Anthem Press

The book looks at the turn of the century, when organized soccer began to be played in a systematic way by the European community of Rio and São Paulo, mostly by the British. It shows that the new sport was embraced by these people as a way to celebrate their culture, and to imitate the activities of the elite schools in Britain that became quite popular throughout Europe. Young Brazilians from the elite also embraced the sport as a way of sharing a popular European sport that was identified with what was respected as a white/upper class activity. In this way making a distinction from the lower and darker populations. Making this distinction was important in this moment of post-emancipation, affirming the superiority of the upper/white class. It was also important for the European residents of Brazil in order to distinguish themselves from Brazilians (colonial mentality). Football was one aspect of the modernity that these two cities were craving to achieve.

The book highlights the impact of European-based racial assumptions on the development of professional soccer. It provides a broad discussion on how the official discourse after 1930 was one of conciliation, claiming that Brazil was not European, but unique due to its racial mixing. This idea began to be promoted by artists and intellectuals as an attempt to Brazilianize the country, but it was soon embraced by politicians with the leadership of President Getulio Vargas in an attempt to create a unified national identity. In this context, futebol was also unique in relation to European football because of its mulatoism. Although this new attitude would influence social and racial barriers within football to fall, racism did not end, nor did Brazil become a racial democracy – as it has been claimed by many. 

The Elizabethan popular audience had a natural love of clowning, slapstick and the mayhem that was released when the rules of society were relaxed, broken or subverted. A play set on Midsummer Night and structured as a dream was going to be fun and full of the resonances associated with a festal day that had age old overtones of love, marriage, misrule and jolllity. Midsummer was traditionally celebrated with dancing and feasting and always involved secret assignations in the woods later when it was dark. Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play with a bit of everything – magic, moonlight, mayhem, love’s mad entanglements, fairies, mistakes, mechanicals as mummers, all set in the spookiness of the woods at midnight - and all of it provoking laughter.

The business of comedy was more important and serious than simply raising a laugh. It has always served a much graver purpose than mere humorous entertainment, but has also been regarded by religious, moral and cultural guardians as a lesser form than tragedy and a morally questionable one. In a world where society was strictly stratified even the arts had hierarchies. In painting devotional studies (Annunciations, Nativities, Crucifixions) were thought to be the highest endeavour, and historical subjects were thought superior to landscape and portraiture. Grotesque topics of common life (card-playing, village dances, tavern scenes) were thought of as very low art. In literature the epic poem, tragic drama, religious poetry, history plays, even lyrics and love verses were thought of as higher forms than mere comedy. Though the plays of Terence and Plautus were studied, translated and performed by schoolboys and undergraduates, and the satires of Juvenal and Horace were similarly on educational syllabuses, comedy was regarded with suspicion. It was thought to be a too vulgar form, too associated with the bourgeoisie and the commoners, too concerned with trickery, knavery and sex.

 It would not be amiss to re-title the play A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare, for, though matters in Athens are complicated and tense enough, the escape to the woods releases all manner of dark things and makes the entanglements even worse. The piece can be acted in two ways. The traditional approach has been to display it as a fast-moving, action-packed, farcical romp, a carnival of silliness; a light-hearted celebration of human foolishness, full of mistakes and misperceptions, nonsense and laughter, but turning out all right in the end, and not to be taken seriously as it is only a playful entertainment. It may also be seen as a play where oppressiveness, manipulation, misplaced love, hatred and menace dominate and the inconstancy of the human heart is disturbingly exposed. Hermia escapes from Egeus’ dictatorial threats only to find herself (and her complacent assumption of happiness to come in exile) at the mercy of forces she cannot control and does not understand. What happens in the woods is unsettling and represents the more frightening fears that lurk in the psyche and emerge in dreams. It is the woods that provoke the dream/nightmare element.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history.  Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.

Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazine’s production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of 'Walkabout' in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to 'Walkabout' magazine’s imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, 'Travelling Home' reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australia’s cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.

