The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

An ongoing debate in the fields of forensic investigation and transitional justice after atrocity has often involved a conceptual binary between, on the one side, a legal or “human rights” approach, and on the other a victim-centric or “humanitarian” approach. This binary understanding of forensic forms of repair has contributed to harmful generalizations that fail to appreciate locally specific practices and politics. Forensic human identification practices in the US–Mexico borderlands have often been categorized as humanitarian, apolitical responses to state violence along the border. In this chapter, through a close examination of forensic identification efforts in Arizona, I show how individual identification can be a political process. In a context where the individual personhood of migrants is erased before, during, and after unauthorized migration across the international border, individual identity takes on political meaning and social significance. I show how individual identifications often involve dialogue within a complex network of state and nonstate actors. To be sure, in the US–Mexico border context and elsewhere, identification can serve to sanitize violence, stifle political claims, and reassert state power. However, it can also involve political practices of care that open new forums for justice and repair.

One of the fundamental tools in diophantine geometry is the notion of a height function. This function measures the geometric and arithmetic complexity of rational points on a projective variety defined over a number field and is a key to a number of the fundamental finiteness results in arithmetic geometry, e.g., Mordell–Weil Theorem, Siegel’s theorem, Mordell–Faltings’ theorem and so on.

Chapter 5 shows that development banks provide policy-makers with the ability to address policy contestation. I document the varying policy contestation from labor unions, civil society organizations, and legislators to each type of internationalization support: acquisitions and greenfield investments, project finance, and mergers among domestic firms. I then show that this variation obeyed differences in the salience of associated domestic effects and in BNDES’ funding strategy for each intervention. The chapter shows that BNDES relied increasingly on providing equity financed through market sources to finance politically sensitive overseas investments. These dynamics reveal the “fragile autonomy” of states under democracy: their capacity to support national firms in global markets depends on their ability to strategically mobilize or obfuscate their interventions and pushes them toward more market-conforming instruments of industrial policy.

This chapter uses creative, narrative nonfiction writing to portray a deathbed conversation or confession of sorts between a dying person and their healthcare providers. While literary in style, it is based on seven years of the author’s immersive field research in post-Apartheid South Africa in long-term and frail care homes. After providing background on long-term care and the history of racial segregation in that country, the chapter depicts a scene where white and Black nursing staff provide palliative care for and converse with a dying white woman whose character is composed from life history interviews with multiple residents of the home. As a contribution to the anthropology of death, the chapter shows how humanistic and literary approaches can be used to represent voices of dying people, as well as the ways histories of racial violence and inequality can be highlighted in research on long-term and palliative care.

In the face of socioeconomic shifts – a high aging population, decline in marital and birth rates, irregularization of labor and precaritization of life – the family model of mortuary care in Japan is coming undone. As sociality trends toward single households, the prospect of dying alone increases in this era of “family-less dead.” The rise of lonely deaths – those who die unaccompanied whose remains, if unclaimed, wind up as “disconnected souls” in public cemeteries – spurs national anxiety, but also a new “ending industry” offering alternatives to family-based deathcare. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter examines one of its most popular businesses: services that clean up the stuff left behind by the deceased. A job once done by kin, workers can now be hired to sort through personal belongings – even those of the lonely dead. In exploring what kind of work this is, the chapter teases out the physical and affective strands workers bring to this task that may well be the final “touch” of those who go otherwise unmourned. The chapter asks, does this constitute a modicum of recognition for the otherwise “unrecognized dead”? And what does this say about the sociality of dying with/out others in Japan, or anywhere, today?

Populist leaders often rise to power by promising a utopian future and radical change. However, their reliance on demagoguery, protectionism, and state control frequently undermines long-term prosperity. This chapter explores how populist governance weakens institutions, disrupts markets, and exacerbates inequality. Drawing examples from Latin America and beyond, it warns that populism reshapes democracy by amplifying grievances and concentrating power. Strong institutions – not demagoguery – are essential for development.

In this chapter attention turns to the Early Modern English lexicons of texts written by radical Protestants (and some of their opponents) from the late sixteenth century up to and including the civil wars: pamphleteers such as ‘Martin Marprelate’ and Richard Overton, whose usages demonstrate remarkable linguistic creativity, and revolutionary thinkers such as the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley. The chapter concludes with an examination of the language of the Putney Debates of 1647, in which the soldiers of the New Model Army, victorious in the civil wars between king and parliament, discussed how the country should be governed. The Debates were a remarkable event in the history of democracy, in which religious expression was linked intimately to the holding and handling of political power.

This chapter focuses on the nature of love, and especially on the relationship between love as self-regarding and other-regarding (eros and agape). It is argued – in dialogue with authors such as Anders Nygren and C.S. Lewis – that Aquinas’s theory of love can account for and harmonize these two aspects of love.

Locality is inherently unstable and fragile, especially in colonial contexts, where the process of (re)creating and maintaining neighbourhoods requires intense interaction and shifting landscapes of power. With Basilicata as case study I explore the production of locality from the perspectives of local and colonial populations. Drawing on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence, I focus on the divergent strategies that inland and coastal sites employed to produce their localities. I also re-examine the strength of locality as a heuristic tool for the study of Greek colonisation, concluding on which of Appadurai’s insights are useful for interpreting ancient Mediterranean interactions.

Maintaining Southeast Asia’s remarkable success in exports of cash crops and aquaculture products has required responses to climate-change stresses through adoptions of different crop varieties, different crops, relocation of cultivation areas, and shifts in pesticide approaches. The costs of these adaptations are often out of reach for smallholders. Smallholders’ difficulties in obtaining certifications and achieving competitive productivity levels have compelled many smallholders to turn to large-scale operators, often disadvantaging the smallholders. Some governments and external actors assist smallholders by strengtheningsupply chains, subsidizing purchases and weather insurance, and expanding technical assistance. Extended treatments are presented on Thai success in rice, cassava, and rubber, and the complexity of smallholder and large plantation relations in Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil cultivation.

This chapter continues the discussion of the centrality of the Holy Land in both the imaginary and the actual politics of the Irish religious minorities. In 1926 the Chief Rabbi of the Irish Free State, Isaac Herzog, moved to Jerusalem and to a much more prestigious Chief Rabbinate. The chapter follows the development of his philosophy, his interaction with various Zionists groups, and the parallel development of an Irish Protestant Zionism (Irish Protestants held positions of power and influence in the administration of the Mandate). If the Mandate was part of the new liberal empire, it was also a military frontier, a new Ulster. The Hebron riots of 1928 generated a strong reaction among both Irish minorities, with the development of a vocal Christian Zionism in Éire and among southern Irish Protestants serving in Palestine. From the early 1930s a renewal of anti-Semitism in Continental Europe added to the significance and urgency of Zionism. The chapter then follows the response of the authorities to the question of Jewish refugees, with three case studies: Palestine itself, the Irish Free State (which became Éire in 1937), and Northern Ireland.

Modelling a regression function in a nonparametric way offers considerable additional flexibility to capture complex variation as a function of one or more covariates. Local polynomial estimators offer an attractive approach to estimation, and extend the ideas of kernel smoothing developed in the previous chapter. Our theory presents finite-sample bounds on the mean squared error over Hölder classes. We also consider an alternative method based on splines.

Why do some countries grow while others remain mired in poverty? This chapter investigates global inequality and the role of institutions in shaping growth. It shows that markets alone cannot guarantee shared prosperity. Effective governance and adaptive institutions are critical for channeling growth into opportunity. Through case studies and empirical data, it contrasts inclusive and extractive models of development.