With its fresh and unprecedented opportunities for sexual involvements and new self-definitions, World War II was a pivotal event in the history of queer Americans. This is especially true of males who experienced the war as young adults, either as civilians or servicemen. Relying on the recollections of fourteen men, this chapter examines the war’s varying impact. Some of these recollections are lengthy portions of full-scale autobiographies, while others are considerably briefer. Some of the men are well known, such as Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Gore Vidal, while others are obscure, such as journalist Ricardo Brown, actor Gordon Heath, and diarist Donald Vining. A few autobiographies, such as Vidal’s Palimpsest and composer Ned Rorem’s Knowing When to Stop, are classics. In contrast, Ricardo Brown’s The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s is ostensibly only an ethnography of a gay bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, through the eyes of one patron, yet it is an essential examination of wartime queer life itself. Analyzed and compared side by side, these fourteen memoirs provide a heretofore unappreciated glimpse of both queer life and the war.

This chapter is developed in the context of the Russian army, which was deeply permeated with corruption and graft. It was essentially an eighteenth-century army in the 1850s, fighting industrialized countries. The soldiers were basically all serfs; in the officer corps there were dramatic contrasts between ignorance and incompetence at one end and intelligence, energy, and cosmopolitan professionalism at the other. This was also true of the medical department and its nurses, the ‘feldshers.’ The internationally renowned surgeon Nikolai Ivanovitch Pirogov, who became director of the nursing service, is introduced, as is the widowed sister-in-law of the Tsar, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, his patron at the imperial court. She had the daring idea of sending female nurses to work on the battlefield. Together these two individuals established the Sisters of the Exaltation of the Cross, a lay sisterhood of clinically trained nurses devoted entirely to military nursing. Local women had come forward to help with the nursing, but once the trained Sisters arrived they were so superior that the local women were relegated to minor roles. On arrival in the Crimea, Pirogov immediately began organizing and vastly improving the hospitals.

This chapter centres on circumcised women’s experiences of bioprecarity in the context of seeking clitoral reconstructive surgery in Sweden. Female genital cutting (FGC), significant in marking the mature, desirable and marriageable woman in some cultures (Johansen, 2017), is today a significant phenomenon in Europe due to recent migration patterns (van Baelen et al., 2016). Transcultural migration and societal changes create new perceptions of the body, self and identity. At the same time, new notions of bodily rights, what is perceived as legitimate claims and needs and advances in biotechnology have enabled circumcised women in some European countries to have their clitoris reconstructed (Foldés et al., 2012). Based on original empirical data in the form of interviews with FGC-affected women, this chapter seeks to investigate how migrant women who have undergone FGC perceive their bodies and selves, how they construct and negotiate their identity within new social structures and gender norms and how they understand clitoral reconstructive surgery after FGC, in the Swedish context.

Chapter 3 considers the Dindshenchas Érenn (‘Placelore of Ireland’), a collection of around 200 poems and 200 prose pieces about named places comprising medieval Ireland’s most explicitly topographical narratives. The Dindshenchas Érenn was formally brought together as a cohesive corpus and first attested in the Book of Leinster manuscript. This chapter considers the narrative topographies of the Dindshenchas Érenn, looks at the role of place-making poets as medieval Ireland’s geographers and tracks ideas about the use of verse as the appropriate literary form in which to write and formalize Ireland’s landscape. The poets suggest that the verbalized territories of the dindshenchas poems, simultaneously real and imagined, were to be contemplatively accessed, virtually inhabited and moved through in an appropriative act. This, furthermore, was an act of collective national imagining. The island-wide bardic curriculum demanded that by the eighth year of training poets were able to recite the entire topographic corpus on demand, and multiple dindshenchas texts advertise the poets’ ability to conjure lost sites and spaces with their words and visionary abilities. The Dindshenchas Érenn thus becomes a national landscape, a virtual Ireland created, performed and preserved by the poets and scribes of Ireland.

The conclusion examines more contemporary versions of anthropology’s dominant current of antiformalism. Tracing this pattern across diverse approaches – embodiment, assemblage thinking, infrastructure – it reveals how a certain sort of Wittgensteinian antiformalism has become orthodox. While scholarship focussed on form exists, it remains largely subordinate to an implicit picture that finds ethnographic facts ‘unanalysable, specific, indefinable’. By contextualzing this stance, the conclusion suggests holding commitments – formalist or antiformalist – more lightly in order to recover explanatory power without sacrificing reflexivity.

During the colonial period, investment in India’s physical infrastructure far outpaced that in social sectors. In the first two decades of independence, political energy was focused on political consolidation and national self-sufficiency. Starting in the 1970s, attention shifted to basic needs. We trace the history of public-good provision over the four decades from 1971 to the latest census in 2011. We document the considerable expansion in public goods over this period and the variation in access across states. We illustrate how patterns of provision were the outcome of ‘top-down’ policy priorities interacting with ‘bottom-up’ processes of collective action. For scarce facilities, such as secondary schools, regions within states with political voice were most successful in obtaining access. We show that areas where secondary schooling expanded rapidly were also those where the most marginalized social groups among the Indian castes and tribes experienced social mobility.

This chapter offers a general introduction to this book: It defines the notion of heritage language, addresses the state of the field in the research of German as a heritage language and discusses the notion of “German” in this context. It also explains the motivation for writing this book.

CAI formation began 4.567 Ga ago and ferromagnesian chondrules formed 2-2.7 Ma later. The order of OC parent-body accretion may have been (from earliest to latest) IIE, H, L, LL. Ordinary chondrites formed in the Inner Solar System along with other noncarbonaceous materials. 26Al decay was the primary asteroidal heat source. Ordinary chondrites have been modeled as being a significant component of Earth. Each OC asteroid was subject to major collisions. These are marked by peaks in cosmic-ray exposure (CRE) age distributions: for example, 45% of H chondrites have a CRE age of ~7.5 Ma. The U/Th-He ages of L chondrites are lower than those of H or LL chondrites due to the collisional breakup of the L parent body ~470 Ma ago. The lower maturity of OC asteroidal regoliths compared to lunar regolith is due to OC asteroids’ experiencing a lower micrometeorite flux, lower average projectile velocities, more-significant spallation processes, and having an ultramafic composition. Some OC are associated with abundant non-OC material; these include OC clasts in Cumberland Falls (aubrite), Almahata Sitta (anomalous ureilite), Bencubbin (CBa chondrite), Galim (EH/LL breccia), and Kaidun (carbonaceous-chondrite breccia).

Chantal Akerman, on a suggestion by a Hollywood producer, commenced to do a 'little comedy', instead of her epic historical fresco. It is indeed the comic mode that dominates her feature-length output in the 1980s, from Toute une nuit, an effervescent study of urban love, to the musical comedy Golden Eighties. The fictional work of the 1980s, whilst signalling an important change of mood, also marks a crucial shift in Akerman's cinematic language. Jeanne Dielman and Les Années 80 are parodies and draw on the conventions of the romantic musical. The elegant Aurore Clément in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna and the deliberately clumsy female character in L'Homme à la valise appear as two versions of the director, one idealised, the other comically distorted Akerman. She not only draws attention to the constructed nature of gender identities, but also figuring a self in crisis on the verge of mental implosion.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book. It emphasizes the specificity and particularity of systems. It also repeats the insight that religion and systems theory belong in the humanities because the response to systemic dissonance requires the conscious attention of participants in the system. However, the responses are not predetermined by the nature of the dissonance and can take a variety of forms. Finally, the basis for comparing religion, is not the similarities among phenomena but the role of the systemic mitigation within specific systems.