Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
Emrys Westacott, author of ‘The Virtues of our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits’ was one of the guests on BBC World Service’s The Forum on Sunday 1 April. In addition to talking about his book he was asked to provide the programmes regular Sixty Second Idea to Change the World in which he suggested tackling political corruption by introducing some austerity constraints. To hear more about these and listen to his interview please click here
FACT: “When Tipu Sultan attacked Travancore, a British ally, in 1789, it led to war with the East India Company. For two years, Tipu held his own against the British forces until Charles, Lord Cornwallis, laid siege to Tipu’s capital. Hostilities were ended in 1792 by the Treaty of Srirangapattana, in which Tipu surrendered half his territories, paid thirty million rupees, and handed over two of his sons—Abdul Khaliq, age eight, and Muiz-ud-din, age five—as hostages to the British.”
The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
by Partha Chatterjee
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of “the black hole of Calcutta” was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the “civilizing” force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India.
Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire’s entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.
“This is a powerfully argued account of the origins and subsequent justification of British rule in India, and an exploration of the response by Bengali elites to colonialism. A work of classic history, this book carries an intellectual power and brilliance of insight that will excite much interest and comment.”—Thomas Metcalf, professor emeritus of history, University of California, Berkeley
We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9756.pdf
Emrys Westacott, author of ‘The Virtues of our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness and Other Bad Habits‘ will be visiting the UK in March. On 28 March he will be in discussion with Julian Baggini at a Festival of Ideas Event at Foyles in Bristol and will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on 31 March.
FACT: “In 1975, the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC, later the Autism Society of America,) lobbied to include autism as one of the developmental disabilities covered under the Education for All Handicapped Act. They succeeded. The bill, later revised and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, entitled children with autism and other developmental disabilities to a ‘free, appropriate, public education.’ The NSAC also demanded autism’s inclusion in the Developmental Disabilities Act, a bill authorizing services and support. . . .”
Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder
by Chloe Silverman
Autism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical research, and clinical innovation. Understanding Autism, a social history of the expanding diagnostic category of this contested illness, takes a close look at the role of emotion—specifically, of parental love—in the intense and passionate work of biomedical communities investigating autism.
Chloe Silverman tracks developments in autism theory and practice over the past half-century and shows how an understanding of autism has been constituted and stabilized through vital efforts of schools, gene banks, professional associations, government committees, parent networks, and treatment conferences. She examines the love and labor of parents, who play a role in developing—in conjunction with medical experts—new forms of treatment and therapy for their children. While biomedical knowledge is dispersed through an emotionally neutral, technical language that separates experts from laypeople, parental advocacy and activism call these distinctions into question. Silverman reveals how parental care has been a constant driver in the volatile field of autism research and treatment, and has served as an inspiration for scientific change.
Recognizing the importance of parental knowledge and observations in treating autism, this book reveals that effective responses to the disorder demonstrate the mutual interdependence of love and science.
“Autism remains a contested condition, and given the steep rise in research, diagnosis rates and media coverage, the debate is set to run and run. Science historian Chloe Silverman gives a balanced, sensitive social history of autism that unflinchingly covers many controversial byways. She explores the theory and biomedical advances, and how gene banks, schools and autism organizations have enriched understanding—augmented by parents of children with autism, whose experiences have informed and inspired much research.”—Nature
We invite you to read the Introduction here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9611.pdf
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, we will publish an ethnography of hackers from Biella Coleman. So it is fairly serendipitous that I found her introductory post to a series of articles she is writing for the Concurring Opinions blog (well serendipitous in the sense that her editor sent me the link 
. I hope you will check our her posts over the next month.
I would like to thank Danielle Citron for the invitation to pen some thoughts here on Concurring Opinions, and letting an anthropologist enter this legal arena. For my first post, I thought I would ease in slowly and give a taste of my work on hackers, geeks, and digital activism along with some of the themes and issues I will likely explore over the month.
Being there are not a whole lot of anthropologists of my ilk ( as I like to joke, I am an “arm chair anthropologist” who sits in front of her computer to study the high tech digerati of the west), I often get asked how or why I came to the study hackers, many people assuming that I had some hacker relative in my life or was myself a budding young hacker, both of which were not the case. Fitting to this blog, I got to hackers via the law. In 1997, when my friend—an avid free software developer—found out I had a keen but personal interest in patents and access to medicine, he sat me down to tell be about this legal concept called the “copyleft.” It was one of those moments that I still remember so vividly as I was nothing but floored, astonished, excited, and puzzled, especially when I learned of the full depth and extent of this legal alternative that had been dreamed up, not by lawyers, but by geeks and hackers.
Read more here: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/anthropological-introductions.html
We invite you to browse and download two new catalogs featuring great books by great authors.
In the religion catalog you can check out the Lives of Great Religious Books series with books by Garry Wills, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Martin E. Marty. You will also find new books from Robert Wuthnow, Paula Fredriksen, Mark Chaves, Leora Batnitzky, Peter Schäfer and Timothy Matovina – just to name a few.