This edited collection aims to contribute to the decolonial social and cultural analyses of global entangled inequalities by focusing on their local articulations. Drawing on empirical research conducted by scholars in Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia and in Canada, the book engages with the conceptual framework of global inequalities and the methodological perspective on entanglement. It does so by approaching global inequalities and their local articulations: (a) global political economy, structural violence, entangled inequalities; (b) financial inequalities and state injustice; (c) inequality within and beyond race and ethnicity; (d) decolonial struggles against inequality; and (e) decolonial futurities. It is on these grounds that this edited volume aims to contribute to the analysis of entangled global inequalities by mobilizing a decolonial framework paying attention to the intersections of race, gender, labour, finances and the State.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

This book throws new light on post-colonial evaluations of the Partition and its effect on eastern India. Until very recently, a striking state of 'near silence' has existed concerning the violence encountered by those who fled across the Bengal border. 'Bengal Partition Stories' addresses this silence through the retelling of stories inspired by the division of Bengal, the mass exodus that followed and their repercussions on the cultural, social and economic character of the region, modern India as a whole and the newly-formed nation of Bangladesh.

Despite numerous critical enquiries into the history, politics and social dynamics that contributed to the partition of Bengal, there remains a distinct lack of in-depth exploration into the personal experiences of those directly affected. Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings of the event and its aftermath, 'Bengal Partition Stories' seeks to fill this gap by unearthing and articulating the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

There is a fundamental mismatch between the global trade rules as they govern international economic behaviour and the political economic factors influencing domestic policy making. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the multilateral trading system is in crisis. Countries are increasingly turning to bilateral and regional (and mega-regional) trade deals to push forward their trade agenda. There is far less consensus around these next-generation trade agreements which reach into every aspect of domestic policy-making. At this time, more than ever, policy-makers, treaty negotiators, and scholars and students of international law need to understand the ways in which this growing regime of international trade and investment impacts regulatory decisions. 

This book demonstrates how seemingly disparate spheres of legal theory and practice (investment incentives, patent protection, land reform, etc.) are all linked together through the lens of international trade and investment, while also offering solutions in the form of new negotiating texts and country examples as a way forward toward a new multilateral trade and investment regime. Furthermore, each chapter identifies the regulatory challenges facing countries.

‘Rethinking Cultural Resource Management in Southeast Asia’ explores the challenges facing efforts to protect Southeast Asia’s indigenous cultures and archaeological sites from the ravages of tourism and economic development. The tourism industry has long recognized the economic benefits of cultural resources, and in Southeast Asia many countries have already developed elements of their cultural heritage into tourist attractions. If not properly managed, the side effects of this development have the potential to be disastrous. As such, there is a now pressing need to create a coordinated study of the growing field of cultural resource management (CRM).

This volume develops a set of themes, including: tourism and its alternatives as CRM strategies; the mitigation of the effects of tourism and other developmental forces; site preservation, ranging from monuments to vernacular architecture, villages, and urban neighbourhoods; and legal issues facing resource management. Its essays discuss innovative approaches to CRM, and avoid the assumption that Euro-American solutions are applicable worldwide; in the Southeast Asian context, funding is often limited, whilst concepts of cultural resource ownership and governmental authority differ from those in the West.

The ultimate goal of CRM is sustainable management, but the convergence between development and preservation is often tense because it entails compromise and negotiation between parties with conflicting interests. The frequently cited concept of “sustainability” is therefore subject to differing interpretations, and conflicts between the short term and long term, local and global, and restoration and regeneration are perennial sources of dispute between stakeholders.

Southeast Asian cultures are thus under intense pressure on many fronts. What this volume seeks to illuminate is the need for effective management strategies to reduce the destructive potential of these conflicting interests: tourism in this region is highly dependent on cultural attractions, and proper management strategies would ensure that these cultural assets are preserved. In turn, this will allow these cultural resources to contribute significantly to the material wellbeing – and stability – of their respective societies.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

This study examines the significant roles of five women poets, in order of chronology: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning, and Louisa Lawson. The work of these poets can outline the development of women’s poetry in Australia and internationally across the nineteenth century, and their inclusion radically alters current scholarship, rethinking the ways in which women poets, feminist politics, and the legacies of Romanticism relate to colonial poetry. Colonial poetry in Australia has generally been interpreted through a lens of oppositionality or insularity. 

