The Exclusive Brethren ‘Doctrine of Separation’: An Anthropology of Theology

Why do the Exclusive Brethren attend church ten times a week? Why do they shun excommunicated members, including immediate family? Why do they refuse to eat with outsiders? Why will they employ outsiders in their businesses, but never be employed by them? Why do they reject modern media as “pipelines of filth”? Why do they refuse to vote, while simultaneously campaigning for Conservative Party candidates? Why do they only live in detached houses, and build churches entirely without windows? How, in other words, do the Exclusive Brethren try to live good lives? And what can we learn anthropologically from these models of ‘the good’, and from the objections they provoke? Drawing inspiration from Keane’s (2014) suggestion that ‘we shouldn’t decide in advance what ethics will look like’, this paper seeks to critically contribute to new scholarship within the anthropology of morality and detachment by constructing, in a very literal sense, an anthropology of theology via an analysis of the Exclusive Brethren ‘doctrine of separation’.

Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England

Women of letters writes a new history of English women's intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. The book argues that many women of this period engaged with a life of the mind and demonstrates the dynamic role letter-writing played in the development of ideas. Until now, it has been assumed that women's intellectual opportunities were curtailed by their confinement in the home. This book illuminates the household as a vibrant site of intellectual thought and expression. Amidst the catalogue of day-to-day news in women's letters are sections dedicated to the discussion of books, plays and ideas. Through these personal epistles, Women of letters offers a fresh interpretation of intellectual life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one that champions the ephemeral and the fleeting in order to rediscover women's lives and minds.

Ethics in sexual behavior assessment and support for people with intellectual disability

Sexuality is an issue of equality, rights, and ethics, especially when it comes to the sexuality of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This paper offers a discussion of ethics related to the assessment and intervention supports of sexual behavior in people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. A brief history of sexuality and disability is presented. Issues of sexual abuse of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the laws related to sterilization, pornography, sexual rights, and consent are explored. Finally, specific ethical concerns related to intervention by behavior analysts in the realm of sexual behavior are examined.

The ethics of ethical debates in peace and conflict research: Notes towards the development of a research covenant

This article outlines the case for peace and conflict researchers to formulate a research covenant to better shape their ethical obligations and responsibilities. This is an urgent necessity given that ethical debates have in some proponents become emotive and are not conducted in an ethical manner. In coming to this assessment, the article reviews trends in the research ethics literature and draws out some of the generic issues addressed in a review of the personal reflexivity that an assortment of individual peace and conflict researchers have engaged in when recounting their fieldwork experiences. These generic issues are reformulated in an attempt to codify appropriate ethical practice in peace and conflict research, and they go towards determining the contents of the research covenant. It is suggested that the research covenant is a more ethical way to debate the ethics of peace and conflict research.

Crafting Modern Design in Italy, from Post-War to Postmodernism

The years between 1945 and the early 1980s are the most celebrated in Italy’s design history. From the rhetoric of reconstruction to the postmodern provocations of the Memphis design collective, Italy’s architects played a vital role in shaping the country’s encounter with post-war modernity. Yet as often as this story has been told, it is incomplete. Craft was vital to the realisation of post-war Italian design, and an area of intense creativity in its own right, and yet has been marginalised and excluded in design historiography.

Containing precious metals: hallmarking, minting and the materiality of gold and silver in medieval and modern England.

This book chapter extends the argument constructed by Oakley in his conference paper ‘Containing gold: Institutional attempts to define and constrict the values of precious metal objects’ presented at ‘Itineraries of the Material’, a conference held at Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Oakley’s chapter investigates the social forces that define the identities, social pathways and physical movement of objects made of precious metal. It presents a case study in which constitutive substance rather than the conceptual object is the key driver behind the social trajectories of numerous artefacts and their reception by contemporary audiences. This supports the main contention of the book as a whole: the need to reconsider, and when necessary challenge, the dominance of the social biography of objects in the study of material culture. Oakley’s research used historical and ethnographic approaches, including three years’ of ethnographic field research in the jewellery industry. This included training as a precious metal assayer at the Birmingham Assay Office and observing the industry and public response to government proposals to abolish the hallmarking legislation. This fieldwork was augmented by archive, library and object collection research on the histories of assaying and goldsmithing. Oakley presents an analysis of the historical development and contemporary social relevance of hallmarking, a technological process that has never previously been subject to ethnographic study, yet is fundamental to one of the UK’s creative industries.

