In a famous family memoir, Annabel Davis-Goff has represented the mental space inhabited by the minorities as a walled garden, secluded and sheltered from the outside world. The chapter considers several instances of how such ‘walled gardens’ actually worked, including the Big House and Protestant schools. One area in which schools were careful to negotiate their relationship with majority culture was the teaching of the Irish language. By contrast, in the surviving Jewish sources it is difficult to find any response other than acceptance of Gaelic in schools. They were in no position to resist or even to complain publicly about the language requirement. Perhaps the most important ‘walled garden’ of minority sociability, linking Jews and Protestants, was Freemasonry. Catholic media denounced the Craft for their anti-national values, secret unionism and theological heterodoxy. Yet, driven by their cosmopolitan ideals and by opportunism, Freemasons adapted to the new order. They saw the Free State not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity to assert their alternative to nationalist legitimacy, one based on the post-imperial value of internationalism.

Chapter 1: Notes from the Field. Homer and Hesiod describe how Hephaistos worked in his fabled smithy. Later texts from Athens to Rome to Byzantion cover myth, history, and technology and introduce Pliny, Pausanias, Christodoros, and many other writers. We shall consider how they responded to bronze statues from what was to them ancient Greece, and their interest in lifelikeness, alongside their fascination with production – from wax to alloy to surface detail – and the effects of corrosion. Authors faced the conundrum of statues that looked alive because they were made of bronze or that were prevented from living for the same reason. Some statues were protectors, others were threatening enough to be punished, and a few were even destroyed so as to remove their evil influence.

This final discussion chapter has two goals. The first is to examine predictions that arise from the learning and memory model of hunger. The second is to examine some more general problems, identified in the book, that concern hunger, but fall on the margins/outside of the model. One set of predictions from the model concern how hunger develops. A key question is whether infant feeding experiences are critical or whether it is events that occur around weaning that are more important for the development of adult hunger. Other model-related predictions concern time-based hungers, the importance of operant learning, linkages to biology (neuropsychology, developing a better method of measuring the different facets of hunger – a hunger battery), and the functional importance of hunger in initiating the search for food. Several more general problems about hunger were identified in the book. One was the issue of psychological stress and its complex relationship with eating, another concerned starvation, with several questions emerging (hunger in starvation, links to hibernation, and impacts on development). The book ends with a brief summary of the learning and memory model of hunger.

The first half of this chapter explores the linguistic means by which Twa tell their story. By mobilising linguistic resources, they are challenging their continued exclusion under the charge of ‘mind-set’ problems and are attempting to renegotiate the social constructs that govern the position of Batwa in Rwandan society. As such, the language practice of contradiction is read as an assertion by Twa of their full membership in society and a demand for equal care. The second half of the chapter locates the Rwandan state as the key mediator of global life for Rwanda’s Twa, translating global ordering narratives into the everyday. The state makes use of the development narrative, refracting it through the prism of national unity, to offer Twa an attractive and accessible vision of a non-fragmented modern Rwandan subject.

This chapter explores the rationale behind, and the importance of understanding, the unique profiles of each child being cared for, across early childhood settings. The purpose of this is to frame ways in which all children can be supported to achieve the best developmental, educational and wellbeing outcomes possible, now and in the future. Drawing on the principles and frameworks discussed in Chapter 1, this chapter will support further understanding of the importance of individualised care and education for every child.

This chapter examines the Aliseda Hoard discovered in southwest Spain in 1920, where it has long and widely been valued as an icon of Orientalizing goldsmithing. The original context is undocumented, and the jewelry has variously been associated with an aristocratic female burial, a hoard or a sanctuary. Renewed research allows us to reinterpret the hoard as the ‘keimelion’ of the house or aristocratic lineage of Aliseda, where it was buried in a ritual area. This was a place for celebrating spring between the seventh/sixth and fifth centuries BCE and represents the sense of locality developed on the northern periphery of Tartessos.

The concluding chapter situates the book’s findings within Tunisia’s political trajectory from 2016 to the present. Building on the deliberative practices observed between 2013 and 2016, it argues that the decline in civic and political rights was not due to the transgression of liberal norms, but rather to their top-down imposition as universal and unconditional. This imposition, coupled with the neglect of locally grounded democratic expressions, contributed to growing public disillusionment with democracy and its transformative potential. However, despite ongoing constitutional crises, government reshufflings, and authoritarian presidential rhetoric, many Tunisian citizens continue to debate what it means to live democratically. This chapter critiques dominant approaches to studying democracy, both in Tunisia and globally, and highlights the need to account for democratic practices that exceed institutional frameworks. It calls for a deeply social understanding of democracy, one that recognizes the dynamic interplay between political institutions and everyday social life.

This chapter engages with the uneasy materiality of burned human remains as distinct from the material presence of fleshed, unburned, and articulated bodies. It works against perceptions of incinerated remains that establish them as “second-rate” corporeality of the dead and argues, instead, that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains. This is especially the case when the fired-transformed remains do not result from cremation but, instead, are the outcome of a violent and purposeful destruction of the corpse. While burning constitutes a radical intervention into the material register of human remains, it rarely erases them entirely. Cutting across a spectrum of rematerializations and transformations of ashes from the Holocaust that encompass environmental encounters, memorialization, archeological interventions, display, and material dispersal, the chapter considers incinerated human remains as lively and resistant traces. It argues that ashes comprise a challenging and transformative presence, one that is acted upon and, through a myriad of practices, constituted and/or undone as human remains. At the same time, the chapter casts ashes from the Holocaust as agentive and politically expressive, and, thus, invested with the ability to challenge and defy the human-made politics of dead bodies.

Chapter 3 explores the physical and social boundaries of non-Muslim neighborhoods, which separated them from Muslim communities. It discusses both visible and invisible markers, such as dress codes and regulations activated when residents left these areas. Additional symbols of distinction included language and ritual practices. Non-Muslim schools are examined as institutions that bridged these boundaries, serving as heterotopias that encouraged interaction while enforcing discipline. The chapter also reexamines the idea of the “scapegoat” to analyze episodes of violence, especially during Moharram and Safar, highlighting how minority areas became particularly vulnerable to attack during crises like famine or political unrest.