These poets are examined through a transnational frame, which foregrounds challenges to women’s subjugation, and oppression relating to class, and race. Since studies of colonial Australian women writers have tended to focus on those writing novels or journals, women’s poetry of the period has received less critical attention. The highly gender-conscious writing of these poets reflects knowledgeable and innovative political dialogues that consistently demonstrate the global context of colonial women’s poetry. These poets often took what may be considered a cosmopolitan approach, which extended beyond British or emergent Australian nationalisms, in which gender was recognised as a unifying category far more than nation or Empire, extending their interests across ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, and Indian, Italian, North American, French as well as European cultures, and sometimes incorporating discourses around slavery, indigeneity, and New- and Old-World dichotomies. 

This book is concerned with the related historical relationships of women’s political writing and gender to colonialism, literary romanticism, and emerging national identities. Themes explored in this study, demonstrating these poets’ access to a political discourse of gender and class, include abolitionism, Hellenism, eroticism and spiritualism. In prioritising the contributions of women, particularly through print culture, this study seeks to recognise colonial Australian women’s poetry as a transnational literature, politicised by its engagement with imperialist and nationalist discourses at a transnational level.

Thomas Pennant of Downing, Flintshire (1726–1798), naturalist, antiquarian and self-styled ‘Curious Traveller’, published accounts of his pioneering travels in Scotland and Wales to wide acclaim between 1769 and 1784, directly inspiring Dr Johnson, James Boswell and hundreds of subsequent tourists. A keen observer and cataloguer of plants, birds, minerals and animals, Pennant corresponded with a trans-continental network of natural scientists (Linnaeus, Simon Pallas, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White), and was similarly well-connected with leading British antiquarians (William Borlase, Francis Grose, Richard Gough). Frequently cited as witness or authority across a wide range of disciplines, Pennant’s texts have seldom been themselves the focus of critical attention. There is as yet no biography of Pennant, nor any edition of his prolific correspondence with many of the leading minds of the European Enlightenment.

The ‘Tours’ were widely read and much imitated. As annotated copies reveal, readers were far from passive in their responses to the text, and ‘local knowledge’ would occasionally be summoned to challenge or correct them. But Pennant indisputably helped bring about a richer, more complex understanding of the multiple histories and cultures of Britain at a time when ‘Britishness’ was itself a fragile and developing concept. Because the ‘Tours’ drew on a vast network of informants (often incorporating material wholesale), they are, as texts, fascinatingly multi-voiced: many of the period’s political tensions run through them.

This volume of eleven essays seeks to address the comparative neglect of Pennant’s travel writing by bringing together researchers from literary criticism, art history, Celtic studies, archaeology and natural history. Attentive to the visual as well as textual aspects of his topographical enquiries, it demonstrates how much there is to be said about the cross-currents (some pulling in quite contrary directions) in Pennant’s work. In so doing they rehabilitate a neglected aspect of the Enlightenment in relation to questions of British identity, offering a new assessment of an important chapter in the development of domestic travel writing.

Thomas Pennant of Downing, Flintshire (1726–1798), naturalist, antiquarian and self-styled ‘Curious Traveller’, published accounts of his pioneering travels in Scotland and Wales to wide acclaim between 1769 and 1784, directly inspiring Dr Johnson, James Boswell and hundreds of subsequent tourists. A keen observer and cataloguer of plants, birds, minerals and animals, Pennant corresponded with a trans-continental network of natural scientists (Linnaeus, Simon Pallas, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White), and was similarly well-connected with leading British antiquarians (William Borlase, Francis Grose, Richard Gough). Frequently cited as witness or authority across a wide range of disciplines, Pennant’s texts have seldom been themselves the focus of critical attention. There is as yet no biography of Pennant, nor any edition of his prolific correspondence with many of the leading minds of the European Enlightenment.

The ‘Tours’ were widely read and much imitated. As annotated copies reveal, readers were far from passive in their responses to the text, and ‘local knowledge’ would occasionally be summoned to challenge or correct them. But Pennant indisputably helped bring about a richer, more complex understanding of the multiple histories and cultures of Britain at a time when ‘Britishness’ was itself a fragile and developing concept. Because the ‘Tours’ drew on a vast network of informants (often incorporating material wholesale), they are, as texts, fascinatingly multi-voiced: many of the period’s political tensions run through them.

This volume of eleven essays seeks to address the comparative neglect of Pennant’s travel writing by bringing together researchers from literary criticism, art history, Celtic studies, archaeology and natural history. Attentive to the visual as well as textual aspects of his topographical enquiries, it demonstrates how much there is to be said about the cross-currents (some pulling in quite contrary directions) in Pennant’s work. In so doing they rehabilitate a neglected aspect of the Enlightenment in relation to questions of British identity, offering a new assessment of an important chapter in the development of domestic travel writing.

This book looks at contemporary Gothic cinema within a transnational approach. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study invokes its literary as well as filmic forebears, by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic: the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, or region, or culture. It was considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, and post-colonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the broader range of forces from a wider international perspective while at the same time also engaging with concepts of nationalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself. It also facilitated studies to focus on notions of hybridity where terms were not fixed but were constantly shifting and mobile.

The central idea of the book is that after horror/Gothic film was dragged into disrepute by the rise of torture porn and endless North American remakes, a set of international filmmakers are seeking to emphasize the aesthetic, artistic and philosophical potential of the Gothic. Such filmmakers include Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden, Stoker), Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), Wim Wenders (Only Lovers Left Alive), Ben Wheatley (A Field in England), Jane Campion (Top of the Lake), and Carol Morley (The Falling).

Although written in an accessible manner, the book incorporates theory and engages extensively into research to tap into key developments in Gothic studies – transnationalism, fandom and genre fiction, and transmedia exchanges – bringing these together along with popular culture and associated phenomena.

Given Australia’s status as an (unfinished) colonial project of the British Empire, the basic institutions that were installed in its so-called ‘empty’ landscape derive from a value-laden framework borne out of industrialization, colonialism, the consolidation of the national statist system and democracy – all entities imbued with British Enlightenment principles and thinking. Modernity in Australia has thus been constituted by the importation, assumption and triumph of the Western mind – materially, psychologically, culturally, socio-legally and cartographically. ‘Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values’ offers a critical intervention into the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

Volkan is the vice director of an important financial company. He achieved success young, and has spent his life indulging in the worldly pleasures money can buy. But for all the fun money and success can bring, he has started to feel like something is missing from his life.

On his way home from a business trip to Europe, Volkan realizes he has picked up the wrong suitcase—one full of women’s clothing and priceless antiques. Enter Melike Eda, the owner of the suitcase—a jewellery maker, antiques expert, and an antiquities smuggler. She and Volkan hit it off, but will they be able to fill the empty spaces in each other’s lives?

Volkan also meets Eylem, a poet and blogger, who inspires him to make changes in his life. She has run away to the big city to escape her past, but things aren’t so easy for her as she struggles to make enough money and take care of her dependent sister.

‘Saffron Yellow’ follows the stories of these three people as they make their way through life, trying to find meaning and love. 

