This chapter discusses ghosts and demons. Ghosts were a capacious and ill-defined category. People feared ghosts but might also pity them. The annual Ghost Festival on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month marks the moment when ghosts enter the yang world. Buddhist and sometimes Daoist priests perform pudu, the rite of universal salvation, and ordinary folk put out food for ghosts to eat. Demons are an altogether more chaotic and violent force. A major dimension of folk religion is concerned to protect communities against demonic attack. Ritual specialists, especially Daoist priests and yin-yang masters, devise complex liturgies to keep demon armies at bay. The chapter looks at the role of ghosts in folk entertainment, particularly ‘ghost opera’. It shows that the attitude of the CCP was contradictory. Mao Zedong, like many members of the educated classes, valued this art form and backed efforts to reform it. Much of the content of ghost opera, however, could not be reconciled with materialism and revolutionary values, and after an aborted effort at reform, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, succeeded in banning it (although in practice the ban was never completely effective).

This chapter centers on Bieral’s role in the 1854 Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, where he organized armed guards to prevent Burns’s rescue. Bieral’s participation reveals his alignment with pro-slavery Democrats and his complex racial identity. The chapter interrogates his motivations – political loyalty, racial self-interest, and personal pride – while contrasting his actions with abolitionist efforts. Bieral’s subsequent assault on attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., exemplifies the violent enforcement of political power. The narrative situates Bieral within the broader context of antebellum racial politics, highlighting the paradox of a possibly mixed-race man defending slavery to assert his whiteness and authority.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.

Chapter 2 considers how the diagnosis of frenzy – in its standard definition, an inflammation of the brain or meninges – both shaped and was shaped by anatomical knowledge. Reading the work of the anatomist Thomas Willis (1621–1675) alongside his various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interlocutors, it situates his anatomical work within a longer tradition of brain–mind cartography. The chapter argues that Willis’s determination to map the functions of the brain onto its structures was driven, in part, by his clinical experiences of frenzy. His explicit hope was that his anatomy would be the foundation stone on which a new, clinically useful ‘Pathologie of the Brain and nervous stock, might be built’. But not all of his hopes for the project were medical in nature, or even this-worldly. Willis also sought to shore up two vital truths, both of which frenzy seemed to undermine: first, that there was a categorical difference between the human soul and that of all other living beings, and second, that the human soul alone would survive the death of the body.

Bieral’s relocation to New York and integration into Tammany Hall’s Empire Club mark his rise as a political enforcer. The chapter details his involvement in pedestrianism, prizefighting, and Democratic factionalism, including the violent 1859 Syracuse convention. Bieral’s alignment with pro-slavery “Hards” and his role in suppressing abolitionist dissent reflect the entwinement of sport, politics, and violence. His involvement in the Heenan–Sayers fight and other high-profile events solidified his status as a cultural figure. The narrative emphasizes the performative nature of masculinity and the strategic deployment of physicality in political contests.

Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which frenzy was weaponized during the many religio-political upheavals of the period. As a figure of speech, it offered rich material for English polemicists, who knew that questioning their opponents’ sanity was more effective than simply refuting their claims. As a literal diagnosis, frenzy also had a practical use: it could silence politically inconvenient people without making a show. This chapter shows how its conferral was used to justify the incarceration of prophets, mystics, and kings. Yet the diagnosis had one serious drawback: it gave its recipients the gift of innocence. Frantic persons were incapable of crime, and could neither be convicted nor punished for their actions. If a recipient later became not just inconvenient but too dangerous to live, any previous diagnosis – no matter how spurious – had to be redacted from the record. This was a problem for the religious polemicists too: the aim was to pathologize ‘heretics’ ‘papists’, ‘puritans’, and ‘sectarians’, not to excuse them from all wrongdoing. Eventually, this chapter argues, that flaw drove Anglican polemicists to abandon frenzy for a new diagnosis: ‘melancholy enthusiasm’.

This chapter presents an examination of central commitments found in some Buddhist traditions. The aim is to identify a Buddhist worldview that differs from the others considered in this study and thus constitutes a genuine alternative to them.

