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The Mind Possessed examines spirit concepts and mediumistic practices from a cognitive scientific perspective. Drawing primarily, but not exclusively, from ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in Belém, northern Brazil, this book combines fine‐grained description and analysis of mediumistic activities in an Afro‐Brazilian cult house with a scientific account of the emergence and the spread of the tradition's core concepts. The book develops a novel theoretical approach to questions that are of central importance to the scientific study of transmission of culture, particularly concepts of spirits, spirit healing, and spirit possession. Making a radical departure from established anthropological, medicalist, and sociological analyses of spirit phenomena, the book looks instead to instructive insights from the cognitive sciences and offers a set of testable hypotheses concerning the spread and appeal of spirit concepts and possession activities. Predictions and claims are grounded in the data collected and sourced in specific ethnographic contexts. The data presented open new lines of enquiry for the cognitive science of religion (a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship) and challenge the existing but outdated theoretical frameworks within which spirit possession practices have traditionally been understood.

After the chicken, the House Sparrow is the most widely distributed bird species in the world, occurring on all continents except Antarctica and on most human-inhabited islands. Although its Latin name is Passer domesticus, it is certainly not domesticated. In fact, it is widely regarded as a pest species and is consequently not protected in most of its extensive range. This combination of ubiquity and minimal legal protection has contributed to its wide use in studies by avian biologists throughout the world. This book reviews and summarizes the results of these global studies on House Sparrows, and provides a springboard for future studies on the species. House Sparrows have been used to study natural selection in introduced species, circadian rhythms, and the neuroendocrine control of the avian annual cycle. One current question of considerable interest concerns the catastrophic House Sparrow population decline in several urban centers in Europe. Is the House Sparrow a contemporary canary in the mine? Other topics of broad interest include the reproductive and flock-foraging strategies of sparrows, and sexual selection and the function of the male badge in the species. The book also explores the role of the House Sparrow in disease transmission to humans and their domesticated animals.

Facing the Music investigates the practices and ideas that have grown from some five decades of cultural diversity in music education, developments in ethnomusicology, and the rise of ‘world music.’ It makes a case for the crucial role of learning music in shaping rich and diverse musical environments for the twenty‐first century, both in practical terms and at a conceptual level: “what we hear is the product of what we believe about music.” Advocating a contemporary, positive and realistic approach to cultural diversity in music education and transmission, the book takes into account and celebrates the natural dynamics of music, regarding every musical act as an expression of its current contexts in terms of cultures, communities, and underlying constructs, and establishing that “most music travels remarkably well.” In seven chapters that each approach the issues from a different angle, the book gradually unfolds the complexities of learning and teaching music ‘out of original context’ in an accessible manner, and presents a coherent model to approach these, as well as lucid suggestions for translating the resulting ideas in practice. While mapping the various factors that determine all acts of music transmission, it also comes to surprising insights into the nature and preconceptions underlying much formal music education settings across the world, including those focusing on western classical music. Based on an insider's view of both the delights and challenges of music in multicultural societies, Facing the music provides a rich resource for reflection and practice for all those involved in teaching and learning music, from policy maker to classroom teacher.

The Zen Canon offers learned but accessible studies of some of the most important classical texts in the tradition of Zen Buddhism. Each essay in the volume provides historical, literary, and philosophical commentary on a particular Zen text or genre of texts. Among the most prominent types of texts featured are Chan or Zen “recorded sayings” (yulu) texts, “transmission of the lamp” anthology texts (chuandenglu), koan collections, and “rules of purity” or monastic regulation texts. These canonical writings helped shape the overall conception of Zen Buddhism and the kinds of practices that have come to give Zen its identity. One theme of Zen Canon, therefore, is that the classical anti-textual posture of Zen Buddhism is not one that can be taken literally. While making fun of spiritual writing of all kinds, Zen Buddhists managed to produce one of the largest and most influential bodies of canonical texts in the world. Among the most famous Zen texts discussed in The Zen Canon are the Mazu yulu, the Lidai fabao ji, the Transmission of the Lamp Ching-te era, the Record of Hongzhi, the Wu-men kuan, and the Chanyuan qinggue.

Reliabilist accounts of knowledge are widely seen as having the resources for blocking sceptical arguments, since these arguments appear to rely on assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are rendered illegitimate by reliabilist accounts. The goal of this book is to assess the main arguments against the possibility of knowledge, and its conclusions challenge this consensus. The book articulates and defends a theory of knowledge that belongs firmly in the truth-tracking tradition, and argues that although the theory has the resources for blocking the main standard lines of sceptical reasoning, there is a sceptical argument against which the theory offers no defence, as it doesn’t rely on any assumptions that the theory would render illegitimate. The book ends with the suggestion that the problem might have a metaphysical solution—that although the sceptical argument may make no illegitimate epistemological assumptions, it does rest on a questionable account of the nature of cognition.