Given Australia’s status as an (unfinished) colonial project of the British Empire, the basic institutions that were installed in its so-called ‘empty’ landscape derive from a value-laden framework borne out of industrialization, colonialism, the consolidation of the national statist system and democracy – all entities imbued with British Enlightenment principles and thinking. Modernity in Australia has thus been constituted by the importation, assumption and triumph of the Western mind – materially, psychologically, culturally, socio-legally and cartographically. ‘Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values’ offers a critical intervention into the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

This book sets forth how the “greening” of Wharton’s private and public writings contributes to exciting strands in cultural geography and recent postcolonial theory: for example, biological and political constructions of citizenship, mobility, race, and nation; hospitality and hostility toward the “Other”; fraught experiences of exile and competing conceptions of home/land; trans/national selfhood; the figure of the nomad, the outcast, or the wanderer. Ultimately, it will address this question: What are the issues, broadly speaking what motivates an ecocriticism, how does that address the challenges of cultural geography, why can we uncover meaning by turning to Wharton? The argument made is that a reading of Wharton’s fiction can help reveal how to understand those issues. This book situates Wharton as an author who is acutely responsive to pastoral tropes and terrain, among other species of spaces. She addresses the affective and geographical resonances of such sites, especially sparsely populated localities and landforms—voguish mountain resorts, private ornamental gardens, lush public parks, monumental and “sham” ruins—which offered pampered American socialites a brief escape from the “welter.” I wish to complicate popular perceptions of “Wharton’s world”—reinforced by numerous handsomely produced cinematic and television adaptations of her novels—as one rooted in often-opulent domestic interiors with their waspish social cliques, strict rules of politesse, and elaborate hierarchies.

Indeed, one of the central aims of this book is to treat pastoral as a kind of palimpsest—a “parchment” upon which successive generations of artist-pilgrims have etched their impressions, constantly revising its imagery, formal procedures, and lyrical effects. This notion of the palimpsest also reinforces how my research seeks to extend the range of Wharton studies. First of all, my close reading of selected texts adds another “layer” of sophistication to the ever-evolving field of ecocriticism, whose core ideas and critical standpoints have assumed both an urgency and galvanizing potency given the seismic upheaval to our material localities around the globe—some of the most damaging tornadoes in US history; flooding in the American Midwest; devastating earthquakes in Haiti, China, and Japan; stronger and more extensive wildfires in the American Southwest.

On the commercial side, artificial intelligence applications are powering many sectors. Globally, governments are exploring how to comprehend, incorporate, apply, and use artificial intelligence technologies. The scope of government use of artificial intelligence technology goes beyond that of commercial organizations and is far more complex. In government, the challenges will be as follows: (1) How can governments use artificial intelligence technology to improve their efficiencies? (2) How can governments become more citizen-centric, service based, accessible, and responsive? (3) How can governments protect their citizens from the misuse of artificial intelligence  (e.g., alleged Russian bots’ interference in U.S. elections)? (4)  How can governments use artificial intelligence technology to make better policy decisions and avoid wrong decisions  (economic, social etc.)? (5) How can governments develop new standards to govern and manage the deployment of artificial intelligence technologies (e.g., autonomous cars, financial markets and trading, healthcare bots)? (6) How will the legislative bodies respond to the rise of intelligent machines? (7) How will the use of artificial intelligence in the military change the arms race? (8)  What roles governments will need to play in developing global standards related to artificial intelligence (United Nations)? (9) How can governments improve their countries’ productivity with artificial intelligence? (10) How can governments handle the upcoming unemployment that would result from AI automation? All the above questions are at an early stage of exploration and many have not been addressed comprehensively. This book deals with all the above issues and provides the first guide to governments and policy makers of the world on artificial intelligence.

For a quarter of a century now, and more particularly over the last decade, Maurice Halbwachs has inspired a growing literature embodied by many sociologists and historians of social sciences, published for the most part in scientific journals, focusing on the sociological thought that Halbwachs developed in his writings. Then come many studies that emerge from the history of ideas and epistemology: these are entirely devoted to a particular facet of Halbwachs’ work, either to place it in its scientific context or to discuss it on the basis of fundamental cognitive issues.

Our task is not to summarize or synthesize the thinking of Halbwachs, which would be far too vast an undertaking for an exercise of this kind. He was keenly aware of the most pressing epistemological and methodological questions surrounding the nascent sociology. He thought about the place of demography in the study of social life; he posed the problem of the role of psychology; and he considered the application of statistics. Better yet, he asked what a society really is: a kind of “organization” trying to last and preserve itself, adapting to the conditions of its environment. There is no doubt that Halbwachs contributed to the emergence of sociology especially after World War I. His studies have always been innovative, part of the intellectual debates at the moment. In particular, his work invests the question of knowing if it was possible to study in a positive way human spirit, and especially intellectual faculties.

