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Agricultural-pastoral people spread over the Indian subcontinent in many phases. Hunting-gathering, along with shifting cultivation, dominated all the moister tracts of this region. The pattern of resource use became grounded in a continual march of agriculture and pastoralism over territory held by food gatherers. The highest concentration of agricultural-pastoral populations was along the Gangetic plains. Buddhism and Jainism did not succeed in destroying the social hierarchy of Indian society then. The eight centuries from 500 bc to ad 300, which followed the colonization of the fertile lands of northern India, appear to have been characterized by the availability of large surpluses of agricultural production for activities outside food production. Elephant forests and hunting preserves brought in a new form of territorial control over living resources—control by the state. Protection to cattle has undoubtedly been significant in influencing the practices of mixed agriculture and animal husbandry, which are so characteristic of India.

The Metropolitan Borough of Southwark was formed in 1900 from the amalgamation of the civil parishes of St Saviour's Southwark, St George's, Christ Church, and St Mary Newington. Old local attachments continued to predominate even after the amalgamation of the civil parishes. In Southwark these attachments centred on three principal focuses: first, the area in the north around Borough High Street, historically known as the Borough; secondly, the Elephant and Castle; and thirdly, the eastern part of Walworth in the immediate vicinity of the East Street Market. The characteristics for which Southwark was famed during the 19th century were low life, criminality, and heathenism.

This chapter turns to Elephant, Gus Van Sant's film about the Columbine killings, which may be regarded as interactive and which provokes consideration of non-linearity as a new form of composition, rather than as a form of decomposition or simple disruption. This opens the way to a broader consideration of the cultural forms and practices of everyday life within informational culture. The logic of narrative as an ongoing response to information may be generalized: there is an elephant called narrative in the room.

The Pan-American Highway rises in the far north of the Americas at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and, except for a small gap in Panama, runs the entire length of the two American continents to terminate at Ushuaia in southernmost Argentina. Along its way it travels nearly 50,000 kilometres, from the polar landscape of the far north, through the boreal forests of Canada, the temperate plains and hot deserts of the USA and Mexico, and on further into the tropical zones of Central and South America, until it reaches the sub-polar landscape of Tierra del Fuego. The American landscape was not always like this. To travel along the Pan-American Highway some three million years ago, in the Pliocene Epoch, would have revealed a different world. It was a little warmer than our own. Far away, the Greenland ice sheet covered only a small part of that land mass. At the other end of the world, there was less ice covering the West Antarctic than we are familiar with today. Going south, from Prudhoe Bay along the Pan-American Highway of the Pliocene, there was none of the scrub tundra now seen by the ice road truckers. Forests then extended far to the north, covering vast areas of northern Canada and Alaska, and draping the coastal margins of Greenland. They stretched, too, into Siberia, a mass of forest extending thousands of kilometres from Norway to Kamchatka. There was almost no tundra in the north, except for a few patches in Greenland and on the far northern extremities of Siberia. Instead the polar sun rose across that well-nigh endless green Pliocene forest. Such a prehistoric journey south along the Pan-American Highway would take one across the grasslands of temperate America. These are truly ancient, having been long established even then. Patterns of seasonal temperature and rainfall, though, allowed forests to grow where none are present today. There were no humans to cut down the trees or hunt the animals that lived in the forests. There were no Great Lakes either, for no northern ice had grown yet, to scour out their floors and fill them with melt water.

On 18 December 1912 Arthur Smith Woodward and Charles Dawson announced to a great and expectant scientific audience the epoch-making discovery of a remote ancestral form of man—The Dawn Man of Piltdown. The news had been made public by the Manchester Guardian about three weeks before, and the lecture room of the Geological Society at Burlington House was crowded as it has never been before or since. There was great excitement and enthusiasm which is still remembered by those who were there; for, in Piltdown man, here in England, was at last tangible, well-nigh incontrovertible proof of Man’s ape-like ancestry; here was evidence, in a form long predicted, of a creature which could be regarded as a veritable confirmation of evolutionary theory. Twenty years had elapsed since Dubois had found the fragmentary remains of the Java ape-man, but by now in 1912 its exact evolutionary significance had come to be invested with some uncertainty and the recent attempt to find more material by the expensive and elaborate expedition under Mme. Selenka had proved entirely unsuccessful. Piltdown man provided a far more complete and certain story. The man from Java, whose geological age was unclear, was represented by a skull cap, two teeth, and a disputed femur. Anatomically there was a good deal of the Piltdown skull and, though the face was missing, there was most of one side of the lower jaw. The stratigraphical evidence was quite sufficient to attest the antiquity of the remains; and to support this antiquity there were the animals which had lived in the remote time of Piltdown man; there was even evidence of the tool-making abilities of Piltdown man. In every way Piltdown man provided a fuller picture of the stage of ancestry which man had reached perhaps some 500,000 years ago. Dawson began by explaining how it came about that he had lighted on the existence of the extremely ancient gravels of the Sussex Ouse: . . . ‘I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. . . .

This chapter focuses on the reality of rhetoric of community involvement in urban-regeneration partnership in Great Britain. It evaluates the effectiveness of Elephant Links Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) and Project Vauxhall, two resident-based organisations that claimed to represent local people and use confrontational tactics. The chapter investigates whether these organisations were able to advance the arguments they made using these tactics, and whether they could have advanced them more effectively within or outside the partnership. It argues that early regeneration policy under Tony Blair's first term as Prime Minister was characterised as an uncritical and poorly conceptualised idea of community.

This chapter traces the chronology of leprosy in the ancient world, as well as the attempts of the physicians of the time to identify and treat the disease. From the time of Rufus of Ephesus to the writing of Aretaios's On Acute and Chronic Diseases, professional physicians came to agree on “elephantiasis” and “Elephant Disease” as the scientific terms for leprosy. And from the works of Galen and Aretaios, Elephant Disease remained the standard scientific name for this disfiguring illness until the end of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. The term “leprosy” however finds its true etymological origins in the Greek word lepra, which referred to more benign skin diseases but were, nevertheless, used to identify a contagious skin disease known in Hebrew as “tsa'arath” by translators of the Bible. From there the chapter traces further references and attitudes to the disease by the early Christian writers.

Ming period records show the Chinese confronting “bandit” armies in Yunnan using war elephants in the Indian manner, but the Chinese themselves refused to do so. The “land ethic” of India allows for the juxtaposition of cropland, pasture and forest; that of China proper maximizes cropland at the expense of pasture, forest and wild animals including elephants. After the demise of the war elephant there was a two-century reign of the timber elephant, now coming to an end except in Myanmar. Prospects for the persistence of Asian elephants, now protected in the wild, are reasonably good, though elephant-human conflict will be a continuing problem, while African elephants are rapidly being killed off for the ivory trade.

Difficulties of measuring cognitive capabilities; comparison between elephant and human brain; turning an elephant brain into soup; more neurons in the elephant brain, but fewer in the elephant cerebral cortex than in the human cerebral cortex; ranking species by numbers of cortical neurons; cetaceans also have fewer cortical neurons than humans

Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure one single line from the “Cyclops” section of Ulysses about an elephant called Jumbo. It follows Jumbo the elephant through a thicket of cultural history in the 1880s to discover the elephant as a symbol of imperial ambition, of the carnivalesque and the tragic, of a Victorian age. The approach to Jumbo the Elephant reveals a way in to Joyce through exhumation, through the recovery of a world that has been lost, just as Ulysses is a recovery of a pre-war world.

Shilts struggles to overcome obstacles from being an openly gay reporter as his job at KQED officially comes to an end. Jobless again with no prospects in view, Shilts falls into a hole of drinking and marijuana use. Going back to freelance writing jobs to survive, Shilts’s coverage of the assassination of Milk and Moscone draws the attention of New York City editors who ask him to write up a proposal for a biography of Milk. Shilts undertakes well-researched and positively reviewed book on Milk’s life. Shilts’s work on the Milk bio also takes in important aspects of the growing gay community in San Francisco. Shilts embraces a “new journalism” writing style he admires from novelist James Michener.

This chapter recounts the author's experiences working in prison as a correction officer. It describes the day-to-day tasks of a guard and debunks many of the myths about prisons. Like George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," it tells some of the lessons the author, subsequently an academic, learned about justice. It also compares the university system with the prison system, finding uncanny similarities.

This chapter examines the transformation of bodies from “alive” to “dead” in early American films by focusing on the way they pictured execution and emulated the structure and logic of the electric chair. Aspiring to shock and titillate with moving images, filmmakers resourced executions for a quick fix. Planned killing appealed as a chance to control time and inspired tricks of the cinematic frame. This chapter first considers the influence of execution on film editing and the importance of timing in editing screen events, as well as the way the electric chair hovers over the cinema of attractions. It then considers the change from “dying” to “dead” in films such as The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), McKinley's Funeral Cortege at Washington, DC (1901), Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). It also discusses human executions in American cinema as an illustration of electricity's theoretical instantaneity.

This chapter presents a commentary on David Lynch's film career. It focuses on how plastic is the prime matter of his filmmaking, essential to his understanding of cinema. It takes up plasticity's capacity for infinite transformation as an architectural and design dynamic, a feature of mise-enscène, and a mode of fashioning and psychologizing cinematic space. It then explores the emotional registers of plasticity, attempting to explain a key affective paradox in Lynch's work: the way it seems both so manifestly insincere and so emotionally powerful, so impersonal and so intense. Finally, it considers Lynch's persistent tendency to think of forms of media and forms of life as related species. Here, plastic is useful for conceptualizing his picture of the human organism as malleable and heterogeneous. The films examined in this chapter include Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Lost Highway (1997).

This chapter explores a range of films that seek to reveal a more complex reality to be found by resisting, refusing, and digging through the officially endorsed accounts of 9/11. Michael Moore's polemic documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 is a reminder of the divided political climate that had developed in the three years after 9/11. The film suggests how the public sphere had been co-opted by a self-serving political elite, and how seductive media images and spin had been used to exploit the events of 9/11 in order to embark on an imperialist war in the Middle East. A number of web-based conspiracy films were also produced, including 9/11: In Plane Site, The Elephant in the Room, and the most widely viewed Loose Change, which claim that the official version of 9/11 was some kind of cover up.

This chapter offers a reading of the film Elephant, questioning the nature of the trauma-image. It argues that Elephant is among the first type of films, those that do not ignore the mental component of the image but take it seriously into consideration. The reality and images in the Columbine High School shootings are discussed. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Columbine High School students, shot and killed 13 of their classmates and teachers, leaving another 23 wounded before killing themselves at the scene. When Eric is found being mocked at school, a classmate throwing cream on him, an explanation of social rejection might be suggested. Eric and Alex purchased rifles on the Internet, received within 24 hours, with no questions asked. The film Elephant reported the opportunity of reflecting on a tragic occurrence. It proposed a new kind of image, one that improves the concepts of the mental-image and time-image.