Hunting and the Ivory Tower: Essays by Scholars Who Hunt
Author: Douglas Higbee Despite the academy having a reputation for supporting broad and open inquiry in scholarship, some academics have not extended this open-minded support to colleagues personal pursuits. A variety of scholars enjoy hunting, which has been stereotyped by some as an activity of the unsophisticated. In Hunting and the Ivory Tower, Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina present essays by seventeen hunter-scholars who explore the hunting experience and question negative assumptions about hunting made by intellectuals and academics who do not hunt. Higbee and Bruzina suspect most academics understanding of hunting is based on brief television news reports of hunter-politicians and commercials for reality TV shows such as Duck Dynasty. The editors contend that few scholars appreciate the complexities of hunting or give much thought to its ethical, ecological, and cultural ramifications. Through this anthology they hope to start a conversation about both hunting and academia and how they relate. The contributors to this anthology are academics from a variety of disciplines, each with firsthand hunting experience. Their essays vary in style and tone from the scholarly to the personal and represent the different ways in which scholars engage with their avocation. The essays are grouped into three sections: the first focuses on the often-fraught relation between hunters and academic culture; the second section offers personal accounts of hunting by academics; and the third portrays hunting from an explicitly academic point of view, whether in terms of value theory, metaphysics, or history. Combined, these essays render hunting as a culturally rich, deeply personal, and intellectually satisfying experience worthy of further discussion. A foreword is provided by Robert DeMott, the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He is a teacher, writer, critic, and internationally respected expert on novelist John Steinbeck.
Author: Natalie Bormann
Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)? No doubt, when contemplating an attack on US territory by intercontinental ballistic missiles, consulting Michel Foucault and critical international relations theory scholars may not seem the obvious route to take. The answer to this lies in another question: why has there been so much interest and continuous investment in NMD deployment when there is such ambiguity surrounding the status of threat to which it responds, controversy over its technological feasibility and concern about its cost? Posed in this manner, the question cannot be answered on its own terms the terms given in official accounts of NMD that justify the systems significance on the basis of strategic feasibility studies and conventional threat predictions guided by worst-case scenarios. Instead, this book argues that the preferences leading to NMD deployment must be understood as satisfying requirements beyond strategic approaches and issues. In turning towards the interpretative modes of inquiry provided by critical social theory and poststructuralism, this book contests the conventional wisdom about NMD and suggests reading the strategy in terms of US identity. Presented as an analysis of discourses on threats to national security, around which the need for NMD deployment is predominantly framed, this book is an effort to let the two fields of critical international relations theory and US foreign policy speak directly to each other. It seeks to do so by showing how the concept of identity can be harnessed to an analysis of a contemporary military-strategic practice.
Author: By Sarah Stanbury
Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches.In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culturethough these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its culture of the spectacle, whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.
Author: Noble E. Cunningham
Based on an exploration of the total mass of executive and legislative records for the years 1801-1809something no other scholar has attemptedthis thoroughly documented account describes the machinery and operation of the presidential office, the Cabinet, the departments, and other offices and commissions in the executive branch. It also explains the organization and processes of the national legislature. Cunningham has cleared away many errors and misconceptions, among them the claim that Jefferson was not interested in the normal process of day-to-day administration. In fact, Jefferson emerges as one of the most effective administrators ever to occupy the Presidency. This is an important and path-breaking study in administrative and legislative history. Julian P. Boyd, Princeton UniversityOriginally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: David A. Gerstner and Julien Nahmias
French filmmaker Christophe Honore challenges audiences with complex cinematic form, intricate narrative structures, and aesthetically dynamic filmmaking. But the limited release of his films outside of Europe has left him largely unknown to U.S. audiences. In Christophe Honore: A Critical Introduction, authors David A. Gerstner and Julien Nahmias invite English-speaking scholars and cineastes to explore Honore's three most recognized films, Dans Paris (2006), Les Chansons d'amour (2007), and La Belle personne (2008)-the trilogy. Gerstner and Nahmias analyze Honore's filmmaking as the work of a queer auteur whose cinematic engagement with questions of family, death, and sexual desire represent new ground for queer theory. Considering each of the trilogy films in turn, the authors take a close look at Honore's cinematic technique and how it engages with France's contemporary cultural landscape. With careful attention to the complexity of Honore's work, they consider critically contested issues such as the filmmaker's cinematic strategies for addressing AIDS, the depth of his LGBTQ politics, his representations of death and sexual desire, and the connections between his films and the New Wave. Anchored by a comprehensive interview with the director, the authors incorporate classical and contemporary film theories to offer a range of cinematic interventions for thinking queerly about the noted film author. Christophe Honore: A Critical Introduction reconceptualizes the relationship between film theory and queer theory by moving beyond predominant literary and linguistic models, focusing instead on cinematic technique. Students and teachers of queer film will appreciate this thought-provoking volume.