This study examines the significant roles of five women poets, in order of chronology: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning, and Louisa Lawson. The work of these poets can outline the development of women’s poetry in Australia and internationally across the nineteenth century, and their inclusion radically alters current scholarship, rethinking the ways in which women poets, feminist politics, and the legacies of Romanticism relate to colonial poetry. Colonial poetry in Australia has generally been interpreted through a lens of oppositionality or insularity. 

These poets are examined through a transnational frame, which foregrounds challenges to women’s subjugation, and oppression relating to class, and race. Since studies of colonial Australian women writers have tended to focus on those writing novels or journals, women’s poetry of the period has received less critical attention. The highly gender-conscious writing of these poets reflects knowledgeable and innovative political dialogues that consistently demonstrate the global context of colonial women’s poetry. These poets often took what may be considered a cosmopolitan approach, which extended beyond British or emergent Australian nationalisms, in which gender was recognised as a unifying category far more than nation or Empire, extending their interests across ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, and Indian, Italian, North American, French as well as European cultures, and sometimes incorporating discourses around slavery, indigeneity, and New- and Old-World dichotomies. 

This book is concerned with the related historical relationships of women’s political writing and gender to colonialism, literary romanticism, and emerging national identities. Themes explored in this study, demonstrating these poets’ access to a political discourse of gender and class, include abolitionism, Hellenism, eroticism and spiritualism. In prioritising the contributions of women, particularly through print culture, this study seeks to recognise colonial Australian women’s poetry as a transnational literature, politicised by its engagement with imperialist and nationalist discourses at a transnational level.

'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' brings together new interpretations of the work of this sociologist and philosopher. It discusses how Simmel’s work is relevant, interesting and significant for advancing contemporary discussions and debates. Compared to the volumes of works on other sociological giants like Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, the Anglophone secondary literature on Simmel has remained relatively scarce until recently.

The book addresses general questions on ‘social life in process’ that characterize the whole of Simmel’s work and also includes chapters that focus on specific issues. The primary concern in each chapter is not just to review Simmel’s ideas or provide accurate readings but often neglected readings but also to explore how Simmel offers a model for addressing various disciplinary concerns and examine the degree to which he continues to speak to the experience of the present.

The international scholars writing in this companion are contributors to an emerging new wave of Simmel scholarship. Included in the volume is Austin Harrington’s translation of selections from Simmel’s book on Goethe and a comprehensive list of Simmel’s work in English.

'The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu' provides an introduction to the French sociologist’s thought and an evaluation of the international significance of his work from a range of national perspectives. This volume assesses Bourdieu’s work as a product of his social situation in France and, more importantly, in relation to his experience as French Algeria gained its independence. The companion then proceeds to ask how the concepts he developed can legitimately be applied to other situations.

The volume is divided into two parts, with the first devoted to aspects of Bourdieu’s thought and the second discussing case-studies of the international deployment of his thought. The international list of contributors elaborate on the implications and consequences of Bourdieu’s phenomenological orientation; explore the meaning of ‘reflexivity’ in Bourdieu’s work offering, in the process, a comprehensive guide to relevant secondary literature; examine the validity of the ways in which Margaret Archer and Bernard Lahire have attempted to go beyond Bourdieu’s original formulations; and spell out the implications of Bourdieu’s thinking in relation to the possibility of an international social science. The contributors also provide a biometric analysis of the circulation of Bourdieu’s ideas within Europe and offer interpretations of Bourdieu’s work within their own national contexts rather than in terms of a shared discourse of international sociology.

