This book examines Sino-Middle Eastern relations on a bilateral level since World War II. It highlights the depth of China's involvement in the region with each country on a five dimensional approach: energy security, trade relations, political relations, arms sales/security cooperation, and cultural relations. Regarding each of these criteria, the Middle East holds a strategic significance to China's national security, vital interests, territorial integrity, sovereignty, regime survival, and economic prosperity. China has been an integral part of the political developments on the Middle Eastern political scene. It has supported the region's quest for independence and national liberation, exchanged diplomatic recognition with the region and established political partnerships with the Middle East. Trade relations are an essential element of China's involvement in the Middle East. Their bilateral trade volume exceeds $220 billion annually, and is steadily heading toward $500 billion by the end of 2015. The Middle East supplies fifty-four percent of China's energy needs, and is expected to provide seventy percent of China's imports by 2020. Energy security has become the core of Sino-Middle Eastern relations and the main goal of its increasing involvement in the region. China has also become a main source of arms sales to the region. The Middle East influenced Chinese culture and language immensely, simultaneously, influenced by Chinese culture, traditions and customs. Apparently, the peoples of the Middle East are enthusiastic about China's role in the region. However, the American so called ';pivoting out' and China's imminent ';pivoting in' brings tremendous levels of anxiety in the region. A similar situation occurred a century ago, when the people of the region, the social and political movements in the Middle East, and the governments of the region, solicited and welcomed the American involvement in the region, something they deeply resent and regret. China seems to be going through the same path, and the people of the region have begun to scrutinize its presence. If Beijing continues its inconsistent policy in the region, its injudicious support to autocracies, it will defiantly mobilize popular resentment against its involvement in the Middle East. Therefore, its presence might not endure in comparison to the American, British, or French presence in the Middle East.

Africa's Social Cleavages and Democratization offers a comparative approach to African countries by providing an in-depth analysis of the impact of ethnicity and religion on both multiparty and post-multiparty eras. By applying different theoretical frameworks, Douglas Kimemia explores and analyzes how social cleavages have affected the growth of democracy in Africa.It is crucial to assess the relationship between democratic development and the impact of social cleavages, because multiparty politics have increased political competition, participation, transparency, and civic engagement in Africa. However, social divisions have significantly slowed the maturing of democracy, as these social cleavages have become polarizing factors, which are used by political elites for their own self-interest. As a result, politics of identity caused by competition of natural resources have led to increased conflicts and political instability in Africa. The social cleavages have also led to polarized party systems and caused adverse effects on democracy due to the highly polarized societies and political competition.Despite the many positive impacts, multiparty politics have increased the consciousness of ethnic and religious identities, leading to unhealthy political competition as evidenced by highly fragmented societies prone to conflicts and violence. Kimemia comprehensively examines different governing, electoral, and party systems in order to determine the different incentives and how social divisions shape them. This analysis helps to distinguish more permanent political structures from the merely epiphenomenal within the African political scene.

There is a need for historical studies in music education that focuses on the common person. Historians in general have been doing this for years, but music education history has yet to catch up to the field. Although there have been many biographies and biographical studies about the more well-known music educators, little has been done investigating what teaching was like for the average teacher, and even less is known about teaching music in the early years of music education in the United States. A Musician and Teacher in Nineteenth Century New England: Irving Emerson, 1843-1903 argues that understanding history requires knowledge of the people who lived during the time. This book focuses on what Irving Emerson's life was like as a musician and music teacher during this early and critical period of music education.During this time in history, the growth of music as a curricular study in the United States, from singing schools to classroom singing and note-reading, paralleled Emerson's teaching career. It was because of the groundwork established by music teachers like Irving Emerson that the music curriculum developed in the twentieth century to include music appreciation, instrumental music ensembles and marching band, along with general music classes and choral music education. This is an invaluable resource to music educators, musicians, and historians alike in understanding the beginnings and formation of what is today music appreciation in the education system.

Global Issues in the Context of Spaces examines globalization using the concept of space to contextualize discussion of global issues. The manuscript uses the concept of space to contextualize global issues because spaces are the theater of human activity. Global issues result from specific dynamics emerging between people and their activities within specific spaces. The growth of population, the increase of human activity, and the usage of new spaces explain the complexity and challenges of global issues today.

