The Pacific ‘grass skirt’ has provoked debates about the demeaning and sexualised depiction of Pacific bodies. While these stereotypical portrayals associated with ‘nakedness’ are challenged in this book, the complex uses and meanings of the garments themselves are examined, including their link to other body adornments and modifications. In nineteenth-century Fiji, beautiful fibre skirts (liku) in a great variety of shapes and colours were lifetime companions for women. First fitted around puberty when she received her veiqia (tattooing), women’s successive liku were adapted at marriage and during maternity, performing a multiplicity of social functions.This book is based on a systematic investigation of previously understudied liku in museums collections around the world. Through the prism of one garment, multiple ways of looking at dress are considered, including their classification in museums and archives. Also highlighted are associated tattooing (veiqia) practices, perceptions of modesty, the intricacies of intercultural encounters and the significance of collections and cultural heritage today. The book is intended for those interested in often neglected women’s objects and practices in the Pacific, in dress and adornment more generally and in the use of museum collections and archives. It is richly illustrated with rare and previously unpublished paintings and drawings, as well many examples of liku themselves.

Volume 13 of Melilah, an interdisciplinary electronic journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras.

Matters of Belonging foregrounds critical practices within ethnographic museums in relation to their diverse stakeholders, with a special focus on collaboration with artists and differently constituted, self-identified communities. The book emerges from the EU-funded project SWICH (Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage) that places ethnographic museums at the centre of ongoing debates about Europe’s shifting polity and questions around heritage, citizenship and belonging. Addressing diverse political climates and citizenship regimes, legal frameworks and colonial/migratory histories, the articles seek to question the role of ethnographic and world cultures museums within contemporary negotiations of how to define Europe, Europeans, and European heritage, especially mindful of the region’s colonial and migratory pasts. The book is neither celebratory nor congratulatory, and does not depict a triumphal overcoming by ethnographic museums of their troubled pasts. Its aim is to think critically about these museums’ responses, to identify both pitfalls and positive developments, and to sketch out possible futures for museums generally, and ethnographic museums specifically, as they try to locate themselves within discussions about Europe and its futures. Core to the book’s argument is that it may exactly be in their entanglement with the colonial past that these museums can become important sites for thinking about colonial entailments in the present. Facing up to this past is the beginning of addressing these larger legacies. The authors suggest that the ethnographic museum has been the site not just for trenchant questioning of colonial durabilities in contemporary Europe, but also for the development of new practices – of collaboration and authority-sharing, of recognition and belonging. The book explores these models, not as complete, but as a starting point to push forward new practices.

Paint it, Black covers the remarkable history of kohl containers from the Early Bronze Age to the present day, including ancient Egypt, ancient Persia, the culture of the Early Islamic Period and the present-day cultures of North Africa and West Asia. For thousands of years, people from all over the world have used body paint and kohl, a black powdery substance, has been universally used by both men and women throughout history. The book also incorporates a catalogue of a unique collection of kohl containers kept in the Wearable Heritage collection.

David Hume was not only a lover of political speculation, who dealt with politics in his most important works, but also an expert in military strategies and techniques; a friend and confidant of generals, ministers, parliamentarians, local administrators, dukes, and barons. He was also a talented diplomat, a moderate member of the British government, and an original interpreter of international affairs and war, which he experienced first-hand on the battlefield. Nevertheless, until today, Hume’s practical experience as statesman has not been adequately considered. In this book, the first complete edition, the five writings concerning Hume’s involvement in the practice of policy are collected: A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, late Lord Provost of Edinburgh (1748); Account of the Descent on the Coast of Brittany and the Causes of its Failure (1746); Journal of the British Embassy to the Courts of Vienna and Turin (1748); Dispatches of a British Diplomat at Paris (1764-65); and Correspondence of an Under-Secretary of State (1767-68).

