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Latin America has experienced an unprecedented expansion of LGBTQ+ rights in recent decades. Although obstacles remain for LGBTQ+ citizens, countries such as Uruguay and Argentina have become world leaders in enacting LGBTQ+ rights, and public opinion has shifted dramatically towards more positive sentiments. What underlies these shifting attitudes? Drawing on both survey data and interviews, we describe multiple processes by which individuals move from prejudice and rejection to tolerance and acceptance. We show that attitude change is often slow and gradual, and that explaining these trends requires attention to both macro-level forces and individual experiences. In Latin America, a boom in international tourism created economic incentives for tolerance; broad shifts in demographics and the media landscape created openings for people to reconsider what a family looks like; and societies grappling with human rights abuses were more receptive to appeals for protecting LGBTQ+ rights as human rights.
Words are among the basic building blocks of language, allowing us to share a tremendous range of ideas. This book summarizes research on how words are represented, organized, and processed in our brain, offering a fascinating window into the neural basis of language. It begins with a foundational overview of linguistics and neuroscience, including neurons, networks and functional areas. It then delves into key topics and theories. It explores such questions as How do the meanings of words for objects and events relate to the brain regions involved in perception and action? Are different semantic categories of words, like those for animals and tools, segregated in the brain? What are the neural substrates of abstract words? The book describes how different theories answer these questions, and how numerous experiments help adjudicate between them. It also includes learning objectives, chapter summaries, and over 60 figures.
Pablo Neruda in Context includes forty-two essays by some of the main experts on Pablo Neruda's oeuvre that focus on how his places of residence and travel (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France, Asia), the landmark event of the Cold War, as well as literary and political influences affected his poetic evolution. It also considers the other genres of his writing, including memoirs, letters, translation, and drama, as well as the musical and film adaptions of his work throughout the world. Other essays study his anti-colonial and ecocritical messages, his complicated relationships with women and other writers, as well as his take on race and the significance of his plausible assassination by Augusto Pinochet's military junta. The last section explores Neruda's poetry as world literature as well as his impressive reception in India, Japan, China, the Arab world, the Anglophone world, Russia and Eastern Europe, and his overall lasting legacy.
The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This important book illuminates the deeply intertwined histories of the Nicaragua Canal and the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Coast, uncovering a compelling truth, long overshadowed by the triumphalist narrative of the Panama Canal. Focusing on British and US efforts to control the canal route through Nicaragua, Rajeshwari Dutt shows how imperial ambition, racial ideology, and local power struggles shaped one of Latin America's most contested infrastructure projects. She traces the role of racial language in imperial, colonial, and national agendas; the shifting dynamics of Anglo-American imperialism on the Mosquito Coast; and the violence embedded in the very pursuit of interoceanic connection. Methodologically, the book advances a practice of reading failure as a lens through which to understand the fragility of imperial projects and the contradictions that undermine their global ambitions. At its heart, The Link That Divides reveals a central paradox: that dreams of connection were built on – and undone by – the reality of division and exclusion.
Ronald Coase's Nobel work outlined gains by reducing transaction costs and promoting property rights and markets to confront externalities. Countering market failure assertions and calls for centralized government intervention, Coase retorted that decentralized market negotiations could be welfare-improving by promoting collaborative, efficient problem solving, and releasing resources to the general economy. Despite this, his approach is not central to any US environmental law implemented after 1970. Federal government mandates dominate. Where's Coase? explains why. The private objectives of political agents lead to policies that are likely to be too costly and inequitable, despite provision of public goods. Citizens face high collective action costs and lack information to distinguish between public goods and private agent benefits. Examining three major environmental laws: the Clean Air Act, the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Act, and the Endangered Species Act, the book explores policy development and assesses the resulting costs relative to Coase's framework.
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, Laura Eramian and Peter Mallory offer a comprehensive conceptualization of 'critical friendship' across its diverse meanings. Drawing on contemporary insights and cross-cultural examples from interdisciplinary contributors, the chapters examine the ambivalence of friendship, its entanglements with other relations or institutions, the quest for selfhood and recognition, and how friendship finds meaning across private and public life. Through an empirically rich evaluation of the multiple ways that friendship is practiced, valued, or interpreted, this volume advances critical debates on friendship across social psychology, anthropology, sociology and beyond.
This Element focuses on the villancicos (or choral poems) of the Novohispanic philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Though the villancicos have traditionally been considered minor works that Sor Juana wrote by commission for various religious feasts, this Element argues that Sor Juana's villancicos are in fact important philosophical writings. Specifically, this Element shows that through her villancicos Sor Juana presents a philosophical pedagogy, develops a form of virtue pluralism based on a series of moral paradigms, articulates a form of mannerist feminism, and provides a partial defense of Black and Indigenous people.
Why does the state matter to its people? How do people know and experience the state? And how did the state come to be both desired and dreaded by its subjects? This study offers a historically grounded social theoretical account of state consolidation in Iraq, from the foundation of the country as a League of Nations British Mandate in 1921 through to the post-2003 era. Through analysis of key historical episodes of state consolidation (and fragmentation) during the past century, Nida Alahmad argues that consolidation rests on two sequential and interdependent factors. First, domination: the state's capacity to dominate land and population. Second, legitimation: whereby the state is accepted and expected by the population to be the final arbitrator of collective life based on common principles. Moving between intellectual traditions and disciplines, Alahmad demonstrates that a theorization of state consolidation is a theorization of the modern state.
