Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2020

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  • Publication
    A Bridge Between: Spanish Benedictine Missionary Women in Australia
    ( 2020)
    Massam, Katharine
    This sensitive account of Spanish Benedictine women at an Aboriginal mission in Western Australia is poignant and disturbing. Notable for its ecumenical spirit, depth of research and deep engagement with the subject, A Bridge Between is a model of how religious history, in its broader bearings, can be written. — Graeme Davison, Monash University With great insight and care, A Bridge Between presents a sympathetic but not uncritical history of the lives of individuals who have often been invisible. The story of the nuns at New Norcia is a timely contribution to Australia's religious history. Given the findings of the Royal Commission, it will be widely read both within and beyond the academy. History is, here, a spiritual discipline, and an exercise in hope and reconciliation. — Laura Rademaker, The Australian National University A Bridge Between is the first account of the Benedictine women who worked at New Norcia and the first book-length exploration of twentieth-century life in the Western Australian mission town. From the founding of a grand school intended for 'nativas’, through links to Mexico and Paraguay then Ireland, India and Belgium, as well as to their house in the Kimberley, and a network of villages near Burgos in the north of Spain, this is a complex international history. A Bridge Between gathers a powerful, fragmented story from the margins of the archive, recalling the Aboriginal women who joined the community in the 1950s and the compelling reunion of missionaries and former students in 2001. By tracing the all-but-forgotten story of the community of Benedictine women who were central to the experience of the mission for many Aboriginal families in the twentieth century, this book lays a foundation for further work.
  • Publication
    A Cautious New Approach: China's Growing Trilateral Aid Cooperation
    ( 2020)
    Zhang, Denghua
    ‘As a student of international relations and a former diplomat, Zhang brings the insights of a practitioner and the eye of scholar to explain why Chinese actors choose to engage in aid cooperation with traditional donors in the Asia-Pacific. This book is among the first to take a holistic approach to understanding the motivations of the many agencies involved in China’s aid program, and it will challenge the expectations of many readers.’ —Dr Graeme Smith, The Australian National University ‘This book breaks new ground by examining a little-known dimension of China’s foreign policy: trilateral aid cooperation. Denghua Zhang sets this highly original analysis in the context of the new assertiveness of Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping, the China International Development Cooperation Agency established in 2018, and the Belt and Road Initiative, which now serves as the framework for Chinese overseas aid and engagement. At a time when the debate in the West about the rise of China has intensified, not always knowledgeably, this book fills an important gap in our understanding of China in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.’ —Dr Stewart Firth, The Australian National University ‘This thoroughly researched work examines trilateral cooperation as a new and interesting aspect of China’s growing international aid program, and as a window into the changing nature of that program as well as the wider foreign policy in which it is embedded. The broad themes and topics discussed are clearly significant, ultimately touching on one of the most important international issues of our time, the implications of the rise of China for a long-established Western-dominated international system.’ —Prof. Terence Smith-Wesley, University of Hawai‘i
  • Publication
    A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth:
    ( 2020)
    Byron Smith, Joshua;Henley, Georgia
    A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to provide an updated scholarly introduction to all aspects of his work. Arguably the most influential secular writer of medieval Britain, Geoffrey (d. 1154) popularized Arthurian literature and left an indelible mark on European romance, history, and genealogy. Despite this outsized influence, Geoffrey’s own life, background, and motivations are little understood. The volume situates his life and works within their immediate historical context and frames them within current critical discussion across the humanities. By necessity, this volume concentrates primarily on Geoffrey’s own life and times, with the reception of his works covered by a series of short encyclopaedic overviews, organized by language, that serve as guides to further reading. Readership: A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth should appeal to anyone with an interest in Arthurian literature, Celtic studies, and medieval history.
  • Publication
    A Conceptual Commentary on Midrash Leviticus Rabbah: Value Concepts in Rabbinic Thought
    ( 2020)
    Kadushin, Max
    In this book Kadushin offers a running commentary on sections of Leviticus Rabbah. His goal is not only to explicate individual sections of this Late Antique midrashic work, but also to highlight the basic conceptual framework within which the rabbis worked. Kadushin's commentary highlights the indeterminacy of belief and the genuine emphatic trends that distinguish rabbinic Judaism while also calling attention to the special character of the rabbinic religious experience which he had earlier described as normal mysticism.
  • Publication
    A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming:
    ( 2020)
    Johnson, Dale R.
    For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western. A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has resonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.
