Indian classical music has long been fascinating to Western audiences, most prominently since the Beatles' sessions with Ravi Shankar in the 1960s. This fascination with the musical genre still prevails in the twenty-first century.

Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre examines Thumri Lyrics, a major genre of Hindustani music, from a primarily linguistic perspective. On a cultural level, it discusses the interface between devotional and secular poetry. Furthermore, it explains the impact of social and political change on the musical life on North India.

Well-written and thoroughly researched, this book is a valuable contribution to the field of South Asian studies. It will be interesting to academics across the discipline, including linguistics, politics, sociology, cultural and gender studies.

A good social history of Europe has yet to be written though, given the developments over the last few decades, this seems more urgent than ever before. This volume presents an important step forward in that it brings together eight internationally known social historians from Europe and Israel, each of whom offer an overview of some key themes in European history during the last two centuries. While dealing with the great changes of this period, the authors reveal the commonalities that link European societies together but also important differences at a national level.

At the end of the 1970s, China was a poor country with a huge population, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic economy was organized through direct administrative instructions and was isolated from the international economy. After a quarter of a century, China has been transformed beyond imagination. In the course of this transformation, China's policymakers have faced enormous challenges.

The essays in this book address different aspects of those challenges. The 'development' challenge involved devising policies that would raise the mass of the Chinese people out of poverty and avoid the disasters that had, in the worst cases, caused millions of deaths through famine. The 'transition' challenge involved, firstly, resolving the relationship between changes in the economic and political systems; and secondly, finding the correct sequence and nature of reforms necessary to improve economic performance. The 'globalization' challenge involved identifying the best way in which to integrate China's economic system with the international economy at a time of revolutionary change in the global business system. These essays seek both to enhance understanding of China's immense success in meeting these challenges in the past and to provide an indication of the challenges that still lie ahead. China's system reforms have been described as 'groping for stones to cross the river'. The journey across the river is far from over, and the other bank is only dimly visible.

A good social history of Europe has yet to be written though, given the developments over the last few decades, this seems more urgent than ever before. This volume presents an important step forward in that it brings together eight internationally known social historians from Europe and Israel, each of whom offer an overview of some key themes in European history during the last two centuries. While dealing with the great changes of this period, the authors reveal the commonalities that link European societies together but also important differences at a national level.

At the end of the 1970s, China was a poor country with a huge population, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic economy was organized through direct administrative instructions and was isolated from the international economy. After a quarter of a century, China has been transformed beyond imagination. In the course of this transformation, China's policymakers have faced enormous challenges.

The essays in this book address different aspects of those challenges. The 'development' challenge involved devising policies that would raise the mass of the Chinese people out of poverty and avoid the disasters that had, in the worst cases, caused millions of deaths through famine. The 'transition' challenge involved, firstly, resolving the relationship between changes in the economic and political systems; and secondly, finding the correct sequence and nature of reforms necessary to improve economic performance. The 'globalization' challenge involved identifying the best way in which to integrate China's economic system with the international economy at a time of revolutionary change in the global business system. These essays seek both to enhance understanding of China's immense success in meeting these challenges in the past and to provide an indication of the challenges that still lie ahead. China's system reforms have been described as 'groping for stones to cross the river'. The journey across the river is far from over, and the other bank is only dimly visible.

Youth Community Inquiry offers a detailed look at how young people use new media to help their communities thrive. Chapters address questions about learning, digital technology, and community engagement through the theory of community inquiry. The settings range from a small farming town, to a mostly immigrant community, to inner-city Chicago, and include youth from ages eight to 20. Going beyond works on social media in a narrow sense, the projects in these settings involve the use of varied technologies, such as GPS/GIS mapping tools, video production, use of archives and databases, podcasts, and Internet radio. The development of inquiry-based activities serves as a record of the diverse experiences and a guide to future projects. The book concludes with an overview of a curriculum that readers may adapt for their own settings.

