Chapter 3 explores the physical and social boundaries of non-Muslim neighborhoods, which separated them from Muslim communities. It discusses both visible and invisible markers, such as dress codes and regulations activated when residents left these areas. Additional symbols of distinction included language and ritual practices. Non-Muslim schools are examined as institutions that bridged these boundaries, serving as heterotopias that encouraged interaction while enforcing discipline. The chapter also reexamines the idea of the “scapegoat” to analyze episodes of violence, especially during Moharram and Safar, highlighting how minority areas became particularly vulnerable to attack during crises like famine or political unrest.

“Communications (1971–1982)” examines the largely overlooked decade during which the Falkland Islands and Argentina were formally linked by regular air and maritime connections. This unprecedented period brought profound changes to Island life: Argentina built an airfield on the Islands, expanded its presence in Port Stanley, and promoted educational exchanges and tourism. Drawing on a newly uncovered archive, the chapter reconstructs how islanders and Argentines experienced this phase of intensified interaction and how it reshaped public opinion, diplomatic discussions, and the wider political landscape. It follows the shifting attitudes toward cooperation and negotiation across the 1970s, as seen by islanders, Argentines, British and Argentine diplomats, political elites, and the press. While moments of collaboration did emerge, the chapter shows how, by 1982, hardened positions had taken hold on both sides. These entrenched views rendered the original 1971 Communications unsustainable, and its gradual erosion contributed to the escalation that culminated in the Falklands War.

This chapter discusses the development of international law in the post-war era that aimed to liberate global information flow to guarantee world peace. It starts by discussing the achievements and failures of the 1948 Geneva conference on the freedom of information and considers two avenues in which the post-war project of freedom of information continued after the 1948 conference. First, in the drafting of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, freedom of information as a peace project became framed into a fundamental human right, displacing the question about the material and interstate aspects of freedom of information. Second, freedom of information was addressed in forums of international telecommunication and trade dominated by the United States, where freedom of information became equated with the elimination of discriminatory telecommunication rates to enable American global trade. This chapter shows a division of labour and crucial conceptual compatibility between the human rights framing and free trade framing of freedom of information and multiple fault lines surrounding the early intimation of the dual-sided framework.

This chapter examines how death and dying are perceived to be knowable and manageable through end-of-life care. Leveraging extensive ethnographic research about English palliative and end-of-life care since 2010, the author scrutinizes how policies shape perceptions and practices surrounding the care of the dying. This includes discussions on how the end of life is understood within policy, influenced by palliative care philosophy and practice, and how this influences experiences and expectations of death and dying. Through detailed descriptions, the chapter highlights the impact this has on perceptions about when dying is recognized, the centering of needs-based approaches to care, and the cultural values evident in how “good” dying and death are discussed and idealized. Contrasting policy assumptions with lived experiences, the author invites an analysis of the limits of palliative and end-of-life care as frameworks for understanding dying and death. Ultimately, the chapter emphasizes the necessity for nuanced approaches to end-of-life care, portraying dying and death as not only inescapable facets of life but also deeply entrenched in social and cultural contexts that warrant consideration.

The introduction presents the book's core puzzle of why states promote the outward investments of national firms despite the political and distributional costs of doing so. It previews a theory of globalized state-led development whereby policy-makers promote the internationalization of domestic business to pursue the structural transformation of their home economies. The chapter also describes the book's research strategy of within-country and cross-national comparisons of globalized state-led development in Brazil and China.

This chapter explores the notion of “time-as-weather” (time as an active force rather than just an abstract parameter) in postwar efforts to address mass violence. It examines how Quechua-speaking survivors of the 1985 army massacre in Accomarca, Ayacucho, Peru, engage with official projects that seek to govern the legacies of state atrocities through the controlled circulation of dead bodies. The chapter discusses two temporal frameworks within which survivors position their efforts to remake their worlds. One is Peru’s necrogovernmental project, which seeks to create a linear temporality to bury state violence in the past and move on politically. The other is “regimes of animation,” long historical periods that encompass political administration of life and death in the Andes, presupposing the decomposition of dead bodies into life-giving elements like water. The chapter argues that survivors’ efforts transcend these frameworks, introducing their own political and cultural specifications that view time as an active, material force – like weather – rather than a mere chronological marker. By using material remnants and ruins to inscribe the history of state atrocity on the landscape, they highlight the dynamic interplay between memory, materiality, and time, asserting a novel form of historical inscription that forces history to confront “time-as-weather.”