Follow the link to the religion catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/rel12.pdf
In the anthropology catalog look for new books by Chloe Silverman, Peter Benson, Junko Kitanaka, Stephen J. Collier, Duana Fullwiley, and Marcia C. Inhorn. Forthcoming this May are books by Partha Chatterjee, Thomas Blom Hansen, and a book by Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. Be the first to check them out in the catalog.
Follow the link to the anthropology catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/anthro12.pdf
Both catalogs have many more new titles and your favorites now in paperback. Enjoy browsing.
Kristen Ghodsee’s “Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria” has won the 2011 John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize from the Bulgarian Studies Association. This award is established for the most outstanding recent scholarly book within any area of Bulgarian studies.
“Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.
Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region’s state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women’s embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks’ new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria’s Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.”
This is the most recent in a slew of prizes for “Muslim Lives,” which has also won the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize, the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, and the 2010 Heldt Prize.
Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.
Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.
The Society for the Anthropology of Europe, part of the American Anthropological Association, has announced that Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria by Kristen Ghodsee is the winner of the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.
According to their web site, “The William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology honors the best book published annually in Europeanist anthropology as determined by a panel comprising SAE senior members, chaired by the Society’s President-elect.”
People who follow such things, may be interested to learn that another PUP book won this same prize last year: The Empire of Trauma by Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman.
FACT: Tree resins were among the earliest additives to wine. Ancient humans made several intuitive leaps that lead to this development: if a tree oozed resin to heal a cut in its bark, then applying resin to a human wound should serve to cure it, and, by extension, drinking a wine laced with a tree resin could both help to treat internal maladies and prevent the dreaded “wine disease.”
Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern
The history of civilization is, in many ways, the history of wine. This book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the earliest stages of vinicultural history and prehistory, which extends back into the Neolithic period and beyond. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, Ancient Wine opens up whole new chapters in the fascinating story of wine and the vine by drawing upon recent archaeological discoveries, molecular and DNA sleuthing, and the texts and art of long-forgotten peoples.
Patrick McGovern takes us on a personal odyssey back to the beginnings of this consequential beverage when early hominids probably enjoyed a wild grape wine. We follow the course of human ingenuity in domesticating the Eurasian vine and learning how to make and preserve wine some 7,000 years ago. Early winemakers must have marveled at the seemingly miraculous process of fermentation. From success to success, viniculture stretched out its tentacles and entwined itself with one culture after another (whether Egyptian, Iranian, Israelite, or Greek) and laid the foundation for civilization itself. As medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society. As an evocative symbol of blood, it was used in temple ceremonies and occupies the heart of the Eucharist. Kings celebrated their victories with wine and made certain that they had plenty for the afterlife. (Among the colorful examples in the book is McGovern’s famous chemical reconstruction of the funerary feast—and mixed beverage—of “King Midas.”) Some peoples truly became “wine cultures.”
“No one is better qualified to sift through the widely scattered clues [to the origins of winemaking] than McGovern, a skilled scientific sleuth who wields the most powerful tools of modern chemistry in his search for the roots of ancient wines.”—J. Madeleine Nash, Time Magazine
“A rich treasury of lore on viticulture. . . . McGovern’s book will likely remain a standard in every serious wine-lover’s library for a long time. To that achievement–and to glorious wine itself—let us raise our glasses high.”—Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History
We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7591.pdf
FACT: Among the slaughtered remains found in the Drakensberg Mountains is a now-extinct giant buffalo Pelovoris antiquus, which weighed almost 2000 kilograms and whose modern-day (smaller) descendant is one of the most dangerous game animals in Africa (Milo1998).
A Cooperative Species:
Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
by Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis
In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis—pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior—show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers.
Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the coevolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, A Cooperative Species provides a compelling and novel account of how humans came to be moral and cooperative.
“Bowles and Gintis stress that cooperation among individuals who are only distantly related is a critical distinguishing feature of the human species. They argue forcefully that the best explanation for such cooperation is altruism. Many will dispute this claim, but it deserves serious consideration.”—Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics
We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9474.pdf
Religion Dispatches Magazine Online’s Lauri Lebo has a good suggestion for what to do this coming Saturday when, according to Harold Camping, true believers will ascend to heaven while the rest of the Earth heads towards destruction: throw a party!
Apparently many atheists (and believers who don’t think the Rapture is coming in two days) have decided to ring in the purported end of the world with a celebration. Lebo has a few tips for a successful judgement day bash, including appropriate drinks to serve (such as the “Death in the Afternoon,” a Hemingway favorite) and what time to start your festivities (6 p.m. is allegedly when the Rapture will begin).
Interestingly enough, the reported information about the rapture includes not just a specific start time, but a prophesy that there will be “a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth.” If this sounds familiar, it may be because historically earthquakes have figured into the apocalyptic predictions of many civilizations. Read Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur with Dawn Burgess to find out more!
(And please, be careful with that absinthe!)
At Goodreads, enter for a chance to win Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson.
This major biography sheds new light on Tesla’s visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Enter by May 28, 2013 for a chance to win!
Good luck!
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig |
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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, & Brian Sullivan |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
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Higher Education in the Digital Age by William G. Bowen |
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Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman |
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The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell by A. Zee |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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