The current situation in Argentina is unprecedented. In compliance with prescribed timings and procedures, the crimes committed by the state in recent history are being prosecuted and penalized. This book traces the path of the trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina, from the Trial of the Juntas that began during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín to current developments under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, analysing the ideas of memory, truth and justice. In the volume, judges, lawyers, historians, journalists and witnesses from the era of terror give a lucid and critical reconstruction of the last thirty years. The contributors also point to other states where crimes against humanity are still being committed on a daily basis, despite being notionally proscribed. This book is translated from Spanish, originally appearing under the title Juicios por crímenes de lesa humanidad en Argentina (2011).

The development of new technologies places new challenges to the interpretation and implementation of legislation in the information society. The recent deployment of service-oriented computing and cloud computing for online commercial activities has urged countries to amend existing legislation and launch new regulations. With the exponential growth of international electronic commercial transactions, a consistent global standard of regulating the legal effects of electronic communications, the protection of data privacy security and the effectiveness of Internet-related dispute resolution are motivating factors to build users' trust and confidence in conducting cross-border business and their sharing information online. The second edition of this book continues taking a 'solutions to obstacles' approach and analyses the main legal obstacles to the establishment of trust and confidence in undertaking business online. In comparing the legislative frameworks of e-commerce in the EU, US, China and International Organisations, the book sets out solutions to modernise and harmonise laws at the national, regional and international levels in response to current technological developments. It specifically provides information on the key legal challenges caused by the increasing popularity of service-oriented computing and cloud computing as well as the growing number of cross-border transactions and its relation to data privacy protection, Internet jurisdiction, choice of law and online dispute resolution. It considers how greater legal certainty can be achieved in cloud computing service contracts and other agreements resulted in service-oriented computing. The second edition of Law of Electronic Commercial Transactions is a clear and up to date account of a fast-moving area of study. It will be of great value to legislators, politicians, practitioners, scholars, businesses, individuals, postgraduate and undergraduate students. It provides in-depth research into finding solutions to remove eight generic legal obstacles in electronic commercial transactions and offers insights into policy making, law reforms, regulatory developments and self-protection awareness.

This edited collection casts light on central issues within contemporary philosophy of mathematics such as the realism/anti-realism dispute; the relationship between logic and metaphysics; and the question of whether mathematics is a science of objects or structures. The discussions offered in the papers involve an in-depth investigation of, among other things, the notions of mathematical truth, proof, and grounding; and, often, a special emphasis is placed on considerations relating to mathematical practice. A distinguishing feature of the book is the multicultural nature of the community that has produced it. Philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians have all contributed high-quality articles which will prove valuable to researchers and students alike.

In recent years, the study of the Qur'an and its interpretation has expanded to incorporate insights gained from historical, biblical, literary and critical studies. A variety of approaches to the Qur'an and the Muslim exegetical tradition are currently available. Approaches to the Qur'an consists of thirteen essays by leading scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, in the fields of qur'anic studies and Islamic studies. Taken together, they offer a sample of the aims, methods and topics of enquiry now being pursued. Each study has a full critical apparatus, and the book includes a consolidated bibliography which will be of great value to students and specialists.

This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English. Filling a significant gap in the literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century Russia, it is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history, and even during the Khrushchev "Thaw" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from its reforms and liberating policies. The author, Luibov Denisova - a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia - includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives; interviews; sociological research and oral traditions. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes and paints a unique picture of rural womenaEURO (TM)s life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

In this important new book, the authors explore how production was organized in the context of the economic development of modern Japan. Production organizations are taken to mean the long-term relationships which economic agents create for production, based on employment contracts or long-term transactions. This includes hierarchical organizations such as factories and corporations, but also flexible arangements such as subcontracting. Modern Japanese economic development is characterized by the co-evolution of these two types of production organizations, while American economic development in the modern period is characterized by the development of a mass production system based on large hierarchical organizations. The question is raised as to why and how a certain type of organization proliferated in a certain industry in a certain period, and what the role of that organization was in coordinating production and giving incentives to the economic agents involved. The result is a comparative institutional analysis of the organizational foundations of Japanese economic development in the modern period.

