Books on the topic 'Last Great Ape (Organization)'

The human propensity for religious behavior and, eventually, religious organization is the by-product of natural selection working on the neuroanatomy of low-sociality and non-group-forming hominins to become more social and group oriented as a necessary strategy for survival on the African savanna. Using cladistic analysis to determine the behavioral and organizational propensities of the last common ancestor to present-day great apes and humans’ hominin ancestors, while at the same time engaging in comparative neuroanatomy of extant great-ape and human brains, the neurological basis of religion is isolated. Religion emerged under early selection pressures to make hominins more social and able to form stable groups. From the combination of dramatically increased emotionality and cognitive functioning, the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens approximately 300,000 year ago created the neurological platform for religious behaviors among early humans.

Cladistic analysis is employed on behavioral and organizational patterns among present-day great apes that, because of their genetic closeness to humans, can be used as a surrogate for making inferences about the behavior and organizational propensities of the last common ancestor to great apes, hominins, and humans. A series of preadaptations among great apes for language, emotionality, mother–infant bonding, life history characteristics, propensities for play, and nonharem/promiscuous mating represents one source of information on the nature of the last common ancestor. Moreover, a set of behavioral propensities among all great apes adds to the body of information that can be used to make inferences about the nature of the last common ancestors, hominins, and humans. Thus, it is now possible to make inferences about the biological nature of human behavior and organizational tendencies that are less speculative than earlier analyses of human nature.

Using the same criteria as that employed to assess imperial interoperability in Chapter 3, this chapter examines how Britain, India, and the dominions raised their armies and worked together during the Second World War. It finds that, in spite of some terrible defeats, such as Singapore and Dieppe, and some difficult personal relationships between generals, the armies of the empire worked quite well together. This owed much to decades of common training, organization, and staff procedures. The ability of the empire’s armies to work together contrasts sharply with the inability of any of them to work smoothly with American formations, as the South Africans discovered in Italy and the Australians discovered in the Pacific. The Americans spoke a different staff language than the one that the armies of the British Empire had learned over the four-plus decades of the imperial army project.

This chapter analyses the text and epigraphy of two monumental inscriptions in Rome; both are important sources of information on landholding in early medieval Italy, and both shed light on the development of the Patrimony of St Peter and the evolving power of the popes as de facto rulers of Rome and its environs in the seventh and eighth centuries. Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) commissioned the earlier of the two inscriptions for the basilica of St Paul, where it still survives (MEC I, XII.1). The inscription preserves the full text of a letter from Gregory to Felix, rector of the Appian patrimony (Ep. XIV.14). It ordered Felix to transfer the large estate (massa) of Aquae Salviae, with all its farms (fundi) as well as other nearby properties, from the patrimony into the direct control of the basilica of St Paul in order to fund the provision of its lighting; it was one of the last letters that Gregory wrote. The patron of the second inscription was Gregory’s eighth-century namesake and successor, Pope Gregory II (715–31), indignus servus (MEC I, XIV.1). This one is fixed in the portico of the basilica of St Peter, where it stands alongside another eighth-century inscription, namely, the epitaph of Pope Hadrian I that was commissioned by Charlemagne after Hadrian’s death in 795. Gregory II’s inscription also records a donation in Patrimonio Appiae, this time to provide oil for the lights of St Peter’s. This chapter investigates the form, content, and historical context of the production and display of these two inscriptions, analysing parallels and differences between them. It considers what they reveal about estate organization and the development of the territorial power of the papacy in this formative period, as well as the role of Gregory the Great as an exemplar for the early eighth-century popes.

As the guidelines of human attitudes and behavior, the values are extremely important for individuals and for the society. All major societal flaws (violence, war, aggression, criminal, delinquency, lawlessness, corruption, ecological devastation, terrorism, totalitarianism, exploitation, misery, poverty, hunger, starvation, ignorance, fanaticism and others) are result of behavior that is as odd with basic human values. Thus, a value-congruent behavior is a necessary condition for stable and successful society and the strengthening of value-aligned behavior is a planetary task. Psychological research convincingly demonstrated that the values represent and occupy a great field of attitudes and beliefs, one of the three great domains of the psychological trilogy (personality; attitudes, beliefs and values; cognitive abilities). In psychology, we need a clear and elaborated theoretical explanation of values. A comprehensive theoretical model of values (CTV) was therefore developed in last decades. It comprises all important aspects of the values: the structure, hierarchical organization, development, cross-cultural validity and differences, connections to other important psychological and behavioral domains and the role of values in our life. The knowledge of values is necessary, yet it is not enough in order to cope with all risks of individual and societal welfare. Another requirement is therefore crucial, namely the abovementioned alignment of values and behavior. Values that are not accomplished or realized in our behavior are useless. Thus, the research of value–behavior relations is extremely important in psychology. It is one of essential pillars in the scientific basis of a stable society and has therefore tremendous practical consequences. It also brings us closer to the perennial question connected with the role of values in our life: does the behavior that is aligned and congruent with values make us happier or not. Thus, the final part of my lecture will be focused on the empirical answers to that question. And, as research results are proving, the life and behavior which are congruent with the values factually correlate with the happiness and general wellbeing.