The essay investigates the effects produced by criminal networks involved in the production and harvest of agricultural products. Focused on the analysis of caporalato , it explores the enslavement of immigrant agricultural labourers and territorial segregation practices. Moreover, it deals with the topic of the agromafi as’ role and discusses matters related to the deregulation of the agricultural market, as well as the general crisis of the agroindustries. Because caporalato has become a methodological instrument in the framework known as globalization of the farmlands , this essay tries to evaluate the complex relationship between the agromafias’ power and the operational conditions of Italy’s local economies. The authors then explore elements of the extremely pervasive criminal network, that determines productive trends of entire agricultural departments, with the intention of denouncing the dangerous socio-cultural drift that mafia-like criminal organizations are creating in Europe.

In every psychic experience, even in the production of a work of art, there exists a nucleus that is impossible to transform. It resists any and every action against itself. We are used to dealing with these irreducible and radical othernesses by adapting them to our own way of knowing and our experience. In reality, they make up the ugly material of our living and, hence, of our humanity. We can, however, transform them in some way, without altering their substance, but rather organizing them in different configurations, which generate new forms. Psychoanalysis can aid in this difficult and risky process, providing resilient equipment, much like a sophisticated spacesuit, allowing one to travel the cosmic spaces of psychic life and of human reality without bursting into flames. In the actual world, we find ourselves having to deal with problems never before encountered, which eradicate old certainties – problems which feel uncanny compared to the known experiences of ourselves and others. We meet with disorganized and fragmentary conflict, to which psychoanalysis attempts to answer adopting an open, non-defensive procedure, aiming to widen the field of experience rather than reducing it, in accordance with the basis of its practice and theory.For this reason, the interweaving of various forms of knowledge is necessary in order to link the diverse aspects and levels of psychic and external reality. The author examines this theme through the psychoanalytic approach, as well as through philosophy, science and art, and using stories based on personal life and clinical experiences.

The essays contained in this volume explore the historical trajectories along which the Mediterranean has been conceptualized as a cultural, religious and economical resource and how these various aspects are intertwined. While staying clear of a merely “imagological” or “representational” point of view, the authors consider the interplay between culturally shaped attributions (for example the longstanding desire for a Mediterranean “Otherness” as expressed in German literature), their testing in empirical encounters, and the effect these encounters produce on both sides. Although focused particularly on 19th and 20th century culture, this volume offers a timely contribution to conceptualising the challenges of the 21st century. The conjunction of both provinciality and universality, the connectivity and fragmentation of the Mediterranean continues to be at the basis of the European matrix of all possible (hi)stories.

Socialization in childhood and at a young age is marked, not only by measurable factors such as age, sex, ethnic group, religion or parents’ income, but also by variables such as depression, aggressiveness, inner calm or serenity. It makes all the difference whether a child experiences during their development an atmosphere of acceptance, gladness and emotional warmth, or one of depreciation, indifference and emotional coldness. The atmosphere in which a child is brought up shapes them as people, at least as much as the measurable factors of their social context. By discussing in detail how the atmosphere in the family, the kindergarten or at school can affect a child’s well-being, this book calls for the importance of shaping such atmospheres so to produce a positive influence on children living and learning together.

Legacy cities, also commonly referred to as shrinking, or post-industrial cities, are places that have experienced sustained population loss and economic contraction. In the United States, legacy cities are those that are largely within the Rust Belt that thrived during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, these cities declined in economic power and population leaving a legacy of housing stock, warehouse districts, and infrastructure that is ripe for revitalization. This volume explores not only the commonalities across legacy cities in terms of industrial heritage and population decline, but also their differences. Legacy Cities poses the questions: What are the legacies of legacy cities? How do these legacies drive contemporary urban policy, planning and decision-making? And, what are the prospects for the future of these cities? Contributors primarily focus on Cleveland, Ohio, but all Rust Belt cities are discussed.