In the past decade, digital games have become a widely accepted form of media entertainment, moving from the traditional 'core gamer' community into the mainstream media market. With millions of people now enjoying gaming as interactive entertainment there has been a huge increase in interest in social multiplayer gaming activities. However, despite the explosive growth in the field over the past decade, many aspects of social gaming still remain unexplored, especially from a media and communication studies perspective. Multiplayer: Social Aspects of Digital Gaming is the first edited volume of its kind that takes a closer look at the various forms of human interaction in and around digital games, providing an overview of debates, past and present. The book is divided into five sections that explore the following areas: Social Aspects of Digital Gaming Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds Online Gaming Co-located and Console Gaming Risks and Challenges of Social Gaming This engaging interdisciplinary book will appeal to upper level students, postgrads and researchers in games research, specifically those focusing on new media and digital games, as well as researchers in media studies and mass communication.

This volume of eight new essays by leading scholars provides a stimulating dialogue between a range of critical perspectives. Encompassing the fields of cultural history, history of science, literature, and politics, the collection explores The New Atlantis' complex location within Bacon's oeuvre and its negotiations with cultural debates of the past and present. Often regarded as the apotheosis of Bacon's ideas through its depiction of an advanced "scientific" society, it is also read as a seminal work of science fiction. -- .

This book aims to discredit the myth that has the `unique cultural traits' of the Japanese as the key to the country's success, arguing that the more realisable foundation of long-term investment in training and research is responsible. The book looks at the development of Japan in the pre-War period. Yukiko Fukusaku sees the achievements of this period as central to the present competitiveness of the country's industrial technology. She uses the Mitsubishi Nagasaki shipyard as a case study, looking at technological innovation and training as the keys to long-term stability and economic success. The book has implications for industrial development worldwide. Japan's starting point over a century ago was similar to the present conditions of many developing countries and the book's emphasis on the acquisition of better skills as a key to development is as relevant to Europe and America as it is to the Third World.

Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter. Chinese experts applied the methods associated with these devices to both weather forecasting and to the interpretation of human affairs. Hidden by a veil of secrecy, these methods have always been relatively little known other than by their names. The first work in any language to explore these three methods, known as sanshi (three cosmic boards), this book sheds light on a topic which has been shrouded in mystery for centuries, having been kept secret for many years by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau.

American merchants established trading firms in the ports of Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki which operated from 1859-1899 until the repeal of the Unequal Treaties. Members of a privileged, semi-colonial community, the merchants formed the largest group of Americans in 19th century Japan. In this first book-length treatment of this group, Kevin Murphy explores their interactions with the Japanese in the treaty port system, how the Japanese leadership manipulated them to its own ends, and how the merchants themselves defined the limitations of American business in Japan through their ambiguous but deep concern with order and opportunity, restraint and dominance, and conservatism and dominance.

Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist movement-Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs-revealing how these highly visible proponents of the antislavery cause were able to creatively engage and at times overcome the cultural biases of their listening and reading audiences. When engaged in public sphere discourses, these individuals were not, as some scholars have suggested, inclined to accept unconditionally stereotypical constructions of their own identities. Rather they were quite skillful in negotiating between their affinity with antislavery Christianity and their own intimate involvement with slave circle dance and improvisational song, burial rites, conjuration, divination, folk medicinal practices, African dialects and African inspired festivals. The authors emerge as more complex figures than scholars have imagined. Their political views, though sometimes moderate, often reflected a strong desire to strike a fierce blow at the core of the slavocracy.

In recent years, the importance of disseminating the findings of social research has been given increased emphasis. The most effective way in which this can be done is via the mass media. However, there are frequent complaints that media coverage of social and educational research is very limited and often distorted. Through a detailed analysis of a particular case about ethnic inequalities in educational achievement, this book examines some of the processes involved in the reporting of research findings, and their implications for judgements about media distortion and bias. This volume is relevant to many fields, including education, media studies, cultural studies, sociology and social policy.

