The Russian spirit when analyzed gives an answer to the second question, which takes the form of two questions: Will Russia make a separate peace, and is the German influence strong?

The Russian spirit is a little incoherent. To define it is difficult, just as it is difficult to define the power of Russia's sleeping resources. It is, like all things in Russia, a thing of contradiction. But Russia's spirit realizes Russia's resources, and Russia's own subconscious mind sees Russia more clearly than the outer world can see her. “For instance, when the Central Powers last fall drove Russia's army out of a vast territory the outer world felt that Russia had met a defeat which had shaken the Russian Empire,” said Paul Miliukov to me. “The empire was not shaken. There was depression. Losses had been great. But this war is not the Russo-Japanese War. The people in the last war were unmoved; the war was far away in Russia's back yard. This war is another affair; it is on the front porch.”

The depression had a rebound; Russia's spirit surged back. And a part of its surging back is due to the fact that the Russian Empire is so great in extent, so rich in natural resources, and so well provided with endless hordes of men able to bear arms that it is like a great resilient lump. It may yield to pressure, as it yielded to Napoleon and as it yielded in 1915 to the Austro-German advance which swallowed Warsaw. But the lump retains its resiliency; it has a character of persistent expulsion. It may not be difficult to stick a thumb into Russia, but it is tiresome trying to keep it there. The lump is irritating with its resiliency. It is absurdly complacent!

For the outsider to believe that Russia must be depressed is natural. The financial situation is not pleasant. The ruble's value has slid down from about 50 cents to less than 30 cents. No one sees any metal money. The Government printing presses turn out postage stamps to provide the country with small change; these stamps do not stick to the fingers, for there is no mucilage on their backs.

From childhood Maxim had felt the presence of some mysterious authority over his destiny. Somewhere there was a government. Its arm was long; its grasp was strong; its power was great. If it now reached out for Maxim at a time when the harvest was just beginning, and, indeed, at the time when he was making plans to marry Vera, the niece of old Vladimir, there was nothing to be done about it. So it is in Russia. But also there is an astonishing self-respect for the individual in Russia; so strong is it that in many quarters parents and school-teachers would not think of corporal punishment. Therefore Maxim looked at the recruiter, who was old enough to be his father, and said insolently: “You make a good soldier.” The other looked at Maxim's clear skin and eyes, at his flaxen hair, and at the straight, powerful body of the young giant. “So do you,” he said indulgently. “And when you are a soldier you will learn something about your country. When soldiers come back from wars they are the wisest men in their villages. And they can talk of things that no one can print in newspapers.”

Maxim was glad to hear it. He put a map of Russia on the wall and made the soldier draw a line upon it to show his old father, bent by husbandry, and his old mother, withered by housewifery and hoeing cabbages, where the fighting was going on. “Warsaw has fallen,” said the soldier. “I know. I can read,” replied Maxim. “If the people would pray more, we would get it back again.”

His mother's knotted fingers clung to his sleeve, and her thin, dry lips were shut tight. Vera cried a little and allowed herself the torture of memories of spring days when they had danced together outdoors on the green behind the communal steam bathhouse. So Maxim left his village with his young, strong body and his good, untrained mind and a woolen blouse, a woolen suit, and a pair of greased boots; with him he took all that he had.

Introduction

In our endeavour to comprehend the intricacies associated with living and working in 4.0 societies (Scribano and Lisdero 2019), this chapter delves into ethnographic research. Harnessing the potent reflexive tool of the visual (Harper 2002), an image from our field diary serves to orient readers within the challenging context that we aim to explore here:

The image, along with its accompanying message on the social network Twitter, evokes a distinct context – a framework of situated social practices – that compels us to scrutinise various dimensions closely.

Firstly, the image underscores social conflict. This is articulated through an action undertaken by a collective of riders, who decry the precariousness of living and working conditions following the decree in Argentina imposing lockdown measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This social media action serves as an opportunity to direct our gaze towards social practices that may have eluded our attention. In this sense, the visibility of the conflict enables us to observe underlying social processes in a unique manner.

The second crucial aspect pertains to the recent transformation within the realm of labour. The image underscores the undeniable reliance of our cities on human labour to sustain their current functionality. Contrary to theories proclaiming the ‘end of work’ or diminishing the body's role as the foundation of productive processes in new technologies, the image eloquently portrays that work maintains a central position in our societies. Particularly in societies like ours, situated in the Global South, a significant portion of those engaged in labour do so under conditions that starkly contrast with the traditional image of the salaried worker. Furthermore, it draws attention to the latest developments in the ‘world of work’, especially those stemming from the integration of digital mediums. In essence, the designation of riders’ activity as ‘essential’ in Argentina – a label enabling mobility amidst isolation – vividly illustrates the centrality of the body and its vital energies in comprehending the production processes of social life and the transformations within 4.0 societies.

The War of Europe is bringing us to a test of our international sense.

We must begin to apply international sense to our diplomacy; but we must also begin to apply it to our business.

We need just now all the international sense we can summon; we need it to grasp the extraordinary opportunities which the war will develop.

Of all these extraordinary opportunities to give the best of us, and receive value in return, none will be greater than that offered by Russia.

“But you Americans have no international sense,” said a Scotchman in Petrograd to me. He has been sent out from England since the beginning of the war to make studies of future commercial opportunities in Russia, and he has worked so well his way into the confidence of official Russia that he is now an employee of the Russian Government in the work of collecting and arranging confidential economic statistics - almost a secret-service agent of Commerce.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and stared out the window at the regiments of soldiers drilling on the public square beneath the gray skies. He went on: “I wonder whether you Americans will ever develop that sense. You receive more immigrants than any other nation, but you know nothing of the hearts and souls of the lands from which they come. The English are stubborn enough in their self-satisfied content with their own manners and language and customs, but they are skilled inter-nationalists compared with you Yankees. And this is really your era. You can make more and better goods for the world markets - and for Russia - than any other nation in the world. Germany had the trade, but lost it. The rest of us are crippled. Russia will bound forward after this war. She is the one country needing development - almost a virgin field. But whatever you may be at home, in world salesmanship you are terrible duffers. Russia? My dear fellow, Russia is the Biggest Possibility in the World. But you won't see it. You Americans have no international intellect.”

Have we?

Is psychoanalysis too heavy for the alphabet that Colette printed on the very flesh of the world? Is this scholarly terminology too harsh for her “subtle senses,” which she transforms into a “word greater than the object”? Maybe this therapy is useless for the craft of her writing. It doesn't claim to “think” but only to follow a “gourmet's quest,” given that it's “the everyday fare that sparks her interest.”

And what if “monstrous Colette” ( Jean Cocteau), her “infernal evil” (Liliane de Pougy), which is said to have “perverted” even “maternal instinct” ( Jeannie Malige), this glimmer of “a certain France […] as complicated as ancient China” (Marguerite Yourcenar), what if they move closer to us when we listen through the device Sigmund Freud discovered? It's not because the mischievous Claudine runs out on the dramatic Viennese women in a neurotic fin de siècle that the secrets of the “pure and impure” and the animal or floral borders of her pleasure light up in the glow of this “interior experience.” Nor is it because this independent writer seduces Simone de Beauvoir herself after having condemned the feminists to a whiplashing. Colette's is an experience that the mystics practiced and which psychoanalysis restores to modern men and women. Freudian vocabulary from “depression” to “perversion” and other “sublimations” no longer offends if we take the trouble not to apply it but to deepen its meaning, as I tried to do, reading Colette in Female Genius. Labels and clichés dissolve in proximity to Colettian desires. Today, it's the reverse of listening to her through Freud that I want to propose: how Colette's experience, as I read it in her writing, not only calls upon, deepens, displaces, and modifies psychoanalytic tools but also the conventional reception of literary genius and the very pleasures of reading.

This Jouissance of Writing […] Named Sido

Apollinaire once described Colette as “perverse,” before his preference for “mischievous,” no longer hesitating to compare her provocative audacity to the tragic immodesty of the first Christians: “And so, freed from modesty, the Roman martyrs entered the arena.” Perverse? Colette? Certainly, a little, or not at all.

Introduction

This chapter examines the nature of health policy and implementation in Sudan. It analyzes the challenges of the healthcare delivery system in the country. It argues that despite the previously well-established healthcare system in the country, the challenges of several years of political instability have prevented Sudan's ability to effectively prevent the spread of communicable and noncommunicable diseases. The finding of the research analysis reveals that the ineffective healthcare delivery system has created an aftermath of an increase of chronic and endemic infectious diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis are incrementally causing substantial morbidity and mortality. Further, antimicrobial resistance has become a major threat throughout the healthcare system, with an emerging impact on maternal, neonatal, and pediatric populations. Communicable and noncommunicable diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, renal disease, and cancer are also increasingly causing high rates of substantial morbidity and mortality. Some recommendations are provided on how to better adapt healthcare delivery strategies that could be more effective in helping Sudan to accomplish its sustainable development and healthcare goals in the future. There is however an urgent need for the nation to focus more on how to meet the healthcare needs of its citizens in both the urban and rural areas by adopting a better economic support system, and health information system, and attracting a better-qualified health and professional workforce. It will also be a sustainable humanitarian service for the Government of Sudan to adopt health laws and social justice policies that support women and girls to make their own decisions about personal sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Brief History of Sudan

The Republic of Sudan is a country in the northeastern part of the African continent. The nation has boundaries with the following African countries. the Arab Republic of Egypt in the north, and the Republic of Ethiopia in the southeast. The Red Sea is located in the northeastern part of Sudan, and the Republic of Eritrea is located in the eastern part of Sudan. Further, the Republic of Sudan has boundaries with the Arab Republic of Libya in the northwestern part of the country, while the Arab Republic of Chad is located in the western part of the country.

As mentioned earlier, this chapter is constructed according to the emerging themes and content analysis that provide a sharper and more explicit focus on women's own voices, which is the central aim of this book. Most of the extracts in this chapter are derived from focused interviews and all the different data sets that were used in the discussion. The research process for this study was as follows:

Thus, the four randomly selected colleges were best divided into four economic classes: upper, upper-middle, lower-middle and working. The focused group interview women sample did not allow me to mention their real names in this study. Therefore, I used fake names: Nawal (from Jinnah (upper class), Gulalai (from Home Economics (upper-middle), Aiman (from Frontier (lower-middle) and Kiran (from City (working); however, the director of education allowed me to mention the real names of the colleges (see Appendix I for their brief social background information). It is important to emphasise here that to gain deeper insights, I conducted the interviews in local languages, and I translated them verbatim, as one of the central aims of this book is to allow women's voices to be heard. Three of the interviews took place in their college and one at the sample woman's house; the selection for the interview was purely on a voluntary basis from the initial Survey sample.

Methodological Aspects of This Study

It is unlikely that women's colleges in Peshawar would allow male researchers access to female students’ experiences and thoughts. Hence, my gender, religion, nationality and education were important factors that made this study possible. Due to the then political situation of Pukhtunkhwa, the administrators of educational institutions were reluctant to share information about the educational institutes. Therefore, the principals of the girls’ colleges were understandably cautious about my research and did further security checks before allowing me to commence my study, because they feared that collecting young women's (20–25 years old) thoughts and ideas would probably have a negative influence on the women students themselves. Thus, I selected both quantitative and qualitative methods, as both methods can be used to enhance the findings.

Dr Shabana Shamaas Gul Khattak is the proud daughter of a proud and noble people. Her tribe, the Khattak, belongs to one of the largest and most celebrated ethnic groups in the world, the Pukhtun. They live in one of the most inaccessible areas of the world, yet in terms of geo-political location a vital region of Asia. The Pukhtun have produced ruling dynasties and in modern times presidents of major nations like India and Pakistan. The region has invariably attracted high-quality writing. From the very start of the British-Pukhtun encounter, there was a detailed study by Mountstuart Elphinstone. Other colonial officers fascinated by the Pukhtun wrote monographs that have lasted, and these include names like Sir Evelyn Howell and Sir Olaf Caroe. There were of course novelists writing about this area and its people. Rudyard Kipling's Kim features a dashing, though stereotypical, Pukhtun horse trader, and the novels of John Masters feature Pukhtun tribesmen. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, this region continued to attract fine writers. Leading anthropologists like Frederick Barth, Andre Singer and Charles Lindholm contributed to Pukhtun studies. There is the popular Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan frontier by Aisha Ahmad and Roger Boase. Sahibzada Riaz Noor and Ijaz Rahim, two outstanding officers and poets, have written extensively on the people and area. Another civil servant, Gulam Qadir Khan Daur, has written a powerful book on his tribe in Waziristan.

In spite of limited access to educational facilities and living in a patriarchal society, the area has also recently produced some high-quality scholarship by female Pukhtuna associated with the region. Dr Amineh Hoti obtained her PhD from Cambridge University studying Yusufzai women in Swat and Mardan, and Dr Faryal Leghari recently got her PhD from Oxford University based on her work in Waziristan. Amineh is the great-granddaughter of the Wali of Swat, and Faryal's mother was from Mardan. Malala Yusufzai, is also from Swat and has written and spoken extensively about the area.

A close look at Vincente Minnelli's musical film Gigi (1958) uncovers ambiguities making it difficult to decide, especially today, if the movie is 1) celebrating incestuous/incestual desire or 2) enabling reflection on such a troubling phenomenon via the characters’ attempts to cope with it, as in Colette's novel. In this chapter, I examine this difficulty and consider how Minnelli's direction adapts Colette's vision.

His superb popular film introduced many Americans to Colette's name. Alan Jay Lerner's screenplay and lyrics, along with Frederick Loewe's music shape thought-provoking performances by Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan with Maurice Chevalier adding dangerous charm. This version is upbeat, a Pygmalion operetta in which narrative, romance, and comedy resemble elements in Lerner and Loewe's Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, of two years before, but its engagement with the incest taboo makes it different and worth more attention than paid until now.