News, Neoliberalism, and Miami's Fragmented Urban Space examines cultural and social forces responsible for inequalities that have emerged in the rampant development of Miami as a ';world city.' This book argues that neoliberal movements rely on the power of journalistic discourses to authorize and legitimize harmful social acts such as gentrification. Moses Shumow and Robert E. Gutsche Jr. provide original analyses of intersections among memory, race, capitalism, and journalistic power, particularly at a time of immense political and environmental change. The authors examine changes in neighborhoods and in public-private developments that are bound to widen an already-great divide between classes and races in South Florida.

The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 17651800 reveals the largely forgotten importance of state sovereignty to American constitutionalism. Contrary to modern popular perceptions and works by other academics, the Founding Fathers did not establish a constitutional system based upon a national popular sovereignty nor a powerful national government designed to fulfill a grand philosophical purpose. Instead, most Americans throughout the period maintained that a constitutional order based upon the sovereignty of states best protected and preserved liberty. Enshrining their preference for state sovereignty in Article II of the Articles of Confederation and in the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments to the federal constitution, Americans also claimed that state interpositionthe idea that the states should intervene against any perceived threats to liberty posed by centralizationwas an established and accepted element of state sovereignty.

The aim of the book is to explore the social and cultural impact of rumor from Antiquity to the mid-1990s, examining it as one of the most important contributing factors to violence and discrimination. Usually defined as an unverified account that circulates from one person to another and refers to an object, event, or matter of public interest, rumor and its impact have largely been ignored by scholars and authors. Eugen O. Chirovici has tried not only to describe a number of major historic events, but also to explain how the rumors that influenced them came into being and to account for the collective desires or fears that nurtured them. Merely to conclude that the human mind has always been vulnerable to rumors, sometimes with lethal consequences, is not enough; it is important to understand not only what happens, but also why it happens. For at least three reasons, Chirovici thinks that it is importantparticularly in this era of explosive development in mass communicationsto understand the complex mechanisms whereby rumors emerge and spread. The first is that history has taught us that in certain circumstances rumors can be extremely dangerous, being employed as tools of manipulation, disinformation, and propaganda. The second relates to a deeper understanding of the way in which the most recent inventionsthe Internet, social networks, digital landscapeaffect and will go on affecting our lives; the virtual world is a historically unprecedented vehicle for the dissemination of rumors. And the third has to do with the wider and more nebulous idea of progress. In other words, are we less vulnerable to rumors today than we were, for example, in the Middle Ages?

Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, ';the greatest sickness of the soul.' He thereby is able to ';foresee' their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another.In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato's extended apologia or defense of Socrates as ';a teacher of tyrants' and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such ';value judgments' are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronesis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author's inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates.The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.

Collectivities, in brief, is a term describing the intellectual and creative potential of groups. Collectivities then mark a position in the connection between disciplinary fields; a position that is simultaneously productive of new knowledge and new politics. In Collectivities: Politics at the Intersections of Disciplines Robert Carley looks at the classical ideas and theorists that have influenced interdisciplinary work in the humanistic and social-scientific disciplines as well as contemporary cases of interdisciplinary meeting points, specifically cultural studies, Chicana/o studies and radical sociology (e.g. critical, liberation, public, and Marxist approaches). He discusses the intellectual, creative, and political potential of these groupings. Noting that interdisciplinary groups often come together to address political or social problems, Carley provides an analysis of these groupings as well as ways of understanding their work. He suggests that we might understand interdisciplinarity as more than merely a constellation of scholarly fields. By looking at the political contexts that inform our understanding of as well as the approaches of interdisciplinary groups Collectivities suggests some new ways to think about the production of knowledge when it occurs between disciplines.

