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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
The synthesised prehistory of south-west Asia, from the cultural
emergence of modern humans as sophisticated and mobile
hunter-gatherers in south -west Asia around 50,000 years ago, to
the time when a dense population of villagers and mixed farming
economies existed throughout the region around 8,000 years ago. It
is the story of the momentous transformation of human society and
culture; after the seemingly endless millennia of small-scale,
mobile, hunting and gathering peoples there emerged a way of life s
that we can recognise as the foundations of our own. It is an
account of the emergence in our human ancestors of an understanding
and articulation of their world and their place in it.
The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax explores the vulnerability of
educated and politically engaged Westerners to Progressive
Orientalism, a form of Orientalism embedded within otherwise
egalitarian and anti-imperialist Western thought. Early in the Arab
Spring, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog appeared. Its author claimed
to be Amina Arraf, a Syrian American lesbian Muslim woman living in
Damascus. After the blog's went viral in April 2011, Western
journalists electronically interviewed Amina, magnifying the blog's
claim that the Syrian uprising was an ethnically and religiously
pluralist movement anchored in an expansive sense of social
solidarity. However, after a post announced that the secret police
had kidnapped Amina, journalists and activists belatedly realized
that Amina did not exists and Thomas "Tom" MacMaster, a
forty-year-old straight white American man and peace activist
living and studying medieval history in Scotland was the blog's
true author. MacMaster's hoax succeeded by melding his and his
audience's shared political and cultural beliefs into a falsified
version of the Syrian Revolution that validated their views of
themselves as anti-racist and anti-imperialist progressives by
erasing real Syrians.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was one of the defining moments in the
history of the modern Middle East. Yet its co-creator, Sir Mark
Sykes, had far more involvement in British Middle East strategy
during World War I than the Agreement for which he is now most
remembered. Between 1915 and 1916, Sykes was Lord Kitchener's agent
at home and abroad, operating out of the War Office until the war
secretary's death at sea in 1916. Following that, from 1916 to 1919
he worked at the Imperial War Cabinet, the War Cabinet Secretariat
and, finally, as an advisor to the Foreign Office. The full extent
of Sykes's work and influence has previously not been told.
Moreover, the general impression given of him is at variance with
the facts. Sykes led the negotiations with the Zionist leadership
in the formulation of the Balfour Declaration, which he helped to
write, and promoted their cause to achieve what he sought for a
pro-British post-war Middle East peace settlement, although he was
not himself a Zionist. Likewise, despite claims he championed the
Arab cause, there is little proof of this other than general
rhetoric mainly for public consumption. On the contrary, there is
much evidence he routinely exhibited a complete lack of empathy
with the Arabs. In this book, Michael Berdine examines the life of
this impulsive and headstrong young British aristocrat who helped
formulate many of Britain's policies in the Middle East that are
responsible for much of the instability that has affected the
region ever since.
It is now recognized that emotions have a history. In this book,
eleven scholars examine a variety of emotions in ancient China and
classical Greece, in their historical and social context. A general
introduction presents the major issues in the analysis of emotions
across cultures and over time in a given tradition. Subsequent
chapters consider how specific emotions evolve and change. For
example, whereas for early Chinese thinkers, worry was a moral
defect, it was later celebrated as a sign that one took
responsibility for things. In ancient Greece, hope did not always
focus on a positive outcome, and in this respect differed from what
we call "hope." Daring not to do, or "undaring," was itself an
emotional value in early China. While Aristotle regarded the
inability to feel anger as servile, the Roman Stoic Seneca rejected
anger entirely. Hatred and revenge were encouraged at one moment in
China and repressed at another. Ancient Greek responses to tragedy
do not map directly onto modern emotional registers, and yet are
similar to classical Chinese and Indian descriptions. There are
differences in the very way emotions are conceived. This book will
speak to anyone interested in the many ways that human beings feel.
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2016
(Hardcover)
Li Yuming, Li Wei
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R4,055
Discovery Miles 40 550
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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China, with the world's largest population, numerous ethnic groups
and vast geographical space, is also rich in languages. Since 2006,
China's State Language Commission has been publishing annual
reports on what is called "language life" in China. These reports
cover language policy and planning invitatives at the national,
provincial and local levels, new trends in language use in a
variety of social domains, and major events concerning languages in
mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Now for the first
time, these reports are available in English for anyone interested
in Chinese languge and linguistics, China's language, education and
social policies, as well as everyday language use among the
ordinary people in China. The invaluable data contained in these
reports provide an essential reference to researchers,
professionals, policy makers, and China watchers.
For decades, large dam projects have been undertaken by both
nations and international agencies with the aim of doing good:
preventing floods, bringing electricity to rural populations,
producing revenues for poor countries, and more. But time after
time, the social, economic, and environmental costs have outweighed
the benefits of the dams, sometimes to a disastrous degree. In this
volume, a diverse group of experts-involved for years with the Nam
Theun 2 dam in Laos-issue an urgent call for critical reassessment
of the approach to, and rationale for, these kinds of large
infrastructure projects in developing countries. In the 2000s, as
the World Bank was reeling from revelations of past hydropower
failures, it nonetheless promoted the enormous Nam Theun 2 project.
NT2, the Bank believed, offered a new, wiser model of dam
development that would alleviate poverty, protect the environment,
engage locally affected people in a transparent fashion, and
stimulate political transformation. This was a tall order. For the
first time, this book shows in detail why, despite assertions of
success from the World Bank and other agencies involved in the
project, the dam's true story has been one of substantial loss for
affected villagers and the regional environment. Nam Theun 2 is an
important case study that illustrates much broader problems of
global development policy.
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