Books on the topic 'Sign Language Understanding'

This chapter argues for specific actions needed for language planning and language policies involving sign languages and Deaf communities, based on the understanding of what sign languages are, who the signers are, where they sign, and the sign language transmission and maintenance mechanisms of the Deaf community. The first section presents an overview of sign languages and their users, highlighting that sign languages are often used in contexts where most people use spoken languages. The second section addresses the functions, roles, and status of sign languages in relation to spoken languages, as well as the relationship between Deaf communities and hearing society. The medical view of deafness, which has a significant impact on language policies for Deaf people, is critically considered. The third section offers examples of language policies, especially related to the use of sign languages in education, and an agenda for future work on sign language policy and planning.

Research in code-switching, undertaken against the backdrop of very negative attitudes towards the concurrent use of two or more languages within the same conversation, has traditionally been geared towards rehabilitating this form of language use. From being seen as a random phenomenon reflecting the user’s lack of competence, code-switching is currently seen as sign of an advanced level of competence in the languages involved and as serving different interactional functions. However, as a result of its success, the research tradition now faces an entirely new challenge: Where to from here? How can research in code-switching continue to be relevant and interesting now it has largely achieved its original purpose? This books seeks to answer this programmatic question. The author argues that, in order to overcome this challenge, the notion of bilingualism (multilingualism) itself must be redefined. Bilingualism must be seen as consisting of multiple interactional practices. Accordingly, research in bilingualism and in code-switching in particular must aim to describe each of those practices in its own right. In other word, the aim should be an empirically based understanding of the various interactional practices involving the use of two or more languages. In the book, this new research direction is illustrated by means of three case studies: language choice and speech representation in bilingual interaction, language choice and conversational repair in bilingual interaction and language choice and appositive structures in written texts in Rwanda.

The central ideas of variationist sociolinguistics are that an understanding of language requires an understanding of variable as well as categorical processes, and that the variation witnessed at all levels of language is not random. Rather, linguistic variation is characterized by orderly or “structured heterogeneity.” In addition, synchronic variation is often a reflection of diachronic change. This chapter reviews representative studies and outlines the main assumptions underlying the variationist approach. It presents an example of variationist analysis, using the well-known case of variation between Spanish null and overt subject personal pronouns. Then, the chapter considers a number of relatively recent developments in variationist sociolinguistics including the expansion of the variationist paradigm into new areas such as second-language acquisition and sign linguistics, as well as recent work that combines ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis.

The semantic meaning of a linguistic form is its intentional content. Parts of sentence meaning that have traditionally been thought to be determined by speaker intentions—the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, and anaphors—are actually settled by public semantics. True descriptive language carries natural information that matches semantic content, so it can be understood by an interpreter in the same way that ordinary non-intentional infosigns are understood; no recognition of speaker intentions is required. But true descriptive language also carries much additional information the understanding of which is supplied by speakers and hearers from their own prior knowledge.

Perceptual processing is translation of patterns in the data of sense into cognitive understanding without uniceptual inference. Understanding language differs from ordinary perceptual processing in that the signs it translates are detached rather than attached. This similarity is obscured because ordinary uses of the verbs of perception do not track a kind of psychological processing. Their use is mostly factive, which encourages overlooking the fallibility of perception. One result is the mistaken view that perceptual illusions are an anomaly and that perception is cognitively impenetrable. The assumption that each of the senses has its own proprietary level of perception and the assumption that differences in the result of perceptual processing are always accompanied by differences in perceptual experience are questioned. Finally, a number of intuitive objections to the idea that understanding language is a form of perceptual processing are discussed.

Hearing loss is devastating because it prevents communication through verbal language and thereby produces social isolation. The experience of hearing loss or deafness is the most common sensory deficit. The experience of affected individuals is highly variable because it depends on age of onset and treatment efficacy, among many factors. The roles of the external and middle ears in conduction and of the internal ear in sensorineural processing are used as a framework for understanding common forms of hearing loss. The contributions of inner and outer hair cells to cochlear function are detailed. How cochlear amplification results from the actions of prestin in outer hair cells is explained. The roles of age, noise, genetic background, and environmental factors in presbyacusis are considered. Approaches to hearing loss, including cochlear implants and sign language, are discussed. Finally, the brain regions involved in speech production and comprehension are detailed.

Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence in various fields and its importance is growing. Here, for the first time, some of the key texts are made available in English for a new generation of scholars in the humanities. By introducing key works of Henri Meschonnic, this Reader will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. This book includes fourteen key texts which cover the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for the individual and society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study and philosophy of language, with rich repercussions in fields such as translation studies, poetics and literary studies, and in redefining notions such as rhythm, modernity, the poem and the subject. The Reader is accompanied by introductory texts to Meschonnic, his key concepts and his poetics of society, as well as by a glossary, index and bibliography.

This chapter draws conclusions from the analyses presented in From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures. After a short summary of the content in the previous chapters of the book, the implications for understanding of indexicality and gender are discussed. Particular attention is given to the indexical disjuncture, in which signs with opposing indexical associations are linked to simultaneously index conflicting or contradictory meanings. It is argued that although indexical disjuncture is not unique to gay male culture, it is a common hallmark of gay male style. The chapter then discusses the ways in which language use highlights differences in understandings of gay community and issues related to social acceptance and social change.

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? gbut viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in moving from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs, including, especially, language.

The introduction argues that the Bible’s penitential language (i.e., sin, repentance, confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving), which was so much a part of religious and even political life in American history, has been replaced in the most recent decades in the United States by a language of conflict and confrontation. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and other religious tradition hold in common some or all of this biblical penitential language and have various ways of putting it into practice. This book, however, details the history of the American Catholic understanding of penance as a virtue and as a sacrament and demonstrates how that understanding and practice was influenced and transformed by successive religious and cultural and intellectual movements in Europe and the United States. The book calls for a return to a renewed penitential tradition that can contribute to personal as well as social peace and integrity.

Musical topics have invited comparison with language ever since Leonard Ratner adopted the rhetorical termtopos. Yet topic theory has not addressed the “double articulation” of language: while words function as meaningful signs, they are articulated by meaningless elements, what Louis Hjelmslev referred to collectively as “figurae.” This chapter develops an analogous theory of topical figurae, structural features that articulate multiple topics but do not themselves signify topically, adapting concepts from phonology (deletion, markedness, assimilation, neutralization). The musical analyses explore both the semantic and syntactic implications of topical figurae, focusing on Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F major, K. 332. Embedded equally in the musical structure and the topical code, figurae bridge the gap between formal analysis and cultural hermeneutics and can lead to a more holistic understanding of topical meaning.

This book examines the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. It takes a phenomenological approach to this question, defined by the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. Based on this commitment, it develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended (4e) tradition of cognitive science. The book draws extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, it extracts a basic framework for a phenomenology of language, comprising both a general overall picture of the role of language and a more specific model of the disclosive function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, the book then explores its broader significance, arguing that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science.

This book examines what the different New Testament writings have to say about sin within the broader historical and theological contexts of first-century Christianity. These contexts include both the immediate world of Judaism out of which early Christianity emerged, as well as the larger Greco-Roman world into which Christianity quickly spread as an increasingly Gentile religious movement. The Jewish sacrificial system associated with the Jerusalem Temple was important for dealing with human sin, and early Christians appropriated the language and imagery of sacrifice in describing the salvific importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Greco-Roman understandings of sin as error or ignorance played an important role in the spreading of the Christian message to the Gentile world. The book details the distinctive portraits of sin in each of the canonical Gospels in relation to the life and ministry of Jesus. Beyond the Gospels the book develops how the letters of Paul and other early Christian writers address the reality of sin, again primarily in relation to the revelatory ministry of Jesus.

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and Europeans communicated with each other during colonial encounters. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The newcomers, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers throughout French America. Céline Carayon's close examination of French accounts, combined with her multidisciplinary methodology, enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expression. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by the multiplicity of Indigenous languages, intimate and sensory communications ensured that colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. Nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the French imperial imagination and strategies. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

After Plato’s Forms, and Aristotle’s substances, the Stoics posit the fundamental reality of lekta, the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. It is the first time in the tradition of Western philosophy that what is signified is properly distinguished from signs and signifiers. This book explores the many implications of this distinction which gives an existential autonomy to lekta. Language can only ever express meanings, but what happens to meanings which are there, ready to be said but which are never actually expressed? The book analyses the deep shift in ontological paradigm required by the presence of lekta in reality. A unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view is revealed in which the lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality. This means that we cannot not speak or think in terms of lekta, and for this reason, they are all there is to say. The Stoic position has ignited many fiery debates in antiquity and in modern times. The Stoics were the first to be concerned with questions about language and grammar, and the first to put the relation of language to reality at the heart of the enquiry into human understanding, and the place of man in the cosmos. These questions remain central to this day in life and philosophy.

This book focuses on the stories of eighteen transgender survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) and how their accounts challenge conventional understandings of this form of abuse. By examining the contexts in which abuse occurs, the book anchors transgender experiences with IPV within a largely trans-antagonistic culture. The dynamics of abuse, as told by survivors, are largely informed by an existing transphobic and genderist society. The prevalent themes in the accounts describe how transphobic and genderist attacks manifested as distinct patterns of abuse. When reflecting and making sense of their reality, survivors saw many of their experiences with abuse as attempts by abusers to control their gender transition and define them on the abusers’ own terms. The book discusses a prominent dynamic of the abuse as controlling transition, in which victims felt that abusers wanted to regulate their identities. This control occurs through two generic strategies: (1) discrediting identity work, redefining the situation to focus on participant-defined insecurities, a form of altercasting; and (2) targeting sign vehicles, including regulating gender transition treatments and controlling through props. Finally, survivors described what is referred to as walking the gender tightrope in which respondents used gendered language in the processing of their victim identity. Additionally, they discussed various help-seeking strategies and how they navigated genderist boundaries and barriers to these resources. The book works toward characterizing the distinct experiences of transgender survivors of IPV while also identifying differences across the intersections of race, class, and gender identities.

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.