The Open Invitation explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and activist video. Schiwy analyzes activist videos from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, the Zapatista’s Other Campaign, as well as collaborative and community video from the Yucatán. Schiwy argues that transnational activist videos and community videos in indigenous languages reveal collaborations and that their political impact cannot be grasped through the concept of the public sphere. Instead, she places these videos in dialogue with recent efforts to understand the political with communality, a mode of governance articulated in indigenous struggles for autonomy, and with cinematic politics of affect.

Petroleum is the most valuable commodity in the world and an enormous source of wealth for those who sell it, transport it and transform it for its many uses. As the engine of modern economies and industries, governments everywhere want to assure steady supplies. Without it, their economies would grind to a standstill. Since petroleum is not evenly distributed around the world, powerful countries want to be sure they have access to supplies and markets, whatever the cost to the environment or to human life. Coveting the petroleum of another country is against the rules of international law — yet if accomplished surreptitiously, under the cover of some laudable action, it's a bonanza. This is the basis of "the petroleum game," where countries jockey for control of the world's oil and natural gas. It's an ongoing game of rivalry among global and regional countries, each pursuing its own interests and using whatever tools, allies and organizations offer possible advantage. John Foster has spent his working life as an oil economist. He understands the underlying role played by oil and gas in international affairs. He identifies the hidden issues behind many of the conflicts in the world today. He explores military interventions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria), tensions around international waterways (Persian Gulf, South China Sea), and use of sanctions or political interference related to petroleum trade (Iran, Russia, Venezuela). He illuminates the petroleum-related reasons for government actions usually camouflaged and rarely discussed publicly by Western politicians or media.Petroleum geopolitics are complex. When clashes and conflicts occur, they are multi-dimensional. This book ferrets out pieces of the multi-faceted puzzle in the dark world of petroleum and fits them together.

Psychoanalysts of all schools have generally dismissed and sometimes openly disapproved feminism and its critique of male universalism. While other disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, have welcomed the contributions of feminist theory, psychoanalysis remains hindered by its own unconscious, which is patriarchal. This book wants to cast light on the unthought of Freudian and Lacanian theory by way of an analysis of the concept of femininity. The aim is to show how phallocentrism functions as a screen which obscures the real relations between the sexes, the meaning of desire and the understanding of sexual difference.

The first Manifesto of Futurism was published in Le Figaro on February 20th, 1909. It was to become the first avant-garde movement in art – it aimed to change the function of art within society, foster Italian culture beyond its provincial domains, and last but not least, to extend language as free expression of a new and forthcoming society of technology. Art in life was the ultimate aim of Marinetti’s poetry, which then expanded well beyond Italian borders and artistic expression, becoming an attitude for new society. The more that society was developing social constraints, the more that artistic expression would become free of canons to let imagination fluently overwhelm reality. The main topics proclaimed as crucial by Futurists are the contemporary most influential topics for social stability: politics, communication and technology as well as the major movers of social change. What can we still learn from the radical claims of avant-garde art?

Since the 1960's, developing countries in Latin America started a complex journey towards establishing new values, the ones of modernity. This volume considers the work of renowned Italian-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani, who more than anyone else has been able to outline the process of modernization from this particular aspect. The author highlights Germani’s idea of ‘freedom’ as a crucial and unavoidable concept at the core of the “modern” way of being persons, subjects, social actors and active participants within a social system. Germani also refers to the opposite direction, that of social marginality, and suggests that a ‘free’ human being is somebody who is responsible for his or her actions. Within this context, every human being is the bearer of rights insofar as he or she is capable of making choices, taking responsibilities and, able to identify – on equal footing with everyone else – the right and duty to be free. Bringing a new light to the great 20th century sociologist’s thought, this book aims to trace the path of modernization and the timely issues of freedom, marginality, and participation that still profoundly defines our social structure.

History of Cinema Without Names is an editorial project which gathers research papers presented at Gorizia Conference. It promotes a new research perspective on the notions of film authorship, style, and genre, with the aim of re-articulating their theoretical definition.