The chapter examines anthropology’s first explicit engagements with Wittgenstein through the rationality debates and British structuralism. It shows how these developments reflected aspects of Wittgenstein’s transitional thinking about context, particularly regarding questions of cultural translation and understanding. The chapter argues that these debates turned on problems of contextual form that continue to animate anthropological theory.

This chapter studies the controversy that led to the founding of East India Company College as a training institute for future administrators of British India. Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s unilateral decision in 1798 to establish a mandatory training college at Fort William, Calcutta, for all new recruits of the East India Company precipitated a conflict that embroiled the Court of Directors of the Company and the parliamentary Board of Control. I show that the language of corruption in this imperial context was transformed from accusations of personal enrichment to questions regarding procedural propriety, institutional overreach, and cultural difference. The Court of Directors could not refute Wellesley’s claim that Company civil servants were poorly trained. Nor did they wish to lose control over their prerogative of hiring personnel or determining the ideal qualities of an effective imperial administrator. They resolved instead to found East India College at Haileybury, formalizing a new imperial bureaucracy.

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

The framework of ‘Romanization’ developed by Haverfield in 1905 - that Romans ‘civilized’ their imperial subjects, particularly those in ‘barbarian’ western provinces - remains hegemonic, notwithstanding multiple revisionist attempts. It has been reasserted, rejected, or modified, but still frames the debate. Yet, the postcolonial project to decolonize the production of historical knowledge has prompted some scholars to seek fresh approaches and to rewrite the history of Roman imperialism. This book asks: what is the value of postcolonialism in the discourse on Romanization? How has it influenced the discourse on Romanization thus far? Can postcolonialism move the discourse on Romanization forward? Borrowing Said’s concept of travelling ideas, this book undertakes a comparative study between the point of departure and the point(s) of arrival of travelling ideas of postcolonialism to understand their path and impact in the discourse on Roman imperialism and Romanization.

To litigate or not to litigate, that is the question any Chinese companies operating in the United States long enough must contemplate. For American companies, litigation is nothing but an unavoidable business risk and often a vital competition strategy, routinely dealt with by legal and managerial professionals applying monetarized cost–benefit analysis. Such analysis typically incorporates attorney fees and other litigation expenses, potential reputational damage, time and human resource consumption, and the present value of expected litigation gains or losses. By contrast, litigation in China carries complex social meanings and is often avoided to preserve long-term cooperative relationships or to signal desirable attributes to uninformed third parties. When lawsuits do occur, they are often handled by stakeholders without professional legal assistance. Disputants consider a wide range of material and nonmaterial interests that are shaped by both formal institutions undergoing significant transformation and complex, entrenched social norms governing dispute resolution. Chinese companies immersed in these two disparate institutional environments approach legal disputes in the United States.

In China, corporate management and business transactions often relegate the legal system to a more peripheral role. Chinese companies then encounter formidable institutional obstacles when operating in developed countries with robust, strict, and complex legal systems. Obviously, nowhere else are the hurdles as high as in the United States. How then do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent legal risks? This chapter begins with an overview of China’s outbound direct investment in the United States. It then introduces research questions ranging from the role of in-house legal counsel in Chinese companies to their legal responses to unfair treatment by the US government. Next, this chapter selectively summarizes and critically reviews the existing literature pertinent to the interactions between multinational companies and the complex US legal system. From this, I formulate a comprehensive theoretical framework predicated on dual institutional influence, which will be applied consistently throughout the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the research methodology.

Litigation is a complex matter, calling for more sophisticated inquiries than what can be measured by a binary variable, namely, whether or not a Chinese company had experienced US lawsuits. This dichotomy glosses over crucial aspects of Chinese companies’ interactions with the US adjudicatory system. For instance, while prominent Chinese companies such as Huawei have litigated hundreds of lawsuits in the United States, most others were involved in no more than a few cases. However, the coding in Chapter 4 grouped them together in terms of US litigation experience. In fact, those that litigate infrequently may have more in common with Chinese companies that have managed to avoid US lawsuits altogether than prominent repeat players. To unveil important information lost from collecting and coding the data as a binary variable and to ameliorate possible biases in survey data concerning sensitive topics, this chapter explores a hand-collected objective dataset: federal lawsuits involving Chinese companies. It also presents three detailed case studies to demonstrate how Chinese companies with direct investments in the United States navigate the complex host-state legal system. These case studies (i.e., Lenovo, Huawei, and Fuyao Glass) will revisit the hypotheses and findings of prior chapters.

The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.

In this epilogue, we consider first the language of resistance and how its rhetoric encodes a complex and competing set of positionalities: it is hard, we argue, to distinguish between cultural resistance and cultural difference. This process is especially complex in the Roman Empire, where cultural conflict between Roman and Greek, for example, has to negotiate the surprising dynamics of cultural authority where the colonisers privilege the culture of the conquered, and where Christianity is a major vector in the changing nature of resistance over time. This opening discussion leads to six ways in which the case of the Roman Empire offers a particularly productive and challenging model for contemporary resistance studies, which shows a way forward from this volume: first, resistance from marginalised groups and the possibility of institutional rejection of dominant culture; second, resistance from within the elite; third, resistance as a multidirectional process which is testimony to the fragility of imperial self-assertion; fourth, the resistance between classes, and especially slaves to masters; fifth, how the imaginary of resistance – its narratives and tropes – functions; sixth, how resistance has its own historical account which shifts from public acts of resistance to models of inwardness.

When assessing people from very different backgrounds who have had complicated and challenging life experiences, mental health professionals need to be wary of jumping to wrong conclusions.

