Chapter 4 shows how the emergence of novel policy beliefs led to the adoption of globalized state-led development. It documents the policy beliefs of policy-makers from the Brazilian Workers’ Party regarding the benefits of state support for nationally controlled MNCs for the country’s long-term development. It traces the emergence of these novel policy ideas to the epistemic and policy learning of policy-makers and shows how these ideas guided industrial policy and BNDES reform. To further validate the argument, the chapter addresses competing explanations for policy adoption centered on political coalitions, macroeconomic conditions, and business pressures.

In Singaporean Chinese funerals, small patches of fabric, pinned to the bereaved’s sleeves, have replaced elaborate mourning gowns. Anthropologists, examining the transformation of ritual in similar contexts – supposedly secularizing, rationalizing, post-industrial, late-capitalist worlds – have read such changes as evidence of the simplification of ritual and of ritual’s declining centrality in the marking of death. In this chapter, however, I argue that the shift from gowns to patches is more complex, inextricably linked to the policies of the Singaporean state regarding identity. Gowns were linked to the complexities of Chinese folk religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship that linked Singaporeans to their histories in Mainland China. The patch, however, articulates a unified Singaporean Chinese identity, described as “Buddhist bland.” Broadly, I address why, when rituals change, some elements are abandoned, seemingly without regret, while others are retained, becoming orthopraxy. While we might expect that the ritual elements that are retained are those that carry the most meaning, in this example, I suggest, the opposite is the case.

This book has considered what role moral considerations should play within markets. But that leaves to one side the question of whether morality prescribes what sorts of things should be on the market in the first place. In this final chapter we consider recent philosophical debates about what kinds of goods should and should not be available on the market as commodities. If there are to be limits, what principles might govern the determination of those limits? We argue that none of the available arguments establish a strict boundary between the commodifiable and the non-commodifiable. Instead, we suggest that the most important considerations concern the risk of harm both to individuals and to social values.

Chapter 5 begins with a brief overview of the Constitutional Revolution before turning to the role of non-Muslims in the struggle. It begins by exploring the motivations behind religious minorities supporting the revolution. Then it looks at the various ways they contributed – such as providing financial and military assistance, engaging in social initiatives, and establishing cultural institutions like anjomans (associations), schools, and political parties. The chapter highlights the significance of anjomans and explores how transnational networks reinforced the revolutionary cause, with Armenians from the Caucasus and Parsis from India playing especially prominent roles. Finally, it addresses the violence directed at non-Muslims during periods of unrest, underscoring the precariousness of their position even as they participated in the revolutionary movement.

As in other parts of Southeast Asia, the power of ancestral spirits and the spirituality of the place are both distinct, constitutive elements of the domestic and communal ritual activity in Vietnam. In the realm of death remembrance, the homebound ancestral relics are typically contrasted to the displaced souls of the dead and their supposedly homeless existence. However, the notion of home that structures this existential divide is complicated by the experience of a long civil war and the war-caused mass human dislocation, both physical and political. This chapter explores the question of displacement in death, focusing on the shrine for the earth god where people routinely make small offerings on behalf of the wandering souls of the dead today. It will ask if an alternative idea of home is found in this ritualized act and, if so, what the act of remembrance can tell us about the ethics of hospitality.

We trace the evolution of statistics from its origins in the seventeenth century, contrasting twentieth-century data sets and approaches with those seen frequently today. This discussion motivates the approach taken in the book, which focuses on the bias--variance tradeoff as opposed to unbiased estimation, and on finite-sample guarantees as opposed to asymptotics, which can often be misleading in problems whose difficulty is controlled by several parameters. We introduce the decision-theoretic framework that underpins our assessment of the performance of statistical procedures, and discuss the concepts of minimaxity and adaptation. One of our perspectives is to seek to understand the behaviour of methods with respect to as wide a class of data generating mechanisms as possible, and in particular under model misspecification --- where an idealised model that motivates a procedure fails to hold. We discuss the use of the book for teaching and prerequisites for students, concluding with notation used throughout the book.

In late 2021, as schools and colleges in the Indian state of Karnataka resumed in-person classes after nearly two years of institutional closures provoked by the pandemic, a new script for continuing the work of exclusion had to be prepared. Prolonged educational disruption and a forced digital outsourcing of curricular processes had already borne out a nationwide ‘crisis’ in terms of increasing school dropouts, especially among the socially deprived (and those further economically precaritized by the Covid outbreak). Because the pandemic made apparent how the same viral ‘cause’ can exacerbate historical differences in ‘impact’ on the basis of populations’ rights of access to infrastructures – for example, the physical site of the hospital or the school or the college – the state's script for a return to ‘normalcy’ was first dressed up in a shared existential predicament of man, and then in the myth of a common national destiny, a uniform(ed) national-secular humanity.

Both government-funded and private pre-university colleges in Karnataka – enrolling students for higher secondary schooling – started denying Muslim women students entry into classrooms if they insisted on wearing the hijab over prescribed uniforms. College administrators and government officials insinuated, over different moments in the course of the controversy, that formal dress codes had been in existence for a long time and therefore the recent demand for a hijab exception must have been provoked by ‘outside support’ from radical Islamist organizations. While, in principle, the restriction of a freedom for any amount of time cannot become the justifying ground for maintaining status quo, the irony of this inversion of juridical logic is glimpsed in the verdict of the Karnataka High Court on this matter.