This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and institutions of the industry correspond to and accelerate the emergence of a relatively affluent urban leisure-reading market. It argues that this reinvention of Chinese print media vis-a-vis the creation of a post-socialist taste (class) culture is an essential part of the cultural and affective transformations in contemporary Chinese society, and demonstrates how the reinvention of such taste culture effectively creates, through new kinds of reading materials and carefully demarcated target audiences, a middle-class civility that serves as the locus of the new niche media market.

Since the victory of the 1949 revolution the incumbency of the Chinese Communist Party has been characterized by an almost relentless struggle to legitimize its monopoly on political power. During the Mao era, attempts to derive legitimacy focused primarily on mass participation in political affairs, a blend of Marxist and nationalist ideology, and the charismatic authority of Mao Zedong. The dramatic failure of the Cultural Revolution forced the post-Mao leadership to discard these discredited paradigms of legitimacy and move towards an almost exclusively performance based concept founded on market economic reform. The reforms during the 1980s generated a number of unwelcome but inevitable side effects such as official corruption, high unemployment and significant socio-economic inequality. These factors culminated ultimately in the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and throughout China. Since Tiananmen the party has sought to diversify the basis of its legitimacy by adhering more closely to constitutional procedures in decision making and, to a certain extent, by reinventing itself as a conservative nationalist party. This probing study of post-communist revolution Chinese politics sets out to discover if there is a plausible alternative to the electoral mode or if legitimacy is the exclusive domain of the multi-party system.

Winning the Vietnam War proved easier than winning the peace. Since 1975, the reunited country has faced the problem of how a poorer, planned economy in which state ownership and control could successfully absorb a more advanced, capitalist economy. In addition, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War heralded a new age in Vietnam's internal and external relations. Vietnam traces developments since the end of the Vietnam War, including recent economic reforms, the politics of the Communist Party, and the re-establishment of relations with the United States. It gives a comprehensive and informative overview of the current political and economic situation in Vietnam today.

Culture now has a prominent place on the urban policy and re-profiling agendas of cities around the world. City-based cultural planning emphasising creativity in all its guises has emerged as a significant local policy initiative, while the notion of the 'creative city' has become an urban imaging cliche. The proliferation of local blueprints for cultural planning/creative cities has been remarkable, while supra-state bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO are also fostering the use of culture in strategies to revive cities and urban economies and to brand places as 'different'. Cities of Culture highlights significant trends in cultural planning since its inception, revealing and analysing key discourses and influential (globally-circulating) manifestos and processes, as well as their interpretation and implementation in specific places. With reference to examples drawn from Europe, Australia, Asia and North America, Cities of Culture provides insights into the application of urban cultural strategies in different local, national and international contexts, highlighting regularities, tensions and intersections as well as core underpinning assumptions. This book explores the now-pervasive expectation that cultural planning is capable of achieving a wide range of social, economic, urban and creative outcomes. It will be of interest for students and scholars of urban sociology, urban studies, cultural policy studies and human geography.

The traditional assumption today about race is that it is not political; that it has no political content and is a matter of individual beliefs and attitudes. In Race and the Politics of the Exception, Utz McKnight argues that race is in fact political and defines how it functions as a politics in the United States. McKnight organizes his book into three sections, beginning with a theoretical section about racial politics in the United States. Using theorists such as Benjamin, Agamben, and Schmitt, McKnight discusses how the idea of racial communities went from being constituted through the idea of racial sovereignty and a politics of the exception that defined blacks as the internal enemy, to being constitutionally defined through the institutions of racial equal opportunity. In the second section, McKnight further develops his critical race theory by exploring in more detail the social use of race today. The election of President Obama has brought the politics of racial equality to a critical point. In spite of a very powerful set of political tools to define it as a thing of the past, race matters. In the final section, McKnight engages with important African American fiction from each of the three major periods of racial politics in the US. Earlier descriptions of political theory are used throughout these analyses to refine the argument for a new critical politics of race. Scholars of political theory, identity politics, African American studies, and American Studies will find this work ground-breaking and relevant.

Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. "Relational Archaeologies" questions how such a view of human beings, 'other-than-human' creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. "Relational Archaeologies "explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means 'to be' and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.