This introduction to The New Believers begins by identifying a broader problem with the contemporary novel: that it often ends with bleak defeat or uncertain irresolution. Instead, I identify a new grouping of contemporary writers – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders – who turn to spiritual beliefs, powers, and presences to offer new hope and possibilities for the contemporary novel, ones that might empower specific progressive causes. I show how this grouping is distinct from other forms of the contemporary, including writers who are hostile to religion, indifferent to it, or committed to it, and I show how the New Believers avoid the problem of oppressive totality by assessing the value of spiritual ideas by their impact on the immanent and the worldly, specifically how spiritual ideas alleviate and prevent material, bodily, and ecological suffering. This new grouping shows that the contemporary novel takes spirituality much more seriously than our critical categories have allowed.

This chapter sets out the book’s aim: an attempt to map the changing lexicons of Christian expression in the English language from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Victorians. It is thus a contribution to historical theolinguistics, drawing on the one hand on corpus linguistics and, on the other, the history of the many varieties of English Christianity that existed during this period. The methodology to be adopted in the body of the book is then illustrated with reference to two contrasting groups of female writers active in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period of exceptional religious turmoil: Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The special analytic tools and resources harnessed include the Oxford English Dictionary, Semantic EEBO, Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, UCREL’s Log-Likelihood Calculator, and Sheffield’s Linguistic DNA. The remainder of the chapter defines notions and addresses issues that will recur later in the book: notions of register and genre, and questions to do with the handling of corpora, and with the structuring of religious ‘communities of practice’.

The popularization of psychoanalysis following World War II provided African American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial prejudice and discrimination on Black identity and consciousness. The new field of social psychiatry helped these writers expand their frame to encompass the broader environment of American racism and examine how segregation was not just about the control of Black bodies but about the psychological control of Black minds. Their nonfiction writings and experimentation with the documentary mode of the photo-essay illuminate how visual culture could be adapted to reveal Black lives under the pressure of racial discrimination and increasing cold war surveillance. All four fought to find and improvise safe spaces, both physical and psychological, for African Americans during a decade in which the national security state overshadowed and conflicted with civil rights goals.

The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

An ongoing debate in the fields of forensic investigation and transitional justice after atrocity has often involved a conceptual binary between, on the one side, a legal or “human rights” approach, and on the other a victim-centric or “humanitarian” approach. This binary understanding of forensic forms of repair has contributed to harmful generalizations that fail to appreciate locally specific practices and politics. Forensic human identification practices in the US–Mexico borderlands have often been categorized as humanitarian, apolitical responses to state violence along the border. In this chapter, through a close examination of forensic identification efforts in Arizona, I show how individual identification can be a political process. In a context where the individual personhood of migrants is erased before, during, and after unauthorized migration across the international border, individual identity takes on political meaning and social significance. I show how individual identifications often involve dialogue within a complex network of state and nonstate actors. To be sure, in the US–Mexico border context and elsewhere, identification can serve to sanitize violence, stifle political claims, and reassert state power. However, it can also involve political practices of care that open new forums for justice and repair.

One of the fundamental tools in diophantine geometry is the notion of a height function. This function measures the geometric and arithmetic complexity of rational points on a projective variety defined over a number field and is a key to a number of the fundamental finiteness results in arithmetic geometry, e.g., Mordell–Weil Theorem, Siegel’s theorem, Mordell–Faltings’ theorem and so on.

Chapter 5 shows that development banks provide policy-makers with the ability to address policy contestation. I document the varying policy contestation from labor unions, civil society organizations, and legislators to each type of internationalization support: acquisitions and greenfield investments, project finance, and mergers among domestic firms. I then show that this variation obeyed differences in the salience of associated domestic effects and in BNDES’ funding strategy for each intervention. The chapter shows that BNDES relied increasingly on providing equity financed through market sources to finance politically sensitive overseas investments. These dynamics reveal the “fragile autonomy” of states under democracy: their capacity to support national firms in global markets depends on their ability to strategically mobilize or obfuscate their interventions and pushes them toward more market-conforming instruments of industrial policy.

This chapter uses creative, narrative nonfiction writing to portray a deathbed conversation or confession of sorts between a dying person and their healthcare providers. While literary in style, it is based on seven years of the author’s immersive field research in post-Apartheid South Africa in long-term and frail care homes. After providing background on long-term care and the history of racial segregation in that country, the chapter depicts a scene where white and Black nursing staff provide palliative care for and converse with a dying white woman whose character is composed from life history interviews with multiple residents of the home. As a contribution to the anthropology of death, the chapter shows how humanistic and literary approaches can be used to represent voices of dying people, as well as the ways histories of racial violence and inequality can be highlighted in research on long-term and palliative care.

In the face of socioeconomic shifts – a high aging population, decline in marital and birth rates, irregularization of labor and precaritization of life – the family model of mortuary care in Japan is coming undone. As sociality trends toward single households, the prospect of dying alone increases in this era of “family-less dead.” The rise of lonely deaths – those who die unaccompanied whose remains, if unclaimed, wind up as “disconnected souls” in public cemeteries – spurs national anxiety, but also a new “ending industry” offering alternatives to family-based deathcare. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter examines one of its most popular businesses: services that clean up the stuff left behind by the deceased. A job once done by kin, workers can now be hired to sort through personal belongings – even those of the lonely dead. In exploring what kind of work this is, the chapter teases out the physical and affective strands workers bring to this task that may well be the final “touch” of those who go otherwise unmourned. The chapter asks, does this constitute a modicum of recognition for the otherwise “unrecognized dead”? And what does this say about the sociality of dying with/out others in Japan, or anywhere, today?

In this chapter attention turns to the Early Modern English lexicons of texts written by radical Protestants (and some of their opponents) from the late sixteenth century up to and including the civil wars: pamphleteers such as ‘Martin Marprelate’ and Richard Overton, whose usages demonstrate remarkable linguistic creativity, and revolutionary thinkers such as the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley. The chapter concludes with an examination of the language of the Putney Debates of 1647, in which the soldiers of the New Model Army, victorious in the civil wars between king and parliament, discussed how the country should be governed. The Debates were a remarkable event in the history of democracy, in which religious expression was linked intimately to the holding and handling of political power.

Modelling a regression function in a nonparametric way offers considerable additional flexibility to capture complex variation as a function of one or more covariates. Local polynomial estimators offer an attractive approach to estimation, and extend the ideas of kernel smoothing developed in the previous chapter. Our theory presents finite-sample bounds on the mean squared error over Hölder classes. We also consider an alternative method based on splines.

Chapter 3 documents the existence of a developmentalist legacy in Brazil as an outcome of the country’s state-directed industrialization (1951–1984) and market reforms (1985–2002.) It traces how in the 1940s a developmentalist frame put forward by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was embraced by a wide set of policy-makers and business elites, and became institutionally embedded in the BNDES. It then shows how, in the following six decades, developmentalists adapted their ideas and institutions to changing circumstances – economic liberalization, regime change, economic crises, and party alternations – without renouncing their pursuit of structural transformation. Crucially, through this long-run process, they endowed the BNDES with autonomy from political pressures and influence over business strategies to achieve policy goals. This generated the necessary conditions for the adoption of globalized state-led development.