With people seeking asylum, interpreting appearance, behaviour and non-verbal communication is likely to be harder than usual. Narrative style and autobiographical memory aresubject to diverse influences that include attachment security and autobiographical competence, emotional distress, external prompts and context, social identity, and culture. Major adversity and PTSDcan result in complex difficulties in giving clear consistent accounts. Neurodevelopmental diversity and intellectual disabilities present specific challenges. People seeking asylum also face some narrative dilemmas particular to their situation.

The outcome of an asylum claim often hinges on judgements about a person’s credibility.While determining credibility is the responsibility of the Home Office and courts, mental health professionals can contribute to good decision-making by offering clinical explanations for features of a person’s account or behaviour that have been used to cast doubt on their credibility.

A formulation is an attempt to understand an individual’s predicament. In contrast, a psychiatric diagnosis is a way of categorising difficulties.Making a formulation or diagnosis is not a straightforward task, especially given differences of culture and power.It is helpful to think of both as constructed narratives.

With people seeking asylum, both present specific benefits, disadvantages and challenges.They can powerfully affect the person themselves, determine what help is offered and influence third parties, such as asylum decision-makers. A helpful approach to formulation and diagnosis depends on the therapeutic relationship and the clinician’s skill in working with differences in culture and power. Clinicians need tobear in mind how formulations and diagnoses depend on the quality of assessment and the cultural context in which they are embedded.

Formulations for people seeking asylum need to pay particular attention to culture, family, and physical health, and to the impact of the asylum process, of being a refugee, and of discrimination. Diagnoses should be made only after discussing formulation and considering the potential additional impacts of a diagnosis.

An initial glimpse into the ICC courtroom introduces the lead participants on the first day of the Court’s first trial. This chapter contrasts the modern courtroom in The Hague with culturally distant conflicts arising in the Congo, which tested the Court’s stamina for implementing international legal norms. The Court’s legal mission was formulated in the Rome Statute, a treaty accepted after 1998 by some 120 member states, building on earlier court models from Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Its moral scope contained broad ideals: promoting long-term peace and justice by prosecuting those deemed most responsible for atrocities that “shock the conscience of humanity.” Among the ICC’s innovations was a commitment to elevate victims of mass atrocities, enabling their active participation in trial proceedings. The Court’s overall design included a series of tensions and conflicts that would emerge during the years covered by the Congo trials. In addition to the cultural contrast between The Hague and the Congo, there were tensions between the strictly legal courtroom proceedings and the inevitable political entanglements facing an international court.

Leaving aside the narrow framing of the international courtroom, this chapter focuses on the Congolese district of Ituri, caught in the crossfire of larger national and international forces. The collapse of the sprawling Congo nation in the 1990s prompted outside intrusions from Rwanda and Uganda, spreading conflicts across the entire territory. Military stalemates stirred competing national rebel movements, with patronage relations to Congo’s eastern neighbors and to global trading networks. In the midst of country-wide conflict and regional politics, the ICC Prosecutor selected a single outlying district for his criminal investigation. While the trials would reduce complex events and causes to the actions taken by three men placed on trial, the wider matrix of forces continued to shape the overall conflicts. Under international pressure to rebuild the Congolese state, the main national factions bargained over power-sharing political transitions. The fate of local players in Ituri remained outside the national discourse, even as it drew attention from the UN and NGOs about increasing ethnic violence.

This chapter examines the main trends in the international parodies of Ibsen from the late 1880s and ’90s, both those intended primarily for print and for the stage. Proceeding from Margaret Rose’s model of parody as ‘comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material’, the chapter examines the parodic treatments of Ibsen as a retrospective measure of his reception context: where his contemporaries in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and Germany saw him crossing the lines of conventional drama, lines that the respondents either were invested in defending or simply calling attention to in order to understand through parodic distortion the contributions Ibsen was making. Two areas that provoked repeated parodic treatment had to do with varying international perceptions of the dramas’ cultural specificity and their generic indeterminacy.

An initial glimpse into the ICC courtroom introduces the lead participants on the first day of the Court’s first trial. This chapter contrasts the modern courtroom in The Hague with culturally distant conflicts arising in the Congo, which tested the Court’s stamina for implementing international legal norms. The Court’s legal mission was formulated in the Rome Statute, a treaty accepted after 1998 by some 120 member states, building on earlier court models from Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Its moral scope contained broad ideals: promoting long-term peace and justice by prosecuting those deemed most responsible for atrocities that “shock the conscience of humanity.” Among the ICC’s innovations was a commitment to elevate victims of mass atrocities, enabling their active participation in trial proceedings. The Court’s overall design included a series of tensions and conflicts that would emerge during the years covered by the Congo trials. In addition to the cultural contrast between The Hague and the Congo, there were tensions between the strictly legal courtroom proceedings and the inevitable political entanglements facing an international court.

Leaving aside the narrow framing of the international courtroom, this chapter focuses on the Congolese district of Ituri, caught in the crossfire of larger national and international forces. The collapse of the sprawling Congo nation in the 1990s prompted outside intrusions from Rwanda and Uganda, spreading conflicts across the entire territory. Military stalemates stirred competing national rebel movements, with patronage relations to Congo’s eastern neighbors and to global trading networks. In the midst of country-wide conflict and regional politics, the ICC Prosecutor selected a single outlying district for his criminal investigation. While the trials would reduce complex events and causes to the actions taken by three men placed on trial, the wider matrix of forces continued to shape the overall conflicts. Under international pressure to rebuild the Congolese state, the main national factions bargained over power-sharing political transitions. The fate of local players in Ituri remained outside the national discourse, even as it drew attention from the UN and NGOs about increasing ethnic violence.