Readjusting our Sporting Sites/Sight: Sportification and the Theatricality of Social Life

This paper points out the potential of using sport for the analysis of society. Cultivated human movement is a specific social and cultural subsystem (involving sport, movement culture and physical culture), yet it becomes a part of wider social discourses by extending some of its characteristics into various other spheres. This process, theorised as sportification, provides as useful concept to examine the permeation of certain phenomena from the area of sport into the social reality outside of sport. In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of sportification which we parallel with visual culture and spectatorship practices in the Renaissance era. The emphasis in our investigation is on theatricality and performativity; particularly, the superficial spectator engagement with modern sport and sporting spectacles. Unlike the significance afforded to visualisation and deeper symbolic interpretation in Renaissance art, contemporary cultural shifts have changed and challenged the ways in which the active and interacting body is positioned, politicised, symbolised and ultimately understood. We suggest here that the ways in which we view sport and sporting bodies within a (post)modern context (particularly with the confounding amalgamations of signs and symbols and emphasis on hyper-realities) has invariably become detached from sports’ profound metaphysical meanings and resonance. Subsequently, by emphasising the associations between social theatrics and the sporting complex, this paper aims to remind readers of ways that sport—as a nuanced phenomenon—can be operationalised to help us to contemplate questions about nature, society, ourselves and the complex worlds in which we live.

The challenge and response to global tourism in the post-modern era: the commodification, reconfiguration and mutual transformation of Habana Vieja, Cuba

There is a growing literature on the symbolic and cultural meanings of tourism and the ways in which cities are increasingly competing for tourists through the promotion of cultural assets and different forms of spectacle in the `tourist bubble'. To date, research on the role and impact of tourism in cities has largely been confined to those in Western, post-industrial economies. This paper examines the growth of cultural tourism in the central area of Havana, Cuba, and explores the range of unique, devolved, state-owned enterprises that are attempting to use tourism as a funding mechanism to achieve improvements in the social and cultural fabric of the city for the benefit of residents. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of this example for our understanding of how the pressures for restructuring and commodification can be moderated at the city level. Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

Environmental ethics: philosophy, ecology and other species

Pressure on the environment has increased in step with economic growth and the mass consumption that fueled rising gross domestic product throughout the twentieth century. Both growth and ecological crises have attained a global reach, challenging our established notions of cause and effect, and our framing of problems and solutions. Accordingly, global environmental politics has witnessed major changes and significant "rescaling" in its "locus, agency and scope" (Andonova and Mitchell2010: 257). Both dimensions of global environmental politics - politics and governance, and the ecological problems that are the subject matter of global environmental politics - are being reinterpreted due to increasing complexity, interconnectedness and interdependence. Accordingly, the range of actors and disciplines that infom1 global environmental politics and contribute to framing global environmental problems is widening, in an acknowledgment of inescapable pluralism.

Purity of Blood and Caste. Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites

This essay analyses the roles played by purity of blood and caste in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century identity narratives of Goan clites. Goa and its population are usually excluded from the mainstream literature of Indian social history, and seldom related to the early-modern Atlantic world, making this case study all the more valuable as a place to think the topic of blood and caste. The early establishment and the longevity of the Portuguese imperial presence (1510-1961) in Goa, its location at the crossroads of multiple cultural geographies (Iberian and Indian, and later, also Dutch, British and French), as well as the systematic process of religious conversion of its inhabitants and the questions of legal equality that conversion entailed, all intensified the types, textures, layers and meanings of experiences of social differentiation in this colonial context. This mapping of the experiences of purity of blood and caste in early-modem Goa therefore illuminates from a new angle the role of European imperial powers in the mUltiple expressions of racial classification.

Modern band, Studio Jazz Ensemble, March 5, 2012

Concert program for Modern band, Studio Jazz Ensemble, March 5, 2012

Music of Today Series, UW Modern Ensemble, Inverted Space, "Music by Luigi Nono," February 25, 2014

Concert Program for Music of Today Series, UW Modern Ensemble, Inverted Space, Andre Richard, February 25, 2014