  • Publication
    A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani:
    ( 2020)
    Estigarribia, Bruno
    The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically indigenous majority, and since 1992, it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English-language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description of the language's phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation. Examples come from literary sources and film, scholastic grammars, online newspapers, blogs and other publications, publicly accessible social media data, and the author's own fieldwork. They are specifically chosen to reflect the diversity of uses of modern-day Guarani, with the aim of providing a realistic picture of the current state of the language in twenty-first century Paraguay. This book will benefit researchers and students of Guarani and Paraguay, such as linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, historians, or cultural studies and literature scholars. Typologically-oriented researchers and students of other Tupian and Amerindian languages will have reliable data for comparative purposes. Given the unique socio-historical profile of Guarani, researchers in fields such as language contact, bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, language education, and literacy will find this book a valuable reference resource.
  • Publication
    A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani:
    ( 2020)
    Estigarribia, Bruno
    The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically indigenous majority, and since 1992, it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English-language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description of the language’s phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation. Examples come from literary sources and film, scholastic grammars, online newspapers, blogs and other publications, publicly accessible social media data, and the author’s own fieldwork. They are specifically chosen to reflect the diversity of uses of modern-day Guarani, with the aim of providing a realistic picture of the current state of the language in twenty-first century Paraguay. This book will benefit researchers and students of Guarani and Paraguay, such as linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, historians, or cultural studies and literature scholars. Typologically-oriented researchers and students of other Tupian and Amerindian languages will have reliable data for comparative purposes. Given the unique socio-historical profile of Guarani, researchers in fields such as language contact, bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, language education, and literacy will find this book a valuable reference resource.
  • Publication
    A History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods:
    ( 2020)
    Rubenstein, Jeffrey
    This study analyzes the history of the festival of Sukkot during the second temple and rabbinic periods. While the Jerusalem temple stood, Sukkot was the preeminent festival and primary pilgrimage. The cult observed the festal week with sacrifices, processions, fertility rites and other temple rituals. The destruction of the second temple in 70 CE left rabbinic Judaism with the question of how to celebrate Sukkot, a temple festival, without a temple. Which elements were retained from the legacy of cultic rituals and which were abandoned? What does the rabbinic Sukkot festival share with its antecedent of temple times and in what does it differ? How did Sukkot evolve in the later rabbinic periods as memories of the temple receded? Rubenstein's book address these issues by tracing the development of the festival over the course of a millennium.
  • Publication
    A History of the Mishnaic Law of Agriculture: Kilayim: Translation and Exegesis
    ( 2020)
    Mandelbaum, Irving
    This volume presents a translation and exegesis of Mishnah's Tractate Kilayim (Mixed Species) in an effort to discover the original meaning of the tractate. This volume aims to identify the sense which the formulators of the tractate's laws wished their rules to convey.
  • Publication
    A History of the United Jewish Appeal:
    ( 2020)
    Raphael, Marc Lee
    The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was the primary Jewish philanthropic umbrella organization until it was combined with another philanthropic organization in 1999. Using original archival research, this volume traces the history of the UJA from its origins to 1982.
  • Publication
    A Journey to Inner Africa:
    ( 2020)
    Kovalevsky, Egor
    In 1847, Russian military engineer and diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile's climate and natural resources. A Journey to Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.
  • Publication
    A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law:
    ( 2020)
    Love, Jeffrey;Larsson, Inger;Djärv, Ulrika::0000-0002-9941-8348::600;Peel, Christine;Simensen, Erik
    This volume is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of medieval Scandinavia. This polyglot dictionary draws on the vast and vibrant range of vernacular legal terminology found in medieval Scandinavian texts – terminology which yields valuable insights into the quotidian realities of crime and retribution; the processes, application and execution of laws; and the cultural and societal concerns underlying the development and promulgation of such laws. Legal texts constitute an unparalleled – and often untapped – source of information for those studying the literature, languages and history of medieval and Viking Age Scandinavia. The Lexicon is a welcome contribution to the study of medieval Scandinavia on two counts: firstly, it makes accessible a wealth of vernacular historical documents for an English-speaking audience. Secondly, it presents legal terminologies that span the languages and geographies of medieval Scandinavia, drawing on twenty-five legal texts composed in Old Swedish, Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Gutnish and Old Faroese. By collating and juxtaposing legal terms, the Lexicon thus offers its readers a fascinating, comprehensive window into the legal milieu of medieval Scandinavia as a unified whole. It is in this respect that A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law differs from the other major lexica that came before it: where relevant, it gathers closely related terms from multiple Nordic languages beneath single headwords within single entries. This approach illuminates the differences (and similarities) in usage of specific lexical items and legal concepts across geographic areas and through time. This dictionary contains over 6000 Nordic headwords, and is laid out as a standard reference work. It is easily navigable, with a clear structure to each entry, providing English equivalents; textual references; phrases in which headwords frequently appear; cross-references to aid readers in locating synonyms or cognate terms within the lexicon; and references to published works. Roughly one quarter of the headwords supply semantic analysis and detailed information on the textual and historical contexts within which a term might appear, which help the reader to engage with the broader legal concepts underlying specific terms. The Lexicon is thus designed to provide its readers not only with succinct single definitions of Norse legal terms, but with a sense of the wider Scandinavian legal landscape and worldview within which these concepts were developed.