The world is becoming increasingly bilingual/multilingual, with a large number of children starting to learn languages other than their mother tongue in early childhood. This chapter provides an overview of our current understanding of child second language learners – successive bilinguals, whose exposure to an additional language begins around age 3. While most work on child L2 acquisition in the 1990s, until the mid 2000s was guided by various theoretical accounts and largely focused on morphosyntactic properties and developmental comparisons in different child L2 populations with adult L2 learners and those with developmental language disorders, much work reviewed in this chapter builds on recent theorizing and various phenomena that have significant advances in the field concerning child-internal and child-external factors. To this end, research over the last ten years forms the basis of this chapter, with a focus on how factors such as crosslinguistic influence, age effects, the amount and quality of input and the length of exposure determine young children’s acquisition processes. The examination of all these variables is argued to provide a more integrated and comprehensive approach to child L2 acquisition.

Complex fluids can be found all around us, from molten plastics to mayonnaise, and understanding their highly nonlinear dynamics is the subject of much research.

This text introduces a common theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the flow behavior of complex fluids. This framework allows for results including a qualitative understanding of the relationship between a fluid’s behavior at the microscale of particles or macromolecules, and its macroscopic, viscoelastic properties. The author uses a microstructural approach to derive constitutive theories that remain simple enough to allow computational predictions of complicated macroscale flows.

Readers develop their intuition to learn how to approach the description of materials not covered in the book, as well as limits such as higher concentrations that require computational methods for microstructural analysis.

This monograph’s unique breadth and depth make it a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in fluid mechanics.

This chapter proposes global experimentalist governance as an ideal framework for addressing ocean acidification (OA). Global experimentalist governance consists of five elements: identifying a shared problem, setting open-ended goals, delegating solutions to lower governance levels, establishing feedback and peer-review mechanisms, and adjusting goals based on learning. This approach aligns well with OA’s characteristics, which are both scientific and part of a regime complex. The framework accommodates OA’s complexity through recursive learning cycles, multilevel participation, and provisional goal setting that can adapt as scientific understanding advances. A central unit coordinates, but does not control, the process, using ‘penalty defaults’ to encourage reluctant actors to cooperate. Favourable background conditions for experimentalist governance exist for OA, such as strategic uncertainty due to problem complexity and polyarchic power distribution with no single dominant actor. The chapter concludes that this governance approach could leverage OA’s existing regime complex rather than replace it, making it a promising framework for tackling this emerging environmental challenge.

Chapters 2 and 3 form the ethnographic heart of the book, exploring the economic niches that form an informal welfare system largely reserved for disabled people. Chapter 2 considers brokering at the Kinshasa-Brazzaville border, an activity viewed by some as ‘given’ by the state as a form of compensation for the lack of social welfare. Examining in detail the dynamics of community and the activities performed at the border, the chapter shows how the social values underpinning personal relationships were tested in the moral dilemmas over a common rhetoric of individualism: ‘fending-for-yourself’ rather than caring for mutually dependent relationships. A moral emphasis on the value and nature of professional relationships was shaped by the knowledge that life and work at the border might only ever be a temporary arrangement, as the most dramatic incarnations of ’crisis’ (mpiaka) drew attention to the temporal frame in which these value debates took place.

This book offers an overview of Chinese folk religion, mainly in the period from 1949 to 1976, when Mao Zedong presided over a period of unprecedented political turbulence and steady modernization of economic, social, and cultural life. It explores the involvements and investments of ordinary people in sustaining folk religion through these hard times and seeks to understand why it survived in spite of all the efforts made by the Mao regime to suppress it. The starting assumption – one seldom articulated in histories of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – is that when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, it did so in an overwhelmingly religious society. The CCP declared freedom of religion but restricted it to five religions that it believed conformed, if only potentially, to the model of a modern religion. These were Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism, and each of these was placed under fairly strict state regulation under a national association. The religion of the vast majority of the populace, however, was deemed by the CCP not to correspond to a religion at all, but was dismissed as ‘feudal superstition’ (封建迷信 fengjian mixin), a loose congeries of unscientific beliefs and disabling rituals that prevented the masses from taking control of their lives, promoting dependence on gods and cosmic forces.

This chapter explores the concept of a worldview and provides a helpful definition. Additionally, the differences between religious and secular worldviews are examined and explained.