This book proposes to examine the nature of religion by seeking its origin within the context of the theory of evolution and the development of the human brain. It is argued that religion is the way the mechanism of natural selection in the theory of evolution operates to help humans survive in the context of a dangerous and hostile world. Survival is accomplished when profound experiences like trance cause a rewiring of the brain, giving birth to what later is identified as religious attitudes and ways of behaving. It is possible to speculate that without the development of religion, humans might not have survived to create cultures and civilizations. Therefore, the development of religion makes it possible for early humans to thrive. This evolutionary process involved adaptation to one’s environment, creation of social groups, and development of the body and the brain.
There are also other neglected aspects of evolution not discussed by previous theorists. The implications of the embodied nature of human beings are not always stressed by cognitive theorists. What they more specifically tend to neglect is that human bodies are chemical factories. It is numerous chemicals created within the body that contribute to the development of religious experiences. Another neglected aspect of those influenced by the theory of evolution is that early humans exerted a will to power to survive. This so-called will to power is a process of empowerment with the goal of enabling humans to become strong and powerful enough to survive. This will to power is not something metaphysical but is rather part of the dynamic of natural selection. It is possible to think of the proposed will to power within the operation of evolution as a thought experiment with the goal of enriching the theory of evolution.
With a review of the so-called Big Bang theory about the beginning of the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the quest for the birth of religion, and the cognitive contribution to this quest, the initial chapter commences a major theme of this book, namely the importance of origins. It includes an examination of the problematic nature of religion from a comparative perspective. Pre-historical times witnessed early Homo sapiens surrounded by danger as they attempted to survive. For our human ancestors, religion was not a way to get rich or to distinguish oneself from others, it was a means of survival. This was a perfectly natural development and response to one’s hostile environment.

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the rapid political, social and economic change that ensued, widespread population movements took place across the former territory of the Soviet Union. 'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' offers a new perspective on one of the most significant movements - the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population moving from Soviet successor states to the Russian Federation. While the substantial domestic and foreign policy implications of this migration movement have been recognized, there has to date been little exploration of another crucial aspect of this phenomenon: the micro-level sociocultural experiences and implications of movement and resettlement, and the nature of migrant response.

Based on original empirical data collected by the author, this timely book offers a unique insight into the individual and collective experiences of movement and resettlement among Russian migrants 'returning' to the Russian Federation over the period 1991–2002. Moya Flynn uses different levels of analysis (local, regional, national and global) to open up fresh perspectives on the nature of the Russian migration regime and government migration policy. The book offers the first in-depth examination of non-governmental development in the area of migration in post-Soviet Russia and provides new understandings of the experience of migration and resettlement at the individual level, specifically through an exploration of understandings of 'home' and 'homeland' and a focus on the role of migrant networks.

'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' is a major new contribution to current debates in migration studies. Its unique synthesis of original theoretical and empirical material will appeal to students of contemporary Russian politics, geography, culture and society, academics and policymakers alike.

Categorization is an essential and unavoidable instrumentality for conceptually navigating a world—indeed for being able to conceptualize a world to be navigated. Classification is a pivotal instrument for scientific systemization, featured as a basis for the philosophical understanding of reality since Aristotle, but classificatory concepts of sorts, types and natural kinds inevitably pervade our understanding of ourselves and our position in the social as well as the natural world at all levels. The authors argue that the character, purpose, context and culturerelativity of categories and categorization have been widely misunderstood—that standard philosophical views are substantially correct in some respects but markedly mistaken in others.

The book offers a comprehensive survey of basic principles of classification and categorization, with a multitude of illustrative examples accompanied by instructive analysis of ways and means. Initial chapters include a critical examination of previous work on the nature of categories, a wide-ranging survey of the ways in which categories have been conceptualized in the history of philosophy and a survey of relevant empirical work and scientific theory regarding both perceptual categories and categorization in general. In later chapters, the authors argue that the long-seated misunderstandings of categories that they identify underlie paradoxes in logic regarding vagueness and identity, puzzles in philosophy of science regarding induction, essences, natural laws and natural kinds, and problems in social philosophy and our ethical lives as well. A more adequate grasp of the nature of categories and categorization offers a better understanding of a range of classical philosophical problematics and the promise of alternative approaches.