The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.

This chapter highlights the parameters of modernity, because democracy today cannot rest on earlier practices created for small cities, like Athens, in the ancient world. Therefore, in 1917 and 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber described two new vocations, of “Science” and “Politics,” as characteristic of societies that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Scientists” used instruments and experiments to discover “knowledge” more reliable than “opinion.” The result is that their work overthrew many traditional beliefs and led to “disenchantment.” “Politicians” arose because, when “subjects” became “citizens” in many Western states, they needed leaders and spokespeople who would help them to organize their sentiments and express their preferences. In which case, politicians, elected on behalf of voluntary support from below, ruled on the basis of “tradition,” “legality,” or “charisma.” Weber’s terms overlooked at least two large problems. Charismatic politicians could break the “iron cage” of “bureaucracy,” but, as “demagogues,” they could also lead voters in undesirable directions. Voters, perhaps advised by scholars, would have to resist being led astray, but Weber said nothing about how they, in effect, should exercise a third new “vocation” in modern societies. Citizens were not present before the Enlightenment; they are everywhere now. What are they supposed to do? Weber did not say.

The Founders committed the country to a “democracy” which at that time excluded most Native Americans, Blacks, and women. But the commitment was there, and eventually most of the excluded were granted full citizenship rights. Furthermore, for more than a century, considerable “wherewithal” was provided for them. The elements of wherewithal were provided by political “parties,” by “education,” and by “journalism.” Parties got organized almost immediately, so that politicians could offer voters policy choices and so that the politicians themselves could bring different parts of the new government to work together. “Public schools” started teaching children to maintain religious faith but, during the 19th century, morphed into institutions culminating in land-grant and other “universities” aimed at educating citizens in science, useful occupations, and democratic culture. Journalism first belonged to parties, but technology produced the penny press sold to anyone and hawking sensationalism, which got a professional response in the 1890s when the New York Times announced it would publish only news “fit to print.” Ominously, however, early decades in the 20th century cast “doubts” on the viability of democracy, when thinkers like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Lippmann described ordinary citizens as in thrall to the “herd instinct” and “stereotypes,” and when leaders like Adolf Hitler explained how the masses can be swayed by “big lies.”

Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

Chapter 1 opens with the question of how to achieve normative legitimacy of the state (legitimation). How does the state become accepted and expected by a population to be the arbitrator of their collective life? The chapter reviews legitimation crises in Iraq at four key historical junctures: the foundational moment in 1921, the 1958 revolutionary coup d’etat, and the 1990s in the lead-up to the post-2003 state. Drawing on the work of Iraqi sociologist and public intellectual Ali al-Wardi, this chapter argues that legitimation of a state’s ruling principles (normative legitimation) is linked to a state’s ability to address social injustice. Furthermore, social injustice is intrinsic to any state order. A robust democracy is the only reliable mechanism through which to uncover the nature of injustice – and ways of addressing it – at any given time and space, and thereby avoid a legitimation crisis.

This chapter examines the nature of tone sandhi and various other tonal mutations in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). Each base tone in this language corresponds to a specific sandhi tone, with sandhi resulting from two sets of tonal shifts: smooth tone chain shifts and checked tone chain shifts. Each shift modifies either register or pitch, but not both simultaneously.

Some experimental studies have reported low rates of sandhi application, suggesting limited productivity. However, evidence from both experiments using real words and corpus analysis reveals high rates of appropriate tonal alternations, indicating that productivity is the primary mechanism. Theoretical works have further elaborated the tonal alternations as systematic chain shifts, lending support to this productivity-based view. The evidence suggests that future models of TSM tone sandhi should primarily incorporate productive phonological processes, supplemented by selective lexical storage mechanisms for certain exceptional or high-frequency cases.

In diminutive suffixation, the tone of the pre-á syllable undergoes modification through dextrosinistral spreading of register and/or pitch from the -á suffix, whereby the derived [35] ([Lr, h][Hr, h]) tonal output emerges as a distinctive tone cluster. Conversely, in neutral tone operations, sinistrodextral tone spreading applies to a subsequent function word, which may alternatively acquire a low tone by default in the absence of such spreading.

This chapter examines the tenure of British Consul William Dougal Christie who sought to settle territorial disputes over the Mosquito Shore with rival Central American republics and attempted to establish unchallenged British authority over the Nicaragua Canal route by shifting the capital of the Mosquito Kingdom to the harbor of San Juan del Norte (renamed Greytown). Nicaraguan officials challenged the British position by arguing that the Mosquito Kingdom was a fiction erected by the British. As the possibility of a Nicaraguan Canal loomed ahead, competing sovereign powers of Britain and Nicaragua converged on the authenticity of the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Kingdom as the linchpin around which to settle their territorial dispute over the San Juan delta.

Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of political belonging and the making of political communities by looking at how validation but also contestation are framed at the local and regional levels. By tracing the competing definitions of the notion of ‘seniority’ across time and actors in chieftaincy disputes, I evidence that seniority is used as a central notion on which power depends. The competing criteria to establish seniority have been used to construct new political communities with alternative allegiances. The most recurring and enduring principles across time and scales to construct political communities appear to be those related to indigeneity, oral tradition and genealogy. In order to emphasize the scalar logic at play, the chapter emphasizes the similarities in the narratives appearing at the regional level (Ewe-speaking southeast Ghana) and the local level (in the dukɔ of Dzodze), and will trace this logic from the 1910s to the 2010s, based on the Commission of Enquiry chaired by Sir Francis G. Crowther in 1912. This chapter will therefore look at power dynamics and disputes between Anloga, Dzodze and other dukɔwo in southeast Ghana in the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha-machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.

How is the Gulf understood in the global political economy, and how can we avoid the way in which this region is sometimes subject to exceptional treatment? This book lays out a framework that shows the importance of food to the Gulf states and how we can theorise this significance. This includes works on food regimes, resources, and technopolitics.