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter offers a history of African American theater in the 1940s by way of case studies of three of that decade’s landmark productions: Richard Wright’s adaptation of his novel Native Son (1941), the American Negro Theatre’s production of Anna Lucasta (1944), and Alice Childress’ one-act play Florence (1949). Examining the formation of the American Negro Theatre in the immediate wake of the Negro People’s Theatre movement of the 1930s, the chapter notes how that era’s emphasis on ensemble-centered, collectivist agitprop and audience participation gives way to “standard forms” that emphasize individuality on stage. The process of the stage adaptation of Native Son further illuminates how Wright uncovered fruitful ambiguity in the tensions between liberal individual agency and Marxist class analysis, but struggled to translate that ambiguity to the dramatic form together with his collaborators. A coda demonstrates that Alice Childress’ turn to metatheatricality beginning with Florence serves as a rejoinder to the failure of form experienced by Wright.

Classical methods such as ordinary least squares (OLS) were designed for datasets with just a handful of predictors. However, the trend over the last 30 years or so has been towards larger datasets, in particular where the number of predictors may be large even compared with the number of observations --- so-called high-dimensional data. In such settings, it may be advantageous to consider penalised estimators that reduce variance, at the expense of introducing some bias. We study both ridge regression and Lasso estimators, with the latter having the attractive property that it performs simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation. The Lasso can be computed efficiently using coordinate descent, and we present finite-sample guarantees on its prediction, estimation and variable selection performance. We also consider extensions such as the square-root Lasso, the debiased Lasso and complementary pairs stability selection.

This chapter opens with an ethnographic account of Tunisian civic trainers preparing for the 2014 parliamentary elections, focusing on their efforts to teach the public the practices and sensibilities of democratic citizenship. Their diverse visions of democracy – shaped by the lived experience of the 2011 revolution – introduce the Tunisian public sphere as both a site of civic education and a space where revolution and democracy intersect. These perspectives ground the book’s two central arguments: first, that democracy can be redefined through a historically informed critique of liberalism’s limitations and affordances; and second, that such a redefinition requires attention to localized experiences, challenging the dominant view of revolution and democracy as a linear progression from disorder to order. The chapter also introduces the book’s main figures and theoretical interventions and outlines its structure: a movement from state-sanctioned and international pedagogies of public deliberation to more intimate and contested democratic expressions.

This chapter examines the lexicons of texts in Early Modern English from the 1520s through the 1560s: the turbulent decades spanning the English Reformation. On the one hand are works that look to the world of Catholic Christendom, such as books by the politician, philosopher, propagandist, and martyr Sir Thomas More and – later in the century – the polemical texts written by Jesuit exiles. On the other are outputs by reformers such as William Tyndale – also a martyr – and of later Protestant controversialists. Among the latter group is a royal figure whose writings have in recent years attracted increasing attention: Henry VIII’s last queen, Katherine Parr. The chapter begins with an examination of versions of a key work of the English Reformation: the Book of Common Prayer. Protestant and Catholic lexicons are identified, and shown to align with distinct confessional/theological orientations.

In addition to their usage in density estimation and nonparametric regression, 'kernel methods' also refer to a different concept, where the goal is to augment a feature space and thereby extend the scope of certain existing prediction techniques. The basic idea is to map our observations into a higher-dimensional space and then apply a simple (e.g. linear) method to the transformed data; in the context of regression, for instance, this can yield a nonlinear regression surface that may fit the responses better. For a certain rather large class of methods, namely those whose fitted values depend on inner products between observations, a key point is that this general procedure can often be carried out implicitly, and in ways that ensure the cost of the computations involved is independent of the dimension of the final feature space. The underlying theory relies on a particular type of Hilbert space structure known as a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Some of the most well-known examples of kernel machines include support vector machines and kernel ridge regression, though the class of methods to which the ideas here may be applied is very broad.

Beyond the War challenges war-centered interpretations of one ot the twentieth century’s most publicized armed conflict by recontructing the largely overlooked history of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands before 1982. Whereas most scholarship treats the Islands’ past and aftermath as chapters in a bilateral sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom, this book shifts the focus to the complex and evolving relationships between islanders—mostly of British origin—and Argentines in the four decades preceding the war. It traces how mutual ignorance shaped these relations until the 1960s, and how political, economic, and diplomatic changes gradually transformed them. The book examines the Islands’ structural vulnerabilities, Argentina’s claims following the 1965 UN resolution, and the controversial actions of Argentine nationalists, while reconstructing the impact of the 1971 Communications Agreement both in the Islands and in the mainland. It also explores how ordinary Argentines perceived the Malvinas by analyzing popular culture. Ultimately, the book argues that war was not inevitable, revealing moments of collaboration and exchange that made alternative futures conceivable.

Manin’s program, initiated in [FMT89] and [BM90], provides a way to understand the asymptotic formula for the counting function of rational points on a Fano variety, and this program leads to Manin’s conjecture, which was further revised in a series of papers [Pey95], [BT98b], [Pey03], [Pey17], [LST22], and [LS24]. In this chapter, we discuss the formulation of Manin’s conjecture and examples that have been verified in the literature. In Manin’s conjecture it is important to remove the contribution of the exceptional set so that the asymptotic formula of the counting function reflects the global geometry of a projective variety.