The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

Good hypotheses identify observable implications of the theory – things we would observe if the theory were correct – and make predictions about relationships between measurable indicators of the theory’s concepts. Measurement thus plays a critical role in the transition from claims to tests. Six types of hypotheses are common in political science. Probabilistic hypotheses include directional, relative, no-effect, and conditional types; these hypotheses make claims that they expect to be true, on average, across many cases. Deterministic hypotheses, on the other hand, make claims that should always hold; these include claims of necessity and/or sufficiency. Preregistration attempts to reduce the incentives to adjust hypotheses to match findings.

Chapter 5 examines national identity and immigration in the United States, with specific attention to undocumented immigration. Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants live across the United States. These undocumented immigrants present major challenges for the US government authorities. First is the challenge to the nation’s ability to successfully manage immigration. The second challenge is perhaps of greater psychological importance: the ability to manage American identity. Undocumented immigrants present a major challenge to a nation’s ability to successfully manage immigration to, and the identity of, the country. American identity was founded not from people coming from a common place and bloodlines but for a common purpose. Yet recent studies and public opinion polls have shown these shared ideals (e.g., individualism, hard work, liberty, equality of opportunity, and rule of law) are not so common across the United States. There is polarization and division in beliefs regarding America’s history, present, and future. This chapter concludes with discussion of a recent research study exploring the extent that differences in beliefs regarding American identity relate to differences in beliefs regarding undocumented immigrants.

This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

The book’s conclusion draws together the hymns and themes addressed in previous chapters to reflect synthetically on the visions of death and the afterlife that emerge from them, and to examine their affective, social, and theological resonances in conversation with other, roughly contemporaneous traditions, including those attested by Orphic Hymns and by funerary poetry preserved in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The chapter both presents a concise review of the material covered in earlier sections, and encourages next steps in the study of ritual sources across different communities.

Abstract: This chapter explores the dynamics of international law within a horizontal legal order, characterised by the absence of a central enforcement mechanism and the layered system of compliance that emerges. It conceptualises international law as a normative framework shaped by interactions rather than hierarchy, examining how states are induced to comply with legal norms despite the lack of centralised coercive sanctions. The chapter develops a five-layer model of compliance control, ranging from voluntary internal compliance to institutionally authorised sanctions, highlighting the interplay between internal state mechanisms, bilateral enforcement, collective responses, and institutional determinations. It examines how a horizontal normative order can operate under realist and rationalist assumptions about state behaviour, while showing that insights from behavioural theory, two-level analysis of state conduct, and constructivism enhance the understanding of state compliance with norms. International law operates by facilitating interaction, shaping expectations, and leveraging decentralised enforcement mechanisms to influence state behaviour.

The CPC presides over a large state-owned economy, which is a key pillar of China’s state capitalist model and a critical source of Party power. The party has adapted its governing strategies of the state-owned sector to maintain its economic dominance without stifling growth and innovation – largely by learning from outside. We highlight the importance of the international system as a source of both policy inputs and pressures to change. We find that in the early phases of China’s marketization process during the 1980s, Chinese policymakers looked to Japan and the World Bank as they restructured state-owned enterprises. In the 1990s, American, European, and Japanese policymakers’ pressure on China to downsize its state sector as a condition of WTO accession was a key consideration in Chinese policymakers’ efforts to build “national champions” capable of competing with foreign multinationals in domestic and international markets. We analyze Chinese leaders’ responses to successive challenges in the state-owned economy, and the resilience of state capitalism which buttresses party rule.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

During the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, the Italian peninsula saw a boom in the production of poetry written in Latin, under the impetus of the humanists’ reframing of the relationship between the contemporary and ancient worlds as new texts, authors, artworks and other evidence about the Roman and Greek worlds came to be known in Western Europe. The chapter evaluates how cultivation of ancient models by Neo-Latin (and Neo-Greek) authors reconfigured relationships to the past, while also taking account of how classical studies and the use of Latin had persisted throughout the Middle Ages. It also discusses how Italian poets writing in Latin used the ancient language to express themselves on key cultural themes and debates of their own day. The chapter stresses the abundance and variety of poetic production in Latin produced in every region of Italy, and in genres covering lyric, pastoral, epic, satire, epigrams and didactic verse.

While previous chapters have focused on the deaths of Christians under roughly ordinary circumstances, this chapter turns to deaths precipitated by pandemics and natural disaster. The necrosima accordingly features a number of poems that address instances of mass death due to pandemic and pestilence. In both form and context of preservation, these hymns were manifestly part of their communities’ ritual repertoire. At the same time, however, they witness to periods in which ordinary ritual pathways had broken down. In the midst of sickness and bereavement, the hymns suggest, churches stood empty, clergy mourned the loss of their brothers, even burials had ceased in light of death’s relentless onslaught. This chapter examines the madrāshê in question as spaces for reconfiguring communities’ ritual practices. The necrosima’s pandemic hymns and other, roughly contemporaneous liturgical sources thus point to communities’ embrace of lament, petition, and penance as models for engaging the divine.