The North American Arctic was one of the last regions on Earth to be settled by humans, due to its extreme climate, limited range of resources, and remoteness from populated areas. Despite these factors, it holds a rich and complex history relating to Inuit, Iñupiat, Inuvialuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples and their ancestors. The artifacts, dwellings, and food remains of these ancient peoples are remarkably well preserved due to cold temperatures and permafrost, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct their lifeways with great accuracy. Furthermore, the combination of modern Elders’ traditional knowledge with the region’s high-resolution ethnographic record allows past peoples’ lives to be reconstructed to a level simply not possible elsewhere. Combined, these factors yield an archaeological record of global significance—the Arctic provides ideal case studies relating to issues as diverse as the impacts of climate change on human societies, the complex process of interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the dynamic relationships between environment, economy, social organization, and ideology in hunter-gatherer societies. In this book, each Arctic cultural tradition is described in detail, with up-to-date coverage of recent interpretations of all aspects of their lifeways. Additional chapters cover broad themes applicable to the full range of arctic cultures, such as trade, stone tool technology, ancient DNA research, and the relationship between archaeology and modern arctic communities. The resulting volume, written by the region’s leading researchers, is by far the most comprehensive coverage of North American arctic archaeology ever assembled.

[Introducción]. Con motivo de los 40 años transcurridos desde la Declaración de Alma-Ata, el 11 y 12 de diciembre de 2017 la Organización Panamericana de la Salud (OPS) convocó en Quito el Foro Regional “Salud Universal en el Siglo XXI: 40 años de Alma-Ata”. Como parte de este movimiento regional la Directora de la OPS, la Dra. Carissa F. Etienne tomó la iniciativa de crear una Comisión de Alto Nivel, denominada “Salud Universal en el Siglo XXI: 40 años de Alma-Ata”, presidida por la Dra. Michelle Bachelet y el Embajador Sr. Néstor Méndez, y conformada por un grupo interdisciplinario de expertos regionales. Entre ellos había representantes de la comunidad, la academia y actores políticos, como ex ministros de salud y líderes de sindicatos y movimientos de diferentes grupos sociales. El objetivo de la Comisión fue elaborar recomendaciones para la Directora de OPS que permitieran hacer efectivo el derecho a la salud de las personas, entendido como un derecho humano fundamental, a partir del análisis de los avances y los desafíos que tienen los sistemas de salud en la Región de las Américas. El presente documento refleja el posicionamiento de la Comisión en torno a la Atención Primaria de Salud (APS) y la búsqueda de soluciones para hacer efectivo el derecho a la salud, además del enfoque utilizado para orientar el debate, el análisis y las recomendaciones sobre cómo garantizar este derecho. El documento se basa en los reportes elaborados por cinco grupos temáticos: a) modelo de atención de salud, b) modelo institucional, c) modelo de financiamiento, d) salud y protección social y e) recursos humanos de salud, los cuales están disponibles como anexos a este informe. Estos grupos temáticos fueron liderados por los miembros de la Comisión, y reunieron a un gran número de expertos académicos y movimientos sociales de diferentes países de la Región. La Comisión presenta diez recomendaciones para lograr la salud para todas y todos en la Región de las Américas en el contexto del siglo XXI. [Introduction]. To mark the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Alma-Ata, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) convened the Regional Forum “Universal Health in the 21st Century: 40 Years of Alma-Ata” on December 11-12, 2017, in Quito, Ecuador. As part of this regional movement, PAHO Director Dr. Carissa F. Etienne convened a High-Level Commission: Universal Health in the 21st Century: 40 Years of Alma-Ata, chaired by Dr. Michelle Bachelet and Ambassador Néstor Mendez, and made up of an interdisciplinary group of regional experts, including representatives from communities and academia, as well as political actors, such as former health ministers, trade union leaders, and representatives of different social movements. The objective of the Commission was to develop recommendations for the PAHO Director on how to give effect to the right to health as a fundamental human right, based on an analysis of the progress and challenges faced by health systems in the Region of the Americas. This document reflects the Commission’s position regarding primary health care (PHC), the search for solutions to ensure the right to health, and the approach taken in discussions, analysis, and recommendations on how to guarantee this right. It is based on reports prepared by the five thematic groups addressing: a) health care model, b) institutional model, c) financing model, d) health and social protection, and e) human resources for health (see annexes to the present report). The thematic groups were led by members of the Commission, bringing together a great number of academic experts and social movements from different countries in the Region. In this report, the Commission presents 10 recommendations for achieving health for all in the Region of the Americas in the 21st century.

It’s time for a new story of our origins. One reason is that there a great deal of new evidence about what humans are like and the conditions that shaped human evolution. Another is that the thinking on human evolution has shifted. Evolutionists recognize that humans are very different from other animals, and they have been working to explain the different evolutionary path that humans took. There are still many gaps in the story, but this book describes seven points in our ancestors’ tale and explains the evidence behind these descriptions. The story begins seven million years ago, with the life of our ape ancestors, which were also the ancestors of today’s chimpanzees and bonobos. The second point is three million years ago with an ape that walked upright and lived outside the forest. Then follows a description of the life of early humans who lived one and a half million years ago. At the fourth point, 100,000 years ago, humans lived in Africa who were physically very similar to modern humans. The fifth is 30,000 years ago, during the last ice age, when our ancestors had evolved more complex cultures. The sixth is the period of accelerating cultural evolution that began as the planet started to recover from this ice age. Finally, beginning in the 1700s, there is the transformational period we are in now, which we call “modern times.” The style of this book is unusual for a science book because it has narrative sections that illustrate the lives of our ancestors and the problems they faced.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, examining the imaginative and improvisational interpretations of law by which Indonesians navigate dispossession.

Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in this volume examine old and new kinds of media and their meanings; new modes of transmission in fields such as Jewish music; and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances. Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish. Other essays discuss paratexts in the East, print cultures in the West, and the organization of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias.