Search Results

This chapter presents the requirements for conducting a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Types of missing data, as well as methods of checking for and addressing missing data, such as imputation, are addressed. Normality is also discussed, including how to assess univariate and multivariate normality as well as estimation methods for non-normal data. Finally, approaches to determining the sample size needed for CFA, such as rules of thumb, the Satorra–Saris method, the MacCallum approach, and the Monte Carlo approach are introduced. Because these issues are quite technical, a brief introduction and suggestions for ways to address each issue, as well as suggested readings for additional information, are provided.

This chapter discusses the works of academic historian Sari Kivistö, an expert in charting the moral discourse about scholarly vices in late Baroque and early Enlightenment Europe. Kivistö concentrates largely on dissertations written by German intellectuals between approximately 1670 and 1730, a period where academic self-criticism became a flourishing genre of publication. Kivistö's main purpose is to investigate how scholarly vices were conceptualized in this period of change, exploring in particular the connections between knowledge and morality. Her exploration is divided into five thematic chapters that explore the vices of self-love, the desire for fame, quarrelling, curiosity, and bad manners. Although these vices regularly overlap, Kivistö explains the division by stating that these sins are the most prominently discussed in the primary sources.

This chapter presents a collation of three versions of the same ballad. The samples are characterised by arrangement in quatrains similar to that of the Andalusian zajal. However, the samples are marked by differences of substance, wording, and improvisation. The first version of this Egyptian narrative ballad is sung by Rasid Abu Sari, an illiterate gypsy in his forties, born in the governorate of Bani Swef. The second version is produced on a cassette and marketed by the firm Nefertiti. The last version is from an anonymous and undated booklet with no other title than that of the song and of two other compositions of the same type. It bears the imprint of Maktabat as-Samarli, Alexandria, and was bought in Cairo in 1965.

Chapter 2 explores how the young Puneites of the café culture understood and positioned themselves in their world through their dressed bodies. By wearing jeans they not only clearly distinguished themselves from their elders and the rest of society but also communicated ‘normality’ before an imagined global audience.

The introduction lays the groundwork for the arguments made in the rest of the book. It maps out how, contrary to popular assumptions, some marginalized youth in Iran—termed the face-savers—are not a “generation in wait” prone to oppositional practices, but active agents who conform to social norms in an effort to change their lot in life. Through the repeated, daily practice of saving face, these youth increase public perceptions of their moral worth, which can subsequently lead them to gain incremental mobility within poverty. A historical overview of the interplay between state policies and struggles from below to make the most of life’s circumstances provides additional contextual detail of how the poor’s aspirations for the good life have been shaped by the perceived structures of constraints and opportunities that surround them. The introduction further provides a brief social history of the primary field site, Sari, Mazandaran, and incorporates details of the methodology of the study.

This chapter narrates different stories of surrogate mothers—one of which is Suma. She faced numerous financial woes, such as her loan for an auto rickshaw worth 2,000 dollars. On that note, her vehicle was repossessed because her friend, who had borrowed it, did not make the down payments on the auto. She believed that being a surrogate mother could pull her out of her precarious financial situation, thus, making her a better mother. Unlike other surrogate mothers who were earning 4,000 dollars, Suma was receiving an additional 2,000 dollars amidst the folds of the sari given by her commissioning parents. The remainder of the chapter recounts the stories of Prabha, Idirani, Salma, and Chitra.

This chapter illuminates the racial aesthetic that is at work in vilifying the hijab while glorifying the sari. The history of colonialism and the forced domestication of the sari helps to facilitate its reception as an acceptably “sexy” garment. By contrast, the hijab has not been subjected to colonial modification and is still experienced as strange by observers—culturally, racially, and aesthetically. In order to explore the role that political and cultural authority plays in shaping “acceptable” and “unacceptable” racial aesthetics as linked to the hijab and the sari, this chapter explores the regulation of the sari and the sartorial strategies enacted by Mohandas Gandhi in his political resistance to British rule over India.

Israel has created in Palestine one of the most efficient occupation regimes in history, which is moreover also cost effective, for it is the international community’s donor money to the Palestinian Authority that saves the occupier the burden of directly administering the territories. Israel is a small country with the highest birth rate in the West and one of the highest population densities in the world. The West Bank is her Lebensraum and captive market. Israelis and Palestinians are also the mirror image of each other when it comes to their dysfunctional polities being more an obstacle to, than a vehicle for, assuming historic decisions. The Palestinians’ failure to imbue their struggle with an ethos of state-building and, thanks to major regional and global strategic shifts, Israel’s enjoyment of unprecedented global clout and regional outreach, makes Israelis wonder what is wrong with no peace anyway.