Democracy (Made in Taiwan) argues that post-colonialism and Confucianism met at the historical moment when democratization and liberalization occurred in Taiwan. The familiar political science standards take little note of either Confucianism or postcolonialism. In fact, these standards are unbalanced, wishful, and Washington-centric, and result in a misunderstanding of Taiwan's performance. The liberal bias blinds international observers to the hybrid characteristics embedded in Taiwan's postcolonial history. Although this book is not about failing states per se, its criticism of the standards of success alludes to the problematic nature of the mainstream view of failing states. In many aspects, Taiwan is a disguised failure, or even a fake, in the sense that its democratization adopts a populist identity strategy rather than a liberal one. In addition, its foreign policy compliance to hegemonic leadership is characterized by anti-China determination, instead of a realist approach involving the calculation of power.Having said this, the book does not criticize Taiwan for "e;failing"e; liberalism, in order to prevent the liberal teleology from lingering on. Instead, Taiwan serves as an arena of polemics on political science in this book. By rewriting domestic liberalism and external realism into meanings unknown to the hegemonic power, Democracy (Made in Taiwan) celebrates Taiwan's postcolonial fluidity. Embedded in a kind of ontological anomaly beyond the scope of mainstream political science, which takes for granted the ontology informed by individualism in domestic politics and statism in international relations, Taiwan's case appears subversive not because of the subversive nature of postcoloniality, but due to the inability of political science's liberalism to make sense of postcoloniality. Through decoupling the idea of political science from the entity known as Taiwan, this book attempts to achieve two goals: to re-present Taiwan and to call for reflexive political science.

The most influential sect in the Chinese mainland in the 1940s, Yiguan Dao was largely destroyed in mainland China in 1953. Yiguan Dao not only survived, however, but developed into the largest sect in Taiwan, despite its suppression by the Kuomintang state. In 1987, through relentless efforts, the sect finally gained legal status in Taiwan. Today, Yiguan Dao not only thrives in Chinese societies, but has also become a world-wide religion which has spread to more than sixty countries. This book, based on fieldwork conducted in 2002 in Taiwan, is the first English-language scholarly study exclusively focusing on Yiguan Dao. Lu includes a history of Yiguan Dao in mainland China, but focuses on the sect's evolution in Taiwan in the past few decades. Specifically, he probes the operation of Yiguan Dao under suppression in the past twenty years, and examines the relationship between Yiguan Dao and its rivals in Taiwan's religious market. The Transformation of Yiguan Dao in Taiwan develops the religious economy model by extending it to Chinese societies.

Jennifer M. Wei argues that construction and perceptions of language and identity parallel sociopolitical transformations, and language and identity crises arise during power transitions. Under these premises, language and identity are never well-defined or well-bounded. Instead, they are best viewed as political symbols subject to manipulation and exploitation during socio-historical upheavals. A choice of languagefrom phonological shibboleth, Mandarin, or Taiwanese, to choice of official languagecuts to the heart of contested cultural notions of self and other, with profound implications for nationalism, national unity and ethno-linguistic purism. Wei further argues that because of the Chinese Diaspora and Taiwans connections to China and the United States, arguments and sentiments over language choice and identity have consequences for Taiwans international and transnational status. They are symbolic acts of imagining Taiwans past as she looks forward to the future.

This edited collection of essays answers a basic question posed by contemporary discourse on state building: How might people's identification with a particular ethnic group matter? Essays in this book use an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to understanding regional and local community culture and socio-political development in developing countries-especially in Sub-Saharan Africa-to argue that the state, as well as civil society, confers on cultural differences a legitimacy that can be achieved in no other way but by positive cooperation. Contributors from different countries look at local patterns in state building and modernization as they have unfolded over the course of the last fifty years. They claim that the people and ethnic groups in most developing countries adhere to a concept of popular sovereignty that testifies that aspects of positive and moral ethnicity can contribute to social change as in China, economic development as in India, or in a democratization process as in Rwanda and Burundi. The eventual methodological assumption made by these essays presumes that ethnic conflicts in such countries as Cyprus, Turkey, India, and Rwanda have no moral sanction; ethnicity has not assumed a political ideology. One conclusion reached by the contributors is that some form of accommodation between opposing ethnically diversified groups, as well as between state and ethnic elements, is feasible.

