We portray processes theories which claim that consciousness is related to or identical with a computational process in the brain. The global workspace theory (GWT) proposes that consciousness occurs when information is made widely available via a global neuronal workspace. Higher order theories (HOTs) propose that consciousness occurs when there is a higher-order process that describes a first-order sensory-cognitive process. We will also introduce the ‘small network argument’, which holds that extremely simple systems may fulfil the criteria of process theories and hence would be considered conscious.

With arguably the largest number of speakers of any postcolonial variety of English and a history stretching over four centuries, Indian English has received more attention in the literature than many other varieties. This chapter will track its emergence and development from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, from early English-speaking travelers and the earliest English trading ventures via the gradual extension of British colonial power over the subcontinent and its linguistic consequences, to the diffusion of English to ever greater sections of society at the start of the twenty-first century. Regarding the structure of Indian English, this chapter will take advantage of the large body of corpus-based research which has probed into the actual frequency and distribution of a wide range of Indian English features, allowing for a more empirical approach towards Indian English, encompassing its phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon and (discourse) pragmatics.

Overseas varieties of English emerged during the colonial period (c. 1600-1900) with features arising which stem partly from dialect input of the early settlers and partly from contact among dialect speakers and with indigenous groups along with some features which represent independent developments in new varieties. The external settings at the overseas locations also played a key role here. There are basic distinctions, such as that between settler and non-settler varieties which, despite certain caveats, still retain their validity in the field of variety studies. The internal developments in forms of English at overseas locations reveal patterns which allow of certain generalisations which help to recognise the developmental trajectories in the past and current pathways of change. Furthermore, new sources for the study of vernacular varieties have become available and yield new insights into variety formation during the colonial period.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

In this chapter, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in Brazil – and the expanding nature of the fundamentally anti-Black economy of violability that explains this country’s astonishing level of homicidal violence against Black and non-Black individuals living in predominantly Black spaces – but instead on the critical role that urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the “war on police” and advancing an insurgent intellectual movement that pushes toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has seen a proliferation of anthropological studies on police violence and police culture within the last few decades. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of ethnography’s techniques – in their attempts to provide “privileged” accounts of police praxis.

Our goal in this chapter is to consider the impact of our “Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition” theoretical proposition and lay out a possible roadmap for future ethnographic research to further develop the concept’s material and social analytical value. We approach this goal in three main substantive sections. The first provides an overview of our 2015 theoretical proposition on “racializing affect,” considering its main contributions and cornerstones. In the second section, we show how this theoretical intervention has influenced scholarship on an array of themes, including and transcending the specific intersection of affect and race in our original 2015 analysis. We do this through a systematic review of selected scholarly engagements with the piece accessed via its citational record available through Current Anthropology and Google scholar. Finally, we engage in a critical reappraisal of how discussions around “racialized affect” have expanded in anthropology and the humanistic social sciences more broadly, particularly in relation to ethnography as methodology.

This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

This chapter reviews some of Maconchy’s most celebrated staged vocal works to tease out her tendency to inflect these works politically. Turning briefly to The Three Strangers (1957), The Departure (1961), The Birds (1967–68), as well as other collaborations with librettist Anne Ridler, the chapter examines transformations the composer expresses at simultaneous registers – whether poetic, thematic, or structural. The chapter further compares the political messaging in these works with her teacher Vaughan Williams’s ‘morality’ opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which sets much of the same symbolism extended throughout Maconchy’s oeuvre.

Professional military education was a critical part of the US Army and thus the Air Service and then Air Corps. Officers who aspired to higher rank were required to attend their branch school, the Command and General Staff School, and perhaps even the Army War College. This chapter examines these various schools, especially the Air Corps Tactical School, to show what was being taught. Significantly, air theory was separate and significantly different from the official employment doctrine taught by the Army as a whole. In addition, the Army and Air Corps doctrine was shaped by the isolationism prevalent during the 1920s and 30s, as well as the Great Depression.