Author: Jeffry Kaplow
Jeffry Kaplow investigates the effects of the French Revolution on life in Elbeuf, a textile town in Normandy, through a social-historical lens. A careful study of local demographic, fiscal, and tax records allows him to reconstruct the social structure of Elbeuf's population on the eve of the French Revolution and to make claims about its economy, which was based on wool production. Somewhat unusually, there was no strong noble or clerical presence in Elbeuf, which was dominated by wool manufacturers. Despite the destabilizing effects of the Revolution, which included an economic downturn and an inflamed sense of grievance among less wealthy local constituencies, the bourgeoisie retained its grip on power in Elbeuf and its environs throughout this period. With the support of extensive archival evidence, Kaplow goes to great lengths to model the particular social and economic conditions that allowed this town to avoid succumbing to the tumult of the Revolution and to undergo, in fact, so little change compared with most municipalities of the country.
Author: William J. Byrne
This three volume monograph contains a detailed review of the aboriginal ceramics of southern Alberta, as well as an interpretation of late prehistoric, protohistoric and ethnohistoric developments on the Canadian Plains as reflected by an analysis of these ceramics.
Author: Jill B. R. Cherneff
Visionary Observers explores the relationship between anthropology and public policy, examining the careers of nine twentieth-century American anthropologists who made important contributions to debates about race, ethnicity, socialization, and education. Included are Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology; Ruth Benedict, who analyzed modern societies during and after World War II; Margaret Mead, anthropology's most recognized public educator; Gene Weltfish, whose pragmatic anthropology positioned education at the core of culture; Hortense Powdermaker, whose fieldwork embraced Black America, Hollywood, and the Pacific; Solon Kimball, who studied the impact of desegregation; Ruth Landes, who adopted a cultural approach to educating teachers; Jules Henry, who analyzed the institutional consequences of imposing middle-class culture; and Eleanor Leacock, who pioneered advocacy anthropology.The questions they askedabout culture and human behavior, democracy and inequality, and systemic function and disjunctionand the dilemmas they faced as citizen-scientists are recurrent ones. The topics they addressed illustrate how the lens of American anthropology has long been focused on domestic issues. Through its emphasis on anthropologists as practitioners as well as theorists, this anthology adds a new dimension to the history and development of anthropology in the United States.
Author: Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was perhaps the most influential anthropologist of our time, but his influence extended far beyond his field to encompass all facets of contemporary life. Nowhere were his gifts for directness, humor, and steady revelation more evident than in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where for nearly four decades he shared his acute vision of the world in all its peculiarity. This book brings together the finest of Geertz's review essays from the New York Review along with a representative selection of later pieces written at the height of his powers, some that first appeared in periodicals such as Dissent, others never before published. This collection exemplifies Geertz's extraordinary range of concerns, beginning with his first essay for the Review in 1967, in which he reviews, with muffled hilarity, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. This book includes Geertz's unflinching meditations on Western academia's encounters with the non-Western world, and on the shifting and clashing places of societies in the world generally. Geertz writes eloquently and arrestingly about such major figures as Gandhi, Foucault, and Genet, and on topics as varied as Islam, globalization, feminism, and the failings of nationalism. Life among the Anthros and Other Essays demonstrates Geertz's uncommon wisdom and consistently keen and hopeful humor, confirming his status as one of our most important and enduring public intellectuals.