One of the most controversial policies in Chinese minority education concerns the so-called inland ethnic minority schools or classes in Han inhabited areas in China. Since 2000, boarding Xinjiang Classes have been established in the eastern cities of China for high school students from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in order to educate young Uyghur and other ethnic minority students through the national curricula. Although the Xinjiang Classes are supposed to promote ethnic integration between the Muslim Uyghur minority and the Han majority, there often remains a gap between the stated policy goal and its actual implementation. Guided by the theoretical framework of social capital analysis, this book therefore examines how Uyghur students in the Xinjiang Classes respond to the school goal of ethnic integration. Chen conceptualizes the process of Uyghur students' responses to the school goal of ethnic integration as social recapitalization. While their former social capital from families or communities in Xinjiang is constrained in the boarding school, Uyghur youths are able to develop independent and new social capital to facilitate their schooling. Nonetheless, they lack "e;bridging social capital,"e; which makes the goal of ethnic integration more difficult to achieve.

This book examines the new equity-enhancing politics in China in the context of Chinese traditional cognitive patterns of political legitimacy and its implication for Chinese political development in the near future. Based on an analysis of the new governing philosophy, the generation of political elite, and a new set of public policies, the book reaffirms the emergence of a new Chinese polity that infuses one-party rule with limited electoral and deliberative democracies.Unlike many scholars who perceive the contemporary Chinese history as a constant search for democracy, this book takes a very different approach. It asserts that the enduring question in political development in China today is no different from what was sought after throughout Chinese history, namely, the constant search for political legitimacy. Even though the quest for democracy is instrumental to that end, it may not ultimately lead to the embrace of a full-fledged liberal democracy. The new politics is not only a rationalization of the efficiency-based development, but also a major paradigm shift in China's developmental strategy.

This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language.The first, ';logistical' approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles. The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, ';phenomenological' approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.

This book weaves together the life stories of five extraordinary contemporary Tibetans involved in environmental protection (as well as a host of secondary characters): Tashi Dorje, a well-known and celebrated environmentalist; Karma Samdrup, a philanthropist, businessman, and environmentalist; Rinchen Samdrup, Karma's brother, another extraordinary environmentalist; Gendun, a painter, historian, and researcher from Amdo; and Musuo, a Tibetan from the Dechin area of northwest Yunnan who founded the Khawakarpo Culture Society. In the politically fraught and ever-worsening situation for Tibetans within China today, it is often said that the only possible path for a better solution will be through a change in the way that the majority Chinese society thinks about and understands Tibetans, their aspirations, histories, and desires. This book provides the first such account by drawing readers in with beautiful narrative prose and fascinating stories, and then using their attention to demystify Tibetans, cultivating in the reader a sense of empathy as well as facts upon which to rebuild an intercultural understanding. It is the first work that seriously aims to let the Chinese public understand Tibetans as both products of an admirable culture and as complex individuals negotiating religious ideals, economic change, and sociopolitical constraints. In short it opens up a whole new way of understanding Tibet.

If human biological evolution is part of our worldview, then how do commonplace notions of ethics fit in? To ask the question, ';what does evolution imply about ethics?' we must first be clear about what we mean by evolution. Evolution and the Foundations of Ethics discusses four models of evolution, represented by Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, and Haught. We must also be clear about what we mean by ethics. Do we mean metaethics? If so, which variety? With metaethical theories (such as Error Theory, Expressivism, Moral Relativism, and Moral Realism), theorists are attempting to explain the general nature, status, and origins of ethics. In the first four chapters of this book (Part I), John Mizzoni examines how metaethical theories fit with evolution. Next, in asking about the implications of evolution for ethics,do we mean normative ethics? Theorists who work with normative ethical theoriessuch as Virtue Ethics, Natural Law Ethics, Social Contract Ethics, Utilitarian Ethics, Deontological Ethics, and Ethics of Care)articulate and defend a normative ethics that people can and do use in a practical way when deliberating about specific actions, rules, and policies. The next six chapters (Part II) look at how normative ethical theories fit with evolution. A full reckoning of ethics and evolution demands that we consider the range of ethical elements, both metaethical and normative. Thus, this book looks at what several different models of evolution imply about four metaethical theories and six normative ethical theories. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the intersection of evolutionary theory and ethical theory.