Labor in Hard Times examines how organized labor in Turkey and the United Kingdom turned to international human rights law in response to domestic repression and neoliberal restructuring. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a unique database of labor rights cases, the book traces how workers used litigation at the European Court of Human Rights not just to win legal victories, but to build political pressure, assert legitimacy, and reclaim space for collective action. Focusing on public sector unionists in Turkey and blacklisted construction workers in the UK, it offers a rare view of how grassroots activists and lawyers mobilized international law as a tactical resource: Workers engaged rights discourse strategically to pursue concrete goals, while remaining rooted in class-based solidarity. With vivid case studies, this book speaks to readers interested in international courts, human rights, and the evolving strategies of labor movements in an era of democratic backsliding and global inequality.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) made important contributions to mathematics, the theory of probability, and several scientific fields, was one of the inventors of the first mathematical calculator, and was also a deeply religious thinker who grappled with issues concerning the existence of God, the possibility of human salvation, and the sinfulness of human life. His famous Wager is often discussed, but there is much else of interest and relevance in his thought which remains undiscovered. This book provides an accessible yet detailed account of Pascal's philosophy and how it applies to important issues facing all of us today, as well as novel interpretations of Pascal's ideas. It will stimulate and challenge anyone who is interested in the role of the heart in rationality, human nature, our relation to reality and our individual and collective purpose, and the underexplored thoughts of one of history's greatest geniuses.
What relevance does Mary Wollstonecraft's thought have today? In this insightful book, Sandrine Bergès engages Wollstonecraft with contemporary social and political issues, demonstrating how this pioneering eighteenth-century feminist philosopher addressed concerns that resonate strongly with those faced by twenty-first-century feminists. Wollstonecraft's views on oppression, domination, gender, slavery, social equality, political economics, health, and education underscore her commitment to defending the rights of all who are oppressed. Her ideas shed light on challenges we face in social and political philosophy, including intersectionality, health inequalities, universal basic income, and masculinity. Clear and accessible, this book is an invaluable resource for students and anyone interested in discovering who Mary Wollstonecraft was and how her ideas can help us navigate the struggles of today's feminist movement.
In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by the importation of food. Charting the economics and politics of the Gulf through an examination of its food system, Christian Henderson demonstrates how these states constitute a distinct social metabolism. Starting with the pre-oil phase, this book examines the politics of agrarian change in the Gulf. In the contemporary period, Henderson considers the way that the Gulf states represent 'inverted farms', where the import of prodigious quantities of agricultural commodities has enabled these economies to overcome their lack of arable land. As a result of this trade, states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia have developed their own agribusiness sectors. Henderson further shows how food and consumption in the Gulf states constitute political questions of diet, sustainability, and boycott.
Maimonides (Moshe/Moses ben Maimon, 1138–1204) was not only the dominant rabbinic and Jewish intellectual figure of the later medieval period, but also one of history's greatest philosophers. As the author of the Mishneh Torah (ca. 1180), a compendium and systematization of the Jewish legal code, he remains an unsurpassed (if not uncontroversial) authority on halakha (Jewish law). His philosophical masterpiece, however, is the Guide of the Perplexed (1185-1190), in which he systematically presents his views on theology, metaphysics, cosmology, natural science, epistemology, Scriptural hermeneutics, law and ethics. This accessible and highly readable book introduces the reader to Maimonides' life and thought, and uses a number of enduring and popular philosophical topics – including the problem of evil, freedom of the will, and the relationship between virtue and happiness - to show that he continues to be interesting and relevant to readers today.
Previous studies of Greek oracles have largely studied their social and political connections. In contrast, this pioneering volume explores the experience of visiting the oracle of Zeus at Dodona in NW Greece, focusing on the role of the senses and embodied cognition. Building on the unique corpus of oracular question tablets found at the site, it investigates how this experience made new ways of knowing and new forms of knowledge available. Combining traditional treatments of evidence with more recent theoretical approaches, including from psychology, narratology and environmental humanities, the chapters explore the role of nature, sound, touch, and stories in the experience of consultation. By evoking the details of this experience, they help the reader understand more deeply what it was like for ancient men and women to visit the oracle and ask the god for help. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
What if anthropology's fundamental assumptions about cultural and social context were shaped by a philosopher many anthropologists have never engaged with? This book explores how, from the early twentieth century to the present day, anthropological ideas about context have been shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein's evolving philosophy, often without anthropologists fully realizing it. It shows how Wittgenstein's philosophical journey mirrors anthropology's own theoretical transformations. Through careful analysis of key figures from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to Geertz and contemporary theorists, Paolo Heywood reveals unexpected connections between philosophical developments and anthropological practice. The result is a surprising genealogy of how we came to think about culture, society, and everyday life the way we do. This intellectual history illuminates the hidden philosophical assumptions that continue to shape anthropological work today. It reveals how disciplines are shaped by ideas they've forgotten they borrowed, and the surprising ways such ideas evolve in new contexts.
Much of Pascal’s philosophy, though applicable to a variety of problems and issues we face today, is couched in religious terms that, even for religious believers today, may not resonate. This chapter explores some possibilities of developing some key Pascalian ideas – the limits of reason and experience, the ambiguity of the world, the heart, our sometimes-misplaced desires, and the wager – in secular terms. One possibility that emerges as particularly fruitful is to replace Pascal’s “God” with William James’s “religious belief” that the good will ultimately triumph, and that it is important and beneficial for us to believe it.
Wollstonecraft, like most philosophers of the enlightenment period, had a deep trust in the power of reason to change the course of human history, and thought that religion, provided it was not dogmatic and allowed for dissent, was a crucial element of what it meant to be a good human being. Yet she was also an applied philosopher who engaged with revolutionaries proposing social and political reforms. In this chapter, I look at how her work was shaped by the political acts that took place around her, and how it in turns attempted to help shape the new social and political frameworks that were developing at the time – the French Revolution, which she commented on in her Moral and Historical View of the French Revolution.