This chapter summarizes Neurath’s manifold achievements before 1934, when he was forced to leave Vienna. Neurath managed to fit several careers into one, relatively short lifetime, being active in education, urbanism, economic planning, museology, graphic design, and philosophy. After an account of his student years, we document his participation in the proto-Vienna Circle, his theories of war economy, and his attempt at socialization in revolutionary Bavaria. Back in Vienna, Neurath became director of the Austrian settlers’ organization, involved in architectural planning, and founded the Social and Economic Museum, where a team of collaborators developed the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (later known as Isotype). Neurath was also a founding member of the Vienna Circle, alongside Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Hahn. Neurath was a dissenting voice from the Circle’s prevalent adulation for Wittgenstein.

Numerous unpublished Greek manuscripts contain the rituals of marriage as performed in diverse regions of the Byzantine world. This chapter both discusses the universal practices of weddings known across Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and discerns unique traditions local to specific regions, like Byzantine Southern Italy or Palestine. The prayers of the marriage rite are analyzed, and attention is given to such gestures as crowning and veiling couples and to traditions previously unknown to Byzantinists, like the practice of breaking a glass at weddings, popularly understood today as a Jewish custom, as well as specific aspects of ritualized bridal costume and the roles of witnesses, or paranymphs.

The five main terms, generally misunterstood, of the theory. The state makes the difference between the Bedouin and the sedentary. Born in violence and ideology, it favours peaceful activities against its own origins.

Appendix

Introduction: Ma Zhucai's Transculturalism and Interpellation

This chapter analyses narratives and recent representations of the Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) trader Ma Zhucai (1891–1963), who developed Kalimpong as the headquarters of his business empire as he charted and moved in and within the trade connections between the 1910s and the 1960s from southwest China. The narratives here bifurcate in two separate Mas: the official Chinese patriot Ma Zhucai (the Memorial-Ma) and the Kalimpong-based trader-smuggler Ma Chu Chai to his English-speaking contemporaries (or the IB-Ma). The former representation emanates from an edited volume whose title is best translated as Diqing Literary and Historical Materials, vol. 10: Memorial of the Patriotic Overseas Chinese Leader Ma Zhucai (hereafter Memorial). The latter representation is from the archives of the British Indian colonial state (mainly of the IB) and the postcolonial Indian state along with ethnography done in 2016–2017 in Shangri- La, Yunnan and Kalimpong. The argument that develops in these Memorial representations is a robust picture of an idealised Ma embodied in the Chinese nation, zhonghua minzu, protecting its borderlands. What emerges unfailingly is the icon of an ideologically interpellated Chinese trader who crossed bounteous borders, from Gyalthang, or Shangri-La, in Kham-Yunnan through Lhasa in Tibet to Kalimpong in India, yet remaining loyal to his motherland. Here we critically contextualise Chinese patriotism and nationalism and its concomitant politico-cultural technologies of memorialising by unpacking Ma's 41 years in Kalimpong and the geographic and economic entanglements with a GMD and CCP China.

Gyalthang (Shangri-La), Ma's native place, is located in the easternmost foothills of the Himalaya mountains at around 3,300 meters above sea level, seen from a Chinese perspective as in the ‘northwest corner of present-day Yunnan province in southern Kham. From 1725 until 2001, this area was referred to as Zhongdian in Chinese.’

Ibn Khaldûn’s life (1332–1406). The plague. How power and society are connected. The theory does not match Western history. It might be more relevant for our time and the times to come.

China as an idea and entity is everywhere today, both materially and symbolically. One way of looking at it is to address the present and future in a world that is profoundly interconnected, although with a resurgence in the idea of borders and barriers. We have a changed mediascape, our planet's sense of brokenness, isolation and fragmentation still infusing the post-Brexit and post-Trump world of nationalism and populist politics with troubling irresolution, but we must also recognise events along the Silk Roads since 2015, where there has been a narrative of strengthening ties, cooperation and a network of relationships with immense global reverberations and continual shifts. This book is not so much clearly concerning these complex geopolitics, notably vis-à-vis India and China, but about looking back and looking forward, in intersecting timeframes, at how these relationships are effected and affected, constrained and cracked. The book could have taken a different form but is confined to relating the representations and shenanigans around a border town during an exacting period.

The burden of the book has been to trace how China figured in the sociopolitical imaginary of the British and thereafter in the postcolonial Indian state, as well as in communist literature in China itself. More specifically, the book considers the Kalimpong border regions between the 1940s and the 1960s (also a consequence of its earlier history of settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as its main case study to explore these issues. The book's primary subject remains—even more so in the twenty-first century—relevant in terms of the border claims in the region and the anxieties that those provoke. The existential angst is very much present, one could say, in relation to the people of Chinese origin but Indianised in varying degrees, still living in the area or in the diaspora of Kalimpong/Indian Chinese that proliferated around the world.