In the late nineteenth century, culture critics who were readers of Darwin's work on evolution pondered what the implications of natural selection might be for human culture, religion and ethics. American pragmatists, by and large, rejected a social Darwinian spin on ethics, economics, and theology in favor of a less determinate humanist version of the ethical implications that emphasized contingency and meliorism. The early arguments between T. H. Huxley and William Sumner over the issues mirrors the contemporary arguments between Stephen Jay Gould and others against ';the New Atheists'' determinate interpretation of cultural implications which largely echo the social Darwinists' position but in the current language of sociobiology. The work of pragmatists such as William James, George Santayana, Jane Addams, and John Dewey detail an evolutionary perspective that rejects the moral implications of social Darwinism.

Is it possible to derive a viable definition of persons from Aristotle's work? In A Person as a Lifetime: An Aristotelian Account of Persons, Stephanie M. Semler argues that we can. She finds the component parts of this definition in his writing on ethics and metaphysics, and the structure of this working definition is that of an entire lifetime. If J.O. Urmson is right that ';[t]o call somebody a eudaimon is to judge his life as a whole,' then a Greek, and by extension an Aristotelian account of personhood would be a description of an entire human life. Likewise, the evaluation of that life would have to be done at its termination. The concept of persons is at least as much a moral one as it is a metaphysical one. For this reason, Semler contends that an important insight about persons is to be found in Aristotle's ethical works. The significance of judging one to be a eudaimon is in understanding that the life is completethat is, it has a beginning, middle, and an end, with the same person at the helm for the duration. If we know what Aristotle's requirements are for a human lifetime is to have all of these features, it follows that we can derive an Aristotelian concept of persons from it. We find the benefit of such an investigation when the difficulties with issues surrounding personal identity seem to indicate that either personal identity must inhere in the physical body of a person, or that, on pain of a view that resembles dualism, it simply doesn't exist. A Person as a Lifetime will be of particular interest to students and scholars of philosophy, history, classics, and psychology, and to anyone with an interest in Aristotle.

More than thirty years ago the political turn that brought the dismantling of agricultural collectives and exclusive rights to small plots of farmland for rural families initiated a historic return to smallholding in the People's Republic of China. Today, agriculture in China is changing again. In many villages smallholder farming is giving way to large agricultural enterprises. This book explores this latest transformation of Chinese agriculture. It traces how the peasantry's frustration with the farming conditions, the priorities of national and local political agents and the changes in the management of collective land since the return to family-based farming have paved the way for a unique Chinese agrarian transition. The argument is based on careful analysis of agricultural politics since the early 1980s and data gathered in three field trips to Shandong, Sichuan, and Guizhou Provinces between 2008 and 2010. The findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies and strategic government intervention (or its absence) for economic transformation. China's Agrarian Transition is one of the first comprehensive accounts of the latest developments in agriculture in the People's Republic and will provide a stimulating read for political scientists, sociologists, economists, and experts on China interested in the ongoing transformation of China's countryside.

A History of the Handel Choir of Baltimore (1935-2013): Music, Spread Thy Voice Around chronicles the history of one of America's longstanding volunteer choral organizations, one that has followed in the footsteps of venerable ensembles such as the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston), the Bethlehem Bach Choir, and the Handel Society of Dartmouth College. It begins by considering music in the city of Baltimore, and establishing the reasons surrounding the choir's formation. Substantial coverage is given to the influence of Katharine M. Lucke, one of Baltimore's grandes damesas a composer, mover, and shakerand a vital force in Baltimore's National Music Week from her position on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Subsequently the book focuses on the contributions of each of the ten conductor/music directors, the vicissitudes of funding a volunteer choir, the choir's contributions to music education in the greater Baltimore metropolitan area, and the choir's repertoire. The book contains extensive appendices describing the choir's repertoire, its presidents, and its unbroken string of Messiah performances.Throughout more than seventy-five years, the Handel Choir of Baltimore has remained true to its original charter as an amateur choral organization that aspires to the highest standards of artistic excellence. A History of the Handel Choir of Baltimore is an invaluable resource to those interested in choral music studies, the running of an amateur, volunteer choir, and other disciplines of music studies.