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This Element shows how New Religious Movements variously conceptualize science and provides readers with an overview of the scholarly conversation surrounding this phenomenon. The first section describes five movements that, in different ways, include relevant references to science in their doctrines: Dianetics/Scientology, the Raëlian Movement, Falun Gong, Stella Azzurra (an Italian Santo Daime group), and Bambini di Satana (an Italian Satanist group). The conceptualization of science within such movements is examined in reference to official beliefs conveyed by the writings and claims of their respective leaders, but ethnographic work among affiliates is included as well. The second section reconstructs academic contributions by scholars who identify notable trends in the conceptualization of science within new religious movements, or have developed typologies to describe that very understanding. The third section concludes the discussion of new religious movements and science by offering suggestions regarding novel directions that the study of their relationship may take.
This Element will reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation. Building on recent scholarship on the nature of late antique urbanism, the authors can observe that the links between late antique Christian thought and the late and post-Roman urban space were far more relevant to the everyday practice of monasticism than previously thought. By comparing Latin, Greek and Syriac sources from a broad geographical area, the authors gain a birds' eye view on the enduring importance of urbanism in a late and post-Roman monastic world.
Over the past few decades, evolutionary psychology has shed light on such features of the human experience as mating, love, religion, aggression, warfare, physical health, mental health, and more. The field of positive psychology has progressed along a parallel trajectory, using behavioral science techniques to help our understanding of human thriving at the individual and community levels. Positive Evolutionary Psychology is dedicated to the integration of positive and evolutionary psychology, with an eye toward using Darwinian-inspired concepts to help advance our understanding of human thriving. This Element describes the basic ideas of this new approach to behavioral science as well as examples that dip into various aspects of the human experience, including such topics as health, education, friendships, love, and more–all with an eye toward providing a roadmap for the application of Darwinian principles to better understanding human thriving and the good life.
The Aztec Economy provides a synthesis and updated examination of the Aztec economy (1325–1521 AD). It is organized around seven components that recur with other Elements in this series: historic and geographic background, domestic economy, institutional economy, specialization, forms of distribution and commercialization, economic development, and future directions. The Aztec world was complex, hierarchical, and multifaceted, and was in a constant state of demographic growth, recoveries from natural disasters, political alignments and realignments, and aggressive military engagements. The economy was likewise complex and dynamic, and characterized by intensive agriculture, exploitation of non-agricultural resources, utilitarian and luxury manufacturing, wide-scale specialization, merchants, markets, commodity monies, and tribute systems.
Just transition prompts us to explore a number of important dimensions of Earth System Governance research, including sustainability transformations, inequality, power and justice. This Element aims to place just transition in the dynamics of the world political economy over the last several decades and to offer an overview of the varieties of just transitions based on an analytical scheme that focuses on their breadth (coverage), depth (social and ecological priorities) and ambition. The focus on breadth, depth and ambition centers on power, inequality and injustice and allows us to analyze and compare just transitions as a prerequisite for their fuller interpretation.
The Hroswitha Club was a group of women book collectors who met from 1944–2004 in the Eastern United States. Despite the fame of individual members like Henrietta Bartlett or Mary Hyde Eccles, there is no sustained study of the Club's work and legacy. This Element makes this history broadly accessible and focuses on how members shared knowledge and expertise and provided a space for legitimacy and self-growth in a period where women's access to formal education and academic institutions was limited. By making this network visible through an examination of archival records, library catalogs, and pamphlets, this project positions the Club as a case study for a more thorough examination of the ways that intersectional identities can make visible or obscure whose intellect, money, and resources have shaped the study of rare books in the United States.
In this Element, the authors consider fully discretized p-Laplacian problems (evolution, boundary value and variational problems) on graphs. The motivation of nonlocal continuum limits comes from the quest of understanding collective dynamics in large ensembles of interacting particles, which is a fundamental problem in nonlinear science, with applications ranging from biology to physics, chemistry and computer science. Using the theory of graphons, the authors give a unified treatment of all the above problems and establish the continuum limit for each of them together with non-asymptotic convergence rates. They also describe an algorithmic framework based proximal splitting to solve these discrete problems on graphs.
Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion.
Readers are essential agents in the production of bestsellers but bestsellers are not essential to readers' leisure pursuits. The starting point in this Element is readers' opinions about and their uses of bestselling fiction in English. Readers' relationships with bestsellers bring into view their practices of book selection, and their navigation of book recommendation culture. Based on three years of original research (2019–2021), including a quantitative survey with readers, interviews with social media influencers, and qualitative work with international Gen Z readers in a private Instagram chat space, the authors highlight three core actions contemporary multimodal readers make– choosing, connecting, and responding– in a transmedia era where on- and offline media practices co-exist. The contemporary multimodal reader, or the MMR3, they argue, illustrates the pervasiveness of recommendation culture, reliance on trusted others, and an ethic of responsiveness.
An often-forgotten passage of Philip Converse's classic essay on mass belief systems introduced the concept of an issue public – a segment of voters that has crystallized attitudes about a particular topic. Some people deeply care about particular topics, and they might be equipped to reach judgments on these topics. This simple idea could provide an important corrective to work that casts citizens' political competence in a negative light. But, previous attempts to evaluate the issue publics hypothesis have been unsatisfying. This Element proposes and tests a new measurement approach for identifying issue publics. The evidence gathered leads to the conclusion that issue publics exist, but are smaller and more particularistic than existing scholarship presumes them to be. As such, researchers underappreciate the significance of issue opinions in electoral politics.
The value of great leaders seems to be an unquestioned assumption. The goal of this Element is to explore the counterintuitive idea that great leaders can pose a hazard to themselves and their followers. Great leadership, which accomplishes morally commendable and difficult objectives by leaders and followers, requires competence, morality, and charisma. A hazard is a condition or event that leads to human loss, such as injury, death, or economic misfortune. A leader can become a hazard through social psychological processes, which operate through the metaphor of Seven Deadly Sins, to create negative consequences. Great leaders can undermine their own success and accomplishments, as well as their followers. They can become a threat to the organization in which they are employed. Finally, great leaders can become a danger to the larger society. The damage great leaders can create can be reduced by applying the corresponding virtue.
Modality is a vast phenomenon. In fact, it is arguably a plurality of phenomena. Within it, one type of modality warrants distinctive interest in philosophy and, in particular, in metaphysics. In view of this, this Element has a first part devoted to modality as a general phenomenon, where different types of modalities are distinguished, and where the question of unification is raised. Following this, the second part is focused on metaphysical modality: the type of modality that is of distinctive interest in metaphysics, and thus for the series of this Element. In this second part, the overarching question is about the source of metaphysical modality, and the discussion here informs back, and is informed by, the question of unification from the first part. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Natural language occurs in time. Events happen earlier, later, or simultaneously with other events; however, this temporal dimension is often downplayed or overlooked. This Element introduces readers with a background in structural linguistics to dynamic approaches to phonological processing. It covers models of serial order, speech production and speech perception, with special attention to how they can enhance one another. The work then asks whether dynamic approaches have the potential to change how we think of phonological structure. Key ideas discussed include phonemes and auditory targets, control mechanisms creating structure, and the shape of phonological representations in a dynamic context. The work should function as a bridge for those with linguistic questions who want to learn answers derived from the study of speech as a dynamic system.
Years of collective political science research has fueled the stereotype of the uninformed or illogical American voter who ardently supports parties or candidates but lacks any cohesive ideological reasons for doing so. Prior works, however, do not tell the whole story nor fully capture the nature of public opinion in today's increasingly polarized political environment. Thus, this Element makes the case for more careful and nuanced assessments of ideological thinking in the American electorate. Using a variety of more contemporary survey and experimental data, it shows that a substantial portion of Americans do hold coherent political beliefs and that these beliefs have important consequences for the American political system. Though partisanship still plays a powerful role, the electorate as this Element presents it is much more ideological than the literature too often assumes.
The Paris Agreement embodies a flexible approach to global cooperation, aimed at encouraging ever more ambitious climate action by a variety of players on all levels of governance. Regional organizations play an important role in mobilizing such action. This Element provides novel insights into the conditions under which policy entrepreneurs can bring about transformative policy change in regional settings, with a focus on the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It finds that opportunity structures in the EU have been conducive to successful climate-progressive policy entrepreneurship at several key junctures, but not consistently. In contrast, the ASEAN governance context provides few access points for non-elite interests, making it fiendishly difficult for policy entrepreneurs to push for substantive policy change in the face of powerful domestic veto players. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element reports an investigation of translators' use of web-based resources and search engines. The study adopted a qualitative eye tracking-based methodology utilising a combination of gaze replay and retrospective think aloud (RTA) to elicit data. The main contribution of this Element lies in presenting not only an alternative eye tracking methodology for investigating translators' web search behaviour but also a systematic approach to gauging the reasoning behind translators' highly complex and context-dependent interaction with search engines and the Web.
Is a facsimile an edition? In answering this question in relation to Shakespeare, and to early modern writing in general, the author explores the interrelationship between the beginning of the conventional process of collecting and editing Shakespeare's plays and the increasing sophistication of facsimiles. While recent scholarship has offered a detailed account of how Shakespeare was edited in the eighteenth century, the parallel process of the 'exact' reproduction of his texts has been largely ignored. The author will explain how facsimiles moved during the eighteenth and nineteenth century from hand drawn, traced, and type facsimiles to the advent of photographical facsimiles in the mid nineteenth century. Facsimiles can be seen as a barometer of the reverence accorded to the idea of an authentic Shakespeare text, and also of the desire to possess, if not original texts, then reproductions of them.
Celebrated as an actress on the London stage (1776–80) and notorious as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (1779–80), Mary Darby Robinson had to write to support herself from the mid–1780s until her death in 1800. She mastered a wide range of styles, published prolifically, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post. As her writing developed across the 1790s, she increasingly used the motifs of Gothic fiction and drama descended from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). These came to pervade her late novels and poems so much that she even wrote her autobiography as a Gothic romance. She also deployed them to critique the ideologies of male dominance and the forms of writing in which they appeared. This progression culminated in her final collection of verses, Lyrical Tales (1800), where she Gothically exposes the conflicted underpinnings in the now-famous Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
In this Element, the authors introduce and apply a framework for the linguistic analysis of fake news. They define fake news as news that is meant to deceive as opposed to inform and argue that there should be systematic differences between real and fake news that reflect this basic difference in communicative purpose. The authors consider one famous case of fake news involving Jayson Blair of The New York Times, which provides them with the opportunity to conduct a controlled study of the effect of deception on the language of a single reporter following this framework. Through a detailed grammatical analysis of a corpus of Blair's real and fake articles, this Element demonstrates that there are clear differences in his writing style, with his real news exhibiting greater information density and conviction than his fake news. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element provides an overview of pre-modern and ancient economies of the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The region is widely known for its densely occupied semisedentary villages, intensive production economies, dramatic ritual life, and complex social relations. Scholars recognize significant diversity in the structure of subsistence and goods production in the service of domestic groups and institutional entities throughout the region. Here, domestic and institutional economies, specialization, distribution, economic development, and future directions are reviewed. The Element closes with thoughts on the processes of socio-economic change on the scales of houses, villages, and regional strategies.