Seeming a less complex novel than Colette's others, Gigi in fact raises important and tough questions about an amorous relationship between “parent” and “child,” as my preceding chapter shows. While psychoanalytic critics credit Julia Kristeva, along with other French feminists, with shifting the focus from a male-centered psychology to one more cognizant of the female, her theories and literary criticism in fact also bring new light to psychological formations in both sexes, as I will explain in this analysis of Minnelli's film and its unconscious subtext.

Focusing on the young Gigi and the father figure Gaston from Colette's novel, including its “happy” ending, the film also adds a character absent from it, Gaston's uncle, Honoré. He is Anita Loos's invention in her 1951 Broadway production based on the novel. Played by Chevalier, the addition has a significant impact on the movie's contradictory messages.

Minnelli uses Honoré to frame the narrative in a way that celebrates womanizing with emphasis on the love object before she matures. Such a beginning makes one uneasy over the suggestions of incestual relations. The latter, as explained in my Introduction , engages individuals who play the role of child and parent without being related biologically. Biology does connect them in the more commonly used term “incestuous.”

Doubtless, technology has been valorised and demonised in the fields of social sciences over decades. Technology serves as a double-sword that emancipates but, at the same time, standardises human relationships. In this book, which is edited by Adrian Scribano, readers will find for sure a selection of high-quality chapters written by experts in the sociology of sensibilities who theorise on the different levels of what Castells dubbed ‘the digital age’ (Castells & Kumar 2014; Castells 2015). In my book Technolog y, Terrorism and Apocalyptic Future, I delineated the effects of technology over the mythical narratives revolving around fear. Technology divides the world into two parts, one of wich should be lost in the past, like an Eden or forbidden paradise, and an other which should be purged because of human sin. The first allegory signals hope, and the latter refers to fear. Technology not only creates a more unjust world but also puts man in a disruptive landscape where scarcity prevails. The question of whether technology situates mankind as the (just) administer of the world invariably leads to a state of anxiety which is filled by a set of apocalyptic narratives (discourses). Not surprisingly, in the age of terrorism, technology unplugs us from our emotional inner world (Korstanje 2019). If terror opens the doors to economic programmes that otherwise would be rejected by citizens, it is no less true that emotionality was radically shifted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Korstanje & George, 2021).

In a similar line of inquiry goes the present (pungent) book. Adrian Scribano, in the first chapter, speaks to us about how digital technologies have changed not only our phenomenological world but also human interactions (as well as sensibilities). In this text, he argues convincingly that the trans-globalisation process – far from disappearing –is mutating to a new stage. This change is mainly marked by three points, which Scribano discusses with clarity: the banalisation of consumption, the paradox of sovereignty and the transformation of energy transmission. This world is ruled by a much deeper neocolonial religion that combines mimetic consumption with degraded humanism. This postmodern (predatory) system interposes Hope as the cure for the anxieties mass consumption fails to placate. As he puts it, hope is always rooted in the near future, not always happening as it was imagined.

Introduction

The chapter on health policy analysis in Botswana explores the dynamic of the types of healthcare policy formulated by the government of the nation. It uses data analysis to explain how the health of the citizens of the country tends to be improving even though environmental conditions in some parts of Botswana tend to be very challenging to a large population of the nation. Unlike many African countries, the chapter focuses on the vision of sustainability and the challenges in Botswana that are inconsistent with those of neighboring countries. The chapter also uses graphics to explain the positive impacts of the new healthcare policies implemented by the nation's government in the past decade. It analyzes the extent to which affordable healthcare policies have expanded treatment options for rural and urban residents of Botswana simultaneously. Further, the chapter describes the condition of health promotion infrastructure, investment in health promotion, human resource training, and collaboration between public and private healthcare providers to improve health delivery in the country. Infrastructure and services for health promotion in Botswana are provided by the government through educational institutions, faith-based organizations, nongovernmental organizations, general medical practitioners, and mining companies complementing the efforts of the Ministry of Health. The research for this chapter involves the administration of a survey and content analysis of government reports, academic journals, and World Health Organization reports. A review of government gazette documents was conducted to trace health policy evolutionary developments and their impact on the general lives of the people of Botswana. The research findings reveal that limited resources such as transport and financial resources are a major challenge to health and education promotion activities across the country. Health educators are limited when it comes to traveling to rural communities in Botswana. Some health policy recommendations that could help to enhance the effectiveness of healthcare delivery in the country are also provided.

Brief History

Botswana is a democratic country in the southeastern part of Africa. It has a border with South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia. Botswana is almost engulfed by the Kalahari Desert, thereby making the country a sparsely populated nation with little agricultural activity (Dibie 2018). Botswana had a population of 2.6 million, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$20.3 billion in 2022 (World Bank 2022).