  • Publication
    A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
    ( 2020)
    Hirschler, Konrad
    This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus.
  • Publication
    A Political Science Manifesto for the Age of Populism: Challenging Growth, Markets, Inequality and Resentment
    ( 2020)
    David M. Ricci
    Populism and authoritarian-populist parties have surged in the 21st century. In the United States, Donald Trump appears to have become the poster president for the surge. David M. Ricci, in this call to arms, thinks Trump is symptomatic of the changes that have caused a crisis among Americans - namely, mass economic and creative destruction: automation, outsourcing, deindustrialization, globalization, privatization, financialization, digitalization, and the rise of temporary jobs - all breeding resentment. Rather than dwelling on symptoms, Ricci focuses on the root of our nation's problems. Thus, creative destruction, aiming at perpetual economic growth, encouraged by neoliberalism, creates the economic inequality that fuels resentment and leads to increased populism. Ricci urges political scientists to highlight this destruction meaningfully and substantively, to use empirical realism to put human beings back into politics. Ricci's sensible argument conveys a sense of political urgency, grappling with real-world problems and working to transform abstract speculations into tangible, useful tools. The result is a passionate book, important not only to political scientists, but to anyone who cares about public life
  • Publication
    A Populist Exception?: The 2017 New Zealand General Election
    ( 2020)
    Vowles, Jack;Curtin, Jennifer
    The ‘spectre of populism’ might be an apt description for what is happening in different parts of the world, but does it apply to New Zealand? Immediately after New Zealand’s 2017 general election, populist party New Zealand First gained a pivotal role in a coalition with the Labour Party, leading some international observers to suggest it represented a populist capture of the government. The leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters, justified his support for Labour as necessary to allow capitalism to ‘regain … its human face’. The new prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, spoke of a kinder, inclusive politics. This book draws on the 2017 New Zealand Election Study to uncover New Zealanders’ political attitudes and preferences post-election. Its authors ask: is New Zealand now A Populist Exception? Through detailed empirical analyses of how populism and authoritarianism affected vote choice, opinions about immigration, satisfaction with democracy and the relevance of gender and indigeneity to these issues, this book finds that New Zealand politics today does not reflect the international trend toward ideological polarisation and electoral volatility. The authors argue that inclusive forms of populism can be pluralist if a leader’s rhetorical approach recognises ‘the people’ as diverse and encompassing. A Populist Exception? concludes that although populism has long been a strong current in New Zealand history, contemporary New Zealand exhibits a moderate form of populism, with liberal and pluralist values in balance with a strong commitment to majoritarian democracy.
  • Publication
    A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry
    ( 2020)
    Bulut, Ergin
    A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.
  • Publication
    A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture
    ( 2020)
    Sánchez, Carlos Alberto
    Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of "violence" as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that "violence" itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize "brutality" as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror-all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible.
  • Publication
    A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory
    ( 2020)
    Frank, Adam J. ; Wilson, Elizabeth A.
    "The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins's affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins's other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins's work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies."
  • Publication
    A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli
    ( 2020)
    Gray, Alyssa M.
    This book is a targetted study engaging the widely known phenomenon that many tractates in the Babylonian Talmud exhibit broad similarities to their counterparts in the Palestinian Talmud. Gray argues that this is the result of the production of an "early Talmud" in Palestine that made its way to Babylonia, where it formed later Babylonian editors used it in building the Babylonian Talmud.
  • Publication
    A Translation of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Wang Pi’s Commentary:
    ( 2020)
    Lin, Paul J.
    During the Spring-Autumn period (722–420 BCE) and the time of the Warring States (480–222 CE), China was in great turmoil. Intellectuals and social reformers sifted through their wisdom and knowledge of China’s experiences up to then, attempting to find a solution to their situation. The Tao Te Ching, one of the foremost products of the era, is a metaphysical book, a source of the highest political thought. Many readers have found in it representations of the highest ideals of human endeavors. Yet given its likely oral origin and the technological limitations of its early textual transmission, the Tao Te Ching raises numerous questions related to authorship, date of origin, internal organization, textual coherence, and editorial history. Of the scores of translations of the Tao Te Ching, the great majority are based on the edition prepared by the third-century scholar Wang Pi. Wang’s profound commentary is itself a deeply influential text in the development of Taoist thought. Paul Lin presents the commentary, otherwise unavailable in English, in the form of footnotes accompanying his meticulous rendition of the Taoist classic.