This book poses two sets of questions related to women and books in early Christianity: First, what roles did women play in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christianity? And, to be more specific, to what extent were women authors, scribe copyists, book-lenders, and patrons of early Christian literature? Second, how did the stories of women in early Christian literature come to be transformed in the process of copying? And can we detect the influence of debates about women in the earliest churches and debates about asceticism and the human body in the textual transmission of the New Testament and apocryphal texts? These questions serve to guide the book, which aims most broadly to highlight the gendered and layered history of early Christianity. The book argues that historians cannot avoid the inherently representational evidence for women writers and readers as well as the layered stories of female figures such as Eve, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Theca; rather, by embracing the multiplicity of representations, scholars and students can attend simultaneously to rhetorical and literature constructions and historical reality.

The book opens with a chapter on the classical theory of multipoles in electromagnetism, in which static and dynamic multipole expansions of various physical quantities are derived, including of the Maxwell fields D and H. Chapter 2 presents a semi-classical account of multipole theory, in which the Barron-Gray gauge is used to derive multipole polarizabilities describing the induction of molecular moments by a harmonic plane wave. Aspects of symmetry are treated in Chapter 3 — space-time behaviour of tensors and physical properties of molecules and crystals. In Chapter 4, D(E,B) and H(E,B) are obtained for linear anisotropic media, yielding expressions for the material constants which are required to satisfy origin independence, the Post constraint, and certain symmetries but fail the first two. Despite these difficulties, the standard theory is used in Chapter 5 to derive a wave propagation equation; this is applied to explain various physical effects in transmission, two of which are also described in a scattering theory. Chapter 6 deals with the reflection of electromagnetic waves from an anisotropic medium. The reflected intensities violate origin independence, showing again the unphysical nature of existing multipole theory. In Chapter 7, the fields are transformed while leaving Maxwell's equations unchanged, from which new material constants are derived in Chapter 8 that meet the three requirements in Chapter 4. Chapter 9 applies the transformed expressions to transmission and reflection phenomena, confirming the results of Chapter 5, while yielding reflected intensities that satisfy space and time invariances.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions—St. John and St. Matthew—are an essential part of the modern repertory, performed regularly both by professional ensembles and amateur groups. These large, complex pieces are well-loved; but because of our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach wrote the passions for a particular liturgical event at a specific time and place; we hear them hundreds of years later, often a world away and usually in concert performances. They were performed with vocal and instrumental forces deployed according to early 18th century conceptions; we usually hear them now as the pinnacle of the choral/orchestral repertory, adapted to modern forces and conventions. In Bach's time, passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them. Today, we tend to regard them as having fixed texts, to be treated with respect. Their music was sometimes recycled from other compositions, or reused itself for other purposes. We have trouble imagining the familiar material of Bach's passion settings in any other guise. We can learn about these issues by exploring the sources that transmit Bach's passion settings today, performance practice (including the question of the size of Bach's ensemble), delving into the passions as dramatic music, examining the problem of multiple versions of a work and the reconstruction of lost pieces, exploring the other passions in Bach's performing repertory, and sifting through the puzzle of authorship.

This book covers both practical and theoretical aspects of atomic resolution transmission electron microscopy. The discovery of the carbon nanotube, the three-dimensional imaging of the ribosome, and the imaging of a single foreign atom inside a thin crystal by energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy have all demonstrated the immense power of this technique. The recent development of aberration-correction devices has brought the spatial resolution of the method below one Angstrom. The emphasis throughout is on a clear presentation of fundamental concepts, and practical advice. The chapters review simple electron optics, phase contrast theory, coherence theory, and imaging theory for thin crystals. The multiple scattering theory is given in full, and the relationship between the various formulations (Bloch-wave, multislice, scattering matrix, Howie–Whelan equations, phase grating etc) is explained. Applications in biology and materials science are covered, with discussions of radiation damage, sample preparation, image processing and super-resolution, electron holography, and aberration correction. The theory of high-angle annular dark field Z-contrast imaging by scanning transmission electron microscopy is given in full. Additional chapters are devoted to electron sources and detectors, fault diagnosis, experimental methods and associated techniques such as channelling effects in X-ray microanalysis, microdiffraction, cathodoluminescence, environmental microscopy and electron energy-loss spectroscopy.

Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, this book argues that cultural politics—specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts—played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. The book argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel—such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals—completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature. The book demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures. Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism—the new, transatlantic “civilizing mission” through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged.