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This book explores how identities emerge, persist and change and which power resources are tapped in the course of this process -- topics that are of great importance in academic and popular debates today. The thrust of this collection of papers from experts in various fields is two-sided, cutting against both the post-modern view of identity as merely a shifting assemblage of images and categories marketed through the media and the view of identity as something fixed and rooted in primordial authenticity. The contributors illustrate the dynamics of identification as performance and narrative, as power and meaning, and as an interplay between self and other, difference and similarity.

Birgitta Mark shows how mystical experience covers three aspects of a person's general experience: mystical ideas, mystical states of consciousness and mystical development. In this comprehensive and balanced study, she examines the state and theory of mysticism, explores the credibility of evidence for mystical experience, including scientific theories of consciousness and neuronal activity and how they influence mysticism, delves into the writings and subsequent interpretations of the mystical experience of John of the Cross and connects evidence and hypothesis within his writings. The author notes that her own understanding of mystical states of consciousness is based upon S. A. Greenfield's theory of consciousness and A. R. Damasio's theory of emotions. In her own view, she says, the main cause of the promotion of mystical development is the recurrence of such mystical states of consciousness. This well-researched book would be of interest to scholars of religion, mysticism, and psychology and others who wish to learn more about our understanding of mystic states and how they affect and are affected by the persons who have experienced them throughout history.

"Baptism and the New Life" is the first thesis about St. Paul's theology in almost 70 years. The main subject of the book is the Pauline enthusiasm for salvation and the new life expressed in Rom 6. 1-14.

In 27 articles, the book presents the range of recent research on Ladakh, a small state in the Himalayas.

P.O. Brondsted (1780-1842) was the father of classical archaeology in Denmark, and his writings won great acclaim all over Europe. He travelled in Greece from 1810 to 1813 examining the ancient cities of the island of Kea and the sculptures of the Parthenon, and participating in excavations on the island of Aegina as well as in Bassie. In addition to his love for classical Greece, he had a great interest in the Greece of his own time, and in the Greek struggle for independence. These interviews with Ali Pasha show Brondsted's interest and fascination in the man. The meeting is recounted, and Ali Pasha is shown to be a powerful and controversial despot, with political connections all over Europe.

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The idea that children's learning is influenced by economic, political, ecological, cultural and other influences is being focused upon by educators world-wide. The editors of this volume point out that there is a huge amount of scientific knowledge from different disciplines that could be a basis for the necessary changes in teaching and learning both in and out of school, on different educational levels and under different institutional conditions. The editors define learning activity as a special kind of activity directed towards the acquisition of societal knowledge and skills through their individual reproduction by means of special learning actions upon learning objects. Learners can acquire skill and knowledge, they add, only by actively acting with the material according to its substance and structure, and through the co-ordination, communication and co-operation between learners and other people since that is one of the most essential features of learning activity. The book explores how learning proceeds. "Societal forms of thinking and knowledge" considers the interdependency between the societal traditions of production, science, art an public life and personal thinking modes and knowledge. "Teaching, learning activity in theory and practice" explores the relation between content of knowledge, teaching and learning activity. "Social interaction, development of motives and self-evaluation" examines the core aspects of learning activity. "Play, spontaneous learning and teaching" looks into the transition from pre-school to school and the transformation of activities as preconditions for children's learning activity.

The transition from foraging to farming in prehistoric Denmark has been a topic of debate over the past sixty years. Michael Stafford contributes to this discussion via an analysis of stone tools from several well-known sites in Denmark spanning the transition to agriculture. Results of this analysis are applied to several recent theoretical approaches seeking to explain how and when the transition happened, and a new perspective is synthesised and defended.

Current research into photography from a European perspective strikes a solid contrast to North American studies. This synopsis of Continental thought covers recent attempts to re(write) the history and theory of photography. In assessing current research, the contributors argue that photography is the matrix according to which we produce images in the broadest sense, including imaginary ones. Major emphasis is placed on the reception of the image. Individual authors comment on the task of verbally describing a photograph, survey historical issues of visuality and interpretations, discuss new documentary practices, and measure the significance of the subject in the statement made by the photograph. The work of Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden and her sensual, rarely pictured pictures are featured. In studying gender aesthetics and politics, the essays explore the connection between photography and pornography, reject standard psychoanalytic interpretations, and incorporate new linguistic philosophical approaches to the medium. Death, memory, the traumatic, and photography's muteness towards the past are also discussed. A final essay assesses how the impact of photography will vary once a passive viewer becomes a use of interactive video. This book should be of use in advancing theories of photography and photography's place in the post-modern consciousness.

Text in Danish and Latin.

Two-Volume Set. This is the last volume in the series of reports from the Danish excavations on the ancient Tall of the important Syrian site and town of Hama. It presents the medieval architecture of the mound from the Arab conquest in 636 to 1401 when the citadel of Hama was destroyed by Timur Lenk. The excavations revealed that the early Islamic town was not as insignificant as previously believed. The periods of Hama's greatest strength were, however, the 12th and 13th centuries, when many different structures were built on the mound, such as a bath, mills and other industrial structures (among these a workshop for the production of grenades). Its fortifications mainly dated from the 12th century, although an older Byzantine wall was also found.

This study examines how in the dispute between Thukydides and Hellanikos, scholars have long taken it for granted that the preserved historian was right and the lost one mistaken, despite the fact that the Battle of Oinoe, for example, does not fit into the chronology of Thukydides. By restoring the dates recorded by Hellanikos, Schreiner asserts that a reliable chronology can be established. The first historian to record the period from the Persian Wars to 431 BC was Hellanikos, the author of the lost "History of Athens" from its mythical origins through the fifth century BC. He reported there was one war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 421 and another from 412 to 404, and that the first was caused by contemporary events of the 430s. Thukydides, writing a monograph on a war he sought to establish as the most disastrous to date, criticised Hellanikos as chronologically inaccurate and lacking an appreciation of the impact of a stronger Athens. Thukydides asserted that there was only one war, beginning in 431 and ending in 404, caused by the growth of Athens following the Persian Wars and the fear that growth inspired in Sparta. The book, in reviving the text of Hellanikos, should encourage scholars of antiquity and military history to re-evaluate their interpretations of the era.

This survey by scholars, experts and politicians with knowledge of, and influence in, the Caucasus region reflects its many conflicting ethnic groups and nations. An introductory section deals with the entire region from the historical perspective, drawing special attention to its geographical importance and relations with the former Soviet Union and the present Russian Federation. Subsequent essays analyse the ethnic and national problems in North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Crimea, Nagorno-Karabakh and Chechenia. The concluding articles discuss the Turkish influence on Caucasian conflicts.

Novelist Sean O'Faolain, playwright Brian Friel, and poet Seamus Heaney have been highly critical of the Irish revolutionary generation for its oversimplification of the interstice between past and present. These post-war writers complain that the nationalists see Irish history as a great romantic narrative with a tragic beginning and possibly a happy ending. The present collection of essays centres on the implications of an intricate conception of Irish history and identity. It emphasises both the historical considerations and the literary representations of Irish identities. The text of the "Good Friday Peace Accord" is included along with individual chapters on the slow triumph of politics, historical revisionism, uses of the national anthem, on Sean O'Faolain, on Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes", and nationalism and unionism in this decade. The chapters on literary representation discuss the peotry of Northern Ireland, of John Hewitt and Seamus Heaney, James Joyce's "modern hells", Samuel Beckett, and the state of the Irish theatre. Apart from essays by such Irish writers as Tom Garvin, Colm Toibin, Edna Longley, and Fintan O'Toole, the collection contains contributions by American, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish scholars.

This volume brings together international scholars of American Studies whose work explores the issues of ethnicity, race, gender, national, and cross-cultural identity in American literature and culture. The ramifications of this discussion go far beyond the borders of North America; in our era of European consolidation and global communications, even the seemingly most homogeneous of national literatures find themselves at last responding to and acknowledging external cultural influences. With articles ranging from an examination of early colonial texts through postcolonial theory to a theoretical discussion of Michael Wigglesworth's Diaries and the latest work of Maya Angelou, "Other Americans, Other Americas" will appeal to a wide academic audience as a significant contribution to the latest scholarship in the field of multicultural studies.