Books on the topic 'Placebo (Musical group)'

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates the role of music in Christian practice and history across contemporary world Christianities (including chapters focused on communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia). Using ethnography, history, and musical analysis, it explores Christian groups as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book traces five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias, music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume approaches Christian musical practices as powerful windows into the ways music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) among places. It also pays attention to the ways Christian musical practices encompass and negotiate deeply rooted values. The volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural practices, narratives, and values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.

Community musical theatre projects have played important roles in engaging young people of diverse ethnicities in multicultural and religious Malaysia to cross borders, deconstruct stereotypes, appreciate differences, and build interethnic peace. This essay provides insights into the strategies and dialogic approaches employed in two such community musical theatre projects that promote peace-building in Penang. The emphasis is on the making of musical theatre through participatory research, collaboration, ensemble work, and group discussions about alternative history, social relationships and cultural change. The projects also stress partnerships with the multiethnic stakeholders, communities, traditional artists, university students, and school teachers who are involved in the projects. Equally important is the creation of a safe space for intercultural dialogue, skill training, research, and assessments to take place; this a working space that allows for free and open participation, communication, play, and creative expressions for all participants.

The rapid pace of technological change over the last decade, particularly in relation to social media and network connectivity, has deeply affected the ways in which individuals, groups, and institutions interact socially: This includes how music is made, learned, and taught globally in all manner of diverse contexts. The multiple ways in which social media and social networking intersect with the everyday life of the musical learner are at the heart of this book. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning opens up an international discussion of what it means to be a music learner, teacher, producer, consumer, individual, and community member in an age of technologically-mediated relationships that continue to break down the limits of geographical, cultural, political, and economic place. This book is aimed at those who teach and train music educators as well as current and future music educators. Its primary goal is to draw attention to the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined by examining questions, issues, concerns, and potentials this raises for formal, informal, and non-formal musical learning and engagement in a networked society. It provides an international perspective on a variety of related issues from scholars who are leaders in the field of music education, new media, communications, and sociology in the emerging field of social media.

The Nordic countries, a group of countries spanning a large area of northern Europe and the North Atlantic, present unique natural and cultural environments in which popular music has come to play a significant role. Research on the region’s music has largely followed national narratives and ignored more complex geographies and transcultural issues. This first handbook of music in the Nordic countries explores the significance of popular music in the history of the region, with implications for broader debates about the region’s uniqueness and its future. The chapters highlight music’s place in media and tourism industries, in sustaining exotic images of the North, but also in more serious issues such as racism and environmentalism. Many of the chapters show evidence of nationalist and xenophobic responses to emerging transnational to emerging transnational developments. The handbook examines how these dynamics shape music and its place in history, education, and in public performance, from street performances to festivals, and beyond to mass media ceremonial events. The case studies illustrate popular music’s significance in evolving lifestyles, technologies, and institutions in modernity.

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. This book seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, the book examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. The book studies this sound in detail and in its context. It offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, the book treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, it recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

With the growth of free improvisation as a field of study within academic institutions there is a need to investigate the fundamental musical and psychological processes that lie behind this creative form of social activity. This chapter presents interviews with eight expert free-improvising musicians. The interviews focused on how the participants developed their creative skills, and offer insights into their learning processes. Thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews highlights three main learning modes: autodidactism, mentoring and learning in a social context. These areas of learning influenced conceptual and practical approaches to performance, and participants emphasised the importance of mentoring and group learning as critical elements in their becoming improvising musicians. The experiences of the interviewees reveal the socially constructed nature of musical development and creativity, and the nature of the social environments in which learning can take place.

From the brilliant Benjamin Franklin to the dauntless Ragged Dick and the high-kicking Jack Kelley, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long commanded attention as symbols of struggle and success. But what do we really know about them? Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys places this idealized occupational group at the center of the American experience, analyzing their dual role as economic actors and cultural symbols over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform. The book chronicles the career of hawkers and carriers from the 1830s to the 1930s in all parts of the country and on the railroads that linked them. It examines the place of girls in the trade and the distinctive experience and representation of black, immigrant, and disabled news peddlers. Based on a wealth of primary sources, including rare and iconic visual material, Crying the News reveals the formative role of newsboys in corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. It documents scores of forgotten newsboy strikes and unions, and their affiliation with the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, and Industrial Workers of the World. The result is an epic history of print capitalism and working-class childhood from the pavement up.

For Urfalli Suryanis, an ethno-religious migrant community from Turkish Urfa/Edessa, chant is of paramount importance. Using Syriac, the fugitive Christians who escaped post-WWI persecution continue to practise this ancient oral musical tradition in their new home in Syria. This minority group has a communally agreed conception of identity that should be understood in its proper set of terms. Their conception of Suryaniness may best be seen through particular chants from the Edessan school of Syriac chant they practice in St. George’s Syrian Orthodox Church of Aleppo. Focusing on an example from Great Lent, this chapter traces the local terms of an Urfalli Suryaniness that is believed, lived, constructed, and performed, around a unique blessing. The chapter contextualizes expressions of Suryaniness in the local terms of being and belonging, where the Suryani ideal is manifested in the combination of demographic existence and a performative reconstructive process that relates to faith, place, time, history, memory, and language.

What does music making “look” like when viewed from a leisure studies perspective and the point of view of a drummer as participant observer? This chapter reports on four years of ethnographic research in Liverpool during which the author participated in a number of popular music groups as a drummer. The chapter is presented as an EP-style track listing that spotlights sites of music making and leisure practices in the production of this characterful city. In addition to the neglected experiences of drummers in popular music and leisure studies, it argues that rehearsal spaces also offer opportunities to explore the relations of music making, leisure, cities, place, regeneration, and social identities. Throughout, the chapter shows how a leisure perspective opens up different views of music making in terms of social, historical, political, and economic relations. Such a perspective, especially from a drummer’s-eye view, showcases the worthiness of researching music making as leisure.

This chapter describes the recordings of the Nashville Washboard Band. In the spring of 1942 Fisk University music professor John W. Work III welcomed a quartet of street musicians called the Nashville Washboard Band into his home. This visit marked the first of two. The second took place that July when the group, bringing along a fifth player, returned to make their sole recordings. The group was a frequent sight in downtown Nashville, playing less than a hundred feet from the War Memorial Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry broadcast its weekly radio show. When not stationed there or beside the Andrew Jackson Hotel nearby, they entertained the lunchtime crowd that gathered on the south steps of the state capitol. The group's four principal members all lived within walking distance of these spots where they toted their largely climate-resistant instruments. They also offered a repertory bound to pique the attention of passersby.

This chapter examines how country and western musicians regularly navigate the frontier between self-expression and community expression, and such navigation is a defining characteristic of the folk medium of country and western music. In New England, this frontier occupies a space between a show and a dance—what is referred to as the country and western event, and which is a defining characteristic that distinguishes New England country and western from its other regional variations. At the country and western event, the performing group and the audience participate in negotiations between what the band wants to play and what the audience wants to hear. Today, the line between the show and the dance is thoroughly blurred, though some vestiges of the old formal style hang on in places like the Canadian-American Club of Watertown, Massachusetts.

This discussion considers the utopian/dystopian dialect in relation to Acid House culture in Leeds during the late 1980s. It utilizes an ethnographic, autoethnographic, and fictional/nonfictional narrative method to illustrate the key signifiers and relations of Acid House culture, including utopian ideals, social class, and the significance of geographical location. Overall the chapter serves to illustrate the significance of individual and group identities, the importance of embodiment and the changing intersection of social constructs such as class. Chas Critcher had defined Acid House as “no more that music associated with LSD,” but this chapter highlights the richly textured sense of feeling, space, place, and social relations that demonstrate Acid House was something much more than that. This chapter also has a direct association with the themes of agency, identity, meaning, and cultural appropriation.

This chapter examines the role of the traditional dance of the Skolt Sámi in Finland in constructing and producing identity. The Skolt Sámi are a culturally and linguistically distinct group of the Eastern Sámi. Originally they lived in a widespread area, from Lake Inari eastward to the Russian city of Murmansk. Today most Skolts live near Lake Inari in Finnish Lapland, where they were relocated after World War II. The multiple identities of the Skolts are actualized in many ways—including in language, music, and clothing—but perhaps most distinctively in their dancing. Their dancing traditions, especially the quadrille, separate them from other Sámi in Finland and connect them to Northern Russian culture. Despite their dramatic past, the Skolts have preserved their culture and distinctive identities. The quadrille has a special place among the Skolts, and it continues in a new context as a part of their embodied culture.

This introductory chapter first describes the artists featured in this volume. These twelve musicians, singers, and groups recorded between 1934 and 1942—seven black and five white—provide a baker's dozen of folksongs and traditional tunes. Apart from their surpassing artistic gifts, these individuals illuminate an America rich with local creativity. They resided in such places as Salyersville, Kentucky; Byhalia, Mississippi; and Salem, Virginia. They also confined their music making largely to their own communities. Sometimes they sang on playgrounds, sometimes while chopping cotton, and sometimes from behind bars. The remainder of the chapter discusses sociologist and a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Charles S. Johnson; the origins of the present volume; and the author's recollections of the wonderful, frustrating, frightening, and transporting moments with the songs and singers that comprised the present volume.

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

Over 120 scholarly articles This work provides a compendium of the best available scholarship on Mexico’s rich history and culture. An international group of leading authors, including well-known Mexican scholars, reveals new or little-known dimensions of this past or confirms with new sources previous interpretations of the Mexican experience. Themes include the expected topics of politics and economics, combined with powerful articles on biography, environment, gender, and culture, including music, art, and cinema. Unique to this work are the articles on digital sources, such as digitized archives and photographic collections, with information on accessing and using them for historical research. Articles add to topical considerations such as gender and ethnicity, place Mexico into wider dimensions such as the Atlantic World and the Pacific Rim, and offer conclusions on natural phenomena such as flora (yielding pulque) and volcanic eruptions (in a farmer's corn patch). Authors enlighten readers with assessments of Spanish-Aztec warfare, indigenous mastery of the Spanish legal system to bend it to their purposes, songs prohibited by the Inquisition, and more than one hundred other fascinating aspects of the nation's history. Coverage of individuals includes widely known figures such as the monumental Benito Juárez, the hero and traitor Antonio López de Santa Anna, Porfirio Díaz, and Lázaro Cárdenas, as well as several outstanding women whose contributions have helped shape Mexican culture and politics. The Tlatelolco massacre of demonstrators in 1968 receives careful assessment and other essays examine the changing popular and political attitudes that followed. The tragedy ushered in events that created Mexico's electoral democracy confirmed in the 2000 presidential election. Written in clear explanatory prose and incorporating the latest research, the encyclopedia's articles offer a marvelous narrative of use to scholars, students, and the general reader.

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.