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New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.
New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.
A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortality As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human. The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist though...
Norway, it is claimed, has the most social anthropologists per capita of any country. Well connected and resourced, the discipline - standing apart from the British and American centres of anthropology - is well placed to offer critical reflection. In this book, an inclusive cast, from PhDs to professors, debate the complexities of anthropology as practised in Norway today and in the past. Norwegian anthropologists have long made public engagement a priority - whether Carl Lumholz collecting for museums from 1880; activists protesting with the Sámi in 1980; or in numerous recent contributions to international development. Contributors explore the challenges of remaining socially relevant, of working in an egalitarian society that de-emphasizes difference, and of changing relations to the state, in the context of a turn against multi-culturalism. It is perhaps above all a commitment to time-consuming, long-term fieldwork that provides a shared sense of identity for this admirably diverse discipline.
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.
Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernste...
Revolutionary Struggles and Girls' Education: At the Frontiers of Gender Norms in North-Ethiopia argues that at the base of girls’ poorer performance than boys at secondary school level when puberty has set in, is the “symbolic violence” entailed in sanctioned femaleness. Informed by the modesty of Virgin Mary in Orthodox Christian veneration, it instructs girls to internalize a “holding back” which impinges on her self-efficacy and ability to be an active learner. Neoliberally-informed educational policies and plans which have co-opted liberal feminism also in Ethiopia, do not address “hard-lived” gender norms and the power and domination dynamics entailed when parity between ...
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Kant’s moral and political philosophy has been important in developing ethical thinking in international relations. This study argues that his theory of the state is crucially important for understanding the moral agency of the state as it is discussed in contemporary debates. For Kant, it is argued that the state has not only duties but also, controversially, inalienable rights that ground its relationship to its citizens and to other states. Most importantly, the state – regardless of its governmental form or factual behaviour – has a right to exist as a state. The Kantian account provided, therefore, explores not only the moral agency but also the moral standing of the state, examining the status of different kinds of states in world politics and expectations towards their ethical behaviour. Every state has a moral standing that must be respected in a morally imperfect world gradually transforming towards the ideal condition of perpetual peace.
A genealogy of the field from Adam smith to the mid-twentieth century -- Contemporary CPE : the turn towards comparative capitalisms and the relationship with IPE -- Varieties of capitalism and the next steps beyond -- Labour markets and their regulation : industrial relations and the organization of business and labour -- Models of finance and corporate governance and their implications -- The political economy of debt -- Welfare state models : taming the market? -- The state as an actor : not a neutral umpire -- Conclusion : future directions for comparative political economy